The Pattern in the Carpet

by Margaret Drabble

  John Locke and Maria Edgeworth wrote extensively on the use of play in education, and influenced succeeding generations of pedagogues. Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (published in German in Switzerland 1944, trans. R. F. C. Hull, Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd, 1949) addressed the meaning of play, but it was the publication of L’Enfant et la vie familiale sous L’Ancien Régime by Philippe Ariès in 1960 (published in translation by Jonathan Cape in 1962 as Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life) that sparked a new interest in childhood as a subject, which expressed itself in works such as J. H. Plumb’s article, ‘Children in eighteenth-century England’ (Past and Present, May 1975), and Lawrence Stone’s The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500–1800 (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1977). Many biographies of eighteenth-century figures and families now cover childhood and education in more detail than they used to do: of particular relevance to me here were Flora Fraser’s Princesses: The Six Daughters of George III (John Murray, 2004) and Stella Tillyard’s Aristocrats (Chatto & Windus, 1994). The most poignant memoir of this epoch remains Benjamin Heath Malkin’s A Father’s Memoirs of His Child (London, printed for Longman by T. Bensley, 1806), a work illustrated by William Blake, which reminds us of Blake’s role in the invention of infancy. Vic Gatrell’s City of Laughter: Sex and Satire in Eighteenth Century London (Atlantic Books, 2006) offers a contrasting and more robust panorama of London life at this period and James Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson (1791) and Ernest Campbell Mossner’s The Life of David Hume (Thomas Nelson, 1954; Clarendon Press, 1980) provide a valuable backdrop. Germaine Greer’s The Obstacle Race (1979) is a treasure house of information about women’s lives and art.

  A detour into art history via a jigsaw puzzle of Brueghel’s Kinderspieler (Children’s Games) revealed a world of theory and speculation, which included Edward Snow’s sympathetic and revealing Inside Brueghel (North Point Press, 1997), Simon Schama’s The Embarrassment of Riches (Collins, 1987), and Mary Frances Durantini’s The Child in 17th Century Dutch Painting (Bowker, 1983). Hanging the Head: Portraiture and Social Formation in Eighteenth Century England (New Haven, 1993) by Marcia Pointon was also useful in this context.

  Jigsaws took me by a different route to the works of Georges Perec and another cluster of texts. I am indebted to Simon Mason for mentioning Perec in the early days of my research, for otherwise I might never have come across Perec’s jigsaw masterpiece, Life: A User’s Manual (Collins Harvill, 1978), translated by David Bellos. Bellos’s full and impressive life of Perec, Georges Perec: A Life in Words, was published by Harvill in 1993. Other sources include Perec’s novel Things (1965; trans. Bellos, Harvill, 1990) and Perec’s collection of essays, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces, edited and translated by John Sturrock (Penguin, 1997); the Oulipo Compendium, edited by Harry Mathews and Alastair Brotchie (Atlas Press, 1998, 2005); various works by Jean Baudrillard, of which the principal are Simulacra and Simulation (1981; trans. Sheila Faria Glaser, University of Michigan Press, 1994) and Revenge of the Crystal (trans. P. Foss and J. Pefanis, Pluto, 1990).

  Mosaics, suggested to me as a sideline by Kevin Copley in a taxi between the British Library and the Museum of London, have a literature of their own, as well as their own collections and museums. Works consulted include The Art of Mosaics (Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1982); Katherine Dunabin, Mosaics of the Greek and Roman World (Cambridge University Press, 1999); Peter Fischer, Mosaic: History and Technique (Thames and Hudson, 1969, 1971); Maria Fabricius Hansen, The Eloquence of Appropriation: A Prolegomena to an Understanding of Spolia in Early Christian Rome (Rome, L’Erma di Bretschneider, 2003); Anna Maria Massinelli, The Gilbert Collection: Hardstones (2000); Antero Tammisto, Birds in Mosaics: A Study on the Representation of Birds in Hellenistic and Romano-Campanian Tessellated Mosaics to the Early Augustan Age (Rome, 1997). Both Pliny the Elder and Goethe were captivated by and wrote about mosaics; for the former, I consulted both a Natural History: A Selection (Penguin, 1991), translated by John F. Healy, and Philemon Holland’s earlier version of 1601. For Goethe’s Italian Journey I have used throughout the translation by W. H. Auden and Elizabeth Mayer (Collins, 1962; Penguin, 1970). Ruth Hayden’s Mrs Delany: Her Life and Her Flowers (British Museum Press, 1980, 1982) describes Mary Delany’s floral mosaics, and Olga Raggio’s description of ceilings is to be found in The Gubbio Studiolo and its Conservation (vol. 1, published by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1999).

  The sources of the landscape jigsaw are multiple, and include classic works by W. G. Hoskins (including The Making of the English Landscape, Hodder and Stoughton, 1955), Raymond Williams, John Berger and John Barrell. I found particularly eloquent John Barrell’s The dark side of the landscape (Cambridge University Press, 1980). Matthew Johnson’s somewhat revisionist Ideas of Landscape (Blackwell, 2007) was also very stimulating. The works of John Clare have long been important to me, and Jonathan Bate’s fine John Clare: A biography (Picador, 2003) shed further light on the reasons for my interest. Clare’s vision of a pastoral childhood connects with rereadings of Georgian poets, the scattered autobiographical writings of Alison Uttley, the strangely disturbing biography of Uttley by Denis Judd (Alison Uttley: The life of a country child, Joseph, 1986). Uttley’s principal work in this context is The Country Child (Faber and Faber, 1931). Childhood and Cultural Despair: A Theme and Variations in Seventeenth-Century Literature by Leah Sinanoglou Marcus (Pittsburgh, 1978) is a compelling study reflecting on childhood and the pastoral. Raphael Samuel, in Theatre of Memory (Verso, 1994), writes about nostalgia, heritage and the reproduction industry, and Susan Stewart explores some of these themes in On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection ( Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984). The psychology of collecting led me to William James (The Principles of Psychology, vol. 2, Macmillan, 1890) and the novels of Henry James and Balzac, both of whom were fascinated by it. La Vie Étrange des Objets (1959, translated as Art on the Market, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1961) by Maurice Rheims deals with some similar material. Lady Charlotte Schreiber (1812–95), better known to many as Charlotte Guest, editor of the Mabinogion, was a celebrated collector of porcelain, glass, enamels, earthenware, playing cards and fans; she bequeathed her collections to the Victoria and Albert Museum and the British Museum. Biscuit Tins: The Art of Decorative Packaging (New Cavendish, 1979) by Michael J. Franklin, the biscuit tin expert, was one of the most colourful of the collectors’ manuals in which I browsed. A Companion to Museum Studies, ed. Sharon Macdonald (2006), has much useful information about the changing role of the museum, and includes the essays by Charles Saumarez Smith and Nick Prior from which I quote.

  I have cited various mentions of jigsaws in fiction, but was unable to find a home for some I discovered or that were offered to me. I particularly regret a reference in Israeli novelist David Grossman’s novel, Someone to Run With (2000; Bloomsbury, 2003), in which a young man in Jerusalem buys a 10,000-piece puzzle of the Swiss Alps for his family during the Gulf War, ‘to try to ease the tension of the evening hours between the shelter siren and the All Clear’. The mother gives up after three days, saying she prefers Saddam’s missiles to Swiss torture, and the others drop out over the weeks, suffering from snow blindness, but the youngest member of the family, aged seven, works on it till it is finished, a week after the war ends. This seemed to say something to me, but I never found out what it was. At least it illustrates that the assembling of jigsaws is not an exclusively English preoccupation.

  David Grossman’s son was killed in the Israel–Lebanon conflict in 2006, but that is part of another puzzle, and I don’t know what that one is either.

  ‘Darkly witty and exhilarating’

  The Times

  ‘Unique and profoundly stirring’

  Observer

 

 

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