Hurrah. Faber has reissued one of the most illuminating and insufficiently praised books of the last 60 years. Alethea Hayter’s A Sultry Month, first published in 1965, marked a new way of writing biography: a study of several linked lives, considered in close focus over a period of a few weeks. It shifted the way I looked at history.
In June 1846, the temperatures soared in London. Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning were plotting their elopement; Robert Peel resigned as prime minister; Jane and Thomas Carlyle were suffering from constipation and from each other; William Macready was playing King Lear at the Princess theatre. And an almost forgotten painter, Benjamin Robert Haydon, cut his throat. There were plenty of bigwigs around, but Hayter’s collage gives characters the importance they had at the time, not the fame they later achieved. Haydon was then a looming figure; full of a sense of his own destiny, perpetually in debt, bemused when crowds passed by his one-man exhibition to goggle at “Tom Thumb the midget”, put on display in Piccadilly by the circus proprietor Barnum.
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