Crome Yellow
Encyclopedia
Aldous Huxley
Aldous Leonard Huxley was an English writer and one of the most prominent members of the famous Huxley family. Best known for his novels including Brave New World and a wide-ranging output of essays, Huxley also edited the magazine Oxford Poetry, and published short stories, poetry, travel...
. It was published in 1921. In the book, Huxley satirises the fads and fashions of the time. It is the witty story of a house party at "Crome" (a lightly veiled reference to Garsington Manor
Garsington Manor
Garsington Manor, in the village of Garsington, near Oxford, England, is a Tudor building, best known as the former home of Lady Ottoline Morrell, the Bloomsbury Group socialite...
, a house where authors such as Huxley and T. S. Eliot
T. S. Eliot
Thomas Stearns "T. S." Eliot OM was a playwright, literary critic, and arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century. Although he was born an American he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 and was naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39.The poem that made his...
used to gather and write). We hear the history of the house from Henry Wimbush, its owner and self-appointed historian; apocalypse is prophesied, virginity is lost, and inspirational aphorisms are gained in a trance. Our hero, Denis Stone, tries to capture it all in poetry and is disappointed in love.
Crome Yellow is in the tradition of the English country house novel, as practiced most notably by Thomas Love Peacock
Thomas Love Peacock
Thomas Love Peacock was an English satirist and author.Peacock was a close friend of Percy Bysshe Shelley and they influenced each other's work...
, in which a diverse group of characters descend upon an estate to leech off the host. They spend most of their time eating, drinking, and holding forth on their personal intellectual conceits. Huxley's novel, however, has slightly more actual events and far more delineation of character than Peacock's novels -- which is interesting considering Huxley's tendency in most of his other novels to lecture at great length.
Also of interest is a brief pre-figuring of Brave New World
Brave New World
Brave New World is Aldous Huxley's fifth novel, written in 1931 and published in 1932. Set in London of AD 2540 , the novel anticipates developments in reproductive technology and sleep-learning that combine to change society. The future society is an embodiment of the ideals that form the basis of...
. Mr. Scogan, one of the characters, describes an "impersonal generation" of the future that will "take the place of Nature's hideous system. In vast state incubators, rows upon rows of gravid bottles will supply the world with the population it requires. The family system will disappear; society, sapped at its very base, will have to find new foundations; and Eros, beautifully and irresponsibly free, will flit like a gay butterfly from flower to flower through a sunlit world."