"Sir Charles Dilke: A Victorian Tragedy" by Roy Jenkins

This is one of those biographies which seems to be intended for a select readership: those who are already in the know. Roy Jenkins has written a book which demands at least a working knowledge of the personalities and politics of late-19th century Britain. He's a bit better when his hero goes abroad but he doesn't explain who, for example, the Prince Imperial is. He compounds the mystery by quoting chunks of foreign Language, usually French, without translation. Books should be about communication and I would have thought that Mr Jenkins as a well-known and successful politician would be a great communicator. Perhaps he thinks I read French. Perhaps he doesn't want me to understand. Perhaps he has written this book purely for his own amusement.

Sir Charles Dilke was a Victorian with a baronetcy and a private income who became a Liberal MP, on the radical wing of the party, and soon attained Cabinet rank under Prime Minister Gladstone. He was then named as a co-respondent in a divorce case and, despite his name being apparently cleared, was judged by the establishment to be guilty. He lost his position, he lost his influence, and he lost his seat (although after some time being ostracised by society in general he got another constituency which he represented as a back-bencher to the end of his life).  

Of course it was the scandal that prompted me to read the book and I wasn't prepared for wading through the masses of biographical detail about his early life and his gradual gaining of political influence. As I say above, to properly appreciate what was going on you need to have a decent understanding of late Victorian politics. I don't, so most of the names passed me by in a blur.

Even when I recognise a name, it seems that Jenkins wants to try to keep me in the dark. He mentions Leslie Stephen as a influence on Dilke at Cambridge University without telling us that this man was the father of Virginia Woolf. (He does tell us that Dilke's second wife was, in an earlier marriage, thought to be the model for Dorothea Brooke in George Eliot's Middlemarch.)

By now I'm bored.

Then come the court case(s). Jenkins trawls through the testimony. There's a lot of detail. Too much. I drown. More of a blur.

Even when we get to the chapter that suggests there might have been a conspiracy, every little thing is told to us. There is no smoking gun. There's a lot of circumstantial evidence. There are hints that could be used to suggest theories but Jenkins fails to draw out any generalities from the stodgy mass of evidence. He is too serious a scholar to speculate.

What did I learn? Little, except that Queen Victoria meddled in government far more than is generally allowed. 

Selected quotes:

• "He thought a thirty-mile walk the most agreeable way of passing a quiet Sunday afternoon, and he was known on occasion to walk from Cambridge to London during the day, attend a dinner in the evening, and walk back during the night." (Ch 1) It is over fifty miles from Cambridge to London; Google reckons that would take twenty hours. To do it in ten hours would require a walking speed of five miles per hour which is scarcely credible. Has anybody ever checked this 'fact'?
• "He had a horror of 'soft' climates and of the easy, purposeless living to which he thought they gave rise. The banana, the most typical product of such a climate, he regarded with particular horror." (Ch 2)
• "Stanley, the explorer, came on one occasion, but he struck Dilke as 'brutal, bumptious, and untruthful." (Ch 4) This autobiography of Stanley makes it clear that he was exceptionally brutal and a pathological liar.
• "He possessed to an unusual degree the essential ingredients of moral intolerance - he was a puritan fascinated by sex." (Ch 12)
• "The Congo Free State, under the personal suzerainty of the King of the Belgians ... was intended to be a spearhead of civilisation in Central Africa. By the middle of the 'nineties, however, the spear looked somewhat blunted. Slave dealing persisted and the army of the Free State ... had been fed for long periods by means of a system of organised cannibalism." (Ch 18) Another fact that might need checking.
• "In these later years he much enjoyed going to plays in Paris, but however satisfying he found the performance he always left after the first act. He was not bored, but thought that one act of a play was enough." (Ch 19)

Jenkins says that the speeches the Dilke made in the House of Commons were typified by by very long and lacking in oratory but thoroughly thorough, full of facts and evidence. This biography is much the same. There are a lot of facts (though I think some needed treating rather more sceptically) but the overall impression is one of tedium.

October 2023; 418 pages

This review was written by the author of Bally and Bro, Motherdarling  and The Kids of God