The Pattern in the Carpet: A Personal History With Jigsaws

by Margaret Drabble

  'A Heap of confusion' is a good phrase.

  The second Earl Spencer, incidentally, remained a credit to his enlightened education; although born into a fast-living family where card games and gambling were far more popular than books, he became a dedicated bibliophile and collected one of the greatest private libraries in Europe.

  Geography, as Cowper here notes, was often an overlooked or despised element in the school curriculum and not taken very seriously. My father thought geography 'a soft option' and teased my son Joe for pursuing it at school, but I enjoyed trying to answer Joe's O-level questions with him. ( Joe Swift's solution to global population control was appropriately Swiftian: shoot the babies.) But many have equally plausibly maintained that maps are more fun for little children than algebra, Greek and Latin. Thomas Fuller dedicated the first book of his popular A Pisgah-Sight of Palestine (1650) to 'The Right Honourable Esme Stuart, Earl of March and Darnley, Lord Leighton, etc' whose 'tender months' at that point had not yet completed a year, but who, Fuller trusts, might in due course grow into the book, as he would grow into his clothes. And meanwhile, Fuller hoped, he might 'take pleasure in the maps which are here presented'.

  The fifth book of A Pisgah-Sight is dedicated to another titled infant, the Right Honourable John Lord Burghley, and Fuller again fondly mentions his maps, explaining that he is hoping to plant a ripening nursery of patrons. And his maps of the Holy Land are indeed quaint and wonderful, full of whales, ships, mountains, camels, ravens, angels, cities and soldiers, with a splendid depiction of the dark Dead Sea (MARE MORTUUM, MARE SALSUM, MARE ASPHALTITIS) and the blazing towers of Sodom, Gomorrah, Zeboim and Admah. Mount Pisgah itself is proudly shown, with Moses, aged 120 years, standing aloft upon it and surveying the whole land of Canaan. (Fuller slyly remarks that Moses could see Palestine so well because he had a clear view from the top and enjoyed miraculous eyesight for his age.)

  These maps are far more friendly and entertaining than the notorious illustrations in that other staple of children's pre-Enlightenment Sabbath reading, Foxe's Book of Martyrs. John Day's woodcuts for the Book of Martyrs, which were recut and recopied and reprinted for three hundred years, terrified generations with their graphic portrayals of tortures, whereas seventeenth-century pictorial maps of the counties of England, decorated with heraldry and scenery, offered harmless, peaceable and instructive visual pleasure. Fuller's Palestine was a playful and entertaining land, full of miniature wonders and, although Biblical, happily free from religious gloom and exhortation.

  Children used to enjoy inventing imaginary countries, before they had virtual worlds to play with. Fanny Burney's nephew created a land called Protocol, and she entertained the daughters of George III with stories of this place. Thomas Malkin, a child prodigy who died in 1802 at the age of six, also invented an imaginary kingdom, of which we have a fuller record: he created a detailed map of the island of Allestone, together with an account of its history, treaties, kings, customs and folklore. We know about Thomas through a memoir written by his father, Benjamin Heath Malkin, schoolmaster, antiquarian and topographer, which records the brief life and death of this remarkable infant. A Father's Memoirs of his Child is distinguished by a frontispiece designed by Malkin's friend William Blake, and includes a memoir of Blake as well as a generous selection of his poems, made available to a wider public for the first time – another signpost in the dawning recognition of the singular state of infancy. Malkin describes his son's precocious achievements and quotes at length from his letters. The child, he writes, has a 'most happy art in copying maps' and 'a remarkable habit of inventing little landscapes ... cutting up waste paper into squares and drawings.'

  Like the young Brontës and, many years later, the adult J. R. R. Tolkien, Tom created a well-charted realm. He also played with ready-made, dissected maps in the Spilsbury fashion. In one of his letters, dated 18 January 1799, little Thomas writes: 'I have a new map. Thomas can put it together and when Mama takes some counties out Tom can tell what they are.' His father assures the reader that 'His dissected maps, from which he had very early acquired his knowledge of geography, afforded him pleasure and interest to the last. He had some Counties of England in his hands, reading the names of the towns in them, within half an hour of his dissolution.' However, he also, interestingly, tells us that 'he ceased to talk of the imaginary country' during his illness. The father was relieved that the child's brain, dissected after his death, showed no sign of abnormality. He had feared that his son had died of some form of brain fever, and clearly worried that he had been subjected to excessive mental stimulation.

  This is a very sad story. The death of children was commonplace at this period, but it is still a sad story. And, sadly, we don't have a picture of little Thomas Malkin playing with a dissected map, although we can witness him being borne up to heaven by one of Blake's angels. But we can more happily see Masters Thomas and John Quicke at work on a map of Europe in a pastel portrait by William Hoare, dated c.1770, which may be the earliest image of a jigsaw in art. In this newly post-Locke, family-oriented age, portraits of children engaged in natural activities were popular. Hoare, a Bath-based artist, specialized in portraits of young people, and drew his own daughter in many informal poses. In this portrait of the Quicke children, he portrays the younger boy holding the stubby shape of Italy in his hand and looking up to his brother for approval or affirmation. Family groups of this period often show educational scenes, with parents reading to children, or children holding books or sketching, with books strewn casually (but not carelessly) upon the nursery or drawing room floor. Little dogs remained the most favoured accessory (Hoare painted a fluffy little girl in a fluffy white dress holding a fluffy little white dog, where the substance of animal and child merge in a worrying manner) but the portrayal of pursuits that illustrated parental concern and interaction also became popular. Some of these ostentatiously affectionate groupings may protest a little too much, but the Quicke children playing quietly with their map, without visible adult interference, seem to me to be happy with their task.

  (Can it be possible that little Miss Hoare was the artist who later drew the obscene cartoon of 'A modern Venus', which survives in Horace Walpole's collection? This is reproduced in Diana Donald's The Age of Caricature (New Haven, 1996) where she describes it as 'a playful visualisation of the physique suggested by the "pouter pigeon" fashion of the 1780s, with its puffed out bosom and rump.' I disagree. I find it more repulsive than playful.)

  Maria Edgeworth, one of the most influential of educational theorists after Locke, endorses the use of the jigsaw, manifesting as she does so her characteristic attention to closely observed details of child behaviour, worthy of a Tavistock-trained child psychotherapist. In Practical Education (1798), written with her father Richard Lovell Edgeworth, she observes:

  Whoever has watched children putting together a dissected map, must have been amused by the trial between Wit and Judgement. The child who quickly perceives resemblances catches instantly at the first bit of the wooden map, that has a single hook or hollow that seems likely to answer his purpose; he makes perhaps twenty different trials before he hits upon the right; whilst the wary youth, who has been accustomed to observe differences, cautiously examines with his eye the whole outline before his hand begins to move; and, having exactly compared the two indentures, he joins them with sober confidence, more proud of never disgracing his judgement by a fruitless attempt, than ambitious of rapid success. He is slow, but sure, and wins the day.

  Auntie Phyl and I were much given to fruitless attempts, and not inclined to sober confidence; it was more fun that way. We were keener on resemblances than differences.

  Maria Edgeworth also introduces puzzle maps into her Early Lessons (1801), where she provides a lively description of young Frank's struggle to reassemble his older brother Henry's dissected maps, and his loss of the 'little crooked country of Middlesex', for which he searches everywhere: 'under the tables – under the chairs – upon the sof
a – under the cushions of the sofa – under the carpet – everywhere he could think of'. He is happy when at last he finds it, on a table where it had been concealed by a large book of prints, and the next morning he succeeds in hooking every county into its right place: 'He was much pleased to see the whole map fitted together – "Look at it, dear mama," said he, "you cannot see the joining, it fits so nicely."

  Not to see the joining – that is satisfying.

  The 'lost county' is a recurrent motif in jigsaw lore. It is the little land of lost content.

  XX

  In an age when theories of education were so widely discussed, the provision of dissected maps is a sure marker of progressive teaching methods. And they were found in the highest of social circles. Lady Charlotte Finch (1725–1813), an aristocrat with connections as grand as those of the Spencers, used maps to instruct her charges, who included two future kings, George IV and William IV She was governess to the fifteen children of George III, and is credited with supervising what has been described a progressive nursery, which encouraged child-centred learning. Queen Charlotte herself took an exceptionally close interest in her children's education, read Rousseau and Fénelon, and is said to have kept a volume by Locke on her bedside table.

  Zoffany's sumptuous family portrait of Queen Charlotte with her Two Eldest Sons (c.1764–5) is a speaking tableau of childhood, with multiple messages: it shows the elegantly robed and jewelled young queen in her dressing room, with the two-year-old Prince of Wales and his one-year-old brother Frederick grouped around her in colourful fancy dress, both somewhat dwarfed by an enormous but docile boar-hound. The Prince of Wales is dressed, warrior-like, as Telemachus, son of Ulysses and Penelope, and Frederick as a tiny Turk with a pretty, silvery turban and a diminutive gown of blue and gold. The mood is playful but imperious, for the room is full of the rich spoils of trade and Empire: a richly patterned Turkish carpet, a French clock, a lavish display of Flanders lace, and life-size lacquered Chinese mandarin figures standing on either side of a tall gilt-framed mirror. On the far left of the painting, we may see on the palace lawn, through the gorgeously draped window, a solitary flamingo, representing far-flung lands and voyages, and on the far right, reflected in a mirror, discreetly attentive, the profile of a woman who is taken by some to be Lady Charlotte Finch, representing the world of learning.

  It was Lady Charlotte who ordered the fancy-dress outfits for the little princes, as she recorded on 6 September 1764. Dressing children in historical costume was popular at this period, as Reynolds' child portraits bear witness; little boys were immortalized in the garb of Jupiter, Hannibal, Bacchus and Henry VIII, images that curiously combine playfulness with pathos and an ominous sense of destiny. Zoffany's little princes and Reynolds' heroic children provide a striking contrast with Hoare's painting of the Quicke brothers, who are shown fair and square, without parody, as themselves, engaged in a proper children's activity, not aping the aspirations of adults or providing a sly moral for the superior viewer. The Quicke portrait, like Chardin's portraits of children playing the goose game or solemnly absorbed with knucklebones, or shuttlecocks, or toy drums, or windmills, shows respect.

  The geographical allusions of Zoffany's work remind us that geography and dissected maps were of more than academic interest to kings and princes. George III was to see the maps of the Americas redrawn, and his lavish embassy to China under Lord Macartney in 1792–4 was rebuffed. It was important for heirs to the throne to be able to locate their plantations, their colonies and the empires of their rivals.

  Lady Charlotte's equipment for teaching geography included, as well as the more usual globes, two elegant mahogany cabinets, one with thirteen shallow drawers, the other with three deeper drawers, furnished with brass locks and handles, perhaps designed for travelling between the royal residences in and around London. They contained several maps, two by Spilsbury, and one of North America from a printed plate from the Atlas méthodique of Jean Palairet. Across a vast tract of the north-west of the map of America are inscribed the words 'Partie Inconnue'. Jill Shefrin has written a monograph on these cabinets, their contents and Lady Charlotte's teaching methods, engagingly titled Such Constant Affectionate Care, which gives due prominence to Spilsbury's invention. These cabinets are the first though not the last example of royal patronage of the puzzle, but it is not known (or not yet known) whether they were commissioned directly from Spilsbury by Lady Charlotte. In 2000 they were offered for sale by a private owner and spent some years in limbo with a dealer awaiting an export licence before a successful appeal was made through the Department of Culture, Media and Sport to save them for the nation. This appeal, as reported by the press, slightly overstated Lady Charlotte's accomplishments, for it claimed that she herself was the inventor of dissected maps, an attribution that has long been dismissed as false. But the value of the cabinets (they sold for £120,000) certainly bears witness to a growing interest in Spilsbury and other early jigsaws both from scholars and from collectors. In 2007 they were put on display at Kew Palace, and I am told they will travel between Kew and the Museum of Childhood at Bethnal Green.

  Kew Palace is an appropriate home for the puzzles, for the royal family used Kew as a retreat for many years, and here in various houses, palaces, lodgings and gardens the princes and princesses enjoyed fresh air, picnics, games and botanizing. Flora Fraser, in her tragicomic royal saga Princesses (2004), described Kew as 'a full-blown royal campus, which the royal children rarely left during the summer months, where servants intrigued against each other, and where tradesmen in the village that had grown up around the church on the Green vied for preferment'. Queen Charlotte's cottage ornée survives today as a tourist attraction, and Kew Palace (originally built as a merchant's residence in 1631) has been renovated to give a sense of the family life of George III, the queen and their many children. Other items on display include a 'baby house' complete with furnishings embroidered by the princesses, cut-paper silhouettes, a silver rattle and a silver inkstand, globes, musical and scientific instruments, and examples of George III's accomplished architectural drawings. The message of Kew Palace is mixed; it was a place of domesticity and safety, but it was also a place of suffering and frustration, eventually contaminated for the king by memories of bouts of illness, confusion and constraint.

  The baby house has an unusual wallpaper. Its colour is what I call turquoise, and what the experts call verditer green, and it shows a pattern of irregular amoeba-like blobs outlined in white floating against a turquoise background dotted with tiny spots in a darker shade of green. (I was complimented by the Deputy House Manager on my visit to Kew for wearing a colour-coded turquoise T-shirt, which we took to be a happy omen.) The baby house colour scheme has been picked up in the house itself. In the queen's boudoir, on the first floor, the walls are a strong clear verditer, with a Greek-key border of black and green, re-created from an early nineteenth-century fragment uncovered during restoration. The curtains are black and yellow chintz, and there are two little tables, one a green-baize card table, the other a sewing table with a work-basket, at which the queen and the princesses would spend hours on their knotting and netting. It is not a room of excessive grandeur.

  Today, the ghosts of frustration and illness have been banished to the unrestored attics, and a more positive spirit of years of domesticity, artistic endeavour and earnest education prevails. Flora Fraser's account of the childhood of the princesses gives a vivid portrait of the texture of their lives – the music, dancing and drawing lessons with a succession of governesses, the elaborately dressed theatrical tableaux, the promenades, picnics and birthdays, the conscientious acquiring of foreign languages. In the evenings they sewed, while listening to renderings of the works of Walter Scott; sewing was euphemistically known as 'working', although the objects made were mainly ornamental gifts. (Auntie Phyl and I used to say that we 'worked' at a jigsaw, and women of her generation kept their sewing things, as did the queen, in a 'work-basket'.) The poor Princess Roy
al, unlike the rest of her family, was not at all musical, hated the endless evenings of Handel ('I think that my dislike for music rather increases') and was keenly conscious of her poor ear, which restricted her skill in dancing. (My sister Helen said to me the other day that we would not have done well as princesses, as none of us had a good ear. She is right.)

  The claim that Lady Charlotte invented dissected maps and puzzles rests largely on a misleading note to this effect, of a later date, which was found with the cabinets. Nor, as it now appears, was John Spilsbury himself necessarily the inventor. He was probably the first commercial bookseller to market them, but Jill Shefrin has put forward the name of an earlier originator, Madame Jeanne-Marie Le Prince de Beaumont (1711–1780), a writer, teacher and well-known reteller of fairy stories, who entered 'cartes de géographie en bois' in the prospectus for her exclusive and expensive school in Henrietta Street, Cavendish Square, London, in an advertisement of c.1755–60. (This, alas for patriotism, would make the jigsaw in part a French invention.)

  There are several references of the period to Madame de Beaumont's 'wooden maps', including one by the well-connected court favourite Mary Delany (1700–1788), who refers to them specifically, and as early as December 1759, in a letter to her sister Anne Dewes. Mary Delany spent many evenings with the royal family and children, and was well acquainted with Lady Charlotte; the paths of Lady Charlotte and Madame de Beaumont also, according to Shefrin, 'crossed over a period of years', the former putting into practice the educational theories of the latter. Caroline Lennox, Lady Holland, also referred to these maps; writing in 1762 to her sister Emily about her son Harry, who was being educated à la Rousseau, she notes that 'he works very hard all day out of doors, which is very wholesome ... He eats quantities of fish and is so happy and pleased all day. At night we depart a little from Monsr. Rousseau's plan, for he reads fairy-tales, and learns geography on the Beaumont wooden maps; he is vastly quick at learning that or anything else.' This sounds a very pleasant regime.