FEATURE
THE Art Room at the London Library. image Credit: Paul Raftery
M
y latest novel, The Yellow Diamond, is about the super-rich of Mayfair. There haven’t been many novels about this elusive audience, but I can’t claim any originality for the geographical setting. Mayfair is probably the most fictionalised district of London. In the early days of the novel (the late 18th century), when an address beyond the northern boundary of Hyde Park was considered dangerously provincial, the novel-reading and writing classes were concentrated in this beloved region. Jane Austen, for one, chose a lot of Mayfair. Fans track the social status of characters in, say, Sense and Sensibility by their precise location in the area. In the novel, Elinor and Marianne Dashwood go shopping, and it is mentioned only in passing that the venue is Bond Street, because really where else would they go for a spot of retail therapy? In William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, Rawdon Crawley and his wife are broke but still manage ‘a very small comfortable house in Curzon Street’ (mainly by defaulting on their creditors). There are not so many references in Dickens, whose centre of gravity was east, although in David Copperfield,
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Mr Micawber fantasises about a Mayfair residence (don’t we all?). This impecunious gent places an advertisement ‘in all the papers’, demanding to be employed ‘on remunerative terms’. He is so confident of something turning up that he plots a move from his lodgings in Camden. ‘He mentioned a terrace at the western end of Oxford Street, fronting Hyde Park, on which he had always had his eye, but which he did not expect to attain immediately, as it would require a large establishment. There would probably be an interval, he explained, in which he would content himself with the upper part of house […] say in Piccadilly.’ A minor character in Our Mutual Friend, Fascination Fledgeby, is one of many fictional people to live in the Albany. Others include Jack in The Importance of Being Earnest and E.W. Hornung’s Raffles, the ‘gentleman thief’. In Arthur Conan Doyle’s novel, The Lost World, the adventurer Lord John Roxton inhabits that ‘famous aristocratic rookery’, and Doyle provides us with one of the best descriptions of a flat in all literature: ‘Rich furs and strange iridescent mats from some Oriental bazaar were scattered upon the floor. […] Like a dado round the room was the jutting line of splendid heavy game-heads […] with the rare white rhinoceros of the Lado Enclave drooping its supercilious lip above them all.’
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