Victorian Miniature

Description

Nancy Mitford once observed that some of the most bitter personal clashes of all time have been 'between the Manor and the Vicarage'. Owen Chadwick's Victorian Miniature paints a detailed cameo of nineteenth-century English rural life, in the extraordinary battle of wills between squire and parson in a Norfolk village. Both the evangelical clergyman and the squire, proudly conscious of his Huguenot ancestry, were passionate diarists, and their two journals open up a fascinating double perspective on the events which exposed their clash of personalities. The result is a narrative that is at once deeply informative about Victorian class distinctions, rural customs and festivities, and richly entertaining in a manner worthy of Trollope.

'It reads like a novel, and it is in fact a small masterpiece.' John Clive, The Times Literary Supplement 'Better than any fiction.' The Times 'Chadwick tells their story with grace and great charm, for he is as fully a master of writing as of history, and there can be hardly anybody who would not rejoice over the reading of such a book as this, which is quite fascinating from its first page to its last.' The Guardian