The Frank Muir Book [antikvár]

PrefaceHaving to write a preface after labouring for five years to produce the book is an unnerving experience and something of an anti-climax; rather like an elephant who has succeeded at long last in giving birth to her calf being then required to balance a bun on her head.But a preface has its uses. It can give readers a whiff of the author's prose style and an indication of his potential as an inducer of tedium, thus enabling them to moderate their enthusiasm, lower their sights, and so prepare themselves for the main body of the work. And a preface can also give the author a few precious moments alone with a person who has bought the book, or is having a free read of it in a bookshop, or has borrowed it from a library by mistake, in which the author can try to explain what the book is about.There have been many descriptions of what history is, e.g. 'A vast Mississippi of falsehood' (Matthew Arnold), 'Fables that have been agreed upon' (Voltaire), 'A confused heap of facts' (Lord Chesterfield), 'Little more than the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind' (Gibbon), 'The biography of a few stout and earnest persons' (Ralph Waldo Emerson), 'A cyclic poem written by Time upon the memories of man' (Shelley), 'Bunk' (Henry Ford), but there are probably as many ways of looking at the past as there are writers and historians prepared to look. This book is an attempt to look at social history from the viewpoint of people who were alive at the time and were not at all happy about what was going on.As in most histories, my book is concerned with great personages and great deeds but the concern is with their imperfections, not their glories; with the aspects of them which caused contemporaries to treat them with scorn, fury, or ridicule. The approach is that of the judge who before considering sentence asks 'Is anything known against?' Thus the Wordsworth in this book is not the Great Nature Poet but the Wordsworth with clammy hands and no sense of smell; Rousseau is not the philosopher who tried to reform education but Rousseau the despiser of intelligent women; the Age of Elegance is not represented by beaux of wit and charm but by the Whig duchess who said to the footman behind her, 'I wish to God you wouldn't keep rubbing your great greasy belly against the back of my chair.'Embedded in the text are more than a thousand expressions of