Told by an Idiot

Rose Macaulay, 1923

Aug 13, 2025

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One couldn’t help caring what reviews said, however hard one tried not to. It was petty and trivial to be cast up and cast down by the opinions of one’s fellows, no wiser than oneself, expressed in print, but so it was. Why? Chiefly because they were expressed in print, to be read by all. One’s disgrace, if it were a disgrace, was so public. People who didn’t know that reviewers were just ordinary people, with no more authority or judgment than they had themselves, believed them. If people read in a review, “It cannot be said that Miss Carrington has been successful in her new book of stories,” they thought that it really could not, not knowing that almost anything can, as a matter of fact, be said, and often is. And if a reviewer said (as was more usual, for reviewers are, taking them all in all, a kindly race), “This is a good book,” people who didn’t know any better really thought that it was so. Then the author was pleased. Particularly as the book wasn’t really good in the least.

That’s the tone of the whole thing. If you’re up on the cultural and political history of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, this book is a hoot. I was chuckling over it at breakfast. Otherwise you might find it more of an education. It’s not perfectly sustained and by the end I was skimming a little. Still this quote is from close to the end and it made me laugh. If you do want to bone up on the period, there are many good books, not least The Unknown Prime Minister. (Whatever you do, don’t read The Strange Death of Liberal England, which is crass and florid and not very careful about the truth. It’s grossly overrated by journalists who enjoy “prose style” and so has an inflated reputation.)

My crank theory that every novel is a quest novel more than survived this book—Papa is a classic example of a character on a journey of the mind. He’s perhaps the funniest figure in the book. It’s also full of people who fail to go on their quests — an all too modern theme. Alice Evans had some thoughts on how it contrasts to religious culture today.