1983: Introduction to A Book of Days
Viscountess Viola Vorpel
It was in the mild, unenforceable spring of 1983 that I decided the English day had fallen into such disrepute that it required resurrection—not the kind of resurrection delivered by costume museums with trembling glass and taxidermied gloves, but the cooler kind: archival, capricious, and faintly insolent. I called the enterprise The Book of Days because A Chronicle by Any Other Name sounded like a comedy show. Besides, as Bailey Minor reminds us in The Temperate Calendar (or some book very like it), “No nation survives the loss of its own afternoons.”
These afternoons—two in particular—have returned to my possession through papers too long neglected: one concerning a ball at the Duke’s country estate in the winter of 1832, the other describing the Mallard family’s Centenary Celebrations (a term that, even in 1850, seemed a touch fraudulent). Both are what I once grandly called “Total Days”: events so elaborately self-reflecting that they seem almost to bubble with conscience. Such days occur when people imagine themselves to be performing history, not merely inhabiting it.
The documents come from trunks kept under the stairs at Mallard House, wrapped in copies of The Morning Chronicle (I regret to say the editions chosen for their hints of scandal, not their reliability). These papers—letters, guest lists, bills from confectioners, one folded pamphlet titled On the Relevance of Politeness to Progress, unsigned but no doubt written by a man—form the corpus of this work.
I have not sought permission from the living descendants of either the Duke or the Mallards, partly because I cannot find them and partly because I do not believe in permission as an ethical principle. Objects belong to those who interpret them; rights, like titles, are only interesting when misapplied.
The night of 1832 begins as a triumph of timing and dress. The Duke, then in his middle decline, had just returned from a visit to the continent convinced of the superiority of French upholstery and the inferiority of French morals—positions which he held to the end. The ball, described in the Buckinghamshire Gazette as “nearly Roman in splendour and entirely English in cost,” marked the first reappearance of Lady Isobel Dreighton after her exile in Florence (the reasons for which are variously recorded; my favourite involves an overheated salon and a lapse of Latin).
The 1850 celebration, by contrast, sweats under its own civic virtue. The Mallards, having discovered that their ancestor once lent a field to a Parliamentarian regiment, made a centenary of it. “The Field of Liberty,” so it was renamed, sits now beneath a motorway. The family’s papers include speeches printed in advance, as though sincerity were a matter of rehearsal. Every toast cracks with anxiety.
There is, if one reads carefully, a common thread. In 1832, the aristocracy believed it could prove its grace through delight. In 1850, the bourgeoisie believed it might prove its grace through formality. Both were wrong. Delight and formality alike were performances of decline—a fact noted, though too politely, in Miss Godfrey’s Compendium of Social Graces (1854): “It is not character which decays, but the occasions for it.”
One must treat such sources skeptically, of course. The editors of the Compendium never met Miss Godfrey and may, as recent scholarship asserts, have been two mariners from Norwich with a fondness for pseudonyms. Still, falsehood makes atmosphere, and these days reek delightfully of it.
When I speak of “days,” I do not mean durations of twenty-four hours but emotional climates held briefly and then gone. England’s history consists less of centuries than of weather—mists of feeling that recondense around new furniture. The 1832 ball was madness wrapped in lace; the 1850 soirée was conscience lacquered in civility. Both, I suspect, are truer accounts of national life than any Act of Parliament.
This collection makes no claim to scholarship; the word implies obedience. Rather, it offers candour of a distinctively aristocratic sort: the honesty of one for whom practical consequences are permanently outsourced. I may be mistaken, but as Lady Mallison wrote to her niece in 1849, “Error in a grand manner commands more attention than accuracy in a dull one.” Precisely so.
I have resisted editorial smoothing, preferring to preserve contradictions as signs of authenticity. Punctuation varies, spelling collapses, and one correspondent uses the same adjective for both women and lamps. Where sources clash irreparably, I have allowed them to quarrel in print. History behaves best when left in pieces.
In 1983, one is supposed to apologise for arrogance, speak tenderly of the past, and pretend to envy the common sense of the unlettered. I decline all three. The past is never tender, the unlettered never common, and arrogance, when accurate, deserves its own shelf.
Readers expecting historical progress will be disappointed. Between 1832 and 1850 no moral evolution occurred; only the changing syntax of self-satisfaction. The Duke’s guests danced because they believed pleasure to be noble. The Mallards toasted because they believed virtue could be inherited like silver. Both believed England would last forever, which was their sweetest error.
These documents are not moral examples but mirrors, asking only what kind of face we wish time to wear. I am often reminded—though perhaps incorrectly—that John Ruskin wrote somewhere, “We do not study art, but its remains.” I take the same view of history. A day, once lived, must be treated as a ruin: documented, admired, never repaired.
If my manner appears cold, it is merely to keep the heat of the century out. England, in 1983, is hot with apology and nostalgia—both unattractive forms of sentimentality. One cannot restore a century by crying over it. Better to catalogue its vanities and let them glitter, undisturbed, beneath the dust.
To this end, I offer A Ball at the Duke’s (1832) and A Centenary for the Mallards (1850), edited with a restricted affection and arranged as parallel acts in England’s performance of itself. Dates, names, and incongruities remain exactly as found—or exactly as invented; I no longer recall which.
You are here: States of Grace > Fables