And all that jazz

So much more than flappers and frivolity, the 1920s saw Britain blossom with an extraordinary creative confidence that transformed art, fashion, music and literature, as Claire Jackson discovers

- Claire Jackson

JAY GATSBY—the Oxford man, old sport—threw fabulous parties. ‘Every Friday, five crates of oranges and lemons arrived from a fruiterer in New York—every Monday these same oranges and lemons left his back door in a pyramid of pulpless halves,’ wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald in the 1925 novel The Great Gatsby. A RollsRoyce became an omnibus, transporting guests to and from the city, a full orchestra was installed and the night air was filled with cocktails, quickly forgotten introductions and splendid frivolity.

As Gatsby set about decorating his Long Island home like the World’s Fair, a party planner of a different ilk was preparing a London soirée. In Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, published in the same year, the eponymous host Clarissa famously decides to buy the flowers herself. The Great War had thrown a stone into the lake and the ripples continued to expand: Dalloway ruminates on her place in society; a war veteran throws himself out of a window. Yet the tragedy also feeds a hunger to live, to unbutton collars and raise hemlines; liquor is quicker and so are the dances. There will be consequences to this hard-fought emancipation—and, like the millions who spent on the never-never, we don’t want to think about the present. So raise a gin cobbler to those short years in the mid 1920s when world peace seemed possible, the economy and the music were booming—and British creativity fizzed.