Charlotte & Lionel : a Rothschild love story /

Lionel Rothschild was the son of Nathan, who founded the London branch of the family's vast banking empire. Lionel and his first cousin, Charlotte, agreed to an arranged marriage and began an unlikely, but long, partnership characterized by devotion, genuine love, and joint efforts that interacted with many of the great events and great historical figures of Victorian Britain. In addition to his great influence and power through his financial interests, Lionel achieved political power and was the first Jew to sit in Parliament. He was instrumental in gaining financial backing for the British acquisition of a dominant interest in Suez Canal shares. He aided famine relief in Ireland and worked tirelessly to improve the lot of British Jews. With her charm, beauty, and intelligence, Charlotte was both a hostess to the glittering elite and a trusted advisor to her husband. Weintraub's narrative is engrossing and often fascinating, both as a love story and as a portrait of a couple who moved effectively within Victorian society without being fully accepted by it. --Jay Freeman

Weintraub, biographer of Queen Victoria and Benjamin Disraeli, knows the Victorian world well, and here he profiles one of its oddly (given their Jewishness and British anti-Semitism) quintessential couples. Lionel Rothschild, scion of the British branch of the famed banking family, married his beautiful German wife, Charlotte, in 1836, when she was 16 (he was a decade older). The bride was, following family custom, also Lionel's cousin and would mature into a sparkling saloniste and hostess whose dinner invitations, Weintraub notes, were preferred over those from Buckingham Palace. Weintraub, author of the bestselling Silent Night: The Story of the World War I Christmas Truce, intimately traces their relationship, which brought them "mixed blessings." Lionel fought to be able to take a seat in Parliament (as a Jew, he couldn't take the necessary oath "on the true faith of a Christian" until legislators amended the archaic oaths law, a process that dragged on for 11 years). Charlotte and Lionel were a fine match, she tending to charities, bearing children, hosting fabulous gatherings and nursing him through various health crises, he serving as banker to royalty in Britain and on the continent. Charlotte attracted passion not only from her husband: Benjamin Disraeli fictionalized her more than once; Endymion, Weintraub says, was an "extraordinary love letter" to her. While immortalizing her in his fiction, however, he apparently didn't act on his feelings, and there's no evidence to suggest she considered him anything other than a close family friend. Weintraub offers an enticing inside look at a storied family that played a central public role in Victorian England. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Weintraub adds one of Victorian England's most intriguing love stories to his formidable list of biographies of Victorian lives (e.g., Four Rossettis; Disraeli). Beginning in 1836 as an arranged marriage of first cousins, the union between Charlotte von Rothschild and Lionel de Rothschild represents, for Weintraub, a union "not confined to the edges of Victorian life, but...integral to it." Despite social isolation occasioned by the religious discrimination of the time, Charlotte blossomed into a hostess whose salons attracted not only Benjamin Disraeli, Charles Dickens, and W.M. Thackeray but also Giuseppe Garibaldi and "the eternal" Charles Villiers. Lionel, the leader of the family's banking business at the height of its power, "initiated Irish relief funding during the famine, helped guarantee the Prince Consort's Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace, [and lent] millions to the government on no security to purchase what was in effect a controlling interest in the Suez Canal." Weintraub's carefully wrought narrative, based on family papers in the Rothschild Archive, is also carefully documented with 12 pages of sources. Recommended for all libraries.-Robert C. Jones, Central Missouri State Univ., Warrensburg (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Popular Victorian biographer Weintraub (Edward the Caresser, 2001, etc.) returns with a languid account of a dynastic marriage between cousins in the famous banking family. Though they were friends of Disraeli, Thackeray, and Trollope, bankers to the Queen, rivals of Midas and Croesus, Lionel and Charlotte Rothschild belonged to a group that Victorian England strove mightily to keep in the background. As Jews, the Rothschilds were denied official political roles in England despite their enormous financial sway across Europe. Weintraub (Arts and Humanities Emeritus/Penn. State Univ.) wishes here to place them in the foreground, and a minor strength of this strangely limp account is the narrative of Lionel Rothschild's 11-year struggle to take his seat in the House of Commons. (His constituents repeatedly elected him, but the gentile Commons would not permit a Jew to be seated, nor would Rothschild agree to take the explicitly Christian oath.) Although the subtitle suggests a "love story," its focus is often elsewhere. Yes, we are given details of their betrothal: he was 27, she was 16, they were first cousins, and the marriage was arranged. We hear about their wedding in 1836 and about the extremely painful abscess on the buttocks that killed Lionel's father. We hear as well about the births and childhoods and struggles of the couple's various children. But the allure of the astonishing Rothschild fortune is too powerful for Weintraub to combat, and so we hear ever less about love and ever more about the Rothschilds' astonishing homes, their priceless collections of furniture and art, their travels, their soirees (Tom Thumb performed at one), their famous friends, the financial decisions that affected nations, wars, and monarchs. Then we watch them decline: Lionel suffered horribly from arthritis, and both eventually succumbed to strokes. An unfortunate demonstration that, at least in this case, the people who lend are not nearly so interesting as those who borrow.