And it is with that thought that this introduction comes to an end.

I am delighted to report, by way of postscript, that Ms. Clarke has remained quite unspoiled by success, and that she is the same sharp, smart woman with the same ready wit whom I met over a decade ago, and though her hair has now turned completely white, it has done so in an elegant and stylish way which means she cuts an imposing figure on the back of book jackets. Colin Greenland, on the other hand, has become significantly less elfin as the years have gone by, but what he has lost in elvishness he has made up for in wizardliness, and now gives the vague impression that he is merely waiting for a team of hobbits to pass by in order to send them upon an adventure, although the piratical glint in his eye would cause me to think twice about going on such an adventure were I one of those hobbits and not, as I am, a scribbling person.

My introduction to a 2009 edition of Susanna Clarke’s novel, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell.

On Richard Dadd’s The Fairy-Feller’s Master-Stroke

Much of the Tate Gallery’s Pre-Raphaelite collection is in Washington, DC, as I write this, and the Pre-Raphaelite paintings they have left have been folded into a Victorian room. I am told that when they return, it will be to a gallery organized by time period and not by artistic school. This makes sense to me.

I am in the Tate Gallery to have my photograph taken, and I am standing beside the one painting I want to talk about, early in the morning. No crowds. I tell the photographer about the history of the painting, and the painter, while getting increasingly irritated with a smudgy blotch on the glass, at the top right, and eventually I take out a cloth for cleaning off my computer’s screen and I scrub vigorously at the glass until it is clean. Nobody comes and arrests me, which is, I decide, a good thing.

I am able, with no one else around, to stare at the painting until I have had my fill, but when the photographer moves me on to other places in the gallery I am still not satisfied.

There is a small plaque beside the painting, which says: Presented by Siegfried Sassoon in memory of his friend and fellow officer Julian Dadd, a great-nephew of the artist, and of his two brothers who gave their lives in the First World War. It has been in the Tate’s collection since 1963.

Reason tells me that I would have first encountered the painting itself, the enigmatically titled Fairy-Feller’s Master-Stroke, reproduced, pretty much full-sized, in the foldout cover of a Queen album, at the age of fourteen or thereabouts, and it made no impression upon me at all. That’s one of the odd things about it. You have to see it in the flesh, paint on canvas, the real thing, which used to hang, mostly, when it wasn’t traveling, in the Pre-Raphaelite room of the Tate Gallery, out of place among the grand gold-framed Pre-Raphaelite beauties, all of them so much more huge and artful than the humble fairy court standing among the daisies, for it to become real. And when you see it several things will become apparent; some immediately, some eventually.