‘There were two fishermen,’ the boy said to the pews of the empty church, looking occasionally towards the priest who sat cross-legged at the back. ‘One man fished in the stormy rivers of gin, and one man fished in the calm rivers of pure water.’
He made a few half-hearted attempts at sketches, but feeling uninspired, he turned to his pet idea instead. There was a portfolio in which he had stored his various drawings and notes, as they had been developed or abandoned, as well as published pictures, haphazardly included, for some element they might contribute to the whole. This portfolio he now opened.
*
For a while, the adventures of gardeners were included in the scheme – during the troubles with à Beckett, Jane suggested to her husband that if he spent more time in the garden, or merely cultivated a window box, it would take his mind off Figaro and would soothe him in general. Instead, he asked himself: what if a gardener were one of the members of the Daffy Club? The passing thought developed a life of its own, and comic drawings on the theme of gardening soon followed.
He conceived of a man retired from business. To occupy his days, this man had become a keen gardener, consulting the almanacs so that he knew when to plant. The man loved to sit in an arbour in the full heat of an English summer, admiring his work, and often fell asleep there with a bottle of beer in his hand; while in winter, the man read all the books on plants he could find, and would fall asleep in his armchair before the fire, clutching another bottle of beer, whose neck formed the handle of a dream-trowel.
Seymour had jotted down in the portfolio occasional notes concerning horticultural affectations. It amused him that London gardeners often painted everything in their gardens bright green, whether a bench, a fence, a shed, a trellis, or the frame of a summer house. Then the gardener would stand back, next to a paint pot, and admire his work, hands on hips, thinking himself quite the country gentleman, unaware of the clash between the startling hues produced by lead paint and the natural and subtle shades of vegetation. Seymour was also tickled by gardeners’ passion for tall bellflowers, at least three feet high, with some towering to six or seven feet, blooms which they insisted upon calling ‘campanoolas’. Almost every little garden at the beginning of summer boasted such a thrusting of blue.
One picture in the portfolio showed a gardener in moleskin trousers and leather buskins, digging absurdly hard in his allotment, his brow pouring with sweat. The gardener commented to an onlooker: ‘D’ye see, I labours hard all the veek, and on Sunday I likes a little gardening recreation.’ Seymour smiled again at that picture. He might sell it to Carlile. There were also pictures in which gardening mingled with the theme of sport. One showed men shooting at birds, to keep them away from a seedpatch, but shooting a neighbour by mistake. Another showed two sportsmen with guns, pursued by an angry gardener with a dog and a whip, shouting: ‘Get out of my grounds, you cockney rascals.’ ‘Ve’r a-going as fast as ve can,’ said the terrified sportsmen.
A brief note apparently signalled the end of the gardening theme: ‘More can happen to sportsmen.’
*
LEADING UP ONE WALL OF this house’s staircase is a series of six large plates that Seymour drew in 1829 for McLean, A Search for the Comfortable, being the Adventures of a Little Gentleman of Small Fortune. Each plate consists of a number of smaller captioned scenes, making fifty scenes in total, which describe the adventures of Peter Pickle, a thin bespectacled clerk. The plates form a loose narrative, and had originally been issued in a wrapper. They were added to the portfolio for the pet idea, and as Mr Inbelicate had written a summary of the plates in his youth, I present that now.
The Adventures of Peter Pickle
Peter Pickle was a lowly, humble clerk in the employment of Counsellor Puzzlewig, until he inherited from his Uncle Cramp a fortune of four hundred pounds a year.
The clerk abandoned the tedium of ledgers and pen, and was soon to be seen at a dancing school, jigging to the sound of a fiddle. Shortly afterwards, he immersed himself in the joys of drink and before long was staggering, arm in arm, with two new friends whom he had met at a public house. They taught him to play cards, and he lost. He lost at billiards as well. Not being used to such a life, he was soon ill from all the excess. Suffering from a headache, he resolved to start anew amid the quieter pleasures of the countryside.
Alas, Peter Pickle’s rural retirement proved a savage disappointment. His sleeves were snagged on brambles. A dog grabbed his coat-tails. Geese honked at him. Pigs and bulls harassed him. The country yokels laughed at his plight. He did think he had found a friend in the village barber – but, sitting in the barber’s chair, he learnt what his fellow villagers really thought of him. ‘One person believed you were mad,’ said the barber. ‘Another that you were a fraudulent bankrupt hiding from your creditors. Mrs Maggot said you might be a papist conspirator. The beadle’s wife feared you might hang yourself and cause trouble to the parish.’
Deciding to take a stroll, he asked for directions from a group of children, who deliberately sent him the wrong way: down the bank, over the moor, through Deadman’s Lane – finishing up to his knees in a bog. Even there, the mischief of the children did not end – as suddenly he heard a whistle. He had been declared a thief on the run.
Peter Pickle sat in his cottage in abject misery. ‘Was ever any poor wretch as beset by the blue devils as I am?’ he wailed. That night, he did contemplate the rope.
But instead of being a ‘trouble to the parish’, he embarked upon a new course of action: seeking the fascinations of the arts and sciences. First, he became an antiquary – until he was fleeced by a scoundrel who sold him a homemade bust of a Roman emperor. Thus, he turned to aeronautics, and ascended in a hot-air balloon – until he fell out of the basket into a river. His next pursuit was music – until he faced the wrath of his neighbour, who did not appreciate Peter Pickle’s horn practice in the middle of the night. Next came chemistry – until an experiment set his home on fire. Poetry was his new salvation – until, attempting to describe the beauties of the sky, he was stuck for a rhyme for ‘azure’. Portrait painting was his last hope – until his first subject, a woman, was so disgusted with his portrayal that she put her umbrella through the canvas.
Abandoning all these pursuits, Peter Pickle resolved to travel and see more of the world. Unfortunately, in a coach he was squashed to near-suffocation between two other passengers, a fat man and his equally voluminous wife. Deciding to cross the Channel to France, he boarded a paddle steamer – whose paddles broke, and he suffered the indignity of being rowed ashore at night. In Paris, it seemed that his luck had changed when he met two friendly gentlemen – until the association led to his arrest by the police at the Palais Royal, whereupon he was obliged to quit France within forty-eight hours.
Returning to England, Peter Pickle was out strolling, wondering what to do, when he saw a woman who had fallen in a ditch. He rescued her. He courted her. He married her. After so much disappointment and misery, had Peter Pickle finally found happiness?
The day after the wedding, his wife revealed: ‘I was a milliner, but as I found it very laborious, I thought it best to get married again.’ Peter Pickle, to his horror, was introduced to her five children, whom it was now his responsibility to raise.
*
After a seasoning of Peter Pickle was added to the portfolio’s pot, it was bubbling away nicely. Another addition came after a conversation with Edward Holmes, when he paid a visit to the Seymours.
‘I have accepted,’ said Holmes, ‘an invitation to lecture on music at the Islington Literary and Scientific Society.’
‘That’s exciting. I have seen the society’s posters,’ said Jane.
‘More twaddle about useful knowledge,’ said Seymour.
‘Their aim is indeed the diffusion of useful knowledge upon all subjects except theology and politics.’ From his pocket he took out a publicity leaflet, listing forthcoming lectures on diverse subjects: jellyfish, pneumatics, the elephant be
etle, the properties of a piece of coal. The leaflet noted that there were ordinary, honorary and corresponding members.
‘Corresponding members?’ said Seymour.
‘People who write in with their discoveries.’
*
To the stock composed of the Daffy Club, the Houghton Angling Club, incompetent sportsmen, comic gardeners and the March of Intellect, meaty chunks of Pierce Egan’s sequel to Life in London were cut off and thrown in: the fat knight Sir John Blubber; the great gaiety of the scenes at Hawthorne Hall, with sports and dancing and musical parties and the squire; an archery contest; a debtors’ prison; falling through ice; failures with ladies.
A dumpling or two could be seen floating on top, including a preliminary sketch of club members at a table, with a dog under a chair, a spittoon on the floor, and the members smoking and drinking. The club’s president sang:
His wife she bit off half her tongue
But vot a sad disaster
The other half more active rung
And scolded all the faster.
Such a stew needed to be strained.
Besides, as was obvious from inspection of the Houghton Club’s chronicles, the records of any real club would contain much that would be deadly dull. Who, apart from Richard Penn and Canon Beadon, cared that Richard Penn and Canon Beadon together caught five jack weighing a total of twenty-seven and a half pounds last Tuesday? The solution was editing.
The editor could be developed as a personality and presence in his own right – indeed, Seymour knew this happened to some extent in the New Sporting Magazine, with the magazine’s editor, Robert Surtees, sometimes reporting made-up conversations between himself and Jorrocks, his fictional character based upon the oysterman.
Thus Seymour conceived that a gullible man would wander all over England, with a small party of friends, forming a little society of corresponding members, and they would send back reports of their exploits and the Münchausen tales they had heard. The club, upon being wound up for some reason as yet to be determined, would pass its records to an imaginary editor, with a view to preparing a work for publication. Seymour would provide etchings to accompany these edited reports.
But Seymour still had to settle upon a name for the main character, the gullible man. And what other characteristics would he have? Also, what should the club be called? And who should accompany the gullible man on his adventures?
Seymour sat back, put his hands behind his head, and closed his eyes.
*
He may have been prodded by the name of Mr Peter Pickle. He may have pondered the theme of travelling, of using coaches, and of drinking in inns as horses were changed. He may have thought of Egan’s work, and its mention of the village with the art gallery nearby.
Whatever the direct inspiration, Seymour abruptly opened his eyes, and sought his wife. He found her in the kitchen.
‘I have the name of my main character,’ he said.
‘That’s nice. And what is that?’
‘I am going to call him Mr Pickwick.’
*
I TURN BACK THROUGH THE PAGES I have already written, and have pleasure in quoting myself: ‘For there is no Don Quixote without his squire Sancho Panza, and Seymour in his painting of Sancho surely knew this. And perhaps even then, as a young man at work on this canvas, portraying the thin knight and a fat squire – I say, perhaps even then – his mind wondered playfully about reversing fat and thin. What if, he might have asked, what if there were a fat knight and a thin squire?’
At the heart of Seymour’s pet idea was a man who travelled throughout the kingdom, whose natural gullibility filled his head with mad stories; this, it must be agreed, is much in the manner of Don Quixote’s delusions. I might use an image from a later generation of graphic artists, of a light bulb over Seymour’s head – of Seymour realising that the Quixote could be recreated in England. Of course, if there was a Don Quixote, he needed a Sancho. And what if, instead of a thin Quixote…?
It is easy to imagine Seymour making the reversal of fat and thin, just as it is easy to imagine Seymour placing a pair of such characters side by side. What else would a caricaturist naturally do but put a thin man by a fat one, so as to make the fat seem fatter by contrast, and the thin thinner? And if the master was gullible, then the servant would surely be sharp. Seymour had already drawn an assistant to a fisherman in his work for Penn – a young fellow with a cockade in his hat. The light bulb would go on again: something could be done with a chap of that sort, to produce the modern-day Sancho Panza. I can imagine the enthusiasm of Seymour, that he can barely keep still in his seat, impelled by the idea of a new Quixote. He, Seymour, could travel all over England himself, sketching the places the fat man visits. The fat character was on a mission to observe – to see more, the pun that the artist had always been.
Not surprisingly, Seymour made Mr Pickwick a bespectacled character, intent on absorbing information through his eyes. Once given circular glasses, Seymour drew him as all circles: his body fat and spherical, his head bald and round. The character had to be of a certain age – a young gullible soul was not as interesting as one who had reached the middle of life, and still did not know the way the world was. Also, he would not be fashionable, a gullible man was not awake enough for that. The obvious outfit was tights and gaiters. They were going out of style, and would not be worn by a young man, but only by a man getting on in years. A swallowtail coat was fine for the upper body and, as a last touch to indicate a man with a scientific mission – even a mission that gathered nonsense – Seymour drew a very scientific and very circular magnifying glass hanging from Mr Pickwick’s neck by a cord.
Having designed the main character, Seymour turned his attention to the club. Again he closed his eyes, put his hands behind his head, and pondered.
*
The Daffy Club had named itself after a euphemism for alcohol; and, indirectly, after a man called Daffy, inventor of a medicinal tonic. Could he could choose another medicine instead of Daffy? The Woodhouse Club, perhaps, after the manufacturer of the ethereal essence of ginger? Unfortunately, that would not work without a tradition of calling alcohol ‘Woodhouse’.
He looked at Mr Pickwick’s body. The enormous stomach itself suggested drinking and eating to excess. If Mr Pickwick founded the club, then it could legitimately be called the Pickwick Club, a club founded by a great toper and trencherman.
He remembered Edward Barnard’s talk of Putney puntites – men who moored their punts by Putney Bridge, supposedly to catch fish, but in reality to eat, drink and smoke. No serious angler would moor near Putney Bridge. That was perfect! That was the essence of the Daffy Club. There was an interest in sport among the members, but their real pursuit was drinking! What’s more – and now he opened his eyes and seized his pencil – if Mr Pickwick were a Putney puntite, angling would never satisfy him. There was the motivation for leaving the confines of a sporting club, and going on a mission to observe the world!
He played around with the idea, and made scribbles and notes in his portfolio.
One note said: ‘Penn and his sticklebacks’ – and then the mysterious word ‘cottins’, Penn’s personal name for the fish, when he responded to scientific queries. Seymour wrote: ‘Suppose the work opens five years after the club has been founded. The Putney puntite’s interest in fishing has now shrunk to almost nothing. He has an interest in sticklebacks. Which he ludicrously calls by some silly name.’
There were various dialect words he had heard fishermen call sticklebacks. Prickleback, sticklebag, barnstickle, sharpling, spawnytickle, tittlebat.
He wrote: ‘Tittlebats!’
He continued: ‘When a man develops an obsessive interest in a fish so small and so unimportant, his life has shrunk to little more than a dot. It is then that he must refresh himself, and broaden his experience of the world. Should he not feel the need to refresh himself, others will suggest it to him. His new aim is to see more of life. Knowing nothing of the world exce
pt small fish would make him the gullible sort I seek.’
He paused again. There was the Society of Antiquaries and the obscurity of their interests. Perhaps the puntite could pursue some interest in antiquarian issues?
He had touched upon this with Peter Pickle. The idea was congenial. But it couldn’t be much broader than the interest in tittlebats. In a flash of inspiration, he wrote: ‘The supply of water! He has an antiquarian interest in the history of ponds!’
The character of Mr Pickwick needed to be fleshed out. Seymour leant back again and closed his eyes. What would Mr Pickwick have been like as a boy?
*
Samuel Pickwick’s mother, like many other proud mothers, marked the increases in her only child’s height by a vertical series of pencil marks upon the wall. Unlike other mothers, she also marked the increases in his girth, by a horizontal series of pencil marks.
‘No woman will ever accuse me of not feeding my boy properly,’ she said, as Samuel held still, pressed sideways against the wall. She added the mark showing the expansion in his stomach. The bonny child would become a bonny man. ‘You’re my lovely little barrel,’ she said.
His mother was also an advocate of the powers of Hampstead spring water, which she said was sure to keep Samuel healthy throughout his life. Every Sunday, under her supervision, he drank a flaskful. The chalybeate taste, like sucking on an empty fork, was unpleasant, but being prescribed by his mother, he took it down.
She also prescribed that most of his time was spent indoors. Rarely did she allow Samuel to play in the streets and in the fields, and then only under her strict supervision. For no one would snatch her Samuel away! As a result, his eyes, starving for light, did not develop fully, and when still a boy, he was fitted with round spectacles. ‘How handsome you look,’ she said, and the boy believed her. After all, she believed it herself; although, as if not noticing any contradiction, she told him that when she was fitted with spectacles as a schoolgirl she cried all day.
Death and Mr. Pickwick Page 47