A family at war

The Quest for Corvo started something rather peculiar in biography. A.J.A. Symons’s 1934 classic — described as ‘an experiment’ — set out the biographer’s search for his subject, and not just the results. This was justified in the case of an elusive and unusual figure like the ‘Baron’ Corvo. Nowadays, many biographies are written like this, and we have to hear about the author tramping from archive to library to study. Can it really be justified in the case of a 20th-century duke, whose papers are in the order in which he left them?

I may be lacking in curiosity about the scholarly life, but I’m just not thrilled by the following paragraph in Catherine Bailey’s latest book: ‘I tapped in my reader number and selected “Search the Catalogue”. It was a bleak afternoon in late November and I was at the National Archives in Kew.’ Most readers would surely rather hear about the products of research, unadorned, than about the laborious process of getting there. Bailey continues: ‘What I discovered next changed the course of my research entirely … But first, I had a long conversation with the Duchess.’ This is all very well, in a preening way. But when so much of a book is about the process of finding stuff out in an unremarkable manner, you have to wonder whether there is much of substance at the end of the quest. In this case, the final material is thin indeed.

The 9th Duke of Rutland died of pneumonia, relatively young, in 1940, in the muniments rooms of Belvoir Castle. He attached great importance to his role as the keeper of the Rutland archives, and in the last days of his life spent as much time as possible in the rooms, apparently sorting through the family papers. Few people were admitted to them then, for good reason — you can’t have the public traipsing, in large numbers, through an archive.