The Pantomime Life of Joseph Grimaldi

by McConnell Scott, Andrew

  The Signor’s ubiquity was confirmed the following year when he was featured prominently in a poisonous little volume called The Children of Thespis, a survey of London celebrities by the verse satirist Anthony Pasquin. Pasquin was the pseudonym of John Williams, a dissolute and disaffected outsider who was not above using the threat of his pen as a means of coercing painters and performers into buying gifts and dinners for him and his friends, although his portrait of the Signor clearly demonstrates that he received no bribes from that quarter.* It was a toxic little ditty:

  What monster is this, who alarms the beholders,

  With Folly and Infamy perch’d on his shoulders;

  Whom hallow’d Religion is lab’ring to save,

  Ere Sin and Disease goad the wretch to his grave,

  ’Tis Grimaldi! Alas, Nature starts at the name;

  And trembles with horror, and reddens with shame!

  The poem goes on to imagine the Signor’s soul called to account in a cod-Miltonic hell filled with pasteboard allegories rearing up to denounce a man so mired in wickedness that angels weep, Justice begs to see him hanged, and Mercy, having heard his confession, involuntarily vomits.

  While devoid of literary merit, Pasquin’s fantasy of Grimaldi in Hades was exceptionally well timed, as shortly after its publication the Signor paid for his crimes in full, dying on 14 March 1788, in a room off a court in Stangate Street, Lambeth. The poet was happy to take the credit, adding a note to the second edition of The Children of Thespis that read, ‘the detested caitiff personified in this description, read his portrait, reflected and expired’. The actual cause was dropsy, a swelling of the organs and tissues brought about by frequent compression and inflammation of the joints. Giuseppe Grimaldi had survived Pasquin’s squib just as he’d survived decades of dissipation, and if anything in particular could have been said to bring on the condition, it was the handstands and pratfalls that marked his sudden adventures in clowning.

  Joe and John must have wondered if he was really gone. It wasn’t the first time they had seen their father lying dead, then suddenly springing back to life – there were his food-induced comas, and once, about a year ago, he’d decided to fake his own death. The Signor had been keen to discover if his boys really loved him or simply endured him in the hope of receiving an inheritance, and with the help of Sam the footman, he decided to put their feelings to the test, darkening the drawing-room of Little Russell Street, laying himself out on a table and covering himself with a sheet as Sam went off to break the news to the children. Whatever nauseous unease or perverse exhilaration the Signor felt at mimicking death, it was quickly forgotten the moment Joe and John came in to view the corpse. Joe, who immediately sensed that something was up, let out a long, theatrical wail. John, who saw nothing but ‘relief from flogging and books’, couldn’t hide his delight, and started singing and skipping around the table, clapping his hands. ‘You cruel boy,’ Joe reprimanded him, loudly and tearfully, ‘hadn’t you any love for your dear father?’

  ‘Don’t be such a fool,’ said John. ‘Now we can have his cuckoo-clock all to ourselves.’ The Memoirs record:

  This was more than the deceased could bear. He jumped from the bier, threw off the sheet and attacked his younger son most unmercifully; while Joe, not knowing what might be his own fate, ran and hid himself in the coal cellar, where he was discovered fast asleep some four hours afterwards by Black Sam, who carried him to his father, who had been anxiously in search of him, and by whom he was received with every demonstration of affection, as the son who truly and sincerely loved him.

  Another version of this story was passed down by the reviewer Thomas Goodwin, whose father had been the music librarian at Covent Garden. In this account, the Signor had gone missing ‘and the report quickly became current that he had fallen from the cliff at Margate’. Three or four days later, he appeared at home, but instead of finding his family in deep mourning, he found them perfectly happy and stoically resigned to their loss. Goodwin’s version also concludes with a rampage.

  This time there would be no vengeful resurrection. Giuseppe Grimaldi was quite dead, having prepared for his long-anticipated foray into the afterlife with a distinctive combination of meticulousness and malice. His will was particularly divisive, despite its desire to ‘avoid all disputes’ by forming the estate from the proceeds of a public auction of everything he possessed, including the collection of all outstanding debts for benefit tickets and monies owed ‘for the teeth’. This last point supports the insistence of the Gentleman’s Magazine that the Signor maintained his dentistry throughout his career and not just as a complement to his provincial tours. ‘His temper led him into a variety of disagreements with managers,’ it claimed, ‘on which occasions he returned to tooth-drawing as a matter of course,’ and with some success: ‘As his manners were remarkable, and his dialect ridiculous, many visited him, rather to notice his peculiarities than test his skill.’ Another obituary noted that his skills included ‘Dancing Master, Dentist, Conjurer, Clown at Sadler’s Wells, and Practitioner in Physic’, this final talent presumably acknowledging the modest celebrity of his embrocation, which was in time bottled and marketed by a Dr Chamberlain, who had a practice near the Wells.

  The sum of these various sales and collections was to be ‘put out to the best advantage in behalf’ of Mary and the boys, Joe, John and the mysterious third son, addressed with particular affection as ‘my dearly beloved William’. There was no reference whatsoever to Mary Blagden’s daughter Isabella, or to Anne Perry’s Henrietta Marguerite, or to Joe’s mother, Rebecca Brooker. Two other daughters by Mary Blagden, Margaret (now Margaret Farmer) and Catherine, were bequeathed merely ‘one shilling each for their bad behaviour’. What they had done to deserve such a rebuke is uncertain, although Pasquin had already intimated a family rift: ‘In their hate of his principles, all are agreeing,/And the fruit of his loins curse the cause of their being.’ Most probably, they had sided with their mother. (Mary Blagden herself had died when Joe was almost two. She never received her divorce, and was buried as Mrs Grimaldi.)

  The instructions for the Signor’s burial did not suffer from any kind of oversight; in fact, they omitted nothing. First, he made sure his family followed the advice of The Uncertainty of the Signs of Death, which counsels that bodies should be sent to their graves only after forty-eight hours, having had candles applied to their feet and needles inserted under their nails to guarantee death. In the end they waited seven days, just to make sure. After that, the Signor desired that Mary, as eldest daughter and most trusted child, ‘see me put into my coffin and the day that I am buried to sever my head from my body’. Mary had not the slightest inclination to decapitate her own father’s corpse, though the terms of the will were clear and even provided her with an additional five pounds to compensate her for her ‘mourning’.

  A surgeon was summoned and, turning her head away, she placed a finger gingerly on the cleaver’s handle as he bore down, making heavy going of the bone and gristle. Her father’s wishes fulfilled, Mary was to retrace the steps of one of his graveyard walks by following the body to Northampton Chapel, Exmouth Street, a stone’s throw from the Wells, and, remaining vigilant against any miracle resurrection, complete the interment by placing ‘a headstone … at the top of my grave, [at] the place where I wish to lay … as I have often showed it to her’. In fact, she was not able to have him placed exactly where he had wished, at the Pantheon between the windows, probably due to the express stipulation that the cost of the entire funeral, including his headstone, should not exceed ten pounds. Two months later, a fitting public memorial was published in the form of a souvenir print sold by J. Barry of Oxford Street. Entitled ‘Grim-All-Day-at-Breakfast’, it showed an oleaginous gargoyle toasting a crumpet and cackling over a bosomy dancer a fraction of his age.

  According to the Memoirs, the Signor’s estate came to fifteen thousand pounds, an enormous sum, given that a half-share in a patent theatre, the sole province of h
igh financiers, cost around thirty thousand. Such riches seem unlikely in light of the Signor’s many sudden and violent demands for money, combined with the fact that when he died his salary was only 16s. 8d. a day. In addition, he was frequently changing address, moving from one rented accommodation to another, more like a man trying to avoid his creditors than one who was comfortably off. The point is moot, as whatever the Signor was actually worth, Joe saw none of it, due to the actions of the executors – Tom King, a one-time manager of the Wells, who was now up to his neck in Sheridan’s mess, running the day-to-day business at Drury Lane, and Joseph Hopwood, a lace manufacturer who lived in Long Acre behind Covent Garden. King thought the world of Joe but his present responsibilities vexed him beyond all reason and he was far too harried to pay any attention to the matter of the Signor’s will. The administration of the whole thus fell on Hopwood, who was facing financial difficulties of his own and used the money to float his business. He quickly went bankrupt and fled the country, leaving Joe with nothing but ‘a broadsword and a guinea’.

  With no father to support them and their inheritance gone, the young Grimaldis were suddenly vulnerable, and their straitened circumstances immediately forced them to move into cheaper accommodation as the lodgers of Mr and Mrs Bailey, furriers, who lived in Great Wild Street at the north end of Drury Lane. As an act of charity, Mr Ford, the schoolmaster, offered to legally adopt Joe and let him continue his education. It was a generous thought, but Rebecca had to decline as her nine-year-old son was suddenly the family’s principal breadwinner. Sheridan, himself a father and partial to random acts of charity, altruistically raised Joe’s salary to twenty-five shillings a week when he heard of the Signor’s death, and also allowed Rebecca to take a dancing engagement at Sadler’s Wells, thus effectively doubling her salary in the four months the seasons overlapped.

  But for Joe it was a very different story at the Wells. His summer salary was abruptly cut from fifteen shillings a week to three, and his duties expanded to include helping the carpenters and scenemen, and other menial work. Rebecca complained, but it was that or nothing: what use was the son of a dead clown when he didn’t even have his own act, let alone the talents of the current juvenile darling of the stage, the three-year-old singer Allan Ramsay, ‘the fairy of the Wells’? It was a predicament best summarised in a disheartening press notice that confirmed Joe’s obscurity even as it fawned over Ramsay, saying, ‘We remember two or three years back a young son of Grimaldi’s who frequently entertained us in the likeness of a Monkey; but the fairy of the Wells can do more, and gives us a Song and Recitative in such correctness and execution, that … every other specimen of infantile acting is left far behind.’

  As poverty pressed in, Joe’s younger brother decided to leave home. John had always hated the theatre, and though he could be prevailed upon to earn a shilling whenever extras were required, he despised the drills that seemed always to end in a beating. John saw the Signor’s death as a longed-for manumission and a chance to fulfil his dream of going to sea. Richard Wroughton, a comedian who had taken active charge of Sadler’s Wells in 1782, had witnessed John’s dissatisfaction and kindly used his contacts (Sadler’s Wells being a perennial favourite with sailors) to secure him a place on an East Indiaman departing for the Cape. When Rebecca pointed out that they couldn’t pay for all the kit and provisions necessary for John to take up such a position, Wroughton gave him fifty pounds, saying only, ‘Mind, John, when you come to be a captain you must pay it me back again.’ Preparations were quickly concluded, but as John made his farewells and found his berth, he was dismayed to learn that his ship wouldn’t be sailing for another ten days. Impatient to get going and to put as many miles between himself and the memory of the Signor as possible, he noticed that the frigate alongside them was preparing to drop down to Gravesend with the next tide. Abandoning the kit that had been bought with Wroughton’s money, as well as most of the clothes off his back, he stripped down to his breeches and swam to the King’s vessel where he entered himself as a cabin boy under a false name. It was an ungrateful and impetuous thing to do, but John was only eight. They wouldn’t hear from him again for nearly sixteen years.

  Though the Signor’s death had enabled John to imagine a future, it left his brother at a loss. Even for all his neglect and ire, Joe still considered the Signor a ‘severe but excellent parent’. He had been his patron and tutor, the mentor who had introduced him to the thing he loved most. What was more, he was a concrete presence on which he could fix his thoughts, the living embodiment of life’s threats and promises, which, when taken away, had left him susceptible to formless fears and loathed introspection.

  Though still very young, Joe already knew what it was to feel uncomfortable in his own skin. The easy confidence he had shown in the green room came less naturally now, and he became shyer offstage, with a tendency to melancholy. This was one inheritance that couldn’t be taken from him, the spectre of depression that would only strengthen as he matured. Fortunately, he was resourceful enough to try to fend it off, and in the weeks and months that followed the Signor’s death, he busied himself, walking to his grandfather’s butcher’s shop in Parker’s Lane to cut carcasses with his cousins, or investing time in his nascent hobbies, establishing a coop of racing pigeons and beginning a collection of butterflies that would eventually grow to more than four thousand specimens. The quiet respite of these solitary activities served as its own embrocation in this season of uncertainty, and he spent long, calming hours stalking his prizes through the cornfields of Dartford and Camberwell, or searching the sky for the sight of a familiar wing.

  It was a necessary defence. Europe was on the verge of a war that would continue unabated until he was almost forty years old, and even the comfortingly institutional surroundings of the theatre were becoming increasingly unstable. Just a few months after the Signor’s death, George III suffered a bilious attack that would culminate in his first full episode of insanity. As it seemed increasingly likely that the King would be declared unfit to rule, the Whigs began an aggressive campaign to have the Prince of Wales declared Regent with a full range of monarchical powers. Realising that this would signal the death of Tory influence, the Prime Minister, William Pitt, sought to limit the terms of a Regency as strictly as possible, thus opening up a partisan battle that plunged the country into agonies of strife. With a scarcity of accurate information in the capital, London was awash with rumours and disgust at the apparent delight the Prince of Wales was taking in his father’s illness.

  These were problems that Joe could have easily avoided had not Sheridan insisted on bringing the trouble back to the theatre. Deploying his legendary opportunism, he had presented himself as the official liaison between the Whigs and the Prince of Wales, assuming the mantle of master-negotiator and gatekeeper to the Prince’s wishes, thus attaining what he’d always wanted: everyone’s attention, and a monopoly on intrigue. From that moment on, he proceeded to behave as if he were the sole person capable of delivering the nation, which naturally produced more rancour within the party than it spared. Even his dear friend and ally the Duchess of Devonshire couldn’t help, remarking that he played ‘a sly game’ and ‘cannot resist the pleasure of acting alone’, while the independent MP Sir Gilbert Eliot thought him an incorrigible old ham, writing to his wife that ‘He employs a great deal of art, with a great deal of pain to gratify, not the proper passion in such affairs, but vanity; and he deals in the most intricate plotting and under plotting, like a Spanish play.’

  As Sheridan abandoned Drury Lane in favour of hectic politicking and the avid pursuit of his own importance, November passed into a bitterly cold winter. In a frost-bitten foreshadowing of the King’s final illness twenty years later, the Thames froze from Putney to Rotherhithe, a bear was baited on the ice at Wapping, and booths were set up offering roast ox and Punch and Judy shows. Joe made his first appearance since the death of his father, playing a demon in Drury Lane’s Harlequin Junior, but it was not a hap
py return to the stage. Sheridan, ‘uncertainty personified’, as the actress Sarah Siddons had dubbed him, allowed his negligence to run on unchecked, terminally shattering the patience of his long-suffering acting manager, Tom King. Though all too familiar with his proprietor’s prolonged absences, King could no longer abide his inability to delegate the slightest responsibility and, unable to persevere, he resigned on the eve of the new season. He explained his decision in a long letter to the press, composed from the solitude of a country retreat, in which he complained of the ‘something undefined, if not undefinable’ nature of his status, along with his powerlessness ‘to approve or reject any dramatick work; the liberty of engaging, encouraging, or discharging any one performer; nor sufficient authority to command the cleaning a coat, or adding, by way of decoration, a yard of copper lace, both of which, it must be allowed, were often much wanted’.

  King’s sudden departure threw the company into disarray, and a successor was not named until two weeks into the new season when Sheridan managed to pay attention long enough to cajole his principal actor, John Philip Kemble, into overseeing daily affairs. Though generally well-organised and utterly devoted to the theatre, Kemble was pathologically unsuited to management, which favoured penny-pinching book-keepers and populists like Garrick, who had been known to say, ‘I dare not innovate for my life.’ Kemble, by contrast, thought of himself first and foremost as an artist and scholar. He studied a text ‘with metaphysical exactness’, rarely embarking upon a part unless he had first legitimised it with historical research. ‘To be critically exact’, wrote James Boaden, ‘was the greatest ambition of his life.’ Though he had been brought up in his father’s provincial troupe of travelling players, showmanship and hucksterism remained alien to him, and it pained him greatly to have to deal with petulant actresses and irascible alcoholics and their unreasonable requests. To compound matters, the harsh winter, the King’s madness and the unrest that preceded his appointment conspired to make it a particularly dreadful time to take it up: attendances were down and the company at large had taken the managerial uncertainty as an excuse for widespread truancy. Worst of all, they were singing ‘God Save the King’ up to eight times a night. At least the King’s longed-for recovery in February 1789 put paid to that, but even the heartfelt rejoicing and the sight of Sarah Siddons dressed as Britannia was not enough to defuse the feelings of disquiet that had wormed their way into the marrow of Drury Lane. Revolution had exploded in France, polarising British opinion. At the theatre, that giant screen of the cultural imagination, audiences became sensitive to the slightest political insinuation. Paranoia was all the rage, reflected in the dark anachronisms of Gothic drama and its recurring themes of haunting, tyranny and surveillance.