Rosemary Hill

In A Journal of the Plague Year Defoe’s narrator keeps an eye on premises belonging to his brother, who has taken his own family out of the stricken city. Walking one day towards the warehouse in Swan Alley near London Wall he meets, in the otherwise deserted street, three or four women coming toward him wearing high-crowned hats. Reaching the warehouse he finds it broken open. Inside, half a dozen more women are trying on a consignment of the hats, meant for export, ‘fitting themselves … as unconcerned and quiet as if they had been at a hatter’s shop’. It is a dream-like scene: the fashionable looters, each looking for her size, while around them London rots and grass grows in the Strand. It is also a striking demonstration of Freya Stark’s maxim that ‘there are few sorrows through which a new dress or hat will not send a little gleam of pleasure however fugitive.’‘

When Elizabeth David’s A Book of Mediterranean Food appeared in 1950, many of the ingredients it called for were unobtainable. But even after meat came off the ration, few people can have had much practical need for a traditional Turkish recipe for stuffing a whole sheep. That was not the point. Saturated with description, of figs and aubergines, of fishing boats at anchor in Marseille and paella pans left out to dry in Spanish courtyards, Mediterranean Food brought a beakerful of the warm South to chilly, postwar England.

In the 15 years her memoir covers Emma Tennant transformed herself. The poised, if slightly stolid-looking debutante of 1955 was, by the end of the Sixties, a three-times-married, chronically hard-up, left-wing novelist. There was little more to wish for. Given the temper of the times and the Tennant family’s established bohemian tendencies it was not such a surprising trajectory. But all lives are surprising to those who live them. Tennant evokes, sometimes with too much vividness to be entirely coherent, the bewildering experience of a life lived forwards by someone who never considers herself its heroine and indeed often seems to herself to be struggling for a speaking part.

An artist who becomes an adjective is difficult for the biographer. The Hogarthian world of teeming streets, lubricious drawing-rooms and earthy taverns has been softened by censorship and repetition until Gin Lane has, somehow, come to seem part of Merrie England. The occasion for this book was the 1997 tercentenary of Hogarth’s birth, which was also marked by several small exhibitions. The Tate, the British Museum and the National Gallery all showed the works in their own collections, but there was no attempt to form an overview or to revise his reputation in a single, major display. Perhaps this reflected the fact that while the paintings and their details remain eternally popular the moral world they represent is one in which the late 20th century is not at ease.

William De Morgan’s Life, death and reputation form a curious episode in the history of taste. He died, in 1917, a famous Edwardian novelist, and was almost forgotten. Nearly half a century later he was rediscovered as a great Victorian ceramist. Appropriately, the technique in which he excelled as a potter, lustre, is one that has itself been several times lost, rediscovered and discarded again by different civilisations. It requires a mixture of artistry and chemistry for which De Morgan was ideally suited.