He was thirty-seven. But he recalled when he was seventeen. There was a university friend, an Irishman, of great charm, eight years older than himself, James Emerson Tennent. Forster remembered the warm Irish smile and the enthusiastic handshake, when they introduced themselves in the rows of the lecture theatre at University College, London.
‘Pleased to meet you, Mr Foster,’ he said – Foster, not Forster. This was a common mistake; but the error persisted with this friend, who for a while even wrote letters beginning ‘Dear Foster’.
He remembered the Irishman coming to see him at Penton Place, Pentonville, where he lodged. He recalled his friend drawing on a cigar while shelling an oyster, and over a glass of claret his friend would talk about Greek wine and then Greece itself – but he would still say ‘Foster’, though he had been corrected on several occasions.
‘Now, Foster,’ he said, ‘you and I must go to Greece together one day. I am always amused by the faith the Greeks put in amulets and other superstitions. They may no longer believe in oracles and incantations and spells and shamanic practices, but they hang up dirty rags in honour of their saints to cure a cold. When we go to Greece, Foster, I shall show you.’
Forster smiled at the thought of his friend taking along the alter ego, John Foster, while he, John Forster, stayed behind.
This mingled with the necessity for action regarding Mrs Seymour’s letter.
He thought too of Dickens’s novel Martin Chuzzlewit, in which the character of Mrs Gamp, to add credence to her stories, spoke about her friend Mrs Harris – until she was told: ‘I don’t believe Mrs Harris exists at all.’
An idea came.
Forster was tickled by his own cleverness. He sat down and wrote to Edward Chapman, inviting the publisher to supper.
*
Three days later, in a similar atmosphere of wine, lamplight and cigars, Chapman sat opposite Forster in the study.
‘May I ask you something?’ said Forster. ‘If I say “Mr Pickwick” to you, what image does it create in your mind?’
‘It can create only one image.’
‘Well, tell me.’
‘A fat man, in tights and gaiters, bald, with glasses.’
‘What if Mr Pickwick were a thin man?’
‘But he isn’t.’
‘Suppose he were.’
‘The thought is impossible. I would even say – it is abhorrent.’
‘I want you to entertain the possibility.’
‘The entire Pickwick Papers would be different. All the eating and drinking and conviviality wouldn’t occur with a thin man. You would expect him to dine on dry crusts and cold water. You wouldn’t want to be in his company. Where would the fun be?’
‘Let me press you further. What if Mr Pickwick, as well as being thin, did not wear tights and gaiters, and lacked glasses and bald head as well?’
‘This is heaping absurdity upon absurdity, Forster. It wouldn’t be Mr Pickwick. It may be someone called Mr Pickwick, but it wouldn’t be our Mr Pickwick.’
‘And let me press you even further – what if he were not called Pickwick?’
‘Then there would be nothing in common with Mr Pickwick at all.’
‘So if someone created this thin character – he could not in any sense be the creator of our Mr Pickwick?’
‘Of course not. Oh.’ Realisation dawned. Chapman smiled. ‘Oh, you scoundrel, Forster. I think I see where you are going with this.’
‘If Seymour drew a thin character, who looked nothing like Mr Pickwick – and if the character were then altered, with the fatness and all the other characteristics the world knows being suggested by someone else – it would kill his widow’s claims once and for all.’
‘But it would be our word against hers.’
‘Not if we support our words. Tell me, Chapman – where are you from, originally?’
‘Born and bred in Richmond, Surrey.’
‘Let us suppose you made Seymour draw a character according to your specifications. Suppose you asked Seymour to throw away his thin man – and instead, base his drawing of Mr Pickwick on your description of a fat friend of yours, someone you knew in Richmond. I even have in mind a name for your imaginary friend. It has always been a minor annoyance that I am often called “John Foster”. I have been trying all my life to get my own name spelt correctly. And I am highly amused at the thought of bringing this John Foster to life. So – suppose John Foster of Richmond was the original of Mr Pickwick.’
‘My feeling is that if we did it – we would be found out.’
‘We would not. As publisher, your word would be accepted as true. And consider – thirteen years have passed since Pickwick first appeared. With every passing day, populations move, people die. It would be hard to check the story, and harder still as more years passed. Who would have the means or the time to check records? And no one can say with certainty that he does not exist. We do not even have to say that he comes from Richmond yet. We don’t have to give his name either, unless pressed.’
‘It might work.’
‘It would work.’
*
I WAS ABOUT TO ASK MR Inbelicate whether he had investigated the records for Richmond, when he remarked: ‘Just because Robert Seymour is dead does not mean Robert Seymour is dead.’
With an extraordinary mischief in his eye, he opened a cupboard, and took out a brown paper parcel, which he placed into my hands. It bore a stamp from the reign of Edward VII, and an addressee, whose name I did not recognise. Inside was a manuscript, whose title was a revelation. I read, and could not stop myself reading.
*
The Life of Robert Seymour, Son of Robert Seymour
I USUALLY TELL PEOPLE MY NAME is R. Seymour, not Robert Seymour. Too many know my father was Pickwick’s first artist – and I would prefer no questions.
I am the last member of our family.
I was born in 1830. My sister Jane, the year before. About the time of my birth, my father was commissioned to illustrate a reprint of an old play, The Famous Chronicle of King Edward the First, and it was, according to my mother, a great joke that Shortshanks was illustrating Longshanks. So, in the crib I was sometimes called Tinyshanks.
I have memories of my mother attempting to sell my father’s drawings in a shop in Catherine Street, off the Strand, but it was not successful. This was after his death. I remember she published the sketches again and again, in the hope of raising a few pennies, using different colour papers to give them some novelty – green, blue, yellow, red, white. Unfortunately, the plates themselves were wearing out, and the drawings became weaker with every reprinting.
I know that my mother and my uncle Edward told my father that he didn’t charge enough for his drawings, but he produced so many he was not bothered at all. He had lost a little money in Spanish bonds, I know that, but the financial position of our family was sound, until Pickwick destroyed our security. We did not recover.
Mother died in 1869. Uncle Edward is gone too.
I have never married, and neither did my sister. She died in 1881. She might have been a successful singer, for her voice was remarkable. Up to her death, she was employed at the Central Telegraph. Like our mother, she supplemented her slender income by selling pictures drawn by our father, the remainder of the old stocks, printed on differently coloured paper. She was braver than I.
*
My father sinned against God. His life was not his to take away. And we, his family, were punished on this earth for his sin. People shuddered when they knew who we were. Many times, when I was young, I heard whispers, identifying me by my father.
*
I have not progressed far in life. For a while I was an egg merchant, in Squirrel’s Heath, Romford. Sometimes a misshapen egg would pass before me, and later I discovered that this was the origin of the word ‘cockney’: coken ey – Middle English – cock’s egg. I think I am a bit of a cock’s egg myself. Such is my connection to my father’s world of cockney sportsmen.
*
I last saw my father’s grave in the late 1880s, when I had a couple of days to fill before I started a new job as a clerk. The stone bore only my father’s name, even though he was followed in the plot by others from our family. We were too poor to afford a stonemason’s fees.
By the 1880s, the grave was overgrown. I wasn’t surprised at that, but to my dismay, there were even dungheaps nearby. I said a few poetic lines as I stood before the stone. I do not claim they were very original. Something about ‘Life’s unfinished road’ and something about ‘Render back thy being’s heavy load’ – I do not remember the rest. I do remember thinking, as I walked away, that no one from our family would ever see the stone again. Oddly enough, the other day I was looking at a graveyard scene my father illustrated in a work called The Reciter’s Album, The Actor’s Utility Book. On one of the tombstones he had drawn the inscription: ‘R. Seymour, Pentonville’. It left me with a peculiar feeling, and I could barely sleep that night.
My father’s sins may have been more than suicide. In the note he left, he called my mother the ‘best of wives’. I have sometimes thought of that. Of how my father’s problems could not be solved by such a woman. Which is to say, no woman in the world could help him.
There isn’t much in his work to shed light on his feelings about women. There is a drawing, called Preface, which appears in a collected edition of the Comic Magazine. I open the volume now. You pass a title page, Funny Bones, of a skeleton laughing, hands on ribs, skull tilted in good humour, and then there is an extraordinary image of a man with a monstrous nose – a truncheon of flesh, about two feet long, veiny, hairs sticking out, and the gnarled head is a darker shade. The nose pokes through the doorway before the rest of a man’s face enters. It is obviously a phallus. To complete the picture, a woman looks on, and she sees only the nose, or the penis as it would appear to her, entering through the doorway, and she is horrified.
What am I to conclude from this picture? Most likely, that my father was prone to taking risks – among the polite puns of the Comic Magazine, he chanced this obscene drawing. Yet I have heard rumours, whispers, of the sordid life my father led. Well, if Mr Pickwick had Sam Weller, then perhaps my father yearned for something of that sort. They are not my sins. I am a bachelor because I have never succeeded in finding a wife. After a time, I gave up, and accepted what I am.
*
I have also looked at my father’s works for clues to his mind prior to the moment when he raised the fowling piece to his heart.
There is his picture, Better Luck Next Time, of a man attempting to hang himself from the bough of a tree, saved by a broken rope. It would be easy to say: Father was thinking of suicide long before he committed the act. I see here something different from the actual event in the garden. The attempted hanging in this drawing is an impulsive act – the man has been rejected by a woman, and puts a rope around his neck. My father, though, planned his suicide. He left a note. He had made previous threats to kill himself. He made certain no one would disturb him, in the early morning. He chose a method for which there was no possibility of survival. The rope wouldn’t break for him. I cannot help feeling that the man in the picture is attempting suicide almost in a moment of whimsy. This is completely different from my father walking into the garden with the fowling piece, determined to carry out the act. If the picture Better Luck Next Time represented the feelings of my father a couple of years earlier, then, very well, he had long-standing thoughts about suicide, but if the picture reflected his state of mind, the strength of desire to do it then was not strong. Something happened prior to the morning he walked into the garden, something which made his desire to die increase and strengthen, and become a firm resolution. The one obvious candidate for that something was the meeting with Dickens, to take grog, a few days before. That my father burnt his Pickwick correspondence and papers immediately after that meeting surely shows his extreme distress after seeing Dickens.
There is also a drawing, from my father’s New Readings of Old Authors. It shows an officer of the law taking away a large round basket of fruit from a poverty-stricken woman. She is obviously a street vendor. The arms of the woman and those of her thin, ragged children are outstretched, pleading with the officer to relent, but he walks away. Underneath is a quotation from The Merchant of Venice: ‘You take my life when you do take the means whereby I live.’
I conceive of my father in a moment of despair, thinking of how Dickens had all but torn the picture of the dying clown to shreds, finding only the sticks of furniture in the clown’s hovel worthy of any praise. I think my father came to believe that à Beckett had told the truth – in a disturbed state of mind, Father believed he had little talent as an artist, for here was another young man, another editor, telling my father his abundant flaws. My father magnified these alleged flaws, and disregarded all the evidence of his career to the contrary. I can imagine him doing that, in a black mood. If Dickens made my father feel that he could not continue as a successful artist then Dickens took away the means whereby my father lived.
There remains the question of why father did not blame Dickens in the suicide note. But there is a simple answer. If he had blamed Dickens, or anyone at all, the suicide could be viewed as an escape from life’s problems; the inquest might well have reached a felo de se verdict. Father was a religious man, and knew what felo de se meant – denial of a Christian burial. He would have known too that felo de se would strip my mother of all rights to inherit. By ascribing his suicide to his own weakness and infirmity, and not to any external circumstances, he helped the inquest to reach a verdict of insanity.
Though even in the word ‘weakness’, I sometimes hear echoes of my father’s struggle against Dickens. It is as though a fallen boxer were to cry out: ‘It is not my opponent’s strength, but my own pathetic weakness that brings me down.’ There was no exoneration of Dickens. There was still an opponent, a strong man, who landed the blows, without mercy.
The great author may not have pulled the trigger. My father did that himself. But I will always see Dickens as the cause of our family’s tragedy.
*
I do remember my father acting out a Christmas drawing of a plum pudding coming alive, for my sister and me, plunging a knife and fork into its sides for arms, balancing a wine glass on top for a head, and two more glasses were legs. I can remember my sister laughing, and that was a happy moment.
I remember, as well, that a couple of years after my father’s death, a few unused pictures of his appeared in the Town and Country Magazine. There was one called Baked Taturs, showing the fate of a baked-potato seller, Hot Bob, attacked by a runaway bull at a bull-baiting event. The bull gored Hot Bob in the bosom. I remember clutching the picture when I was a boy. It was as though my father had come back to me, briefly. I came across the picture again a few days ago. What is the point of keeping it? I have no one to pass it to. I threw it on the fire in the general turnout of my possessions I am conducting.
*
They would call my father’s caricatures ‘cartoons’ these days. I do not care for the modern word. Whatever the word one uses for the creator of such pictures, sometimes I think my father didn’t really want to be a caricaturist at all. I suspect he always wanted to be a distinguished painter, like Joshua Reynolds. It was a case of ‘I ended up as this’ – as is so with most of us.
If I see a second-hand bookshop, I am invariably drawn in to see whether there is anything by my father
on the shelves. It is usually a reprint of his Sketches by Seymour. I pick up the volume and put it down again. Like my mother, the publishers reprinted many times, until the plates were worn out and they were little more than smudges. Every new edition served only to diminish my father’s posthumous reputation.
*
Sometimes I walk down to the River Stour. If the day is bright, it lifts my mood. In the summer, I might observe boys after catfish, eels, and other small fish. I usually take a bag of bread to feed mallards: one quacks, and others start quacking – as though sharing a joke, it always seems to me. And the burnt-toast smell of the nearby malthouse comes down to the river, upon the wind. There is also the bell from the church of St Stephen’s, which chimes clearer since being recast.
But I do not go to church, and I avoid public houses.
*
I do a little sketching of landscapes. I think that, if I draw quickly, my style is similar to my father’s. I have occasionally drawn Mr Pickwick, not because I want to, but because people who have traced me have sometimes asked for a souvenir, and, though I am reluctant, I have made a few shillings by this means. In truth, anyone could draw a crude Mr Pickwick – he is all circles. Round bald head, fat round body, round spectacles, round magnifying glass hanging in front of his waistcoat. The whole of The Pickwick Papers itself seems full of circles – more fat men, the spinning wheels of coaches, hats that are blown off and roll along the ground. Also, next to the circles, like a school geometry textbook, Pickwick has straight lines – including men thin as sticks. It seems to me that as long as geometry endures, Mr Pickwick will too. In that sense, he is timeless, he is immortal – Mr Pickwick existed before Euclid wrote his Elements. But it took my father to bring him to life.
*
The other day, though it was cold, I sat on the bank of the river and sketched, but my work disappointed me. I crumpled it into a ball and tossed it in the water, and watched it float until it became sodden and sank to the duck-shit carpet on the riverbed. The river, I might remark, is one of the few places where I am unlikely to see an image from The Pickwick Papers. Although, even there, I am reminded of the fishing theme on the wrapper.
Death and Mr. Pickwick Page 82