Thank you so much for this beautiful essay/reflection, which combines so many things I love. Chatsworth is my Arcadia too; I fell in love with a photograph of it when I was 11, and declared then that I would work in that building when I grew up, which I did for 19 years, leaving in 2010. Debo was my boss, patron, inspiration and eventually friend. Through her, I had my only encounter with Tom Stoppard. He was due to compere an event when she and Patrick Leigh Fermor would discuss their collected correspondence, recently published, and she asked me if I would introduce Tom. She pretty much told me what she wanted me to say, with a tease or two built in, so that part was not too hard. But a few weeks before, I was suddenly invited up to the Old Vic in Edensor for lunch, 'to meet Tom'. I had only recently returned from giving some lectures about Chatsworth in America, to accompany an exhibition. I arrived with trepidation, to find we would be four for lunch, the other guest being Debo's niece and editor, Charlotte Mosley. Tom arrived in the dining room last, smoking, of course, and we sat. Debo, sensing my nervousness, opened the chat. Looking across the table at Charlotte, she said 'Oh Char, aren't we lucky, sitting here with one of the greatest communicators in the world....and a man who writes plays.' We all chuckled, and before I could demur, Tom put his cigarette down and said 'That sounds about right' and off we went. It was typical of Debo's ability to level the playing field when she chose, and he was a sport to go along with it. And as so many of the tributes to him from his eminent friends have said was typical, he deployed his open curiosity, asking me lots of questions about what my first job there - car parking & lavatory cleaning for a summer - had been like and what I had learned about visitor preoccupations as they arrive after a long drive. I walked away from that lunch with my head in the clouds and my feet on air, and thankful that I hadn't gone all fan-boy and told him how much I admired his plays, Arcadia especially, given I'd have had nothing intelligent to say about them. One more thing, about Chatsworth and Pemberley. When the Joe Wright film of P&P was made, I was asked to do a filmed interview, for the DVD 'extras', about Chatsworth as a location for the film. They were especially keen that I link the description of the arrival at Pemberley with Chatsworth, and while I was careful not to say that we 'knew' she based it on Chatsworth, and said that it was a possibility and anyway, once the film was out, that's what people would believe. A distinguished local historian got in touch once the DVD was released, furious with me for not debunking it, on purely economic grounds. Darcy, he said (rightly) is untitled and described as being very rich on 'ten thousand a year', while the contemporaneous 6th Duke of Devonshire is an aristocrat who had an income of anything between £70-90,000 a year. Mr Darcy simply could not have afforded to run or live in a place the size of Chatsworth, his income would not have been sufficient and the wretched film had inflated our sense of Darcy's wealth to oligarch levels, which was silly, and upset the delicate social web of the book, which, with the exception of Lady Catherine de Burgh, is between levels of the gentry, not the aristocracy. That was me told. He may have been right, in purely economic terms, but he was I felt overlooking two things. Firstly, in the medium of film, what has to be communicated instantly and visually is 'huge unobtainable wealth' not historical accuracy, and Chatsworth did that very well. And secondly, there is no reason why Austen might not have been inspired by Chatsworth's setting and approach through the landscape, as you suggest here, without meaning to imply in her text that the house was as enormous (she calls Pemberley 'large') as the reality she may have seen. I tried to make these points to the historian; he was not impressed. Anyway, thank you for combining three great loves of mine - Austen, Stoppard and Chatsworth - into one, for me, very plangent essay.
Thank you so much for this beautiful essay/reflection, which combines so many things I love. Chatsworth is my Arcadia too; I fell in love with a photograph of it when I was 11, and declared then that I would work in that building when I grew up, which I did for 19 years, leaving in 2010. Debo was my boss, patron, inspiration and eventually friend. Through her, I had my only encounter with Tom Stoppard. He was due to compere an event when she and Patrick Leigh Fermor would discuss their collected correspondence, recently published, and she asked me if I would introduce Tom. She pretty much told me what she wanted me to say, with a tease or two built in, so that part was not too hard. But a few weeks before, I was suddenly invited up to the Old Vic in Edensor for lunch, 'to meet Tom'. I had only recently returned from giving some lectures about Chatsworth in America, to accompany an exhibition. I arrived with trepidation, to find we would be four for lunch, the other guest being Debo's niece and editor, Charlotte Mosley. Tom arrived in the dining room last, smoking, of course, and we sat. Debo, sensing my nervousness, opened the chat. Looking across the table at Charlotte, she said 'Oh Char, aren't we lucky, sitting here with one of the greatest communicators in the world....and a man who writes plays.' We all chuckled, and before I could demur, Tom put his cigarette down and said 'That sounds about right' and off we went. It was typical of Debo's ability to level the playing field when she chose, and he was a sport to go along with it. And as so many of the tributes to him from his eminent friends have said was typical, he deployed his open curiosity, asking me lots of questions about what my first job there - car parking & lavatory cleaning for a summer - had been like and what I had learned about visitor preoccupations as they arrive after a long drive. I walked away from that lunch with my head in the clouds and my feet on air, and thankful that I hadn't gone all fan-boy and told him how much I admired his plays, Arcadia especially, given I'd have had nothing intelligent to say about them. One more thing, about Chatsworth and Pemberley. When the Joe Wright film of P&P was made, I was asked to do a filmed interview, for the DVD 'extras', about Chatsworth as a location for the film. They were especially keen that I link the description of the arrival at Pemberley with Chatsworth, and while I was careful not to say that we 'knew' she based it on Chatsworth, and said that it was a possibility and anyway, once the film was out, that's what people would believe. A distinguished local historian got in touch once the DVD was released, furious with me for not debunking it, on purely economic grounds. Darcy, he said (rightly) is untitled and described as being very rich on 'ten thousand a year', while the contemporaneous 6th Duke of Devonshire is an aristocrat who had an income of anything between £70-90,000 a year. Mr Darcy simply could not have afforded to run or live in a place the size of Chatsworth, his income would not have been sufficient and the wretched film had inflated our sense of Darcy's wealth to oligarch levels, which was silly, and upset the delicate social web of the book, which, with the exception of Lady Catherine de Burgh, is between levels of the gentry, not the aristocracy. That was me told. He may have been right, in purely economic terms, but he was I felt overlooking two things. Firstly, in the medium of film, what has to be communicated instantly and visually is 'huge unobtainable wealth' not historical accuracy, and Chatsworth did that very well. And secondly, there is no reason why Austen might not have been inspired by Chatsworth's setting and approach through the landscape, as you suggest here, without meaning to imply in her text that the house was as enormous (she calls Pemberley 'large') as the reality she may have seen. I tried to make these points to the historian; he was not impressed. Anyway, thank you for combining three great loves of mine - Austen, Stoppard and Chatsworth - into one, for me, very plangent essay.
This is a wonderful comment, thank you.
I wondered where you were taking me but the destination, as it came into view, seems absolutely right.