Blondelle

Blondelle is a work by Henry Drummond Wolff, the English diplomat and Conservative politician who lived from 1830 to 1908. Wolff served in various diplomatic posts including British minister at Tehran from 1887 to 1890 and as ambassador to Madrid from 1892 to 1900, and was substantially involved in Conservative party politics in Britain during the Disraeli and Salisbury years. He was one of the founding members of the Fourth Party, the small group of Conservative MPs led by Lord Randolph Churchill in the early 1880s that pushed for a more populist and reform oriented Conservative politics.

Alongside his diplomatic and political careers Wolff produced a substantial body of writing, including memoirs, travel books, political essays, and occasional fiction and verse. His autobiographical Rambling Recollections published in two volumes in 1908 shortly before his death gives a substantial picture of late Victorian British diplomatic and political life from the inside.

The specific contents of Blondelle depend on how Wolff treated the subject. The name Blondelle is associated in European literary tradition with the medieval minstrel Blondel de Nesle, who according to the legend located the captive Richard the Lionheart in an Austrian castle by singing a song that only the two of them knew until he heard the king’s voice answering from the tower window. Wolff may be drawing on this legendary material, on a French romantic tradition that uses the name, or on some entirely different subject for his book.

Wolff wrote in the cultivated literary mode that the late Victorian aristocratic diplomatic and political class produced. His books combine substantial real world experience with the literary and historical learning that the classical education of the period provided to men of his background, and the result is the kind of educated amateur literary production that the period valued highly even when the actual literary merits were modest.

The book is mostly of interest now to readers of late Victorian British political and diplomatic memoir literature and to specialists in the late Victorian Conservative party and the British diplomatic service of the period. It pairs naturally with Wolff’s other writings and with the broader memoir literature of the Disraeli and Salisbury years.