p. [>] 'Princess Elizabeth is a lovely little fat ... for the purpose' Flora Fraser, ch. 2,'Growing Up', Princesses
p. [>] 'cannot be created by charters ... perish by themselves' Hugh Kingsmill, The Poisoned Crown, Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1944
p. [>] 'hauntingly still and grave ... expression and gesture' Helen Langdon, Travellers' Art Guide to Italy, Mitchell Beazley, 1984
p. [>] ' imitations fondly made. weakness, and his lovesWilliam Wordsworth, The Prelude, Book 7, 'Residence in London'
p. [>], 'a sort of existentialist mosaic ... and unpublished'
p. [>] 'An early book I tried to write ... squares of opinion and feeling' John Fowles, Wormholes, Jonathan Cape, 1988, pp. 367, xi of Preface
p. [>] 'a map of England ... towns were worked in silk' H. Winifred Sturge and Theodora Clark, The Mount School, York, J. M. Dent and Sons Ltd, 1931
p. [>] 'I satisfied my hunger ... seemed to do me good' The Prose of John Clare, ed. J. W and Anne Tibble, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1951
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Many people helped me, some wittingly and some unwittingly, with this book. Some talked or wrote to me about jigsaws and some recommended further reading.
Amongst my correspondents I thank Peter Barber, Xavier Bray, Anthony Brown, Linda Cameron, William Chislett, Beverley Cook, Alan Dein, Sebastian Edwards, Irving Finkel, Juliet Gardener, Pat Garrett, Daniel Hahn, Howard Hardiman, Roland Huntford, Toph Marshall, Simon Mason, Julian Mitchell, Charles Saumarez Smith, Jill Shefrin, Donald Sinden, Gillian Sutherland and Colin Thubron. Nicholas Tucker was helpful and encouraging in more ways than one. Michael Berry found rare books for me, and Michael Codron submitted to an interview about his jigsaw addiction, an interest to which I was alerted by Michael Frayn.
Julia Hoffbrand of the Museum of London showed me some very early dissected maps and puzzles, and directed me to Alan Dein's BBC Radio 4 programme about the Jackson Pollock Convergence jigsaw.
Treasured jigsaws were given to me by Julia Blackburn, Sindamani Bridglal, Carmen Callil, Donald and Shirley Gee, Julian Mitchell, Richard Rowson, Augusta Skidelsky, and various Swift children and grandchildren. Helen Langdon and Susan Haskins talked to me about aspects of art history, and Kenneth Uprichard of the British Museum about mosaic restoration. Hilary Dickinson, Judith Landry and Julian Mitchell listened to me patiently and came up with comments over a wide and random spectrum of interests. Ronald and Natasha Harwood described to me the pleasure of crosswords, and Valda Ondaatje the pleasure of playing bridge. Jeremy Rosenblatt and Ian Blatchford spotted news items and metaphors, and David Millett explained jigsaws and fretsaws.
Kevin Copley opened my eyes to a whole new area of speculation when he mentioned mosaics, and Tom Holland sent me off on a search for a jigsaw of the Alexander mosaic at Naples, which I never found. Alan Sillitoe talked to me about his fondness for maps, and Doris Lessing about the therapeutic uses of jigsaws. Mia Beaumont and Bernadine Bishop also offered very useful comments in this area. Simon Mason alerted me to Georges Perec's novel, Life: A User's Manual, which was the starting point for many further quests.
Joyce Bainbridge, who, with her late husband Eddie, was a lifelong friend of my aunt Phyllis Bloor, has been immensely helpful with this book. She has many memories of my grandparents' house, Bryn, and of Long Bennington, the village where they lived. She is a custodian of village history and our visits to her keep the past alive. She has treasured photographs and stories that would otherwise have been lost or forgotten.
I thank all my family for their support. My daughter Becky has shown a keen interest in doing jigsaws with me, and some of her friends have helped to assemble impossible puzzles in my absence. I would never have finished the Jackson Pollock without them. (Paula Smith has a particularly good eye.) Michael Holroyd, who has no personal interest whatsoever in this curious pastime, has watched over me tolerantly, and taken some bizarrely revealing photographs of my works in progress.
I also thank my editor Toby Mundy, for publishing this eccentric book and for sending it off in new directions during various stages of its composition, and Caroline Knight, for her encouragement and help with the text. My thanks also to my agents, Michael Sissons and the late Pat Kavanagh, who looked after me, supported me and encouraged me over many years.
An essay called 'A Day Out in Kew', which incorporates and enlarges on an episode in my research for this book, appears in Jane Austen Sings the Blues (ed. Nora Stovel, University of Alberta, 2009), which is a Festschrift in honour of Austen scholar Bruce Stovel.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY
This book, as I explain in the foreword, began as a book about jigsaws, and I read widely if randomly round this subject and the subject of children's games and literature. The most important single source was The English Jigsaw-Puzzle 1760–1890 by Linda Hannas (Wayland Publishers, 1972), a pioneer text that led me to F. R. B. Whitehouse's Table Games of Georgian and Victorian Days (Priory Press, 1951) and Chris McCann's Master Pieces: The Art History of Jigsaw Puzzles (Collector's Press, Inc., Portland, Oregon, 1998). Jill Shefrin's work in this field – 'Make it a Pleasure not a Task', Princeton University Library Chronicle, LX: 2 (Winter, 1999) and Such Constant Affectionate Care: Lady Charlotte Finch, Royal Governess and the Children of George III (Los Angeles, Cotsen Family Foundation, 2003) – has been invaluable. Shefrin's The Dartons: Publishers of Educational Aids, Pastimes & Juvenile Ephemera, 1787–1876. A Bibliographic Checklist. Together with a description of the Darton Archive as held by the Cotsen Children's Library, Princeton University Library & a brief history of printed teaching aids (Cotsen Occasional Press) will be published in 2009. Peter Haining's Movable Books: An Illustrated History (New English Library, 1979) colourfully illustrates an adjacent area.
The specialist literature on children's literature in English is extensive, and the key text for me was F. J. Harvey Darton's Children's Books in England (1932; third enlarged and revised edition, ed. Brian Alderson, Cambridge University Press, 1982), which in turn introduced me to his edition of The Life and Times of Mrs Sherwood (Wells Gardner, Darton, 1910) and his pseudonymous novels My Father's Son: A Faithful Record (Hodder and Stoughton, 1913) by 'W. W. Penn', and When:A Record of Transition (Chapman & Hall, 1929) by 'the late J. L. Pole'. Marjorie Moon's John Harris's Books for Youth 1801–1843 ( Five Owls Press Limited, 1976) was also useful, as was The Oxford Companion to Children's Literature (Oxford University Press, 1984) by Humphrey Carpenter and Mari Prichard. The new Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004) is a storehouse of well-researched lesser lives, including those of the Spilsbury family. The account of Robert Southey's childhood is from the first volume of The Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey, ed. C. C. Southey, 6 vols. (Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans, 1849). Information about Lindley Murray is from The Mount School, York by H. Winifred Sturge and Theodora Clark ( J. M. Dent and Sons Ltd, 1931).
Lists of games and pastimes may be found in Rabelais and in Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy (1621); and there are early descriptions of card games in Henry Peacham's The Complete Gentleman (1622). Joseph Strutt published a classic compendium titled The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England in 1801. William Hughes Willshire produced a Descriptive Catalogue of Playing and Other Cards: Playing Cards in the British Museum (1876). Catherine Perry Hargrave's A History of Playing Cards (Dover Publications Inc., 1930,1966) is a history of playing cards and their origins. Thomas Fuller's A Pisgah-Sight of Palestine (1650) is full of engaging maps, while Victor Morgan's 'The cartographic image of "the country" in Early Modern England' ( Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series, vol. 29, 1979) explores adjacent territory. Anke te Heesen's The World in a Box: The Story of an Eighteenth Century Picture Encyclopedia (1997; trans. 2002, Chicago Press) records a singular experiment employing picture cards. Willard Fiske's Chess in Iceland (1905) is full of arcane gamesmanship.
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.
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The Pattern in the Carpet: A Personal History With Jigsaws Page 32