George Moore - "Esther Waters"

Frank Richard Stockton - "Ting a ling"

E. Nesbit - "The Incomplete Amorist"

Desiderius Erasmus - "The Praise of Folly"

Annual Bibliography of Commonwealth Literature 2007
This paper argues that discourses of love in Ghanaian market literature for youth offer a view into complex negotiations of agency and empowerment. Drawing on Deborah Durham's notion of youth as "social `shifters'" and Francis Nyamnjoh's conception of the "interconnectedness" of agency, I take Ghanaian market literature as one specific case of how African literature for youth foregrounds questions of continuity and change as African societies enter into increasingly complex global relations. In this literature for youth, received notions of love, often constructed out of impressions from American pop and hip hop music, carry new notions of agency that compete with existing "domesticated" forms. Authors like Ike Tandoh and Evelyn Tay employ discourses of love to offer youth alternative avenues for empowerment in a context of socio-economic disenfranchizement. In a creative process of "straddling", this writing both reveals and reproduces the contradictions that obtain in youth configurations of agency.

Historical and Political Essays

W >> William Edward Hartpole Lecky >> Historical and Political Essays




At the same time it is certain that the Queen fulfilled with
perfection that most difficult duty of an able constitutional
Sovereign--the duty of yielding her convictions to those of her
responsible Ministers and acting faithfully with Ministers she
distrusted. To a Sovereign with clear views and a more than common
force of character this must often have been very painful, and to have
fulfilled it faithfully and with no loss of dignity is no small merit.
It is the universal testimony of all who served her, that no Sovereign
ever supported her successive Ministers with a more perfect loyalty or
held the scales between contending parties with a more complete
impartiality. No one understood better to what point a constitutional
Sovereign may press her opinions and at what point she is bound to
give way; and while maintaining her rightful authority she never in
any degree transgressed its bounds. In the very beginning of her reign
she showed this quality in a high degree. She looked up to Lord
Melbourne with an almost filial affection, and there were peculiar
reasons why his great opponent, Sir Robert Peel, should have been
distasteful to her. The dispute about the removal of her Ladies of the
Bedchamber, and still more the conduct of Sir Robert Peel in
supporting the reduction of the income which the Whigs had proposed
for Prince Albert, must have touched her feelings on the most
sensitive points, and the stiff, formal, somewhat awkward manner of
Peel seemed very little fitted to ingratiate him with a young
Sovereign. Yet when the change of Ministry arrived, Peel found no
trace of resentment in the Queen. She gave him her complete
confidence, and she fully estimated his great qualities. Of all the
Ministers who served her there is indeed none of whom she has written
in warmer terms. When Lord Palmerston became Prime Minister in 1855 it
was contrary to her earnest desire, but when the change was made
Palmerston himself acknowledged that he had 'no reason to complain of
the least want of cordiality or confidence on the part of the Court.'
At the time when she was most opposed to her Ministers, she fully
acquiesced in the principle that she must submit all letters on public
affairs to them and frame her replies upon their advice. There were
constant attempts on the part of foreign Sovereigns who were connected
with her to carry on affairs by correspondence with her without the
knowledge and sanction of her Ministers, but the Queen steadily
resisted them. Anything, indeed, that in any way savoured of intrigue
was in the highest degree repugnant to her nature.

She acted in the same way in internal affairs. Few measures that were
carried in her time were more repugnant to her than Gladstone's
disestablishment of the Irish Church. It abolished an institution of
which she was herself the head and which a special clause in the
Coronation Oath required her to uphold, and she foretold, not without
good reason, that it would not pacify Ireland but would be an
encouragement to further agitation. The question, however, had been
submitted at a general election to the decision of the country, and
after that decision had been unequivocally given in favour of the
policy of Gladstone, she frankly accepted it with the assent of the
Prime Minister. When a great danger of a conflict between the two
Houses of Parliament had arisen, she devoted herself actively in
preventing it. She employed for that service the instrumentality of
Archbishop Tait--a great statesman-prelate, whose promotion to the see
of Canterbury was due to her own personal initiative, contrary to the
wish of Lord Beaconsfield, but most fully justified by the result--and
it was largely due to the intervention of the Queen that the Church
Bill was not thrown out in the House of Lords. She acted in a
somewhat similar way with reference to the Franchise Bill of 1884,
though on this occasion she does not seem to have disliked the
measure, which she urged the House of Lords to accept.

On three very memorable occasions the intervention of the Queen had
probably a great effect on English politics. It is well known that at
the time when the issue of peace or war with the United States was
trembling in the balance on account of the seizure of the Southern
envoys on the 'Trent,' the Queen, acting in accordance with the Prince
Consort, by softening and revising the language of an English despatch
to America, did very much to prevent the dispute from leading to a
great war; that in the proclamation which was issued to the Indian
people after the Sepoy Mutiny, she insisted on the excision of some
most unfortunate words that seemed to menace the native creeds, and on
the insertion of an emphatic promise that they should in no wise be
interfered with, and thus probably prevented a new outburst of most
dangerous fanaticism; that at the time of the Schleswig-Holstein
dispute she contributed powerfully and actively to give a turn to the
negotiations that averted a war with Prussia and Austria, which, as is
now almost universally recognised, could only have led to a great
catastrophe.

Whatever opinions may be formed of the merits of the dispute between
Denmark and the German powers about Schleswig-Holstein, few persons
who judge by the event can doubt that an isolated intervention of
England on behalf of Denmark against the combined forces of Austria
and Prussia would have been absolutely impotent to effect the object
that was desired, and that even if France had consented to join in the
struggle it would have led to a military disaster hardly less than
that of the war of Sedan. If, contrary to all probability, the
combined forces of France and England had proved stronger than those
of Austria and Germany, the result could have hardly failed to be that
France would have been established on the left bank of the Rhine, and
that the treaty of Vienna, which it was one of the great objects of
English policy to maintain, would have been torn into shreds.

The dangers, however, of conflict arising from the extreme
irritability of English public opinion against Germany on the Danish
question, were very great, and there can be little doubt that the
personal influence of the Queen with the German Sovereign was an
appreciable influence, and it was her desire that a paragraph in the
Queen's Speech opening Parliament in February 1864 was erased. Words
which contained at least a veiled or attributed threat to Germany were
omitted, and instead of them an inoffensive paragraph was inserted
expressing the Queen's ardent desire for peace and recording the
earnest efforts she had made to maintain it.[51] At the same time
when, by the Convention of Gastein in August 1865, the Duchies were
severed from the Danish throne and placed in the virtual possession of
Prussia and Austria, the protest of Lord Russell against so flagrant a
violation of public right, and especially of the right of the people
to be consulted on their own destiny, was drawn up with her full
assent and indeed in a great measure at her suggestion.[52]

On other occasions her remonstrances were disregarded, and courses
were pursued to which she strongly objected. The surrender after
Majuba was in her opinion a pusillanimous abandonment of the English
flag, and it was with extreme reluctance that she acquiesced in it.
Still more vehement were her feelings about the long abandonment of
General Gordon in the Soudan. She had been indefatigable in urging on
the Ministry of Gladstone the duty of speedy measures for his rescue,
and when, owing to the long delay of the Ministry, the most heroic of
modern Englishmen perished at Khartoum, her indignation knew no
bounds. In a letter to his sisters, burning with mingled pity and
indignation, she pronounced his 'cruel though heroic fate' to be 'a
stain left upon England,' which she keenly felt. This was one of the
few occasions in which she allowed her sentiments in hostility to the
policy of her Ministers to appear publicly before the world. In
general, she had a profound distrust of the policy and judgment of Mr.
Gladstone, and she fully shared the dread with which the great body of
English statesmen looked upon the Home Rule policy. It was no new
sentiment on her part, for she had lived through the Repeal agitation
of O'Connell, and as far back as 1843 Sir Robert Peel had somewhat
unconstitutionally declared in Parliament that he was authorised by
the Queen to state that she, like her predecessor, was resolved to
maintain the Union inviolate by all the means in her power.

There can now be no harm in saying--what when both parties were alive
was naturally kept in the background--that the relations of the Queen
with Mr. Gladstone were usually of a very painful character. She had
personally not much to complain of. The skill and firmness with which
Mr. Gladstone resisted the attempts to diminish the parliamentary
subsidies for her family were fully and gratefully recognised by the
Queen, but the main course of his politics, both foreign and domestic,
filled her with alarm, and she never appears to have experienced the
attraction which his great personal gifts exercised over most of those
with whom he came in immediate contact. The extreme copiousness of his
vocabulary, the extreme subtlety of his mind and reasoning, and the
imperiousness of temper with which he seldom failed to meet
opposition, were all repugnant to her. To those who have experienced
the sustained emphasis of language with which Mr. Gladstone was
accustomed in conversation to enforce his views, there is much truth
as well as humour in the saying which was attributed to the Queen, 'I
wish Mr. Gladstone would not always speak to me as if I was a public
meeting'; and a little episode which is related by Sir Theodore Martin
illustrates the irritation which Mr. Gladstone's methods of business
must have caused to a very busy and overworked lady who always loved
few words and simple and direct arguments.[53] At all times the Queen
had decided political opinions, and the experience of a long reign had
given her a large measure of not unjustifiable self-confidence. Few
persons had studied as she had during all those years the various
political questions that arose, and she had had the advantage of
discussing them at length with a long succession of the leading
statesmen of England. Under such circumstances her opinions had no
small weight, and although in the Liberal Government she gave her full
confidence to Lord Clarendon and Lord Granville, she looked with the
gravest apprehension on the policy of Mr. Gladstone.

It was a painful and irksome position, but it did not lead the Queen
to any unconstitutional course. No public act or word ever disclosed
her feelings. It was indeed in most cases very slowly, and in small
circles and through private channels, that the convictions of the
Queen became known.

At the close of the second Ministry of Mr. Gladstone she at once
offered him an earldom, which he refused, and on his death she fully
acquiesced in the public funeral in Westminster Abbey, and the Prince
of Wales attended it as her representative. In an autograph letter to
Mrs. Gladstone she spoke with the deep and genuine warmth that was
never wanting in her letters of condolence of her sympathy with the
bereavement of that lady. She spoke of his illustrious gifts and of
his personal kindness to herself, but it was noticed that no sentence
in the letter intimated any approbation of his general policy. 'Truth
in the inmost parts' was indeed a prominent characteristic of the
Queen, and she wrote nothing which was not in accordance with her true
convictions.

There were occasions when she took independent steps, and some of these
had a considerable influence on politics. Louis Napoleon was one of the
few great Sovereigns who were not related to her, and to few persons
could the _coup d'etat_ which brought him to the throne have been more
repugnant, but the cordial personal relations she established with him
undoubtedly contributed considerably to the good relations which for
many years subsisted between England and France. Bismarck detested
English Court influence and was greatly prejudiced against her, but he
has left a striking testimony to the favourable impression which her
tact and good sense made upon him when he first came into contact with
her. She possessed to a high degree the power of choosing the right
moment and striking the true chord, and she appears to have been an
excellent judge not only of the feelings of large bodies of men, but
also of the individual characters of those with whom she dealt. She had
a style of writing which was eminently characteristic and eminently
feminine, and it is easy to trace the letters which were entirely her
own. Her letters of congratulation, or sympathy, or encouragement on
public occasions scarcely ever failed in their effect and never
contained an injudicious word. The same thing may be said of her many
beautiful letters to those who were suffering from some grievous
calamity. Whether she was writing to a great public character like the
widow of an American President, or expressing her sorrow for obscure
sufferers, there was the same note of true womanly sympathy, so
manifestly spontaneous and so manifestly heartfelt, that it found its
way to the hearts of thousands. The tact for which she was so justly
celebrated, like all true tact, sprang largely from character, from the
quick and lively sympathies of an eminently affectionate nature. No one
could have been less theatrical, or less likely in any unworthy way to
seek for popularity; but she knew admirably the occasions or the methods
by which she could strike the imagination and appeal most favourably to
the feelings of her people. She showed this in the very beginning of her
reign when she insisted, in defiance of the opinion of the Duke of
Wellington, on riding herself through the ranks of her troops at her
first review. She showed it on countless other occasions of her long
reign--pre-eminently in her two Jubilees and in her last visit to
Ireland. It is well known that this visit was entirely her own idea. To
many it seemed rash or even positively dangerous. They dwelt upon the
bitter disaffection of a great portion of the Irish people, upon the
danger of mob outrage or even assassination, upon the extreme difficulty
of preventing a royal visit to Ireland from taking a party character and
being regarded as a party triumph or defeat. But the Queen, as Sir
William Harcourt once truly said, 'never feared her people,' and nothing
could be more happy than the manner in which she availed herself of the
new turn given to Irish feeling by the splendid achievements of Irish
soldiers in South Africa, to come over, as if to thank her Irish people
in person, and at the same time to repair in extreme old age a neglect
for which she had been often, and not altogether unjustly, blamed. There
never indeed was a more brilliant and unqualified success. To those who
witnessed the spontaneous and passionate enthusiasm with which she was
everywhere greeted, it seemed as if all bitter feeling vanished at her
presence; and the Irish visit, which was one of the last, was also one
of the brightest pages of her reign. The credit of its most skilful
arrangements belongs chiefly to the officials in Dublin, but the Irish
people will long remember the patient courage with which the aged Queen
went through its fatigues; the tactful kindness and the gracious dignity
with which she won the hearts of multitudes who had never before seen
her or spoken to her; the evident enjoyment with which she responded to
the cordiality of her reception. One feature of that visit was
especially characteristic. It was the Children's Review in Phoenix Park,
where, by the desire of the Queen, 'some fifty thousand children were
brought together to meet her. No act of kindness could have gone more
directly home to the hearts of the parents, and it left a memory in many
young minds that will never be effaced.

It is rather, however, by the example of a life than by any public
acts that a constitutional Sovereign can impress her personality on
the affections of her people. Of the reign of Queen Victoria it may be
truly said that very few in English history have been so blameless as
this, which was the longest of all. Her Court was a model of quiet
dignity and decorum, singularly free from all the atmosphere of
intrigue and from all suspicion of injudicious or unworthy
favouritism. She managed it as she managed her family, with a happy
mixture of tact and affection; and though she gave her confidence to
many she gave it to such persons and in such a way that it seemed
never to be abused. No domestic life could in all its relations have
been more perfect, and her love of children amounted to a passion.
Among the great female rulers it would be difficult to find one less
like Queen Victoria than the Empress Catherine of Russia, but they had
this common trait of an intense love of children and a great power of
winning their affection. There is a charming letter of Catherine to
Grimm, describing her life among her grandchildren, which might almost
have been written by the English Queen. Her vast family, spread
through many countries, was her abiding interest and delight, and
although she had to pay in full measure the natural penalty of many
bereavements, she at least never knew the dreary loneliness that
clouded the last days of her great predecessor, Elizabeth.

In the early years of her reign she fully filled her place as the
leader of English society. In the plays she patronised, in the art
she preferred, in the restrictions of her Drawing Rooms, in the
fashions she countenanced, in the intimacies she selected or
encouraged, her influence was always healthy and pure, and for some
years it powerfully affected the tone of English society.
Unfortunately, after the great calamity of her widowhood the nerves of
the Queen seem to have been shaken, and though she never intermitted
her political duties and spent daily many hours over her
correspondence, she allowed her social duties to fall too much and too
long into abeyance. She still, it is true, occasionally appeared in
public ceremonies. She laid the first stones of several hospitals and
infirmaries. She presided over the inauguration of several great
industrial enterprises. She sometimes opened Parliament in person, and
was sometimes present at military and naval reviews. But she scarcely
ever appeared in London, except for a few days. She never appeared in
a London theatre. She shrank from great crowds and large social
gatherings, and buried herself too much in her Highland home. This is
one of the few real reproaches that history is likely to bring against
her. Her influence on English society was never wholly lost, and it
was always an influence for good, but for many years it was exerted
less frequently and less powerfully than it should have been, and the
tone of large sections of society lost something by her retirement.

It may be doubted, however, whether this long retirement really
injured her in the minds of her people. Her rare occasional
appearances had a greater weight, and the depth of feeling exhibited
by her long widowhood became a new title to respect. The transparent
simplicity and unselfishness of her character were now generally
appreciated, and her own books contributed greatly to make her people
understand her. It is in general far from a wise thing for royal
personages to descend into the arena of literature unless they possess
some special aptitude for it. They expose themselves to a kind of
criticism wholly different from that which follows them in their
public lives--a criticism more minute and often more deliberately
malevolent than that to which an ordinary writer is subject. The Queen
wrote pure and excellent English and she had a good literary taste,
but she certainly could never have become a great writer; and the
complete frankness and unreserve of her Journals, as well as their
curious homeliness of thought and feeling, were not viewed with favour
in some sections of the fashionable and of the literary world. There
were circles in which the word 'bourgeois,' and there were others in
which the word 'commonplace,' was often pronounced. Yet in this, as on
nearly all occasions when the Queen acted on her own impulse, she
acted wisely. Her books had at once an enormous circulation, and there
can be no doubt that they contributed very widely to her popularity.
Multitudes to whom she had before been little more than a name, now
realised that she was one with whom they had very much in common. Her
evident longing for sympathy produced an immediate response. Her deep
domestic affection, her constant interest in her servants, her high
spirits, her love of scenery, her love of animals, her power of taking
delight in little things, appeared vividly in her pages and came home
to the largest classes of her people.

In some respects the Queen was an eminently democratic Sovereign.
While maintaining the dignity of her position, rank and wealth were in
her eyes always subordinate to the great realities of life and to
true human affections. In no one was the touch of Nature that makes
the whole world kin more constantly visible. She was never more in her
place than in visiting some poor tenant on the morrow of a great
bereavement, or uttering words of comfort by the sick bed of some
humble dependant. Men of all ranks who came in contact with her were
struck with her thoughtful kindness, and her royal gift of an
excellent memory never showed itself more frequently than in the
manner in which she remembered and inquired after the fortunes and
happiness of obscure persons related to those with whom she spoke.

Her religious opinions were brought very little before the public.
Beyond a deep sense of Providential guidance and of the comforting
power of religion, little is to be gathered from her published
utterances; but she seemed equally at home in the Scotch Presbyterian
and the Anglican Episcopal Church, and her marked admiration for such
men as Dean Stanley and Norman Macleod, and for the preaching of
Principal Caird, gives some clue to the bias of her opinions. Her mind
was not speculative but eminently practical, and while she patronised
good works of the most various kinds, there is reason to believe that
those which most appealed to her personal feelings were those which
directly contributed to alleviate the sufferings, or promote the
material welfare, of the poor. She devoted the greater part of her
Jubilee present to institutions for providing nurses for the sick
poor, and this is said to have been one of the charities in which she
took the warmest and most constant interest.

She is said not to have had any sympathy with the movement for the
extension of political power to women, which became so conspicuous in
her reign; but her own success in filling for sixty-three years the
highest political position in the nation will always be quoted in its
support. Considering, indeed, how comparatively small has been the
number of reigning female Sovereigns, it is remarkable how many in
modern times have shown themselves pre-eminently capable. Isabella of
Spain, Catherine of Russia, Maria Theresa of Austria, and our own
Elizabeth, all rise far above the level of ordinary Sovereigns. Some
of these seem figures of a larger and stronger mould than Queen
Victoria, but they governed under very different constitutional
conditions, and, with one exception, there are serious blots on their
memory. There are few sadder facts in history than that the pure and
tender-hearted Spanish Queen should have been deeply tinged with the
persecuting fanaticism of her age and country; that she should have
consented to the establishment of the Inquisition in Castile, to the
expulsion of the Moors from her dominions, to the first law in Europe
establishing a practical censorship of the Press. The unscrupulous
ambition, the shameless favouritism, the gross personal vices of
Catherine, are as conspicuous as her high intelligence, her
indomitable will, her majestic commanding power. The reign of
Elizabeth is perhaps the most glorious in English history, but the
character of that great Queen is lamentably tarnished by waywardness
and caprice. Among purely constitutional Sovereigns Queen Anne holds a
respectable, though certainly not a brilliant, place, and it may be
added that much of the merit of the very constitutional though not
very glorious reign of George II. is due to the excellent sense and
judgment of Queen Caroline. In spite of the saying of Burke, the age
of chivalry is not wholly dead. The sex of Queen Victoria no doubt
gave an additional touch of warmth to the loyalty of her people, and
many of the qualities that made her most popular are intensely, if not
distinctively, feminine. They would not, however, have given her the
place she will always hold in English history, if they had not been
united with what men are accustomed to regard as more peculiarly
masculine--a clear, well-balanced mind, singularly free from
fanaticisms and exaggerations, excellently fitted to estimate rightly
the true proportion of things.

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