V.S. Pritchett in NW1

From Ipswich to Regent's Park Terrace

Victor Sawdon Pritchett was born in Ipswich on 16 December 1900 and came to literature late and sideways. He left school young, went to Paris at the age of twenty in search of a writing life, and from 1923 was filing pieces for The Christian Science Monitor. By the time he settled in NW1 he was already middle-aged and already among the most widely read critics writing in English.

In 1956 he bought a house in Regent's Park Terrace, the stuccoed street on the Camden Town side of the ground that runs up towards Primrose Hill. He could only afford it with a loan from the New Statesman, the weekly for which he had long written; a commission from an American magazine later in the decade helped him repay it. Regent's Park Terrace is the London address most closely bound up with the rest of his working life.

The pastry board and the fountain pen

Pritchett's method was famously domestic and famously relentless. He wrote in fountain pen on sheets of paper held down by a bulldog clip on a wooden pastry board balanced on his knees, and he kept to a routine that his biographer Jeremy Treglown summarised in the title of his study, A Working Life: a long morning at the board, lunch, a nap, errands, tea, and then back to the board again.

The pages that came off it were dense with revision. His second wife Dorothy Roberts, whom he married in 1936 and who was fourteen years his junior, typed the manuscripts and ran the household around the work. Treglown's account of the marriage is not a comfortable one — Dorothy struggled with alcoholism during the 1940s and 1950s, and overcame it — but the arrangement is inseparable from the volume of finished prose the house produced.

A weekly critic at the centre of English letters

Much of what made Pritchett's reputation was periodical work. He reviewed for the New Statesman over decades, became its star critic, served as its literary editor and later joined its board as a director. In some years he supplied more than half of the magazine's principal literary articles. It was an unusual position for a writer with no university education, and it made him, for a long stretch of the mid-century, close to the default English critical voice.

The Regent's Park Terrace years also account for a remarkable share of his books. The two volumes of memoir, A Cab at the Door (1968) and Midnight Oil (1971), were written from that house, as were the story collections When My Girl Comes Home (1961) and The Camberwell Beauty (1974), and his critical biographies of Balzac (1973), Turgenev (1977) and Chekhov (1988). His breakthrough short story, Sense of Humour, had appeared much earlier, in 1937, and the novel Mr Beluncle in 1951.

The company he kept between Camden Town and Primrose Hill

The Pritchetts arrived in NW1 just before the streets around them acquired their reputation. A few minutes' walk away, Gloucester Crescent was filling with the people who would earn it the labels "the trendiest street in London" and "Britain's cleverest street": Jonathan Miller bought his house at No. 63 in 1961; Alan Bennett lived at No. 23 for more than forty years; Claire Tomalin has been at No. 57 since 1963; George Melly was at No. 55 between 1964 and 1971; the novelist Alice Thomas Ellis was at No. 22 from 1960 to 2001.

The wider neighbourhood is thick with commemorated writers and thinkers. Regent's Park Terrace itself carries an English Heritage blue plaque — not to Pritchett, but to the documentary film-maker Humphrey Jennings at No. 8, erected in 2006. Within a short radius are plaques to Arthur Hugh Clough at 11 St Mark's Crescent (2009), A. J. P. Taylor at No. 13 (2013), Sylvia Plath at 3 Chalcot Square (2000) and Friedrich Engels, who lived at 122 Regent's Park Road from 1870 until 1894. Kingsley Amis lived on Regent's Park Road from 1984.

Honours, and a very long ending

Pritchett was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1958, appointed CBE in 1968, and knighted in 1975 for services to literature. He was President of PEN International from 1974 to 1976, won the W. H. Smith Literary Award in 1990 and the Golden PEN Award in 1994, and was made a Companion of Honour in 1993. He died in London on 20 March 1997, aged 96.

He remains an oddly quiet presence in a loud postcode. The Camden streets around Regent's Park Terrace are heavily plaqued and heavily written about, and the Gloucester Crescent set has been the subject of memoirs and a feature film. Pritchett, who spent four decades a few doors away producing some of the century's best short stories and criticism, is the neighbourhood's most easily overlooked figure — which, given how he worked, seems roughly in character.