Customer Reviews

Nelson: A Personal History

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I had wanted to read a biography of Nelson for some time, having become interested in him thanks to Patrick O'Brian. This one is the right price, and is a good starting point, but I find I still need to read more to get all the information I want, as this is a biography of Nelson ON LAND.

I know other people have written copiously of his tactics, and I figured this wasn't solely a textbook of strategy, written with the clarity and generosity of hindsight, but I also figured I would come out of it with some sense of Nelson as a sailor. I didn't. There is one mention of a ship missing stays, and another of his gunnery crews firing broadsides at the astounding rate of one per minute (I don't know how many minutes that lasted), but I have no sense of how he must have impressed his superiors to advance to post-captain so quickly. I can't tell, based on reading this book, just how he liked to sail.

Here's an example of how the book is weighted: It gave four pages to the famous Battle of the Nile (Abu Qir), quite a bit of which was dedicated to the admittedly horrible sight of L'Orient blowing up, and the next fifty pages, approximately, on his dalliance in Naples with Lady Hamilton. I understand her importance in his life--after reading this book, I can hardly be unaware of it--but I want to know which qualities Nelson most valued in his ships and crews. He seems to have been a reasonably friendly captain and admiral, but I wish Mr. Hibbert had documented his career at sea with the impressive attention he gave his life ashore.

I am a great admirer of Christopher Hibbert but I was very disappointed in this book. When I finished it I had the impression that I still didn't know much about what kind of man Nelson was. He seemed to be almost a cartoon character or someone in an old swashbuckler type movie, rather than a real person. One reason for this is that Mr. Hibbert relied too much on quotations from Nelson's own letters. Nelson apparently always saw himself as someone destined to be very special and oftimes when he wrote or said something it seemed as though he did it with one eye (if you'll pardon the pun) on posterity. He would be melodramatic and predict that this or that battle would make his name or result in his death, etc. He would be very upset when he wasn't promoted quickly enough or didn't get prize money after a battle but when he made a comment for public consumption he would say his only wish was to serve king and country. He loved to strut around with medals and ribbons pinned to his chest and he was seemingly always available to have his portrait painted by every artist in England. Mr. Hibbert does not provide any analysis or even express his opinion. It is almost as though he thought this was a story that could tell itself. Well,..... it couldn't! Mr. Hibbert called this book "Nelson: A Personal History", but it is too much about Nelson's personal life and at the same time not personal enough. There are too many quotations from letters to Emma Hamilton expressing his love for her, but not enough information about why Nelson abandoned his wife. There is too much gossip from people who either liked Mrs. Hamilton or couldn't stand her and one is left confused rather than feeling that a balanced picture has been presented, again, because Mr. Hibbert makes no attempt to separate the wheat from the chafe. Nelson's career is given short shrift and it seems as though in a flash he has gone from being a boy at sea to admiral, with no explanation of how he got from one place to the other. We are shown enough to know that Nelson was indeed a very brave (if reckless and sometimes foolhardy) man but it is never explained to us what made Nelson a great strategist or set him above any other captain or admiral of the fleet. We are given only one glimpse of the complexity of the man, and this towards the end of the book. Nelson met the future Duke of Wellington in a room of the Colonial Office, where they were both waiting to see Lord Castlereagh. Nelson had no idea that he was talking with somebody of any reputation or importance, although Wellington recognized Nelson. According to Wellington "he (Nelson) entered at once into conversation with me, if I can call it conversation, for it was almost all on his side and all about himself and, in reality, a style so vain and so silly as to surprise and almost disgust me." Nelson then left the room for a moment, apparently to find out from someone who exactly he had been speaking with. After finding out that Wellington was "somebody" he came back into the room and his manner was totally different. Wellington continued "his charlatan style had quite vanished...and certainly for the last half or three-quarters of an hour, I don't know that I ever had a conversation that interested me more...I saw enough to be satisfied that he was really a very superior man; but certainly a more sudden or complete metamorphosis I never saw." If only during the course of this 400 page book these depths could have been explored, we might then have been presented with the "real" Nelson!

For a biography of a military leader, I was quite surprised to find out how little military events and details are given by Mr. Hibbert. For those interested in sea battles, tactics, and getting a feel for what life was like in the British Navy at the time of the Napoleonic Wars, skip this book. Hibbert's excruciating detail about Nelson's social life, liesure travel, meals at inns, parties, Lady Hamilton's dresses accumulates to the point that it is very tempting to "abandon ship" on this book. Many, many paragraphs drone on about tedious social affairs and extensive quotes from letters are repetitive and boring, not illuminating.

This book examines Nelson's personal life focusing a great deal of attention on his relationship with Lady Hamilton. It is not a flattering picture of the naval hero. I would have preferred to have read more of a military history of Nelson's accomplishments and evidently chose the wrong book. Well researched and based on personal correspondence , Hibbert's book is not without it's own merits , it just lost my interest about two thirds of the way in as it became increasingly bogged down in myriad details of this single relationship.

I have just spent the last 4 weeks, on & off, trying to finish this fairly thin volume; during that time I've read over 10 other books - I think that indicates the readability of this biography.

The biographer seems more interested in cramming in relatively superfluous information, with scant regard to punctuation with the result that each sentence ends up even longer than this one and I had to re-read many of them several times to make out the sense of what was being implied.

Although meticulously researched, this seems less concerned with Nelson's naval actions and more with his below-the-navel actions. Our biographer seems not to have heard of the Naval Chronicle or Admiralty Papers - the Nile action is dealt with in a page, Copenhagen slightly more, but 2 years in the West Indies occupy less than a page.

Nelson & Bronte (!?!) himself comes out of this looking more like an immature, pretentious, love-struck, egocentric hypochondriac than the Great Hero still revered nearly 2 centuries later. On the plus side, it is apparent that Nelson is loved by his men, whom he clearly cares for, (knowing many of them by name) and is diligent in supporting those less fortunate than himself, both with cash and influence.

The focus on his tawdry menage-a-trois, stately processions round Britain and portrait-posing does little to foster the heroic image - in effect we are led to believe that the Nile action was won by luck, Copenhagen by bluff, and Trafalgar by a foolhardy tactic...

I felt sadly let-down and would prefer a more readable, naval-oriented biography.

The author focused a lot on the man particulary on his relationship with Lady Hamilton. While a lot of attention was focused on the personal side the book was a little weak on the military side of the man which is why we even know about him.