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George Grove, Music and Victorian Culture.

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George Grove, Music and Victorian Culture. Edited by Michael Musgrave. New York: Palgrave, 2003. [xiv, 346 p. ISBN 0-333-94804-1. $82.00] Illustrations, bibliography, index.

Having grown up in a home graced with "Spy" cartoons of eminent Victorian barristers, I was delighted to see on the dust jacket of this book the same cartoonist's rendering of George Grove ("G") for an 1891 issue of Vanity Fair. It is a good index of the way in which Michael Musgrave and his colleagues manage to place Grove so richly within the context of time and place. Living from 1820 to 1900, Grove was a virtually exact contemporary of Queen Victoria herself (1819-1901), and indeed, as Musgrave says, "no one figure in later-nineteenth-century Britain is as worthy of the title Great Victorian of Music" (p. 3).

The lack of that serial comma in the title may be a stumbling block for American readers, who should be aware that the book really is about those three topics. It does not theorize or undertake cultural criticism, but it is by no means devoid of wider historical interest.

George Grove, Music and Victorian Culture is a multiauthor book but it is not really set up as a collection of independent essays. Rather, it reads more as though Musgrave, in setting out to write a detailed study of Grove's life and career, enlisted supplementary assistance in some specialized areas from the reigning experts--for example, David Wright on the founding of the Royal College of Music (RCM), Christina Bashford on program notes, Peter Horton on archival materials at the College (where he is reference librarian), or Rosemary T. VanArsdel (a specialist on Victorian periodicals) on Macmillan's Magazine.

The arrangement of chapters in the book roughly follows the four stages of Grove's varied...

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