Customer Reviews

Imperial Vanities

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After reading this quite enjoyable, well-written book, you might be excused for thinking that the British Empire consisted mainly of very eccentric people....who were hyperactive, to boot. You have Samuel Baker banging his way through Ceylon and Africa with his 21 pound rifle, shooting everything in sight (that is, when he isn't killing 300 pound wild boars with his foot-long, 3 pound knife). Of course, when Sam was 32 he did stop off long enough at the slave auctions in the Balkans to buy a lovely, blonde, 17 year old Hungarian girl. This was Florence, who eventually became Sam's second wife, and partner in exploration. (Sam's first wife had died.) The upper-crust back home in England weren't too impressed by Sam's choice of helpmeet, to say the least. Then we have Sam's brother, Valentine Baker, a promising cavalry officer who ruined his career by making a pass at a woman on a train one fine day. She apparently didn't fancy him and started screaming blue murder out the train window. From the evidence, it doesn't appear that Val actually tried to "ravage" her. She testified that he touched her on the leg by the ankle and tried to kiss her. Back in Victorian times, doing that to a respectable woman was all it took to bring dishonor upon yourself. It also didn't help that Queen Victoria got wind of all this and refused to let Val continue serving with his regiment. She had a long memory and never forgave him. (One shudders to think what she would have thought of Bill Clinton's Oval Office antics.) That brings us to Charles 'Chinese' Gordon, who had a famous date with destiny in Khartoum. Gordon was by far the oddest of the lot. (He once survived stepping directly in front of a 32 pound gun in China. When the gun misfired, Gordon shrugged it off by saying that the "inferior races" didn't know how to keep their powder dry.) One wonders how anyone in their right mind could have put him in a position of authority. Just before being sent to Khartoum to try to evacuate the garrison, the very religious Gordon had been so restless that he had been all set to go to the Congo to work for that famous humanitarian, King Leopold of Belgium. (I'm being facetious. Under the guise of bringing civilization to Darkest Africa, Leo was actually turning the Congo into his own personal slave-labor colony. Gordon was so anxious to do something....anything....that he wasn't too particular who he worked for.) Islamic fundamentalism didn't mean much to Gordon. China....Africa.....it was all the same to him. If you weren't British you were a heathen, and that's all Gordon had to know. He thought that Mohamed Ahmed (known as the Mahdi) was just some gangster who wanted to make the Sudan his own personal fiefdom. Gordon was convinced that if he could meet the Mahdi one-on-one he could straighten everything out. Needless to say, things didn't work out that way. As everyone knows, Gladstone didn't send out a relief force until it was too late. Khartoum was overrun by the forces of the Mahdi and Gordon wound up with no head. Those amazing Gordonian eyes could no longer work their magic. Actually, he may have gotten what he was looking for. A pretty good case can be made that he suffered from a martyr-complex. Many other eccentrics appear in these pages- David Livingstone, James Hanning Speke (who enjoyed, in his spare time, measuring the busts and limbs of African girls with a tape) and several who had nothing to do with exploration. One of my favorites was Lord Hatherton, who had estates in Staffordshire. In the parish church he attended, he had the pews for his family taken out and replaced with armchairs and a working fireplace. Hatherton would rattle the pages of "The Times" to indicate when he thought the sermon had gone on long enough. One disadvantage of Mr. Thompson's decision to tell the stories of, primarily, 3 people in such a short book is that, in the end, none of the men seem quite real. We see a lot of action, but not much information concerning what really made them tick. They almost come across as caricatures. Still, the book can easily be appreciated on two levels- as a rip-roaring adventure story, and as a cautionary tale regarding the limitations and responsibilities of empire.

Victorian England produced scores of great soldiers and explorers. Three of the most famous were the soldiers Valentine Baker and Charles "Chinese" Gordon and the explorer Samuel Baker. Brian Thompson's Imperial Vanities is a biography which intertwines the lives of these three larger than life characters.

Many books have been written about each of these men. They lived exciting lives crammed with adventure and drama. The three were some of the most colorful characters of the Nineteenth Century. Brian Thompson is a good writer and he does an excellent job of weaving their stories together. However, in the end these three characters lived such rich lives that it is an injustice to try to tell their stories in just 254 pages.

This is a good book for anybody who wants a quick sketch. I would not recommend this book for someone who loves Victorian England and the stories of the men who carved out an Empire.

While many know the story of Gordon at Khartoum and earlier in Shanghai, Samuel and Valentine Baker maybe under the radar of most casual readers of the era.

Thompson introduces us to the Bakers and their ilk with ease. We feel Samuel's self-righteousness and importance - as he careens around Ceylon and later at home and in Austro-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire. Gordon is somewhat placed into the story surreptiously, through segues to Valentine Baker, Fred Burnaby, Laurence Oliphant and David Livingstone - moving from Sam's almost atheistic world view (of his own self-importance) to Livingstone and Gordon's Christianity (and for Gordon - some whacked out Messiah/Martyr complex) and at the same time exposing the character flaws in all of them - sometimes fatal flaws.

A wonderful book that moves you around in society with it's blinders on, but nevertheless produced adventure, bravery, and according to Thompson... the modern world.