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J. Anthony Froude: The Last Undiscovered Great Victorian

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James Anthony Froude was an interesting man and he lived in very interesting times. His life encompassed many of the great lives, and great ideas, of the 19th Century. Sadly, he is not well-served by this biography. An earlier reviewer thinks that it is hard-going because of the preponderance of "facts", but it is the clumsy, plodding, infelicitous prose that makes the reading a chore. Where the language is not simply inept, (for example on Page 249, where the "women are working so cruelly" instead of `being worked so cruelly'), it is utterly wrong.
For example:

On Page 9, and again on Page 120 Professor Markus states: "Simply put, he was brutalized". Bashed, he might have been, but he was not thereby made a brute.

Page 30: "When he spoke of Christ on the cross, the Crucifixion itself was as palatable to the congregation as it was to the priest who evoked it". (Perhaps `palpable' was meant? The editor appears to have been nodding here as well).
And, might one suggest:
-"inherently" instead of "an `endemically' controversial man" (P. 92).

-Elizabeth "Regina", not Elizabeth `Rex' (P. 88)

"model" instead of `prototype' (P.22. "...Pattison, the eventual prototype for George Eliot's pedant Casaubon").
-
-`would-be' instead of `erstwhile' P.92. "Froude's enemies would one day paint Anthony as an erstwhile Boswell fawning a Great Man." Only with a great deal of mental gymnastics can erstwhile be made to do here.

Those are just a few of the more egregious solecisms. Apart from the ill-chosen word, the punctuation and construction are so clumsy as to make almost every page, for the reader, a struggle to understand. "Anthony thanked them all for their kindness, governor, ministers, the people". (Page 222) can be understood, at least, even if one has to stop and make allowance for the ugliness of the sentence. But on Page 188 we have "Carlyle himself might have been reticent, to use a much more fitting word for choosing Froude as his biographer, one which might have appeared too grandiose to utter to his niece -or to Tennyson when he asked". What on earth is being said here?
The reader of this life is continually having to stop for such sentences (many, many of them) and tease out the sense.
Professor Markus has no doubt spent a deal of time on the research for this worthy subject. The facts are certainly here. But they are in desperate need of a coherent organization, and the prose a polishing so that it approaches some of the "dazzling clarity" of Froude's own.

J. Anthony Froude was a student and ultimately biographer of Thomas Carlyle. Born in 1818, Froude became a Tractarian member seeking to purge Protestant elements from the Church of England, but quit when the leaders including his brother turned to Roman Catholicism. Instead he began to mistrust all churches and by 1849 while at Oxford he wrote the novel THE NEMESIS OF FAITH starring a clergyman who has reservations about his divine choosing. The book cost him his fellowship and provided his archdeacon father further proof that his son was sinfully pathetic. He soon met Thomas Carlyle who changed Froude's life as his Scottish mentor convinced him that biography was "the only history". Froude learned the lesson well with works on Henry VIII, Elizabeth I and eventually Carlyle after the man died in 1881.

This is an interesting biography that targets an audience filled with those readers who want to know everything about the Victorian age in layers on layers of depth. The amount of information will send many fans into overload, but savored slowly over a couple of weeks will provide a powerful feel for the mid to late nineteenth century Victorian intelligentsia. The insight into Froude's early years as a mentally abused member of a deeply pious intellectual family and his odd relationships with his teacher Carlyle and the great Victorian's spouse are deep and profound. However, though captivating at times, the book can become overwhelming with just the facts.

Harriet Klausner