“A World on Fire” treats readers to a sprawling drama of British engagement with the American Civil War. Amanda Foreman builds her narrative, which she describes as “a biography of . . . the many relationships that together formed the British-American experience during the Civil War,” around a huge cast of politicians, diplomats, soldiers and civilians in Great Britain, the United States and the Confederacy. Also the author of a best-selling book on Georgiana Spencer Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire (1757-1806), Foreman is largely unconcerned with arcane scholarly debates, writing for an audience of non-specialists drawn to engrossing accounts of major historical events.
A half-dozen individuals, some of whom wrote famous accounts, will suggest the variety of Foreman’s witnesses. Charles Francis Adams served as American minister to Great Britain — as had his father and grandfather before they occupied the presidency. Arthur James Lyon Fremantle, an officer in the Coldstream Guards, traveled widely throughout the Confederacy and was present at Gettysburg. A Washington socialite before the war, Rose O’Neal Greenhow became a Confederate spy and lived for a time in London. Francis Charles Lawley, private secretary to William Gladstone in the 1850s, contributed pro-Southern articles to the Times, and Frank Vizetelly, a war correspondent and artist for the Illustrated London News, created a memorable illustrative record. Sir Percy Wyndham, a soldier of fortune who fought for the United States, cut a flamboyant swath while campaigning in Virginia.
(Random House) - ‘A World on Fire: Britain's Crucial Role in the American Civil War’ by Amanda Foreman. Random House. 958 pp. $35.
Foreman’s descriptive gifts show especially well in bringing vividly to life the political and diplomatic worlds of Washington and London. Although her text offers few surprises about such well-studied topics as the Trent Affair, how the loss of Southern cotton affected British textile manufacturers and workers, and maneuvers relating to diplomatic recognition of the Confederacy, it excels at deft biographical portraits and inserts readers into the drawing rooms, governmental buildings and other sites of discussion, debate and policy-making.
Foreman’s introduction of the senior British diplomat in the United States, for example, creates a memorable impression. “Even by English standards,” she notes, “the forty-two-year-old Richard Brickerton Pemell Lyons was an eccentric character. Any display of emotion — including his own — made him uncomfortable.” The fact that Lyons neither smoked nor drank “simply accentuated his strangeness” to residents of Washington. Gossipmongers speculated about whether the bachelor would succumb to the charms of an American woman, but “it was soon discovered . . . that Lyons, with his little round face and droopy eyes, was neither a Mr. Bingley nor a Mr. Darcy.” Similarly, Foreman reveals much about Charles Francis Adams in a single passage. The diplomat found little to recommend the English aristocracy, members of which returned the favor: “Those who did try to be friendly to Adams were often put off by his stiff manner. . . . Adams was incapable of producing charm on demand, a serious handicap for a diplomat.”
These books offer keen insights into leadership and management challenges, which on a day-to-day basis can bring their own dramas, twisting plot lines and, in this city, political intrigue.
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