‘The Wry Romance of the Literary Rectory’, by Deborah Alun-Jones – review

The property pages of Country Life invariably feature an old rectory or two, probably graceful 18th-century, of honeyed Cotswold stone, and if you plan to move in you will need a deep pocket. This is Aga Saga country, Joanna Trollope territory. Old vicarages, old rectories, all the defrocked plant of the Church of England, are in hot demand: the estate agent’s dream. They are substantial, elegant, they propose permanence and stability and some sort of evocative past, and today they will be tricked out with central heating, en suite bathrooms and, of course, that Aga.

It was not always thus. Deborah Alun-Jones’s book is a collection of essays about various vicarages, parsonages, chancelleries and their well-known inhabitants, from Sydney Smith to John Betjeman, and it has to be said that a resounding theme is the cold. Nobody was comfortable in the ecclesiastical plant, time was. Large, draughty and damp; never mind the romantic overtones, she suggests, the ‘dreamlike idyll’ that she finds as a thread to link the quality of these various occupancies, the prompt for creativity.

The link is a touch tenuous, it has to be said, and most of the people concerned were in these houses because they had to be — they were on church business: Sydney Smith, Dorothy Sayers growing up in her father’s Bluntisham Rectory, R.S.Thomas at Manafon, George Herbert at Bemerton, near Salisbury, the Benson children and later the de Waalls in the chancellery at Lincoln. Rupert Brooke does indeed appear to have found in the Old Vicarage at Grant-chester some kind of lyrical inspiration, an arcadia convenient for Cambridge and for plunging naked into the Cam in fits of neo-paganism.

And Vikram Seth in the house where George Herbert lived and wrote, has found inspiration and resonances in the connection with his great predecessor.