The Acceptance World was published by Heinemann in 1955, completing the first trilogy (or “movement,” as Powell called the four groups of three novels). The title comes from the world of bill discounting — the “acceptance world” is the financial mechanism by which promissory notes are traded — and serves as a metaphor for the social world in which people accept obligations, make promises, and negotiate the gap between expectation and reality.
Jenkins is now established as a writer and moves in literary London — a world of publishers, literary editors, and the complicated social networks that sustain the London book world. He falls in love with Jean Templer, Peter’s sister, beginning the first of the love affairs that will mark his progress through the sequence. Stringham is drinking heavily. Widmerpool is accumulating power in the City with the single-mindedness of a machine.
The volume’s finest set piece is the dinner at the Ritz at which Jenkins encounters the novelist St. John Clarke, an established literary figure who is being fought over by rival secretaries — each of whom wants to control the great man’s political direction. The scene is a comedy of literary politics that Powell, himself a working novelist, renders with insider precision.
Collecting The Acceptance World
First edition (Heinemann, London, 1955): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $200–$500
- Very good/very good: $80–$200