A Buyer’s Market was published by Heinemann in 1952. Jenkins is now in London, working in publishing and moving through the overlapping social worlds of the late 1920s: debutante dances, bohemian parties, country house weekends, and the dinner tables of the great and the would-be-great. The volume introduces several characters who will be important throughout the sequence: the painter Edgar Deacon, whose terrible paintings are redeemed by his kindness; the sinister Milly Andriadis, whose parties attract a dangerous mixture of bohemians and aristocrats; and Mr. Deacon’s protégé Gypsy Jones, a strident left-wing activist.
The novel’s central theme is the “buyer’s market” of its title — the social market in which young people negotiate their futures through relationships, alliances, and self-presentation. Jenkins observes this market with his characteristic detachment, noting the gap between what people want and what they get, between the images they project and the realities they conceal.
Widmerpool reappears, now working in the City, still graceless but increasingly formidable. The sugar he has thrown over him at a party by Barbara Goring — one of the sequence’s great comic set pieces — is an early humiliation that Widmerpool will remember and, in his way, avenge across the decades that follow.
Collecting A Buyer’s Market
First edition (Heinemann, London, 1952): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $300–$800
- Very good/very good: $100–$300