Caroline Blackwood

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The Unreliable in Pursuit …

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SOURCE: "The Unreliable in Pursuit …," in The Times Literary Supplement, No. 4408, September 25, 1987, pp. 105-07.

[In the review below, Lonrigg offers an unfavorable assessment of In the Pink, charging that the book is inaccurate and lacks purpose.]

In the Pink reads as though Caroline Blackwood wrote a series of loosely connected articles about foxhunting for a glossy magazine, had them rejected, and then decided to bind them together in hard covers. It is difficult to guess why else this book should have been written; it is too unreliable in detail to be informative, and maintains too strict a moral neutrality to have the interest of a tract. It can be recommended neither to those who know about hunting nor to those who want to know about it. The sort of information we are given is that Victorian women "galloped alongside the bewhiskered men casting seductive glances from under their provocative hunting veils".

There are extended interviews with "antis" and others—apparently chosen because they are unrepresentative of those who follow the sport. There is no account of the physical act of chasing foxes on horseback—there are accounts of two days spent in cars attempting to follow the hunt, but apparently no hounds or horses were sighted after the meet. Literary quotations appear for no reason and in no historical context; there is no evidence of broad reading or serious research.

Someone going hunting is described by Blackwood as a "hunter" or "huntsman"; in Britain the former is a horse (in America a sportsman with a firearm) and the latter a person in charge of a pack of hounds in the field. William Somerville, most eminent of early Georgian hare-hunters, is described as a Regency fox-hunter, and "Nimrod" (uniquely influential as a hunting writer in the 1820s) and even Peter Beckford are thought to have been Victorians. A "drafted" hound means one transferred to another kennel, not condemned to death. In the season a hound today does not "walk about thirty miles to the meet several times a week". There was no hunting tailor called Mr Pink. "The Earl of Spencer" would be surprised by that partitive.

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