The curent issue of the TLS posts the 1935 review of Waugh’s Edmund Campion in its Then and Now column. The review is written by A.F. Pollard, Professor of History at University College London and specialist in the Tudor period. His best known book is his 1929 study of Wolsey. Waugh’s book was published in September 1935, and the review was in the TLS for 3 October of that year. Pollard’s article is not among those collected in the 1984 Critical Heritage volume, and this may be the first time it has been republished. The review is detailed and on the whole favorable:
His book, he says, is only “a short, popular life”, which “makes no pretension to be a work of scholarship”; but we might add that Mr. Waugh is pretty well read in the proper authorities, better versed than most writers on the period in its religious dialectic, and gifted with a facility of expression generally denied to scientific historians. Notwithstanding his zeal for Jesuit martyrs, he can recognize that “humble, eccentric men” could “die deliberately, without hope of release, for an idea” in Mary’s reign: and, while he is precluded from calling them martyrs, his recognition of their sincerity and devotion entitles him to the respect of others who cannot enjoy quite the same historical Weltanschauung.
The article goes on to catalogue several errors, mainly in Waugh’s descriptions of periods before and after Campion’s life. The current TLS also carries a review of the new scholarly biography of Campion by Gerard Kilroy which had been foreseen by Waugh in 1935. This review is available only with a subscription. See earlier post.
NOTE (3 February 2016): The full text of Peter Davidson’s TLS review has been made available by a kind friend. Davidson raises two points worth noting. Kilroy makes use (“with meditated, ironic mischief”) of Waugh’s title for the Oxford chapter of Brideshead Revisited (“Et in Arcadia Ego”) as the title for his own chapter describing Campion’s years spent in Prague, “the one period of peace and stability in Campion’s life.” In his conclusion Davidson compares Kilroy’s work with Waugh’s “eloquent if deeply partisan book” and notes that Waugh donated the proceeds of the book’s sale to Campion Hall where they were used “to finance Charles Mahoney’s exquisite murals in Edwin Lutyen’s Lady Chapel.” See earlier post.
