Although deeply saddened by the passing last month of Lady Mary Clive (1907 - 2010), at the age of 102, I confess I was a little thrilled to find a copy of her very entertaining and refreshingly unsentimental book (The Day of Reckoning, London: Macmillan & Co, Ltd, 1964) in which she discusses the art, decoration and fashions of the world in which she grew up, during the reign of Edward VII and George V.  If the paintings and artists and books and furniture styles she described in 1964 were already distant memories for her readers then, you can imagine how arcane this material is today. Fascinating.
 
The title of her book derives from that of an enormously popular painting from 1883 by Samuel Edmund Waller (1850 - 1903) which depicts a downcast young gentleman and lady (his sister presumably) on the steps of a great country house (based on Kirby Hall in Northamptonshire, now a ruin), while an auctioneer stands nearby and the man's horses are led away.  To Lady Mary's mother, "the whole story was as clear as crystal.  The young man had ruined himself gambling, racing, playing billiards, backing bills and was now being sold up.  It was a very usual predicament.  She had met the young man in countless novels..."  To the younger generation, however, the message of the work was not quite so transparent and the painting's appeal less obvious: "Ruined?  To us the word meant Monte Carlo... One could not be ruined in the calm light of an English morning with one's sister beside one."

Times change.  Taste changes.  Generation gaps widen.  As Lady Mary writes, "Rightly or wrongly, Victoria's name became a synonym for prudishness, yet when she died 'they' commissioned a monument swarming with nudes.  It was unveiled in 1911 by which time George V was on the throne, and my mother, who was among the vast crowds present, used to declare that when the sheet dropped there was a gasp of horror." 

Lady Mary was the 2nd daughter of the 5th Lord Longford (her mother was a daughter of the 7th Earl of Jersey).  Her father died in the First World War, her husband Meysey Clive whom she married in 1940 was killed in action in 1943. As a widow with two children Lady Mary continued living at Whitfield, a large estate in Herefordshire.  After the war, "she pulled down the two Victorian wings of the house, returning it to its original Georgian proportions." (Telegraph, obituary)

Born in 1907, Lady Mary is obviously not quite a 1904 notable, but in the larger scheme of things her book captures the details of an era I have tried to conjure for you myself, in other small ways.  She manages to evoke the look of an era in transition, from Victorian to Edwardian to neo Georgian, and if you were ever called upon to design the sets for a film where the action takes place in, say, England in the 1920s, you would be well-advised to study The Day of Reckoning. 

Of course the title points to other meaning, other "reckonings" as well.  I suspect what made a painting like Waller's so popular with Lady Mary's parents' generation, besides the artist's considerable talent for painting architecture and horses, had to do with that feeling of pending doom so many people experience around the turn of a century, a foreboding that something, if not Y2K or the Second Coming or Armageddon, then something equally dire and apocalyptic was about to come along.  As it turned out, they weren't entirely wrong.  But then again, some people are always on the lookout for doom and reckoning. 

In the meantime, however, as my dear friend Justin observed, "How lovely it would be to have Victorian wings to pull down."