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Many people have complained about the obscurity of Adrian Stokes' psychoanalytic aesthetics. Melanie Klein, for instance, told him: “[W]hile in your writings some parts are of great beauty others are not clearly enough expressed. I have heard this criticism expressed by people who much appreciated your books and seemed to me to belong to the class of ‘good’ readers” (in Sayers, forthcoming). No such criticism could justly be leveled against Stephen Kite's book about Stokes. It is admirably clear in providing the first account of the architectural basis of Stokes' journey toward beauty from the ugliness of Edwardian London as he remembered it after the First World War.
Within Stokes' family the First World War took a devastating toll. One of Stokes' two older brothers, Geoffrey, aged only fifteen, had been stationed in a crow's nest at the top of a ship's mast during the Battle of Jutland in May 1916 when over six thousand fellow combatants were wounded or killed. Geoffrey survived, but he was severely traumatized. Less than a year later, in April 1917, Stokes' eldest brother Philip died from a head wound sustained during battle near the Somme. He was nineteen.
After the war, said Stokes, London—which he had “once loved” for its “vastness, freedom and gaiety”—plunged him into “the darkness of despair,” its street lights appearing as “anaemic mediocrities of pain and ugliness” (Kite, p. 18). He remembered prewar London with loathing. He recalled the fountains in Hyde Park being operated by a “cold and grinding