The Victorian Eighteenth Century: An Intellectual History. By B. W. Young.Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press. 2007. xii + 190 p. £50 (hb). ISBN 978-0-19-925622-8.

Recent decades have seen a series of monographs explore British Victorianengagements with earlier epochs. Yet curiously little attention has been paid tonineteenth-century readings of and reactions to the Hanoverian past from which theVictorians emerged. Brian Young’s title promises an investigation of an importantdimension of Victorian engagement with the Georgian to which the reader turns inkeen anticipation, based on his earlier pioneering essay on the nineteenth-centuryreading of the Hanoverian church. It must at the outset be stated, however, that thetitle is a deeply misleading one. This is not an ‘intellectual history’ of the Victorianengagement with the eighteenth century, or even a history of the Victorians’‘intellectual engagement’ with it. Instead we are offered four rather disparate casestudies without a conclusion and with only a pretty perfunctory introduction to pullthem even loosely together; the undoubted merits of each might in fact have beenmore readily appreciated in separate publication. The most substantial is a two-chapter discussion of Thomas Carlyle’s writings on the French Revolution andFrederick the Great. This is followed by a consideration of John Henry Newman’sengagement with Edward Gibbon’s historical writing, in which Henry Hart Milmanserves as a foil. The third study reflects on contrasts and continuities in the ‘familyromance’ fashioned in writings on the eighteenth century of the Stephens from SirJames (1789-1859) via Leslie and siblings to Virginia Woolf. The final chapter offers anaccount of the ‘uncanny’ eighteenth century found in the works of two contrastingauthors of ghost stories, M. R. James and Vernon Lee (Violet Paget). All these studiesare marked by the author’s erudition and a close attention to significant detail, both inthe literary works considered and in the personal lives of their authors (here the essayon the Stephens is particularly strong), while the last in particular deploys a rangeof disciplinary perspectives to good effect. Readers investigating the lives or writingsof Young’s subjects will find much of value. But those primarily interested in theVictorian engagement with the eighteenth century may find themselves as frequentlyfrustrated as enlightened. Young is clearly in command of wider dimensions of thesubject, as demonstrated in tantalising asides relating to other literary engagementswith the Hanoverian (such as those of Thackeray, Scott and many much less familiar).But these are not pursued with the same assiduity as discussions – for example, ofGibbon’s account of Arianism – that throw little direct light on the ostensible overalltheme. Even if one treats the book as an ‘intellectual history’ of the Hanoverianengagements of its specific subjects alone, issues of wider context still give pause forthought. For both Carlyle and Newman, born in 1795 and 1801 respectively, much oftheir rendezvous with the eighteenth century consisted of personal or politicalencounters with non-relatives who had lived through it or who were actively engaged(like them) in efforts to bolster or remove aspects of its political, institutional, social,moral and intellectual structures. Young has nothing to say about Newman’sengagement in the religio-political debates of the 1820s to 1840s, which generated –in the blue books resulting from select committees and royal commissions and othermore ephemeral journalistic sources – the building blocks of long-enduring Victorianconstructions of the Hanoverian. Yet these probably have as much to tell us about thesignificance of the Georgian in his thought as his encounter with Gibbon. Aconsideration of their wider impact would also provide grounds for caution before

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offering unqualified assent to Young’s assertion that ‘Carlyle dominated Britishunderstanding of the eighteenth century in the reign of Victoria’ (p.12). There weremany Victorian eighteenth centuries.

Arthur BurnsKing’s College London

Mon Journal de la Guerre de Sept Ans. By Charles-Joseph de Ligne. Text establishedand edited by Jeroom Vercruysse et Bruno Colson. Paris: Editions Honoré Champion.2008. 552 p. €85 (hb). ISBN 978-2-7453-1711-7.

Prince Charles-Joseph de Ligne was a young officer in the Austrian army during themilitary campaigns of the Seven Years War, which are the subject of his journal, nowreissued in a scholarly edition by two leading European specialists on eighteenth-century warfare, Jeroom Vercruysse and Bruno Colson. It is not a memoir, writtenreflectively after the event, or an attempt to give shape to a life of military service.Rather, like many of the journals kept by army officers at the time, it records theday-to-day progress of the author’s unit, the skirmishes fought, the troop formationsdeployed, the length of marches, the state of health of the combatants, the lie of theland as battle was joined. As a military strategist, the Prince de Ligne was fascinatedby tactical manoeuvres and by the capabilities of individual regiments and theircommanders. And he was not afraid to record what he thought of his role or of thepart played by others, both on his own side and among his opponents. His commentson the qualities of Frederick II of Prussia are perhaps especially interesting in thisregard. The Prince may have been only twenty-one when the Prussian army enteredSaxony in 1756, but he lacked neither confidence nor ambition.

For the military specialist the wealth of detail contained in this journal will be asource of precious insights into the ways in which eighteenth-century armies foughtand planned campaigns. It will also provide a useful glimpse into the military cultureof the age, through the mentality of a young nobleman brought up in a militaryfamily with an assumed right to command. On the other hand, the generalist maybaulk at the density of information, the often unrelenting detail about individualunits in the army, the length of forced marches, the placement of pickets or theforaging campaigns between battles. But that is very much the character of a militaryjournal, replete with the sorts of comment that an officer would think significant,worth noting at the end of a tiring day. De Ligne tells us that this is how his journalwas composed, through notes that he furiously scribbled down after an engagementand destined for his livre jaune, which he intended to publish as part of his collectedmilitary memoirs once the war was over. There is little reason to doubt him, since thatis how the volume reads: as a young man’s immediate responses and reactions tothings he has seen and done during the day. Besides, this is typical of the genre, andthere is little to suggest that De Ligne had innovative literary ambitions or to supposethat he was not influenced by other journals he had read. Mon Journal de la Guerre deSept Ans is useful not for its novelty but because it presents such a full and thoroughexample of an established genre of military writing. It was composed earlier than themajority of works of its kind, providing for the Seven Years War the sort of detailedcommentary that is normally associated with the Napoleonic campaigns.

The journal is not without its moments of drama and emotion or lacking in the kindsof description of landscape that belong to the eighteenth-century travel narrative. De

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