On the one hand, it's always very sad when a much respected colleague decides to retire. On the other hand, if they have a lot of books, they often have a bit of an office clear-out. Which can result in the most desirable finds suddenly going begging. I remember getting some real treasures (Thomas Love Peacock, Sir Philip Sidney, Lewis & Short's complete Latin Dictionary) when Peter Dane retired from the English Department at Auckland University.
Professor Peter Lineham is retiring from Massey. His notorious book-buying habits have reached such a scale that he simply can't fit the ones in his office into the massive collection at home. As a result, I've become the proud owner of a beautiful six-volume edition of the Works of Scottish historian William Robertson, three volumes of Ranke's History of the Popes, Gibbon's Journal, books by Churchill, Christopher Hill, and a bunch of others - including this one:
Greville, Charles. The Greville Diary, 1817-1860: Including Passages Hitherto Withheld from Publication. Ed. Philip Whitwell Wilson. 2 vols. London: William Heinemann, Ltd., 1927.
I'd just been reading about this book in a massive history of the events that led up to WWI: Dreadnought, by Robert K. Massie. It consists of extensive extracts from the diary of Charles Cavendish Fulke Greville (1794-1865), a British aristocrat and political insider who seems to have seen it as his duty to provide a kind of Pepsyian record of all the peccadilloes of the ruling class during the early to mid nineteenth century.
When it was first published, in eight volumes, between 1874 and 1887, it caused huge offense to Queen Victoria (among many others). She wrote that she was:
horrified and indignant at this dreadful and really scandalous book. Mr Greville's indiscretion, indelicacy, ingratitude, betrayal of confidence and shameful disloyalty towards his Sovereign make it very important that the book should be severely censured and discredited ... The tone in which he speaks of royalty is unlike anything which one sees in history, even of people hundreds of years ago, and is most reprehensible ... Of George IV he speaks in such shocking language, language not fit for any gentleman to use.As you can imagine, it was extremely popular at the time. People rather liked his disrespectful tone, both in Britain and America, where it went through numerous editions.
This 1927 edition has been criticised for "poor editing and ... inaccurate statements," but beggars can't be choosers. I don't know that I'd ever have the patience to work my way through the whole thing, so this unexpurgated, thematically arranged set of selections from it will have to do - for the moment, at least.
Interestingly enough, Bloomsbury insider Lytton Strachey spent his final years editing, with Roger Fulford, a massive 8-volume edition of The Greville Memoirs, 1814-1860, which was billed as the "first complete and unexpurgated edition," and appeared a few years after Strachey's death, in 1938.
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- category - History & Archaeology: Anthologies & Secondary Literature: Nineteenth Century
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