`On December 28th the immortal dinner came off in my painting room . . ." wrote the painter Benjamin Robert Haydon in his autobiography. Haydon was given to grandiose notions, but for once he was right. His post-Christmas dinner party in 1817 gathered about the table some of the truly immortal minds of the time - the poets Keats and Wordsworth and the essayist Charles Lamb. And there was Haydon himself who, though sadly not the genius-painter he claimed to be, was a genius of sorts - but as a writer. Much of what we know of the flavour of intellectual life in London in the first quarter of the 19th century is due to the colourful, perceptive diaries Haydon wrote.
He was hugely ambitious but alienated his patrons by his determination to take offence and stand on principle. He ended his disappointed life by suicide in 1845.
In 1817 Haydon was still young, solvent and in the swim. He had lately moved from cramped airless lodgings to a house in Paddington with a vast painting-room - he detested the word "studio" - where at last his huge canvases of historical scenes could be hung. During the immortal dinner, his work-in-progress, Christ's Entry Into Jerusalem, depicting personages such as Voltaire, Newton and Wordsworth himself among the crowd, was as much a presence as his guests.
Haydon venerated Wordsworth. He knew Keats also did - the previous month the young poet had sent him round his new sonnet, "Great spirits now on earth are sojourning; He of the cloud, the cataract, the lake . . .". Lamb was a friend of both and guaranteed to be fun. When in London Wordsworth came with his "walker", Tom Monkhouse, also a friend of Keats. No women were invited, not even Mary Lamb, Charles's sister - though she may have been suffering one of her periodic bouts of madness just then. One odd thing that strikes one about this most appealing era is the invisibility of its great women apart from say, Mary Shelley. The Romantics were connubial but seem to have liked to keep their intellectual society male. Penelope Hughes-Hallett's method is not to probe the status quo but to describe its realities. Her attitude is tender, her manner discursive and erudite. The dinner on that pleasant winter day - more frosty than foggy - is the axis around which her narrative turns, as she relates the past and future lives of the assembly, their concerns and relationships, to provide a panorama of the city's intellectual landscape at the time.
The conversation was lively, roving from poetry to the terrors of the operating-theatre, from a critique of the heady new scientific explanations for such natural beauties as the rainbow to Haydon's genius, from religion to the exploration of Africa. All these topics, and more, are grist to Hughes-Hallett's mill. After dinner, which took place in the afternoon, the company retired to a smaller room for tea. Later there was supper. More guests arrived, among them an admirer of Keats, the aspiring poet, Joseph Richie, soon to set off to look for the source of the Niger. At some point, Lamb fell asleep as he did when he drank too much, and woke up to tease the Comptroller of Stamps, who had turned up in frills and was making awkward conversation, discomfiting Wordsworth, his employee.
The fact that the three youngest - Richie, Keats and Monkhouse - would be dead within a few years lends poignancy to the festive occasion. Only Wordsworth, the eldest, would sail on, relatively unassailed by misfortune. It is a pity that the cut and thrust of their brilliance, as Haydon remembered it, does not shine out more. Hughes-Hallett is too conscientious a historian to make bold use of her delightful title and invent a little. The Immortal Dinner does tend to slide out of sight behind the historical foreground. We voyage around, but do not quite get to sit at the table.
Anne Haverty's novel The Far Side Of A Kiss has just been published by Chatto & Windus.