Contributor: Will Bowers
Location: British Library, London.
Description: This opening occurs in the first of the dinner books kept at Holland House, Kensington, in which Elizabeth Vassall-Fox (Lady Holland, 1771-1845) recorded who dined at the house between 1799 and 1845. The coterie that gathered at this Jacobean mansion, then on the outskirts of west London, kept alive the flame of Charles James Fox, the uncle of Henry Richard Vassall-Fox (Lord Holland, 1749-1806). The group continued Fox’s desire for reform, especially his fight for the emancipation of slaves and Catholics, his opposition to European wars, and his support of global freedom movements. The international dimension of these concerns meant the house was a kind of alternative foreign office for liberal culture and politics, receiving European authors and politicians who it was hoped would spread Foxite principles aboard. The centre of exchange for this group was the dining room, in which Lady Holland played the chatelaine, entertaining the leading cultural figures of Romantic culture. Her eight assiduously kept dinner books, which Leslie Mitchell neatly describes as ‘catalogues of talent’, document forty-five years of the salon. (Mitchell, 35)
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