He was the ‘most wounded crushed and insignificant of human beings’,28 he said: ‘a blighted palsied parboiled creature’; ‘a poor crazy carcass’29 ‘worthless other than as a curiosity’.30 ‘I have said unto the worm thou art my sister,’ Palmer wrote.31 He could not settle to his painting and yet every hour unoccupied drove him further towards madness. When he caught flu, he was pleased to be at least stupefied; when he recovered, his health felt like a curse for it only left him more sensible to the pain of his grief. On hearing that ‘dearest dearest Finch’32 had suffered a stroke (his second) he wished that he could die instead of his old friend. It was only after many weeks had passed that he could even say: ‘Yesterday was the only day a part of which I have not passed in bitter weeping.’33
The father’s anguish would only have been heightened by the appalling suspicion that he, at least in part, might have been at fault. The doctors decided that More had died of a sudden effusion of blood on the brain. ‘Over-work!’ Palmer blurted out to Richmond in his first dreadful rush of despair. Yet if he feared that his relentless study programme had been too much for his son, it was a secret remorse, never openly acknowledged but left to fester and nag. ‘I really did treat the dear boy liberally and handsomely,’34 he later told Julia Richmond. ‘I always discouraged head work for a long while after dinner – and at one time played a game or two at backgammon every afternoon with him to keep him from study,’35 he informed Gilchrist. The death of his son was the fault of the climate, he later insisted. ‘Had we and the grammar school been in a dry bracing air I think my dear one would have been with us now,’36 he wrote. But it was not his correspondents who needed such assurances; it was Palmer himself.
Palmer and Hannah returned only briefly to London. Neither could bear the idea of remaining at Douro Place. They could never have gathered again in that cosy parlour without the ghost of their dead son drifting among them; they could never have played the silk-fronted piano without seeing his pale hands moving over the keys. Besides, as Palmer told Richmond, they did have one child left and – even if they seemed almost to have given up on him already – they still wanted to do the best for him, which would entail finding ‘a tolerably bracing spot’37 out of town where Palmer could get on with the work which would provide for what remained of his family.
Where to go, was the problem. The grieving Palmer was too sad to care about scenery: a beautiful view gave him ‘no more pleasure than the contemplation of the kitchen sink’.38 But while his wife wanted only to linger in the place where she had last seen her son, to have remained at High Ashes would have been more than Palmer could bear and so, two weeks after the death, the Palmer family were to be found in a cramped, rented cottage on Redhill Common, close by to the Linnells, where they planned to stay while they looked for somewhere else. The banalities of house-hunting at least offered Palmer a sense of pragmatic purpose. He was not unaware of the bathos of the situation: ‘The drooping head over which angels watch must be lifted up amidst this unfeeling hard world of ours and – degraded in men’s eyes by the sorrow which should make it sacred – peer about and “look sharp” and go on the tramp after hideous boxes with stuccoed sides and slated roofs – called Houses! And we must frequent the sweet society of house agent and pore over their mystic books.’39
He wanted a healthy rural place, within easy train distance from London, near to Hannah’s family and with a grammar school for Herbert, who, he said, must be educated and not left to run with the village boys. Redhill seemed to offer a solution, except neither of them liked the place: even the sight of the railway line, down which their dear boy had gone to die, was harrowing, wrote Palmer, and the view it offered towards the slopes of Leith Hill where their son lay buried was dreadful to his sight. And so, despite all the help and advice of the many friends to whom the Palmers had recourse, the search for a home for the time being proved fruitless. By the end of the summer they had moved into another set of rented lodgings in Reigate.
Palmer crept into that cottage, Herbert remembered, ‘like a sorely wounded animal no longer able to meet his kind’.40 ‘All that is left untouched by the finger of woe is the black cat who was found this morning purring in the copper with two kittens,’41 Palmer told Julia Richmond. Soon this contented feline would be his only companion, for the cottage was not only incommodious, but damp and, at the doctor’s recommendation, the rheumatic Hannah and delicate Herbert retired to Redstone. It was a return which would surely have been encouraged by Linnell, not least since his own wife had fallen ill that summer. He also extended the hand of friendship to Palmer, sending him (as he had once done to Blake) a ton of coal so that he would not be cold. The gesture, however, though thoughtful, was not sufficient to re-warm the relationship between them and the occasional letters Palmer wrote to Linnell during this period are brief, businesslike dispatches. The last token strands of the friendship between them were being allowed to snap.
With nobody but Herbert’s old nursemaid to care for him, Palmer was abandoned to his solitary grief. The six months that followed were probably the most melancholy of his life; but he struggled against depression, resolving at the very least to do his duty, to get on with the work that he could not afford to neglect, especially since More’s illness had incurred heavy medical costs. When not painting, he tried to ‘ward off the ghastly thoughts’ among his ‘dear kind books’.42 It proved a fairly effective policy. Not only did five drawings by him appear in the 1862 summer show but, in the ‘sweet society’ of the authors he loved, he found himself ‘as little miserable as one can be who, in the world, must never more be happy’.43 He found in the Bible – particularly in the morose narratives of Job and the laments of Exodus – emotional fellowship. And though, when the gospels of two Sundays in succession could proffer nothing more comforting than first the parable of the barren fig tree and then the story of the buried talent, his mind was driven to ever more painful meditations, his faith in the long run stood firm. We may sail in an egg shell, with a straw for a mast and a cobweb for a rope, he wrote, quoting from Ben Jonson; but ‘then comes the voice from Heaven, bidding us open our eyes and see, and stretch out our hands and grasp the ANCHOR OF THE SOUL . . .’44
The people he most loved provided another source of consolation. ‘Having nothing left which I do not expect to lose, my entire earthly solace must henceforth be in the wellbeing of my friends,’ he told young Julia Richmond, and he implored her ‘whenever another little budget of events accrues’ to write. ‘Do not “wonder” in future whether “I shall care to hear from you” for though you are a very young lady you are a very old friend.’45 It must have tugged at his heart strings to hear that her brother Willie was winning prizes at the Royal Academy, but he still sent the boy a message to say how much he would like him to visit – though, since it was December and he knew how valuable daylight becomes in winter to artists preparing work for Academy exhibition, he would understand if he did not have the time. He fussed over the news that his old friend Richmond had a cold, putting it down to the dampness of the clay he was sculpting, recommending that he light a fire in his studio two hours before he enters so that he may go into warm vapour rather than the chill dank.
Palmer missed his family. When he felt lonely at tea time, he would set out a chair for his little cat Trot. ‘Up jumps poor puss and between us we make a segment of the circle,’ he told Mrs George. ‘Even the dumb creatures have gratitude and love in their measure, and the time will come when we shall know that the sagacity which finds a new planet is less essential to the perfection of our nature than gratitude and love.’46 He was sympathetic when his brother William yet again presented a problem. After more than twenty years working at the British Museum, William had lost his job in the Department of Antiquities, having been absent through illness (he was suffering a disease of the cranial bones and rheumatism, the minutes of a museum sub-committee record) for almost a year. He was facing imminent beggary, said Palmer, who, having apparently forgiven his deceitful si
bling for pawning all his pictures, set about trying to contact trustees who might be persuaded to secure more than the basic superannuation allowance for a man who had four mouths to feed. ‘The future of my poor brother’s children rankles within me,’ for they are ‘clothed with all the desolateness and none of the poetry of sorrow’,47 he told Richmond who in his turn, as so often, tried to help out. For a while, it was hoped that William’s son might be employed in his place as a museum attendant, but although by January of the following year the father was receiving his £46 pension, there is no record of his boy having been given the job.
Palmer had always been generous but the deep sense of charity that characterised his later years was engendered by sorrow. ‘Perhaps without sorrow there is little sympathy for others,’ Palmer suggested; ‘for by sympathy I do not mean any amount of good nature, but fellowship in suffering.’48 Affliction, he wrote, ‘acts like a vigorous stonebreaker upon the flint of our hard hearts’.49 And yet, beyond all the brave efforts to rebuild his life, his sadness always lay waiting; often he could do nothing to fight but gave way to his grief. ‘Today the first snow has fallen upon our dear boy’s grave!’ he wrote that winter to Mrs George as he sat alone by his fireside, the wind moaning round the house. ‘It is a foolish fancy; but I have always felt it very sad that, while we are warm by our winter fireside, those precious limbs, mouldering though they be, of our lost dear ones, should be far away from us, unhoused and in the damp, cold earth, under the wind, and rain, and frost.’50
The single greatest help to Palmer’s recovery came in the form of another death. At the end of November, Alexander Gilchrist passed away. Palmer had grown close to him over the five or so years that he had spent working on his Life of William Blake and had enjoyed many hours at his family home in Cheyne Walk. He had helped to nurse him through the bout of scarlet fever that had eventually killed him. By shifting his focus from his own loss to a fellow sufferer’s predicament, Palmer may have been saved from a more prolonged personal collapse. He proved a staunch friend to Gilchrist’s wife, Anne, doing whatever he could to console her, to sustain her spirits and offer her new hope. The letters he sent her were his longest and most philosophical meditations on the process of mourning and Hannah joined him in sending messages of support. ‘Women who have suffered your bereavement,’ she told the new widow, ‘are said to be under the peculiar protection of the Almighty – subject to his peculiar care tenderness and love.’51
Anne Gilchrist, left so suddenly to fend for herself and her several children, was grateful for their kindness, but she had little time to meditate upon her loss. Among the first tasks that faced her was the need to move house and, barely a month after the demise of the family breadwinner, she had left London and was renting a cottage near Haslemere, while she, like the Palmers, looked for a more permanent home. Though Palmer bombarded her with advice, when it came to practicalities he was completely ineffectual. When Anne was suddenly required at short notice to move he was too busy to help. Within two weeks, she had found a house on her own and by April 1862 she was ensconced in nearby Hindhead.
Palmer persuaded her that she should, with his help, complete the Blake biography left unfinished by her husband. The task would become a source of great solace in their shared grief. Roused from his lethargy, Palmer attended to it punctiliously, correcting anything from basic facts through philosophical meanings to punctuation marks. He was particularly keen to make sure that no indecent or coarse words or irreverent references would be included as Blake, he explained, had often been provoked to write by intense irritation with the result that some of his sentiments could appear blasphemous, and blasphemy, Palmer believed, would have blighted the chances of the book. As a result, the work of a hero whose fierce spiritual purity he had never really understood was subjected to a prudish censorship. His attempts at bowdlerisation, however, were not always successful. There was a story often told by Blake’s patron, Thomas Butts, who said that, calling round on the poet one day, he had found Blake and his wife sitting quietly in their summerhouse freed of ‘those troublesome disguises’ which have prevailed since the Fall. ‘Come in!’ Blake had cried: ‘it is only Adam and Eve, you know!’ Husband and wife had, apparently, gone into character to recite passages from Paradise Lost in their little backyard Eden. Palmer had dismissed this tale. It was unlike Blake, he said. It would be better excised. It remained, however, though other passages did not.
Palmer’s beloved Milton would have been outraged: in his Areopagitica he had launched a fierce attack on censorship. But Palmer was delighted by the results of all his efforts, shame-sparing asterisks included. He could hardly contain his effusions when, in November 1863, the finished volumes finally arrived. Cutting the pages, he read wildly all over the place, relishing every aspect of the work. ‘Surely never book has been put forth more lovingly,’52 he cried. He predicted many print runs and dreamt of debates carried on in periodicals. And even though these were not immediately to come about, Palmer, in collaborating so impassionedly with the Gilchrists on this biography, undoubtedly played a major part in setting off the process of reassessment which, over the ensuing years, was to turn a forgotten engraver into an exalted figure in British art.
After publication, however, his correspondence with Anne Gilchrist rapidly fell away. Perhaps she was too occupied with caring for her family, or maybe she had grown tired of his sententious outpourings on anything from child-rearing practices to the problems of country bakers. But the friendship had served its most important function, setting Palmer back on course to continue the next phase of his life. It was not that the Palmers would ever forget their eldest son: Hannah kept all his possessions – from a bookcase full of the bargain volumes that he had used to rummage for in the Farringdon Road market, to his old schoolboy essays. Palmer, in a drawer in his study, kept a handful of other treasured relics. He seldom dared look at them, but he liked to keep them near him. More remained an obsession. The nineteen-year-old whom a headmaster had praised in the prize-giving two weeks after his death as a boy of unusual promise, became elevated in his father’s memory into a very paragon.
20
Redhill
Midnight has struck – and the hours – however slowly,
creep towards dawn
from The Letters of Samuel Palmer
Palmer had dreamt all his life of a rural existence but in May 1862, as he packed up his paintings into a few small boxes to leave for his last ever home, it was not to some pastoral idyll that he found himself moving but to the suburban realities of Victorian life. The house was Hannah’s choice. Palmer had spent seven months hunting fruitlessly, tramping – even in a weakened state when two miles a day was the most he could manage – fourteen miles of coach road from south to west Surrey; but nothing he found met his fastidious criteria. Hannah, wanting to be near her family, finally settled on a modest, detached house in Mead Vale, a suburb of Redhill, in the borough of Reigate.
Redhill, named after the local common that was itself named after the red fuller’s earth – a clay used until the end of the nineteenth century for absorbing grease from natural wool in a process known as ‘fulling’ – which was mined in the region, was a new town that, since 1818, had been gradually creeping across the waterlogged wastelands flanking the increasingly busy London to Brighton Road. With the opening of the railway in 1841 it had flourished and, by the time that the Palmers moved there, its population had risen to around 10,000. It was about ‘as ugly a town as you could find’, declared Herbert, ‘with no history beyond the history of the railway, and no old association’.1 The same might be said of Redhill today: a soulless aggregation of Edwardian leftovers and harsh modern blocks with a pedestrianised shopping precinct instead of a heart. But nowadays, Palmer’s leafy suburb of Mead Vale is more readily associated with the town of Reigate: the more appealing Georgian neighbour with which Redhill merges as it leaks down the A25.
It is still possible to follow – give or take a few traffic juncti
ons – Palmer’s instructions for how to get from Reigate Town station to his home. A road leads steadily uphill between lines of new houses and a sprinkling of prettier cottages that he would have known. Keeping the old stone wall of Reigate church to the right, as Palmer suggested, the walker follows the road round and then upwards into a world of big gardens and gravel driveways, double garages and magnolia trees. The solitary gas lamp which once marked the Palmers’ lane has gone, but the house – at the top of a road that is now called Cronks Hill – is still there, tucked away at the end of the little right-hand turning. A big solid building on the corner was Palmer’s landmark.
Palmer’s home is now called the Chantry, but then it was called Furze Hill House and was marketed by the letting agents as a Gothic villa. It could hardly have felt further from the aesthetic that Palmer so loved. What today’s buyer might covet as quirky seemed ridiculously pretentious to his tastes – not that he, in a state of depression, could rouse himself much to care. It met his requirements. It was built on high ground, standing about 400 feet above sea level, and yet was not lofty enough to be bleak. The soil was dry. ‘We see the evening reek stopping just below us,’ he wrote, and if it often ‘strikes cold’ just at the bottom of the hill, ‘all is dry and pleasant above’.2 It was cheerfully near to a town and, with two stations nearby, it would take only half an hour for Palmer to get into Charing Cross, while Brighton, where Hannah could go shopping, was also conveniently reached by rail. When the wind was in the right direction you could even smell the sea breezes, Palmer observed – or at least those who didn’t take snuff professed that they could.
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