At Home

• CHAPTER VII •

THE DRAWING ROOM

I

If you had to summarize it in a sentence, you could say that the history of private life is a history of getting comfortable slowly. Until the eighteenth century, the idea of having comfort at home was so unfamiliar that no word existed for the condition. Comfortable meant merely “capable of being consoled.” Comfort was something you gave to the wounded or distressed. The first person to use the word in its modern sense was the writer Horace Walpole, who remarked in a letter to a friend in 1770 that a certain Mrs. White was looking after him well and making him “as comfortable as is possible.” By the early nineteenth century, everyone was talking about having a comfortable home or enjoying a comfortable living, but before Walpole’s day no one did.

Nowhere in the house is the spirit (if not always the actuality) of comfort better captured than in the curiously named room in which we find ourselves now, the drawing room. The term is a shortening of the much older withdrawing room, meaning a space where the family could withdraw from the rest of the household for greater privacy, and it has never settled altogether comfortably into widespread English usage. For a time in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, drawing room was challenged in more refined circles by the French salon, which was sometimes anglicized to saloon, but both those words gradually became associated with spaces outside the home, so that saloon came first to signify a room for socializing in a hotel or on a ship, then a place for dedicated drinking, and finally, and a little unexpectedly, a type of automobile. Salon, meanwhile, became indelibly attached to places associated with artistic endeavors before being appropriated (from about 1910) by providers of hair care and beauty treatments. Parlor, the word long favored by Americans for the main room of the home, has a kind of nineteenth-century frontier feel to it, but in fact is the oldest word of all. It was first used in 1225, referring to a room where monks could go to talk (it is from the French parler, “to speak”), and was extended to secular contexts by the last quarter of the following century.

Drawing room is the name used by Edward Tull on his floorplan of the Old Rectory, and almost certainly is the term employed by the well-bred Mr. Marsham, though he was probably in a minority even then. By midcentury it was being supplanted in all but the most genteel circles by sitting room, a term first appearing in English in 1806. A later challenger was lounge, which originally signified a type of chair or sofa, then a jacket for relaxing in, and finally, from 1881, a room. In America, living room came into being in about 1870, and quite rapidly drove parlor out of use there, but failed to catch on elsewhere.

Assuming he was a conventional sort of fellow, Mr. Marsham would have strived to make his drawing room the most comfortable room in the house, with the softest and finest furnishings. In practice, however, it was probably anything but comfortable for much of the year, since it has just one fireplace, which could do no more than warm a small, central part of the room. Even with a good fire going, I can attest, it is possible in the depths of winter to stand across the room and see your breath.

Though the drawing room became the focus of comfort in the home, the story doesn’t actually start there; it doesn’t start in the house at all. It starts outdoors, a century or so before Mr. Marsham’s birth, with a simple discovery that would make landed families like his very rich and allow him one day to build himself a handsome rectory. The discovery was merely this: land didn’t have to be rested regularly to retain its fertility. It was not the most staggering of insights, but it changed the world.

Traditionally, most English farmland was divided into long strips called furlongs and each furlong was left fallow for one season in every three—sometimes one season in two—so that it could recover its ability to produce healthy crops.* This meant that in any given year at least one-third of the nation’s farmland stood idle. In consequence, there wasn’t sufficient feed to keep large numbers of animals alive through the winter, so landowners had no choice but to slaughter most of their stock each autumn and face a long, lean period till spring.

Then English farmers discovered something that Dutch farmers had known for a long time: if turnips, clover, or one or two other amenable crops were sown on the idle fields, they miraculously refreshed the soil and produced a bounty of winter fodder into the bargain. It was the infusion of nitrogen that did it, though no one would understand that for nearly two hundred years. What was understood, and very much appreciated, was that crop rotation transformed agricultural fortunes dramatically. Moreover, because more animals lived through the winter, they produced heaps of additional manure, and these glorious, gratis ploppings enriched the soil even further.

It is hard to exaggerate what a miracle all this seemed. Before the eighteenth century, agriculture in Britain lurched from crisis to crisis. An academic named W. G. Hoskins calculated (in 1964) that between 1480 and 1700, one harvest in four was bad, and almost one in five was catastrophically bad. Now, thanks to the simple expedient of crop rotation, agriculture was able to settle into a continuous, more or less reliable prosperity. It was this long golden age that gave so much of the countryside the air of prosperous comeliness it enjoys still today, and allowed the likes of Mr. Marsham to embrace that gratifying new commodity: comfort.

Farmers also benefited from a new wheeled contraption invented in about 1700 by Jethro Tull, a farmer and agricultural thinker in Berkshire. Called a seed drill, it allowed seeds to be planted directly into the soil rather than broadcast by hand. Seed was expensive, and Tull’s new drill reduced the amount needed from three or four bushels per acre to under one; and because the seeds were planted at even depths in neat rows, more of them sprouted successfully, so yields improved dramatically, too, from between twenty and forty bushels an acre to as much as eighty.

The new vitality was also reflected in breeding programs. Nearly all the great cattle breeds—Jersey, Guernsey, Hereford, Aberdeen Angus, Ayrshire*—were eighteenth-century creations. Sheep likewise were successfully manipulated to become the bundles of unnatural fleeciness we see today. A medieval sheep gave about a pound and a half of wool; re-engineered eighteenth-century sheep gave up to nine pounds. Underneath all that lovely fleece, sheep were gratifyingly plumper, too. Between 1700 and 1800, the average weight of sheep sold at Smithfield Market in London more than doubled, from thirty-eight pounds to eighty. Beef cattle expanded similarly. Dairy yields went up, too.

All this was not without cost, however. To make the new systems of production work, it was necessary to amalgamate small fields into large ones and move the peasant farmers off the land. This enclosure movement, in which small fields that had formerly supported many were converted into much larger enclosed fields that enriched a few, made farming immensely lucrative for those with large holdings—and soon in many areas that was almost the only kind of holding there was. Enclosure had been going on slowly for centuries, but it gathered pace between 1750 and 1830, when some six million acres of British farmland were enclosed. Enclosure was hard on the displaced peasant farmers, but it did leave them and their descendants conveniently available to move to towns and become the toiling masses of the new Industrial Revolution—which was also just beginning and was funded to a very large extent by the surplus wealth enjoyed by the ever-richer landowners.

Many landowners also discovered that they sat on great seams of coal just at a time when coal was suddenly needed for industry. This didn’t always represent a notable advance in beauty—at one time in the eighteenth century, eighty-five open-cast coal mines could be seen from Chatsworth House, or so it has been said—but it did translate into gratifying heaps of lucre. Still others made money from leasing land to railways or building canals and controlling rights of way. The Duke of Bridgewater earned annual returns of 40 percent—and really returns don’t get much better than that—from a canal monopoly in the North of England. All of this was in an age in which there was no income tax, no capital gains tax, no tax on dividends or interest—almost nothing to disturb the steady flow of money being banked. Many people were born into a world in which they had to do virtually nothing with their wealth but stack it. The third Earl of Burlington, to take one example of many, owned vast estates in Ireland—some forty-two thousand acres in all—and never visited the country. Eventually he was made lord treasurer of Ireland and still never visited it.

This wealthy elite and their offspring covered the British countryside with stout and rambling expressions of this new joie de richesse. By one count, at least 840 large country houses were built in England between 1710 and the end of the century—“dispersed like great rarity plums in a vast pudding of a country,” in the exuberant words of Horace Walpole.

Extraordinary houses need extraordinary people to design and build them, and perhaps none was more extraordinary—or at least more unexpected—than Sir John Vanbrugh (1664–1726).* Vanbrugh came from a large family—he was one of nineteen children—that was well-to-do and of Dutch extraction, though they had been settled in England for nearly half a century by the time Vanbrugh himself was born.

“A most sweet-natur’d gentleman, and pleasant,” wrote the poet Nicholas Rowe of Vanbrugh, who seems to have been well liked by everyone who met him (with the notable exception of the Duchess of Marlborough, as we shall see). A portrait of him by Sir Godfrey Kneller in the National Portrait Gallery in London, made when Vanbrugh was about forty, shows an agreeable man with a pink, well-fed, rather ordinary face framed—indeed, all but overwhelmed—by a periwig of baroque magnificence, as was the fashion of the day.

For the first three decades of his life he displayed no particular sense of direction. He worked in a family wine business, went to India as an agent for the East India Company—then still a fairly new and undistinguished enterprise—and finally took up soldiering, though without much distinction there either. Sent to France, he was arrested as a spy almost as soon as he stepped ashore and spent nearly five years in prison, albeit in reasonable, gentlemanly comfort.

Prison appears to have had a galvanizing effect on him, for upon his return to England he became with remarkable swiftness a celebrated playwright, producing in rapid succession two of the most popular comedies of his day, The Relapse and The Provok’d Wife. Featuring characters with names like Fondlewife, Lord Foppington, Sir Tunbelly Clumsey, and Sir John Brute, the plays may seem just a touch heavy-handed to us but were the height of drollery in that overdone and highly fragranced age. It was pretty risqué stuff. One scandalized member of the Society for the Reformation of Manners said that Vanbrugh “had debauch’d the stage beyond the looseness of all former times.” Others loved his plays for exactly the same reasons. The poet Samuel Rogers thought him “almost as great a genius as ever lived.”

Altogether Vanbrugh would write or adapt ten works for the stage, but meanwhile, and with no less startling abruptness, he also turned his talents to architecture. Where this impulse came from was as much a mystery to his contemporaries as it is to us. All that is known is that in 1701, at the age of thirty-five, he began work on one of the grandest houses ever built in England, Castle Howard in Yorkshire. How he persuaded his friend Charles Howard, third Earl of Carlisle—described by one architectural historian as “rather nondescript but obviously uncontrollably wealthy”—to underwrite this seemingly insane ambition is no less uncertain. This was not just a big house, it was a place that was positively and determinedly palatial, built “on a scale previously the prerogative of royalty,” in the words of Vanbrugh’s biographer Kerry Downes. Clearly Carlisle saw something in Vanbrugh’s rough sketches, and Vanbrugh, it must be said, did have the backup of a real architect of undoubted gifts, Nicholas Hawksmoor, who had twenty years of experience but was oddly content to work as Vanbrugh’s assistant. It seems also that Vanbrugh may have worked for free. (No indication of money changing hands has ever been found—and on both sides these were men who kept track of such things.) In any case, Carlisle dismissed the distinguished architect he had been planning to use, William Talman, and gave the novice Vanbrugh free rein.

Vanbrugh and Carlisle were both members of a secretive society known as the Kit-Cat Club, an organization of Whiggish* disposition that had been founded more or less exclusively to ensure the Hanoverian succession—the dynastic change that guaranteed that all future British monarchs would be Protestant even if, in the short term, they were not notably British. That the Kit-Cats achieved this aim was no small accomplishment since their candidate, George I, spoke no English, had almost no admirable qualities, and was by one count no better than fifty-eighth in line to the throne. Beyond this one piece of political maneuvering, the club operated with such discretion that almost nothing is known about it. One of its founding members was a pastry chef named Christopher—or “Kit”—Cat. Kit-cat was also the name of his famous mutton pies, so whether the club was named for him or his pies has been a matter of debate in certain very small circles for three hundred years. The club lasted from only about 1696 to 1720—specific details are unknown—and total membership was only about fifty, of whom two-thirds were peers of the realm. Five members—Lords Carlisle, Halifax, and Scarborough and the Dukes of Manchester and Marlborough—commissioned work from Vanbrugh. Membership also included the prime minister Robert Walpole (father of Horace), the journalists Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, and the playwright William Congreve.

At Castle Howard, Vanbrugh didn’t exactly ignore the classical proprieties; he just buried them under a kind of kudzu of baroque ornamentation. A Vanbrugh structure is always like no other, but Castle Howard is, as it were, unusually unusual. It had a large number of formal rooms—thirteen on one floor—but few bedrooms: nothing like the amount that would normally be expected. Many rooms were oddly shaped or poorly lit. Much of the external detailing is unusual, if not actually erratic. The columns on one side of the house are simple Doric, but those on the other are a more ornate Corinthian. (Vanbrugh argued, with some logic, that no one could see the two sides at the same time.) The most striking characteristic of all, for at least a quarter century, was that the house was built without its west wing—though this was not in fact Vanbrugh’s fault. Carlisle got distracted and neglected to put up the west wing, leaving the house conspicuously unfinished. When the wing was finally built, twenty-five years later by another party, it was in an entirely different style, so that the visitor today is met with a baroque east wing as Vanbrugh intended and an inescapably unmatching Palladian west wing that pleased a later owner and hardly anyone else.

Castle Howard’s most famous feature, its domed crown (formally a lantern, from a Greek word meaning “to admit light”) over the entrance hall, was a late addition, and is strikingly out of scale with the building beneath it. It is too tall and too thin. It looks as if it were designed for another structure altogether. One architectural critic noted, diplomatically, that “at close quarters it does not fit very logically on to the building below.” It was at least novel. The only other domed structure in England at the time was Christopher Wren’s new St. Paul’s Cathedral. No house anywhere had ever had anything like it.

Castle Howard is in short a very fine property, but fine in a way that is entirely its own. The dome may be slightly odd, but Castle Howard would be nothing without it. We can say that with unusual confidence because for twenty years Castle Howard was without it. Late on the night of November 9, 1940, a fire was discovered in the east wing. In those days the house had just one telephone, and the phone melted like chocolate before anyone could get to it. So someone had to run to the gatehouse, a mile away, and call the fire department from there. By the time the fire crew arrived from Malton, six miles distant, two hours had passed and much of the house was lost. The dome had crumpled in the heat and fallen into the house. Castle Howard was domeless for the next twenty years, and it looked all right—it was still stately, still imposing, still stolidly grand—but it had lost its perk. When the dome was finally restored in the early 1960s, it became instantly and peculiarly endearing once again.

Despite his limited experience, Vanbrugh now landed the commission for one of the most important houses ever built in Great Britain, Blenheim Palace, that colossal explosion of magnificence at Woodstock in Oxfordshire. Blenheim was intended to be a gift from the nation to the Duke of Marlborough for his victory over the French in the Battle of Blindheim (somehow anglicized into Blenheim), in Bavaria, in 1704. The estate came with twenty-two thousand acres of prime land, which brought an income of £6,000 a year, a hale sum for the time but not, alas, nearly enough to pay for a house on the scale of Blenheim—and Blenheim was so big as to be effectively off any scale.

It contained three hundred rooms and sprawled over seven acres.* A frontage of 250 feet for a stately home was enormous; at Blenheim the frontage was to be 856 feet. It was the greatest monument to vanity Britain had ever seen. Every inch of it was covered in decorative stony sumptuousness. It was grander than any royal palace and so, not surprisingly, very, very expensive. The duke, a fellow member of the Kit-Cat Club, seems to have gotten along with Vanbrugh well enough, but, after agreeing the general principles of the thing, he went off to fight more wars, leaving domestic arrangements in the hands of his wife, Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough. She thus oversaw most of the work, and from the start she and Vanbrugh did not get along. At all.

Work began in the summer of 1705 and was trouble immediately. Many costly adjustments had to be made along the way. The principal entrance had to be changed when a cottage owner refused to move, so the main gate had to be located in an odd place at the back of the town, requiring visitors to pass along the high street, turn a corner, and enter the grounds through what even today feels oddly like a tradesman’s entrance (albeit rather a grand one).

Blenheim was budgeted to cost £40,000. Ultimately it cost about £300,000. This was unfortunate, as the Marlboroughs were notoriously parsimonious. The duke was so cheap that he refused to dot his i’s when he wrote, to save on ink. It was never clear who was to pay for the work—Queen Anne, the treasury, or the Marlboroughs themselves. The duchess and Queen Anne had a close, rather strange, and just possibly intimate relationship. When alone they gave each other odd pet names—“Mrs. Morley” and “Mrs. Freeman”—to avoid any awkwardness arising from the fact that one of them was regal and the other was not. Unfortunately, the building of Blenheim coincided with a cooling of their affections, which added to the uncertainty of financial responsibility. Things grew more complicated still after the queen died in 1714 and was replaced by a king who felt no particular affection for, or debt to, the Marlboroughs. Many of the builders went unpaid for years as the disputes dragged on, and most eventually got only a fraction of what they were owed. Building work ceased altogether for four years, from 1712 to 1716, and many of the unpaid workers were understandably loath to return when work resumed. Vanbrugh himself didn’t get paid until 1725—almost exactly twenty years after work started.

Even when things were moving along, Vanbrugh and the duchess squabbled endlessly. She thought the palace “too big, too dark and too martial.” She accused Vanbrugh of extravagance and insubordination, and became implacably convinced that he was a bad thing. In 1716, she dismissed him altogether—though at the same time instructing the workmen to stay faithful to his plans. When Vanbrugh came with his wife in 1725 to see the finished building—a building on which he had lavished some two-thirds of his architectural career and one-third of his life—he was informed at the gate that the duchess had left standing instructions that he was not to be admitted to the grounds. So he never saw his finished masterwork except as a shimmer in the distance. Eight months later he was dead.

Like Castle Howard, Blenheim is in a baroque style, but even more so. Its roofline is a festive eruption of orbs and urns and other upright embellishments. Many people hated its monumental scale and ostentation. The Earl of Ailesbury dismissed it as “one mass of stone without taste or relish.” Alexander Pope, after exhaustively enumerating its failings, concluded: “In a word, it is a most expensive absurdity.” The Duke of Shrewsbury dismissed it as “a great quarry of stones above ground.” A wag named Abel Evans wrote a mock epitaph for Vanbrugh:

Lie heavy on him, earth, for he

Laid many a heavy load on thee.

Blenheim is a gloriously overwrought piece of work without question, but transfixing nonetheless, and the scale is so off the chart that it can hardly fail to awe the first-time visitor. It is hard to believe that anyone would want to live in such an oppressive vastness, and in fact the Marlboroughs barely did. They didn’t move in until 1719, and the duke died just two years later.

Whatever one thought of Vanbrugh and his creations, the age of the celebrity architect had begun.*

Before Vanbrugh’s day, architects weren’t much celebrated. Generally, fame went to those who paid for the houses, not those who designed them. Hardwick Hall, which we encountered in Chapter III, was one of the great buildings of its age, yet it is merely supposed that Robert Smythson was the architect. It is a pretty good supposition, for all kinds of reasons, but there is no actual proof of it. Smythson was in fact the first man to be called an architect—or nearly to be called an architect—on a monument of about 1588, in which he is described as “architector and survayor.” But as with so many others of his era, very little is known about his early life, including where he was born and when. He makes his first appearance in the records at Longleat House at Wiltshire in 1568, when he was already in his thirties and a master mason. Where he was before that is completely unknown.

Even after architecture became a recognized profession, most practitioners came from other backgrounds. Inigo Jones was a designer of theatrical productions, Christopher Wren an astronomer, Robert Hooke a scientist, Vanbrugh a soldier and playwright, William Kent a painter and interior designer. As a formal profession, architecture was actually very late developing. Compulsory examinations were not introduced until 1882 in Britain, and architecture wasn’t offered anywhere as a full-time academic discipline until 1895.

By the mid-eighteenth century, however, domestic architecture was getting a lot of respect and attention, and for a time no one had more of both than Robert Adam. If Vanbrugh was the first celebrity architect, Adam was the greatest. Born in 1728 in Scotland, the son of an architect, he was one of a quartet of brothers who all became successful architects, though Robert was the undoubted genius of the family and the one remembered by history. The period from 1755 to 1785 is sometimes called the Age of Adam.

A painting of Adam in the National Portrait Gallery in London, made in about 1770 when he was in his early forties, shows a kindly looking man in a powdered gray wig, but in fact Adam was not a particularly adorable fellow. Arrogant and egotistical, he treated his employees poorly, paying them little and keeping them in a kind of perpetual servitude. He fined them severely if they were caught doing any work other than for him, even a sketch for their own amusement. Adam’s clients, however, venerated his abilities and for thirty years simply couldn’t give him enough work. The Adam brothers became a kind of architectural industry. They owned quarries, a timber business, brickworks, a company for making stucco, and much else. At one point they employed two thousand people. They designed not just houses but every object within them—furniture, fireplaces, carpets, beds, lamps, and all else down to incidental objects like doorknobs, bell pulls, and inkstands.

Adam’s designs were intense—sometimes overwhelming—and gradually he fell out of favor. He had an inescapable weakness for overdecoration. To walk into an Adam room is rather like walking into a large, overfrosted cake. Indeed one of his contemporary critics called him “a Pastry Cook.” By the late 1780s, Adam was being denounced as “sugary and effeminate” and had fallen so far out of fashion that he retreated to his native Scotland, where he died in 1792. By 1831, he was so thoroughly forgotten that the influential Lives of the Most Eminent British Architects didn’t mention him at all. The banishment didn’t last terribly long, however. By the 1860s, his reputation was undergoing a revival, which continues now, though these days he is remembered more for his rich interiors than for his architecture.

The one thing all buildings had in common through Adam’s day was a rigorous devotion to symmetry. Vanbrugh, to be sure, didn’t entirely achieve symmetry at Castle Howard, but that was largely accidental. Elsewhere, however, symmetry was adhered to as an immutable law of design. Every wing had to have a matching wing, whether it was needed or not, and every window and pediment to one side of the main entrance had to be exactly mirrored by windows and pediments on the other side regardless of what went on behind them. The result often was the building of wings that no one really wanted. Not until the nineteenth century did this absurdity begin to end, and it was a remarkable property in Wiltshire—one of the most extraordinary ever built—that started the process.

It was called Fonthill Abbey, and it was the creation of two strange and fascinating men: William Beckford and the architect James Wyatt. Beckford was fabulously rich. His family owned plantations all across Jamaica and had dominated the West Indian sugar trade for a hundred years. Beckford’s doting mother made sure her son enjoyed every advantage in his upbringing. The eight-year-old Wolfgang Mozart was brought in to give him piano lessons. Sir William Chambers, the king’s architect, taught him to draw. Beckford’s wealth was so inexhaustibly great that when he came into his inheritance on his twenty-first birthday, he spent £40,000—an obscenely colossal sum—on the party. Byron in a poem called him “England’s wealthiest son,” probably rightly.

In 1784, Beckford became the centerpiece of the most spectacularly juicy scandal of his age when it emerged that he was involved in a pair of tempestuous, wildly dangerous dalliances. One was with Louisa Beckford, the wife of his first cousin. At the same time, he also fell for a slim and delicate youth named William Courtenay, the future ninth Earl of Devon, who was generally agreed to be the most beautiful boy in England. For a few torrid and presumably exhausting years, Beckford maintained both relationships, often under the same roof. But in the autumn of 1784 there was a sudden rupture. Beckford received or discovered a note in Courtenay’s hand that threw him into a fit of jealous rage. No record exists of what the note said, but it provoked Beckford into intemperate action. He went to Courtenay’s room and, in the slightly confused words of one of the other houseguests, “horsewhipped him, which created a noise, and the door being opened, Courtenay was discovered in his shirt, and Beckford in some posture or other—Strange story.”

Indeed.

The particular misfortune here was that Courtenay was the darling of his family—he was the only boy among fourteen siblings—and shockingly youthful. He was sixteen at the time of the incident, but may have been as young as ten when he fell under Beckford’s unwholesome sway. This was not a matter that Courtenay’s family would ever let drop, and we may take it for granted that Beckford’s cuckolded cousin was less than jubilant, too. Disgraced beyond any hope of redemption, Beckford fled to the continent. There he traveled widely and wrote, in French, a gothic novel called Vathek: An Arabian Tale, which is virtually unreadable now but was much admired in its day.

Then, in 1796, his disgrace nowhere near over, Beckford did a wholly unexpected thing. He returned to England and announced a plan to tear down the family mansion in Wiltshire, Fonthill Splendens, which was only about forty years old, and build a new house in its place—and not just any house but the largest house in England since Blenheim. It was a strange thing to do, for he had no prospect of ever filling it with company. The architect he selected for this slightly demented exercise was James Wyatt.

Wyatt is a curiously neglected figure. His only substantial biography, by Antony Dale, was published over half a century ago. He would perhaps be more famous but for the fact that so many of his buildings no longer exist. Today he is remembered more for what he destroyed than what he built.

Born in Staffordshire, the son of a farmer, Wyatt was drawn to architecture as a young man and spent six years in Italy studying architectural drawing. In 1770, aged just twenty-four, he designed the Pantheon, an exhibition hall and assembly room on Oxford Street in Londaon, which was loosely modeled on the ancient building of the same name in Rome. Horace Walpole thought it “the most beautiful edifice in England.” In 1931, the building, still beautiful though much altered, was torn down to make way for a Marks and Spencers department store.

Wyatt was an architect of talent and distinction—under George III he was appointed Surveyor of the Office of Works, in effect official architect to the nation—but a perennial shambles as a human being. He was disorganized, forgetful, perpetually dissolute, and famous for his tremendous benders. One year he missed fifty straight weekly meetings at the Office of Works. His supervision of the office was so poor that one man was discovered to have been on holiday for three years. When sober, however, he was much liked and widely praised for his charm, good nature, and architectural vision. A bust of him in the National Portrait Gallery in London shows him clean shaven (and indeed clean, a slightly unusual condition for him), with a very full head of hair and a face that seems curiously mournful or perhaps just slightly hungover.

Despite his shortcomings, he became the most sought-after architect of his day. However, he took on more commissions than he could manage and seldom gave satisfactory attention to anyone, to the endless exasperation of his clients. “If he can get with a large fire and have a bottle by him, he cares for nothing else,” wrote one of his many frustrated customers.

“There is an overwhelming consensus of opinion,” observed his biographer Dale, “that Wyatt had three outstanding faults: an entire lack of business capability, the complete incapacity for constant or intensive application … and utter improvidence.” And these were the words of a sympathetic observer. Wyatt was, in short, feckless and impossible. A client named William Windham stuck it out for eleven years on a job that should have taken a fraction of the time. “A person has some right to feel impatient,” Windham wearily wrote his absent architect at one point, “finding the principal rooms of his house near uninhabitable because he has not been able to obtain from you what would not be the work of a couple of hours.” To be a Wyatt client was to be long-suffering.

Yet Wyatt’s career was both successful and remarkably productive. Over a span of forty years, he built or refashioned a hundred country houses, extravagantly reworked five cathedrals, and did much to change the face of British architecture—not always, it must be said, for the good. His treatment of cathedrals was particularly rash and sweeping. A critic named John Carter was so exercised by Wyatt’s predilection for ripping out ancient interiors that he dubbed him “the Destroyer” and devoted 212 essays in the Gentleman’s Magazine—essentially his whole career—to attacking Wyatt’s style and character.

At Durham Cathedral, Wyatt had plans to surmount the building with a mighty spire. This never came to pass, which is perhaps no bad thing, for at Fonthill Wyatt would soon show that there were few places more dangerous to be than under a Wyatt tower. He also wished to sweep away the ancient Galilee Chapel, the last resting place of the Venerable Bede and one of the great achievements of English Norman architecture. Happily, that plan was rejected, too.

Beckford was enthralled by Wyatt’s dashing genius but driven to sputtering fury by his unreliability. Still, he somehow managed to keep the wayward architect focused enough to draw a plan, and work started shortly before the turn of the century.

Everything at Fonthill was designed on a fantastic scale. Windows stood fifty feet high. Staircases were as wide as they were long. The front door rose to a height of thirty feet but was made to seem even taller by Beckford’s practice of employing dwarf doormen. Eighty-foot curtains hung from the four arches in the Octagon, a central chamber from which radiated four long arms. The view down the central corridor stretched for over three hundred feet. The dining room table—Beckford its only occupant night after night—was fifty feet long. Every ceiling was lost in a distant gloom of hammerbeams. Fonthill was very possibly the most exhausting residence ever built—and all for a man who lived alone and was known everywhere as “the man on whom no neighbour would call.” To preserve his privacy, Beckford built a formidable wall, known as the Barrier, around the estate. It was twelve feet high, twelve miles long, and surmounted by iron spikes to deter trespassers.

The Great Western Hall, leading to the Grand Saloon or Octagon, at Fonthill Abbey (photo credit 7.1)

Among the additional, incidental planned structures was a mighty tomb, 125 feet long, in which his coffin would be placed on a dais 25 feet above the ground, so that, he believed, no worms could ever get to him.

Fonthill was deliberately and riotously asymmetrical—“architectural anarchy” in the words of the historian Simon Thurley—and rendered in an ornate Gothic style that made it look like a cross between a medieval cathedral and Dracula’s castle. Wyatt didn’t invent neo-Gothicism. That distinction goes to Horace Walpole for his house Strawberry Hill, in outer London. Gothick, as it was sometimes spelled to distinguish it from the genuine medieval stuff, originally signaled not an architectural style but a type of gloomy, overwrought novel, and Walpole invented that too with The Castle of Otranto in 1764. Strawberry Hill, however, was a fairly cautious, picturesque sort of thing—a more or less conventional house with some Gothic tracery and other embellishments attached. Wyatt’s Gothic creations were vastly darker and heavier. They had looming towers and romantic spires and jumbled rooflines that were studiously asymmetrical, so that they looked as if the whole structure had grown organically over centuries. It was a kind of Hollywood imagining of the past, long before there was a Hollywood. Walpole invented a term, gloomth, to convey the ambience of Gothick; Wyatt’s houses were the very quintessence of gloomth.* They dripped it.

In his obsession to get the project completed Beckford kept up to five hundred men working round the clock, but things constantly went wrong. Fonthill’s tower, rising to a height of 280 feet, was the tallest ever put on a private house, and it was a nightmare. Rashly, Wyatt used a new kind of rendering called Parker’s Roman cement, invented by a Reverend James Parker of Gravesend, yet another of that inquisitive breed of clergymen whom we encountered at the outset of the book. What impulse brought the Reverend Mr. Parker to the world of building materials is unknown, but his idea was to produce a quick-drying cement of the type once used by the Romans, from a recipe since lost. Unfortunately, his cement had little inherent strength and, if not mixed exactly correctly, tended to fall apart in chunks—as it did now at Fonthill. Appalled, Beckford found his mighty abbey coming to pieces even as it went up. Twice it collapsed during construction. Even when fully erect, it creaked and groaned ominously.

To Beckford’s boundless exasperation, Wyatt was often either away drunk or working on other projects. Just as things were literally falling apart at Fonthill and the five hundred workers were either running for their lives or twiddling their thumbs awaiting instructions, Wyatt was engaged in a massive, abortive project to build King George III a new palace at Kew. Why George III wanted a new palace at Kew is a reasonable question, as he had a very good one there already, but Wyatt went ahead and designed a formidable edifice (nicknamed “the Bastille” because of its forbidding looks), one of the first buildings anywhere to use cast iron as a structural material.

We don’t know what the new palace looked like, because no reproduction of it exists, but it must have been something. It was made completely of cast iron except for doors and floorboards—a design that would have given it all the charm and comfort of a cooking pot. Unfortunately, as the building rose beside the Thames, the king began to lose his sight and his interest in things he couldn’t see. Also, he never liked Wyatt much. So, with the building half finished and more than £100,000 wasted, work was stopped ten years after it began and never resumed. The structure stood empty and uncompleted for years until a new king, George IV, finally had it pulled down.

Throughout their fractious relationship, Beckford bombarded Wyatt with outraged letters. “What putrid inn, what stinking tavern or pox ridden brothel hides your hoary and glutinous limbs?” ran one typical inquiry. His pet name for Wyatt was “Bagasse” (pimp). Every letter was a screed of rage and inventive insult. Wyatt was, to be sure, maddening. Once he left Fonthill to go to London, ostensibly on urgent business, but got only three miles, to another property owned by Beckford, where he fell in with another boozy guest. A week later Beckford discovered them there together, insensate and surrounded by empty bottles.

The final cost of Fonthill Abbey is unknown, but in 1801 an informed observer suggested that Beckford had already spent £242,000—enough to build two Crystal Palaces—and the building was less than half done. Beckford moved into the abbey in the summer of 1807 even though it was uncompleted. There was no comfort in it at all. “Sixty fires had to be kept continually burning winter and summer to keep the house dry, let alone warm,” Simon Thurley records in Lost Buildings of Britain. Most of the bedrooms were as plain as monastic cells; thirteen had no windows. Beckford’s own bedchamber, strikingly austere, contained a single narrow bed.

Wyatt continued to attend intermittently and to drive Beckford to fury with his absences. In early September 1813, just after his sixty-seventh birthday, Wyatt was riding back to London from Gloucestershire with a client when his carriage overturned and he was dashed against the wall, striking his head a fatal blow. He died more or less instantly, leaving his widow penniless.

Just at this time, sugar prices went into a depression and Beckford ended up uncomfortably exposed to the downside of capitalism. By 1823, he was so strapped for funds that he was forced to sell Fonthill. It was bought for £300,000 by an eccentric character, John Farquhar, who had been born in rural Scotland but went to India as a young man and made a fortune manufacturing gunpowder. Returning to England in 1814, Farquhar settled in London in a fine house on Portman Square, which he conspicuously neglected. He conspicuously neglected himself, too—to such an extent that on his walks through the neighborhood he was sometimes stopped and questioned as a suspicious vagrant. After buying Fonthill, he hardly ever visited it. He was, however, in residence on the most spectacular day in Fonthill’s brief existence, just before Christmas 1825, when the tower emitted a sustained groan, then collapsed for a third and final time. A servant was blown thirty feet down a corridor by the rush of air, but miraculously neither he nor anyone else was injured. About a third of the house lay under the heaped wreckage of the tower, and would never be habitable again. Farquhar was remarkably equable about his misfortune and merely remarked that this greatly simplified the care of the place. He died the following year, immensely rich but intestate, and none of his bickering relatives would take on the house. What remained of it was torn down and cleared away not long after.

Beckford, meanwhile, took his £300,000 and retired to Bath, where he built a 154-foot tower in a restrained classical style. Called the Lansdown Tower, it was erected with good materials and prudent care, and still stands.

II

Fonthill marked the summit not only of ambition and folly in the domestic realm but also of discomfort. A curious inverse relationship had arisen, it seems, between the amount of effort and expense that went into a house and the extent to which it was actually habitable. The great age of housebuilding brought new levels of elegance and grandeur to private life in Britain, but almost nothing in the way of softness, warmth, and convenience.

Those homely attributes would be the creation of a new type of person who had scarcely existed a generation or so before: the middle class professional. There had always been people of middling rank, of course, but as a distinct entity and force to be reckoned with, the middle class was an eighteenth-century phenomenon. The term middle class wasn’t coined until 1745 (in a book on the Irish wool trade, of all things), but from that point onward the streets and coffeehouses of Britain abounded with confident, voluble, well-to-do people who answered to that description: bankers, lawyers, artists, publishers, designers, merchants, property developers, and others of generally creative spirit and high ambition. This new and swelling middle class served not only the very wealthy but also, even more lucratively, one another. This was the change that made the modern world.

The invention of the middle class injected new levels of demand into society. Suddenly there were swarms of people with splendid town houses that all needed furnishing, and just as suddenly the world was full of desirable objects with which to fill them. Carpets, mirrors, curtains, upholstered and embroidered furniture, and a hundred things more that were rarely found in homes before 1750 now became commonplace.

The growth of empire and of overseas business interests had a dramatic effect, too, often in unexpected ways. Take wood. When Britain was an isolated island nation, it had essentially just one wood for furniture making: oak. Oak is a noble material, solid, long-lasting, literally hard as iron, but it is really only suitable for dense, blocky furniture—trunks, beds, heavy tables, and the like. But the development of the British navy and the spread of Britain’s commercial interests meant that woods of many types—walnut from Virginia, tulipwood from the Carolinas, teak from Asia—became available, and these changed everything within the home, including how people sat and conversed and entertained.

The most prized wood of all was mahogany from the Caribbean. Mahogany was lustrous, warp-resistant, and sublimely accommodating. It could be carved and fretted into the delicate shapes that perfectly suited the exuberance of rococo, yet was strong enough to be a piece of furniture. No wood used in England before had had these characteristics: suddenly furniture had a sculptural quality. The central uprights of the chairs—the splats—could be worked in a way that was wondrous to a people who had never seen anything less clunky than a Windsor chair. The legs had flowing curves and luscious feet; the arms swept along to terminal volutes that were a pleasure to grasp and a delight to behold. Every chair—indeed, every built thing in the house—seemed suddenly to have elegance and style and fluidity.

Mahogany would have been nothing like as esteemed a wood as it was had it not been for one other magical new material, from the other side of the Earth, that gave it the most splendid finish: shellac. Shellac is a hard resinous secretion from the Indian lac beetle. Lac beetles emerge in swarms in parts of India at certain times of the year, and their secretions make varnish that is odorless, nontoxic, brilliantly shiny, and highly resistant to scratches and fading. It doesn’t attract dust while wet, and it dries in minutes. Even now, in an age of chemistry, shellac has scores of applications against which synthetic products cannot compete. When you go bowling, it is shellac that gives the alleys their peerless sheen, for instance.

New woods and varnishes dramatically broadened the forms that furniture could take, but something else was needed—a new system of manufacture—to produce the volumes of quality furniture necessary to satisfy the endless demand. Where traditional designers like Robert Adam made a new design for each commission, furniture makers now realized that it was far more cost-effective to make lots of furniture from a single design. They began to operate a factory system on a large scale, cranking out pieces that were cut from templates, then assembled and finished by teams of specialists. The age of mass manufacture had been born.

There is a certain irony in the thought that the people who did the most to establish mass manufacturing techniques were the ones we now most revere for their craftsmanship, and of no one is that more true than a shadowy furniture maker from the north of England named Thomas Chippendale. His influence was enormous. He was the first commoner for whom a furniture style was named; before him, the names faithfully recalled monarchies: Tudor, Elizabethan, Louis XIV, Queen Anne. Yet we know remarkably little about him. We have no idea, for instance, what he looked like. Except that he was born and grew up in the market town of Otley, on the edge of the Yorkshire dales, nothing at all is known of his early life. His first appearance in the written record is in 1748, when he arrives in London, already aged thirty, and sets up as a new type of maker and purveyor of household furnishings known as an upholder.

That was an ambitious thing to do, for upholders’ businesses tended to be complicated and extensive. One of the most successful, George Seddon, employed four hundred workmen—carvers, gilders, joiners, makers of mirrors and brass, and so on. Chippendale did not operate on quite that scale, but he employed forty or fifty men, and his premises covered two frontages at 60–62 St. Martin’s Lane, just around the corner from the modern Trafalgar Square (though that wouldn’t exist for another eighty years). He also provided an extremely complete service, making and selling chairs, occasional tables, dressing tables, writing tables, card tables, bookcases, bureaus, mirrors, clock cases, candelabra, candle stands, music stands, sconces, commodes, and an exotic new contrivance that he called a “sopha.” Sofas were daring, even titillating, because they resembled beds and so hinted at salacious repose. The firm also stocked wallpaper and carpets, and undertook repairs, furniture removals, and even funerals.

Thomas Chippendale made indisputably fine furniture, but so did lots of others. St. Martin’s Lane alone had thirty furniture makers in the eighteenth century, and hundreds more were scattered across London and throughout the country. The reason we all know Chippendale’s name today is that in 1754 he did something quite audacious. He issued a book of designs called The Gentleman and Cabinet-Maker’s Director, containing 160 plates. Architects had been doing this sort of thing for nearly two hundred years, but nobody had thought to do it for furniture. The drawings were unexpectedly beguiling. Instead of being flat, two-dimensional templates, as was standard, they were perspective drawings, full of shadow and sheen. The prospective purchaser could immediately visualize how these handsome and desirable objects would look in his own home.

It would be misleading to call Chippendale’s book a sensation, because only 308 copies were sold, but the purchasers included forty-nine members of the aristocracy, which made it disproportionately influential. It was also snapped up by other furniture makers and craftsmen, raising another point of oddness—that Chippendale was openly inviting his competitors to make use of his designs for their own commercial purposes. This helped ensure Chippendale’s posterity, but didn’t do much for his immediate fortunes since potential clients could now get Chippendale furniture made more cheaply by any reasonably skilled joiner. It also meant two centuries of difficulty for furniture historians in determining which pieces of furniture are genuine Chippendales and which are copies made using his book. Even if a piece is a “genuine” Chippendale, it doesn’t mean that Thomas Chippendale ever touched it or was even aware of its existence. It doesn’t even necessarily mean that he designed it. No one knows how much talent he brought in, or whether the designs in his books are in fact from his own hand. A genuine Chippendale simply means that it came from his workshop.

Such is the Chippendale aura, however, that it needn’t even have been as close to him as that. In 1756 in colonial Boston, a furniture maker named John Welch, using a Chippendale pattern as a guide, made a mahogany desk that he sold to a man named Dublois. The desk stayed in the Dublois family for 250 years. In 2007, Dublois’s descendants put it up for auction with Sotheby’s in New York. Though Thomas Chippendale had no direct connection to it, it sold for just under $3.3 million.

Inspired by Chippendale’s success, other English furniture makers issued pattern books of their own. George Hepplewhite’s Cabinet-Maker and Upholsterer’s Guide was published in 1788, and Thomas Sheraton followed with the Cabinet-Maker and Upholsterer’s Drawing-Book, issued in installments between 1791 and 1794. Sheraton’s book had more than twice as many subscribers as Chippendale’s and was translated into German, a distinction not accorded Chippendale’s own volume. Hepplewhite and Sheraton became particularly popular in America.

Although any piece of furniture directly associated with any of the three is today worth a fortune, they were more admired than celebrated in their own lifetimes, and at times not even all that admired. Chippendale’s fortunes slipped first. He was an outstanding furniture maker but hopeless at running a business, a deficiency that became acutely evident upon the death of his business partner, James Rannie, in 1766. Rannie was the brains of the operation; without him, Chippendale lurched from crisis to crisis for the rest of his life. All this was painfully ironic, for as he struggled to pay his men and keep himself out of a debtor’s cell, Chippendale was producing items of the highest quality for some of England’s richest households, and working closely with the leading architects and designers—Robert Adam, James Wyatt, Sir William Chambers, and others. Yet his personal trajectory was relentlessly downward.

It was not an easy age in which to do business. Customers were routinely slow in paying. Chippendale had to threaten David Garrick, the actor and impresario, with legal action for chronic unpaid bills, and stopped work at Nostell Priory, a stately home in Yorkshire, when the debt there reached £6,838—a whopping liability. “I have not a single guinea to pay my men with tomorrow,” he wrote in despair at one point. It is clear that Chippendale spent much of his life in a froth of anxiety, scarcely for a moment enjoying any sense of security at all. At his death in 1779, his personal worth had sunk to just £28 2s 9d—not enough to buy a modest piece of ormolu from his own showrooms. The firm struggled on under the directorship of his son but finally succumbed to bankruptcy in 1804.

When Chippendale died, the world barely noticed. No obituary appeared in any paper. Fourteen years after his death, Sheraton wrote of Chippendale’s designs that “they are now wholly antiquated and laid aside.” By the late 1800s, Chippendale’s reputation had fallen so low that the first edition of the Dictionary of National Biography gave him just one paragraph—far less than it gave Sheraton or Hepplewhite—and much of that was critical and a good deal of it was wrong. The author was so little absorbed by the facts of Chippendale’s life that he had him coming from Worcestershire, not Yorkshire.

Sheraton (1751–1806) and Hepplewhite (1727?–1786) could hardly boast of magnificent success themselves. Hepplewhite’s shop was in a down-at-heel district, Cripplegate, and his identity sufficiently obscure that his contemporaries referred to him variously as Kepplewhite and Hebblethwaite. Almost nothing is known of his personal life. He had actually been dead for two years by the time his own book of patterns was published. Sheraton’s fate was even more curious. He seems never to have opened a shop, and no piece of furniture that can be attributed to him has ever been found. He may never have made any, but acted merely as a draftsman and designer. Though his book sold well, it appears not to have enriched him, for he had to supplement his income by teaching drawing and perspective. At some point he gave up furniture design, trained as a minister for a nonconformist sect known as the Narrow Baptists, and became essentially a street-corner preacher. He died in squalor, “among dirt and bugs,” in London in 1806, leaving a wife and two children.

As furniture makers, Chippendale and his contemporaries were masters without any doubt, but they enjoyed one special advantage that can never be replicated: the use of the finest furniture wood that has ever existed, a species of mahogany called Swietenia mahogani. Found only on parts of Cuba and Hispaniola (the island today shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic) in the Caribbean, Swietenia mahogani has never been matched for richness, elegance, and utility. Such was the demand for it that it was entirely used up—irremediably extinct—within just fifty years of its discovery. Some two hundred other species of mahogany exist in the world, and most are very good woods, but they have nothing like the richness and smooth workability of the departed S. mahogani. The world may one day produce better chairmakers than Chippendale and his peers, but it will never produce finer chairs.

Curiously, no one at all appreciated this for the longest time. Many Chippendale chairs and other pieces, now considered priceless, spent a century or more being casually knocked about in the servants’ quarters before they were rediscovered and returned to the main house in the Edwardian era. Some six hundred pieces of Chippendale furniture have now been confirmed altogether. Others, handed down or disposed of in estate sales, could easily be sitting unregarded in some country cottage or suburban bungalow, more valuable than the houses that contain them.

III

If we were to go back in time to a house in Chippendale’s day, one difference that would immediately strike us would be that chairs and other items of furniture were generally pushed up against the walls, giving every room the aspect of a waiting room. Chairs or tables in the middle of the room would have looked as out of place to Georgians as a wardrobe left in the middle of a room would look to us today. (One reason for pushing them aside was to make it easier to walk through rooms without tripping over furniture in the dark.) Because they were kept against the wall, the backs of early upholstered chairs and settees were often left unfinished, just as we leave bare the backs of chests and wardrobes today.

When one had visitors, the custom was to bring an appropriate number of chairs forward and arrange them in a circle or semicircle, rather like storytime in an elementary school. This had the inevitable effect of making nearly all conversations strained and artificial. Horace Walpole, after sitting for four and a half hours in an agonizing circle of fatuous conversation, declared: “We wore out the Wind and the Weather, the Opera and the Play … and every topic that would do in a formal circle.” Yet when daring hostesses tried to introduce spontaneity by arranging chairs into more intimate clusters of threes and fours, many felt the result was tantamount to pandemonium, and more than a few could never get used to the idea of conversations taking place behind their backs.

The one problem with the chairs of the age was that they weren’t terribly comfortable. The obvious solution was to pad them, but that proved more difficult than one might have thought, because few craftsmen had all the skills necessary to make a good padded chair. Manufacturers struggled to get square edges where fabric met wood—piping and cording were originally brought in as a way of disguising these inadequacies—and were frequently out of their depth at producing padding that would maintain a permanent domed shape on the seat. Only saddlers could reliably provide the requisite durability, which is why so much early upholstered furniture was covered in leather. Fabric upholsterers also had the problem that many preindustrial fabrics could be produced only in widths of about twenty inches, creating a need for seams in awkward places. Only after the invention of the flying shuttle by John Kay in 1733 did it become possible to produce fabrics in widths of three feet or so.

Improvements in textile and printing technologies transformed decorative possibilities beyond furniture as well. This was the age that saw the widespread introduction of carpets, wallpapers, and bright fabrics. Paint, too, became available in a range of bright colors for the first time. The upshot is that, by late in the eighteenth century, households were full of features that would have been the wildest indulgences a century before. The modern house—a house such as we would recognize today—had begun to emerge. At last, some fourteen hundred years after the Romans withdrew, taking their hot baths, padded sofas, and central heating with them, the British were rediscovering the novel condition of being congenially situated. They hadn’t entirely mastered comfort yet, but they had certainly discovered an alluring concept. Life, and the expectations that went with it, would never be the same again.

There was, however, one consequence in all this. The advent of comfort in the home, in particular the widespread use of soft furnishings, made furniture much more vulnerable to stains, burns, and other careless abuses. In an effort to save the most valuable furniture from the worst of the risks, a new type of room was created, and it is there, conveniently, that we go next.

* A furlong in horse racing is 220 yards, or one-eighth of a mile, but farming furlongs originally were of no particular length. The word means simply “long furrow.”

* Ayrshires were the creation of Bruce Campbell, inventive second cousin of James Boswell, who was put in charge of the family estate in Scotland only after Boswell himself declined the responsibility, preferring a life of conversation and refined debauchery in London to dairy farming in lowland Scotland. Had Boswell been more dutiful, we would have lost not only his great Life of Johnson but also one of the world’s best breeds of dairy cattle.

* Though the name is now pronounced “Van-bruh” or “Van-burra” (like the terminal diphthong of “Edinburgh” or “Barbara”), it appears to have been pronounced “Van-brook” in his own lifetime. It was frequently so spelled.

* Whig is a shortening of Whiggamore, the name for a group of seventeenth-century Scottish insurgents. Where Whiggamore itself came from is uncertain, as is the question of how it then suggested itself as a suitable name for a group of powerful English aristocrats. It was first applied derisively by the Tories, but embraced with pride by the target group. Exactly the same thing happened with the term Tory.

* In a large house, room numbers are generally notional. It depends on the extent to which you count storerooms, closets, and the like as separate rooms (and also no doubt how carefully one counts). The published numbers for the total rooms at Blenheim range from 187 to 320—quite a disparity.

* It was also, come to that, the age of the celebrity craftsman. One such was the great carver Grinling Gibbons, who lived from 1648 to 1721. His interesting Christian name was his mother’s maiden name. He grew up in Holland, of English parents, and came to England in about 1667, after the restoration of Charles II as king. He settled in Deptford, in southeast London, where he made a very basic living carving figureheads for ships. One day in 1671, John Evelyn, the diarist, chanced to pass his workshop and was immediately taken with Gibbons’s skill and personable manner, and possibly with his good looks. (Gibbons was by all accounts stunningly good-looking.) He encouraged the young man to take on more challenging commissions and introduced him to people of influence, such as Christopher Wren.

Thanks to Evelyn’s support, Gibbons became very successful, but most of his wealth actually came from running a workshop that produced statuary and other stonework. It was Gibbons, it appears, who came up with the idea of depicting British heroes as Roman statesmen, in togas and sandals, and this made his work in stone extremely fashionable. Though he is now widely thought of as the greatest woodcarver in modern times, he was not especially famous for it in his own lifetime. For Blenheim Palace, Gibbons produced £4,000 worth of decorative stonework but only £36 worth of wood carving. Part of the reason his wood carvings are so valued today is that there aren’t very many of them.

* Although he is little read now, Walpole was immensely popular in his day for his histories and romances. He was a particularly adept coiner of words. The Oxford English Dictionary credits him with no fewer than 233 coinages. Many, like gloomth, greenth, fluctuable, and betweenity, didn’t take, but a great many others did. Among the terms he invented or otherwise brought into English are airsickness, anteroom, bask, beefy, boulevard, café, cause célèbre, caricature, fairy tale, falsetto, frisson, impresario, malaria, mudbath, nuance, serendipity, somber, souvenir, and, as mentioned a few pages back, comfortable in its modern sense.