Historical Characters, Including Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 42

[cahn]

Last post, we had (among other things) Danish kings and their favorites; Louis XIV and Philippe d'Orléans; reviews of a very shippy book about Katte, a bad Jacobite novel, and a great book about clothing; a fic about Émilie du Châtelet and Voltaire; and a review of a set of entertaining Youtube history videos about Frederick the Great.

Comments

Re: Charles Hanbury-Williams: Man About Town (The Life, I)

[selenak]

gaaaaah! Yeah, I would... never have got it based just on that.

I mean, our authors do leave the tiny hint because they quote Henry Fox writing that H-W and his wife are very sick "in the same way", but that could have meant all kinds of things. (For all an unsuspecting person knows, they simply both had the flu.)

lololol. With this and the Wilhelmine description put next to each other, there definitely seems to be a bit of bad feeling there to anyone who "claims" to be learned... :P

H-W: Fake learned people were EVERYWHERE I WENT!

Like I said, all these quotes remind me of nothing so much as certain fanboys explaining that female fans aren't true geeks, they're just pretending to be.

Now, I have no idea how much or little Hervey and Wilhelmine actually read, but going by their surviving letters and books, they were on the upper scale of well educated 18th century people. Not on a Voltaire and/or Émilie level, but few people were, certainly not H-W. Now I'm assuming that Wilhelmine, like Fritz, read all the Greek and Latin classics in French translations, not in the original, while H-W did read Latin and Greek at school. (Not sure about Hervey, because while I might misrenember, I think he was alreaedy sickly as a child and thus got taught by schoolmasters instead of going to a school.) But she did read them, and was able to make the kind of nerdy jokes about the Appian way when in Italy for which you have to be firm in your Roman history to get.

=> Basically, H-W does that thing where if you dislike people, you look for reasons why even their acknowledged better qualities aren't really good