Going literally Dutch: the editing

Lisa Jardine's well-produced book Going Dutch (HarperCollins) looked appealing the moment I saw it in the bookshop. It has an elegant cover. It is printed in full colour throughout, and to prove the point, it has a different coloured rule for each page per chapter. Not that such a feature would influence me, of course.

The book opens tremendously well, with the 1688 invasion of England that is never referred to by the British as an invasion. I knew little about the details, and Jardine captures the reader's attention by jumping in at the most dramatic point in the story. I have no problems with the author's jumping around chronologically if it helps the drama of the telling. But now I am around half way through the book, I am starting to notice a few places where the manner of the delivery and presentation are starting to become annoying.




Of course it isn't possible to sustain the story of a non-invasion over 350 pages, but I am starting to question if it really requires all those pages to tell this story.  The book could do with a thorough copy-edit, for a start. The author has an irritating way of adding unnecessary adverbs and adjectives to intensify descriptions. We are told that the English and Dutch  had a "robust set of common interests". On page 63 we read of a move "designed specifically to antagonise".


Adjectives are added throughout to intensify unnecessarily: when someone makes an effort, it is more often than not a "conscious" effort. A relationship cannot just be fruitful; it must be "extremely" fruitful. Constantin Huygens is "entirely captivated" by England's courtly milieu (could you be half-heartedly captivated?). Constantin Huygens cannot just have a delight at displaying his musical talents to the King, it has to be a "personal" delight (p98) - could you have an impersonal delight? On page 64 we have "actively manoeuvring".

Features are repeated as if we as readers can only grasp them after two or three repetitions. Constantin Hugyens junior, we are told "was an outstanding linguist, whose English and French were as fluent as his native Dutch) (p7). But on page 95 we are told of Huygen's "absolute fluency in English"  (could you be half-heartedly fluent?). There are other examples of similar repetition.

Characters are regularly introduced, then introduced again. On page 11 we read of William III's "Scottish-born chaplain, Gilbert Burnet". On page 18, we read about "Gilbert Burnet, Prince William's Scottish chaplain". On page 29 we seem to be introduced to him again: "Gilbert Burnet, an expatriate Scottish cleric who had become close confidant and advisor to William and Mary". Then on page 42 we read "Gilbert Burnet was an Anglican cleric, born in Scotland". If I ever appear on Mastermind, I think I'll choose for my special subject Gilbert Burnet's birthplace - I'll never forget it.
On page 102 we are introduced to "the great Flemish artist Pieter Paul Rubens". The following pages are all about Rubens, but by page 106 he has become "the great Dutch painter Pieter Paul Rubens".  We had already been told he was a great painter, but I suppose it was helpful to point out he had changed nationality.


All these infelicities are combined with some very poor captioning. For a book that is about cultural exchanges, it would be good to know who painted the pictures that make up the many illustrations in the book. But trying to find out the details of the illustrations is a frustrating experience. The captions themselves are unhelpful: "Bust of William III at Petworth House" (p65) is a typical example. Who  is this impressive sculpture by? A search through the list of illustrations is difficult because no page numbers to the illustrations are provided. When the reader eventually finds this illustration, the resulting information is no more enlightening: "Bust of William III at Petworth House (c) NTPL/Angelo Hornak." I assume the National Trust knows who sculpted it, and they might have told the author. Other illustrations don't even state where the picture is - most of the images from the image agencies AKG (referred to in lower-case as "akg-images" and Bridgeman (always referred to as "Bridgeman Art Library") fail to state where the picture is held. I don't expect these collections to care much about metadata, even though one of them ostentatiously claims to be an Art Library, but either the author or the editor of a book of cultural history should take the trouble to find out the location, the date, and the painter.