1901 & All That

ELT 49 : 3 2006 that genders subject and object and is exemplified by Charles Tansley 's assertion "women can't paint." Given the premise of the book, this chapter might have been strengthened by a consideration of the significance of Lily's "Chinese eyes" as a metaphor for Other ways of seeing than the occidental which privileges binarism. Traditional Chinese art does not require human intellect to interfere or mediate. The Daoist aesthetic stresses the importance of "Sitting in Forgetfulness," the Chinese painter does not "represent" nature, a term suggestive of a split, but harmonises with the object in a process of contemplation. Song Dynasty landscape painting, as Cubist art in the West was only just beginning to do, employed multiple perspectives that blurred consciousness and observation. This development in twentieth-century European aesthetics is reflected in the multifaceted eyes of Clarissa Harlowe's namesake in Mrs. Dalloway. Clarissa Dalloway enjoys multiple scopically empowered positions, most importantly the desiring sexual gaze. She "cannot take her eyes off" Sally Seton. Woolf challenges feminised discourses of vision that were hitherto narrowed by propriety . That they resonate still is indeed remarkable and it is to be hoped that Ogden's illuminating book might profitably be read by contemporary psychobiologists. ANNE WlTCHARD Birbeck College, University of London 1901 & All That -------------------A . N. Wilson. After the Victorians: The Decline of Britain in the World. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux; London: Hutchinson, xii + 609 pp. $35.00 £25.00 AIMED SQUARELY at an educated popular audience, called with some self-deprecation "the chattering class," this account is the sequel to Wilson's best-selling The Victorians (2002), characterized by a commentator as "an enjoyable romp" through the reign of Queen Victoria. This ambitious new romp opens with the funeral of the Great Queen herself and the Durbar at Delhi, perhaps at once the most pretentious , tasteless, and splendid displays of imperial power ever staged, and ends with the coronation of Elizabeth II. At somewhat breakneck speed and aware of the need for judicious corner-cutting, Wilson covers five tumultuous decades of Britain's history, during which it dwindled from Great Power to a much smaller player on the world scene, was divested of its far-flung Empire, recovered from two catastrophic wars paid for not only in blood but also in economic decline, and adjusted to the rise of the common man (and woman), whose power, at least in theory , greatly increased in the post-Victorian period. 340 BOOK REVIEWS Balancing social with political history, Wilson's absorbing story is built up from wide reading in secondary materials as well as some original research. Footnotes and an index are expected gestures to scholarly authority. Here they collide with the more demotic touch of plentiful black-and-white illustrations, not always very happily captioned , perhaps the work of an editorial assistant. They inform us, for example, that "John Cowper Powys (1872-1963) is surely the greatest English novelist of his generation." (Surely not, or which generation would that be, one is tempted to respond.) The caption alongside Elgar astride a bicycle informs us: "Sir Edward Elgar, a keen cyclist, was the greatest English orchestral composer since Purcell." Alas, Elgar's dates were 1857-1934, Henry Purcell's 1659-1695. The work's thirty-seven pithily titled chapters ("God—and the Americans ," "Shipwreck," "Peace") follow a straightforward chronological order. At times there is, perhaps deliberately—Wilson once gladly proclaimed himself a "Young Fogy"—the sense of an overly long pageant play, that somewhat embarrassing old genre now decently dead. The emphasis on political history accounts for the unduly pessimistic title, for though Great Britain assuredly declined as a world power during the decades in Wilson's purview, her inhabitants emerged, beginning just after the Second World War, from the grinding poverty and gross inequality that beset the twentieth century's first decade. It saw a million of the capital's denizens living below the poverty line, and slightly less than fifty percent of the nation's wealth in the hands of five million people, with the remainder shared out among thirty-eight million people. From this vantage point, "decline" is relative indeed: the wealth brought by Empire was so...