The Collapse of Orthodoxy: The Intellectual Ordeal of George Frederick Holmes (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 357 firm and oligopolistic conditions in a number of industries reduced the number of buyers for certain products in producers' goods. This concentrated market also emerged in a number of consumers' goods industries with the increasing urbanization of the country. The concentrated nature of the market made it profitable for many manufacturers to wholesale, or even retail, their own products. Moreover, after the Civil War, a number of new products were offered to the public that were either perishable or technologically complex. These products required special handling or servicing that the network of wholesale merchants were unable to offer, forcing a number of manufacturers to market their own products. These changes did not occur in all sectors of the economy. In industries where the nature of the product remained relatively standard, and the markets diffuse (groceries, drugs, hardware, jewelry, liquor, and dry goods), the independent wholesaler continued to play an important role. Even in this area, however, the growing predominance of brand names and national advertising limited the wholesaler's role; he was no longer called upon to sell goods, merely to distribute them. This is a clearly written and well formulated study, grounded in research in the records of a number of nineteenth-century merchant and manufacturing firms. It is a valuable contribution to a little explored facet of nineteenth-century history. Erling A. Erickson University of the Pacific The Collapse of Orthodoxy: The Intellectual Ordeal of George Frederick Holmes. By Neal C. Gillespie. (Charlottesville: The University Press of Virginia, 1972. Pp. x, 273. $9.50.) A biography of a disagreeable personality makes depressing reading. Yet, Professor Gillespie ably compensates by enlarging the scope of this study of an obscure representative of southern intellectuality. George Frederick Holmes is revealed as a mordant critic of major trends and fads in Atlantic Victorian culture, but also as a self-pitying scholar. In the parlance of wartime Rebels, Holmes was ever a "croaker," that is, an enthusiast who groaned catastrophe whenever the going got tough. Roots of his misery lay in family history. Born into a debt-haunted household of Northumbrian gentlefolk, Holmes learned disappointment early. His father, author of financial woe, lived extravagantly in Demerera, British Guiana, but after his death in 1831, the Holmes's survived gallingly on family charity. Holmes repeated the reliance— and resentments—in marriage to Lavalette Floyd of Virginia not long after he arrived in America equipped with university degree and little else. Holmes used his wife's gentility and a feverish production of essays to obtain various college posts until the Floyd connection brought him to the University of Virginia in 1857 as its first professor of history. 358civil war history That eminence achieved, he seldom published thereafter. Unbusinessminded like his father, Holmes took small pleasure from his forty years at Charlottesville. Little wonder that Lavalette, often pregnant, spent much of married life on a Floyd plantation far from his joylessness. In intellectual pursuits, Holmes exhibited a similar pessimism. Though gifted, he published mostly in undemanding southern journals , bringing him provincial notice but not acclaim in a competitive world. His opinions and investigations were too diffuse, glaringly bigoted , and unsettled to be entrusted to major undertakings. Yet, in the grand style to which Victorian intellectuals often aspired, he hoped to synthesize the best of Enlightenment thought with modernist approaches , traditional Christianity with science, faith with order, historical particularities with discoveries of laws of social behavior. Skillfully Gillespie traces these preoccupations in a penetrating survey of how a lesser luminary viewed his culture. In his introspection, Holmes mirrored the underlying uncertainties and soulful stresses of the inquisitive Victorian mind. Holmes hoped to ride out the temporary afflatus of romantic iconoclasm through reformulations of traditional thought. Thus, he defended slavery. Too scholarly to proclaim southern supremacy, he concentrated on weaknesses in free Atlantic societies, deficiencies the South, he thought, was happily too unsophisticated to have yet embraced . Consequently, he admired George Fitzhugh's early work with its lamentations against direful modernisms. Cannibals All!, Fitzhugh's treatise on slavery as panacea of social ills everywhere, disillusioned Holmes. Fitzhugh, he mourned, was simply another garrulous, romantic system-builder, as hostile to intellectual discipline as to Yankee "isms...