hicklit
8th December 2004, 03:23 PM
When the young Benjamin Disraeli, precociously self-assured and outrageously flamboyant, (a sort of nineteenth-century Laurence Llewellyn-Bowen - but without all the unpleasantness), first considered a career in politics one of the resident MPs for the High Wycombe seat he coveted was the Hon Robert John Smith. This was just before the so-called Great Reform Act of 1832, and Smith, the son and heir of local grandee Lord Carrington, served his time as MP while, basically, waiting for his old man to snuff it. Then he could take over the stately pile – Wycombe Hall – and the thousands of rolling Bucks. acres himself and indulge in all the port-quaffing, fox-hunting, vole-irritating habits of his time and class.
Except that, on inheriting the title, Smith (now, of course, the new Lord Carrington) began to develop some, well, eccentric, ideas – particularly in the area of his own physiognomy. And such was the fervour with which he proselytised his unusual views that he became known as Glass Bottom Carrington. You see he developed the unshakeable conviction that, as one contemporary wrote, “an honourable part of his person was made of glass, so that he was afraid to sit thereon, and during the whole of his uneventful life, he persistently refused to sit whenever it was possible by any exercise of ingenuity to stand or lie down.”
Yes, in spite of the relative ease with which - through even the most basic of diagnostic procedures - one would have supposed such a idée fixe might be dislodged from the mind of even its most stubborn adherent, the barmy aristo remained convinced that he was possessed of a crystalline derrière. A translucent tush. A posterior made by Pilkingtons. An Arse of Glarse.
I am indebted (as Cyril Fletcher used to say on ‘That’s Life’) for this information to the consistently brilliant historical biographer, Christopher Hibbert, whose latest book – ‘Disraeli: a personal history’ – I have been reading and greatly enjoying. Hibbert, now eighty, has been a remarkably prolific and consistent writer over the years. Labelled a ‘popular’ historian by the more academic (i.e. unreadable) end of the ever-expanding history market, Hibbert has always emphasised the ‘story’ in ‘history’. His books celebrate the joy of narrative and triumphantly succeed in reminding me why I became interested in history in the first place.
Except that, on inheriting the title, Smith (now, of course, the new Lord Carrington) began to develop some, well, eccentric, ideas – particularly in the area of his own physiognomy. And such was the fervour with which he proselytised his unusual views that he became known as Glass Bottom Carrington. You see he developed the unshakeable conviction that, as one contemporary wrote, “an honourable part of his person was made of glass, so that he was afraid to sit thereon, and during the whole of his uneventful life, he persistently refused to sit whenever it was possible by any exercise of ingenuity to stand or lie down.”
Yes, in spite of the relative ease with which - through even the most basic of diagnostic procedures - one would have supposed such a idée fixe might be dislodged from the mind of even its most stubborn adherent, the barmy aristo remained convinced that he was possessed of a crystalline derrière. A translucent tush. A posterior made by Pilkingtons. An Arse of Glarse.
I am indebted (as Cyril Fletcher used to say on ‘That’s Life’) for this information to the consistently brilliant historical biographer, Christopher Hibbert, whose latest book – ‘Disraeli: a personal history’ – I have been reading and greatly enjoying. Hibbert, now eighty, has been a remarkably prolific and consistent writer over the years. Labelled a ‘popular’ historian by the more academic (i.e. unreadable) end of the ever-expanding history market, Hibbert has always emphasised the ‘story’ in ‘history’. His books celebrate the joy of narrative and triumphantly succeed in reminding me why I became interested in history in the first place.