Mind Your Language | 10 October 2009

I’ve been reading a most interesting book.

I’ve been reading a most interesting book. It’s all about the books Gladstone read, the way he read them and what he did with the 30,000 books he collected in his long life.

Most of the book is written engagingly enough. ‘Until the late 19th century, most books were published without an index, obliging the assiduous reader [like Gladstone] to complete their own.’ That is a clear sentence, even if its use of the plural pronoun their as a gender-neutral singular might annoy some. But the introduction uses an entirely different kind of language, a baffling thicket of unsignalled conjunctions and disjunctions, of clotted noun phrases, and heaped up jargon.

‘There remains important work to be done regarding the representation and reception of Gladstone in a variety of spheres,’ we are told. ‘That a figure who was both so personally eclectic and who operated as such a multifaceted cultural icon within his society should not have been reassessed from such perspectives is surprising.’ So here we have a hall of disco-ball mirrored spheres, multi-faceted but ready to be seen in perspective as some kind of icon.

It is hard to navigate through this sort of stuff, with its empty verbiage and concealed meanings. The whole book aims ‘not only to undergird but also to challenge the significance of isolated individual pieces of reading evidence’. That sounds a dangerous stunt, like firing a six-shooter from the underside of a galloping horse. Let us hope the girth is not tied too loose.

The pinnacle of this academic tower of Babel is its title: Reading Gladstone, for the book is not about reading Gladstone but about Gladstone’s reading. In an attempt to justify it, the author, Ruth Clayton Windscheffel, declares that ‘Reading Gladstone refers to Gladstone’s persona when he was engaging with texts.’