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Balfour’s
World Aristocracy
and Political Culture at the Fin de Siècle
Nancy W. Ellenberger
Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2015 Hardcover. xvi+414. ISBN 978-1783270378. £30
Reviewed by Mark Klobas Scottsdale Community
College (Arizona)
As a politician in the
late 19th and early 20th centuries, Arthur Balfour was a member of an
endangered species: the aristocrat who chose a career in the public sphere. That
this choice was unusual reflected the changes that were taking place in British
society, as men from the business and professional classes increasingly
supplanted those from the landed elite in the House of Commons. How Balfour
navigated this changing social and cultural environment is the subject of Nancy
Ellenberger’s challenging and enlightening study. Focusing on Balfour and some
of the prominent members of his social circle – George and Mary Wyndham, Laura and
Margot Tennant, and George Herbert, the 13th earl of Pembroke – she provides an
examination of their inner worlds while showing how they adjusted to the
changing external world in which they lived. To show the range of
effects of these changes on the lives of Balfour’s social circle, Ellenberger
creates what she terms a ‘braided narrative’ [11]. In successive chapters,
she focuses on two or three members and analyses their lives within a thematic
context. Though Balfour himself gets the benefit of a standalone chapter, often
he recedes to the background as Ellenberger focuses on the relationships
between the others to describe friendships, courtships, romantic relationships,
and the changing role of women at that time. Using this approach, Ellenberger
compares Balfour and Pembroke to examine the educational experiences of the era
for men, Laura and Mary to present the adolescence of privileged girls, Margot
and George to see the differing dangers faced by men and women of their class, Margot
and Pembroke for insights into the construction of friendship, Mary and Balfour
for the means of amusement, and Margot and Balfour for the nature of scandal of
that age. It is an approach that yields bountiful dividends, providing studies
of the varied opportunities and evolving standards for their time. The dynamic of change
is at the heart of Ellenberger’s analysis. As she demonstrates, the
late-Victorian world in which these men and women came of age experienced a
number of transformations which altered dramatically the lives of their class.
One of the most important of these transformations was the extension of the
public sphere, as the increasing role of the broader public – one informed by
an expanding popular press – made the public affairs which were previously the
purview of a relative few the concern of an increasing percentage of society.
Politicians now had to concern themselves with not just winning over the
cabinet and Parliament, but the public as well, requiring a greater skill at
public relations than had been necessary before then. These changes were
parallelled by transformations in gender relations and standards, science and
thought, and the role of Britain in the world, all of which created new
opportunities and challenges for the members of Balfour’s generation. What emerges is a
sense of how Balfour and his friends defined themselves as elites in a time
when their status and role within British society was shifting. As Ellenberger
shows, theirs was a world unlike any that their ancestors had known, with not
just the men but the women of their class performing on a more public stage. In
some ways this continued to bind them to a ‘script’ of gender and cultural
expectations, now one that encouraged more open expression of their inner
selves, albeit in a manner controlled by the context of private and small-group
interactions. As a result, a persona of the reserved, detached individual was
adopted by many of them, embodied best by Balfour himself, who made it the hallmark
of his public political image. Ellenberger bases her
analysis in an impressively wide range of both archival and published sources.
Her incorporation of the cultural context broadens her scope to include
literary studies as well, demonstrating the virtue of an inter-disciplinary
approach to studying the past. Yet this comes at a price, as her writing is
often burdened with jargon that can make her arguments difficult to understand.
It requires a closer reading of Ellenberger’s arguments, though in the end such
an effort pays considerable rewards in terms of her analysis of Balfour’s
social circle and the insights she gleans from their experiences. This is a
book that should be read not just by those interested in Balfour and his acquaintances, but by anyone seeking to learn more about late Victorian society and
how the young members of its elite adapted to the new demands they faced.
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