—The Sunday Times has a story (7 July) in which Will Lloyd considers whether the recent election has brought social mobility back to the the British government and ended the domination of the “posh boys” who were the leaders of the Blair and Cameron regimes. How the posh boys had become established is part of the story, and Evelyn Waugh makes a contribution. Here’e an excerpt:
…Waiting for the Etonians was the title of a book from 2009 by the left-wing columnist Nick Cohen, anticipating the Cameron government. This comeback “was the weirdest thing”, says the historian David Kynaston. “The working assumption everyone had was that the old Etonians would never come back, an assumption compounded by Margaret Thatcher, with her grocer’s daughter from Grantham stuff.”
With its turn towards cuddly, hug-ahoodie, socially liberal conservatism, the ancient British ruling class had reinvented itself for the 21st century. Kynaston, the author of several acclaimed histories of postwar Britain, compares hearing Cameron’s voice on the radio in the 2010s to hearing the voices of upper-class Tories such as Anthony Eden (Eton), Harold Macmillan (Eton) and Douglas-Home (Eton) on the radio when he was a child. He quotes Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, in which one character warns the protagonist Charles Ryder that charm is “the great English blight. It does not exist outside these damp islands. It spots and kills anything it touches.” That, argued Kynaston, was “at the heart of Cameron”.
The posh renaissance of the early 2010s was not confined to politics. The tawdry celeb culture of the Noughties gave way to a near-Edwardian opulence. Millions of people, some probably even descended from big-house servants, enjoyed watching Downton Abbey every Sunday night on ITV. Aspirationally posh, jolly boarding school types, from Nigella Lawson to Clare Balding, Boris Johnson to Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, filled our television schedules. Brideshead was revisited once more in a 2008 film adaptation starring the Downton stud Matthew Goode…
The path for this elite comeback was paved by Tony Blair, who declared the class war “over” in 1999. Globalisation, access to university education, and social benefits skimmed from taxes on the City were supposed to result in a classless New Labour Britain. Cameron then sought to convince the country that he was the heir to Blair and ordinary enough to be its leader, deploying bromides such as “it’s where you’re going to, not where you’re from, that counts”. Tory MP Nadine Dorries, however, derided him and Osborne as “posh boys” ? a term she later applied to Rishi Sunak…
—The Tatler has a feature length article on the Mitford sisters which opens with a description of a film mentioned in a recent post and based on their own lives rather than on those of the characters they had created in their writings. Here’s the opening:
Move over, Rivals: the upcoming Disney adaptation of Dame Jilly Cooperâs famous novel is no longer the only hotly anticipated television series to have on your radar. Outrageous, a new project that dives into the lives of the Mitford sisters, promises to âbring the full, uncensored storyâ of the familyâs scandalous exploits to life, according to the show description. The series â which will be based on Mary S. Lovellâs biography, The Mitford Girls and air on BritBox in 2025 â will star Bessie Carter (best known for her role as Prudence Featherington in Bridgerton) as the much-loved author, Nancy Mitford; other cast members include Anna Chancellor as the Mitfordsâ mother.
Nancy Mitfordâs novels, which star the charmingly eccentric British aristocracy, have been adapted for the small screen several times;Â The Pursuit of Love was most recently made into a series starring Dominic West and Lily James. It seems only natural, therefore, that the Mitfords themselves should become the subject of television interest â particularly as their own lives were even more captivating than fiction…
The article is by Clara Strurick and can be read in full at this link.
–The religious website Aleteia has a discussion of Waugh’s novel Helena. The article is by Suzanne M Wolfe and begins with this:
The 20th-century British novelist and Catholic convert Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966) is known primarily for his biting, funny, and profoundly satirical novels. One famous exception, of course, was the romantic saga set between the world wars, Brideshead Revisited (though along with the drama it still contained a share of social satire).
When he published his novel Helena in 1950, however, many of his readers were taken aback. Unlike Brideshead and his satires of modern life, here is a book set in the ancient world. It chronicles the life of St. Helena, mother of the Roman Emperor Constantine, and discoverer of the True Cross of Christ.
What is it about this relatively obscure Catholic saint that induced Waugh to attempt a very different sort of novel â one that he took great pride in?…
An interesting illustrated discussion follows and can be seen and read here.
—The Oldie has posted an article in which art critic and biographer Mirabel Cecil has described what was thought to be Rex Whistler’s lost masterpiece. In the article she goes on to describe the painting “Ulysses’s Farewll to Penelope” and, based on a recent discovery, updates this as well some other matters that appeared in her 2012 book written jointly with her husband Hugh. Waugh and Whistler were friends although not close. She mentions Waugh briefly in the article in the context of her critique of the treatment of Whistler’s works in one of the museums where it is displayed:
…The hang is only part of the problem. The caption is in equally poor taste as well as being pretty useless. Instead of explaining who Rex actually was, his dates, or how this self-portrait has come to be here, it states only that he was the model for the painter Charles Ryder in Brideshead Revisited. This is not even proven, although the museumâs caption presents it as fact.
The only record we have of Evelyn Waugh on Rex is in a letter Waugh wrote to their mutual friend Lady Diana Cooper:
âI barely knew Rex Whistler. How I love him for asking, âWhat has victory to do with it?â It was the question one longed to hear asked in the last years of the war and not hearing it made me morose. It is the theme of my own little trilogy.â (Waugh refers to his Sword of Honour war trilogy, and not to Brideshead Revisited.)
Waugh wrote this years after the war; but it shows his contemporariesâ admiration for Rex. Waugh, Diana Cooper, Cecil Beaton⊠they all loved him for who he was. And they respected him for the brave decision he made in giving up his successful career and enlisting in order to fight the Nazi tyranny…
The article is quite interesting and can be read in full at this link.