All went well, until the king sent for the officer to attend him in the field. The reason was unknown, but as all messages to attend a sovereign are urgent, the officer left, without a further thought of Nixon.
Nixon sat in his closet eating the bread and meat left for him, licking the bones clean, and drinking from a barrel of cider. He consumed all his food quickly, as if he feared its theft.
No one heard Nixon when he called out: ‘I shall starve! I shall starve!’
Some time later, the officer returned. It was only then, apparently, that he remembered Nixon. He made his way to the closet, opened it, and there was Nixon lying dead upon the floor. He was shrivelled, collapsed into himself, the clothes lying loosely around his wasted frame. His face had developed a peculiar grin, where the starvation had stretched his lips.
*
In the examination room, Besant wrote that Nixon was a renowned prophet, and exhausted his knowledge with that simple statement; while Skeat wrote a third of a page, noting that some claimed Nixon had even predicted the Cato Street conspiracy of 1820, for Nixon had announced:
When the Monument shall be brought to the Tower
Then shall fall rebellion’s power.
After a satisfied look across the aisle towards Besant, Skeat noted that one of the conspirators was called Monument and he was taken to the Tower.
Before the allotted two hours expired, Besant had answered all the questions he was able to answer. He put down his pen. Ten other pens had fallen already. Besant cast an anxious glance towards Skeat, who wrote on, gripping the nape of his own neck, his face full of ill humour.
Skeat continued writing until the very last moment allowed. When Calverley collected the papers, Skeat’s bundle was the thickest by far.
There followed a supper of oysters, beer, and milk punch, when all talk of Pickwick was banned.
*
It was four o’clock the following afternoon, and the college butler rang the dinner bell. The undergraduates, including Besant, Skeat and all the others who had sat the Pickwick examination, assembled in the hall, under the eyes of the portraits of the college heads. The paintings suggested the high hopes with which the college had welcomed young men to study, hopes which perhaps were not entirely in accordance with all the contents of Pickwick.
Everyone stood as the fellows came in, followed at the end by the junior fellow, Calverley. Just before entering, he had pinned a paper to the board used for college announcements of scholarships, sporting victories and examination results. Calverley assumed an air of greater gravity than normal. He took his place at the high table. The Latin grace was read. All sat down. Trout was served by waiters, and the fishes’ boiled eyes, somewhat smaller than alabaster marbles, stared blankly from the plates at the expectant examinees.
As soon as the meal was over, there was a rush to the noticeboard. One candidate seized the paper, and read aloud: ‘Pickwick examination. First prize, Besant; second prize, Skeat. C. S. Calverley, examiner.’
For the first time in his life at college, Besant was looked upon with respect. Even Skeat was good-humoured about the outcome – he shook his conqueror’s hand, and announced that in Besant he had met his match. He promised that he would buy Besant not one, not two, but three pints of Audit Ale, or Strong Ale if his new friend’s preferences went in that direction. For no one had ever bought Besant a drink before, and his tastes were unknown.
*
‘SO,’ I SAID, ‘SEYMOUR’S SON.’
‘If you pester me, I shall make you wait a month, Scripty. We have to catch up on other matters. Thomas Clarke being one. Now there was a man who knew about waiting.’
*
IN THE PLACE OF KEYS, cabinets, cleanliness and commands that was the keeper’s office in the Queen’s Prison, Southwark, the case of Clarke, Thomas, was under review. It was December 1851.
‘So he has no knowledge at all of his period in prison?’ said a balding man with a long neck, behind the authority of his desk. A framed watercolour of this man and his wife, both standing stiffly beside a lake, hung on the wall behind his chair. The watercolour showed that the wife was the taller of the two, by several inches, and the length of the man’s neck suggested aspirations to height. Beside the picture were a calendar and a ferruled club.
‘He took it bad, sir, when the Lord Chancellor turned down his last appeal,’ said the subordinate addressed. ‘He speaks to himself – and he’s got a voice like an old coalheaver, where gravel and dust have got in.’
‘Listening to that would grate on the nerves after a while.’
‘It does a bit, sir. He chatters away all night and says he shall never go to the Fleet.’
‘To the Fleet?’
‘He doesn’t know that the Fleet was demolished five years ago, and he’s been here nearly ten years. Mind you, he recovers a bit at times, and brightens up.’
‘How do the other prisoners treat him?’
‘Sometimes they tease him a bit, for something to do. I’ve heard ’em make chuffing noises at him, like a train, and they tell him there’s a railway now where the Fleet was. Oh, and sometimes he gets to thinking that someone wants to sell him a house. He starts saying things to the empty air. Things like: “No, I am not going to buy. No matter how many rooms, no matter how large.”’
‘His mind has gone. I shall draw up papers for his transfer to Bethlem.’
*
On Christmas Day 1851, as inmates in the Queen’s Prison celebrated with a carol and a glass of porter, two officers collected Thomas Clarke.
‘What’s today?’ he said to one in his gravel voice, as they left the gates and led him to a wagon.
‘Today!’ replied the younger officer. ‘Why, Christmas Day.’
‘It’s Christmas Day!’ He rubbed his hands, and his eyes twinkled. ‘Mr Pickwick at the Christmas party! That was a marvellous scene!’
Whenever the wagon passed a Christmas wreath on a door, or men raising a glass in a public house, Thomas Clarke called out: ‘Merry Christmas!’
‘Fine day to send a man to the madhouse,’ said the older officer.
‘Doesn’t bother him. He’s enjoyin’ himself,’ said his younger colleague. ‘I s’pose that proves he’s mad, and should go there.’
*
Clarke lay in bed fidgeting, in a dim Bethlem ward. An attendant, pushing a trolley, brought in plates of bread and butter and a jug of water. The bread had been sliced beforehand, for none in the ward would be trusted with a knife, and some had difficulty in performing minor tasks.
The attendant moved down the ward and buttered the bread for each person, taking a little at a time from a butter dish. Clarke watched this procedure very carefully. When the attendant reached his bedside he said: ‘Why did you use a different pat of butter for me?’
‘What difference does it make?’
‘It is rancid, that’s why, isn’t it?’
‘Not at all.’
‘No – I know what it is. It is poison. You’ve taken some of the mixture you use to keep the rats down, and you’ve mixed it into the butter you want to give to me.’
‘Come, it is fine, eat it.’
‘No – now I know what it is. It is not poison. You are testing medicines on me. That’s it! It is some antidote, which will kill me if it doesn’t have any effect. And when you have killed me, you will steal my inheritance. I know your schemes!’
‘Let me show you how safe it is.’ The attendant nibbled a corner of the bread and butter.
‘It is a trick. A magician’s trick. You think it is easy to play a hoax upon an old man whose sight is not the best. I am wise to you!’
For four restless days, Clarke refused all food. His talk became incoherent. Then he changed his mind, and concluded the attendant was bent on starving selected patients to death.
‘You’ll not defeat me!’ he said. ‘Give me the bread and spread the butter thick!’
*
There were periods when Clarke recovered his faculties
. He became less suspicious. He enjoyed walks in the garden and talked lucidly to the attendants of happy moments in his life. This was often after examining a flower in the morning dew.
He would sit on a bench holding the flower, and tell the attendants of the brief time when he was the heir to a fortune, and said that, even to the present day, he often imagined himself walking in sunny countryside, a wealthy man – the way he once did, the way he once was. He might have bought a cottage, he said, in pleasant fields, watching the seasons of sowing and harvest, he might have gone to the village inn, and met with men of good cheer. Instead, he had come to the confines of the debtor’s cell and the prison tap, whose only purpose was to dull men’s senses, and make them laugh amid their own degradation.
And when his bitterness rose, he displayed a vast knowledge of the law, especially as it related to wills and testaments. It seemed preposterous that a man of such learning should be restrained in Bethlem. So, on 27 December 1856, he was returned to the Queen’s Prison.
There, once again, the hopelessness of his case preyed upon Clarke’s mind. He was often heard to mutter in the corridors: ‘If only I had offered the daughter something.’ Then he would say: ‘She would never have got me if I had been generous.’ And often: ‘Someone had to pay for what her father did to her. If it was someone from the family – so much the better.’
On 23 October 1858, Clarke was committed to Bethlem again.
The alternation of sanity and sense might have continued, with Clarke being shuttled between madhouse and debtors’ prison, but death intervened on 25 January 1859.
By then, nearly thirty-two unbroken years had passed since Thomas Clarke was first imprisoned for debt.
*
‘There is something on your mind, Buss,’ said Harrison, as the old friends shared a drink in the Mother Red Cap public house in Camden, on a summer evening in 1859.
‘You will think it is nothing.’
‘If I think it is nothing, I shall tell you, and perhaps stop you thinking it is something.’
After a few moments, Buss said: ‘Yesterday, I was in a second-hand bookshop. Just idling among the shelves. A smart little man entered, too smart to be a customer in that shop, really. He went straight up to the counter, unfolded a piece of paper, and presented it the bookseller. It was obviously a list of books. The bookseller said “Yes” or “No” a number of times as he looked at the paper – obviously he meant whether or not he had a book in his shop. Then he said something like: “Oh, the first issue, without the border added to the Cruikshank picture. You’ll be lucky to find a copy of that, sir.” The smart little man said: “I know it is rare. Why do you think I want it?”’
‘You have lost me,’ said Harrison. ‘Why on earth should that bother you?’
‘Harrison, there is a rare work associated with me.’
‘Which work?’
‘Do you not know? The one that was made rare. The one where my pictures were withdrawn and replaced with pictures by another artist.’
‘Oh – you mean Pickwick.’
‘Of course I mean Pickwick!’
‘Well, what of it?’
‘When I saw the man yesterday it was a confirmation of a thought that has often occurred to me. Harrison, I know what is going to happen. Bibliomaniacs will go in search of copies of Pickwick which contain my etchings. I will be collectable for my failure. Even after I am dead, I will be known as the man who failed at Pickwick.’
‘This is silly. The fellow you saw yesterday wasn’t even after Pickwick.’
‘It will happen. It probably is already. I can imagine connoisseurs who sniff with contempt if the failed Buss plates are not there. And those imperfect things will become the sign of a perfect first edition. No matter that I have done many other paintings and illustrations. No matter that with further practice I took to etching, and became – though I say it myself – expert. All will be ignored. While two paltry offerings – not even really my work – will be my monument.’
‘You must not dwell upon this.’
‘But I do dwell upon it! Every successful work I have done, every work which might be my legacy, is dissolving. You know all the theatrical portraits I did when I was younger? The great performers of the age came to me. And yet because of Seymour’s picture of the lowest grade of actor, a drunken idiot of a clown, all this will be forgotten.’
‘You will be ill if you keep on about this. Forget it, Buss. It happened over twenty years ago. It is not the end of the world.’
‘I have been thinking of poor Seymour, etching his last Pickwick plate. Do you know what I think turned his brain? He was worried about the acid biting the plate. He was thinking about the difficulty of avoiding foul biting. That was why he killed himself. Then after his death, there were no bounds to the praise heaped upon him. Suddenly he was one of the greatest artists since Hogarth – no living artist was his equal and never could be! And there was I, little Buss, instantly to be compared with this supreme genius, Seymour. Any artist would have struggled against Seymour’s posthumous reputation. And by the time Browne came along, the public’s shock at Seymour’s death was waning and he was only compared to me, a novice. If only Chapman and Hall had gone to Browne first!’
‘I will get us another drink.’
When Harrison returned, Buss said: ‘I have been thinking about Adcock as well.’
‘Who?’
‘The man who actually did the etching for my Pickwick plates. He died towards the end of 1850. I know, you see, because I wrote his obituary for the Almanack of the Fine Arts.’
‘What happened to him?’
‘He went to St Kitts, and eventually got himself appointed manager of one of the largest sugar plantations on the island. Shortly after that, cholera took him. I did not mention Adcock’s involvement with Pickwick in the obituary. You see, I promised him that I would take all the blame. But suppose I had mentioned Pickwick. I would have granted Adcock a terrible posthumous notoriety. All the fine and delicate work he did as an engraver would be ignored, and he would be remembered just for his brief involvement with Pickwick. I would not wish such a fate upon anyone. But I know it is going to happen to me.’
*
‘WE MUST NOT FORGET THAT there was another man who had a connection with Pickwick in 1836,’ said Mr Inbelicate. ‘The man who turned down the chance of being its author.’
‘Charles Whitehead, I presume you mean.’
‘Before long, he was writing to the Literary Fund for help.’
He showed me a copy of Whitehead’s application, written six months after he had rejected the opportunity of Pickwick.
‘My distress,’ he wrote, ‘at the present moment, arises from the circumstances of a bill falling due in three days from this date, which I am unable in any way to meet.’ The application spoke of other debts, in arrears.
‘He was granted twenty pounds,’ said Mr Inbelicate. ‘And no doubt some of that was poured down his throat.’
*
IT WAS EARLY MAY IN 1854, and a bright late morning, when Charles Whitehead entered his lodgings carrying a batch of manuscripts under his arm, tied together with frayed string. His wife was out, earning coins as a laundress, so sunlight through a window was his only company – showing up flaking paint, the damp ceiling, bare boards, a rusty bedstead, and an assortment of wooden boxes which served as cupboards, chairs and tables. Whitehead sat down on a crate, at a crate, undid the string, and began inspecting the manuscripts, all submitted by would-be authors.
For ten years Whitehead had done this work. He discarded the vast majority of manuscripts, and saved but a few to recommend to the publisher. To those saved ones, he made corrections and revisions, not least in spelling and punctuation. It kept him in crusts and liquor, and not much more. If he did find a literary gem among the dust, his feelings upon doing so were mixed – here could be the next coming author, while he, Whitehead, sat at a splintering crate.
When the last manuscript was done, it was hardly
surprising that Whitehead left for a dingy public house, where he struck up a conversation with two friends at the bar. They drank for several hours.
‘One of these days we’ll be sober,’ said the companion on Whitehead’s right, a man with a rigid tuft of grey hair, whose flushed expression implied a state of indefinite postponement of that day.
‘No,’ said the other, an older, thinner and mostly toothless fellow, working his way through a plate of pickled walnuts, ‘we will always be sober – compared to Charles here!’
Whitehead joined in with the laugh, but a look away, and subsequent moments of silence, implied the humour did not accord with his feelings. He began listening to a middle-aged man on a stool further along the bar, who had an open collar and rolled-up sleeves. The man was informing the landlord of the great opportunities in Australia.
‘The sheer quality of the food, and so cheap!’ said the man. ‘That’s what I hear. Sacks of flour – twenty shillings. And they turn it into the very best bread, much better than England. And the meat! So fine, so cheap, that’s what I hear. A sandwich of Australian bread, and Australian mutton, washed down with Australian beer – they say it’s worth the journey alone. And the fun!’
This was not the first time that Whitehead had listened with great interest to such talk.
13 November 1856
As the passengers filed out of the emigrant depot to board the ship Diana, a band on the quayside struck up, to accompany a man with a cracked face and a shattered voice: ‘Billy Taylor, was a sailor…’
As boarding order was alphabetical by surname, Mrs Whitehead looked, with some anxiety, at the number of people ahead in the queue.
‘By the time it gets to us, there’ll only be the worst berths left.’
‘I doubt whether the difference between best and worst will be great,’ said her husband as he shuffled along, a heavy backpack appearing to be the cause of his stoop, although stooping was his posture under all circumstances.
‘So the berths will be equally bad,’ she said.
Carpenters were still on board, hammering and sawing, while livestock in pens added their own aggravation to the noise, as did shouts between families boarding and their relatives on the quay. After the slow rise up the gangway, the Whiteheads descended to the quieter and gloomier world below decks that would be their life for the next four months – where a few evil-smelling oil lamps substituted the assault on their ears with an assault on the nose. The weak glimmer of the lamps fell upon the wooden beams, barrels and piles of luggage, as well as a double tier of beds, which almost ran the length of the ship and upon an even longer trestle table with seats screwed down to the deck’s planks. The Whiteheads settled for an upper bunk at the far end, near a water closet. To Mrs Whitehead’s disgust, there was not even a small curtain around the top tier of bunks, for that was a privilege enjoyed solely by the occupants of the lower tier.
Death and Mr. Pickwick Page 87