The Pantomime Life of Joseph Grimaldi

by McConnell Scott, Andrew

  312 ‘Died by the visitation of God’: ‘Coroner’s Inquest on Joseph Grimaldi, the Celebrated Clown’, June 1837 clipping, Islington Local History Centre.

  312 His grave: Despite a life spent perpetually pleading poverty, Joe left more than £500 to distribute among his family and friends. Louisa Bristow received £74, Charlotte Bryan, Mary’s second sister, received £100 and all his household goods except plate and jewels, and Maria Neville, the youngest of the Bristows, got £50. His neighbour Mrs Arthur received £100 for her kindness, and Dayus, Norman, and another friend, James Banister of Deptford, each received £25 for ‘old acquaintance’ and ‘kind attentions’. Richard Hughes, appointed Joe’s trustee, was bequeathed his shares in Sadler’s Wells and the rights to his memoirs, while Hughes’s daughter Elizabeth received two patchwork quilts made by his first wife, Maria, and one by Maria’s sister, Julia. Before he died, Joe promised Macready the snuff box he had been presented by Lord Byron. Some weeks after the funeral, Richard Hughes received a letter from a woman called Jane Taylor, who claimed to be Joe’s sister and asked if she’d been remembered in his will. Even if he was aware of the Signor’s many daughters, Hughes was convinced that it was a hoax, and after he had penned a polite reply, she was never heard of again.

  Epilogue

  313–14 ‘We don’t know why… a national calamity’: Figaro in London, 10 June 1837.

  314 ‘manners of the middle class’: Angelo, Reminiscences, vol. 1, p. 219.

  315 prohibiting the presence of theatrical booths: Paul Schlicke, Dickens and Popular Entertainment (London: Allen and Unwin, 1985), p. 93.

  315 ‘naughty, fox-hunting’: Andrew Lang, quoted in Vic Gatrell, City of Laughter: Sex and Satire in Eighteenth-Century London (New York: Walker, 2006), p. 418.

  315 ‘the amusements of our youth?’: Thackeray, Four Georges, p. 377.

  315–16 eating the bread of charity: The Times, 2 August 1838.

  316 ‘not without some sentimental feeling’: The Times, 6 September 1838.

  316 ‘stuck to me like a brother’: Blanchard, Life and Reminiscences, vol. 2, p. 584.

  316 ‘risk our necks’: Marshall, ‘Ellar’, pp. 118–19.

  316 ‘slackened by debility’: Marshall, ‘Ellar’, p. 118.

  316 ‘Spangles’: Blanchard, Life and Reminiscences, vol. 2, p. 582.

  317 ‘disappointment and vexation’: Marshall, ‘Ellar’, p. 123.

  317 died within a few weeks: Marshall, ‘Ellar’, p. 122.

  317 ‘Oh! poor old Joey!’: Mayer, Harlequin in His Element, p. 139.

  318 ‘with neither Harlequin … not effect next?’: Percival, vol. 5, f. 86.

  318 ‘serious spirit of the age’: Tatler, 28 December 1831.

  319 ‘mass of gratuitous absurdity’: The Times, 30 December 1830.

  319 ‘recommend themselves to the public’: Halliday, Comical Fellows, p. 50.

  320 accompanied by his daughter: Grimaldi Scrapbook, Harvard Theatre Collection, p. 24.

  320 ‘unpromising state of the weather’: Grimaldi Scrapbook, p. 24.

  320 died in Brighton in 1889: Blanchard, Life and Reminiscences, vol. 2, p. 632, fn. 1.

  320 ‘that glorious comic face’: Findlater, Joe Grimaldi, p. 238, fn. 7. By the time Tom Matthews died, Joe’s grave had fallen into weed-ridden disrepair. Lloyd’s News paid to have it restored in 1909, but the briars soon returned, and when the headstone fell away from the plot, no attempt was made to reattach it. With the stone consigned to a workman’s shed, Grimaldi remained forgotten to all but the most dedicated theatre historians until 1949, when a group of working clowns decided to hold a memorial service in his honour. St James’s was the obvious choice, and the event took place annually for ten years at that location until the church was deconsecrated and the clowns were offered the service’s current home at Holy Trinity, Dalston.

  321 ‘evade the compulsion to suffer’: Sigmund Freud, ‘Humour’, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. James Strachey, vol. 21, pp. 161–6, p. 163.

  322 ‘You should have seen Grimaldi!’: Anon., ‘Reminiscences of Grimaldi’, Bentley’s Miscellany, 19 (1846), pp. 160–1.

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