Glittering Illusion: English Sympathy for the Southern Confederacy

by Sheldon Vanauken

Explains why Great Britain did not intervene in the Civil War

Genres: History, American History, Politics, American Civil War, Nonfiction

182 pages, Hardcover

First published August 8, 1989

Reviews

[Nick · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author makes a very convincing case for his basic premise, which is that the English government chose not to recognize the Confederacy for simple, practical reasons, and not the ones usually quoted in hindsight. His interpretations of the historical trends and the various divisions of English society were also very interesting.
Even his speculations about what might have happened are mostly interesting, although I think that his comments about an independent Confederacy eventually abolishing slavery were based on the worst kind of hindsight optimism. That's ironic, because he accuses historians of something very similar in their take on why England did not recognize the Confederacy as a nation at a point in time when that would have mattered.
Where the book went off the rails entirely was in his rant against American-style democracy. His idea of a meritocracy has the same flaw as most schemes, which is that it would work nicely up until the first time someone figured out how to corrupt the system. Since it would have a built-in strong motive for corrupting the system in favor of your own friends and family, it wouldn't take long, without safeguards more stringent than any society has yet managed. That's even assuming that the idea is a good one, and that a university don inherently deserves a greater say in society than a dockworker [those are two of his own examples]. The novel Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein used some of these ideas, requiring military service in order to gain full citizenship, but Vanauken's is a complex scheme, with extra voting power achieved by personal milestones, sort of "leveling-up" in real life.
In any case, even that part of the book is a good argument-starter, so it's worth reading.

[Miles Smith · Rating 2 out of 5]

An interesting book that will certainly draw interest because of the author's relationship with CS Lewis and Vanauken's own well-known work A Severe Mercy. Vanauken's sympathies are variously anachronistic, reactionary, or are charming depending on the reader, but his history is bad and his intellectual taxonomy is cartoonish. The forward was written by a peer which gives the book the feel or prestige. Given how much I respect Vanauken and how meaningful A Severe Mercy was, I expected more. A disappointing work, to be quite honest.