Adorable Story #144: Evelyn Waugh
Champagne, Snobbery, and Redemption
“I should like to bury something precious in every place where I’ve been happy, and then, when I am old and ugly and miserable, I could come back and dig it up and remember.”
Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited, Book I, Chapter 6.
Few writers have captured the contradictions of the twentieth century with as much elegance as Evelyn Waugh.
A satirist of acute precision, Waugh turned English manners and lost faith into art.
His novels move between laughter and despair — from the champagne fizz of youth to the quiet ache of redemption — revealing a ruthless and romantic mind.
Ultimately, Evelyn Waugh was the chronicler of a civilization in decline.
Table of Contents: Family / Early Life and Education / Trying to Be an Artist / First Marriage, Divorce, Travel / Conversion to Catholicism / The Observer of Decay / World War II / Second Marriage and a (Big) Family / A Master at the Typewriter / “Brideshead Revisited”: Faith, Memory, and a Vanishing World / Later Years / Did you know? The Suicide Attempt That Launched His Career
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Family
Evelyn Waugh was born Arthur Evelyn St. John Waugh on October 28th, 1903, in Hampstead, London.
He was born in an educated upper-middle-class literary family.
His father, Arthur Waugh, was a publisher and literary critic who later became managing director of Chapman & Hall, the firm that published Charles Dickens.
His mother, Catherine Raban Waugh, came from a clerical family (her father was an Anglican clergyman).
They lived comfortably but not extravagantly, and their position was built more on culture and intellect than on money.
Waugh was their second son: his elder brother, Alec Waugh, also became a writer, famous early on for the risqué school novel The Loom of Youth (1917).
Waugh grew up very conscious of class: his father adored the English literary tradition and admired aristocratic manners. Evelyn inherited this fascination but exaggerated it into a lifestyle and sensibility.
Early Life and Education
Waugh attended school at Lancing College, a place he remembered as “a small, closed society of fierce gossip and violent opinion.”
He then went up to Hertford College, Oxford, in 1922 to study history. Oxford offered him refinement, parties, and intellectual acquaintances, but little academic discipline.
