One of the library rejects I have been reading is Jerome K Jerome’s Idle Ideas in 1905
Although ponderous & pompous in places, there was lots to make me smile, even laugh out loud in these gloomy days
Some things never change. In a piece called Should Women Be Beautiful? he says "In the future there are going to be no pretty girls, for the simple reason there will be no plain girls against which to contrast them." Though in those days it was all lotions & potions, he could have written the same in today’s world of plastic surgery
He is interesting on other writers: Thackeray, wittiest, gentlest of men, in spite of the faint suspicion of snobbishness that clings to him; Charles Dickens prone, we know, just ever so slightly to gush; Scott’s women merely the prizes the hero had to win in the end, like the sucking pig or the leg of mutton for which the yokel climbs the greasy pole.
But the biggest surprises come (for me) when he comments on Russia & China
[The Russians] strike the stranger as a childlike people, but you are possessed with a haunting sense of ugly traits beneath. The workers--slaves it would be almost more correct to call them--allow themselves to be exploited with the uncomplaining patience of intelligent animals. Yet every educated Russian you talk to on the subject knows that revolution is coming.
Corruption appears to be so general throughout the whole of Russia that all classes have come to accept it as part of the established order of things.
The world will be glad of Russia--when she has put her house in order.
The present trouble in the East would never have occurred but for the white man's enthusiasm for bearing other people's burdens. What we call the yellow danger is the fear that the yellow man may before long request us, so far as he is concerned, to put his particular burden down. It may occur to him that, seeing it is his property, he would just as soon carry it himself.
A friend of mine … sees rising from the East the dawn of a new day in the world's history. The yellow danger is to him a golden hope. He sees a race long stagnant, stretching its giant limbs with the first vague movements of returning life. He is a poor sort of patriot; he calls himself, I suppose, a white man, yet he shamelessly confesses he would rather see Asia's millions rise from the ruins of their ancient civilization to take their part in the future of humanity, than that half the population of the globe should remain bound in savagery for the pleasure and the profit of his own particular species.
Not what the yellow man has absorbed from Europe, but what he is going to give Europe it is that interests my friend. He is watching the birth of a new force--an influence as yet unknown. He clings to the fond belief that new ideas, new formulae, to replace the old worn shibboleths, may, during these thousands of years, have been developing in those keen brains that behind the impressive yellow mask have been working so long in silence and in mystery.
All this written in 1905
Not all just buttoned up Edwardians, sleepwalking towards a World War
As one of my history tutors once said, when you really look, things were never really just as people think they were
