What We Can Know

McEwan’s novel frequently references a historical event called the Immortal Dinner to develop the central event of Thomas’s research, the narrative’s fictional Second Immortal Dinner. Since the latter event is described as an impactful turning point in the novel’s speculative history, it is useful to understand the impact that the Immortal Dinner had on the literature of its time.

The Immortal Dinner took place on December 28, 1817, at the London house of British painter Benjamin Robert Haydon. The purpose of the dinner was twofold. First, Haydon wanted to celebrate the partial completion of his painting Christ’s Entry into Jerusalem, into which he had painted three of his friends, the Romantic poets William Wordsworth, author of “Tintern Abbey” (1798) and “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” (1807); and John Keats, author of “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (1820) and “To Autumn” (1820); and the essayist Charles Lamb, who were all among the guests at Haydon’s house that evening. Second, the dinner would also provide Haydon with an opportunity to introduce the young Keats to the renowned Wordsworth. At the end of the night, Haydon recorded the events of the dinner in his journal.

In the 1840s, Haydon wrote an account of the dinner in his autobiography, describing it as an “immortal evening.” By then, nearly all the guests had died, with Wordsworth and Haydon himself being the only attendees still living. Haydon nostalgically frames the gathering as a highlight of his social life, balancing high-minded discourse on art and science with wit and tension. According to literary historian Penelope Hughes-Hallett in her 2000 book The Immortal Dinner, Haydon’s nostalgia also stemmed from disappointment with his life in the intervening years, marked by debt and frequent imprisonment. Haydon also revisited his original diary entry to mark the passing of its guests in footnotes.

More than the brilliance of the night in question, McEwan evokes the nostalgia with which Haydon remembered the Immortal Dinner. Thomas is obsessed with returning to the past, believing it to be a better time. Because Thomas lives in a speculative future, McEwan relies on his contemporary reader’s familiarity with the era’s crises to give Thomas’s longings a dramatically ironic twist. Similarly, Vivien’s memoir in the second part of the novel downplays the importance of the Second Immortal Dinner. However significant the gathering may appear to scholars and critics of Thomas’s time, it is never as important in the minds of those living through the moment itself.