Chapter VIII Summary

The next day sees the author travelling out of Middleton through Woodbridge to the ex-military bases at Orford, following the Anglian coastline as it meanders southwards. Soon after leaving Middleton he falls into conversation with a Dutchman by the name of Cornelius who came here looking to buy a large tract of land. His family were sugar beet farmers, and what follows is a discussion of how sugar beet in fact made up the principle wealth and industry of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (before the Great World Wars). It becomes obvious to the author that many of the great artistic endeavours of the world (from the Hague to the Tate) owe their existence in part to the wealth of the sugar industry, which sought to legitimise itself by buying into the high society art market, funding museums and...