Books in Brief: Cecil Rhodes: The Flawed Colossus

Cecil Rhodes: The Flawed Colossus, by Brian Roberts (Norton, 319 pp., $22.50)

The Rhodes family was as idiosyncratic as any in all Victoriana. Of the ten Rhodes children who survived into adulthood, only two—Cecil wasn’t one of them—married. Cecil Rhodes preferred the company of men to that of women, and one of his sisters, Edith, “dressed like a man, in a grey suit, high collar, and man’s tie and hat.” But when his home in South Africa caught fire while Edith was visiting him, his butler saved his books before helping Edith escape. The butler explained: “I first saved what I thought the master valued most.” Rhodes aspired and plotted to spread British influence throughout the world—this was his original intention behind what eventually became the Rhodes scholarships—but he himself spent no more time than he had to in Britain. His true home was South Africa, where his rise to power and riches was phenomenal—he arrived there at the age of 17, and by 37 he had created a financial empire out of virtually nothing, put himself through Oxford, become Prime Minister of the Cape, and carved out vast territories for Britain in the north. But as Brian Roberts points out, his political and business judgments were often wrong. Roberts is fair in his analysis of Rhodes’s character, which, though not spotless, was nevertheless not bereft of accomplishments and virtue. Roberts ends his biography of the founder of Rhodesia on an elegiac note: “In many ways what Rhodes, for all his idealism, effort, and ruthlessness, had built was no more than an elaborate house of cards; a house that has been blown away by the winds of history.”

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H. W. Crocker III

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Cecil Rhodes: The Flawed Colossus, by Brian Roberts (Norton, 319 pp., $22.50)

The Rhodes family was as idiosyncratic as any in all Victoriana. Of the ten Rhodes children who survived into adulthood, only two—Cecil wasn’t one of them—married. Cecil Rhodes preferred the company of men to that of women, and one of his sisters, Edith, “dressed like a man, in a grey suit, high collar, and man’s tie and hat.” But when his home in South Africa caught fire while Edith was visiting him, his butler saved his books before helping Edith escape. The butler explained: “I first saved what I thought the master valued most.” Rhodes aspired and plotted to spread British influence throughout the world—this was his original intention behind what eventually became the Rhodes scholarships—but he himself spent no more time than he had to in Britain. His true home was South Africa, where his rise to power and riches was phenomenal—he arrived there at the age of 17, and by 37 he had created a financial empire out of virtually nothing, put himself through Oxford, become Prime Minister of the Cape, and carved out vast territories for Britain in the north. But as Brian Roberts points out, his political and business judgments were often wrong. Roberts is fair in his analysis of Rhodes’s character, which, though not spotless, was nevertheless not bereft of accomplishments and virtue. Roberts ends his biography of the founder of Rhodesia on an elegiac note: “In many ways what Rhodes, for all his idealism, effort, and ruthlessness, had built was no more than an elaborate house of cards; a house that has been blown away by the winds of history.”