The Valve - A Literary Organ | Unfair to Dracula

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Sunday, June 26, 2005

Unfair to Dracula

Posted by Jonathan Goodwin on 06/26/05 at 05:43 PM

"According to Lady Desborough, a lady of the bedchamber to Queen Mary, on three occasions each separated by several years, the future Edward VIII opened his conversation with the words: “Lady Desborough, I know you’re a bookish sort of a person. At the moment, I’m reading such an interesting novel. I think it would appeal to you: it’s called Dracula‘“ (O. Sitwell, Rat Week 34, qtd. by Ross McKibbin, Classes and Cultures in England, 4).

Part of the humor here is the repetition, but another is the assumption that Dracula‘s not very intellectually nourishing. I’d be delighted if our American monarchs had similar reading habits, but our literacy standards are different.

Comments

I don’t have the context you do, but doesn’t it just sound like the nation’s future king is calling the fair lady a bloodsucker?

By on 06/26/05 at 09:55 PM | Permanent link to this comment

I’m often immune to other people’s irony or jokes, first of all, but “bookish sort of person” contextualizes it, there.

By Jonathan on 06/26/05 at 10:02 PM | Permanent link to this comment

Prince William (or maybe it was Harry?) got his Masters the other day, and in the Times they reproted that he’s the first member of the Royal Family to get a postgraduate degree and only the third to get any sort of university degree at all.

So I guess kingly contempt of bookishness liveth on. Edward presumably took his time ploughing through the regrettably Irish Dracula (sounding out the words, etc.) Well, the last hundred pages or so are fairly slow going.

By on 06/26/05 at 10:20 PM | Permanent link to this comment

But that’s a Scottish Masters, so it’s not strictly a ‘real’ postgraduate degree (all undergraduates in Scottish universities take a 4-year course and it’s called a MA/MSc etc. Although it’s more like the real thing than an Oxbridge MA, of course.). Let’s face it, the last intellectual British monarchs were Elizabeth I (and you don’t need to go to university when you had the kind of private education she got) and James VI & I.

By sharon on 06/28/05 at 03:21 PM | Permanent link to this comment

In terms of intelligent royals, didn’t Charles II take Hobbes as a tutor? That would seem to qualify at least as a royal recognition of the importance of knowledge.
I still take the whole incident at hand, though, to be an incident of princely insubordination, not thickheadedness. I recall a story of the future George III making crude jottings in his notebook about his tutor, the Earl of Bute. Both that instance and Edward’s Dracula comments seem to be just passive-agressive swipes at individuals they view to be inferior, yet who have a measure of authority over them.

By on 06/28/05 at 10:30 PM | Permanent link to this comment

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Sunday, June 26, 2005

Unfair to Dracula

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