The Pattern in the Carpet: A Personal History With Jigsaws

by Margaret Drabble

  The talented Spilsburys, unlike the Dartons, did not found a dynasty, although as we have seen John Spilsbury's name is now firmly recorded in history (or at least in the ODNB and the records of University Challenge) and the intricacies of the Spilsbury family tree have been disentangled. The name of Darton, however, is threaded through the long history of children's literature, and is still current. William Darton (1755–1819), writer, printer, bookseller, stationer and engraver, was the son of the landlord of the Coach and Six Horses in Tottenham, Middlesex, and was apprenticed to an engraver before setting up his own business. He became a Quaker, joining the Society of Friends in 1777, and ten years later began to trade in 1787 in White Lion Alley, Birchin Lane. It was from this address that he published Engravings for teaching the elements of English history and chronology after the manner of dissected maps for teaching geography, which has a claim to be the earliest historical jigsaw puzzle. He soon moved two streets to the east to 55 Gracechurch Street, where he formed a long-lasting partnership with printer Joseph Harvey (1764–1841). Darton's son, another William Darton (1781–1854), was to pursue the same line of business in the same neighbourhood, from an address in Holborn Hill.

  Joseph Harvey, like the Dartons, was a Quaker, and the firm of Darton and Harvey, which flourished for well over a hundred years, had a strong ethical policy. It published anti-slavery literature for adults, and its many publications for children included works by two immensely successful sisters, Jane and Anne Taylor, who came from another prolific and thriving family business of writers and engravers. Anne wrote 'My Mother' (Original Poems for Infant Minds, 1804), and Jane wrote 'Twinkle, twinkle, little star' (Rhymes for the Nursery, 1806), which inspired many commercial spin-offs. Darton and Harvey also published the formidable Mrs Sherwood, whose memoirs were edited by F. J. Harvey Darton. It was William Darton Junior of Holborn Hill who invested heavily in table games and puzzles; his surviving products include an illustrated version of Anne Taylor's 'My Mother' in puzzle form, which was followed by 'My Bible', 'My Son', and 'My Grandmother'.

  The firm of Darton and Harvey also published an author whose name was very well known to me as a schoolgirl in York, though I did not know much about him. In the school garden of the Mount there was a charming, eighteenth-century, octagonal summer house with an ogee roof, which was known to us as 'the Lindley Murray', after the Pennsylvanian-born Quaker grammarian (1745–1826) who eventually settled in York, and whose best-selling English Grammar was published by Darton and Harvey in 1795. Murray had been asked to write his famous Grammar in a 'humble petition' from three friends who were teachers at the Quaker school for girls in York, then located in Trinity Lane, and now known as the Mount School. His work was immensely successful in its day, and the school continues to prosper. It continues to be, as it was then, both Quaker and single sex, and the summer house named after him stands in its garden just as it always has. A history of the school written in 1931 tells us that it was then 'the haunt of schoolgirls, who would still talk of "the Lindley Murray", meaning a summer-house and not a book', and this was true when I was there in the 1950s.

  My sisters and I were not sent to the Mount School because my parents were Quakers. They became Quakers as a result of sending us to the Mount. My mother had taught there, briefly, before her marriage, and had retained happy memories of its friendly and egalitarian spirit, so when my parents were looking for a suitable boarding school its name came up. My father thought we would have a less 'snobbish' education there than at some other well-known schools for girls, and he was right. I cannot remember precisely when he joined the Society of Friends, but it must have been at some point during the 1950s. (My mother, once a vocal, Shavian, anti-chapel atheist, took some years to follow him.) My father, unlike my mother and my aunt, had a religious temperament, and intermittently attended the local Anglican church in Sheffield (now, I believe, demolished), but he found the service unsatisfactory. He could never say the Creed, because he did not believe in most of it, and he hated some of the Old Testament and the psalms, which were intoned from the pulpit or chanted by the congregation. Passages about dashing out the brains of children caused him particular distress: I recall his response to a reading of Psalm 137, which ends: 'O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed: happy shall he be, that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us. Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.' No, he said, as we walked home down the tree-lined suburban avenue; that was not the way to behave, or the way to talk.

  I didn't mind those bits then (I do now) but in St Andrew's I developed a lasting dislike of organ music. To this day the sound of the organ sets my teeth on edge. Just as the cant of Methodist chapels and Sunday schools annoyed my mother and Arnold Bennett, so the windy, droning screech of the organ annoys me. And I didn't like the collection, either. My father would give me a threepenny bit to drop into the nasty, dusty, velvety pouch, which made me feel a hypocrite. It hadn't been mine to give, nor had it been given willingly.

  My father escaped from what he saw as the hypocrisies of the Church of England by becoming a Quaker. He was not a Pacifist, as he maintained that the Second World War was a just war and he was right to have served in it, but by and large the enlightened and rational Quaker faith suited him. It did not compel him to say he believed in the impossible, and he liked the emphasis on social service and internationalism. He became involved, as lawyer then as judge, with the Quaker prison reform agenda, about which he felt strongly. He thought it important to try to belong to a community of believers, although he was in many ways a solitary man. I don't know whether or not he believed in God, but he would certainly have liked to have been able to do so, and he behaved as though he did. I have often wished I could have asked him what he made of Hugh Kingsmill's words about the Kingdom of Heaven, which 'cannot be created by charters and constitutions nor established by arms. Those who set out for it alone will reach it together, and those who seek it in company will perish by themselves.' But I didn't discover these moving words until after his death. I was introduced to them by Michael, Kingsmill's biographer, who found them for himself in Maidenhead Public Library, and by the time Michael met my father in Amsterdam in 1982, my father was on his deathbed.

  Attending a Quaker school and being exposed to Quaker morality and literature (George Fox, William Penn, John Woolman, John Greenleaf Whittier) had an effect on me, and I have never reacted against the Quaker spirit as I did against the church organ. On the whole, I value it, and I was not surprised to discover that Quaker publishing families had been involved with the early days of juvenile literature and educational toys and puzzles, as well as with anti-slavery tracts. This was all of a piece. The vast output of the Darton family has generated a great deal of bibliographical research; descendant Lawrence Darton devoted many years to producing The Dartons: An Annotated Check-List of Children's Books Published by Two Publishing Houses 1787–1876 (2004), a volume of 729 pages, and Jill Shefrin has been working on a descriptive bibliography of everything published for children by the Dartons other than books. This is a task that could have been pursued for many decades or, indeed, in perpetuity. The objects are ephemeral, and their survival chancy, and you can never know when you have reached the end of the list. They seem designed for the employment of those who, like Georges Perec, are addicted to the endless pursuit of classification.

  Lawrence Darton was the first winner of the Harvey Darton Prize, which is awarded by the Children's Books History Society for a work 'which extends our knowledge of some aspect of British children's literature of the past'. This prize was named after his cousin F. J. Harvey Darton, a man whose career began to intrigue me more and more as I looked into this subject. F. J., or 'Fred', is an interesting character, whose modest, authoritative and kindly authorial tone gives little indication of his troubled life. While dipping into his great work Children's Books in England, I had endowed him with a Teas-with-Hovis personality; I assumed he was a kind father, an attentive grandfath
er, a benevolent Quaker patriarch. My father, the kindest of men, was known as 'Fred' to his family in his youth, and I saw Fred Harvey Darton as a man cast in the same mould, but perhaps a little more austere than my father, who was known to startle the teetotal members of his Quaker Meeting by offering them a gin and tonic on a Sunday morning in his later years when Meeting was held in his Suffolk home.

  I could not have been more wrong. Harvey Darton's life surprised me as much as the life of Alison Uttley surprised Auntie Phyl.

  I suppose I should have been alerted to Harvey Darton's true character and circumstances by a faint whiff of Grub Street desperation manifested in the length of the catalogue of his published works. He turned his hand to anything – magazine editing, museum guides, monographs, reviews, topographical works – and he also, more revealingly, published two pseudonymous novels, which give a startlingly different picture of the book trade from that portrayed in his enduring magnum opus.

  The first of these novels was titled My Father's Son: A Faithful Record by 'W. W. Penn', a novel that claims to have been 'prepared for the press by John Harvey' – both Penn and Harvey being deliberately giveaway Quaker names. Published in 1913 by Hodder & Stoughton, it has an attractive, two-tone, blue-canvas jacket with gilt lettering, and a skyline of the towers and spires of the City and the dome of St Paul's – a silhouette of the old publishing world of the Bible and the Book. It is the story of William, the spendthrift offspring of a bankrupt grandfather and a respectable, lower-middle-class, book-trade father. The family business deals in 'moral pamphlets and goody-goody children's tracts', and Will hates and despises it, but makes such a mess of his university career at Oxford and his Civil Service examinations that he is obliged to enter it.

  Office life repels him; he hates the smell of paper and disinfectant, the tedium, the impoverished illustrators and engravers, the 'priddy liddle Victorian uglinesses' of the magazine stories, the meanness, the lack of imagination, the rejection of anything original or beautiful. He hates the 'awful chromo-lithographs, with their staring reds and their glossy finish'. But the public like 'finish'; the best way to use flesh or red, maintains his father, is to use 'only a little, but just so that it hits you in the eye'.

  Harvey Darton paints a gloomy picture of the dirty London streets and alleys round Ludgate Hill and St Paul's Churchyard, a picture far removed from the romantic antiquarian world that captured many budding bibliophiles. But he writes with more feeling of St Paul's itself, and the 'astonishing exhilaration of seeing London's most glorious monument against the morning sun'.

  At Oxford the fictitious William had been encouraged to scout around for up-and-coming children's authors, and had even wondered whether he could 'divert the firm's energies to broader, more humane channels than those of the Church and childhood'. Nothing comes of these dreams and he finds himself musing, 'If only I had control of the business ... If my father were no longer alive!' At this very moment in time his father is conveniently killed by a dray horse, but William is already so deep in debt and deceit that he decides to flee the country, and ends up doing quite well growing bananas in British Honduras.

  Harvey Darton's second novel, When: a Record of Transition (Chapman & Hall, 1929), is credited to 'the late J. L. Pole', and its story is even more darkly illuminating. The novel, in memoir format, is introduced by Pole's old friend Peter Grimstone and 'edited' by his late aunt (conveniently mown down by a fast-moving car 'as she emerged from a tavern into which (no doubt) she had pursued one of the fallen women whom she gloried in rescuing'), who tells us that John Pole, an alcoholic, had died in an institution of an overdose of methylated spirits. Pole's family, like Penn's in the earlier novel, was bookish; they read over meals with a book propped up against a tumbler or a cruet, but they read 'ephemeral stuff', and his father had been a publisher of 'small magazines and cheap books for housemaids'. Pole describes himself sardonically as three persons: 'a general utility "littery-gent", a piety-monger and a licentious novelist', with a weakness for the bottle. His 'wicked' pseudonymous novels (The Goats of Hell, The Jellied Eels of Purity) were published under the pen-name of Vincent Snarsgate and were, he says, 'a safety-valve for my natural malice'. He also published under his own name 'sob-stuff' with titles like Susan's Repentance.

  Pole, like William Penn in the earlier novel, toys with entering the Civil Service after Oxford but he too ends up in Grub Street, reviewing over a thousand novels a year, taking twenty minutes on average over each, and learning all the tricks of the trade. He thinks there must have been some strain of 'literary crime' in his blood, for one of his great-uncles had written what Pole calls 'Christian Dreadfuls'. He gives a vivid account of Grub Street poverty:

  The most flippant cynic cannot treat as a humbug a man who, on a cold day, pulls up a dickey and shows you his bare skin underneath and implores you to buy his rubbishy story. The artists were even more painful, in some ways, for the great transition in book and magazine illustration was at its critical point. The wood-block, that even now underrated glory of the sixties, was virtually dead.

  Some of these illustrators held their own under the title of Bohemians, while others crept

  from office to office, even more shabby, more feeble, some hungrier, some more sodden, until at last an editor would say to a colleague 'Where's old Stickey? He hasn't been in for weeks...' In those days publishing houses possessed, through compassion, a rubbish heap of unusable or forgotten ghosts, bought out of sheer pity. I am told there is less pity now. The publishers are forming combines, and few combines have any bowels for the old.

  There's a familiar ring to that complaint.

  Pole does not reach old age, and the descriptions of his decline into alcoholism are painfully authentic. He continues to function in 'the same dreary round of aimless soaking and drab administrative efficiency', realizing that he is ruining his health, but also resolving

  in my clearer moments, to set down my memories of the War before my memory failed – as it was beginning to fail. I also began research, chiefly at the British Museum, for a large serious work I had long contemplated – a history of relations between the author, the journalist, and the publisher in England, from the earliest times. to today, with its numerous subdivisions and classifications.

  I take it that this imaginary work, The Workshop of Letters (a precursor of the subject that is now known as the History of the Book?), stands in for the Children's Books in England, which Harvey Darton heroically completed, and I also take it that Pole's description of his sudden collapse is autobiographical: 'It was in a tavern, near the B M, just after the Reading Room had closed for the day. I went there with a journalist I knew, with whom I had been discussing some small point of interest, and laid (as I thought) the foundation for a good dinner with a couple of strong whiskies. "At one stride came the dark".'

  He wakes from this fit in the mental ward of a London hospital, suffering from delirium tremens, and is taken to Broadwindsor Hall, a private asylum, to which, after various sorties and efforts at recovery, he returns to die.

  This is not the private life that, perhaps naively, one would have expected of the master scholar of children's literature, and Harvey Darton's own life mirrored his fictional creation's all too closely. He died of cirrhosis of the liver on 26 July 1936, aged fifty-seven, and his last address was a public house in Dorset. He was buried at Cerne Abbas.

  Which was the real Fred, the spendthrift alcoholic, or the tolerant and delighted observer of children's books and games, the connoisseur of woodcuts and half-tones, the amused and amusing recorder of literary taste and 'the struggle between instruction and amusement'? His fictional characters feared some kind of hereditary insanity. Perhaps descent from a clan of high-minded publishers of pretty poems for little people, jigsaws and grammars did not provide an ideal heritage, although it provided him with rich materials.

  I searched in vain for a mention of jigsaws in his two novels, but failed to find one. Children play with an abacus and make 'nasty
little mats of coloured paper' but they do not assemble Darton and Harvey jigsaws.

  And perhaps it is childish to expect that those who devote themselves to children's games and literature should be good citizens or good family members. Some are. Some are not. Some are neurotic and obsessive, and some do not like children at all. Some are perpetual children, which is not always a happy fate.

  Auntie Phyl occupied the middle ground.

  I feel, from no evidence, that Fred Harvey Darton must have liked children. He was known as a gregarious man with many friends, and a lover of country life and sports. Maybe, like J. L. Pole, he was at least two people: the outdoor man who wrote about Dorset and Kent, and the indoor man who pored over books in the British Museum and drank himself into a stupor in the tavern across the road. And maybe there was a third and disappointed Harvey Darton. His marriage to the daughter of a schoolmaster was annulled on grounds of non-consummation, a piece of information that brings to mind another scholar-eccentric, John Cowper Powys. Powys, too, was a rambler, a reader and a topographer, with strong connections with Dorset and Cerne Abbas. I wonder whether they ever met.

  Children's writers and writers about children's writing are not as Goody Two-Shoes or as Little Grey Rabbit as one might expect.

  Remarkably, Harvey Darton left a lasting legacy, and his great work, revised and updated, is still handsomely in print, as well as available on the shelves of every reference library. There must have been an inheritance of discipline that enabled him to finish this book. But the sales during his lifetime were a disappointment to him, and he felt he had, in his own modest phrase, 'let his publishers down'. He was not a boastful man. He did not like to advertise his own wares and carried this fastidiousness to an extreme. Writing about his association with the highly profitable Chatterbox and The Prize in his Cornhill article of 1932, 'The Youth of a Children's Magazine', he refrained from naming them because he thought 'it would be improper of me to advertise them against their many rivals by dwelling on their well-established fame.'