Happy it-would-have-been-your-119th birthday, Nancy Mitford, a woman who described Jacob Rees-Mogg in a novel written 37 years before he was born:
That’s really Lord Lewes of the Foreign Office in 1932’s Christmas Pudding, one of her early works. Mind you, Captain Chadlington, in the same novel, also seems to be… well, not unrepresentative of certain members of Parliament:
They were being warmly congratulated by the rest of the party on Captain Chadlington’s recent election to Parliament. Paul, having listened during lunch to some of his conversation, felt that it would be impossible to extend the congratulations to his electors; their choice of a representative seemed strangely unfortunate. He was evidently a young man of almost brutish stupidity, and Paul, who had hardly ever met any Conservative Members of Parliament before, was astounded to think that such a person could be tolerated for a moment at the seat of government.
(In The Pursuit of Love (1945) she observes that
…left-wing people are always sad because they mind dreadfully about their causes, and the causes are always going so badly
which hasn’t aged badly, either.)
But as it’s almost the festive season, let’s go back to the 1932 Pudding for this excellent summary of a small child’s Christmas Day
At about five o’clock in the morning Master Christopher Robin Chadlington made a tour of the bedrooms, and having awoken each occupant in turn with a blast of his mouth organ, announced in a voice fraught with tragedy that Auntie Gloria had forgotten to put a chocolate baby in his stocking. ‘Please might I have a bit of yours?’ This quaint ruse was only too successful, and Christopher Robin acquired thereby no fewer than fourteen chocolate babies, all of which he ate before breakfast. The consequences, which were appalling, took place under the dining-room table at a moment when everybody else was busily opening the Christmas post.
…and close with this, which you will almost certainly have seen before, but which always bears reposting — how this particular Mitford sister responded to some of the invitations she received:
…in which she seems to be channelling Herman Melville’s Bartleby, who responded to all requests to carry out his work with the words:
…and who among us doesn’t aspire to respond like that to the toad work which squats on our lives?
Footnote: her sister Jessica was mates with Maya Angelou…
