Flitch of bacon custom a succession of women in an attempt to find the right one. The description of the ceremony in the book is partly based on the art of David Ogborne, an eyewitness to the last ceremony in 1751. "The Flitch of Bacon" public house, of which the protagonist of Ainsworth's novel is the publican, still exists in Little Dunmow. "The Flitch of Bacon" is a comic opera from 1779 by William Shield and Sir Henry Bate Dudley. "Made in Heaven" is a 1952 film starring David Tomlinson and Petula Clark about a married couple attempting to win the Dunmow flitch. "Dunmow
What is a Masterpiece? confluence of memories and emotions forming a single idea", that it has "a power of recreating traditional forms so that they become expressive of an artist's own epoch and yet keep a relationship to the past". The highest masterpieces are said to be "illustrations of great themes." Clark also implicitly excluded the erotic from considerations of what constituted a masterpiece, based on his perspective that a necessary condition is the balance between sense and form (works that are too sensual are, therefore, unbalanced and not to be categorised at masterpiece level). What is a Masterpiece? What is a Masterpiece? is