Source:West, Rebecca. 1900

Summary

1900 was a time of imperialist dreams, of unshaken confidence in the old social order and of cultural expansion. Through illustrations and observations, Rebecca West provides a full portrait of the year 1900, capturing the moods and events that gave the year its character.

This extraordinarily handsome picture-and-text book recalls a vanished age with equal parts admiring nostalgia and acerbic commentary. The pictures - mostly period photographs, many extremely rare - display such wonders as the construction of the New York subway and such notable figures as Chekhov and Tolstoy and Queen Victoria.

The text, in a different way quite as wonderful, consists of notes accompanying the illustrations, plus a central, long essay by the ferociously august and witty Dame Rebecca West. 1900 is no mere coffee-table book; it's an incisive and fascinating historical argument.

It was the last year of Queen Victoria's reign and the beginning of Lenin's communist reign. All the glamour, uncertainty, innocence, charm, and exuberance of 1900 are evoked with contemporary illustrations and West's lively insights.

Reviews

As those who know their West might expect, this small coffee-table-style book has a very un-coffee-table text--once you get past the first 50 pages of bland lists and photo captions (highlights of the year 1900). In other words, don't look for much nostalgia here: West (b. 1892) starts off with some notes on the period's sexist double standards, moves on to the Boer War (if it "was not old-fashioned Sweeney Todd villainy, it was certainly the opposite of glory") and Cecil Rhodes ("Poor man, he could do anything but keep sane"). And there are portraits of colonial administrators, bits on religion and education and Fabians, plus, inevitably: "I will swear that the most important event in 1900 was the meeting held on 17 February of that year, at the Memorial Hall. . . which was the beginning of the British Labour Party." On the arts, West is equally idiosyncratic: in England she fastens on "the two butlers," John Singer Sargent and Henry James ("he diagnosed the world's sickness, though that hardly excuses the too pliant knee of his nature") and laments the chilling effect of the Wilde trial; in Europe she finds a provocative puzzle ("Why did Proust use such delicate pastels for his account of the Dreyfus case?"). And, proto-feminist that she is, West winds up with sketches of three women--two who carried the 19th century into the 20th (Edward VII's mistress Mrs. Keppel, Alice Roosevelt), one who took a first great step into the future, "like a strong woman": Colette. Hardly full-fledged West, and the book as a whole has no thematic or visual coherence--but many of the 100 photos are handsome and on every other page you'll find a zappingly eloquent paragraph from a great, greatly opinionated writer. ~KIRKUS REVIEW, undated

Imagine hearing the voice of Maggie Smith as Downton Abbey's Dowager Countess at age 88. She meanders through personal memories and historical discourse about a pivotal year, replete with sometimes bizarre digressions and witty bon mots about the classes, the Queen, the Boer War, and so on. ~Goodreads Contributor, 21 Jan 2015