To establish the year in which it first became the vogue for smart British males to don a deliberately dowdy attire.
The dowdiness all burst upon my astonished eyes at once: the up-and-down collar worn with a top hat and a morning coat; permanently turned trousers worn with Oxford shoes, so as to display an inch or so of sock; tie usually to match the socks and often “self-coloured” and patternless. There are three items of sheer deliberate dowdiness for you. Another dowdy item was even a little earlier, I believe: the one-buttoned glove, showing a bit of bare wrist between it and the shirt-cuff. But the soft-fronted dress-shirt, also a piece of dowdy dandyism, came in much at the same time as the three specimens cited above.
I should guess the year to be either 1907 or 1908, but I am not quite sure. You, with your wonderful memory, may be able to place it, for 1907-8 marks the period when you burst upon the London firmament.
I—who can remember witnessing a departure for Cremorne—I, I need hardly tell you, remember much older and almost as strange things. I remember peg-top trowsers, skin-tight trowsers, bell-shaped trowsers, though I can’t fix the epoch of any of these phenomena; and I can remember when we deliberately wore our trowsers so long that we trod upon them with our heels and frayed them; and that was in 1880-1.
But all I ask that you should fix is the date of the deliberately dowdy well-dressed man....
I think, he writes, 9.8.20, that the time has come for you to write ... a big political novel, a big, serious, flippant, earnest, sarcastic, political novel.... Your book should be quite Disraelian in scope; it should be a roman a clef to this extent, that it would contain half—or quarter-portraits; and you ought to concentrate on it very thoroughly. I am convinced that the world is waiting for it.
Do you observe the comparative sweetness of my mood. It is doomed entirely to this glorious weather. For the rest, I hope and believe that you never resent those whacks with which, when the sky is overcast, I am apt to belabour my correspondents like an elderly Mr. Punch on his hustings.
My good, kind Brighton doctor—good because he is clever, kind because he charges me no fee—was over here from Brighton y’day to see me. He tells me that this peculiar susceptibility of mine to atmospheric influence is a symptom of convalescence rather than ill-health. He is much pleased with the improvement in my condition; and he approves of my winter plans, though he would rather have dispatched me to San Remo or even Egypt had either been feasible.