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Constructing George Wyndham: Narratives of Aristocratic Masculinity in Fin-de-Siècle England

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 January 2014

Nancy W. Ellenberger
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Extract

In June 1913, on a holiday trip to Paris, George Wyndham died suddenly of a heart attack—he was not quite fifty years old. Shocked by this unexpected loss, colleagues in the Conservative Party and the House of Commons, whose inner circles he had occupied for a quarter of a century, organized the usual tributes. Obituaries laid out Wyndham's pedigree as scion of one of England's more romantic landed families, charted his meteoric rise in the 1890s under Arthur Balfour's patronage, referred briefly and discreetly to his troubled tenure as Irish secretary from 1900–1905, and applauded his versatility as a sportsman and a man of letters. Despite his truncated career, interest in Wyndham did not wane after these first homages. Working through the interruption of war, his family saw that collections of letters and essays, with the 1925 set prefaced by J. W. Mackail's “life,” reached the public. These materials prompted pen portraits and biographies that appeared at regular intervals into the 1970s.

A largely sympathetic group of authors, those who wrote about Wyndham faced the interesting challenge of presenting as inspiring and exemplary a life whose disappointments had threatened to outweigh its achievements. The solution they found was one that Wyndham would have accepted, for, indeed, he helped to shape it. In their hands, George Wyndham became a modern Siegfried, the charming, versatile, and disinterested son of an extraordinary ruling class—now, alas, eclipsed—who had guided Britain through two centuries of unprecedented grandeur and prosperity.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 39 , Issue 4 , October 2000 , pp. 487 - 517
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 2000

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References

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9 Spring, David, “Aristocracy, Social Structure, and Religion in the Early Victorian Period,” Victorian Studies 6 (1963): 263–80Google Scholar. Linda Colley makes the point more fully in her Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven, Conn., 1992)Google Scholar, chap. 4. David Kuchta argues that the aristocracy adopted a “republican” simplicity of dress and manners much earlier, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, and that the “great masculine renunciation” of a century later was the result of a mutually reinforcing rivalry between aristocratic and middle-class men to display the “inconspicuous consumption and invidious indistinction” that demonstrated virtue and justified political power; see “The Making of the Self-Made Man: Class, Clothing, and English Masculinity, 1688–1832,” in The Sex of Things: Gender and Consumption in Historical Perspective, ed. de Grazia, Victoria with Furlough, Ellen (Berkeley, 1996), pp. 54–78Google Scholar.

10 David Cannadine is excellent on these developments in his The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy (New Haven, Conn., 1990)Google Scholar, chap. 5.

11 Taylor, Charles, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge, Mass., 1989)Google Scholar uses this term to describe the evolution of modern Western society since the Enlightenment.

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13 The latter phrase is Joseph Chamberlain's. See Cannadine, , Decline and Fall, p. 522Google Scholar.

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15 Dawson, , Soldier Heroes, pp. 34–35Google Scholar; see also Gagnier, Regenia, Subjectivities: A History of Self-Representation in Britain, 1832–1920 (New York, 1991), pp. 3–10Google Scholar. Frederick Kirchhoff discusses the problem of using writing as evidence of a “sense of self,” ultimately concluding, with Henry Kohut, that it is “impossible to differentiate the essence of the self from its manifestations”; see William Morris: The Construction of a Male Self, 1856–1872 (Athens, Ohio, 1990), p. xiiGoogle Scholar.

16 Evan Charteris to Mary Elcho, 1915, EP. Also see Kent, Muriel, “A Romantic Statesman: Review of Life and Letters of George Wyndham,” English Review 45 (September 1927): 321–29Google Scholar.

17 Wyndham, , Essays in Romantic Literature, p. 334Google Scholar.

18 George Wyndham (GW) to Sibell Grosvenor, 2 April 1892, Grosvenor Papers (GP), now at Easton Hall, Chester.

19 Barker-Benfield, G. J., The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago, 1992), p. 162Google Scholar. At one point, Wyndham, a faithful student of Shakespeare, played with the idea that even sexual identity might be only a part we assume (GW to Wilfrid Blunt, 4 April 1909, Blunt Papers, West Sussex Record Office).

20 Taylor, Sources of the Self, chap. 21; Collini, Stefan, Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain, 1850–1930 (Oxford, 1991), pp. 185–89Google Scholar.

21 Spring, David, “Land and Politics in Edwardian England,” Agricultural History 58 (1984): 18Google Scholar.

22 Rutherford, Jonathan, Forever England: Reflections on Masculinity and Empire (London, 1997), pp. 21–25Google Scholar; Roberts, David, “The Paterfamilias of the Victorian Governing Classes,” in The Victorian Family, ed. Wohl, Anthony S. (New York, 1978), pp. 73, 87Google Scholar. Jessica Gerard shares Roberts's view that aristocratic parenting should not be universally stigmatized as repressive or disfunctional; see Country House Life: Family and Servants, 1815–1914 (Oxford, 1994)Google Scholar, chap. 3.

23 Adams, James Eli, Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Masculinity (Ithaca, N.Y., 1995), p. 14Google Scholar.

24 GW to Grosvenor, 14 February 1894, 5 August 1889, all in GP; Wyndham, , ed., Letters of George Wyndham, 1:312Google Scholar.

25 Mackail, and Wyndham, , eds., Life and Letters, 1:317Google Scholar.

26 Ibid., 1:56–57, 286–87. For worshipful views of Wyndham, Madeline, see Oliver, Edith, Four Victorian Ladies of Wiltshire (London, 1945), pp. 85–101Google Scholar; Asquith, , Haply I May Remember, pp. 40–42Google Scholar.

27 On Madeline's affair with her husband's cousin, Blunt, Wilfrid, see Longford, Elizabeth, Pilgrimage of Passion: The Life of Wilfrid Scawen Blunt (London, 1979), pp. 62, 88, 96, 102Google Scholar.

28 Mackail, and Wyndham, , eds., Life and Letters, 2:616Google Scholar; Gatty, , Recognita, pp. 159–60Google Scholar.

29 See Carolyn Dakers's excellent study of the Wyndhams' artistic tastes and connections in Clouds: The Biography of a Country House (New Haven, Conn., 1993)Google Scholar.

30 Roberts, , “Paterfamilias,” pp. 73, 78Google Scholar.

31 Asquith, , Haply I May Remember, p. 42Google Scholar; Dakers, , Clouds, p. 11Google Scholar. These outbursts were not confined to the family. Charteris witnessed an episode while visiting Clouds: “Old Percy screamed like a wounded elephant: ‘G— d— you, will you stop' to the regardless coachman”; see Charteris to Ettie Grenfell, 1898, Desborough Papers (DP), Hertfordshire County Record Office.

32 GW to Grosvenor, 15 July 1902, 25 July 1910, 2 April 1911, all in GP.

33 Madeline Wyndham's scrapbooks are at Stanway House. Her letters to George in the Grosvenor Papers capture the urgency and expectation, as well as the sentiment, in their relationship: “My own own darling Child, Boy, Man, Angel of Love and help … I give thanks to God that you were born and now many are glad that you were born” (29 August 1900). And, “[now] when you most may want your full and glorious strength, and health, and nerve, and power, of which you have more than any other of your compeers, of which nature has given you so abundantly and so much more than to any other man not one of them can come near you and you have got it all … the country will want you, must have you God made you for it don't fail him—be true to yourself. There is not a man in the whole government who can hold a candle to you for all that is needed for a statesman!” (8 October 1905).

34 GW to Mary Elcho, 16 October 1898, EP. Contemporaries believed that Madeline pressured her daughter Mary, already in love with Balfour, into an unhappy marriage with the heir to the earl of Wemyss; see Blunt Papers, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, 34–1975, p. 17; and Maude Wyndham to Ettie Desborough: “Her mother pushed her into marrying Lord Elcho—so one used to be told at least” (3 March 1944, DP).

35 John Tosh makes clear how important it would have been for educated Victorian men who worked at home—many professionals, clergy, and landowners—to have a clear patriarchal authority in the household (“Domesticity and Manliness in the Victorian Middle Class,” in Roper, and Tosh, , eds., Manful Assertions, pp. 48–51Google Scholar).

36 Poem fragment in Wyndham's hand (GP): “I have been lonely all my life / I feel this though I know not why. A wife / and Child were surely mine, and surely / friends too I had.”

37 J. S. Sandars to Arthur Balfour, 5 March 1905, EP.

38 Alfred Lyttelton to Mary Gladstone Drew, 31 December 1886, Mary Gladstone Papers, BL, Add. MS. 46234; duke of Westminster to Grosvenor, 19 October 1886, GP. One of the stories Wyndham apparently told later, to gain sympathy from female friends, was of the “older” woman who had “snatched” the unsuspecting youth; see Betty Ponsonby to Ettie Grenfell, 16 January 1893, DP.

39 Paget, Lady Augusta, In My Tower, 2 vols. (London, 1924), 2:275Google Scholar. Wyndham was deeply in love and reverential: “The Higher Devotion which you feel for Him and tried to describe, is that which I feel for you. I can't help feeling more strongly for you than anything or even for Religion” (GW to Grosvenor, September 1886, GP). After her marriage, Sibell kept the name Lady Grosvenor because of her status as mother to the duke of Westminster's heir.

40 Wyndham's description of the typical English wife, in the draft of a “Toast to Literature” given at a dinner honoring Anthony Hope in 1910, GP.

41 GW to George Curzon, 3 May 1903, Curzon Papers (CP), India Office, F111; Mackail, and Wyndham, , eds., Life and Letters, 2:583, 556Google Scholar.

42 Grosvenor to GW, 3 September 1894, GP; GW to Grosvenor, 21 August and 20 October 1900, 20 May 1911, GP.

43 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York, 1985), pp. 1–5Google Scholar; Hearn, , Men in the Public Eye, pp. 199–201Google Scholar. See, esp., Tosh, John, A Man's Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England (New Haven, Conn., 1999)Google Scholar, chap. 8, which shows how much Wyndham had in common with the “flights from domesticity” in which many other professional men of his generation engaged.

44 GW to Grosvenor, 15 June 1910, GP.

45 GW to Mary Elcho, 1 February 1907, EP; GW to Grosvenor, 8 October 1896, GP: “The whole of life is like one's boyhood at a Private Tutor's: so careless and undressed and sparkling with high spirits.” For empire as a place of sexual license, see Hyam, Ronald, Empire and Sexuality: the British Experience (Manchester, 1992)Google Scholar; McClintock, Anne, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Conquest (New York, 1995)Google Scholar; Sedgwick, Between Men, chap. 10.

46 Egremont, , The Cousins, p. 256Google Scholar. Wyndham's affairs were revealed in Longford, , Pilgrimage of Passion, pp. 331–33Google Scholar; and Mosley, Nicholas, Julian Grenfell (London, 1976)Google Scholar, chap. 4. For speculation that Wyndham was Anthony Eden's father, see James, Robert Rhodes, Anthony Eden (New York, 1986), p. 15Google Scholar. This seems unlikely. Eden was born 12 June 1897, and Wyndham was in South Africa from mid-August through November 1896.

47 Girouard, Mark, The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman (New Haven, Conn., 1981)Google Scholar, chap. 13; Adams, , Dandies and Desert Saints, p. 101Google Scholar.

48 Sussman, Herbert, Victorian Masculinities: Manhood and Masculine Poetics in Early Victorian Literature and Art (Cambridge, 1995), p. 144Google Scholar.

49 GW to Curzon, 3 May 1903, CP. By the last years of his life, Blunt was going after teenagers like Emily Lytton, before he settled down, at age sixty-five, with George's cousin Dorothy Carlton, whom he met as a ward of Percy and Madeline Wyndham (see Longford, , Pilgrimage of Passion, pp. 303–21, 365–80Google Scholar).

50 Mackail, and Wyndham, , eds., Life and Letters, 2:745Google Scholar. Lady Plymouth's letters to Blunt, though reticent, provide evidence of the importance of this relationship, especially in a poem written for her by Wyndham in 1906 and enclosed in a letter to Blunt of 10 August 1915 (Blunt Papers, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge).

51 GW to Grosvenor, 22 May 1911, GP.

52 GW to Grosvenor, 22 September 1908, 20 May 1911, GP; Mackail, and Wyndham, , eds., Life and Letters, 1:405Google Scholar.

53 See Mintz, Stephen, A Prison of Expectations: The Family in Victorian Culture (New York, 1985)Google Scholar on the intense family dynamics of several Victorian middle-class households.

54 Dakers, , Clouds, p. 189Google Scholar. Conversation with Lord Neidpath, great-grandson of Wyndham's sister Mary, in April 1979.

55 It was also, in the aftermath of Dilke and Parnell, politically dangerous. Blunt reported Wyndham's comment that, if he wanted to become prime minister, it would mean “abandoning romance”; see Blunt, Wilfrid Scawen, My Diaries, 2 vols. (London, 1921), 2:339Google Scholar.

56 Egremont, Max, Balfour (London, 1980), p. 191Google Scholar; Blunt, , My Diaries, 2:71Google Scholar. For Wyndham's Irish administration, see O'Halpin, Eunan, The Decline of the Union: British Government in Ireland, 1892–1920 (Dublin, 1987)Google Scholar, chap. 2; Jackson, Alvin, The Ulster Party: Irish Unionists in the House of Commons, 1884–1911 (Oxford, 1989)Google Scholar; Gailey, Andrew, Ireland and the Death of Kindness: The Experience of Constructive Unionism, 1890–1905 (Cork, 1987)Google Scholar, chaps. 7–8. On the Act Land Purchase, see Bull, Philip, Land, Politics and Nationalism: A Study of the Irish Land Question (New York, 1996), pp. 152–81Google Scholar; Bew, Paul, Conflict and Conciliation in Ireland, 1890–1910 (Oxford, 1987)Google Scholar, chap. 4.

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58 Sinfield, Alan, The Wilde Century: Effeminacy, Oscar Wilde and the Queer Moment (New York, 1994)Google Scholar, chaps. 2–3.

59 Adonis, Andrew, Making Aristocracy Work: The Peerage and the Political System in Britain, 1884–1914 (Oxford, 1993), pp. 181, 219CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Roberts, , “Paterfamilias,” pp. 76–78Google Scholar.

60 Gagnier, Subjectivities, chap. 5. Ronald Hyam clearly believes that aristocratic men, whatever their surface assurance, also suffered from the poorly adjusted personalities and “emotional retardation” caused by the public school experience; see Empire and Sexuality, p. 46.

61 Escott, T. S., Society in the New Reign (London, 1904), p. 99Google Scholar; Whitehall Review (4 July 1896).

62 Israel, Kali, “French Vices and British Liberties: Gender, Class and Narrative Competition in a Late-Victorian Sex Scandal,” Social History 22 (1997): 12–13CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Alfred Douglas, the nemesis of Oscar Wilde, and his brother Lord Drumlanrig were Wyndham's cousins. Michael Foldy explores whether Rosebery's political failures in 1895 were related to his reputed affair with Lord Drumlanrig, who committed suicide in 1894; see The Trials of Oscar Wilde: Deviance, Morality, and Late-Victorian Society (New Haven, Conn., 1997), pp. 22–24Google Scholar. See also Dellamora, Richard, Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1990)Google Scholar, chap. 10, for the Wilde scandal as a crisis within the Liberal Party.

63 Ellenberger, Nancy W., “The Souls and London ‘Society’ at the End of the Nineteenth Century,” Victorian Studies 25 (Winter 1982): 33–60Google Scholar; Lambert, Angela, Unquiet Souls: The Indian Summer of the British Aristocracy (London, 1984)Google Scholar; MacKenzie, Jeanne, The Children of the Souls (London, 1986).Google Scholar

64 Ellenberger, Nancy W., “The Souls: High Society and Politics in Late-Victorian Britain” (Ph.D. diss., University of Oregon, 1982)Google Scholar, chap. 5.

65 Boyd, , George Wyndham, p. 15Google Scholar; see Collini: “dilettantism is the very antithesis of character” (Public Moralists, p. 103). Bederman notes that Wyndham's contemporary, Theodore Roosevelt, had a similar problem in convincing other men of his masculinity. She describes how Roosevelt consciously set out to graft “aggressive masculine violence” onto “kindhearted manly chivalry” (Manliness and Civilization, p. 172).

66 GW to Mary Elcho, 27 April 1890, EP. For political jockeying among Commons Conservatives and Unionists in the 1890s, see Shannon, Richard, The Age of Salisbury, 1881–1902: Unionism and Empire (London, 1996)Google Scholar, chaps. 13–14.

67 GW to Grosvenor, 20 April 1890, GP.

68 GW to Ettie Grenfell, 26 December 1997, DP. For Wyndham and the “New Journalism” of the 1890s, see Houghton, Walter E., ed., The Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals, 1824–1900, 5 vols. (Toronto, 1966–1989), 3:305–7Google Scholar. For Wyndham's creation of the journal Outlook, see letters to Philip Hurd from 1897 and 1898, in Wyndham, ed., Letters of George Wyndham; and Outlook (3 May 1924).

69 GW to Mary Elcho, 29 January 1906, EP; GW to Grosvenor, 5 December 1907, GP.

70 Mary Elcho to GW, 19 October 1898, GP. Max Egremont gives a summary of Wyndham's qualities, including his manner of speaking, at the time he first took ministerial office in 1898 (The Cousins, pp. 194–99).

71 Ed Cohen, quoted in Robbins, Ruth, “A Very Curious Construction: Masculinity and the Poetry of A. E. Housman and Oscar Wilde,” in Cultural Politics at the Fin de Siècle, ed. Ledger, Sally and McCracken, Scott (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 141–43Google Scholar; see also Rubenstein, W. D., Capitalism, Culture, and Decline in Britain, 1750–1990 (New York, 1994), pp. 87–88Google Scholar.

72 On Wyndham and Henley, see John Connell, W. E. Henley (London, 1949), pp. 263–64, 290–91; and Wyndham's letters in the Henley Papers (HP), Pierpont Morgan Library, New York.

73 Mackail, and Wyndham, , eds., Life and Letters, 2:450Google Scholar; Nicolson, Nigel, Mary Curzon (New York, 1977), p. 151Google Scholar.

74 Rose, Phyllis, Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages (New York, 1983), p. 5Google Scholar; Mackail, and Wyndham, , eds., Life and Letters, 1:285Google Scholar.

75 GW to W. E. Henley, 25 December 1899, HP; GW to Grosvenor, 16 October 1900, GP.

76 Wyndham, , Essays in Romantic Literature, p. 142Google Scholar; GW to Grosvenor, 22 March 1893, GP.

77 GW to Grosvenor, 26 and 28 January, 19 March, 29 April 1897, all in GP. See the report of Wyndham's toast at the Imperial South Africa Association meeting, in which he said that the association was founded twelve years ago “in a room of his own house by five gentlemen—one of whom only he would name—Dr. Jameson”; see The Times (22 May 1908).

78 Pakenham, Thomas, The Boer War (London 1979), p. 87Google Scholar.

79 Balfour was the model for Wells's, H. G. protagonist in The New Machiavelli (New York, 1911)Google Scholar. Vance describes Balfour as unmanly in late-Victorian terms, noting that his intellectual subtlety, lack of dogmatism, and “feline shrewdness” make him an “essentially modern figure” (Sinews of the Spirit, pp. 183–84). John Charmley recently made the accusation more insultingly: “Balfour almost fitted the description of the heir in Kipling's The “Mary Gloster,” whose rooms at Cambridge were “beastly—more like whore's than a man's”; see A History of Conservative Politics, 1900–1996 (New York, 1996), p. 45Google Scholar.

80 Martin, John, “Inventing Sincerity, Refashioning Prudence: The Discovery of the Individual in Renaissance Europe,” American Historical Review 102, no. 5 (December 1997): 1309–42CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

81 “Youth in Politics,” Outlook (12 February 1898)Google Scholar. Wyndham's authorship of this piece is made clear in Wyndham, , ed., Letters of George Wyndham, 1:435Google Scholar, though the letter is misdated to a year later.

82 Collini reports that John Morley was impatient with the “unintellectual ‘sound man’ held up as the model public figure” (Public Moralists, p. 103).

83 SirFitzroy, Almeric, Memoirs, 2 vols. (London, n.d.), 1:243Google Scholar; Lyttelton, Alfred, obituary on Wyndham, in The Times (11 June 1913)Google Scholar. Even Blunt, a sympathetic audience, recognized some of this quality: “George is egotistical but not, I think, selfish, monopolizing attention to his own talk and his own ideas. Some people resent this, but I am always happy in his company, almost as his mother who adores his self-glorifications, which are a schoolboy's in simplicity” (My Diaries, 1:106Google Scholar).

84 Wyndham, George, “Introduction” in Plutarch's Lives, trans. North, Thomas (London, 1898), p. xxxGoogle Scholar; Adams, , Dandies and Desert Saints, p. 132Google Scholar.

85 The fullest account is Jackson, The Ulster Party, chap. 6. See also Shannon, Catherine, Arthur J. Balfour and Ireland, 1874–1922 (Washington, D.C., 1988), pp. 112–35Google Scholar; O'Halpin, , The Decline of the Union, pp. 39–51Google Scholar.

86 Jackson reviews this assertion in detail in The Ulster Party, pp. 253–60. It is his view that Wyndham's family destroyed his political papers to conceal his involvements with Dunraven's plan.

87 Blunt, , My Diaries, 2:106–7Google Scholar; Earl of Dunraven, Past Times and Pastimes, 2 vols. (London, 1922), 2:38Google Scholar; Ward, , Men and Matters, p. 76Google Scholar; also see “Recollections of a Friend” (The Times, 18 June 1913)Google Scholar. The author of this obituary was identified as the Liberal peer Lord Ribblesdale by Wyndham's sister Pamela Tennant in a letter to Mary Elcho (13 June 1913, EP). Halpin and Jackson both believe that MacDonnell thought he was communicating Wyndham's views based on numerous discussions they had held over how to reorganize Irish administration.

88 “The whole submelody which runs through everything is Melancholy, Humour, false Hilarity, elemental passions, elemental thought, nobility of soul etc. etc. etc. blending into a wailing dirge”; see Adelson, Roger, Mark Sykes (London, 1975), p. 97Google Scholar.

89 George Wyndham, speech to the Primrose League, quoted in The Times (21 November 1907). The ideas of the Tariff Reformers, Diehards, and “constructive imperialists” with whom Wyndham identified are well presented in Philips, Gregory, The Diehards: Aristocratic Society and Politics in Edwardian England (Cambridge, Mass., 1979)Google Scholar; Sykes, Alan, Tariff Reform in British Politics, 1903–1913 (Oxford, 1979)Google Scholar; Green, E. H. H., The Crisis of Conservatism: The Politics, Economics and Ideology of the British Conservative Party, 1880–1914 (London, 1995)Google Scholar. See also Thompson, J. A., “George Wyndham: Toryism and Imperialism,” in Edwardian Conservatism, ed. Thompson, J. A. and Mejia, Arthur (London, 1988), pp. 105–28Google Scholar.

90 Quoted in a letter from Grosvenor to Blunt, 10 August 1913, Blunt Papers, Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.

91 Jackson, , The Ulster Party, p. 283Google Scholar. J. S. Sandars thought Wyndham a spent force after 1906; see his Studies of Yesterday (London, 1928), p. 56Google Scholar.

92 GW to Grosvenor, 14 July, 1909, GP. Alan Sykes considers Wyndham one of three or four leaders of the Conservative right wing; see his “The Radical Right and the Crisis of Conservatism before the First World War,” Historical Journal 26 (1983): 664Google Scholar.

93 Although the Conservative chief whip found him a dilatory attender to Commons business, Wyndham carried an extremely heavy speaking schedule outside Parliament, e.g., he gave twenty-six speeches in a seven-week period in 1907. Besides helping to organize the Diehards and the Halsbury Club, he instigated two national fund-raising campaigns for the Tariff Reform League in 1912, and he wrote the preface to the official handbook distributed to Unionist party workers; see Vincent, John, ed., The Crawford Papers (Dover, N.H., 1984), p. 314Google Scholar; Amery, , My Political Life, 2:413Google Scholar; Garvin, and Amery, , Joseph Chamberlain, 6:977Google Scholar; Begge, Lilian Mary, ed., The Unionist Worker's Handbook (London, 1912)Google Scholar.

94 Jackson, , The Ulster Party, p. 283Google Scholar.

95 GW to Grosvenor, 21 September 1907, GP; George Wyndham, speech given at Hexham, , quoted in The Times (25 October 1907)Google Scholar. Contrast this with a statement given by Blunt regarding Wyndham in 1901: “His theory of politics is that a politician should ‘play the game,’ and that he owes no duty except to his party” (My Diaries, 2:7Google Scholar).

96 Egremont, , The Cousins, p. 254Google Scholar.

97 GW to Grosvenor, 2 February 1906, 12 July 1909, 2 November 1911, GP. But note that Blunt has Wyndham presenting the Diehard revolt against Balfour and Lansdowne as a “conspiracy” (My Diaries, 2:356Google Scholar).

98 See Adams for this interpretation of anti-Semitism as fear that the Jew's “selfmastery confirms [his] capacity for political domination” (Dandies and Desert Saints, p. 132). In a letter to Belloc, Wyndham fumed that “the Jew takes on Europe and children of the Church, our Mother, who has made us men …. We needn't damn them. They were born damned and unfruitful: just sterilities” (Wyndham, , ed., Letters of George Wyndham, 2:520Google Scholar). Geoffrey Searle notes that Wyndham joined a campaign to investigate the “radical plutocrats” in the Liberal party; see his Corruption in British Politics, 1895–1903 (Oxford, 1987), p. 139Google Scholar.

99 GW to Grosvenor, 12 September 1906, GP. References to “little,” “base” people occur also in letters of 28 July 1902 and 16 October 1906 from GW to Grosvenor, GP. For the tones of lofty dismissiveness, see Mackail, and Wyndham, , eds., Life and Letters, 2:622–24Google Scholar.

100 Wyndham, , Essays in Romantic Literature, p. 145Google Scholar; Collini, , Public Moralists, pp. 186–87Google Scholar. For the “functional” man, see Gatty, , Recognita, pp. 43, 115, 119, 160Google Scholar.

101 GW to Grosvenor, 16 May 1907, GP; also 6 June 1906: “I was really meant to be a cavalry leader and not a politician. It amuses me so much and I exert such an influence without any effort.”

102 Clarke, Norma, “Strenuous Idleness: Thomas Carlyle and the Man of Letters as Hero,” in Roper, and Tosh, , eds., Manful Assertions, p. 38Google Scholar; Collini, , Public Moralists, pp. 134–35Google Scholar.

103 Mackail, and Wyndham, , eds., Life and Utters, 2:587, 695Google Scholar; GW to Elcho, 21 December 1907, EP.

104 Mackail, and Wyndham, , eds., Life and Letters, 2:540Google Scholar, 537.

105 Ibid., 2:539; Hearn, , Men in the Public Eye, pp. 128–29Google Scholar.

106 Adams, , Dandies and Desert Saints, pp. 26–27Google Scholar.

107 GW to Grosvenor, 12 July 1909, GP; Mackail, and Wyndham, , eds., Life and Letters, 2:628Google Scholar.

108 GW to Grosvenor, 12 August 1911, GP. See also Ward, , Men and Matters, pp. 100, 102Google Scholar; Gatty, , Recognita, p. 145Google Scholar.

109 GW to Grosvenor, 21 January 1906, 15 June 1910, GP.

110 Mackail, and Wyndham, , eds., Life and Letters, 2:733Google Scholar; Leverenz, David, “The Last Real Man in America: From Natty Bumppo to Batman,” in Fictions of Masculinity: Crossing Cultures, Crossing Sexualities, ed. Murphy, Peter F. (New York, 1994), pp. 21–53Google Scholar.

111 Adonis, , Making Aristocracy Work, pp. 269–73Google Scholar.

112 Mackail, and Wyndham, , eds., Life and Letters, 2:729Google Scholar.

113 Egremont, , The Cousins, p. 25Google Scholar; GW to Grosvenor, 21 September 1907, GP.

114 Eliot, T. S., The Sacred Grove (London, 1920), pp. 24–32Google Scholar. “And good riddance,” Virginia Woolf would have added: “I read Wilfrid Blunt (diaries) at breakfast; I don't like aristocratic writing, do you? I don't like the Souls; I don't like George Wyndham”; see The Letters of Virginia Woolf, ed. Nicolson, Nigel and Trautmann, Joanne, 5 vols. (New York, 1976), 2:390Google Scholar.

115 Wyndham, , Essays in Romantic Literature, p. 163Google Scholar.

116 Greenblatt, Stephen, Renaissance Self-Fashioning from More to Shakespeare (Chicago, 1980), p. 6Google Scholar.