‘Holland House: A History of London’s Most Celebrated Salon’, by Linda Kelly – review

Holland House, which was bombed in 1940, was a large, rambling Jacobean mansion off Kensington High Street. In 1800 it was still in the country, surrounded by leafy woods and fields. Here Lord Holland and his wife Lady Holland created a glittering and influential salon. For over 30 years before the 1832 Reform Act, Holland House was the headquarters of the Whig party. Lord Holland was the nephew of Charles James Fox, and at Holland House the Whig aristocracy — ‘they are all cousins’, as someone said — dined and talked and plotted. An intellectual nerve centre, Holland House was the place where the new men with the new thinking from Scotland met and influenced the Whigs. Byron was a favourite, and it was at Holland House that he first met Lady Caroline Lamb. The cut-throat wit Sidney Smith was a permanent fixture, and Sheridan got drunk there.

Salons are organised and orchestrated by women and, as Linda Kelly shows in this enjoyable book, Lady Holland was considerably larger than life. The heiress to a West Indian sugar fortune — it’s a nice irony that the progressive Whigs were fuelled by money made from slavery — she was married at 15 to a much older husband, Sir Godfrey Webster. At 23, a beauty with brains, she created a scandal when she left Webster and went off with Lord Holland, a youth of 20 whom she met in Italy where he was on the Grand Tour. As a divorced woman, Lady Holland could never be received at court and she was cold-shouldered by stuffy London society. This was one reason why she started her own salon and entertained at Holland House.

As she grew older, she became sharp-tongued and imperious, dictating to her guests and treating her librarian, a gentleman named Mr Allen, as though he was a ‘negro slave’.