Customer Reviews

Neighboring lives

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The neighbors of the title are all the famous and romantic people who lived in Chelsea, London from Thomas Carlyle, who was one of the first to move there, to the PreRaphaelites and Oscar Wilde. The research is superb, the relationships wonderfully done and while the book is more than this, it has the engaging readability of one of those family saga blockbusters. This, of course, is a literary novel and the authors are interested in revealing the characters, as they perceive them, of some of the most famous and influential people of the 19th century. This is a book to love and read over and over again!

If you buy this thinking that it's going to be science fiction, poetry, or horror or any of the other things that Disch excels in, you're wrong, but what you do have is an involved historical epic into the life of English figure and writer-Thomas Carlyle. You can smell the Thames off the pages.

This book, the retelling of some of the quotidian existence of some of figures who were to become the most famous painters and writers in England, all living in Chelsea - which was not then a part of London - from 1834 to 1867 is no less than a ravishing delight for those enchanted by at least a few of the artists - and there are far too many covered to list - and their modi vivendi. The book has as its centre the life of Thomas Carlyle and his household, but it gradually circles away from them exclusively, to encompass a very wide sweep of artists - literary and otherwise - indeed.

Having recently swotted up on my Swinburne, it was a great delight, as well as poignant aperçu, to see him described thus: "There are those - and he was one - who apprehend the world in generalities. That is not to say either that they misapprehend it or that they are blind to its particulars, but that their intelligence fastens rather on atmosphere than on the several scents composing it."

It also must be said that this book is very funny, and many times I concluded the reading of a chapter by laughing aloud. So, a funny, witty, engaging novel, based on facts, about what can only be called the artistic Bohemia flourishing in Chelsea at the time. Any reader with the slightest bit of interest in artists and how they manage (or don't manage) their day-to-day, ahem, affairs can not help but be both charmed and enlightened by this winsome narrative.