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Early Years
The gate into the world of vision
from Samuel Palmer’s 1824 sketchbook
Samuel Palmer was born on 27 January 1805. It was a wintry night. The weather all over England had been bad all week. In the country thick snowfalls had left villages stranded. The stones of the cities were encrusted with ice. And in the capital, on the corner of Adam Street, The Times reported, the house of a tallow chandler had caught on fire, forcing a terrified serving girl to leap for her safety from a second-floor window only to break both her legs on the cobbles below.
Apart from this mildly sensational episode, nothing considered of public note had troubled the peace. But in one quietly respectable Surrey Square dwelling, the residents would not have slept that night. A small upper room – lit by the glow of the visiting doctor’s lantern, warmed by the flicker of a sea-coal fire, disturbed by the bustle of a midwife with her kettles of hot water – must have been the scene of much anxious fluster as a fragile young woman went into her first labour. At five o’clock on Sunday morning she finally gave birth. She would have been pleased to discover that her first-born was a son.
The world into which Palmer arrived was a world at war. In 1789 the storming of the Bastille by an enraged Parisian mob had raised the curtain on a revolutionary drama, the repercussions of which were to affect the entire century in which he lived.
Many in Britain had at first welcomed this rebellion. France’s ancien regime had been greedy, cruel and corrupt and it was hoped that something more like a parliamentary system might replace it, that over-gorged empires and rotten dynasties would be followed by a fairer, more democratic form of rule. But optimism soon faded as aristocratic heads rolled. Political panic flared. Would France’s revolutionary fervour prove contagious? The British Establishment felt under grave threat.
In 1793, France declared war on Britain and Holland. It was the first salvo of a conflict that would not only prove very long – it would continue pretty much unbroken for the next two decades – but would also be fought on a gigantic scale. Mobilising the first ever citizen army, France sent it marching across the European map. The emergence in 1796 of Napoleon Bonaparte only further exacerbated the situation. Britain found itself facing the most powerful military leader that it had ever known. As Nelson and Wellington battled doggedly to defend their nation and its most valued institutions, a patriotic spirit of crusading conservatism ruled the day.
A peace signed briefly at Amiens in 1802 lasted just a few months. By 1803 hostilities had opened again. The baby Samuel was born into a country at real risk of invasion. It was only eight months later that, with Nelson’s victory at Trafalgar in October 1805, Napoleonic ambitions to occupy Britain were decisively thwarted – not that the conflict would end with that. By 1807, having defeated Russia and occupied Berlin, the by-then self-crowned Emperor decided that the most effective way to get the better of his English enemies would be to attack their already war-weakened economy and close European ports off from all British trade. This, the first major example of economic warfare, was to prove highly effective. In Britain, as taxes soared to foot military bills, markets plummeted and bankruptcies loomed. The populace, faced with food shortages, grew increasingly desperate. Social unrest and rioting followed. But the country managed to pull through in large part because Napoleon, affected by his own trading bans, was forced to relax them and finally, in 1815, with the Battle of Waterloo, twenty-two years of almost unbroken warfare in Europe drew to its close. Britain was the only nation involved in this cataclysm to emerge with traditional structures of monarchy, aristocracy and parliament intact.
Samuel Palmer’s birth was registered at Dr Williams’s Library in Red Cross Street, an institution which, originally set up to house a collection of Nonconformist literature, had come to be treated as a place of safekeeping for the baptismal records of dissenters. Dr William Williams, a descendant of the library’s founder, was a friend of Palmer’s father, a relationship which this new birth would further cement. Two men who already had books and beliefs in common now also had boys of about the same age. Years later, Palmer would still continue his acquaintanceship with this family of old friends.
Palmer was called Sam at home. He was a delicate child and from an early age showed signs of the respiratory problems that would trouble him throughout his life. He was only a few months old when his anxious mother first took him to stay with her family in Margate in the hope that the fresh air might do him some good. Margate, with its sandy beaches and its sea-bathing hospital, had by then been transformed from a humble fishing town to an elegant Georgian resort and this was the first of many holidays that Samuel was to spend there. He would always love its wide, windy views. The skies over Thanet were the loveliest in all Europe, believed the great Romantic landscapist Joseph Mallord William Turner, who remained all his life a regular visitor and took his Margate landlady as a long-standing mistress. The same marine vistas that enchanted this painter sank down through the depths of Palmer’s baby stare as his mother, busily fussing over little muslin bonnets, dabbing at dribble and adjusting shawls, carried him in her arms along the sea front.
Palmer’s lasting interest in the supernatural would be nurtured in Margate. As a child, he would listen, wide-eyed, to the town’s many ghost stories, especially to the one that involved an ancient brick house in the high street from the window of which his own grandmother, spooked by some vaporous apparition, had once leapt. ‘It is reported that the people who now live there leave it every Saturday and inhabit elsewhere,’ Palmer informed a friend more than fifty years later. ‘Only think of a restless spirit wandering about one house for nearly a century!’1 Palmer was always to harbour a lurid fascination for ghosts. Psychic sensibilities, he suspected, ran in his mother’s family and one of the stories that he would later tell involved another relation, one Sarah Covell, who claimed to have been paid a call by a friend who, even as she appeared to be making her sociable visit, was in fact in her own home several miles away.
Palmer’s mother, Martha, however, showed no paranormal propensities. An affectionate and devoted parent, she was the product of that enlightened generation which, influenced by John Locke’s groundbreaking treatise on education, had all but invented the idea of childhood. No longer were infants expected to behave like miniature adults. Unlaced from tight costumes and suffocating conventions, they were encouraged to play. They were part of a family that for the first time in English history had begun to define itself less as an economic entity than as an affectionate group. Palmer grew up amid tenderness, encouragement and love. ‘Sorry to say our dear boy’s Cough has prevented his bathing,’ his mother reported back from Margate to a husband who had had to remain working in London. ‘He is a lovely child.’2
Sam’s sickly constitution began to improve once a nurse, Mary Ward, was engaged. She prepared solid food for the infant instead of insipid pap. On the day that she first gave him a plate of smoked salmon, he stretched out starfish hands in greedy excitement – an early sign of the hearty appetite he would later enjoy. Samuel had a peacefully uneventful life. There are no recorded disasters beyond that of the day when his chair toppled over and his mother, screaming with fright, dashed to apply ‘Riga ointment’ to the bump. This sharp-smelling juniper salve would no doubt have had to be used fairly frequently for, as Palmer remembered, he had a particular trick of tumbling upstairs. He was probably tripping on the hems of the petticoats in which all young children, regardless of gender, were at that time dressed. It was not until the age of six or seven that the moment for ‘breeching’ finally arrived and a boy, in what came to be viewed as an important rite of passage, was dressed in his first pair of trousers. No promotion in later life could ever quite match it, Palmer suspected, and yet he was not a boisterous child, preferring sedentary pleasures to more active pastimes, pop-guns and kite-flying to running races or piggy-back rides. The only game of which he was ever to grow fond was backgammon.
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bsp; Though he would have encountered other children in Surrey Square’s communal garden, companions scarcely feature in accounts of his youth. There are very few mentions of his cousins in Clapham and barely a reference to his younger brother William who, born in 1810, was the only one of the many babies whom his mother conceived to survive. Palmer remembered her intermittent periods of confinement well. ‘They used to be golden days,’ he wrote. ‘Boy-like I knew the closet where all the diet-bread and cakes and cold boil’d chickens were kept, and I took care to be as much confined to that spot as my Mother was to her room, except when the nurse pushed me out.’3 But Palmer did not long for siblings to play with. He was a solitary child with a grave disposition and a propensity for daydreaming. He delighted in music – few people could love it more than he did, he said – and books offered a pleasure that would never pall. ‘What a wonderful thing is a good book,’ he would later write: ‘next to a clear conscience, the most precious thing life has to offer.’4 His father, delighted to find that his first-born shared his literary enthusiasms, would bring home volume after volume from his stall and Palmer discovered a world that entranced him between their leather bindings. Curled up by the parlour fire or huddled behind the curtains with a glass of syrupy cordial, a pocket of ginger nuts and his purring pet cat, Watch, snuggled up on his lap, he would work his way through the treasures of literature. If we were placed in this world ‘merely to please ourselves then I think that reading at all events would be worth living for’, he wrote.5
Beyond Surrey Square lay the crowded jumble of a vast metropolis: ‘No! Not the city but the nation of London,’6 as Thomas de Quincey, an amazed first-time visitor to the capital in 1800, had exclaimed. Palmer, putting down his books and scrambling out on to the roof, would have been able to gaze out over that great city, that ‘colossal emporium of men, wealth, arts and intellectual power’,7 which de Quincey described. Keeping close to his mother, he would have jostled through the market crowds or visited the Southwark leather-binders’ workshops with his father, or the chapel on East Street where the famous Welsh divine, Dr Joseph Jenkins, would preach to his impassioned congregation of Particular Baptists, an exclusive sect which believed in the redemption of only a predetermined elect and to which Palmer’s father, with the exaggerated fervour of a convert, would for a time belong.
It was only a mile or so from Surrey Square to the Old London Bridge, the main thoroughfare into the city from the south. Samuel would often have gone there, jumping to safety from the fast-dashing carriages; pushing past overburdened pedestrians or beating a path through bleating flocks of sheep. The cries of the drovers, the shouts of the pedlars, the songs of the flower sellers, the pleas of the beggars, the curses of the boatmen: all would have been familiar to Sam’s attentive ear. Below, on the river, the mists drifted gloomily over the water; fires glowed sullenly from craft moored off dark wharves. The putrid stench rising from the leather-tanners’ pits of urine and faeces mingled with the rich pungency of brewing hops. This was an area that was famous for beer. By 1810, the Anchor Brewery in Park Street was turning out so many barrels a day that Charles Dickens’s Pickwickian character Count Smorltork put it on his itinerary of unmissable tourist sites.
Dickens, whose novels Palmer was to come to enjoy, knew this part of London very well. He spent several months of his childhood in Southwark when his father, imprisoned as a debtor, was sent to Marshalsea. Later, in Oliver Twist, he would describe the riverside, east of St Saviour’s dock, in an area that came to be known as Jacob Island: ‘Crazy wooden galleries common to the back of half a dozen houses, with holes to look upon the slime beneath; windows, broken and patched, with poles thrust out, on which to dry linen that is never there; rooms so small, so filthy, so confined, that the air would seem too tainted even for the dirt and squalor which they shelter; wooden chambers thrusting themselves out above the mud, and threatening to fall into it – as some have done; dirt-besmeared walls and decaying foundations; every repulsive lineament of poverty, every loathsome indication of filth, rot and garbage.’
Dickens campaigned against the social evils of his day, against the poor laws that condemned honest people to the miseries of the workhouse and the long hours of child labour that stole young lives away. But then he came from a family which knew only too well what poverty meant. Such social injustices did not impinge upon the life of the privileged young Palmer. He may well have bestowed the odd charitable coin on some soldier invalided out of the Army or left jobless by peace, but the rough world of the slums which sprawled along the southern banks of the Thames did not appear to have troubled his conscience. Nor did he refer to any of the momentous local happenings: the whale which in 1809 was carried on a barge, its tail projecting four yards over the stern, to London Bridge where it was sold in vast chunks at a shilling a customer, creating excellent business despite the intolerable stench; or the frost fair of 1813 when market stalls were erected on the frozen Thames, when carriages were driven right across the river and ox roasts and dances carried out on the ice; or the Bankside mustard mills fire of 1814, one of many conflagrations that flared in the overcrowded slum courtyards and which created a particularly spectacular sight. The whole heterogeneous medley of urban existence lay less than half an hour’s walk from his childhood home, but Palmer from the start turned his back on it, preferring the fertile domestic landscapes and sylvan villages that lay to London’s south.
Given the delicate condition of his lungs this is not surprising. The capital was growing increasingly polluted; its air thickened by coal smuts and dank river-borne fogs. ‘It is difficult to form an idea of any kind of winter days in London,’ an American visitor recorded in 1810: ‘the smoke . . . forms an atmosphere perceivable for many miles.’ Towers, domes and steeples poked skywards through a smothering pall. London was a sorry place to bring up a child, Palmer reflected. Muriatic acid pervaded the air, corroding the very stone, and ‘what will peel a stone wall is not likely to put flesh on a baby . . . Then there is the case of the filthy gas . . . and the typhus steaming up through the drain vents in the streets.’ Not even a ‘horse breeder or dog trainer would consent to rear his whelps or fillies in such a medium’, Palmer later wrote, and yet we strive to ‘rear the tenderest infancy’ in such vile spots.8
Following paths that led out through an unregulated straggle of development, past smoking brick kilns and pens of muddy hogs, by piles of stinking refuse and the discarded corpses of dogs, Palmer and his father would head off in search of rural pleasures. Sometimes they would go eastwards, following the river as it broadened between banks of smelly mud towards the village of Greenwich where a gentle chalky slope had once provided a picturesque setting for Henry VIII’s palace (long since demolished and replaced by Wren’s seamen’s hospital) and a steep hill rising above offered a fashionable perch for the home of some Palmer relations on whom father and son would occasionally pay a call. At other times they would wander southwards across the fields to Peckham, then still a quiet country spot, though at night timid villagers would not have risked the walk home for fear of footpads. It was in these very fields that, some fifty years earlier, the great visionary William Blake had been witness to heavenly apparitions. He had seen bright-feathered angels roosting in branches and, gazing out across hayfields, had spotted glorious seraphim. But for Palmer it was Dulwich rather than Peckham that was to become what he later, under Blake’s intoxicating influence, would describe as the ‘gate into the world of vision’,9 and Dulwich lay a little further on.
One way to walk there was along the ridge of Herne Hill, passing under chestnut boughs and between billowing lilac bushes before descending downwards into lush meadowlands. The village itself was then still prettily rustic with cows and sheep ambling down its grass-lined streets. A few fine houses were scattered along the lanes and upon the gentler slopes. There was a common where gypsies camped with their donkeys, where the butchers grazed their cattle and old women chivvied their flocks of flat-footed geese. There was a village
pond with a mill and a couple of public houses to which young men would ride out. Families would enjoy pleasant day trips in picturesque surroundings. And it was here, to this village, that Dickens imagined the amiable Mr Pickwick retiring.
The River Effra, now flowing for the most part underground, wound through it, a slender rivulet, its plaiting currents crisscrossed by little wooden bridges leading up to the cottages which nestled among sheltering laburnums and hawthorns. The young Sam, like the critic John Ruskin – whom he was later to know – learnt much of his love of nature here, sharing the same sort of boyish pleasures that Ruskin describes: squatting down by the waters, poring over the tadpoles that squiggled in pools, stuffing himself with blackberries from the over-spilling hedges, collecting bunches of cowslips and gathering the wild dill from which the village – Dilwihs or Dylways meaning ‘the damp meadow where dill grows’ – takes its name. And later, also like Ruskin, Palmer would bitterly lament the development, that ‘foul and unnatural enlargement of London’,10 which would lead to the destruction of this enchanted spot. He was always to treasure it, a rural idyll in his memory. ‘Remember the Dulwich sentiment at very late twilight time,’ he would note, ‘with the rising dews . . . like a delicious dream.’11
Mysterious Wisdom Page 2