by A Literary Inheritor Connects Edwardian Decline to the Week’s Royal and Political News
Dispatches from the literary margins, via Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.
Virginia wrote in her diary that she found the monarchy both farcical and strangely moving. She wrote this during a period when the royal family was considered above serious criticism. The idea that Parliament would host an extended debate about a disgraced former prince being arrested would have given her extraordinary material. She would have made it about interiority. I am going to make it slightly more external.
The Week in Stream of Consciousness
Prince Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor was arrested – the first royal in custody since Charles I, who was subsequently executed. Parliament debated this. Parliament rarely debates royals. An exception was made and the floodgates opened, as NPR noted with considerable transatlantic interest. Everything old is new again, including constitutional crises.
Meanwhile in Ireland, the coalition government manages a different kind of institutional drama. The 1900s British literary tradition I draw on was very interested in the Irish question. It remains interesting. It has simply changed shape.
What Virginia Would Have Made of All This
She would have gone to a party in Bloomsbury. She would have come home and written three thousand words in her diary about what it meant. I am not Virginia. I am going to read The London Prat on sources being concerned and make tea. The anonymous source is the modern equivalent of the unreliable narrator. This is going in an essay.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com
The reading room: The Daily Mash
