Neighboring Lives - A Novel (Chelsea, England)

Scribners, 1981. 1st Edition 1st Printing. Hardcover. Fine/Fine. Muriel Nasser (design). First edition/printing. Book and jacket (in a protector) each in Fine condition. Historical Fiction involving Chelsea around 1860 by the excellent writer Disch and lifelong partner Naylor. Map end papers. Signed by Disch! "ased on delightfully byway (rather than highway) research, this fictionalized series of pairings and gatherings features a dazzling mid-1800s sampling from London's Chelsea "neighborhood of Arts and Letters," the circle dominated by that very unjovial Jove, Thomas Carlyle, and Jane, his witty, cannily accommodating wife. Sly chapter titles smack of earnest period ateliers--"A Rival," "Through the Market Gardens"--and the authors group their luminaries and lesser lights in telling combinations and habitats: the Carlyles' tidy, scoured #5 Cheyne Road; Leigh Hunt's mouldering, odiferous shamble; the Gabriel Rossetti paint-and-peacock mÃ?nage; and Jane's little garden, where she and her friend Geraldine Jewsbury take a quiet smoke as Jane confesses her deep-buried anguish at living with an untouchable, untouching prophet-genius. True, there's some tedium in the spate of fulminations, digs, and compliments that go on in these locales, but there are also memorable moments: graceful, kind, starving Leigh Hunt bravely advances on the thrifty Carlyles' dinner oatmeal; John Stuart Mill, Carlyle's slippery disciple, explains, in hysterics, that the Master's only copy of current work on the French Revolution had been inadvertently burnt--while Mill's mistress glowers in a carriage outside; Browning and others sit speechless before Carlyle's dinner-party massacre of Keats (and Sand and Beethoven); the dying Chopin brings a new sweet world to the Carlyle's piano; novelist George Meredith suffers attacks from both Rossetti's peacocks and housemate Swinburne's naughty verses; stuttering Charles Dodgson fussily arranges Rossettis before his camera and later is meaningfully transfixed by the sight of a wombat in the soup tureen. In spite of this rather freeform roll of vignettes, the predominant personnae, particularly Jane Carlyle, do take on full and convincing portrait stature. And the talk is like that of a group of writers, poets, and artists of any age: some golden wit, some leaden boredom, and a hearty interest in the "tin" that keeps the pens scratching and the brushes wet. Particularly for those familiar with the clouds of creation emanating from Chelsea of a century ago--a fresh, clever view that's vastly entertaining." - Kirkus On Line. Perhaps a bit surprisingly, there is no UK edition of this work!