bhan13's review against another edition
4.0
My most recent favourite book, 'Gentry' examines a selection of families from this class over the last 600 years through their own writings - letters, diaries, account books, etc. I found the letters especially affecting, the pet names and their loving tone is, of course, absent in most history books (the diary entries after the loss of a child were also very powerful), they also demonstrate how active women were in building and maintaining estates and fortunes, something I rarely come across in other books.
This social class, peculiar to the British Isles, has been a major force shaping their history, and the website for the book (with photos, family trees, etc.) is a good supplement:
http://www.thegentry.org.uk/
This social class, peculiar to the British Isles, has been a major force shaping their history, and the website for the book (with photos, family trees, etc.) is a good supplement:
http://www.thegentry.org.uk/
incrediblemelk's review
4.0
I really enjoyed this at first – I like history books generally, and this is an approachably framed one, drawing on private letters and papers to build intimate, specific portraits of different landed English families at various moments of historical, economic and personal crisis.
But about in the middle I found myself struggling, not really looking forward to picking up the book. It began to feel dry, like work rather than enjoyment. Perhaps that's just me; I picked it up again recently and tore through the rest of it relatively quickly.
The overall tone is melancholic: it's a book about a class of people who cared very much about reputation and posterity, but who are largely forgotten and irrelevant today. They emerge clearly as individuals in Nicolson's very punchy, succinct stories: an admirable distillation of what must have been a lot of very tedious work in libraries and archives.
This book has reshaped my readings of class in English literature. While I've frequently encountered the term 'landed gentry' I never clearly saw the gentry as a distinct class: for me there was the aristocracy and then just middle-class professionals. But Nicolson explains quite well that the gentry could be categorised by their values and their ideas about themselves as much as by their property or wealth. Gentility involved a constant struggle to improve or even just to maintain social position by performing a certain ethic of friendship and condescension (in its older, more flattering sense) in a way aristocrats were shielded from by the prestige attached to titles. To move up, gentry had to be 'good families'.
So this is a valuable book because it maps quite a hazy terrain in a clear way. But disappointingly, Nicolson never mentions that he himself is a big old toff. He's a baron, Vita Sackville-West's grandson, went to Eton and Cambridge, and lives in a castle whose estate he manages with the National Trust.
His experiences might have been insightful, although he has written and broadcast extensively on related topics in the past and perhaps considered that old ground. In a way it's admirable, considering the pressure on writers to inject their work with their own subjectivities.
But about in the middle I found myself struggling, not really looking forward to picking up the book. It began to feel dry, like work rather than enjoyment. Perhaps that's just me; I picked it up again recently and tore through the rest of it relatively quickly.
The overall tone is melancholic: it's a book about a class of people who cared very much about reputation and posterity, but who are largely forgotten and irrelevant today. They emerge clearly as individuals in Nicolson's very punchy, succinct stories: an admirable distillation of what must have been a lot of very tedious work in libraries and archives.
This book has reshaped my readings of class in English literature. While I've frequently encountered the term 'landed gentry' I never clearly saw the gentry as a distinct class: for me there was the aristocracy and then just middle-class professionals. But Nicolson explains quite well that the gentry could be categorised by their values and their ideas about themselves as much as by their property or wealth. Gentility involved a constant struggle to improve or even just to maintain social position by performing a certain ethic of friendship and condescension (in its older, more flattering sense) in a way aristocrats were shielded from by the prestige attached to titles. To move up, gentry had to be 'good families'.
So this is a valuable book because it maps quite a hazy terrain in a clear way. But disappointingly, Nicolson never mentions that he himself is a big old toff. He's a baron, Vita Sackville-West's grandson, went to Eton and Cambridge, and lives in a castle whose estate he manages with the National Trust.
His experiences might have been insightful, although he has written and broadcast extensively on related topics in the past and perhaps considered that old ground. In a way it's admirable, considering the pressure on writers to inject their work with their own subjectivities.
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