Meet Mr. Polderoy
The Polderoy Papers. By C. E. Vulliamy. (Michael Joseph. ios. 6d.)
"Mv thanks," writes Mr. Vulliamy " are due to the kindly and informative shades." But our thanks seem rather to be due to Mr. Vulliamy for having given us in The Polderoy Papers a rich Victorian divertissement. The diary of Henry Williani Pederoy, covering the period from 1868 'to 1886, recalls' .in entertaining pageant the varied interests of an active and enquiring age. Here we have the early struggles of women for equality : " Miss Josephine Butler has now published a mischievous and unsettling book on Woman's Work and Woman's Culture"; the craze for Spiritualism and . the exposure of some of its more outrageous frauds ; the onslaught of the more liberal churchmen on the existence of Hell, as if it were not " the duty of all true Churchmen to maintain the existence of this fiery, necessary kingdom, this territory of torment "; the rival merits of cremation, or burial in tasteful baskets, " garnished and beautified by loving hands " ; the dynamite explosions staged by the Irish agitators, and the scarcely less explosive dynamite of Darwin's Descent of Man ; the excavation of early British tumuli ; the- changing fashions of ladies' dresses, and a selection of con- temporary murders and mysteries for good measure.
Henry Polderoy, details of whose forbears and descendants Mr. Vulliamy has filled in with convincing solidity, is presented to US as something of ari oddity even in a period rich in strong personali- ties. He was—it goes without saymg...-4 man of property and leisure, but by no means an idle man. When he was not experi- menting with a water-clock or making a series of canals and sluices to improve and beautify his grounds, he was building a model of Lincoln Cathedral entirely out of fish-bones and cork. He culti- vated, moreover, a quiet interest in the arts and literature, never missed the exhibition of an important painting, had the good taste to prefer Millais' Pre-Raphaelite period to his later style, but considered the " homely, nar-ow and literal " conceptions of Holman Hunt inferior to the lofty works of Gustave Dore. As for books, he cared nothing for the weird or extravagant, and we- find him in 1869 reading aloud to his unresponsive Wife from " a thoroughly clever novel," Mrs. Gerald's Niece, by Lady Georgiana Fullerton' his abiding favourite was, however, Miss Braddon, of Lady Au'clley's Secret. Hardy, he wrote, when with The Return of the Native this writer came to his notice, " is not to be compared with Miss Braddon." True, indeed.
His music-box was furnished with rich operatic melodies, and he himself performed on the harmonium entertaining the servants and their friends on Christmas pay with an arrangement of "The Abyssinian Expedition." Indefatigably industrious and always enthralled by new technical processes, we find him later in life mastering, " after weeks of pers-werance . . . the new process of painting transparently upon glass." Nor was this all, but for the further amusements, inventions and hobbies of Mr. Polderoy, his musical brakes for tricycles and safety devices for dog-carts and a hundred other innocent contrivances of the same kind, the reader should go to the diary itself.
It is hard to say why the opinions and interests of our grand- fathers are so irresistibly entertaining. A little further back in time and we are in history proper - a little further forward and we are troubled by irritating or panful differences in outlook or temperament not yet softened by time. But there is for every generation, one happy interlude. in the comparatively recent past where social customs and ideas appear quaint, ingenuous and appealing. This is the epoch to which Mr. Vulliamy has devoted his researches ; this is the period whose newspapers he has ransacked for points of interest or typical absurdities, for their forecasts of the future (sometimes startlingly right) and their unexpected similarities with our own time. And from this period, the happiest and most prosperous which the English upper classes have ever known, he has conjured up the eccentric yet typical Henry William Polderoy to underline with his private characteristics the peculiarities of an age, and to give, through his lovingly-wrought personality and the quiet yet not uneventful story of his life, reality and coherence to the picture of an age. Reading this book is as quietly entertaining and as soothing to the spirits as sitting for a while enraptured among the ornaments and furniture of one of the spotlessly dusted, super- latively crammed drawing-rooms of the period. C. V. WEDGWOOD.
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