Biography

Mary Augusta Ward (1851-1920) is one of the many intriguing Victorian personalities who make the nineteenth century such a perfect place for academic rummaging. John Sutherland’s biography manages to successfully evaluate both the writer and the woman, with just the right balance between it being scholarly and accessible. Ward was born in Hobart, Tasmania into a veritable Victorian dynasty: the Arnolds. Her grandfather was the infamous Dr Thomas Arnold of Rugby and her uncle was Matthew Arnold, affectionately known as Uncle Matt. Dr Arnold had an astonishingly strong work ethic, much parodied by Lytton Strachey in Eminent Victorians, and this both inspired and alarmed his family. Although he rather undermined his own teachings by dying at the age of just 47, he continued to exert a powerful influence over the other Arnolds. According to Sutherland, his “dead but inextinguishable presence loomed over their subsequent lives like some deity in a Greek tragedy.” ...

You certainly need to fasten your seatbelt for Brian Thompson’s biography The Disastrous Mrs Weldon. Wilkie Collins couldn’t have created the eponymous heroine, even if he’d been a bit heavy-handed with the laudanum. During her extraordinary life, Georgina Weldon married an impecunious army officer against her family’s wishes, set up an orphanage in Charles Dickens’ former home, held a famous French composer captive, had a lesbian affair, and represented herself in over 200 court cases. ...

Harry Price: The Psychic Detective is an investigation into an investigator. There must be a clever Latin phrase for that sort of caper, but I know not what it is. I saw an excellent exhibition of Price’s ghost investigations at The Photographers’ Gallery a few years ago and came away with the impression that he was a serious scientist, although something of a show-off. Richard Morris’ research, however, unearths evidence to prove that Price was often responsible for the phenomena he was trying to debunk. Indeed, in an early piece of writing, he admitted that many people prefer the “bunk” to the “debunk”. He was essentially an accomplished showman who was desperate for recognition. Although greatly admired in some quarters, he was never sufficiently successful to give up his day job as, of all things, a paper bag salesman. ...