The subjectivity of reviews.

 It is obvious that Book Reviews are subjective, biased and ideological. I certainly would not claim to be free from any of these faults when reviewing for Reviewing the Evidence. But once in a while one comes across a case where there are two reviews of the same book which not only come across as being reviews of different books, but take a completely opposed view of their subjects. This has happened recently and dramatically in the case of a new book about Hester Thrale by Ian McIntyre (Hester: The Remarkable Life of Dr Johnson's ‘Dear Mistress').

The first review by Anne Sebba appeared in The Times Books section on October 24th 2008...

>>Hester Thrale was a political wife before the term was invented, a
landowner at a time when wives could not own land in their own name and, above all, a diarist and author. Her ambitious final book, Retrospection,
was the first attempt by an Englishwoman to write a history of the world.

Hester Salusbury married Henry Thrale in October 1763, shortly after her
father's death had severely reduced her options. Eleven months later she
gave birth to their first child and from then on was pregnant almost yearly
during her marriage to Thrale. He forbad her from riding - too masculine;
and from entering the kitchen - too smelly. She was saved from a life of
stultifying boredom by the arrival for dinner in 1764 of Samuel Johnson,
then 55, widowed, living in squalor and close to a mental breakdown. Yet, in
spite of his dirty appearance, scrofula and scarring, Hester and Johnson
took to each other. He soon considered the Thrale home his own and
encouraged her to write more poetry.

How this young woman came to rescue Johnson and in turn find her own strong
literary voice forms the core of this biography. For 16 years she provided
him with endless cups of tea and stimulation as they debated politics, child
rearing, world affairs and literature. But the book's interest goes far
beyond the deep friendship between Hester and Johnson. Hester Thrale,
bluestocking and wit, was a remarkable woman imbued with deep intellectual
curiosity revealed in six leather-bound volumes now housed in the Huntington
Library in California, known as Thraliana. The blank books, a gift to her
(and posterity) from her husband on their 13th wedding anniversary, were
eventually filled with detailed accounts of domestic politics, the French
Revolution, cameo portraits of friends and enemies as well as Latin
epigrams, gossip, poetry and such fascinating details as the price of a
shirt in 1801, shedding a powerful beam of light on the life and culture of
Georgian England.

She put up with death, illness and her husband's frequent infidelities in a
way that indicates that this was nothing more than the age expected. Aged
38, after a stillbirth that nearly killed her, Hester nonetheless hoped that
a visit to his mistress might "dissipate" her husband's gloom.

By contrast, some of her preoccupations seem very modern, especially her
desire to find emotional satisfaction through romantic love. Her second
marriage, to her daughter's Italian music master, Gabriel Piozzo, gave her
renewed enthusiasm for writing but lost her Johnson's admiration and
blighted relations with her daughters for the rest of her life. McIntyre's
detailed account of their shabby treatment of Hester makes painful reading.

This entertaining book brings her out of the Johnsonian shadow at last and
Hester is revealed: a heroine for any age. <<

The second by Frances Wilson appeared in The Sunday Times on November 2nd...

>>Hester Thrale was Dr Johnson's “Dear Mistress” for 16 years. The period of their friendship saw the melancholic lexicographer reach his full gargantuan stature as a writer, while Hester, who did not discover her own literary voice until after his death, bloomed in the light of his admiration. For Johnson's biographer James Boswell, who remained immune to Hester's charms, she was “a little artful impudent malignant devil”. Johnson would eventually agree with him.

Hester's genius was her ability to inspire in others either great love or great hate, and what is striking in her character is how little she apparently minded, or seemed to notice, which was which. Boswell's loathing reached its peak when, in her hugely popular Anecdotes of the late Samuel Johnson (1786), Hester referred only once to a certain “Mr B-”. The revenge of Mr B was to trash Mrs T in his own Life of Johnson (1791), whose success would eventually erase her book altogether.

Born in 1741 the only child of adoring parents, Hester wrote juvenile ditties that were treated as works of incipient genius; she never doubted that she was, indeed, remarkable. That her life would also be remarkable, however, could not have been predicted. To please her rich uncle, whose estate she expected to inherit, she married in 1763 a rich brewer called Henry Thrale - or, as she put it in her diary, Thraliana, “I was sold to a man I did not like for a barrel of porter.” Mr Thrale did not speak and Mrs Thrale did not stop; she was settling down to a life of annual pregnancies (for six months of every year, as she put it, she had her head over a bowl) when a friend of her husband brought Johnson to sup at their house by the brewery in Deadman's Place in Southwark.

Had Johnson not been delighted by her, it is unlikely that Hester would have had an outlet for her intelligence and wit. Johnson liked Henry, too, and he loved a good dinner: so successful was the meeting that soon the 55-year-old widower was installed in the Thrales' country mansion in Streatham, where he slept until noon, ate peaches before breakfast and gnawed on chicken bones to his heart's content. Hester gave Johnson his first feeling of family, and he gave her a padlock in the event that he go mad and should need locking up. The Thrale children regarded him, in the memorable phrase of Johnson's biographer Walter Jackson Bate, “as a combination of friend and a sort of toy elephant”. The animal Hester resembled, Johnson remarked, was the rattlesnake.  

Was Johnson in love with Hester? He seems hardly to have known the answer himself. His feelings towards her, McIntyre suggests in his marvellously rich biography, were undoubtedly erotic, while any fondness she had for him was the result of flattery, boredom and the drag of 12 consecutive pregnancies.

Only four of her dozen children - all girls - made it to adulthood, by which point they had each disowned their mother. Distance was Hester's preferred maternal mode: of her two-year-old daughter, Susanna, she noted that she was “small, ugly & lean as ever; her Colour like that of an ill painted Wall grown dirty”. A year later, the child's colour had become “like that of a Clorotic Virgin at 15”. McIntyre, who admits to finding Hester at times baffling, suggests that such detachment must be understood in the context of the high infant-mortality rate of the 18th century. But it should also be remembered that Hester was someone who happily lived with a husband she didn't like and a house guest she found “irksome”; when she left to embark on a two-and-a-half-year honeymoon with Piozzi, she found the protests of her abandoned children an inconvenience. “In a later age,” McIntyre comments with characteristic wryness, “Hester might well have fallen foul of some of the more intrusive legislation that would find its way onto the statute book in such areas as childcare and health and safety. But then is not now.”

The problem for Hester's biographer is that Johnson's exit from her life was followed so swiftly by the happy-ever-after of her second marriage; and while she lived a further 40 years, during which time she published her letters to and from Johnson, her Anecdotes and an extraordinary dictionary of Synonyms, whose quality McIntyre is right to perceive, her life was never to be so remarkable again. There is never much to say about a happy marriage, and six weeks into her honeymoon Hester would write that, “I have experienced greater and longer felicity than I ever yet experienced.” It is hard to know, however, in what her felicity lay: she did not share her husband's love of music, and he struggled with the language she was so adept at using.

Can we forgive Hester her treatment of Johnson and her daughters? Despite McIntyre's apologies on her behalf, I am not sure that I can. In this, the best account we have of the life of Mrs Thrale-Piozzi, her supreme self-confidence seems the result of shallowness; her coldness the result of self-regard. As Mrs Thrale, she was a bearer of yokes; as Mrs Piozzi, she became, to her children at least, something of a yoke herself.<<

I wrote on ECW...

>>It is very well worth while indeed to read both reviews.
They are utterly different in both their portrayal of the
book and of Hester Thrale herself. Wilson seems to
almost ignore the fact that Thrale was a writer and indeed
a person in her own right and considers her solely in
relation to Johnson; Sebba on the other hand centres
on Thrale as a writer and person for herself. Is it a book
about Johnson or about Thrale? But for a case-study
in how differing ideological perspectives inform reviewing
this is a classic example!

It would be interesting to read the book and form
one's own judgement!<<

On further consideration it is striking how Wilson basically sees Thrale only in relation to Johnson - the 40 years which she lived after his death are just a 'problem' for the biographer. For Sebba her relationship to Johnson is merely one aspect, albeit a fascinating one, of a rich and fruitful life. Wilson's review  appears mean-spirited and dismissive in comparison to Sebba.

As an object lesson in how careful one must be with reviews it might be hard to find a better example. 

tags: books