Lisson Grove: Part One

On December 28, 1817, the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon hosts what he refers to in both his diaries and Autobiography as “the immortal dinner.” What follows is the first half of the first chapter of a book about that dinner, its guests, and the implied world surrounding it—a moment in cultural and literary history framed by the Regency and Romanticism. The stated reasons for the dinner are, one, that Haydon wants to introduce his young friend John Keats to the great William Wordsworth and, two, that Haydon wishes to celebrate his progress on his most important and largest historical painting so far, “Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem.” Haydon has invested three years in this work, with three more to go. Keats, Wordsworth, and Charles Lamb (also a dinner guest) appear as spectators in the most vivid quadrant of the painting, along with anachronistic versions of Newton and Voltaire. Later arriving guests include John Landseer, Joseph Ritchie, and John Kingston. After thoughtful and entertaining discussions of poetry and art and their relation to Enlightenment science, the dinner party evolves into a lively, even raucous evening. Haydon also refers to this memorable event as “an immortal evening.” The title of the book is The Immortal Evening.

I

Keats has the most ground to cover. From Well Walk, in the village of Hampstead, to Lisson Grove, west and a little south of what will soon be London’s Regent’s Park, is a distance of about three, maybe a bit more, miles. In 1817, it will be a walk through countryside and emerging outlying city, a combination first of open fields, small woods, and close-in lanes yielding to streets of shops and market gardens, row housing and classic Georgian brick and stucco houses, some of them mansion-sized. There is also, along the way, the occasional modest furniture or china factory. It is three days after Christmas, and he will have likely started out in the early afternoon since Sunday dinner will be served at a regular 3:30. By report it is already one of those severely cold winter seasons—just three years ago the Thames had frozen over during “the Great Frost of 1813-1814,” and this year seems to be suffering the lingering effects. Keats is wearing, of course, his great coat, the same coat or one much like it that he will forget to take with him on another, later winter day in February, 1820, on a visit into London proper, when the temperature suddenly drops and the consequence is the hemorrhage that will prove to be his “death warrant.” This far from central London there is yet no gas street lighting, so he is probably carrying a lantern for the night walk back.

Of the two other major guests invited to dinner, Charles Lamb is next in the distance he must travel—more than a mile and a half, maybe two miles, depending on the route from Russell Street, Covent Garden, just above the Thames. He has recently moved from Inner Temple Lane, from west along the route of the river. “Here we are transplanted,” he writes to Dorothy Wordsworth the month before. “We are in the individual spot I like best, in all this great city. The theatres, with all their noises, Covent Garden, dearer to me than any gardens of Alcinous, where we are sure of the earliest peas and ’sparagus. Bow Street, where the thieves are examined, within a few yards of us. Mary had not been here four-and-twenty hours before she saw a thief. She sits at the window working; and casually throwing out her eyes, she sees a concourse of people coming this way, with constable to conduct the solemnity. These little incidents agreeably diversify a female life.” Perhaps what Lamb is also saying, without meaning to sound condescending, is that Mary’s window life is distracting as well. Mary is Lamb’s devoted but emotionally fragile sister.

To get to Lisson Grove, Lamb must pass through his beloved but compromised “commercial” area of the Garden, with businesses ranging from brothels, taverns, even Turkish baths, to...