After writing Men at Arms in , Evelyn did remarkably little literary work in That's something I may come back to, but for now I'll push on. In January , Evelyn made a note in his diary that he'd half-remembered some engravings of Canova's work which might be adapted to decorate his story Love Among the Ruins. The copy I bought recently and which features in the photo below, was published in by Septimus Prowett of the Strand.
It's a gorgeous book, its large thick creamy pages have taken the type well. While the illustrations have been placed on finer, greyer paper inlaid onto the cream pages, with generous margins all round. Love Among the Ruins is a story that Evelyn had written in October , shortly after the general election of February which saw the post-war Labour government returned to power with a narrow majority.
Also relevant may have been the death of George Orwell in January of that year. As discussed at length here. The story written in autumn was called 'A Pilgrim's Progress', and it had been rejected by the editors it had been sent to. One said: 'It seems to me sad that this man's talent should be wasted on such a story'.
Another: 'The theme is almost implausibly apt for satire by Waugh and yet his handling of it is, for the most part, dull-witted and tedious. However, Evelyn must have been fond of his creation in order to come back to it, polish it up and push for it to be published as a volume in its own right in Or was it purely his enthusiasm for the scheme of illustration that motivated its promotion from rejected magazine short story to self-contained novella?
Illustration from Love Among the Ruins. Reproduced with the forbearance, I hope, of the copyright holder. Evelyn tells us in his diary entry of 18 January, , that with 'dazzling eyes', a magnifying glass and razor blade he went to work on The Works of Canova. That is, he cut up a few of the engravings that the English artist Henry Moses had made in of sculptures made by Antonio Canova, a neo-classical Italian sculptor, who had died that year.
