Pugg's Portmanteau

by DM Bryan

  But we were done with this bit of unexpected marketing and astonished to find ourselves in possession of a Harlot of our very own. She was not the clean-limbed lady from the Bowles shop, for she appeared in the first picture tattered and ink-clotted, as if already fallen from grace. Neither did she possess a clean sheet of her own, having been pressed into service her author never foresaw, forced to illustrate needless verse. She emerged between the pages of print, smaller in size and clipped at the edges, like a coin. But even if she were not entirely Hogarth’s Harlot, then she was sister to that person, and my mistress and I were well content.

  Sadie, how we’d come to part with a sixpence for a set of pictures, I still cannot say, and yet I felt richer for owning them. The whole of the way home, I gibbered like a lady’s monkey, shocked and astonished at my boldness. Cheapside passed in a haze of wilting cabbages and country folk bawling for custom. Fryday Street shut out the sliding sun, and within the Bell’s yard all was coolness, shadow, and the tang of brewing hops. Soon enough, we had the little book back in our room, but what we did with it there will have to wait for another letter, my dearest Sadie. This one is grown far too long, and if I were to continue I would need more pages. The price of my Harlot will bring about a delay in the purchase of writing paper. I will send these sheets now, but you will have to wait for their sequel. Until then, I am your very loving sister,

  Elizabeth.

  Chapter 4

  The continued correspondence of Mrs. Betty and her sister, showing how Mr. Hogarth’s Harlot leads Betty into danger.

  Bell Inn Yard off Fryday Street, 1732.

  Dearest Sadie,

  When last I wrote, I warned that you must wait to hear more of me. I was grown rich in one kind of paper, investing in prints like a gentleman, but poor in another, having run short of scraps on which to write. Now that you have this letter in your hands, with so little time elapsed, you will have guessed that I must have found a supply of good writing paper. And indeed, I have, for I have made a visit to a printer’s shop—a place I never expected to see with my own eyes. The kind fellow I met there has sent me such a quantity of pages that I might not be short of paper this century.

  Now sister, you and I will have noticed the edges of this page are a little soiled. They were crushed by accident when they fell off the back of an ox cart, and this sad history explains how the printer came to make me a gift of them. When I saw these pages set aside, I said to the printer that such sheets, surely, must not be wasted. The man told me, most respectfully, that they should not be, for they will be used for other purposes. Spoilt sheets, he said, might find employment as pulled proofs that check the compositor’s accuracy. Or, they are sometimes used to protect more precious pages before they are bound into quires. Other times, printers make calculations upon their surfaces, reckoning the size of margins, the number of lines, and the times a sheet might be folded. I praised these economies and told him that a laundress also cares to make soiled things useful again. He said as this was the case, I should myself have some of the paper for my own use. Sister, I have smoothed and wiped this page with a damp cloth, and only a little wrinkling remains to show that it has a past—and truly, sister, which of us cannot say the same?

  You must be wondering how I came to be in a printer’s shop at all. Will it surprise you to learn I went on account of my bastard copy of The Harlot’s Progress, with its back-to-front prints? My mistress continues her interest in Justice Gonson, whose hypocrisy killed the Harlot—or so the world says, pressing Mr. Hogarth’s prints into evidence. What a powerfully curious woman is my mistress, with a boundless interest in life’s persistent oddities. Our summons into Justice Gonson’s presence was just such a bit of strangeness, and as I am her acolyte, she has promised to instruct me as faithfully in this matter as in the use of a copper-bottomed pot or fuller’s earth.

  To begin our investigation, we had no dirty linen, no wine-stained shift, or mud-splattered stocking, only that dearly purchased volume of hudibrastick cantos, the history of which you had in my last letter. We had already seen Gonson’s own Harlot, held up for us by his clerk when we went before the great man. That was an excellent print, showing very clearly that lady’s arrival in the yard of the Bell Inn. Now, the petty-foggers say that reading Mr. Hogarth’s pictures aright is a matter of comparing things large and small—in little clauses he suspends great matters. In this way, the artist paints his Harlot like a sign-painter makes a sign. Mr. Hogarth splits the lady and turns her into emblems, like so many placards hung before inns. The pale rose pinned to the tucker points to her. The Baud’s dangling timepiece points to her. The goose with its neck wrung points to her.

  But Gonson’s elegant print was not the twin to ours. Based on our careful scrutiny of this latter, The Harlot’s Progress: Or, the Humours of Drury Lane, we could not have said which small matters conveyed great truths and which were only small matters in fact: blots, drips, slips of the hand, and the like. In our Harlot, the graceful clarity of Mr. Hogarth’s line grew muddled and wandered drunkenly. In Gonson’s print, a skilled burin delineated most precisely each shade of grey, but in ours, ham-handed grooves overflowed and spilled impenetrability across the page. Our Harlot showed herself marked and spoilt, and the ink-stained pages provided as potent an emblem of the wages of sin as anything printed thereupon. Sadie, I cannot convey to you the disappointment I had in my purchase now that I came to examine it at leisure.

  “Alas, this is not a stain I can lift,” said my mistress, her finger upon the page. “I fear, Mrs. Betty, here is a kind of inkish mould that eats all sense.”

  “I saw, in Gonson’s copy, a mouse near the horse’s hooves, but he has scampered from this page.”

  “Indeed,” said my mistress, “he fears the spreading plague of ink.”

  “That mouse held up a piece of cheese and contemplated the morsel.”

  “Doubtless finding it as delicious a tidbit as the baud found poor Moll.”

  “Or perhaps as the man who sold this clotted pamphlet found me.”

  “Never mind,” said my mistress. “We shall read the verse and see then if we are wiser.”

  Sitting at the table by the window, we bent our capped heads together, and I read aloud. “Oh,” said my mistress at the nonsense that attended the clergyman in the first print. “My,” she said, at the frank discussion of the Harlot’s business. “Dear, dear,” she said again when I read aloud the description of the contents of the Harlot’s room. When I came to a riddle offered for our puzzlement, she begged me to stop reading—for nothing, she told me, could justify such an excess of vulgarity.

  We turned instead to the picture of the Harlot taking tea while Gonson comes to arrest her. “I cannot make out any more here than in the other prints,” said I, turning the pamphlet sideways to orient the picture. “This picture is as clotted as the others.”

  “Do you remember, Mrs. Betty,” said my mistress, “in the print the clerk showed us, which side of the page had the door where the Justice entered?”

  I thought a while. Because I worked with all manner of embroidered cloths, and some printed ones too, I had a good memory for patterns. “Gonson came from here,” I said, pointing to the right-hand side of the page. “But in this print he comes the opposite way. These prints are turned about.”

  My mistress sat in her accustomed chair with her small nose in the air, sniffing as if she could smell something she did not like. “When you read to me aloud, I see your eyes moving across the page, from here,” she said, pointing left, “to here,” and she pointed right.

  I caught at her meaning. “In this print, if I read the Justice before the Harlot, I imagine him watching her unawares. He is always ready, waiting to catch her out in a moment of weakness.”

  My mistress sucked her teeth. “But if the print is reversed.”

  “Why, then I do the Justice a disservice, for it is the Harlot’s own behaviour that
comes first, necessitating his arrival.”

  “That is a more generous way of reading the print with respect to the Justice, but perhaps less so in the Harlot’s case.”

  “But which is Mr. Hogarth’s intention?” said I. “I cannot tell.”

  My mistress said, “Do you know Bartholomew’s Close, over by the church and the livestock grounds?” I nodded, and you know it too, Sadie, for we used to go as girls to see the puppets and the lithe lass who could put her heels on her head. My mistress said, “There is a printer’s shop there, one Mr. Samuel Palmer. I have done washing for his wife, and know him to be a good man. Remember me to him, and ask him if he might tell you which way Mr. Hogarth intended for the Justice

  to walk.”

  “When should I go, mistress Veronica?”

  “Why, you might go immediately, my dear. Surely, you might trust me to do a little washing on my own.”

  And so, sister, I put on my cloak and went out into the smoke-blue morning streets. This time I walked towards Aldersgate, following along the bladder of Little Britain and so into Bartholomew Close. After asking passersby for directions several times, I located the house, hard against the church, and I climbed a wide set of wooden stairs to emerge in a long, well-lit room, with a row of paned windows along one side.

  Only a day after visiting those places where prints are sold, I found myself standing where prints are made, and if I learn any more about the business, I shall be in a fair way to change my trade. Except that, as soon as I came into the workshop, I determined to have as little as possible to do with printers. Sadie, their work makes them dirty beyond compare, and a laundress can hardly stand to see one without crying aloud at the trouble of making their cuffs clean. Although, judging by the dress of the printers in that room, I should not soon be put to the trouble. None of the men I saw in that shop appeared likely to employ a laundress, and guessing from the way they gaped at me, they had never so much as seen one before. They were, in short, an impolite set of men, quick to make a body conscious of her disadvantage in appearing before them as a mere female person.

  Mr. Palmer himself was courteous enough, although he seemed at first to think I had lost my way, appearing in his shop by accident. But he crossed the long, bright room, silencing the catcalls of his men with a stern look, and offered himself to assist me. I gave him my mistress’ name, which he recalled at once with pleasure, and his whole demeanour changed toward me.

  “That good woman assisted me once in a matter of great significance to myself,” he told me, taking my hand (imprinting it with three dark fingerprints that I struggled to ignore). “Whatever I might do to assist her, I will do immediately.”

  He spoke with so much warmth that I felt free to unburden myself of the substance of our inquiry, although I was well aware of the oddity of my putting such things to him. I showed him the Harlot’s pictures in my pamphlet, and explained how we knew of other prints that ran opposite to ours. I asked him how we might know Mr. Hogarth’s intention in designing his Harlot. Then, when I was done, I waited for him to frown or even to scold me for the indecorousness of my inquiry. Sister, I do not know Mr. Palmer’s former business with my mistress, nor will I guess, but he did not so much as blink at my coming to him with such a matter, and he gave me an answer so material to my question that I could not doubt its veracity.

  Leading me to one of the two large presses that filled the long room in which we stood, he commanded the men who laboured there to stop a while so that they might explain to me its secret workings. These men, who only a moment before made free with my reputation, now gave me as respectable a demonstration of their craft as if I might have been the primary projector in some great printing scheme. They bent over the oaken frame, like maids stripping a bed, and unfolded a jointed frame to show me the nest of type inside. “What language is this?” I asked, looking at the letters, strangely familiar but meaningless.

  The men smiled their superiority at me, and Mr. Palmer told me it was English, a page of the Bible no less. “And here is the first part of the answer to your question,” he said, “for this text is backwards. With much practice, a man can learn to read it.”

  But, sister, you will remember that lettering backwards has ever been a fault with me, and now I could make out the text of Proverbs 31:26 with ease. “She opens her mouth with wisdom and the teaching of kindness is on her tongue,” I read aloud. “What excellent work you do here, Mr. Palmer. I commend you.”

  “Thank you,” said Mr. Palmer, staring at me a little longer than was strictly polite.

  At his command, the men took up two padded sticks and spread ink over the lead letters, sitting backwards in their mount. Then they placed a damp sheet of paper into the frame, folded the outer frame to cover the inner and let both down to cover the type. This folded device they shot forward beneath the press itself, which rose up at the end, rather like the headboard of a bed. Connected to the press was a long bar, which one of the men pulled, the muscles of his arms tightening in a manner that somewhat reconciled me to the existence of printers. Then he released the press, and both men moved the frame device forward. Now the second man pulled hard on the bar, bringing the press down with inexorable pressure over a new part of the enfolded page. When they returned the whole to its starting position and opened the folded frames, they could peel back a fully printed sheet. There I saw the verses from Proverbs printed in neat columns. With a bow, Mr. Palmer presented this to me. “For correction with proof rather than reproof is itself a kindness,” he said, and that, Sadie, was rather more than I deserved.

  A moment later he had to take the sheet from me again, for it proved still wet, the ink coming off on my fingers. Mr. Palmer lowered a thin rod suspended by ropes from the beams and added my sheet to a row of others to dry. “Is your mistress still by the Bell Inn?” he asked, and when I nodded, he added, “I shall send it to you there.” And then we moved away from the printing press, Mr. Palmer giving his men the command to return to work.

  Sister, the rest of the time he and I spoke, those men laboured, placing, folding, pressing, shifting, pressing, unfolding, and hanging. They completed the row of wet prints that followed mine, and they filled the length of the room again. At the other press, a second team exerted themselves, also filling the bright air with drying pages. The room grew fragrant with the tang of ink, the fibrous smell of wet paper, and the sweat of working-men. On the walls were hung examples of their work: printed puffs for patent medications, the frontispieces of sermons, an illustrated handbill for Talbot’s menagerie. Under the windows sat long sloped tables, some set with trays and others covered with wooden compartments full of type. Everywhere I looked I saw leaden letters.

  Mr. Palmer took me aside and said, “And now I might fully answer your question regarding the intentions of the ingenious Mr. Hogarth.” He took up my Harlot and opened to the page where Justice Gonson enters.

  Pointing at it, he said, “I am sorry to tell you that a worse set of prints I have yet to see. These are certainly not Mr. Hogarth’s work, for if he is not as elegant as a Frenchman, he still ’graves with an accomplished line. I know wherein I speak, for I print copperplate engravings in my shop also, and the process is the same. For this reason, my dear, I am certain, your prints are mere copies: crude plates drawn after Mr. Hogarth’s own prints, but never touched by his genius.”

  “A print is not a copy?”

  “Of a sort, but Mr. Hogarth’s prints are also originals. Your Harlot is engraved from his, but what is engraved,” Mr. Palmer said, holding out his hands, “is ever reversed when printed,” and he slapped one with the other.

  “And so Mr. Hogarth means for Justice Gonson to enter from the right,” said I.

  Mr. Palmer nodded. “And fix his eyes upwards, away from the Harlot.”

  I looked at my print, and through the inky fog, I could see the lift of the Justice’s chin showing the direction of his gaze.
<
br />   “What does he see?” I asked, unable to make out for myself.

  “Well,” said Mr. Palmer, “some say he’s staring at the witches’ hat and broom hung above the bed.”

  “Broom?” said I. Sister, can anyone be so innocent? My Harlot’s verse stated very bluntly that that collection of twigs was no broom: “Near there, a Rod of Birch was hang’d/With which full many a Bum was banged.” But I did not recite these lines to good Mr. Palmer.

  “Well,” he said, misunderstanding my exclamation, “even a harlot must sometimes do housework. But others think perhaps the Justice gazes at the paintings on the wall—an image of Abraham putting Isaac to the knife—which causes him to consider his own actions.”

  “I see no such image.”

  Mr. Palmer’s finger tapped on the upper corner of my print. “It is this area of undistinguished murk.”

  I squinted hard at nothing, disappointed to miss this improving detail. “What do I see here?” said I, observing a pale shape perched on the taut roof of the bed-curtains.

  Still with his finger on the print, Mr. Palmer said, “It is a wig box above the bed belonging to one James Dalton, highwayman.”

  I bent closer. “I have found out Dalton’s name for myself, for it is clearly writ here,” said I, showing Mr. Palmer the sloping script upon the box. I felt pleased that my print gave up some secrets. I looked again. “Why, I believe the Justice sees it too, for he fixes his gaze upwards, as if to spy the evidence atop the curtain.”