How the prisoner and the immigrant are treated by the government, how the poor are treated and those without influence: this is secretly how the government would like to treat all of us.
David Merridith
From notes for a pamphlet on penal reform. 1840. Unfinished
1 See Henry Mayhew’s monograph ‘The Speech and Language of the London Poor’ (1856). ‘“Freddie”’ (n): a fatally violent assault. “To Freddy” (vb): to attack or to murder. “Freddying” (adj.): an expletive common among criminals and women of a certain character.’ Soon the term entered the lexicon of literature. To freddie an author was to give him an unnecessarily harsh review. – GGD
CHAPTER XXII
THE LAW
THE SEVENTEENTH DAY OF THE VOYAGE: IN WHICH THE CAPTAIN RECORDS THE DELIVERANCE OF MULVEY FROM A PRECARIOUS ENCOUNTER WITH RETRIBUTION.
Wednesday, 24 November, 1847
Nine days at sea remaining.
LONG: 47°04.21′W. LAT: 48°52.13′N. ACTUAL GREENWICH STANDARD TIME: 02.12 a.m. (25 November). ADJUSTED SHIP TIME: 11.04 p.m. (24 November). WIND DIR. & SPEED: N.N.E. (38°) Force 5. SEAS: Turbulent. HEADING: S.S.W. (211°). PRECIPITATION & REMARKS: Shower of very large hailstones in the afternoon. Raw, severe wind. The bad smell recently reported about the ship would appear to be diminishing.
Last night two steerage passengers died: Paudrig Foley, farmhand of Roscommon, and Bridget Shouldice, neé Coombes, aged serving woman, latterly inmate at Birr Workhouse in King’s County. (Insane.) Their remains were committed to the sea.
The total who have died on this voyage is now forty-one. Seventeen isolated for cholera in the hold.
I am compelled to relate a series of troubling incidents, which arose this day and greatly disturbed the peace of those in steerage, with distressing and almost calamitous results.
At three o’clock approximately I was in my quarters studying the charts and attending to some engrossing matters of calculation when Leeson came in. He said he had been told by a young woman of steerage that there was considerable unrest among the ordinary passengers and if I did not hasten with him there might be murder before we were done. This was no innocuous donnybrook but a veritable carnival of thuggee. He insisted we take two pieces from the lockbox, for the passengers were in a very frenzy of anger. We then set out.
Making our way along the maindeck we came upon the Reverend Henry Deedes at meditation, and I prevailed upon him to accompany us below. For although most of those in steerage are of the Roman faith, they regard all men of the cloth with respect and approbation and I considered it might be advantageous to have him with us.
When we went down the ladders to the hatch (Deedes and Leeson and self) a dreadful scene was being enacted. The unfortunate crippled man, William Swales, was cowering on the floor near the water closets. His appearance was most pitiful. By the marks upon his person it were easily deducible that he had been victim of an assault, or several prolonged assaults. His clothes were pulled apart and he was shaking in fear, his face a pulp of blood and unspeakable filth and ordure.
At first the passengers refused to say how this had happened, and even the wretched man himself was greatly reluctant to speak of it, insisting that he had fallen down while inebriated and would soon be happy again. It must be noted that among the common class of Irish exists the general and curious custom of not informing to any person they perceive to be in authority of the shortcomings and crimes of their fellows, be they ever so dastardly. And until I promised that the rations would be halved forthwith, and the company’s rules relating to on-board drinking more strictly enforced than had been the case hitherto, silence was maintained. It was only at the issuing of these latter threats that the full concatenation of events began to be disclosed.
It was revealed that there had been a theft from a passenger called Foley of a cup of Indian meal and this crippled man was suspected. This was adduced as the cause of his punishment. I said the ship sailed under the law of England and in the eyes of that law was part of England’s territory; and under that same benign law a man was innocent until he be proven otherwise, be he ever so great or ever so small. And if any man dared to raise up trouble on my vessel or take the law in his own hands, he would be confined and fettered for the remainder of the voyage the better to ponder his philosophies. The good Minister then spoke up, saying it was not Christian to abuse an unfortunate man without so much as knowing him and he a cripple and did Our Redeemer not take pity on such & cetera.
‘I know him,’ then issued a retort from the back.
The crowd parted to reveal one Shaymus Meadowes, a violent passenger much given to thieving and foolery of the lowest kind and exposing himself. He is quite given over to drinking and its attendant train of ruffianly debasement and has a face like a robber’s dog. Only this morning had he himself been released from the lock-up and then only at the great intervention of Minister Deedes who had befriended him and made kindly intercession on his behalf.
‘Your name is Pius Mulvey,’ said he. ‘You took a neighbour-man’s land off him when he was down on his luck.’
(Among these Irish of the villein class there is no man lower than he who has taken the holding of another in such a circumstance. They had rather the land were left idle and barren than it be husbanded by one who was not born on it.)
‘You are after confusing me with somebody else,’ said the cripple. ‘My name is not Mulvey.’
At this he began to limp away, his appearance most greatly alarmed.
‘I believe and know it is,’ said the other. ‘For I seen you often with that leg of yeers.’
‘No,’ said the cripple.
‘Your neighbour was put out – evicted I say – by that “shoneen” b*****d Blake of Tully, may he die choking in his own sh*t.’ (Other remarks which may be imagined were then made, concerning one Commander Henry Blake, a personage not at all popular among the Connermara poor.) And he went on: ‘Stead of shunning that filthy b*****d of a landlord, you got the lease of your neighbour’s land off him and got it cheap, too.’
At this a great clamour of insults and spitting arose. ‘I’d crack the head of him if I had the strength,’ said one. ‘A worse man never faced the sun,’ said another, a woman, and she called for a noose to be made. (It is distressing to note in these situations that the women are sometimes the worse offenders than the men.)
‘His name is William Swales,’ said I.
‘The “divil” goes by many names,’ cried Meadowes. ‘He is Pius Mulvey of Ardnagreevagh as I live and breathe. Who done another man to death through his cruel robbery.’
Some began to roar again. Once more the Reverend Deedes attempted an intervention but was himself now abused and called horrid names that touched upon his religious persuasion. I did have to assert that judicious and sincere holiness is the inheritance of no particular faction, but that the banner of true religion while it contains an assemblage of distinct threads affords decoration and pride to the whole world by their intimate coalescence. I was myself mocked at this point.
By now Meadowes had the floor and was enjoying fully his celebrity and determined on that (as such men will be who are always unproductive in any sphere save bragging and bullying).
‘Will I tell them the best part?’ said he.
No rejoinder came from the cripple. He was so afraid.
‘Beg me not to,’ said the first, a horrid smile on his lips.
‘I beg you not to,’ the cripple pleaded.
‘On your knees, beg me not to,’ said Meadowes.
The poor cripple sank to the boards and commenced to weep quietly.
‘Call me God,’ said Meadowes. ‘You crown-shawning c**t.’
‘You are my God,’ exclaimed the cripple through his tears.
‘That’s right now,’ said Meadowes, the low scoundrel. ‘And you will do all I command.’
‘I will,’ said the cripple. ‘Only have mercy on me, I beg you.’
‘Lick the filth off my boots,’ Me
adowes ordered, and his wretched victim commenced to do so. At this performance of disgraceful cruelty many of the passengers laughed in mockery; though many again, kinder among them, called for it to stop.
‘Please,’ said the cripple, ‘do not tell on me, I beg it.’
Meadowes bent low and spat into his face.
‘The neighbourman you did was your own brother,’ said he.
‘Lies!’ cried the cripple.
‘Nicholas Mulvey that was once the priest up in Maam Cross. I knew him well. A good decent man, Christ give his soul rest. And his blood is on your hands for certain sure. You murdered him! You murdered your brother!’
‘That never happened,’ cried the cripple, and then: ‘Do I look like a man with a farm of land?’
‘You were put off the land you stole by your decent neighbours and the Liable Boys of Galway, more luck to them,’ insisted the first. ‘And it did happen. For I used to sell kale with my “oldfellow” in Clifden. So didn’t I hear all about it in the town! Land robber! Murderer! Priest hater! Judas!’
‘That is not me. You have the wrong man, I swear it.’
It was only by dint of self and Leeson producing our firearms that utter calamity was avoided and even then I had occasion to fear for my own life as we contrived to take the miserable cripple out of that place.
He is at present lodged in the lock-up by reason of the threats against him. And whatever transgressions may lie in his past – as do lie in the pasts of all men and women, or at least in their hearts and the profundities of their consciences – I pray none will put their hand on that poor man again; for his life will be ended on this ship if they do.
I believe that is all I have to say.
This day I met with Evil’s footman, whose name is Shaymus Meadowes.
If I seed my gal talking to another chap I’d fetch her sich a punch of the nose as should plaguy1 quick stop the whole business. The gals – it was a rum thing now [I] come to think on it – axully liked a feller for walloping them. As long as the bruises hurted, she was always thinking on the cove as gived ’em her … When the gal is in the family way, the lads mostly sends them to the workhouse to lay in, and only goes sometimes to take them a bit of tea and shugger. I’ve often heerd the boys boasting of having ruined gals – for all the world as if they was the finest noblemen in the land.
London street trader to the journalist Henry Mayhew Name unknown
1 ‘Plaguy’: a slang abbreviation of ‘plaguily’; i.e., as quickly and violently as a plague. – GGD
CHAPTER XXIII
THE MARRIED MAN
CONTAINING FRANKEST AND NEVER BEFORE PUBLISHED REVELATIONS OF LORD KINGSCOURT’S SECRET TIMES; CERTAIN OF HIS HABITS AND HIDDEN ASPECTS; HIS NIGHTLY VISITS TO CERTAIN ESTABLISHMENTS WHICH WERE BETTER NOT FREQUENTED BY GENTLEMEN.
‘Those whose ambitions exceed their abilities are fated for disappointment, at least until they grow up. Those without ambition are also sentenced. A man with no enterprise is lost…
David Merridith, letter to the Spectator (7 July 1840) on the subject of ‘Crime in London’.
Emily and Natasha Merridith had risked their father’s rage by travelling to London for their brother’s wedding. Lord Kingscourt’s absence had been explained away by a fortuitous coincidence. The coronation of Queen Victoria was taking place the same morning and every member of the House of Lords had been commanded to attend the ceremony. Laura’s parents had quite understood. In fact they had seemed rather proud of the fact and her father made a point of mentioning it in his speech. ‘The Earl, you will all know, is detained elsewhere.’
John Markham proved a most generous benefactor. His wedding gift was a five-and-a-half-year lease on a townhouse on Tite Street in the fashionable borough of Chelsea. Nothing less than the very best was good enough for his beloved only daughter and her husband. For all the time the newly-weds spent in London they did not need eighteen rooms and a coach-house in Chelsea, but Mr Markham insisted that was not the point. Their home would be ready when they wanted it.
For two years they travelled, the Viscount and his bride, to Paris, Rome, Greece, Florence, further afield to Turkey and Egypt, collecting bibelots and works of art wherever they went. Venice became a home away from home; they lived there in a suite at the Palazzo Gritti through the bitter winter of 1839, and it was there that their first son was born, in December of that year. Friends from London came out to visit. There were trips down to Amalfi and north to the lakes. Lady Kingscourt had a tasteful eye and an expert’s knowledge, an imperturbable eye for a bargain. She knew about paintings, sculptures, books. She had eleven thousand guineas per annum from her family. She bought a lot of books.
Morocco, Tangier and Constantinople were visited; Athens again; a summer in Biarritz. When they ran out of destinations they drifted back to London, moved into their large and comfortable house. It was immediately remodelled to Her Ladyship’s design, with the latest fine wallpapers and gilded mouldings. Paintings were hung; objects put on display; a Renaissance fresco she had purchased in Fiesole was installed on the ceiling of their bedroom for a time, and then dismantled and moved to the study. (Its leering devils and writhing sinners tended to worsen her husband’s nightmares.) A regiment of servants was soon employed to attend to the Merridiths and their treasures. Experts from the National Gallery came to make sketches. The Keeper of the Queen’s Paintings wrote an article on the collection. Laura began to host her celebrated evenings.
Poets and essayists and novelists and critics would turn up in gangs on a Wednesday night: usually hungry and always late. They stood around the buffet like gnu at a waterhole. Money, or the lack of it, was their favoured theme, not beauty or art or mysterious lakes. The guest list was a roll call of belletristic London. To be invited to the Merridiths’ was to know you had arrived. G. H. Lewes of Fraser’s Magazine, Thomas Carlyle, the journalist Mayhew, Tennyson, Boucicault, the publisher Newby; even the famous and envied Mr Dickens who sat in a corner looking morbidly depressed, biting his fingernails when he thought nobody was looking. A cartoon was published in Punch magazine of two writerly gentlemen in turbans and smoking jackets stabbing each other with bloodstained pens. The caption said a lot about Laura’s careful efforts: ‘By Jove or by Allah! Only one invitation to Lady Kingscourt’s “evening” has come. Enough to make an Etonian behave as an Afghani.’
Laura bought the original and had it mounted and framed. She hung it beside the mirror in the downstairs guest lavatory, which carefully chosen location offered several benefits. Most callers would see it at least once in the course of any evening, but they would think her too fashionable to care about it much. If you cared you would have hung it in the hall or the drawing room: the places where the Viscount’s Connemara drawings were hung. The Viscountess understood the nature of style.
For a while they enjoyed a certain quiet happiness, an everyday contentment which was not often questioned. Their son was a beautiful baby, pink and strong; the kind who causes policemen to stop on the pavement and coo into perambulators like elderly nuns. But quite soon after the new family returned to London from Italy, something strange had begun to happen to David Merridith.
A clawing unease crept into his days; the restlessness and anxiety he had known as a child. Marrying Laura Markham had driven it away, but being married was somehow allowing it to return. He began to feel dissatisfied, was prone to depressions. People gradually noticed he was losing weight. The sleeplessness that had plagued him since boyhood worsened. The greater the congratulations for his enviable existence, the more obscurely discontented the Viscount became.
Part of it was boredom, the sheer lack of purpose. The life of a gentleman of leisure did not suit him, it made him feel useless and vaguely ungrateful: the ingratitude making the uselessness sharper. His days were entirely empty of anything important. He would fill them up with plans to improve himself: to read all of Pliny in chronological order, to learn ancient Greek or take up some pastime; to do something good for t
he poor, perhaps. He visited infirmaries, joined philanthropic committees, wrote a lot of letters to newspaper editors. But the committees never seemed to get anything done and neither did the endless and repetitious letters. The making of plans consumed much of his time, but there never seemed to be time to follow any of them through. His journals for those years reveal innumerable beginnings: long walks in the park; unfinished books; abandoned projects; unrealised designs. A life of wishing the days away. Waiting, perhaps, for his future to start.
His wife was a good woman; beautiful, gentle, with a gift for joy which he had often found inspiring. Given the choice she would rather be happy, and with a childhood like Merridith’s that was something attractive. Their house was elegant, their son happy and healthy. Neat as a uniform laid out on a bed, the life of David Kingscourt of Carna; but often he felt their marriage was a kind of masquerade. They didn’t converse as much as they used to; when they did, the subject was always their child. The boy’s father became contentious, more ardent than before. He found himself becoming a man he disliked: correcting the servants on matters of grammar, picking fights with waiters, with guests at the house. Views he had never held he began to assert furiously. Soon no evening was complete without a disagreement.
They broke with some of their long-time friends. He was advised by his physician to stop drinking, and did so for a while.
The couples comprising their innermost circle were also new parents; crazed by parenting. As happily, devotedly besotted by their children as Laura was by Jonathan, and as Merridith was not. At dinner tables and in opera boxes he would find himself grinning at the latest citation of neonate genius, the heartiness of appetites, the firmness of stools, while secretly wishing he was anywhere else. He did not feel superior: rather more of a failure. How marvellous to be a father as befuddled as that; drunk on the wine of paternal love. To scrutinise the contents of your progeny’s diapers like a Roman soothsayer pronouncing on the runes. He loved his boy but he could not love him that much. Often, in shameful fact, he found fatherhood a millstone. The noise of nannies clattering through the beautiful house had an irritating tendency to interfere with his plans.
The Star of the Sea Page 26