A Dance to the Music of Time is a sequence of twelve novels published by Heinemann between 1951 and 1975, collectively constituting one of the great achievements of twentieth-century English fiction. The title comes from Nicolas Poussin’s painting of the same name, in which the four seasons dance in a circle to the music played by Father Time — an image that encapsulates the novel’s vision of life as a recurring pattern of encounters, separations, and returns.
Nicholas Jenkins, the narrator, observes English life from the 1920s (his school days at a fictionalized Eton) through the Second World War to the 1970s. His social world is the English upper-middle class — army officers, civil servants, publishers, painters, writers, aristocrats, bohemians — and Powell traces the intersecting careers, marriages, affairs, and feuds of several dozen characters across five decades. The effect is cumulative and architectural: characters who appear briefly in the early volumes reappear in the later ones, transformed by time, and the patterns of their lives — the rises and falls, the marriages and divorces, the friendships and betrayals — create a tapestry of human behavior that is both comic and deeply serious.
Kenneth Widmerpool
The sequence’s great creation is Kenneth Widmerpool — introduced in the first volume as a graceless, ridiculous schoolboy running alone in the mist, and developed across twelve volumes into one of the most memorable characters in English fiction. Widmerpool is the anti-Jenkins: where Jenkins observes, Widmerpool acts; where Jenkins is diffident, Widmerpool is relentless. He rises through sheer determination from social nobody to political power, accumulating titles, offices, and enemies with equal voracity. His trajectory — from comic figure to sinister one — mirrors the trajectory of the century itself, and his final fate, in the last volume, is both shocking and perfectly appropriate.
Powell’s Method
Powell’s prose is deceptively quiet — long, sinuous sentences that capture the rhythms of English upper-class conversation and the narrator’s characteristic habit of qualification and reflection. The comedy is dry rather than broad: misunderstandings accumulate, social gaffes produce consequences decades later, and the gap between what characters say and what they mean provides a constant source of ironic pleasure.
The comparison with Proust is inevitable and partly justified — both writers produced vast novel-sequences narrated by an observing consciousness, both are concerned with time, memory, and social change — but Powell’s tone is cooler, less emotional, and more English than Proust’s. Where Proust is rapturous, Powell is wry.
Collecting A Dance to the Music of Time
First editions (Heinemann, London, 1951–1975): Twelve volumes, cloth binding with dust jackets.
Market values:
- Complete set of twelve firsts, all fine/fine: $5,000–$15,000
- A Question of Upbringing (Vol. 1, 1951), fine/fine: $1,000–$3,000
- Later volumes individually: $50–$300 each
- Signed by Powell: Significant premium