Who Run the World? Awkward Teenagers.
If you haven’t heard of Alice Loxton, you could be forgiven for living under a rock. If you do know Ms. Loxton, you revel in living under that rock, since that rock is a centuries-old keystone from York Minster or Durham Cathedral. For perennially online history nerds, Ms. Loxton (@history_alice) operates as somewhat of a Beatrice Portinari, guiding her audience through both renowned tourist spots and mundane corners, one reel, podcast, or YouTube video at a time.
I picked up Ms. Loxton’s second book, “Eighteen: A History of Britain in 18 Young Lives” at Waterstone’s in Piccadilly (itself one of Ms. Loxton’s myriad reels) and devoured it with aplomb. Its premise--to spin out 1200 years of British history through eighteen teenagers who would shape it--presents a goal ambitious enough to border on delusion. Yet Ms. Loxton succeeds. Her eminently readable book not only weaves the various eras of British history, but also demonstrates how her subjects’ respective upbringings shaped their creations and discoveries which, in turn, forged the country. We were all vulnerable teenagers once, Ms. Loxton reminds us over and again, and thus we should venture forth, create, and be ourselves. Through being themselves, Ms. Loxton’s eighteen shaped Britain.
In her myriad interviews, Ms. Loxton underlines that she is not an academic. And no, her breadth of history doesn’t reach the level of academic texts. Thank Heavens. Instead, Ms. Loxton gives us British history in bingeable snippets of twelve to fifteen pages or so, short enough to whip through on a bus ride, long enough to be informative. I learned more about the Tudor era through the eyes of Jacques Francis--a diver who attempted to raise the Mary Rose, a ship which sunk off Portsmouth--than I would have through the umpteenth screed on Henry VIII.
Ms. Loxton deserves as much credit for whom she doesn’t include as those she does. Geoffrey Chaucer makes it--and other than a scene in which Richard Burton tries to whittle away his Welsh accent--Shakespeare does not. While it would have been easy for Ms. Loxton to pick James Watt for the Industrial Revolution or Charles Dickens to demonstrate its consequences, Ms. Loxton instead chooses Isambard Kingdom Brunel, co-designer of the Thames Tunnel, a marvel of engineering of which this non-Brit had no idea. Lastly, for a country so quick to stamp ‘The Royal’ on everything, it’s near miraculous that only two royals--Empress Matilda and Elizabeth Tudor-- made the cut. Ms. Loxton’s Britain is one built by commoners.
With three million followers and growing across her social media platforms, Ms. Loxton knows her audience. Again and again, she underlines her subjects’ insecurities, or about the anxieties they must have felt confronting the issues of the day. What must a teenage Bede have felt when the plague wiped out everyone in his monastery except himself and his abbot? Or what was it like for a teenage Elizabeth Tudor to navigate a mercurial father, four mothers-in-law, an abusive father-in-law? By focusing on her subjects’ upbringing--and speculating, sometimes with open-ended questions, about how it may have shaped their futures--Ms. Loxton leaves her reader both informed and inquisitive.
Still, at times I wanted more. Only one of Ms. Loxton’s subjects, Jacques Francis, is non-white. And for a country whose modern identity is shaped by its Empire, it’s an omission to acknowledge that many who shaped Britain may rather have shaped their own countries. In addition, in some cases Ms. Loxton’s focus on teenage years underplays how her subjects’ most significant creations came thereafter. The reader learns a volume about Geoffrey Chaucer’s captivity in France and the Black Death that decimated his London, yet we learn little about the Tales which give him renown, other than how these early experiences may have informed his writing. Similar about Horatio Nelson--of whom we get harrowing narratives of surviving both malaria and a polar bear encounter--yet little about his genius in navigating an outnumbered fleet at Trafalgar. Perhaps a few extra paragraphs about those post-teenage years could have fleshed out her characters a bit more.
Nevertheless, Eighteen deserves its accolades. Ms. Loxton doesn’t let us forget how history is created by people who were, at once, awkward teenagers. And in a world of elders hoarding power and treasure, it’s comforting to be reminded that we can still write our own futures. And with the author barely thirty herself and with three books and scores of videos already to her name, it is exciting to consider what rocks she might have us live under for decades to come.
