Jacob Rees Mogg’s The Victorians sold 734 copies in its first week(still Vince Cable managed 68)
Jacob Rees Mogg studied history at Trinity College Oxford and has now produced a volume, The Victorians, about some leading Victorians he likes.
The book has been universally slated, the most recent review being by Simon Hepher in the Telegraph (its behind a paywall but I’m sure most readers of my blog subscribe to the paper anyway).
The bad news for Rees Mogg (if it is bad news, he has been paid, it may be the publisher Random House that is taking the hit) is that the book sold only 734 copies in its first week and that tends to be the benchmark for sales.
On the other hand Rees Mogg may reflect that when Vince Cable published a work of fiction (Rees Mogg’s may be close but not quite in that category) it managed just 68 sales in the first week in 2017
I am reading it chapter by chapter when time allows and it does beg the question of what kind of history Rees Mogg was actually studying at Oxford, something I’ve been puzzling over for a while.
Certainly it was not research history.
The Victorians contains no footnotes or endnotes to point the reader to sources where they can read more about or check what Rees Mogg says.
It also contains no acknowledgements of any visits to libraries, archives or anywhere else where Rees Mogg might have researched and checked matters.
It does have a brief two-page bibliography consisting entirely of secondary works. This it seems to me is particularly poor. A good deal of Queen Victoria’s personal writing is available free on-line for example but it doesn’t appear that Rees Mogg has looked at it, even though it only requires a google.
Dr Keith Flett convenes the socialist history seminar at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London School of Advanced Studies
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