Kings and Desperate Men

THERE is an almost fierce directness about Mr. Kronenberger’s approach to the eighteenth century in England that distinguishes him from his English contemporaries writing about the same century . Whereas they fall under its spell, so that its mood becomes their mood, expressed with corresponding polish and turn of phrase, Mr. Kronenberger is content to peer, with the intensest sort of curiosity, as through a door, and to record what he sees. The result is a picture full of vigor and gusto, one thoroughly in keeping with the ruthless representations by Hogarth which illustrate the text. The moralistic note is inevitable. It was an age of great if often bad characters, a circumstance of which the author takes full advantage; the reader is ‘informed and entertained,’ as the old phrase goes, but also shocked by the life of ‘the world below.’ Mr. Kronenberger modestly disclaims any special scholarship, but it is evident that he is passionately interested in his theme as a social historian, that he has made an earnest effort to impart some sense of unity to the pattern of the time, and that he has sufficient writing skill to communicate to the reader his vision of the century that produced Marlborough and Bolingbroke, the two Walpoles, Hogarth and Swift, Johnson and Pope, Pitt the Younger and Burke; a century, too, in which the Industrial Revolution was born.

J. C.