‘I was thinking more of the play. Could you draw me a barber like Figaro?’
Seymour licked his lips.
There were men in a barbershop and an extraordinary machine, a capstan worked by steam-driven cogwheels, which performed the various stages of shaving the customers who occupied its seats – a machine which mechanically wielded badger brushes, whipped up lather to a thick foam, and cut with razors. But a customer stood screaming. His nose had been sliced off, and blood gushed forth from between his fingers. The next in line shouted out, terrified: ‘Stop! Stop!’
‘I could draw any sort of barber.’
À Beckett described the character from Beaumarchais, in a hairnet, scarf, waistcoat and breeches, flourishing a razor in front of a group of bustforms moulded into the features of well-known Tories.
Seymour sat down, and within a short while produced a corresponding drawing.
‘That’s it Mr Seymour!’ said à Beckett. ‘That’s the barber! That is indeed the barber! That design will appear on every issue of the publication – you have created the title picture for Figaro in London! You must let me use it.’
*
The first weekly issue of Figaro in London, with Seymour’s barber masthead, duly appeared on Saturday 10 December 1831, and was hawked on the streets by vendors. The public showed some interest. The second issue appeared the following Saturday. The public still showed some interest. It was enough interest for à Beckett to return to Seymour. In the fourth issue, Seymour drew six pictures of well-known political figures dressed as pantomime characters. He showed Sir Charles Wetherell, the immediate cause of the Bristol riots, as a clown – standing knock-kneed, thick-lipped, wearing a spotted shirt and striped trousers, hands in pockets, and with the burning buildings of Bristol in the background. Wetherell’s clown pockets were stuffed with fish – for the stink of scandal.
The demand for the issue was huge.
*
In the little office not far from Temple Bar where à Beckett and Mayhew wrote Figaro in London, the former sat at a gouged and scratched deal table, with a quill and two bottles, one of ink, one of gin. He had poured a tumblerful of the latter, and took a bite of a sandwich.
‘Could we suggest anything to Seymour for his next drawing?’ said à Beckett.
‘The whole Cabinet shown as monkeys, perhaps?’ said Mayhew. He stood at the window, tall and broad-shouldered, looking out. ‘Or reluctant schoolboys? Or he may have better ideas himself.’ Suddenly Mayhew laughed, and à Beckett joined him at the window to see why.
Three lads were running along the street, and a furious beadle bent to pick up his hat, which one of the boys had just knocked off. ‘Hats off to the beadle!’ shouted one of the lads.
‘Boys of our own heart,’ said Mayhew.
There was a knock at the office door. It was Seymour.
After toasting the success of Figaro with gin, they discussed ideas for the next issue. Seymour handed à Beckett an invoice for work done thus far.
‘Why, Mr Seymour,’ said à Beckett, ‘you have spelt “caricatures” in an unusual way.’ It appeared as ‘caricatuers’.
Seymour immediately picked up a pencil and corrected the invoice, but with a noticeable hesitation, as though not sure of the amendment required. ‘I am so sorry.’
‘No need to apologise,’ said à Beckett. ‘I had an uncle, now dead, and whenever he spent time in France, he always came back spelling words strangely.’
When Seymour left the office, à Beckett turned to Mayhew. ‘Did you see how he coloured up, Henry? He is ashamed of his spelling.’
‘It scarcely matters. We are doing the writing on Figaro.’
‘It would be quite a jape, don’t you think, to ask him to identify caricatures by subject, rather than by date, on his invoices, so we could see how he spells the words,’ said à Beckett. ‘I think I would enjoy that. We could watch him correct the errors in front of us.’
‘I don’t like where this might be going.’
‘I have only just noticed that he is left-handed too. I am not surprised.’
‘As long as he produces work to time, it is of no concern.’
‘Oh he’ll do that. Is any artist as fast as Seymour – with his penicillus?’ He grinned lewdly.
‘Stop this nonsense.’
‘Just recalling a Latin class at Westminster. You were never as good a classics scholar as I, Henry.’
‘And nothing earned you more hits and kicks from the other boys than doing well in that class.’
À Beckett’s brows tightened, and for the next hour he sat and worked in silence.
*
THE FAST AND VARIED PENCIL of Robert Seymour now exerted an unprecedented influence upon the pictures that Londoners saw – and the statistics that Mr Inbelicate showed me were a crude, but undeniable, measure of Seymour’s visual influence. Every third political caricature was by Seymour’s hand, twice as many as even his most productive rival could manage. And those were just the political pictures.
A publisher, the distinguished Charles Tilt of Fleet Street, was easily found for Seymour’s 260 images interpreting Shakespeare and Byron, which appeared in twenty-six monthly parts under the title New Readings of Old Authors, with each part containing ten of the images, in a decorative wrapper, at one shilling and sixpence. The reviews were little short of spectacular. Said one: ‘This is the best executed and most humorous publication of the present day.’ Said another: ‘Shakespeare is here travestied with a felicity that would have added laurels to the comic genius of a Hogarth.’
Then came the Comic Magazine, a vehicle for Seymour’s ability in illustrating puns.
‘Seymour often said,’ remarked Mr Inbelicate, ‘that he was born with a pun for a surname – See More – and ambiguity in words can always produce a humorous sketch.’
He showed me issues of that very publication, to prove the point. I smiled at The Staff at Head Quarters, showing police constables smashing truncheons on the heads in a mob, and groaned at A Pair of Slippers, of two men, one fat, one thin, slipping in the street. My favourite was undoubtedly a picture of two bell-ringers, one with the rope tangled around his leg, the other with the rope around his waist, and both being tugged upwards through the holes in which the ropes descended from the belfry, smacking their heads against the ceiling. The caption was ‘Ceiling Whacks’.
Meanwhile, Gilbert à Beckett gave enthusiastic puffs under the artist’s pictures in every issue of Figaro. Let me give a few examples:
‘The lashing style of the almost godlike Seymour digs with a sharply pointed pencil of the most penetrating steel into the very heart of the writhing government.’ ‘His most pungent Majesty, Seymour, the first and last, the king of artists, the very head and front of the pictorial profession.’ ‘The caricature of Seymour is in itself an article and Seymour has shown how insignificant are the dashes of our pen compared with the superhuman digs of his iron-veined pencil.’
‘I am quite sure that Seymour was embarrassed by this sort of effusion,’ said Mr Inbelicate, after he had quoted another: ‘Seymour – The Leviathan of Humour – The Shakespeare of Caricature.’
‘Quite sure?’
‘Take it from me, he felt embarrassment, and asked à Beckett to desist. But à Beckett continued regardless. Anyway, I have had enough for one day,’ said Mr Inbelicate. ‘I am going to bed. You may stay up and read an essay I wrote, when I was a much younger man, on this period in Seymour’s life.’
I reproduce a section below.
Seymour and Cholera
As the pre-eminent visual recorder of the news of the day, there was one phenomenon Robert Seymour could not ignore. It assaulted his nose, as much as his eyes – the scourge of cholera. To walk the streets was to smell the people’s discharges, as though every other house were a fishmarket. There were also the odours of attempted countermeasures: barrels of tar set alight on street corners, lime scattered here and there, vinegar sprinkled on people’s heads like holy water, and bonfi
res of bedding and clothes.
In one street, Seymour saw a man with deep-set glassy eyes vomiting out of his window on the third floor of a tenement, the emetic discharge landing a yard in front of the artist, splashing his shoes. The man gave Seymour a sunken look, moaned, grabbed his stomach, and retreated into the room, yielding glimpses of the bluish lips and bluish fingertips as he wiped his mouth, because in this disease human beings were being coloured in, like prints.
Furthermore, the disease was spreading, and was on both sides of the river. The first cases were in Rotherhithe and Limehouse; but soon you heard of a man taken ill outside Astley’s Amphitheatre in Lambeth, or in Borough Market in Southwark, or outside the parish church in Chelsea, or in Smithfield. There were tides of belief and disbelief about where the disease would strike next. Someone would assert of the disease, ‘It’s here!’ and he was believed instantly, but another man could deny the proposition with vehemence, and denounce the believers as credulous fools.
Fish was blamed. Fruit and vegetables were denounced as especially bad.
It was said that if you drank spirits at a cholera victim’s funeral you would weaken yourself, and catch it from the corpse. But, coupled with all the horror, drunkenness – especially among the lower classes – increased, for drink was an escape. Worst of all was the sight of a drunken man clutching his stomach, suddenly being seized with an awful evacuation of his bowels, as quantities of watery stools ran down his legs.
Among the well-to-do, brandy was rumoured to ward off the disease, and any venture, from a business meeting to seeing a relative, was an opportunity for taking this medicine. In a picture for McLean, Seymour illustrated this brandy cure. Fortifying Against the Cholera showed a mother dosing her whole family with large gulps of brandy, including her children, who fell down drunk. Seymour illustrated too the men of the Board of Health, hunting after causes of disease – in futility, they peered in windows and down drains, climbed up ladders and entered rooms.
Seymour next drew cholera as a colossal spectre, a faceless skeleton wrapped in a shroud. Its huge, bony foot stamped upon the nations of the world.
The response of Parliament was a National Day of Fasting and Prayer, as cholera was proof that the judgement of God was among the people. The response of Seymour to the response of Parliament was two pictures in Figaro, side by side. Fasting by Proclamation showed a fat wealthy man, with a glowing nose and cheeks, sitting at a table, ready to eat, with gluttonous relish, as a flunkey lifted the cloches, and revealed fish on the platters – because, even if the eating of meat was officially shunned, the cooks of the wealthy would still find choice ways of dressing fish. The second picture was Fasting by Necessity, showing two thin, starving, ragged boys, sitting on a doorstep. One boy was gnawing at a bone. Seymour drew the dark shadow of imminent death over these poor young souls.
The two pictures for Figaro became Seymour’s greatest success up to that point in his career. The issue of Figaro in which they were published was sold, and reprinted, in unprecedented quantities. Soon afterwards, the office of Figaro was besieged with orders for back numbers. In one week in May 1832, eleven past issues were reprinted.
*
ONE BRIGHT MORNING, WHEN SEYMOUR made his way to the Figaro office to deliver a picture, he was surprised to see that à Beckett stood already waiting for him on the pavement, considerably excited, with a pile of Figaros under his arm.
‘I have been desperate for you to arrive, Mr Seymour!’ said à Beckett. ‘Come with me! I must show you something, if it is still there.’
À Beckett led the artist to a street a hundred yards away, refusing to explain, except with the remark: ‘You’ll see!’ Not finding the object of his search, à Beckett took Seymour to another street, and then another. Hearing strains of violins, à Beckett followed the music to a fourth street, where he bobbed up and down and positively cried out with joy: ‘There, Mr Seymour, there!’
It was a cart, pulled by half-dead horses, on which stood a miserable-looking man dressed as Don Giovanni, and a band of grimy musicians. ‘Get your Don Giovanni in London!’ said the man, attempting to sell a paper from a pile in the cart.
‘They are so desperate they copy us!’ said à Beckett. ‘Well, they can put on this toggery but they do not have you! This publication will die, because without you, Mr Seymour, they will never take our readers away. Watch this!’
He held up a Figaro, and called out: ‘Get your Figaro in London! The original! The best! With pictures by the one and only Seymour!’ Then he sang: ‘Figaro here, Figaro there!’
Don Giovanni grimaced from the cart, and sang in a cracked voice: ‘Come let all be mirth and gladness! Deeply quaff the draught of pleasure!’
‘He’ll sell even fewer if he keeps on like that,’ said à Beckett. ‘Figaro here, Figaro there!’
A gentleman walking along the street paid à Beckett a penny for a copy, and then, gloating all over his face, à Beckett pointed to the buyer, for the benefit of Don Giovanni. ‘It’s not really “Figaro here, Figaro there!” you know, Mr Seymour. It is Seymour here, Seymour there – Seymour everywhere! You are the ubiquitous Seymour!’
The artist stood against a wall, observing, with some amusement, the operatic vendor on the cart. For once, he did not tell à Beckett that he was embarrassed by fulsome praise. He was the ubiquitous Seymour. He believed it.
After selling more copies of Figaro, they were just turning to depart when a hand tapped à Beckett on the shoulder.
‘Excuse me, before you go.’
The thumb and forefinger of the tapping hand held out a penny, and when à Beckett looked round, he saw a man in early middle age, with piercing eyes, neat, grey hair curling over his ears and a bulbous nose.
‘You’re lucky to catch us – you’ve made a good choice, sir,’ said à Beckett. ‘The popular choice. You wouldn’t want to read the rubbish over there.’
‘The dangerous popularity of your paper is the only reason I keep an occasional eye on its contents,’ said the man. ‘I do not wish to encourage fledgling publications of the same contraband kind.’
With that remark, the man rolled up the Figaro into a scroll so its masthead could not be seen, and he walked away. ‘He still bought it,’ said à Beckett, smiling at Seymour.
The man, meanwhile, walked a few hundred yards to Fleet Street. He noticed, as he went along: a chap descending from a cab, with his thumb marking a page in the middle of Blackwood’s Magazine; a shop window offering miscellanies of verse and prose; a youth boiling a kettle on a brazier, reading a Newgate Calendar; and many other sights relating to the act of reading. He inserted a key in a door beside a brass nameplate which stated: ‘Charles Knight, Publisher’.
On every stair of the staircase, he planted his shoe next to a stack of books. He entered a book-lined office, and nodded to a young man with a long, inquisitive face, sitting at a desk whose perimeter was hidden under additional piles of books.
Knight sat at his own similarly book-enriched desk, and spent a minute casting a disapproving eye over Figaro. ‘Another for the coarse and dangerous pile,’ he said to the young man, as he tossed the Figaro on a yard-high accumulation of pamphlets and magazines, at which a picture of a murder was previously uppermost, showing a woman, with the help of two accomplices, holding a man down and hacking off his head so that it fell into a bucket.
The young man nodded in a wise-beyond-his-years way. He returned to examining proofs of woodcuts, whose pictorial bias was towards antiquated buildings and exotic animals. He then took a book from the pile at his side and attempted to find explanatory material relating to the achievements of the Egyptians.
Charles Knight rested his chin upon his fist, and sat watching the young man at work. The fact he saw him every morning did not make any difference to the pleasure. He observed the scratching of the head. The slight changes of posture in the chair. The lighting of a churchwarden, whose long stem allowed a perfect view of the page. Charles Knight simply had a habit of w
atching people read – a habit he had practised since boyhood.
He had been known to state to bookshop owners, in their very bookshops, that people read differently these days. Yes, there were still those who buried their faces in a book in intense study. But there had been a change, particularly in relation to the newly literate – people nowadays snatched a few minutes of reading here and there, whenever they had a chance.
‘The great concern for the country,’ he had said recently in a rousing speech at a meeting of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, ‘is to ensure that those who are newly literate read material which is worthwhile. One cannot avoid seeing the lower classes drooling over pictures of horrific crimes and other unedifying matter. It is the pictures that attract them. Our mission is to channel that desire for pictorial stimulation into decent and proper courses.’ (Cries of ‘Hear, hear.’) ‘In the stolen moments when people read,’ he continued, ‘they should improve themselves by acquiring a little useful knowledge – whether by absorbing well-written words, or by looking at good-quality pictures. You know as well as I, gentlemen, that to read more is to know more, and to know more is to improve one’s position in society.’ (‘Hear, hear.’) ‘Our object is to enlarge the reader’s range of observation, and to add to his store of facts. We must awaken his reasoning faculties and lead his imagination into agreeable and innocent trains of thought. A man who sits and pursues knowledge of this kind will not destroy property and machines. He will improve his moral judgement.’
The many more cries of ‘Hear, hear’ and the subsequent applause proved that Charles Knight enjoyed the full and enthusiastic support of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge in his endeavour to publish the Penny Magazine, a publication embodying the principles of his speech, and the publication indeed upon which the young man at the desk opposite then worked.
Upon the young man’s desk were examples of the pictorial stimulation that Charles Knight thought decent and proper – woodcuts of quality, to inform readers about the world. Here was the elaborate carving of the Charing Cross; the villas of Pompeii before the eruption; a crocodile caught by the natives of the Dongola; a dormouse awakened from its hibernation to eat beech mast; the monastery of the Grande Chartreuse; the statue of the Memnon in the British Museum; the horse armour displayed in the Tower of London; and the extraordinary natural bridge in the Valley of Shenandoah. All to be accompanied by explanatory text, which the young man would also supply.
Death and Mr. Pickwick Page 31