Mysterious Wisdom

by Rachel Campbell-Johnston

  With growing desperation, Palmer tried to identify the causes of his failure. His energies were dissipated in endless theorising, diffused in the slew of notes that he accumulated in a portfolio labelled ‘Written Memoranda’ in which, like some mad secretary taking minutes at a meeting between an artist and his subject, he tried to record on paper every difficulty of composition and design. The world’s natural phenomena were boiled down into columns and bullet points and lists and laws. But it did no good. In the decade that followed the birth of his son in 1842, Palmer, according to his accounts, sold some forty-five pictures for an average price of around £16 each. This was simply not enough to support a family and, in one letter to Linnell, he confessed that he had ‘only one sovereign in the house – most of which will be paid away today’.61 Hannah could not help. As her work was again and again rejected, her hopes declined apace. The once-spirited little redhead turned picture after picture face to the wall.

  In 1844, Hannah gave birth to her second child, a grey-eyed girl who was christened Mary Elizabeth. Family life offered the Palmers some consolation for the loss of their once cherished vision – of husband and wife working away busily in a peaceably shared studio, he stretching the canvases, she grinding colours, while some bright little maid made their beds and boiled the dinner potatoes. Palmer would read aloud to his wife in the evenings and in 1848, away on a sketching trip, he wrote to tell her how greatly she was missed. ‘Your charms my dear Annie are no weak inducement to lure me back,’ he pined. ‘To me you are fairer than at 17 and though by this time I have got pretty well used to your scolding your love is always fresh and always precious. I hope to prove myself worthy of it by renewed exertions in Art.’62

  In Italy, Palmer had felt himself a manly figure, protecting his pretty young wife from the improper advances of impudent Neapolitans, beating off a wild cow in the Roman campagna with his sketchbook and confronting a furious knife-wielding landlord with aplomb. Now, he found himself unable to provide properly for his family. And, as Anny finally abandoned her artistic aspirations, and with them the engagement with painterly problems which would have led to a sympathy with her husband’s plight, she began to turn more and more to her parents. Linnell became an increasingly overbearing presence in his son-in-law’s life. On top of this, Palmer’s health was not good. ‘The filthy coal pit of London’63 aggravated his asthma, leaving him debilitated, wheezing and weak. The man who had used to stride lonely hills by moonlight would no longer go out and deliver a letter of an evening in London because he was fearful of catching a cold.

  Financial anxieties strained Palmer further. Turning his problems over and over in his head, he was all but incapable of making decisions. He continued to consult Linnell on everything, from how much he should charge for his services as a teacher to which doctor he should hire to attend on his children. At one point, Linnell took it upon himself to go behind Palmer’s back to John Giles and ask him directly how Palmer’s finances stood: Giles was persuaded to impart some information, though later wrote refusing to disclose anything further and expressing regret that he had already told so much. This stand against his authority must have taken Linnell aback for, more usually, when god-like he dispensed money or advice, it was received with tail-wagging gratitude by his son-in-law. Meanwhile his adoring daughter seemed almost to have equated him with a divinity. Writing to thank him for funding a recuperative trip to Margate for her and her son, who had both been ill, she declared the improvement in their healths ‘a great blessing for which I feel a great thankfulness to God and to you for so kindly helping us to procure it’.64

  A new low point in Palmer’s career came in 1846 when an art dealer called round to Grove Street full of extraordinary professions of indifference as to buying. He could only be persuaded to stretch his humiliatingly low offers for Palmer’s paintings when he learnt that Linnell had had a hand in retouching a few. Instead of feeling mortified, Palmer wrote gratefully to his father-in-law. With an ‘hour or two of your skill on the Ponte Rotto’, he told him, that painting too might also sell.65

  As Palmer watched his ambitions grow increasingly improbable, he laid more and more store in the future of his son and set about trying to turn him into a paradigm of religious piety, of diligence, learning and devotion, of filial obedience and moral rectitude. His dreams were to become a heavy burden on the delicate young boy.

  Palmer was a devoted father. He would carry Thomas More around the city on his shoulders, hoisting him even higher when he wanted to see above a crowd; take him on day trips to Primrose Hill to drink tea; invite him into his study and show him how to draw, teach him his alphabet from a big box of letters or how to play the piano by putting his fingers on the keys. Often he would read to him from his own favourite volumes so that the cadences of Blake’s Songs of Innocence were interwoven with More’s earliest memories and by the age of five he had learnt The Lord is my Shepherd by heart.

  More was not yet three years old when he received the first of the many letters that his father was to write to him. Palmer sent it from Guildford. ‘I went so fast in the steam coach!’ he wrote. ‘How you would like it! Here are high hills and the birds sing in the trees.’ ‘Who loves Thomas More?’ he asked at the end of the letter. ‘PAPA!’ came the answer in capital letters.66 Palmer was attuned to a child’s imagination. He knew how to select the stories that would most delight his son and often added illustrations to the margins of his letters. He sketched a fair that he had seen in Surrey, telling his son of its ‘little men not so high as the table . . . and men without arms that could hold a pen between their toes . . . and a learned pig that knew his letters’.67 He dispatched missives from purple moors where, had his son been there, he said, he would have lain down to roll in the heather; or from sandy beaches in which he would have loved to dig. He wrote from a pier from which a little girl had just taken a six-foot tumble without breaking anything (though More, who was delicate, had just broken his leg by tripping in the hall); and from landscapes which had once been trodden by a race of giants. Their bones could still be dug up from the soil, Palmer said. His descriptions could be wonderfully vivid. ‘I wish you were here,’ he wrote from a rocky promontory, ‘although you would really be frightened to look down from these savage rocks at the foam of the sea far beneath dashing against them. For some moments perhaps the waters are sucked into a black cavern, and then forced out again in a cloud of white foam with a deep growl like thunder.’68

  Palmer greatly missed his son when they were apart. He tried to keep up their lessons. Transcribing two bars of music, he instructed More to: ‘place your thumb upon C’ and ‘play slowly’.69 He told him to shut his eyes when his face was being washed so that the soap wouldn’t sting. He explained how italics work – ‘read the slanting words a little more loudly than the rest’70 – and, having sent a postscript requesting him to send a kiss to his little sister, he remembered to tell him: ‘P.S. means “Post Scriptum – or after written”.’71 As the boy grew older he began to respond, sending his father drawings – ‘I think the man sitting upon the coach box is the best you have done’72 Palmer praised – and then, at the age of six, his first letter. And yet, for all his manifest tenderness, Palmer never passed over an opportunity for moral instruction. It began in his very first letter when More was instructed to: ‘Ask GOD to make you a good boy,’73 and it never stopped from that point on. A lively description of a travelling fair with its mermaid woman and fiery lynx was spoiled by what, even in an era of Victorian values, must have sounded a death knell to joy. People come from as far as fifteen miles to enjoy the fair, Palmer wrote, ‘but I think that is silly because it takes up so much of their time. I think we should spend our time in doing things that are useful – in learning to make things – being careful not to break them – and we should try to be very good and wise.’74 The moral hectoring seldom let up. ‘The way to become Good is to pray to the Good and Blessed God to make you good,’75 he informed two-year-old More. ‘Talk to your Mam
ma about the Holy Child Jesus,’ he instructed him when he was three. ‘You should try most of all to be good at those times when you feel inclined to be naughty,’76 he told him. ‘My dear boy pray daily to the blessed Jesus to make you something like what He was when He was the same age as you.’77

  Anything could provide the excuse for a sermon: a walk to a cliff edge was fodder for a grim meditation upon the end of the world and the loss of a tooth, in exchange for which More had been given a book, the starting point of a lecture on loss and gain. The letters stacked up into a weighty burden of advice. It was not unusual for the period. Nursery stories of that era were heavily freighted and often frightening to boot. Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s Lessons for Children was among More’s bedtime books. He knew the tale of the little lamb that, not liking to be penned up at night, had ignored its mother’s warnings and stayed out after dark to play. The wolf had come along, carrying the errant creature away to ‘a dismal dark den all covered with blood and bones’78 to feed it to her cubs.

  Palmer’s attitude to his son’s education was similarly unsparing. ‘As you read every day with your Mother I shall expect to find you improved when I return – therefore take pains or I shall be sadly disappointed,’79 he wrote in 1845. Even as More was learning to read – and he was told to read very clearly attending to punctuation – it was suggested that he should also try to write; as soon as he could write well enough to send his father a letter he was being pushed to embark on a journal – a journal that, moreover, he ought to keep up every day. As soon he had mastered his own lessons, More was enjoined to start instructing his little sister, passing on to her everything that he had himself been taught. First he was simply asked to show her the alphabet – ‘play at PEEP BO with the letters’,80 Palmer suggested – but soon he was expected to teach her also the errors of naughtiness. Next Palmer instructed More that he must look after his mother as well, to be kind and take care of her when she was ill. ‘What a high ladder is that of Christian perfection!’ Palmer had declared;81 his poor son was placed on the first rung and set struggling to get to its top.

  A similarly narrow path was being prepared for little Mary. She was barely three when Palmer wrote to her brother who was holidaying at the seaside: ‘Tell Mary that I love her dearly and that when you dig a grave, a deep wide grave in the sands, she must help you to bury the giant Naughtiness.’82

  The family had gone to Margate for the sake of More who was a sickly child, but it was the strong little Mary who, a short while after their return, fell desperately ill. ‘What would you do if you were in my case?’ Palmer wrote frantically to Linnell. He was in a state of ‘horrible perplexity’ about the incompetence and high fees of the pair of doctors attending. They offered conflicting opinions. One told Palmer that if his daughter managed to live through the next twenty-four hours, she might get through her illness. But ‘I am cut to the heart to see how they have begun,’ Palmer wrote, for the little girl had spent a sleepless night, coughing incessantly. The other doctor assured him that the girl would recover: ‘But how comes it then that the old cough has returned with redoubled violence?’ the stricken father asked. ‘Every cough is a dagger to me,’83 he wrote. Palmer had tried to turn his Lisson Grove study into an artistic haven, decorating it with paintings and etchings and classical busts, but none of these could mean anything now. Cancelling a work trip, even though the doctor had told him that it would be fine to go, he sat in a torment of anxiety. ‘I EARNESTLY trust Mrs Linnell will be able to see us today – I have sent for both doctors – I remain in an agony of distress,’84 he wrote.

  ‘Could Mrs Linnell do us the great kindness of coming immediately?’ a panicking Palmer implored. ‘Dr Mackenzie gave 6 drops of laudanum last night which Anny thinks has caused the sad state of Dear Mary this morning – We have both with one consent – dismissed Dr Mackenzie and depend up Dr Mackintyre – but alas I fear too late.’85 The last words of the letter are almost illegible. Palmer was distraught. And though his earnestly awaited mother-in-law did eventually arrive, she was too late to help. ‘My dear daughter Mary Elizabeth died at 25 minutes to 6 p.m.,’ he recorded on 15 December 1847. ‘She was three years and nine months old.’

  Eleven days later, Palmer recounted the details. ‘Her mother was sitting at the end of the bed when Mrs Linnell said “I think she is gone.” Anny put her face close to Mary’s, but could hear no sound of breathing. Her eyes were open and fixed, but her face turned deadly pale . . . SHE WAS DEAD. Mrs Linnell closed her eyes. The last I saw of her dear grey eyes was in the afternoon, when I watched them. The lids closing a little over them made it seem like a mournful and clouded sunset. She had appeared for the most part unconscious for two or three days, but on the morning of the day she died Anny was going to bed, when she held up one trembling arm and then the other. Anny put her head down between them, when she held her tightly round the neck for about a minute, and seemed to be thus taking a last leave of her mother. She had done so to me about two days before.’86

  Palmer and his cousin Giles were there when Mary was buried in All Saints’ Cemetery, a peaceful private burial ground in Nunhead in the then still undeveloped outreaches of Camberwell, where mourners could wander among neoclassical monuments, along meandering paths overlooking leafy views. ‘It was not until some time after dear Mary’s death that we had any notion as to the cause of her illness,’ Hannah would much later write. ‘The doctors could not understand the seizure, and asked several times if we knew of her having swallowed anything. At the time the questions were asked we did not know – but afterwards dear More remembered having seen his dear Sister suck (when playing in the field adjoining the house) a poisonous weed which when the stalk is broke yields a fluid which looks exactly like milk.’87 It is possible that Mary had found a Euphorbia, the milky latex of which is an extreme irritant, blistering skin and burning the throat if even its fumes are inhaled. When ingested, it can lead to death, especially in a young child. Post-mortem examinations of victims have revealed severe inflammation, and sometimes even perforation, of the stomach wall.

  Palmer felt completely defeated. As he bent over his paintings or sat through his teaching engagements, his eyes would blear over and his voice start to choke as memories of his golden-haired daughter drifted through his head.

  18

  The Years of Disillusion

  O! this grinding world

  from The Letters of Samuel Palmer

  ‘Life,’ said the erstwhile mariner, Edward Calvert, ‘is like the deck of a battle ship in action – there is no knowing who will go next.’1 After the death of Mary, Palmer’s old friend came round to Grove Street every evening to keep him company in his grief. ‘Bitterest anguish would have been less bearable but for your . . . sympathy and vividly remembered kindness,’2 Palmer would later write. He mourned the loss of his ‘dear sweet’3 girl. ‘Words of comfort sound very hollow,’ he wrote three years later to Richmond when he also lost a baby daughter. ‘The blow has fallen; the affections are lacerated,’ the ‘wisest words’ can only be ‘miserable comforters’.4

  But if Palmer was left desolate, it was even worse for his wife. She desperately gathered every last relic of her lost child, stitching a cushion cover from her baby clothes, caressing the casts that had been made of her tiny hands and feet. Sorting through every fragment that would bear testimony to her daughter’s brief life, she turned up a letter from her husband. ‘If Mary is going to be naughty,’ he had instructed More, ‘call out “Mary take care of the wolf!”’5 ‘I cannot remember one single instance in which dear Mary shewed any disposition to be “naughty”. She was most loving and kind to everyone,’6 Hannah scribbled in the margin. Private recriminations may have followed this loss.

  For the sorrowing parents, every room of Grove Street was haunted by memories. They no longer wished to live there and, within a few months, decided to make a new start. It would be as good for the family’s health as it would be for his profession, thought Palmer, for Lisson Grove wit
h its damp clay soil and disreputable neighbours was becoming an increasingly insalubrious place and soon he was consulting Linnell on a cottage in Kensington that he and Hannah were hoping to rent.

  Kensington in those days was still separate from the capital. An outlying town that had grown up in the seventeenth century around the palace to which William III had decamped because of his asthma, it had long been considered a desirable spot, and though by the time the Palmers moved there it was already far from rural, it still remained pleasantly peaceful in parts – its quiet lanes lined by little wooden fences, its cottages pretty and its gardens lush. In March 1848, the Palmers moved into Number 1A, Victoria Road, a picturesque if rather rickety dwelling with a thatched roof, uneven floors that threatened to collapse into the cellar and a garden which boasted its own apple tree. A few minutes’ walk away were Kensington Gardens which, with their gently lilting pastures, their calm ponds and spreading trees, offered a far better apology for the country than what Palmer had described as the ‘dank’ and ‘consumptive’7 Regent’s Park. These would provide not only a good sketching spot but a pleasant place for Hannah to wander and a fine playground for the six-year-old More.

  ‘I look out of the window – several birds are singing – the sun shines so brightly upon the slates – and the white houses look as virtuous as Vesta,’8 an uplifted Palmer told Julia Richmond a few months after moving. ‘I sit and think of you every morning under the cedars in Kensington Gardens,’ Hannah wrote fondly to her father. ‘The sheep [are] so tame that they come all round us and the birds sing gloriously overhead. I take my work and my camp stool and we are out 3 hours every morning.’9 But just as the Palmers on honeymoon in Italy had greeted every new staging post with panegyrics of delight before finding only too quickly that its novelties had palled, within a few months of moving neither of them was feeling so cheerful and Palmer was subsiding into one of his periodic glooms.