Tangled Souls: love and scandal among the Victorian aristocracy
Jane Dismore The History Press, 2022 pp. 326
Hardback, £20.00; paperback, N/A; (Kindle £12.99) ISBN: 978-0750996624; 0750996625
Imagine: a bright young dashing politician, who thinks himself a writer and provocative journalist, and is tipped for the top job of prime minister, gets a young woman pregnant out of wedlock. His social life is a whirl of house parties; some of them he should be at, others he probably shouldn’t. Ring any bells? Yes, this is Victorian upper-class society. In terms of what the Victorians ever did for us – well, they prove once again that history may not repeat itself exactly, but when today’s journalists cry ‘scandal’ it is rarely original news.
Jane Dismore’s detailed visit to the world of the late-19thcentury famed and privileged group known as ‘the Souls’in a game played by the Souls to assuage the grief experienced by the death of Margot Tennant’s (later Asquith) sister Laura. Among discussion and debate on such hot topics as blood sports, votes for women and the justifiability of suicide, the Souls picked their six best friends, six books and six pictures they would choose if exiled to a desert island (p.30).
