George V: The Unexpected King and George VI: The Dutiful King – review

The two Georges were more Victorian than Victoria and made mid-20th-century Britain into a nation that was prudish, dingy and insular. David Cannadine and Philip Ziegler’s studies are miracles of lucid compression

King George V, c1754. Photograph: ./Getty

Richard Davenport-Hines

Saturday 20 December 2014 - The Guardian

Queen Victoria was not the most Victorian of our monarchs. She enjoyed sex, bought modern art, liked looking at drawings of naked men, was emotionally self-indulgent, histrionic and luxurious, neglected her public duties and preferred people lower down in the social scale (whether politicians such as Disraeli or confidants such as the drunken gillie John Brown). Victorian values, as we understand them, reached their apogee in the reigns of her grandson George V (1910-36) and his son George VI (1936-52). They were our two Spartan monarchs, duty-bound, sexually repressed, emotionally disciplined, wanting everyone kept in place and convinced that material discomfort improved people’s characters. And to a great extent, their subjects emulated their example, and made mid-20th-century Britain into a nation that was conventional, stable, prudish, dingy and insular. Neo-Georgian Britain was nothing if not self-respecting and therefore law-abiding.

The Penguin Monarchs series, which is producing 45 elegant miniatures on the life and times of every monarch from Athelstan to Elizabeth II, gets off to a strong start with the two Georges who bore the world’s greatest royal inheritance in a century of world wars and global crises
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