A Norfolk not an Ess

A special thrill when visiting country houses — as I used to do every week in the unconvincing guise of what Evelyn Waugh described in A Handful of Dust as a ‘very civil young man’ engaged in chronicling family seats — was the occasional opportunity of handling one of Humphry Repton’s original ‘Red Books’. This had been beautifully prepared and bound in red morocco for the owner’s late-Georgian predecessor by the great landscape gardener in order to provide the client with a visual explanation of his ideas for ‘improvements’. The pièce de resistance was the ingenious use of flaps, or ‘slides’, devised so as to give ‘before’ and ‘after’ views by means of charmingly illustrated perspectives, complete with clumps of trees.

These captivating volumes were often given an added piquancy by Repton’s lively obiter dicta which might touch on current fashions in horticulture, the insensitive behaviour of upstart ‘nouveau’ landowners or the lack of appreciation for his Art (old Humph could have given the Australian cricketers a few lessons in whingeing). For example, I remember a Red Book at one Norfolk seat in which Repton recorded his familiar gripe that ‘the prophet’ (himself) had not been honoured in ‘his own county’. Although born in Suffolk, partly educated in Holland and ending up in Essex, Repton regarded himself as a Man of Norfolk. He had started out as a general merchant in Norwich before being taken up as a protégé of William Windham of Felbrigg and eventually, in his late thirties, turning his ‘hobby into a profession’ and becoming a landscape gardener who was to be immortalised in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park.