A Classic Victorian Yarn

Whether writing fact or fiction, one of the things the Victorians of the British Isles did well was to tell ripping yarns. Consider all those heroines wandering through drawing rooms, across moors and mountains (often in the same clothes), looking for their version of Mr. Darcy; or the travellers’ records (if such they were) that ranged from darkest Ireland (Mrs. S.C. Hall) to driest Africa (the Khartoum journals of “Chinese” Gordon); or the biographies that read like fiction (Lord John Russell’s eight-volume edition of the journals and correspondence of Thomas Moore); or Benjamin Disraeli’s novels that were as accurate as Hansard and a lot more entertaining. The best collections of ripping yarns claimed either to be factual or fictional, but in fact were both. (Incidentally, this mendacious dichotomy still binds the modern bookselling industry into keeping fiction and non-fiction volumes on separate shelves in an apparent effort to keep them from cross-pollinating.) The...