The Pantomime Life of Joseph Grimaldi

by McConnell Scott, Andrew

  Joe must have known Jefferini for a while. His real name was Jeffreys, and he kept a tobacconist’s on Joe’s old street, Garnault Place, that doubled as an illicit gambling-house. He also knew what it was to suffer for his art. Being inordinately tall, he was hampered when attempting to perform stage acrobatics and consequently suffered terrible injuries that he tried to conceal with excessive gurning, ‘facial contortions’ that, wrote E. L. Blanchard, ‘excited roars of laughter from the audience, [but] were only a vent for the tortures the poor fellow in motley suffered from internal pain consequent to his leaping and dancing’. Joe watched the show from the back of a box accompanied by his neighbour, Mr Arthur, but was duly called to the rail by the acclamation of the audience, where an improvised speech of thanks again ended in the customary flood of tears.

  This was Joe’s last visit to the Wells in any capacity. In the weeks that followed he tried unsuccessfully to sell his memoirs, abandoning the idea in March when he entered into an agreement with the journalist and playwright Thomas Egerton Wilks to ‘re-write, revise and correct’ the entire thing. Wilks took additional notes and recorded further anecdotes to adorn the piece before taking it away and promising to be finished by the end of November. It was from this work, rather than the original manuscript, that Dickens compiled the Memoirs of Joseph Grimaldi, dismissing Wilks’s text as ‘dreary twaddle’.

  Joe, however, didn’t live to see the project get that far. On the afternoon of 31 May 1837, he complained to his housekeeper, Susannah, of tightness of the chest, but was recovered enough by evening to spend a few hours in the Marquis of Cornwallis, where he appeared in good spirits. William Cooke carried him home on his back, and was bid goodnight with the words, ‘God bless you, my boy. I shall be ready for you tomorrow.’ Everything appeared as usual when Susannah put him to bed and left a candle on his table, though later that night she was woken by ‘an unusual noise, similar to loud snoring’, but when she went in to check on him, she found him fast asleep. When she went in again between five and six in the morning, however, ‘she was shocked at discovering her lamented master apparently a corpse’.

  The body was placed in a coffin in the parlour of Southampton Street while the coroner convened at Cooke’s pub. His verdict: ‘Died by the visitation of God.’

  Joe was laid to rest in the churchyard of St James’s, Pentonville, at one o’clock on the afternoon of Monday, 5 June 1837. Though the brow of Pentonville hill was choked with mourners, the funeral itself was simple, consisting of a hearse and two coaches bearing an all-male mourning party of Richard Hughes, Mr Dixon, part-proprietor of the Wells, Mr Arthur, Joe’s neighbour in Southampton Street, Mr Dayus, the treasurer at the Wells, Dickey Wells, landlord of the Sir Hugh Myddleton, and his childhood friend Richard Lawrence. His grave, dug ‘far beyond the usual depth’, a courtesy afforded gentlefolk as a precaution against body snatchers, lay close to the vault of his first wife, Maria Hughes, and at the foot of the grave of Charles Dibdin.

  * Paulo did not remain in the part for long. At the end of January he was injured when his carriage was hit by the drunk driver of a brick cart, throwing him out of his seat and ‘upon the stones with great force’, whereupon he was run over by a coal wagon.

  * The tour company went their several ways following Parsloe’s death. According to the Victorian pantomime producer E. L. Blanchard, the Harlequin, played by John Gay, ‘wandered on to the West, after vainly endeavouring to establish himself in Boston and Baltimore; and, appearing one night at an Indian encampment in his Harlequin’s dress, was taken by the red men for a great medicine man, and lived with them a year, till he had parted with all his spangles. He eventually found his way back to England and Whitechapel.’

  EPILOGUE

  Pantomime’s best days are fled

  Grimaldi, Barnes, Bologna, dead!

  J. R. Planché, Harlequin Out of Place (1847)

  ‘WE DON’T KNOW WHY so much fuss has been made about the death of this certainly very clever mountebank,’ ran the notice in Figaro in London, a journal akin to Punch:

  His own habits had rendered him dead to the public for many years, during which, but for those habits, he might have been continuing his calling with profit to himself and a certain species of satisfaction to the public. But as by his own intemperance he has long deprived us of any pleasure we might have derived from seeing him perform, we cannot make out how he is any more lost to us now than he has been for the last ten years. The gin-drinking paper people twaddle vastly over the interesting fact, that of late years he has been obliged to be carried ‘pick-a-back’ by the landlord, to a gin-shop, in Pentonville, and all we can say is, that the landlord and Grimaldi ought both to have been ashamed of themselves, Joe for being such an inveterate tap-room frequenter as to be carried to it when he could not walk, and the landlord for taking an evidently unfair advantage of the mental imbecility of a customer. It appears it was the delight of Grimaldi to sit drinking and gossiping half the night in a public-house, and that he did so the night before his death as usual. He was consequently called into the presence of his Maker in a ‘beery’ state, and must have been more than half ‘moppy’ when the loud trump of death summoned him. And yet the public is requested to be very melancholy, and to go into the fashionable mourning of a long face upon the occasion. We regret him certainly as we should the sudden ‘exit’ of any confirmed toper, but as to anything more we are not prepared to recognize Grimaldi’s disease by a lengthy lamentation. He certainly could cram more sausages down his throat, and make uglier faces than any man alive, but as he had for so long rendered himself unfit to do anything of this kind in public, we cannot look upon his death as a national calamity.

  As obituaries went, it was far from typical. Figaro was a ‘low periodical’, peddling a ‘heap of falsehood’, thundered Henry Downes Miles, but while certainly guilty of moral superiority and indiscriminately collating father and son, its refusal to parrot the prevailing sentiment presaged changing times.

  Fifteen days after Joe’s funeral, the death of William IV saw Princess Victoria of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha ascend to the throne, heralding a new age for a country that had emerged from a dramatic period of industrialisation, colonisation and political upheaval as the most powerful, wealthy and advanced nation on earth – or so it believed – ready to gild its accomplishments with a reformation of manners so exemplary that it would truly lead the world. The renunciation of Regency licence was a necessary part of that reform, and within a few short years no generation was more ashamed of its past prodigality than those respectable mid-century citizens who looked back on their Regency youth and found themselves virtually unrecognisable: ‘The manners of the middle class’, wrote a disbelieving Henry Angelo, ‘are marked by a mighty change, in favour of general decorum,’ of ‘a cast and character so dissimilar to modern habits, that … we may be said to be no longer the same people.’

  To reform society it was necessary to reform its diversions, and while change moved slowly, one of the most symbolic alterations came almost immediately in the suppression in 1840 of the ‘vicious amusements’ at Bartholomew Fair. To the Corporation of London, within whose jurisdiction that event had taken place under Royal Charter since 1133, the fair had become a disreputable nuisance that detracted from the general progress that had been made among the city’s working classes. By prohibiting the presence of theatrical booths at the fair, the Corporation effectively labelled an entire generation of Chinese jugglers, Scottish giants, pig-faced ladies, fat children and dancing dogs as unsuitable entertainments for the urban masses, banishing them to even more grim and disreputable quarters.

  Reforming measures of this kind continued for several decades until at last that ‘naughty, fox-hunting, badger-baiting old England’ had been ‘improved out of all existence’. ‘Where are the amusements of our youth?’ wrote Thackeray in 1855. ‘I hear of no gambling but amongst obscure ruffians; of no boxing but amongst the lowest rabble. One solitary four-inhand still drove around the parks
last year; but that charioteer must soon disappear … He must drive to the banks of Styx ere long.’

  The Regency pantomime, long reeling from the withdrawal of its greatest star, was another form on the verge of collapse. ‘It is agreed on all hands’, wrote Leigh Hunt, as early as 1831, ‘that Pantomimes are not what they were.’ Joseph Grimaldi was pantomime. No other form had grown so dependent on the skills of one man or been defined so thoroughly by the uniqueness of his style, and without him it could not prosper long. Not even the once-mighty ‘pantomimic wonders’ could save it, as one by one they fell into their own battles with age and illness before the eyes of a largely indifferent public.

  Barnes, ‘paralyzed by premature age and incurable decrepitude’, drank pints of brandy to alleviate his pain, eating the bread of charity and appealing, as the papers put it, to ‘the hands of humanity for some nourishment to feed the last vestiges of a lambent flame that nature, in her settled course, must soon extinguish’. On 6 September 1838, a farewell benefit was arranged for him at the English Opera House by Richard Brinsley Peake where, following Grimaldi’s precedent, he was led to a chair by Ellar and George Wieland to receive the salutes of a procession of sixteen Clowns, Harlequins, Pantaloons and Columbines, a ‘grotesque’ scene, according to The Times, though ‘not without some sentimental feeling’. Twenty-one days later he died, aged fifty. His final request was for his benefit earnings to be passed to his dear friend Tom Ellar, ‘who always stuck to me like a brother’. Distant family members interfered, and Ellar got nothing, even though he could barely afford to feed himself.

  Like Barnes and Bologna, Ellar had failed to qualify for the Theatrical Fund, a fact that left him extremely bitter. ‘We may risk our necks night after night, to draw the only good houses of the season,’ he complained to the journalist Thomas Marshall, ‘and yet there is no relief for us – though we of all others mostly require it.’ The Harlequin who had once appeared to glide above the stage now had a morbid blue complexion and walked with a ‘staggering, shuffling gait, as if every sinew in his frame had been slackened by debility’. Released from Covent Garden in 1836, he slipped through the minors until he was finally sacked from the Standard in Shoreditch, more of a beer-shop than a theatre, for stooping to pick up the few halfpennies that had been thrown at him on stage.

  Destitute and unemployed, he had taken to playing his guitar on the streets accompanied by a Skye terrier called Spangles who, from his great receptiveness to verbal commands and stubborn refusal ever to set foot on a stage, was generally believed to be a retired theatrical dog. In 1839, having seen his name in Grimaldi’s Memoirs, he approached Charles Dickens to see if he would ghost his own autobiography, but Dickens, who had greatly disliked his commission as Grimaldi’s amanuensis, refused, informing him that such an undertaking could only end in ‘disappointment and vexation’. Harassed on the street by the police, Ellar ended up playing his guitar in a gin-house in Shadwell, where the coal-heavers knocked him about for sport. Convinced that it was his fate to die on a dunghill, he was finally picked from his misery by an engagement to play Harlequin at the Adelphi theatre, but died within a few weeks of taking it.

  Jack Bologna was the last to go, and though spared the physical suffering of his comrades, he similarly joined them in a rearguard action against the workhouse. After the failure of his mechanical exhibition, he taught dancing until he was taken on as Ebony, the black-faced assistant to Anderson, the Wizard of the North, an inept and controversial magician who had shocked society with his exhibition of two disabled children he called the ‘Aztec Lilliputians’. It was this camp and degrading position he held until his death in Glasgow in 1846, aged seventy-one.

  With the heart of the pantomime cut out, a new generation of arrangers, like E. L. Blanchard and J. R. Planché, set to work adorning its peripheries, shrinking the denuded harlequinade until it constituted only a few paltry scenes and extending the fairy-tale openings until they came to dominate the piece. Slapstick comedy was replaced with hyper-inflated spectacle and extravaganza – processions, thunderous orchestration and a host of scenic innovations that included ever-more impressive panoramas, animated backdrops and travelogue scenes. Few were happy with the changes. ‘Oh! poor old Joey!’ wailed the Theatrical Observer, having lost its patience with such humourless show. ‘One twist of thy mirth-moving countenance was worth all the moving panoramas in the world; – and we would gladly give the Poreibasilartikasparbosporas, with the Russians, Turks, and Dardanelles, the Ambuscade and Battle, the Castle of the Seven Towers, and view of Constantinople to boot to see thee again with thy old colleague, Barnes, in one of thy thousand and one scrapes.’

  Commensurate to the rise in spectacle was a general decline in the willingness to tackle current affairs and topical issues. Even more than this, the satirical bite of Regency pantomime was replaced by a sententious creep that sought to impart moral lessons through instructive allegories. This was even the case at Sadler’s Wells, where in the 1840s one unimpressed old stager was disheartened to find a Christmas piece ‘with neither Harlequin, Pantaloon, Clown, nor Columbine in it; but, no doubt, with a weighty moral. One of old Joey’s petty larcenies would do more good to the rising generation than twenty morals; but so it is – the march of intellect has banished mirth from Sadler’s Wells. What will it not effect next?’

  ‘Pantomimes seem to have become partakers of the serious spirit of the age,’ concurred Leigh Hunt, ‘waiting for the settlement of certain great questions and heavy national accounts to know when they are to laugh and be merry again.’

  Those questions would not be answered by the emergence of a new comic force, but rather by the unlikely rulings of a parliamentary select committee. Chaired by Edward Bulwer-Lytton and charged with investigating the state of British drama, it led to the passing of the 1843 Theatre Regulations Act, which abolished the 183-year-old patent theatre system and freed all theatres to perform whatever repertoire they liked under licence from the Lord Chamberlain. No longer required to be mute by law, pantomime refused to be silent. The openings grew longer still until they finally swept away the speechless frolics of Clown, Harlequin, Pantaloon and Columbine, replacing the arts of mime and gesture with the buxom, garrulous puns of pantomime dames and principal boys. Cast into the shadows by the eye-catching glitter that surrounded him, the role of Clown gradually diminished until it finally dwindled into ‘a mere mass of gratuitous absurdity without object’, with clowns endeavouring, in the words of Dickens’s friend, the pantomime historian Andrew Halliday, ‘to recommend themselves to the public by dancing on stilts, by walking on barrels, by playing the fiddle with their knees, and by various other devices of the kind’, while having ‘really nothing to do with the business of the scene’.

  Surplus to requirements in theatres, most clowns retreated to the sanctuary of the equestrian ring that had nurtured them in the days before Joey, performing the same balancing acts and circus tricks that had been their bread and butter before the King of Clowns had given them life and purpose. Early Victorian circuses were ramshackle affairs, a far cry from the many-trailered travelling circuses that flourished in America with the advent of the railroads. It was an inching and perilous existence, and that many suffered from chronic indigence and early death only served to reinforce the idea of clowning as a haunted, tawdry trade. Pantomime, meanwhile, struggled to find a new identity, but thanks to the contributions of era-defining music-hall comedians like Dan Leno, the consummate dame, by the end of the nineteenth century it had largely settled into the bizarre, beloved entertainment that abides with us today.

  Of Joe, nothing remained except shadows and traces, elusive impressions of long-vacated moments and instants never to be repeated. Some, like Tom Matthews, were unwilling to let the impression fade, and tried to keep the spirit of Joe alive not only through a long and successful career at both Covent Garden and Drury Lane, but also in the form of a tribute act – possibly one of the first in entertainment history. Matthews’s homage,
worked up twenty years after his master’s death, consisted of ‘anecdotes and sketches of the history of Grimaldi and in his pantomime days’, delivered in the character of Joey and ‘wearing even a part of Grimaldi’s own dress’. Playing single-handedly through scenes that included the skeleton scene, and selections from Mother Goose, the evening concluded with a rendition of ‘Hot Codlins’ accompanied by his daughter Clara on the pianoforte. Audiences proved not to be as loyal to the great man’s memory as the old apprentice (‘owing doubtless to the unpromising state of the weather’, reported the Marylebone Mercury tactfully), and Matthews discontinued the act. His devotion, however, continued in private, for among his possessions when he died in Brighton in 1889 after being bedridden for a number of years were a wig and a pair of shoes that had belonged to Joe, and the ‘painting brush he used to paint that glorious comic face’.

  Back in Hackney, the clown service was over. I took my suitcase and wandered out into the cold, thanking both the vicar and the Clowns’ Chaplain, but declining the invitation to watch the children’s show in the community centre across the street. The clowns had done important work, maintaining their community and diligently preserving Joe’s memory, yet as I made my way towards the station, I couldn’t help wondering whether they were truly the guardians of his legacy. The slap and motley seemed to me a distraction, as the versatility of Grimaldi and the nuances of the harlequinade found their real continuity in music hall, variety, sketch comedy and revue. ‘Joey’ had been the first great experiment in comic persona, and by shifting the emphasis of clowning from tricks and pratfalls to characterisation, satire and a full sense of personhood, he had established himself as the spiritual father of all those later comedians whose humour stems first and foremost from a strong sense of identity – Charlie Chaplin, for example, Laurel and Hardy, or Tommy Cooper.