Half Moon Street
From WikiPOBia
Half Moon Street is located in Mayfair, adjacent to Sheperd Market in London[1]. It runs north south from Piccadilly street nearby Green park. In the 18th. century aristocrats, gentry and the fashionable moved west to Mayfair. Half Moon street consisted of town houses. In the following centuries these Georgian homes were subdivided into fashionable middle class apartments and hotels.
Half Moon Street perhaps has had greater prominence in fiction than in reality. It was the address of Bertie Wooster of P.G.Wodehouse’s novels. It also figures in a novel by Paul Theroux which was subsequently made into a movie of the same name.
In the Canon
Half Moon Street is the location of the residence of Diana Villiers and Stephen Maturin after their marriage aboard the HMS Oedipus when returning to England at the end of The Surgeon's Mate. The house is described as a “handsome modern house...shining with fresh white paint and new-furnished with elegant but fragile satinwood” with an olive tree growing in the billiard room.[2] From here Diana reestablishes herself as a society hostess despite the odium of her “ill-judged connections in India and the United States.” [3] Maturin continues to live separately at The Grapes save for his duties as host at Half Moon. In The Reverse of the Medal Maturin returns to the house in Half Moon Street to learn that Diana has left him and run off with Jagiello.[4] This development echoes Maturin's earlier visit in Desolation Island, when he goes to Clarges Street in search of Villiers only to learn she has run off to America with Harry Johnson.
