A single dinner, attended 185 years ago by such literary luminaries as William Wordsworth, John Keats and Charles Lamb, no matter how brilliant the conversation, may not seem a sufficient subject for a book of 300 pages—but it is in Hughes-Hallett's hands. The host to the evening, painter B.R. Haydon, had an agenda in putting together the dinner: he wanted to show off his progress on the monumental painting Christ's Entry into Jerusalem.
Hughes-Hallet's (Home at Grasmere: The Wordsworths and the Lakes) main source for what transpired is Haydon's diary, which put a grandiose, self-congratulatory spin on the evening. The author takes Haydon's hyperbolic lead, portraying the dinner as a pivotal cultural event of the early 19th century. Far more interesting than the dinner itself, though, is Hughes-Hallett's vivid narrative of life in literary London in 1817. Combining exhaustive research and bold extrapolation, the author frequently digresses on the customs and culture of the day, material that ultimately supplies the meat of this account. Each member of the dinner party is honored with a biography, some of which is emotionally engaging (the tragic history of the Keats family's delicate health) and some not (the gratuitous sortie into how medical schools procured cadavers). Conveyed in a style both erudite and playful, Hughes-Hallett's account is noteworthy for the delicious inside peek it gives readers into the lives of these 19th-century celebrities. Using the dinner as a touchstone, Hughes-Hallett ultimately does convey to the reader the immortal qualities of those present in London on that late December evening in 1817. 75 b&w illus., 2 maps. (Sept. 6)
