many? — are concerned with the elusive business of writing

poetry. She is no doubt right when she says

spirit

Lucky for you that the new words arrive out of what Really does seem a perfect cloud-absent sky.

But the luck is not for that 'I' Which begs for sympathy, wants to tell a

If she does not consistently have that luck by Elizabeth Jennings

Carcanet, f6.95, pp.128

It is hard to write about Elizabeth Jennings because she is not so much a poet as a person. All poets are both, of course, but it is not always the case, as it is with her, that it is impossible to read the poems without a sense of the proximity of a person at once tough and fragile, one who has suffered intensely and comforted her- self with her loves, childish and adult, human and divine. She spares her reader none of this, so she is always near, bearing all with fortitude but needing a listener. She has had many. Her first volume, in 1953, won an Arts Council prize and her second, two years later, brought her the Somerset Maugham Award, which set her on the way not only to enhancing her reputation but — a matter of more import- ance for the poet's development — giving her that spell in Rome which became part of the intimate furniture of her mind. This new volume cannot fail to delight her old readers and to find her new ones.

Tributes indeed contains tributes, to poets, painters and philosophers; and the volume gains additional interest through the identification of those to whom she owes special debts. The piece in honour of St Augustine is the most clearly articulated, no doubt because it has stronger roots than the others, and involves Roman memories as well as her feeling for the author with whom, she says,

Abstractions never Had the last word

— as, indeed, for a Christian thinker, they could not. She is less at home with Hume, and there is a suggestion there, as in some of the poems on painters — Turner, Caravaggio, Goya — of mere opinions floating to the surface in a way which does not happen with poems less apparently occasional. Even the piece 'For Philip Larkin' is of more interest for the light it throws on her reaction to her subject than for any light thrown on the author himself. We have more of the presence, both of the man to whom she is paying tribute and of Elizabeth Jennings herself, in 'A Happy Death,' in which she draws on events which have clearly moved her deeply.

A number of poems — perhaps too and who does? it is perhaps because she is too anxious to write, as if nothing else mattered, though she is certainly far from any such foolish belief. In her poem for Charles Causley she speaks about learning to 'work upon' her verses, but perhaps the greater need is learning to wait for them.

Although there is an element of the occasion in some of the poems, Elizabeth Jennings is not really a social poet.

To be alone just as I often was When small, before the name of solitude

Or loneliness impinged on what I did — that is her real setting, and her hope is to discover, as she says, 'how spirit speaks to spirit'. Many of her poems go back, explicitly or by implication, to the scene. which is so vividly indicated in her 'First Six Years' in Boston, Lines., a place to which, she says, she 'has not returned'. The other resting-place of her mind is Rome where, as an 'eager young poet', she met

So much kindness from simple Italians and some English priests and poets

— a personal world again, in which it was as if

An unhappy childhood was given back and altered.

It is a moment of mystery for the reader, of wonder for the poet, in the city to which she makes her most effective 'tribute'. Its shadow — and its light — fall on that 'wild garden', two hours away from it, which calls up the reflection:

Let France and England have their landscape made By men who want to govern all they see. Such a reaction may seem a little strange, coming from 'the world's true centre', but no such confusion is evoked by the infant Elizabeth, speechless before The currant bushes and the loganberries, An apple tree, a rockery, a lawn.

'Well, death's not the answer.' THE MAKING OF THE ENGLISH MIDDLE CLASSES: BUSINESS, SOCIETY AND FAMILY LIFE IN LONDON 1660-1730 by Peter Earle

Methuen, f25, pp.446

e subtitle of this book describes its Th contents with admirable precision. The author, justifiably sceptical of the glib generalisations of historians that too often reflect nothing more than social and poli- tical prejudice, has set out to examine the condition of the middling sort in London from the Restoration to the time of George II. In so doing, he has based himself on the mass of minute statistical information to be extracted from the inventories of those citizens whose deaths left their estates to come under the management of the Lon- don Court of Orphans. He can thus bring before us the entire household circumst- ances of a haberdasher in a small way of business or a general merchant of much ampler means. He supplements these by a formidable range of other original sources — wills, private papers, civic and Livery Company records, as well as the diaries and general literature of the period that usually colour the ideas of the social historian.

The result is historian's history. He Will be a rash writer who in the future ventures an airy projection of late 17th- or early 18th-century London middle-class life without looking to see what Mr Earle has found out, On the other hand, the very virtues of the method, its intellectual rigour, its constant statistical analysis, its lists, its tables, do not make for easy reading or fluent apprehension. It is not so much a book as a gigantic learned article. But what learning and what a quarry both for the general and the particular inquirer! Among the many valuable parts of the book is that which examines the position of women, both as regards business and marriage. By joining in her husband's trade a wife did not regain the economic rights which were normally forfeit by mar- riage. But if she conducted a business separate from that of her husband she improved her legal status. Nothing, how- ever, could beat widowhood for real eco- nomic independence, assuming of course that the money was there to support it.