K.J. Charles's Reviews > Sir Thomas Lipton: The Man Who Invented Himself

Lipton (yes, like the tea) was a major Victorian/Edwardian figure: a self made man from Glasgow who came from respectable poverty and ended up building a multinational retail empire, and hobnobbing with royalty and presidents.

He's potentially a really interesting figure. He became hugely rich and used his wealth to...improve conditions for his workers with more time off and better pay? No, really. He frequently sent vast sums of money and food supplies to striking worker communities. When he donated almost the entire amount required to Princess Alexandra's fundraiser for £30K to feed the poor, he refused to put up with any "deserving poor" nonsense and insisted that if people were hungry, they should be fed and judgement didn't come into it. Her also supported the nascent Labour Party, and Irish independence, and a lot of pretty revolutionary movements, all the while being a plutocrat.

It would be really interesting to get a sense of the person behind that. Plus he was gay, and managed to live with his long term partner (and his parents in the same house) (also his partner was called William Love, I mean, come on) for literally decades, and to keep his private life out of the papers while being spectacularly famous to the point of affecting government policies across the US and UK.

Unfortunately, this book gives basically no sense of Lipton as a man. It's full of facts about where his great grandfather lived and the many many ways in which he obfuscated, forgot, or lied about his early life, and incredibly minute details about racing, profits, ham prices etc. But in terms of understanding him as a person, no: it's all the surface stuff, except for one brief and excruciating passage where the author imagines Lipton checking out William Love's tight buns, so actually it's a relief there wasn't more of that.

Anyway. Factual and only factual. Possibly the information just doesn't exist to be used, but I'd love to read a novel about Lipton that gets into his head. A modern Arnold Bennett could make hay with this.