A Child's History of England. By Charles Dickens

A Child's History of England

Charles Dickens

Kindle e-book. First published 1852-1854 (serialized).

This is a bare narrative of one king/queen after another. The series starts with a sketchy description of pre-Roman times, the Roman occupation, and the subsequent battles between and among Angles, Saxons, Celts, Vikings and so on. And so we come to the time of Alfred the Great, the Anglo-Saxon King, one of the few for whom Dickens expresses any admiration. The Norman conquest sets in motion of a series of much better documented reigns of kings and queens, in an unbroken line to present. Not that the same family or group rules all the time. Three families, the Plantagenets, the Tudors, and the Stuarts, supplied most of the Kings and Queens over the period from about 1050 to the present. Dickens concentrates exclusively on the personal doings of each and the wars and the battles and the massacres and cruelties that almost all the rulers uniformly perpetrated. He is harsh on most of them, and the writing would be tedious, except that he continuously displays his ironical turn of phrase and is always interesting to read. That is perhaps the only reason to read this book. I would look elsewhere for the actual history.