Albany
Peace in Piccadilly. By Sheila Birkenhead. (Hamish Hamilton, 25s.) LADY BIRKENHEAD deserves to be congratulated upon this admirable history of what the cog- noscenti, so I learn, call 'Albany,' The Albany' being apparently a grave solecism. She has skil- fully woven together the history of the building itself with well-chosen episodes from the lives of some of the more odd and eminent characters who inhabited it The result is an excellently written and most entertaining book. Albany was built at the cost of £100,000 by the first Lord Melbourne, the nominal father of the Prime Minister, in order to please his hard, ambitious social climber of a wife. Its name derives from the fact that, partly in order to assist her climb and partly for financial reasons, the Melbournes changed houses in 1791 with the Duke of York and Albany—the cele- brated Grand Old Duke who marched his ten thousand men up to the top of the hill.
But the Duke's finances were even more tottery than those of the Melbourne family, and in 1801 he dispOsed of York House, as it was now called, for £37,000 to Alexander Copland, an architect who, financed by Coutts, the banker, and by the Farrer brothers, solicitors, undertook to convert the house into 'elegant and convenient Sets of independent Apartments or Chambers, the Inheritance to be vested in Trustees with a view to general regulation and so as to give each pur- chaser a Freehold. Estate in Equity. . . .' Broadly speaking it is true to say that Albany has been run on this basis ever since, although the,original rules restricting occupation to bachelors or widowers have been relaxed.
The eminent figures who occupied Albany at one period or another of their careers are numerous : 'Monk' L4 !wis, Byron, Bulwer Lytton, Macaulay, John La le the publisher, Edward Knoblock the once celebrated dramatist. Glad- stone had rooms for . a short while before his marriage, and Disrael very nearly took on Bulwer Lytton's rooms in 18 36. The stories which Lady Birkenhead tells of these characters, while not for the most part n ew, will be unfamiliar to many readers. I panic :ularly enjoyed her account of 'Monk' Lewis, the garrulous, friendly, snob- bish, tender-hearted author of The Monk- which brought him f ame at the age a twenty, and of which Byrn on said, 'the worst parts . . . ought to have been written by Tiberius at Caprea—they are forced—the philiered ideas of a jaded voluptuary.'
Lewis was constantly bursting into tears even when people were kind to him. Lady Birkenhead quotes Byron's excellent story of how Lewis was observed red-eyed and pale at Oatlands, the Duke of York's country house. Asked why, he replied that the 'Duchess had just said something so kind that—here tears began to flow again. "Never mind, Lewis," said Colonel Armstrong to him, "never mind, don't cry. She did not mean it."'
ROBERT BLAKE
Previous page
