Dibdin endured two years of this ‘slavery’, following it with a year in Davis and Parker’s travelling circus, during which he survived a bayonet charge in Dublin, a collapsing theatre in Bristol and a coach wreck near Macclesfield. Through the intervention of Jean-Baptiste Dubois, he was also saved from drowning in the Irish Sea. A steady job like the Wells was a dream come true, and after Hughes offered him a pay rise of half a guinea a week for the same three dozen new pieces a season, Dibdin, whose aim was always to please his masters, came to London and stayed for the next nineteen and a half years.
The first night of Charles Dibdin’s regime was to be Easter Monday 1800, although the pressures of management manifested themselves in earnest long before a single thigh had been slapped when Hughes, mindful of the pregnant Maria, pulled him aside and bade him cultivate his son-in-law’s talents as best he could. Dibdin’s heart sank at the thought of pandering to a favourite, especially the son of the toxic Italian his own father had so vehemently denounced, but after watching Joe at rehearsals and making a note of ‘any peculiar whimsicality I saw in him’, he was impressed enough to consider using him as Clown. But while persuaded that Joe could hold the role on his own merits, Dibdin still had to avoid the appearance of favouritism if he wasn’t to be compromised with the rest of the company, particularly Dubois.
Things had not been going well for the Frenchman and he was in an especially touchy mood. The newspapers still carried regular praise for his talents and ‘majestic strength’, but he had been beset with problems since the death of his wife. Money eluded him, even though he had taken on extra work arranging pantomimes for the Royalty Theatre in the East End, and plans to set up a performing academy for children had failed to materialise due to the constant harassment he received at the hands of the creditors who greeted him on his return from America. There were also nagging doubts about Charles, his son, now around eleven or twelve, who had yet to demonstrate any great aptitude for the theatre and hadn’t featured on a Sadler’s Wells bill since infancy.
Dibdin understood the need for diplomacy and lighted on a plan that he hoped would please everybody. Taking the scenario of Robert Patlock’s 1751 novel, Peter Wilkins, the story of a shipwrecked mariner who discovers an island of flying people, he devised a pantomime that was part Gulliver’s Travels and part Robinson Crusoe in which all the major characters would be doubled: two Harlequins, two Pantaloons and, of course, two Clowns. The solution was ideal: Hughes would be pleased to see Joe take centre stage, while Dubois would retain his rightful place. Best of all, he would raise the curtain on his tenure at the Wells with an innovation that would place his name squarely before the London public.
Further to mark its departure from the regular harlequinade (and, no doubt, to cajole Dubois into going along with it on account of its novelty), Dibdin decided to deck the clowns in costumes that were totally new, ‘Dresses’, he said, that were ‘more extravagant than it had been the custom for such characters to wear’, that took the form of garishly colourful doublets and breeches, symmetrically patterned with large diamonds and circles and fringed with tassels and ruffs. This was a particularly significant change, as audiences were used to seeing Clown in the tatty livery of a shiftless servant or a peasant’s long smock (à la Pierrot), a costume that had served to pin the character, albeit to an ever-fading degree, to an identifiable social origin by essentially replicating the raiment of an Elizabethan dogsbody. By contrast, Dibdin’s costume lifted the clown out of any specific context, transforming him into a stylised and inimitable archetype, a firebrand as visually striking as he was reckless and energetic. Rehearsals ran through February and March, with Dibdin hurrying to finish the scripts even as the daffodils were blooming.
Easter was an important date in the Georgian calendar, as keenly anticipated as Christmas, and the opening of the summer theatres on Easter Monday saw holiday crowds descending on the Wells in great numbers. Easter 1800 was especially wet and muddy, and the scores of lanterns hanging along the avenue looked particularly forlorn. Inside, the patrons indulged themselves with cold cuts and reached greedily for the bottles they had perched on shelves that ran across the back of the seats. Bruised and spattered riders from the annual Epping Hunt applauded each other for surviving the morning’s stag chase, a rather ridiculous jaunt for grocers and aldermen, who puffed away on old nags and carthorses before saluting their heroics with gallons of beer. Up in the gallery, a fat man named Wren sold refreshments with the booming cry, ‘Come, ladies, give your minds to drinking,’ while a group of laughing sailors tried to pull apart a couple of brawling women who had taken his advice too freely.
If Joe had peeped nervously from behind the curtain as he stretched his hamstrings and chalked his feet, he would have noticed something very different in the fashions of that year’s crowd. Trousers and wide-brims were replacing breeches and tricorn hats, and men were more likely to be carrying umbrellas at their sides than swords. Most significantly of all, their cheerful faces were almost entirely unadorned by wigs. Pitt’s tax on wig powder had set them out of fashion, and for the first time in many of their lives, men and women showed their real hair in public, like French citoyens.
The overture brought some semblance of hush to the house, and as the actors took a deep breath and swallowed their nerves, the curtain rose on Dibdin’s first season as stage manager of Sadler’s Wells. The first piece was a ‘musical bagatelle’, called Old Fools, or Love’s Stratagem, that went down well enough, but Richer’s rope-dance was more in keeping with the holiday mood. As clown-to-the-rope, Dubois amply demonstrated why he had been London’s premier clown for twelve years by dancing a reel while balancing three spinning caps on his head. Next came a pantomime ballet called Filial Love, or the Double Marriage, by which time Joe was already in his first costume of the evening, the tattered kilt of an ancient Briton for his role in a ‘splendid historical ballet of action’ based on the battles of Boadicea. Swordplay and acrobatics kept his mind off the impending pantomime, and all went smoothly until Boadicea delivered a rousing speech: ‘If your breasts conceal one coward care,’ she told her troops, ‘I’ll go alone!’ A fracas broke out in the gallery, and as the assembled Iceni turned their heads to squint through the cigar smoke, they saw a sailor leap over the balcony and scurry down the boxes. ‘I’ll be damned if you do!’ he shouted. ‘Here, Jack! Let’s go, and we’ll show ’em as tight work as we did under his honour Admiral Nelson!’ Peals of cheering and shouts of ‘God Save the King’ held up the show for several minutes as the enthusiast was helped back to his seat.
Boadicea finished and a ‘grand allegorical transition’ was displayed, a rousing pageant portraying the history of Britain from Roman times to the present, followed by comic songs by Mrs Mather and the new singer, Jew Davis, who quickly established himself as a maverick scene-stealer, with the suggestive looks and insinuating faces he used to underscore the lyrics of ‘The King’s Picture’. When the songs finished, the curtain fell. Wren hawked more drinks and the boozy hubbub swelled as the carpenters put the scenery in place for the final piece, the one they were all here to see, the new pantomime.
At last, it was time for Joe and Dubois to make their entrance. At first the audience weren’t sure what to make of these oddly attired figures, but once they’d announced themselves as Guzzle the drinking Clown, and Gobble the eating Clown, and taken their corners in a gluttonous duel to see who could consume the most beer and sausages, they started to roar. Dubois grew fatter and more flatulent, Joe drunker and more incoherent as the contest wore on until, fully victorious over abstemious Lent, the Clowns sang a mock Italian aria, Joe accompanying Dubois on a salt shaker, and Dubois accompanying himself with belches.
After this, the clowns momentarily retired, allowing Mary Dibdin (née Bates) to sing a ballad dressed as a female volunteer. As the moral equivalent of an intermission, she received a lukewarm reception (the only kind she ever got at the Wells), before the harlequinade resumed in earnest and Joe and Dubo
is joined with the twin Pantaloons in frenetic pursuit of the elusive lovers, Harlequin and Columbine.
Dibdin had been sure to stock Peter Wilkins with the three essential ingredients of the genre, ‘magic, quickness and variety’, packing the harlequinade with inventive transformations. A number of these tricks, constructed by the scene painter, ‘Little Bob’ Andrews (‘a giant in the Art’), were helpfully catalogued by the reviewer of The Times, who noted, ‘a Taylor’s box changing to a basket of cabbages, and a cabbage changing again to a basket of rags, a drum to a Temple of Harmony, a box of Quack pills to a basket of ducks, and one of the pills to a single duck’, which, it added, ‘is a most extraordinary piece of mechanism’. The duck, apparently a clockwork automaton built to ‘the full size of life, with all its motions, &c.’, was so impressive that it became the centrepiece of a second Times review that came out four days later. ‘Had such a thing been projected in the old days of superstition,’ concluded the reviewer, ‘the inventor would have been publicly burnt for dealing with the Devil.’
Not all the changes were quite so flawless. During the performance, Dibdin noticed that one of the shutters on the Grave Trap – the long, rectangular trapdoor in the middle of the stage – was not properly closed. Rushing from the wings to set it right, he fell through it and was only saved from breaking his back when his elbows jammed in the narrow space.
The opening night of Peter Wilkins was a triumph, and by the end of the first week the show had become so popular that the boxes at Sadler’s Wells were filled with ‘Nobility of the first rank’, including the Lord Chancellor, Baron Loughborough, who ‘applauded unanimously’. News of the new costumes had also spread among the clown fraternity, who were eager to weigh the changes for themselves. From the stage, Joe and Dubois might have spotted John Follet, in from Covent Garden and trying to look inconspicuous, or perhaps John Porter and Montgomery, clowns to the horse, whom Dubois knew from the Royal Circus. From Astley’s came Joe’s brother-in-law, Lascelles Williamson, along with Madame Mercerot, William West and Jean-Baptiste Laurent, all of whom had been apprentices of the Signor. If they were in any doubt, the laughter and applause spoke for themselves.
It was the first time Joe had played Clown without being either understudy or stand-in, and he’d proved himself Dubois’s equal, if not his better. The difference in their styles was striking. While Dubois ‘clowned’, digging into a seemingly endless bag of tricks and showing off a vast array of skills, the effect was studied and artificial, his fabled versatility evidence that this was just another type of performance among many. Joe, on the other hand, seemed to draw the audience into believing in the essential comedic qualities of the man. No doubt the new costumes worked in his favour, as while Dubois seemed a little uncomfortable in the unfamiliar attire, Joe was present at the birth of a new and hilarious creation. The audience leapt on the association. Eager in their pursuit of unmediated and sincere experiences, Romantic audiences rejected the studied histrionics of previous generations, and were hungry to acclaim raw and unaffected talents, people who seemed not to act their roles but to live them. In Joseph Grimaldi they had found a natural. This was certainly Charles Dibdin’s perception:
For as Clown and singer of Clown’s Songs, exclusive of his excellence in serious pantomime – I despair of ‘Looking on his like again’ – I never saw anyone equal to him – there was so much mind in everything he did. It was said of Garrick, that, when he played a Drunken man, he was ‘All over drunk’ – Grimaldi was ‘all over clown’.
Joe was twenty-one years old, happily married, and had just realised his dearest wish, something he had prepared for since infancy, and surely the most significant moment of his life. Curious, then, that the Memoirs should contain absolutely no mention of Peter Wilkins or his Sadler’s Wells début as Clown. Perhaps the many thrills and challenges he encountered during the season of 1800 were eclipsed by the tragedy that shortly followed.
Maria’s pregnancy had been difficult. It had been a hot summer and she had done herself no favours by dancing in a ballet for the benefit of Signora Bossi del Caro at Drury Lane in early June and celebrating the marriage of Jack Bologna and Harriet Barnewell in the same week. Yet by autumn she had reached full term and the couple were filled with nerves and anticipation at the prospect of their baby’s arrival. Then on 18 October, the feast of St Luke, patron saint of physicians, Joe was called home from a rehearsal at Drury Lane with the news that Maria had gone into labour. He covered the ground as quickly as he always did, but when he arrived at Penton Place and bounded up the stairs, instead of finding Maria and the midwife he expected, he found his brother-in-law Richard weeping over her lifeless body. Childbirth had claimed another victim: of all the young marriages that ended at this period, seventy-five per cent were caused by the death of the wife.
Maria had known her life was in danger, and though she insulated her husband from her fears, her pocketbook was found to contain instructions for her burial, and a self-penned verse she wished to have inscribed upon her headstone, a naïve, though sincerely felt, meditation on the brevity of life. Conscious of her husband’s delicate sensibility, she had made Richard pledge to care for him. Her last words had been ‘poor Joe’. She was buried in the Hughes family vault in St James’s, Clerkenwell, aged twenty-five, the third daughter her father had lost.
Grief sent Joe temporarily insane. He wept bitterly for the cruel fortune that had destroyed his family in one stroke while sparing him to feel the full brunt of the pain. Convinced he would make an attempt on his own life, Richard kept a constant vigil as Joe closed himself off to everything but his mourning, barely talking to a soul.
Somehow, Joe managed to report to Drury Lane, possibly hoping to find solace in his work. Kemble, inattentive to the private life of a junior performer, cast him as the Second Gravedigger in Hamlet. ‘Make her grave/straight,’ said Joe, staring blankly across rows of candlelit faces, ‘The crowner hath sat on her, and finds it /Christian burial.’ Maria had been dead for only two days. The absurdity of life had been fully revealed.
PART TWO
[1800–1810]
5
THE MAGIC OF MONA
Ay, in the very temple of Delight
Veil’d Melancholy has her Sovran shrine,
Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue
Can burst Joy’s grape against his palate fine;
His soul shall taste the sadness of her might,
And be among her cloudy trophies hung.
John Keats, ‘Ode to Melancholy’ (1819)
JOE MOVED GINGERLY TO the edge of the roof and, carefully lifting his hands, released a bird into the reddening sky, watching it bank and complete a full circle before losing it against the rooftops. Though the bird was gone, his eyes remained fixed. Care had lined his face, drawing dark circles around his eyes, etching his open features into an expression of sad passivity. Snatches of song wafted in and out of windows as the dutiful girls of Clerkenwell practised at their spinets, their notes mixing with the squeak of the water engine being cranked by the prisoners of Coldbath gaol directly across the road. From downstairs came the clatter of busy plates. Any moment, Rebecca would call him down and patiently shepherd him back into the daily bustle with food and the chatter she kept deliberately light. These days, he left the roof only reluctantly.
It was almost twelve months since Maria had died. There had been an intense period of grieving in which he felt he was losing his mind, after which he’d been unable to spend another night at Penton Place. Rebecca had moved them both across Spa Fields to Clerkenwell and a house at 4 Baynes Row, where his first coherent thought had been for his pigeons; he had built a dormer to house sixty of them.
Stepping back, he winced. His foot was wrapped in a thick bandage, and where it stopped at the ankle, an angry streak of burnt skin leapt up his shin. Slowly, he limped down the stairs to find the table set and his things straightened. As Rebecca embarked on another harmless disquisition, a young woma
n appeared from the kitchen, flushed from the heat. She smiled but didn’t speak. Her name was Mary Bristow, a member of the Drury Lane chorus descended from a large theatrical family of unremarkable talents. She had been introduced to Joe the previous December when he was apt to go missing for days at a time, sending his friends frantically searching until they found him wandering by the New River or in the meadows behind Pentonville. Moved by the depth of his anguish, Mary Bristow had offered her friendship, encouraged by Rebecca, who was powerless to help her son. But Joe, barely present in a room full of people, had been too weak and distracted to notice her regular acts of kindness until almost a month ago when she had presented herself as his nurse.
It had been a stupid accident. Appearing in The Great Devil, one of Charles Dibdin’s ‘serio-comic spectacles’, based on the current news of a gang of banditti terrorising Genoa, Joe had changed costume nineteen times before emerging as Rufo the Robber, holding up a group of travellers. Intending to pull a gun from his boot and fire a blank, he had discharged it prematurely, firing the wad into his foot and setting fire to his stockings. His leg had smouldered while he finished the scene, and by the time he came off, his foot was so badly injured he had been unable to work for a month. Mary volunteered herself to his care, arriving every morning to clean and dress his wound, keep him entertained when he was in the mood to talk, and sit in respectful silence when he was not. Her patient diligence belied a growing devotion, which, for now at least, went unreciprocated. Joe was a miserable patient, his mind either on Maria, or deploring the ‘tedious’ and ‘interminable confinement’, whose enforced idleness threatened a blanket of depression even as his body craved rest.
The Pantomime Life of Joseph Grimaldi Page 11