Mock History

I've read three chapters of Jacob Rees-Mogg's The Victorians, Twelve Titans Who Forged Britain and I think that's a fair effort. I've read Palmerston, Victoria and W.G. Grace. 

For someone with a 2:1 in History from Oxford one might have expected a bit more historical methodology but that's not Jacob's way. The fact that Boris Johnson also got a 2:1 from Oxford makes me wonder if that grade is standard issue there but in previous times Auden was awarded a third and Betjeman was sent down so it was possible to do worse.

I'm no historian but understand that evidence and sources are the basis of it, not simply stating that 'the truth is that...' and according greatness to public figures in direct proportion to their patriotism, contribution to Britain, Empire and respect for royalty, the 'constitution' and money, not necessarily in that order.

The 'forging of Britain' surely began long before the C19th, though. One might expect Boris's book on Shakespeare, were he ever to write it (God forbid), to make great claims for his contribution to British 'greatness' and others might suggest Alfred the Great, Boudicca, Henry VIII, Elizabeth I were in their somewhere. Perhaps Jacob meant 'Empire'.

One of the things found to be admirable in W.G. Grace's complex character was his wish to play attractice cricket but Jacob's biographer reported that one of his great heroes, over and above cricket, was Geoffrey Boycott who never expressed any such wish or demonstrated any such intention. And, as is never far away from Jacob's approach, W.G.'s monetary motivations are made almost as praiseworthy as his sporting success, the statistics of which Jacob does a fair job of explaining.

I haven't read anything else much about Palmerston or Victoria who, like most of Jacob's heroes, are 'great' because he thinks so but I'd never take his word for anything and so read his accounts with a great deal of scepticism. He writes like an enamoured schoolboy from a time that had gone by before I attended school in the 1960's but vestiges of Biggles, Arthur Ransome and such characters as those satirized in Michael Palin's Ripping Yarns lingered. It's not obvious that Jacob would realize that Ripping Yarns was a comedy. He might think it as much a documentary as Danny Baker said he thought Only Fools and Horses was when it first came on. I might be prepared to take the chapter on Victoria as largely factually correct but if I really wanted to know I'd read somebody else on the subject.

One would reasonably expect a hardback book published at the age of 50 to be better than the author's undergraduate work but I'm not sure this is of a 2:1 standard. It fails to 'make a case', it simply states one.

I'm very grateful to the Portsmouth Library Service for making it available at no cost, especially as I didn't read it all. I mainly wanted to see what it was like and I have. It compares very unfavourably with the work of a proper historian, Katya Hoyer, that I read recently. But while I'm grateful for having had the chance to look at it I'm also now of the opinion that the library budget could have found a better book on the Victorian Age if education, rather than stocking celebrity authors, were their purpose.