After the publication of a number of pictures by Shortshanks, Thomas McLean arrived at his shop early one morning, and encountered a familiar figure waiting outside, but with a grave and determined expression, which was not at all wonted. It was George Cruikshank.
‘Good morning, sir,’ said McLean, as he opened the door, and allowed several young girls with splashed pinafores to leave – they formed the team of overnight hand-colourists. ‘Do come in. If I may say – it is unusual for you to be here so early.’
‘It is.’
McLean pushed his glasses higher on his nose, although there appeared no need for the action. He gestured for Cruikshank to cross the threshold first, and the artist paced around the shop, casting a dismissive look over the prints on the wall. The artist then stood at the counter, twisting a diamond ring around his third finger.
‘Now you have my full attention,’ said McLean.
‘Are you a fool? Did you think you could do this to me, and I would not make the slightest fuss?’
The angle of McLean’s chin changed, and with rapidity. There was a glance, to check whether the box of Shortshanks prints under the counter protruded so as to be visible to the man on the other side. McLean assumed a look of utmost concern, with some suggestion of bewilderment.
‘This is theft!’ said the artist. ‘The name of Cruikshank belongs to me and my brother. It is no one else’s! A man works hard in his profession to build up his name and reputation! I am not going to see it ruined by a copyist.’
‘I presume you refer to the pictures by Shortshanks.’
‘I want him stopped. Without delay!’
‘No insult was intended. The artist is an admirer of yours.’
‘Who is he? Tell me, McLean, or it’ll be the worse for you.’
‘His name is Robert Seymour.’
‘I should have guessed. The joke about Seymour del and Shortshanks sculpt. And – now I come to think of it – yes – there was a man who approached me at the gymnasium some months ago. His name was Seymour. Why did you take him on, McLean?’
‘He is the fastest artist I have ever encountered. He may well become the most prolific caricaturist in England. I can send a boy to him with a request for a picture, and he draws it while the boy waits, and it is often ready before the boy has so much as drunk a cup of tea.’
‘He will burn himself out like a garden bonfire.’
‘I think not. I asked him recently how many pictures a day he could draw, and he said it would sound like an exaggeration, and so he preferred not to tell me. Then he said that wasn’t even counting the pile of first attempts he had thrown away.’
‘A speedy imitator.’
‘I will not hold him back.’
‘You can tell this Seymour to have the courage to draw under his own name. Or I swear it will be the worse for you.’
‘Mark this, Cruikshank. It is a good thing that it is you who have come to see me about this, and not your brother. If he had come complaining, I would have bundled him off in an instant.’
‘I have a good mind to tell him that.’
‘And I have a good mind to tell you that if Seymour drops Shortshanks you may have more to fear. Because I can see you are afraid. Today you can dismiss Seymour as an imitator. That may not always be so. You are the most acclaimed artist in London – for now.’
‘Insulting me will not get you off the hook, McLean.’
‘I will speak to Seymour. There will be no more Shortshanks pictures. In fact, I will insist that he use his own name in the future. Good day, sir.’
‘You are a fool to associate with someone like him.’
‘Good day, sir.’
After Cruikshank left, McLean sat down behind his counter and began writing a letter to Seymour. As he did so, another man in his early thirties entered the shop. Shabby in appearance, red in the face, the most noticeable aspect of the man’s features was a strong nose, on which he balanced small, circular spectacles.
‘Mr McLean?’
‘I am, sir.’
‘My name is William Heath. I am an artist.’
‘Forgive me, but I am not immediately familiar with that name.’
‘I have been in Scotland. For several years.’
*
GLASGOW, OCTOBER 1825. THE LOW ceiling, the unopened windows and the proximity of the walls in the tavern’s clubroom made for the most concentrated fug of Cuban smoke that William Heath had ever encountered. The interior had become shades of golden brown and, thought Heath, it would not be surprising if the assembled whiskery membership eventually became kipper-coloured themselves and blended into the walls.
He had heard that the men gathered in the clubroom were, for the most part, officials involved with the administration and enforcement of the law, including politicians and magistrates, whose concern for budgetary responsibility perhaps attracted them to the landlord’s keen tariffs for cigars and rum. Certainly the prices – together with the public’s view of politicians and the legal profession – explained the nickname he had heard ascribed to this establishment: the Cheap and Nasty Club of Glasgow.
As he stood at the bar, Heath was intrigued by one man sitting quietly on his own.
The man’s broad and resourceful face might well have belonged to a successful barrister or a justice of the peace, and therefore suited him to the room; his current preoccupation, however, suggested nothing of the sort, for he was examining a flower through a magnifying glass. The flower was itself an oddity – it had the exact shape of a poppy, but it was white, not red. Man and flower interested Heath enough for him to discover more.
‘Am I mistaken,’ said Heath, taking a seat opposite the man, without asking if he minded, ‘but is that a poppy?’
The man looked up. ‘Not a normal poppy. I found it today.’
‘It is very curious.’
‘Once you are aware of the possibility of aberrations in plants, you see them all the time. There’s rarely a ramble when I don’t see a plant with an extra petal, or with no petals at all, or with petals sprouting out of other petals.’
‘Is it something in the Scottish soil that does it?’
‘Why no!’ he laughed. ‘Though I have seen a thistle with flattened roots, like ribbons. Are you interested in plants yourself?’
‘Anything odd catches my eye. I am an artist.’
Heath always carried examples of his work with him in an army backpack, and so he took out his illustration The Battle of Albuera: the smoke from cannon mingled with the clouds he had drawn in the sky, and now also with the tobacco smoke that drifted across the table.
The gentleman put down his poppy and examined a pictorial ragged banner with his magnifying glass, and by various noises and nods, showed a keen enthusiasm.
‘I’ve done a lot of military pictures, I have,’ said Heath, bringing out a cavalry charge, ‘but the demand has gone. I came to Glasgow to do city pictures in oils; and I have also sketched a few caricatures and amusing scenes.’
‘You may be surprised to learn that I have an interest in pictures myself. I operate the only lithographic press in Glasgow.’
‘Why, you must be Mr Hopkirk!’ said Heath, pulling back in astonishment. ‘I was going to call on you tomorrow!’
‘Well this is most auspicious. Come, do join me in a rum, sir. Let me shake your hand!’
*
The Scotia public house in Glasgow was known for its secretive, lamplit alcoves; and, located close to the last stage of the penny ferry on the Clyde, men from downriver called in before going home. Joined by sailors, these men swallowed malt liquor and swapped yarns. Shortly after the meeting between William Heath and Thomas Hopkirk, the alcoves at the Scotia found a new entertainment to accompany the drinks: an illustrated publication whose like had never been seen before, the Glasgow Looking Glass.
The customers of the Scotia read over each other’s shoulders and handed round the latest issue. A sailor laughed at a picture of a funeral club, at which men, driven by fear
of the pauper’s grave, banded together to contribute pennies to a common fund for decent burials – but drank themselves senseless at a meeting and lay draped over chairs, on the table and on the floor, while thieves came in and looted their coffer. Down the page was a picture called Pious Jaw Breakers, of a church congregation singing with unnaturally gaping mouths – an allusion, some readers realised, to a Glasgow man who dislocated his jaw in the full sway of devotion to the Lord. Then came an image everyone understood: the wheezing citizens on Glasgow’s streets, forced to breathe in the fumes from factory chimneys, groping their way along, barely able to see in the smoke, while the birds fell dead from the sky and the trees stood leafless from lack of sun.
The publication’s premise was simple – so simple it seemed impossible that it had not been done before, but it needed Hopkirk and Heath to bring it into the world. For the fortnightly Glasgow Looking Glass was like a floral mutation, a humorous magazine of many pictures per page, not just one, or none.
The artist himself drank in the Scotia every day, working on ideas for drawings, as the atmosphere was more conducive to creativity than the Cheap and Nasty; but when the Glasgow Looking Glass had been going barely two months, Heath became unaccountably absent for ten days. ‘Have you seen Heath?’ was asked every evening in the Scotia, but no one seemed to know his whereabouts.
On the tenth day, Heath returned. His whole demeanour was altered. Heath had not been shy before, but never had he shown such an easy confidence as he strode into the Scotia. It was as though he believed he was twice as handsome.
‘Where have you been?’ said a retired sailor, standing cross-legged at the bar.
‘Northumbria. My family home. A bereavement. Ah!’ he said, looking at a stuffed fox in a wall-mounted display case. ‘I can hardly wait for the hunting season. There is nothing like chasing a fox to sharpen one’s wits for war. The best men I served with had all ridden to hounds.’
The sailor and a younger drinking partner looked at each other. ‘You have never mentioned hunting before,’ said the sailor.
‘You have never even mentioned serving before,’ said his companion.
‘Have I not? Captain. Dragoons.’ In the air he made a cut and slash with a movement of his wrist. ‘After the funeral I took the opportunity to collect my old uniform.’ He opened the backpack in which he usually carried his art and tugged at the collar of a military tunic.
‘Where did you see action?’ said the sailor’s companion.
‘Albuera. Many theatres of war.’
‘You must have been young at Albuera,’ said the sailor.
‘I wasn’t a dragoon then. There was always work for boys loading cannon.’
‘May I have a look at your uniform?’ said the sailor.
‘I am just going to the privy,’ said Heath, ‘but by all means have a look.’ He asked the landlord to set a drink on the bar, ready for his return.
The uniform was held up. ‘It’s surely too large for him,’ said the sailor’s companion. ‘I’m about his size. I’m going to try it on.’ The sleeves travelled halfway down his hands. ‘He never wore this uniform. And look at how loose it is. The dragoon this belonged to was a barrel-chested man.’
At the other end of the bar, a grim and unsociable drinker had noticed these goings-on. The one fact known about this man was that he had fought with the Scots Greys at Waterloo, and this was not offered up idly, but had emerged when a party of military veterans came to the Scotia, and they toasted the glorious victory of Wellington and the gallant Prussians. This was the sole conversation the man was ever known to have had. Now he put down his glass with a resolute placement and crossed to the opposite end of the bar to examine the tunic. He listened to the men’s opinions – one suggested that Heath had had a knock on the head in Northumbria, the other that funerals are funny things, a time when you think of what you have and haven’t done in your life, and you see people you haven’t seen for a long time, and that was always difficult. To these explanations, the man of the Scots Greys said nothing except a grim and determined: ‘I’ll find out.’
When Heath returned, there was an onslaught of questions on his personal military history, none of which he answered to the grim man’s satisfaction. A finger was prodded into Heath’s chest, and everyone in the Scotia heard the accusation: ‘You’re a fraud, man! You’re a fraud!’
All conversations stopped; all eyes fell upon Heath.
‘The only service you’ve done is reading books of military history!’ said the grim man. ‘You’re an utter disgrace!’
Heath bolted from the Scotia, leaving the unpaid drink on the bar.
‘From Northumbria is he?’ said the man of the Scots Greys. ‘He’s as likely to have fought at Maserfield with old King Oswald as at Albuera. A disgrace! But don’t think he’ll get away with this. I’ll find him.’
The Scotia never saw William Heath again. It was the case, too, that shortly afterwards the Glasgow Looking Glass relocated to Edinburgh, under the new name the Northern Looking Glass. Six months later, the magazine closed completely, and whether to escape creditors, or because he feared the wrath of the Scots Greys, William Heath fled south to London.
*
HEATH HAD JUST SHOWN THOMAS McLean his picture of the Battle of Albuera. He now produced an issue of the Northern Looking Glass, and pointed to a humorous scene of army surgeons at work on the battlefield, piecing together the maimed: the head of a decapitated man was sewn back on, but so that the eyes looked towards the rear.
‘You obviously have a fondness for military matters,’ said McLean.
‘I get that from an uncle of mine. He was a captain in the Dragoons. Always had an audience for the accounts of his exploits, pretty women especially. Never had to wait long before someone bought him a drink. He died not so long ago.’
Mclean turned the pages. ‘I have seen the Northern Looking Glass before, in Ackermann’s windows.’
‘My former partner, Mr Hopkirk, arranged a deal with him, to be the London agent.’
‘You personally are not tied to Ackermann in any way?’
‘I considered paying him a visit.’
‘You are wise to come to me first. I can use a man of your undoubted talents. I believe we could do something with this Looking Glass magazine. Put your faith in me, Mr Heath, and you won’t go wrong.’
*
A MENTION OF ACKERMANN, TO SAY nothing of maimed soldiers, reminds me of the way in which Dr Syntax, and then Life in London, originally appeared: in parts.
As Mr Inbelicate put it to me once, standing beside a bookcase: ‘If a book is written page by page, and read page by page, why may it not be sold page by page?’
Or, at least – as I pointed out, in a correction which annoyed him, judging from a specific tightening of his mouth – sold in convenient bundles of pages, within a magazine, or as a separate part in its own right.
‘Yes, yes, but in any case, broken up into serial divisions, before publication as a book,’ he said.
Mr Inbelicate had devoted the entire bookcase to historical examples of this phenomenon, and now he showed off its contents to me.
He reached for the top left-hand item, which possessed a thin paper spine – it was a late-seventeenth-century treatise, published piecemeal, on the subject of printing. Onwards his finger moved, to the Select Trials of the Old Bailey, published fortnightly, with accounts of sodomy, murder and highway robbery. Then works on astronomy, architecture, biography, herbs. Then Johnson’s Dictionary and The Pilgrim’s Progress. Tobias Smollett’s The Life and Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves came next, published in twenty-five magazine instalments and completed in 1761. ‘Worthy of special mention,’ he said. ‘A novel which had the audacity for its beginning to be printed before the end was even written.’ Here too were remaindered works, such as one on the French Revolution which had failed to make a profit as a single volume, and so was cut up into parts and resold.
‘It is a bookcase of seething economic force
s,’ said Mr Inbelicate. ‘A work produced in twenty monthly numbered parts needs an initial outlay of just one-twentieth of the total cost,’ he said, with his voice betraying an obsessive fascination which is not usually to be found in a sentence containing the words ‘outlay’ and ‘total cost’. ‘And when put on to the market, the receipts come in within a month, and are used to finance the next part!’
My personal favourite among the items in the bookcase is the partwork Bible, which I have taken down now, to examine again as I type. The woodcuts make me smile for their crudeness, and for their interpretation of Scripture which, shall we say, is somewhat literal. I have in front of me an illustration from the Gospel of Matthew, of a man removing a splinter from another man’s eye – ignoring the huge wooden plank which is embedded in his own.
There was a second bookcase, opposite the one devoted to publication in parts, which Mr Inbelicate had dedicated to another publication method. It consisted of early-nineteenth-century novels published in three weighty and handsome volumes, usually priced at thirty-one shillings and sixpence in total.
‘Now why publish in three volumes?’ he said. ‘I will tell you. For the reason there were not two blind mice, Scripty. For the reason you don’t stop after saying “Friends, Romans”. For the reason that stories have a beginning, a middle and an end. There was no real reason, Scripty! It was a pattern that publishers were stuck into.’
To be fair to Mr Inbelicate, he did go into historical detail, to explain how the novel in three volumes had come to be. Sir Walter Scott had enjoyed success with the three-volume format, and so, naturally, others thought they could as well; while greedy libraries saw they could make three times as much money by lending out a novel in thirds. The cause of the tradition is not as important as its effect, which was pernicious – authors felt the need to fill three volumes. The result was fat novels for an age of fat.
Mr Inbelicate showed me volumes with a superfluity of chapters – each new chapter starting a fresh page, with a lengthy quotation at the start, simply to add bulk. Novels with astonishingly long prefaces, and an abundance of footnotes, printed on pages notable for their broad white margins. The style of writing itself was compromised, with long-winded explanations and rambling characterisations. ‘And this,’ he said, with a small, triumphant giggle, ‘is my favourite item in the entire bookcase – the greatest folly of the era of three volumes.’
Death and Mr. Pickwick Page 24