Mysterious Wisdom

by Rachel Campbell-Johnston

  In 1851 the Palmers also moved house, taking up residence in 6, Douro Place. It was only a short walk from their previous cottage, but it was considered an upward move. Douro Place was a pretty cul-de-sac. The then fashionable sculptor, John Bell – his dramatic Eagle Slayer was to stand at the heart of the Great Exhibition that year – had a house on the corner. But, if a succession of social luminaries arrived at that end of the street, the other, where the Palmers lived, was blocked by a high brick wall.

  Number 6 – now singled out by an English Heritage plaque as the home of Samuel Palmer – is, by current standards, a substantial residence: a four-storey Georgian building set in quiet seclusion, it would be far out of the financial reach of an unsuccessful artist today, but in Palmer’s era it was considered a modest establishment. The visitor, arriving through a green wicket gate, would follow the path through a shady patch of garden which was cheered up in summer by abundant marigolds, to a flight of steps with a tangle of white roses growing around its railings, leading up to the front door. It was dark inside, the daughter of their neighbour, Charles West Cope, remembered, with a long low room on the left as you entered, the floor of which sloped steadily down towards the windows. There was no studio. Palmer used a corner of the drawing room. It had a southerly aspect, which he liked, even though it looked onto the houses opposite. Palmer tried to make the best of this far-from-perfect set-up, settling down amid his clutter of artist’s materials, mended picture frames and homemade portfolios and, in memory of Shoreham, planting a root of hops among the garden’s lilac bushes.

  Many happy hours were spent in that home. Cope’s daughter would much later describe them, recalling how Hannah would caution the guests about the sloping flagstones, remembering her ‘pretty gentle way and voice’ and how Palmer would sing as he played the tall silk-fronted piano or tell the children blood-curdling stories about wolves in which the creatures’ far-off howling seemed to draw nearer and nearer and nearer as the children clustered about him, half-frightened, half-thrilled. She particularly remembered the magnificence of his voice ‘rolling out By the waters of Babylon’.42 This psalm of exile must have meant a lot to him. He was a suburban outcast of his rural dreams. And it would only get worse. The green spaces of South Kensington were being rapidly buried under stucco. ‘They have so built us up with great houses,’ Palmer mourned, ‘as to destroy the elasticity of the air.’43 Sometimes he would burn blotting paper that had been soaked in saltpetre in his bedroom so that he could breathe better. The acrid vapours helped to clear his lungs.

  His health was declining. Throughout the 1850s he was regularly ailing. Appointments were frequently cancelled or postponed. He blamed his impaired constitution on the transition from Italy’s dry summer climates to London’s damp clay. Coughs, colds and wheezes seemed constantly to plague him and, by 1856, he was referring to himself – albeit mockingly – as ‘a wretched invalid’.44 The enthusiastic young visionary who had used to ramble all night across the Kentish Weald was now entering his fifties. Winter, with its ‘bitter weather and untoward rains’,45 herded him towards his hearth; but in summer it wasn’t much better. ‘I DREAD the DUST of town, which withers me whenever I go out,’46 Palmer moaned. Hannah would apply mustard plasters to his chest. But she was not well herself. She had suffered several miscarriages before finally, in September 1853, giving birth to a third and last child, a son who was christened Alfred Herbert: Alfred after the king and Herbert in honour of the poet. For some time his father called him the former and his mother the latter; but in the long run it was Hannah who won out. The boy was known as Herbert, or Hub for short. Cope and Reed were his godfathers.

  From the beginning the infant was sick, succumbing to fevers, convulsions and fits. Dr Macintyre once more became a frequent – sometimes a daily – visitor, and Mrs Linnell, with whom Palmer shared few other interests, became a medical confidante, privy to the details of every symptom and remedy. The baby was prone to squinting, Palmer told her in 1854. ‘We . . . have noticed it all along at intervals.’ ‘[Dr McIntyre says] it might proceed merely from wind or from a very serious cause, congestion of the brain.’47 Within such wide parameters, there was plenty of room for anxieties to run amok and the unfortunate infant was subjected to an assortment of unpleasant treatments that ranged from the administration of grey powders to the lancing of its gums.

  Later that year, Hannah, the baby and his nurse, went to stay at Redstone while Palmer, freed for a few days from teaching commitments set off – with the help of £5 from Linnell – for a holiday with More. Herbert grew temporarily stronger but by 1855 he was seriously ill again and, had it not been for the advice of Dr McIntyre, would have been ‘laid by the side of his still dear little sister’,48 Palmer wrote. By the time the baby had recovered the whole family was exhausted: Hannah had sat up with him every night but one for six weeks, while the nurse had never got to bed before two in the morning. Preparations were once more made for a recuperative trip to Redstone. ‘We have indeed much reason for thankfulness,’ a relieved Palmer wrote, ‘when after fever and insensibility we see our poor Herbert amusing himself with his old playthings and playing his old tricks.’49

  It was around this time that Palmer developed a fascination for homeopathy. This system of medicine, based on treating a patient with highly diluted substances which trigger the body’s natural system of healing, had been introduced into Britain in the 1830s by an Edinburgh trained medic, Dr Quin, who while travelling in Europe had met Samuel Hahnemann, the founder of this holistic discipline. By 1850 he had founded a homeopathic hospital in London and by 1858 had negotiated an amendment to the Medical Act as a result of which homeopathy became not only tolerated but in many cases preferred to traditional treatments – perhaps hardly surprising in an era when mainstream practitioners regularly advocated such measures as bloodletting, purging and the administration of Venice Treacle: a mixture made up of sixty-four substances among them opium, myrrh and viper’s flesh.

  Palmer invested in a homeopathic box containing sixteen different medicines: – ‘all that are wanted for domestic practice’,50 he announced with satisfaction – and from this time on would self-medicate enthusiastically. Pulsatilla taken alternatively with Aconite, he informed Julia Richmond, had done wonders for his eyes. Vision which had grown bleared from hours of close work had been suddenly and almost miraculously restored. He sent her Chamomilla for the colds of her children: he had twice cured a three-year-old by administering six globules dissolved in water, he assured her, and he himself, recently caught out in the driving rain without an overcoat, would surely have succumbed to one of his frequent flus had he not happened to have had his box of medicines in his pocket. ‘2 globules of Dulcamava made me as safe as if I had been sitting by the fire!’51 Palmer believed in homeopathy, much as he believed in haunting, he said: ‘because, if you sift both questions till you sift your arms off, there is still a residuum of evidence that cannot be got rid of’.52 Besides, he insisted, the practice saved him money. By curing a miserable cold in the head in just a few hours he was enabled to start work again immediately and so save himself not just ten stupefying days of miserable snuffling but a considerable amount of money too.

  Money continued to be a trouble to the Palmers. Doctors – and towards the end of the 1850s there were sometimes two in attendance – had to be paid for, quite apart from Herbert’s illnesses, Thomas More was never strong. The rent at Douro Place was higher than that at their previous cottage. The income from Palmer’s Shoreham houses was small and though, in 1851, Linnell, who was party to all his son-in-law’s pecuniary arrangements, had helped him to increase the rents, this did not always have quite the desired effect. A Mr Foreman, who until then had paid regularly, fell as a consequence into arrears.

  Economies had to be practised at Douro Place. They came fairly easily to Palmer who, though occasionally tempted by some fine old book or print, was a man of simple habits. But Hannah found them far harder to bear. Having lost all confidenc
e in her own talents as an artist, she was not far from losing faith with those of her husband too. Her father had already done so and when, in 1850, Hannah’s younger sister Polly had got engaged to Calvert’s son, Linnell, anxious that the same mistake should not be repeated, persuaded her to break the betrothal off.

  ‘Women, well governed, are dear charming creatures,’ Palmer confided to Richmond in 1851. ‘Though (between ourselves),’ he added, they are ‘wonderfully feline’ and most to be doted upon ‘when their claws are in’.53 But Anny’s claws were now more often unsheathed. The woman whom he had once affectionately called ‘Bantam’ now took the nickname ‘My Lady Superior’54 or ‘Head of the House’ to his ‘tail’. ‘My timidity has left me in a minority of one,’55 Palmer wrote. Hannah, comparing her humble circumstances with the comforts of Redstone, felt increasingly dissatisfied. She yearned for a fashionable lifestyle of the sort that a successful Academician would provide. She wanted a smart house with elegant furnishings and so set about creating it, investing in the sort of accoutrements that could ill be afforded. ‘I could have bought all the books it is good for anyone to read for the money this table and these chairs have cost – have furnished an immortal mind for what will not half-furnish a room,’ Palmer wailed to his father-in-law after one of her sprees. ‘Groaning under mahogany’,56 the letter is signed off.

  Instead of the single, part-time maid that Hannah had once thought would be sufficient, she now employed two servants who, as often as not, only added to their problems. The cook acquired so much money while working for this penurious family that she bought herself a watch, while an Irish girl, upset by an argument over the baby’s milk, stormed out at an hour’s notice and demanded a full month’s wages, thereby shoring up all Palmer’s prejudices against Roman Catholics.

  These maids became Hannah’s cohorts in her unremitting battle to keep up appearances. Periodically, even the reluctant Palmer would be winkled out of his study as they set about a vigorous cleaning in which closets were emptied, books dusted and sometimes disposed of and plaster casts all too often carelessly smashed. ‘I am getting used to it, and have ceased to feel much annoyed at the reckless destruction,’ Palmer wrote to his wife who had gone away (to Redstone presumably) leaving her husband to cope with the domestic onslaught. But even he found it hard to maintain an air of peaceful resignation when, visiting a friend, he spotted a bas-relief identical to one that his maids had recently broken placed on prominent display above the parlour door. ‘What egregious blockheads we must become if we ever more attempt to vie with people who have fifty times our income!’57 he mourned.

  Palmer enjoyed going to parties, especially those involving gatherings of artists, for artists he believed had a great deal of humour. His wife, however, wanted him to attend the sort of ‘midnight dissipations’ which he hated – smart social gatherings in which cards and music were considered more important than conversation and in which, when people did talk, they engaged in the sort of gossip which Palmer most deplored. Gossips, he remarked, were like flies, settling ‘with satisfaction on every little heap of filth and refuse’,58 whereas we should be more like bees, collecting honey as we roam.

  Far too often for his liking, Palmer would find himself lurking on the sidelines of some social gathering, a small, bespectacled figure pulling a capacious snuff box, rubbed to the warm glow of an aged Titian painting, from the pocket of a dishevelled coat and blinking myopically at the melee before him. He got far more pleasure, he said, from the few tranquil moments that he and his wife would spend afterwards at home, she reading aloud to him from a life of George Herbert before bed. ‘What poor, fun-loving babies we are – here upon the verge of eternity,’ he wrote bemusedly to Reed. ‘All is puzzle and a heterogeneous heap of inconsistencies so wild and strange that, but for their daily experiences they would be incredible. Thousands lavishing, thousands starving; intrigues, wars, flatteries, envyings, hypocrisies, lying vanities, hollow amusements, exhaustion, dissipation, death – and giddiness and laughter, from the first scene to the last.’59

  Hannah hero-worshipped her father. ‘You live on a hill in more senses than one,’ she told him in 1858: ‘standing on the vantage ground of truth higher up it seems to me than anybody else in the world . . . I long to toil up after you though to reach your height would be impossible even with your helping hand.’60 She began to spend more and more time at Redstone. Linnell, always ready to encourage her visits, might have been suspected of wilfully undermining her marriage had he not also been the provider of the funds that kept her household afloat.

  Where once Hannah had defended her husband against the accusations of her family (‘I find Mr Palmer so different, from the misrepresented accounts of his opinions and practices in London,’61 she had written from Italy), she was now more likely to concur with their criticisms. One evening, having tucked up his trousers to keep them clean as he walked to the Richmonds’, Palmer had forgotten to untuck them again and had spent all evening wandering about with his socks on show. It was obviously a faux pas. ‘Had I maintained three wives at once, had I sent my children to boarding school at Sierra Leone, I verily believe I should have committed no crime so capital in the eyes of my beloved countrymen as that which I perpetrated last night at your house,’62 he wrote in self-mocking apology. But where Julia, his hostess, was quick to laugh off such solecisms, his wife Hannah was mortified.

  Other more serious problems arose. At one point a religious spat broke out between Palmer and Linnell: injuries were aired, resentments nurtured, tales carried, taunts delivered and theological minutiae picked over in petulant detail. Hannah even risked injuring Palmer’s relationship with Giles on the grounds that so many members of his family (though not Giles himself) were Roman Catholic and, if there was one thing on which Palmer and Linnell could agree, it was that Catholics were suspect and not to be tolerated. Another time an argument blew up over a minor indiscretion in which Hannah had gossiped to her father about the private affairs of the Old Watercolour Society. Towards the end of the 1850s, Thomas More became the cause of a huge family row.

  More, by then in his late teens, was often refractory. He could be conceited and wilful and he also had a penchant for practical jokes which – though no specific examples were mentioned (except his buying a peashooter, unbeknownst to his mother, with which he ended up hurting his mouth) – were clearly the sort of pranks which would not have gone down well in Redstone’s regimented world. ‘I have known for long that More is too much indulged, but my being at home makes very little difference in that respect,’ Hannah wrote to her father, who considered her son spoilt. One day More invited his friend Charles Cope over for an impromptu lunch at his grandfather’s, a meal at which Linnell, who planned his time precisely, liked to meet dealers and do business. He got very unsettled – and would even fly into a rage – if his routine was disturbed. Another time Linnell, who was inordinately proud of having taught himself Latin and Greek, had laid a classical trap for More from which the boy had extricated himself with self-confident arrogance. Linnell had been greatly irritated, not least because he suspected that all the effort that went into More’s education would only prepare another Anglican clergyman. ‘You have saddled your hobby of scholastic learning with a worldly object like Balaam,’ Linnell wrote to More. ‘You do not see the messenger of God blocking up your path but keep spurring on the exhausted flesh . . . Seek a living apart from all ecclesiastical dignity which is no dignity but a degradation.’63

  The initial cause of the controversy that in 1859 arose over More remains unclear, but the animosity that resulted was only too manifest. The boy had been sick but the Linnells refused to have him to stay at Redstone. The Palmers, it was hinted, did not show proper gratitude. A favour had been followed, it would seem, by reproachful taunts. Letters passed back and forth. ‘I wish I knew in what way More has offended you; for every grandfather’s house is open to his grandchildren: no mother is left to beseech it as a favour especially for a convalescent
child,’64 wrote a placatory Palmer. Linnell remained unconvinced. Hannah’s brother James entered into the fray and eventually the whole affair was superficially settled, though lingering resentments continued to simmer. When Linnell sent a soothing letter, inviting Palmer and his son to stay, the offer was stiffly turned down. A few months later, More was ill again and was sent to recuperate with friends in the country. Linnell dispatched a present of home-brewed beer and was whole-heartedly thanked by the boy who bore no lasting grudge. But the relationship between Palmer and his father-in-law had been irreparably damaged. Where Palmer used to sign off his letters to him with affectionate subscriptions, now they tended to end coolly with a standard: ‘yours truly’.

  Hannah, however, whose ‘filial reverence’, said Palmer, amounted ‘almost to worship’,65 stayed more and more frequently at Redstone, leaving her husband alone to the companionship of his cats. Palmer was more or less contented. He loved listening to the ‘furry orchestra’66 that these creatures would strike up at night in the streets and for a truly peaceful evening, he told his friend Reed, ‘there must be a cat upon the rug – a sedate well conducted tabby – contemplative of temperament – shutting her eyes or blinking as she muses upon her last mouse’.67 But he missed the warmth of the family circle, with its singing tea kettle (he always preferred the vociferous kettle to the silent urn) and its piano playing, its poetic recitations and its fireside chat and he often felt sidelined and defeated, as if he merely plodded on for the sake of his children. ‘I am prepared to lead a life hopeless of any earthly good, and to persevere to the utmost of my power in patient well-doing, unappreciated and ridiculed,’68 he wrote miserably to Hannah in 1856. When his former pupil Louisa Twining returned some sketches he had lent her, he was pathetically grateful that they had been of use. ‘I shall value them the more for having afforded you some quiet recreation,’69 he told her. He must have wished that his wife was more like this highly motivated woman. When men tend upwards, he wrote to Miss Twining, they move towards ‘hallowed intelligence’, while women aspire to ‘seraphic love’. But ‘when they tend downwards the man falls towards brutality, the woman towards trumpery’.70 Occasionally his resentments towards Hannah found a direct voice. I have been ‘ill-used and unjustly neglected as an artist, as well as in many other ways’,71 he told her in 1856. But he didn’t elaborate.