The Perfect Summer

The Perfect Summer England 1911, Just Before the Storm by Juliet Nicolson

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


"The Perfect Summer chronicles a glorious English summer a century ago, when the world was on the cusp of irrevocable change. In the summer of 1911 a new kind was crowned and the aristocracy was at play, bounding from one house party to the next. At a debutante charity ball where the other girls came dressed as as white swans, the striking Diana Manners made a late appearance as a black swan. The Ballets Russes arrived in London for the first time and people swarmed to Covent Garden to see Nijinsky's gravity-defying leaps. But cracks in the social fabric had begun to show. The country was brought to a standstill by industrial strikes; led by the charismatic Ben Tillett, the Southampton Dockers' Union paralyzed shipping in the south, causing food shortages. The young Home Secretary Winston Churchill worried in his diary that 'all the world is changing at once.'

"Through the tight lens of four months, Juliet Nicolson brings that portentous summer into crisp focus. Drawing on material from intimate and rarely seen sources, The Perfect Summer is a vividly rendered story of how, day by cloudless day, a nation began to lose its innocence."
~~back cover

This was indeed a "brilliant, lucid, entertaining and fascinating" book. Like Eminent Dogs, Dangerous Men, I had expected this book to be a somewhat dry recital of facts and figures, slightly boring -- a book to be waded through rather than read. Instead, I could hardly put it down. It's not fiction, but it reads as easily and charmingly as good fiction does. The author cleverly selected people and events to give an accurate picture of the end of the Edwardian age, juxtapositioning them for the most contrast and continuity.

In many ways, these times are a mirror of those we live in today--the poor working long hours at menial jobs and unable to make enough to live on; the rich living lives of unbridled luxury and frivolousness. We can but wonder whether the Occupy movement will ever gain enough support to compel changes, as the 1911 strikes did.



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