One Hot Summer

by Rosemary Ashton

  The sky was blue, the sun was bright,

  Gaily the steamer ploughed her way,

  Freighted with hearts as blithe and light

  As schoolboys’ on a holiday.

  With Youth (as Stanley) at the prow,

  Pleasure (as Bulwer) at the helm,

  At top of flood the waves they plough

  That lately threatened to overwhelm.

  On to their annual whitebait lark,

  By Wapping’s odour-breathing shore …

  The steamer dashed with Ministères

  (That little thought this day to see),

  Triumphant o’er the Session’s fears,

  Merry of mood and blithe of blee.

  The politicians chat together as they go along the river, discussing topics such as Newdegate’s intransigent opposition to allowing Rothschild to take his seat, the Liberals as led by ‘Pam, so bravely kept at bay’, and the unpopular Board of Works. They cheerfully approach Greenwich, with its famous hospital, when they see a sudden apparition:

  So still with joke, and jibe, and jeer,

  The Ministers the way beguiled,

  Till Stanley’s brow grew less severe,

  And e’en sardonic Dizzy smiled.

  And now the Isle of Dogs was past,

  And the Trafalgar rose to view,

  When suddenly a cloud was cast,

  That shut the Hospital from view.

  (The Trafalgar was a Royal Navy ship launched at Woolwich Dockyard in 1841.)

  And from the cloud a perfume rose,

  That might be smelt but never sung;

  And every member to his nose,

  The guardian bandana flung;

  Slowly the cloud took form, and slow

  The perfume to a centre grew,

  And on the deck before them, lo!

  A grisly form appeared to view!

  A trailing robe of sludge and slime,

  Fell o’er his limbs of muddy green,

  And now and then a streak of lime

  Showed where the Board of Works had been;

  From out his mouth’s mephitic well,

  Poured fetid stench and sulphurous flames,

  And – was it sight or was it smell? –

  All there somehow knew Father Thames.

  He stood, and breathed, and sick and pale,

  The stoutest, at his breathing, grew;

  Quoth he, ‘Such visitors I hail:

  My Lords and Commons, how d’ye do?

  If any gratitude were here,

  You should have asked me to your feast;

  Of all your motley friends this year,

  Thames hath not been the last, or least.

  Who … thinned full many an awkward House!

  Who sped along the India Bill?

  Who huddled up the Jewish claims?

  … who but Father Thames?

  I lurked behind your terrace wall,

  I breathed athwart your window blind;

  Up through your chimneys I would crawl,

  Or through your air-shafts entrance find;

  Thanks most to me, the Session’s done,

  Your foes have fled; ’tis me they fear:

  Mine are the triumphs you have won –

  Yet uninvited I stand here!

  Nor this the worst – small charm for me

  In whitebait, or in Moselle cup –

  But back to Thwaites and Company,

  Bound hand and foot, you’ve given me up!

  The Board of Works to which I owe

  The poison coursing in my veins,

  Henceforward lord it o’er my flow,

  And I must patient drink their drains!

  And you it is to them have given

  This lordship o’er my banks and bed –

  You, in whose service I have striven,

  And stunk and steamed till foemen fled!

  Yours is the scheme my course that girds

  With miles of sewer where fever lurks:

  London till now, bored by their words,

  Will be bored henceforth by their works!’153

  The eventful parliamentary session ended on 2 August with the Queen’s Speech and the ratifying of all the hard-won legislation. Parliament was prorogued until 19 October, and Disraeli wrote triumphantly to Mrs Brydges Willyams that though ‘the last month’ had been ‘one of almost supernatural labor [sic]’, it had been remarkably successful. ‘Notwithstanding all the disturbance and hostility of the early part of the Session, there has seldom been one in which a greater number of excellent measures have been passed, than the present.’154 He was off to his Buckinghamshire house at Hughenden to enjoy a rest and to consume the ‘fat buck’ Queen Victoria sent him on 4 August.155 He did not expect to have a long break, as there was much to do to prepare for ‘the next campaign’, which would not be an easy one.156 He was right. His and Derby’s attempt the following session to bring in a Reform Bill was to fail, and their all too brief spell in power would come to an end in June 1859. But not before Disraeli in particular, in the five months during which he had been able to steer various important pieces of legislation through parliament, had impressed a doubtful commentariat and public with his energy and wit.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The Aftermath of the Hot Summer

  The fallout from the Garrick Club affair

  NEITHER THACKERAY NOR YATES could let go of the petty Garrick Club quarrel. Though Thackeray professed not to care about it in his letter to his American friends the Baxters on 25 August 1858, he had already incorporated another attack on Yates and his journalist friends in the next instalment of The Virginians, which he sent to Bradbury and Evans on 5 August for publication on 1 September.1 ‘There are certain lines which must be drawn’, writes the narrator haughtily, ‘and I am only half pleased, for my part’, when young men like ‘Tom Garbage, who is an esteemed contributor to the Kennel Miscellany’, propose ‘to join fellowship as brother literary men, slap me on the back, and call me old boy, or by my Christian name’.2

  On 6 November Yates’s friend Sala reached 1 a.m. in his ‘Twice Round the Clock’ column and singled out Evans’s Supper Rooms in Covent Garden, well-known haunt of Thackeray, who had, as Sala points out, immortalised the place as the ‘Cave of Harmony’ in The Newcomes. Sala sets the scene: ‘If you wish to see the wits and the journalist men about town of the day, you must go to Evans’s about one o’clock in the morning. Then those ineffables turn out of the smoking-rooms of their clubs – clique-clubs mostly – and meet on this neutral ground to gird at one another.’3 As he had done in his picture of the fashionable club from which one might be excluded for a minor offence, Sala here slyly suggests he is afraid of being lashed out at by Thackeray: ‘I should dearly like to draw some pen-and-ink portraits for you of the wits as they sit, and drink, and smoke, at one o’clock in the morning; but I dare not … Mr Polyphemus, the novelist, not unfrequently condescends to wither mankind through his spectacles from one of the marble tables.’4

  Sala wrote to Yates on 7 November, asking, ‘Don’t you think “Mr Polyphemus” a good name for Thackeray?’ It was: as Sala well knew, Thackeray himself had introduced the man-eating giant from Homer’s Odyssey in his illustrated comic Christmas book of 1850, The Kickleburys on the Rhine.5 In one of his potboiling memoirs written in his sixties, Things I Have Seen and People I Have Known (1894), Sala recalled once more that in the Yates affair Thackeray, an ‘amiable but too sensitive man of genius’, had ‘put forth his giant’s strength to crush and ruin, socially speaking, a writer many years his junior’.6

  In the autumn of 1858 it was announced in the press that Yates was to bring a court case against the Garrick. The Morning Post obliged its readers on 17 November by going over the whole affair, quoting from Yates’s offending Town Talk article, from Thackeray’s letter to Yates and the latter’s reply, from both men’s appeals to the committee of the Garrick, and from the committee’s demand that Yates apologise to Thackeray. Now, says the paper, Yates h
as ‘instigated an action against the committee for trespass, in refusing to allow him to enter the club’. ‘This will raise the important question, as affecting the rights of members generally, whether the club had the right to expel Mr Yates or not.’ The Post noted that there would be ‘a large array of legal talent on both sides’. The attorney general, Sir Fitzroy Kelly, would act for the club, and ‘Mr Edwin James, Q.C., is to lead the case on behalf of the plaintiff’.7

  Dickens involved himself once more as soon as his long summer of readings had come to an end with the final performance in Brighton on Saturday, 13 November. He visited James a week later, then wrote to Thackeray in an attempt to mend matters:

  I find Mr Edwin James’s opinion … strong on the illegality of the Garrick proceeding. Not to complicate this note or give it a formal appearance, I forbear from copying the opinion; but I have asked to see it, and I have it, and I want to make no secret from you of a word of it …

  Can any conference be held between me, as representing Mr Yates, and an appointed friend of yours, as representing you, with the hope and purpose of some quiet accommodation of this deplorable matter, which will satisfy the feelings of all concerned?8

  The stiff and awkward tone of this, the insistence that Yates’s lawyer knew best, and the use of the disapproving word ‘deplorable’ to describe the quarrel were hardly likely to mollify Thackeray, whose antennae were alert to the slightest criticism of his behaviour. Dickens intended to help avert court action, yet he continued in a manner which was bound to make things worse. He told Thackeray what the latter already knew, namely that Yates had asked Dickens’s advice from the beginning. Making an oblique reference to the fact that his own marital troubles arose at the same time as the Garrick business, he explained that Yates had recently ‘done me a manly service I can never forget, in some private distress of mine (generally within your knowledge), and he naturally thought of me as his friend in an emergency’. ‘I told him that his article was not to be defended’, Dickens continued, ‘but I confirmed him in his opinion, that it was not reasonably possible for him to set right what was amiss, on the receipt of a letter couched in the very strong terms you had employed.’ When Thackeray appealed to the Garrick Dickens was, he said, ‘very sorry to find myself opposed to you’, but he was ‘clear that the Committee had nothing on earth to do with it’.9 Dickens finished his letter with a reiteration of his willingness to do his best in the way of mediation, though how he can have imagined he would succeed with these words is difficult to understand.

  Thackeray replied two days later, politely, of course, but making it clear that he was not going to be bullied into conceding that he had been wrong to pursue the matter. ‘I grieve to gather from your letter that you were Mr Yates’s adviser in the dispute between me and him’, he wrote disingenuously. He insisted that he had done the right thing in referring the matter to the Garrick committee. And he made it clear that he did not appreciate the implicit threat that Edwin James would wipe the floor with the Garrick’s defence. Reaching, as always, for the unwritten ‘gentlemanly’ code of practice, he said he could not conceive ‘that the Club will be frightened, by the opinion of any lawyer, out of their own sense of the justice and honour which ought to obtain among gentlemen’. He finished by signing off ‘Yours, &c., W.M. Thackeray’.10 (Yates later claimed that when Dickens showed this letter to John Forster, the latter burst out with ‘He be damned, with his “yours, &c.”!’11)

  Dickens made no reply to this, though he did send Yates both his own letter and Thackeray’s reply, with permission to print them if he wished.12 Thackeray’s hackles were raised once more. He told his correspondent John Blackwood on 2 December that ‘Edwin James says’ that Dickens ‘wrote every word of Yates’s letters … Isn’t it a noble creature?’13 On 5 December Yates served his writ on the club. Articles against Thackeray appeared in the penny papers that weekend, and he received a letter from his journalist friend Matthew Higgins warning him to ‘beware of Edwin James’ and the ‘scarifying’ he would get from him in the witness box.14 A couple of weeks later Thackeray, having sent Blackwood a copy of Dickens’s letter, expostulated about his fellow novelist’s hypocrisy and jealousy: ‘What pent up animosities and long cherished hatred doesn’t one see in the business! “There’s my rival, Stab him now, Yates” and the poor young man thrusts out his unlucky paw … Send me back the letter of the Great Moralist.’15 (Thackeray drew a sketch – which he did not publish – of ‘The Smiler with the Knife’, which showed Yates bowing politely to Thackeray, while holding a knife behind his back.16)

  Things did not quieten down for a while yet. Anny Thackeray reported to a friend towards the end of December 1858 that her father was ‘getting disgusted’, as ‘everybody’s been bullying him about his susceptibility’. She passed on Thackeray’s scorn at Dickens’s remark about Yates having done him a ‘manly service’. ‘Can’t you fancy him & his gusto over Manly Service’, she wrote, adding another piece of gossip: ‘Papa says the story is that Charley met his Father and Miss Whatsname Whatever the actress out walking on Hampstead Heath.’17 Charley had by now taken Thackeray’s side in the Yates affair, writing a short anonymous piece in Punch on 11 December replying to ‘The Lounger at the Clubs’ (Yates), who had once more attacked the so-called ‘gentlemen’ of Clubland in the Illustrated Times the previous Saturday. ‘Really, really, good Mr Lounger’, Charley wrote, ‘this is rather strong’:

  We are ready to believe that you, who, no doubt, belong to all the crack clubs of London, and move, of course, in ‘gilded saloons of fashion’, are better up in the subject than ourselves, but we must take leave at the same time to protest entirely against … the repetition of the old habits of coarse invective and abuse, which we thought had disappeared entirely from our press … Let us give you a word of advice, which our respectable old age entitles us to give such a mere boy in periodical literature, as is the Illustrated Times. Learn that coarseness is not brilliancy, that slangy vituperation is not wit … [and] that a journalist should also be a gentleman.18

  Even before this piece appeared, relations between father and son can hardly have been other than strained, since Charley annoyed his father by remaining engaged to Frederick Evans’s daughter. According to Henry Silver’s diary, Dickens found out that Charley was the author of the article, and by mid-January 1859 he had withdrawn Charley’s name from the Garrick proposal list because of it.19 Thackeray shrewdly diagnosed Dickens’s behaviour. Dickens’s ‘quarrel with his wife’ had ‘driven him almost frantic’, he told a friend, William Synge. ‘He can’t help hating me; and he can’t help not being a – you know what I daresay’ (meaning, of course, a ‘gentleman’). ‘He is now quarrelling with his son’ by ‘withdrawing the lad’s name, just as it was coming up for ballot’. ‘The poor boy is very much cast down at his father’s proceedings.’20

  With the eagerly awaited court case due to begin on Wednesday, 2 February,21 Yates attacked Thackeray once more, this time with a clever parody of Thackeray’s own comic poem ‘Ballad of Bouillabaisse’. Yates’s poem, published in the Illustrated Times on 29 January, and entitled ‘Milk and Honey, by W.M. T—k—y’, contains the following verses:

  All men alive are rogues and villains,

  All women drabs, all children cursed;

  I tell them this, and draw their shillins’

  They highest pay when treated worst.

  I sneer at every human feeling

  Which truth suggests, or good men praise;

  The tongue within my cheek concealing,

  Write myself ‘Cynic’ – for it pays!22

  Though Yates’s friend Sala congratulated him on the cleverness of these lines, he thought them ‘malevolent and their publication ill judged’. ‘Let Polyphemus alone’, he counselled. ‘A man has no right to allow his private feelings to influence his “copy”.’23

  The case never came to court, and the famous Edwin James did not get the chance to ‘make mince meat’ of Thackeray after all.24 T
he Garrick Club claimed that proceedings would have to be taken against its trustees, and since such a case would take place in the notoriously expensive Court of Chancery, Yates had to give it up. It would have cost him £200 or £300. He told a friend on 11 March that the committee had ‘got the best of me in my legal proceedings, and my only resource … has been the publication of a pamphlet’.25 This was the self-exculpatory – and in places self-pitying – Mr Thackeray, Mr Yates, and the Garrick Club, in which Yates set down all the details of the affair and his part in it. Anny Thackeray told William Synge on 6 March that ‘an abusive pamphlet’ was coming out instead of the lawsuit, and she hoped that Thackeray would leave things at that. ‘We are begging our Jupiter to keep in his thunder & not even read it & as he has taken to paying great attention to what we say lately perhaps he won’t.’26

  Thackeray does seem to have dropped it at last, though he asked a friend to lend him a copy of Yates’s pamphlet, and he defended his initial action against Yates in a semi-shamefaced letter of 12 March 1859 to Charles Kingsley, saying he felt rather sorry for him and blaming Dickens. ‘Scores of the pennyaline [sic] fraternity have written on [Yates’s] side’ and have made out that Dickens tried to be a peacemaker, when in fact he ‘dictated Yates’s letters to me’ and made him ‘go to law’.27 The newspapers had heard that Bulwer Lytton and the Irish novelist Charles Lever were to be asked to give evidence on Yates’s behalf, to prove that Yates had done no more – a lot less, in fact – in the way of attacking the work of others than Thackeray had in his unflattering parodies of their novels which appeared as ‘Punch’s Prize Novelists’ in Punch in 1847.28 Bulwer Lytton had been parodied in April 1847 in the short story ‘George de Barnwell, by Sir E.L.B.L.BB.LL.BBB.LLL., Bart’ – Rosina would have appreciated the joke on the name – which opens pretentiously, ‘In the Morning of Life the Truthful wooed the Beautiful and their offspring was Love.’ Disraeli, too, got the treatment in ‘Codlingsby, by D. Shrewsberry, Esq.’, which played on the title of Disraeli’s ‘Young England’ novel Coningsby (1844), and exaggerated Disraeli’s already elaborate romanticising of Judaism.29 Thackeray too had heard that Bulwer Lytton was to be invited to give evidence; he told Blackwood in December 1858 that he believed Dickens was, as usual, involved. Bulwer Lytton, he said, had been ‘applied to (by my indefatigably kind friend Dickens I suppose)’.30