After the Victorians by A. N. Wilson

Author:A. N. Wilson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2015-03-26T04:00:00+00:00

The cryptic crossword and the whodunnit mystery story were two distinctive products of their time, expressions no doubt of the belief that if one could only worry at a problem for long enough it would have a single simple solution: Keynesian or Marxist economic theory, Roman Catholic, communist or fascist doctrine. Many of the brightest minds of the age, if not necessarily the most analytic, while enjoying the mystery stories of Ellery Queen or Agatha Christie, and priding themselves on the speed with which they solved the crossword puzzle, were drawn fatefully towards ideologies, systems. Ronald Knox (1888–1957) was an addict of puzzles of all kinds, and the author of A Book of Acrostics, The book reeks almost heart-rendingly of late Victorian innocence, of parlour games in a large, intelligent, well-meaning upper-middle-class family. (Knox’s father was a bishop.) ‘To break off her engagement if she’d the intention/What place on the Thames would the young lady mention?’ – answer Goring. ‘If the Zoo were for a joy-ride through the streets of London hauled,/After what old-fashioned weapon might the vehicle be called?’ Arquebus. You can almost hear the groans from the assembled company at the atrocious pun. He also wrote humorous articles for Punch, a magazine of which his brother E. V (know variously as Eddie and Evoe) became the editor. Another brother, Wilfrid, was a distinguished New Testament scholar and Anglican holy man. Another brother, Dilly, a religious non-believer, was librarian of King’s College, Cambridge. ‘During the Thirties,’ wrote his niece Penelope Fitzgerald, ‘finding that smoking and patience [i.e. the card game] were not sufficient as alternative tranquilliser and counter-irritant to the active mind, Dilly suddenly produced a new way of writing poetry.’13 Each line had to end with a word of the same form, but with a different vowel, the vowels ‘of course’ coming in their proper order, a, e, i, o, u or the equivalent sounds in English. On the death of A. E. Housman, Dilly wrote:

Sad though the news, how sad

Of thee the poet dead!

But still thy poems abide –

There Death, the unsparing god

Himself dare not intrude.14

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