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Farewell Victoria
Book by White, T. H.
- GenresFiction
192 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1933
About the author
T.H. White
104 books1,541 followersBorn in Bombay to English parents, Terence Hanbury White was educated at Cambridge and taught for some time at Stowe before deciding to write full-time. White moved to Ireland in 1939 as a conscientious objector to WWII, and lived out his years there. White is best known for his sequence of Arthurian novels, The Once and Future King, first published together in 1958.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
January 1, 2019
I thought I'd like this, but found it wearisome to read. The novel follows the life of Mundy, a servant, then a soldier, then a servant again and finally a self-employed cab driver from 1858 until his death in, I think, 1933. Much of it is either descriptive (of events, of the countryside, of the townscapes of southern England) or reflective (going over Mundy's thoughts at different stages of his life). Although I enjoyed some moments - the Zulu Wars, for example, or the episodes involving an extraordinary 7ft Countess Sophie Jaresky - I struggled to concentrate.
Much of the writing has a kind of quiet rhapsodic nostalgia to it, a kind of mood music, that, like the prose writing of Edward Thomas or Richard Jeffreys, I know I ought to like, but which I find I can't do much more than admire. It charts the changes in an ordinary man's life and the life of society over 75 years, so it's not uninteresting from that point of view, but I would rather, I think, read history. At least you don't expect an absence of dialogue in that genre, and, as I get older, I find I value dialogue more and more.
Still, not unworth reading, but I won't suffer separation pangs if I take my copy down to the secondhand bookshop.
Much of the writing has a kind of quiet rhapsodic nostalgia to it, a kind of mood music, that, like the prose writing of Edward Thomas or Richard Jeffreys, I know I ought to like, but which I find I can't do much more than admire. It charts the changes in an ordinary man's life and the life of society over 75 years, so it's not uninteresting from that point of view, but I would rather, I think, read history. At least you don't expect an absence of dialogue in that genre, and, as I get older, I find I value dialogue more and more.
Still, not unworth reading, but I won't suffer separation pangs if I take my copy down to the secondhand bookshop.
February 23, 2018
An idiosyncratic portrait of the age (which White extends - usefully - into the 1930s) comprising snippets and extended anecdotes revolving around Mundy the groom, an archetypal 19th century English working man. Includes lots of oddities White has collected in his trawls through disparate sources. For me this was an amazing read, though for some it may be just too odd. But that's T H White.
May 8, 2021
When TH White is on form, he charms me more than any other writer. The books of the ‘Once and Future King’ books (both the versions in the series and the slightly different solo ones) are works which I utterly adore. ‘Mistress Masham’s Repose’ is possibly one of my favourite children’s books ever and I loved his bestiary. ‘The Goshawk’ was an interesting story of his own failures whilst ‘Age of Scandal’ and‘The Scandalmonger’ are entertaining, but lean into the patrician. Then we have books like ‘The Elephant and the Kangaroo’ and ‘The Master’, which have brilliant moments but are a little icky in their world-views and politics. ‘Farewell Victoria’ is closer the icky end of the scale.
The earliest work of his I have read so far, it leans towards the poetic and the descriptive. Entering into the life of Mundy, we see him as a boy, a young groom, a soldier at the Battle of Isandlwana and as a horse-drawn hackney driver in an age of cars. The plot mainly exists to describe the various bygone times and to reflect on how time changes. Dramatic moments, like Mundy losing his wife to a slicker rival, or being part of a huge military defeat in Africa, are described but mainly exist to give Mundy something to reflect on.
I found TH White’s patrician leanings distasteful in some of his other books and they are in force in this one. During Victoria’s era, everybody knew where there place was and what role they had to play and it didn’t really matter if people died young or were sent off to war, everybody was happier because they knew who they were. Nowadays the country houses have become hotels and people work for silly infantilising companies who baby their workers with healthcare and such, it doesn’t breed character the way it used to. It was alarming reading a book written in 1933 which praises the brave young Italian wearing the fasces on their chest.
He’s always at his best as an author when he encourages openness and learning, this is one of his more closed productions.
The earliest work of his I have read so far, it leans towards the poetic and the descriptive. Entering into the life of Mundy, we see him as a boy, a young groom, a soldier at the Battle of Isandlwana and as a horse-drawn hackney driver in an age of cars. The plot mainly exists to describe the various bygone times and to reflect on how time changes. Dramatic moments, like Mundy losing his wife to a slicker rival, or being part of a huge military defeat in Africa, are described but mainly exist to give Mundy something to reflect on.
I found TH White’s patrician leanings distasteful in some of his other books and they are in force in this one. During Victoria’s era, everybody knew where there place was and what role they had to play and it didn’t really matter if people died young or were sent off to war, everybody was happier because they knew who they were. Nowadays the country houses have become hotels and people work for silly infantilising companies who baby their workers with healthcare and such, it doesn’t breed character the way it used to. It was alarming reading a book written in 1933 which praises the brave young Italian wearing the fasces on their chest.
He’s always at his best as an author when he encourages openness and learning, this is one of his more closed productions.
June 4, 2013
This isn't my favorite of the T. H. White books I've read so far, but the writing is as beautiful as always. I liked the early chapters best, the ones about the old hierarchical household of Ambleden, the little girls observing the privileges of primogeniture even in the bathtub, and Mundy and Ellen as children "finding that they had used the same thoughts" about the world. White seems particularly good at imagining the experiences of children and animals.
He's also good at thinking about war, though, and the section about a World War I soldier mentally tracing the lines of British history while swimming off the coast of Hastings will probably stick with me the longest. Especially this passage from the end of the chapter:
Well, he had brought his history up to date. Now it would behove him, in a few hours, to go back into the historical farce and shoulder his own destiny. Then history would fail him. Then disgusting terrors, personal agonies, would cut him off again from human streams. Then, too close to distinguish a unity, he would have to identify himself, in flesh and blood, with racial importance; would have to merge himself, possibly as a sacrifice, in the only value left to him, the value of being a unit in the endurance of men.
Mundy, the central character, is too uneducated at the start to have an abstract sense of history, but unlike the soldier he's blessed at the end with being able to see it even through his personal suffering. White seems to believe an ability to see the larger picture is the best consolation a person can hope for, and maybe he's right. I think he intended this book to be a contribution to that effort.
He's also good at thinking about war, though, and the section about a World War I soldier mentally tracing the lines of British history while swimming off the coast of Hastings will probably stick with me the longest. Especially this passage from the end of the chapter:
Well, he had brought his history up to date. Now it would behove him, in a few hours, to go back into the historical farce and shoulder his own destiny. Then history would fail him. Then disgusting terrors, personal agonies, would cut him off again from human streams. Then, too close to distinguish a unity, he would have to identify himself, in flesh and blood, with racial importance; would have to merge himself, possibly as a sacrifice, in the only value left to him, the value of being a unit in the endurance of men.
Mundy, the central character, is too uneducated at the start to have an abstract sense of history, but unlike the soldier he's blessed at the end with being able to see it even through his personal suffering. White seems to believe an ability to see the larger picture is the best consolation a person can hope for, and maybe he's right. I think he intended this book to be a contribution to that effort.
August 24, 2018
T.H. White always delights me. This book isn’t his best, in my opinion, but it has undeniable charm and I thoroughly enjoyed it. This passage especially made me swoon:
“He was somebody whom suffering and experience had completely purged, leaving him wise and sweet. He was last year’s apple, wrinkled in a clean barn; wholesome, unbrowned and softly acid.”
“He was somebody whom suffering and experience had completely purged, leaving him wise and sweet. He was last year’s apple, wrinkled in a clean barn; wholesome, unbrowned and softly acid.”
August 5, 2014
I did not finish this one. I just couldn't stand hearing Mundy whining about his wife leaving him for pages and pages and pages. Every stupid little thing is overly-described. So boring.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews