Newgate Prison

In the summer of 1726, the writers Jonathan Swift and John Gay spent several weeks at the home of their friend Alexander Pope on the banks of the Thames at Twickenham (then known as ‘Twitnam’), not resting but toiling away at their various literary activities and mutually inspiring each other. On the surface they were an unlikely trio: Swift was almost 20 years older than either Pope or Gay; Pope was Catholic (at a time when Catholicism was still treated with suspicion) and financially independent, while Swift was an Anglican cleric, the Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin. Gay, in contrast, was a jobbing writer, dependent for financial security on his amiable sociability and maintenance of good relations with a long list of wealthy patrons.

Sir Thomas Malory is not much of a knight. He lies; he is lecherous; he is bested in tourneys; he misses battles due to a dicky stomach; he inadvertently causes the deaths of his friends. He is no Sir Lancelot. But he has his talents, chief among them being his ability to spin a yarn, and he has won much renown for his retelling of the legend of King Arthur and his Round Table, later to be published as Le Morte d’Arthur. Now he has the chance to set his own story straight. Well, straight-ish. A Good Deliverance is a sly and salty fictional account of the life and deeds of Malory, whose real-life record is shrouded in mystery. The story begins in 1468 with the elderly man’s arrest and imprisonment in Newgate Prison. No charges are forthcoming.

To come across dates and names carved into a choirstall or ancient tree is to experience a momentary frisson, a startled connection with the past. Yet this practice of making ‘unauthorised’ personal graphic statements in public spaces is often thought of as antisocial, something to be erased immediately. Unless of course they are by Banksy, whose spray-painted outpourings cost local councils a great deal to clean off before they came to be regarded as valid documents, articulating the thoughts and imaginings of the disaffected. In her ingenious new book Writing on the Wall, the art historian Madeleine Pelling has chosen to use these often transitory pieces of historical evidence as a way of illustrating the huge cultural changes that took place in the 18th century.