Death and Mr. Pickwick (117 page)

‘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.

‘The only privacy we'll get is the darkness,' she said.

Whitehead seemed more concerned by a sign above a lamp which announced: ‘Drinking of Alcohol is Strictly Forbidden'. He set down his backpack, but there was a grim resignation on his lips.

*   *   *

Although Charles Whitehead had prepared himself for at least one hundred dry days, the craving for alcohol intensified as a direct result of the nauseating drinking water. After a week at sea, the water developed a smell which turned Whitehead's stomach every time he attempted a sip. He noticed one man at the trestle surreptitiously pouring a little vinegar from a flask into a cup, which apparently destroyed the odours, but Whitehead's proposal to purchase some of the flask's contents met with a refusal.

‘What you're offering,' whispered the man, clutching the flask firmly, ‘isn't a tenth of what I reckon I can get from you in a few days.'

Whitehead often wandered on the upper deck, looking for clouds, in the hope of salvation by rainwater. When a downpour finally came, he was ready with a cup to collect the runnings from sails and awnings. The taste was still peculiar, with a suggestion of canvas, but it was far better than the contents of the water butts. He and his wife toasted each other with the godsend, and this was among the happier moments on board.

Such moments were marred afterwards. When the sun came out, so did the passengers from the cabins, who were freed from the restrictions on alcohol. They would ostentatiously clutch a wine glass by the stem as they stood by the rail, looking towards the horizon. One man, with an ebony cane, silver buttons and a protruding chin, pitched back his head as he drained a glass of port, and then turning and catching a sight of Whitehead's stare, said: ‘Are you looking at me, sir?'

‘No, sir.' said Whitehead. He answered truthfully.

*   *   *

Every Sunday evening on the upper deck, a long-haired man with a wild eye gave scriptural instruction to a small group of women. His objective was the memorising of biblical verses, and, with a terror in his manner scarcely to be believed, he made the women strive for word-perfection.

After one of these sessions, a certain picked-upon and pointed-at member of the group had had enough: ‘I feel like doing something bright and cheerful,' she said.

She followed up with a suggestion: that they should read aloud from
Pickwick
. This was greeted with such zest that every afternoon, readings from
Pickwick
became an established part of shipboard life, with the women taking it in turn to declaim passages, and attracting other listeners, male and female. Even the long-haired man was caught up in the enthusiasm, and he proposed that the women should learn sections of
Pickwick
by heart. Before long he was pointing to the women in his customary way, but now applied to the sayings of Sam Weller.

Whitehead scheduled his walks on deck to avoid these sessions. He would retire to his bunk, lying next to his wife, and they would both stare at the beams. One afternoon when he saw the long-haired man putting on his jacket, about to leave for a
Pickwic
k reading, Whitehead said to his wife: ‘I know I could have written
Pickwick.
'

‘I do not want to hear that any more,' she said. ‘You were the one who craved a fresh start.'

*   *   *

17 March 1857 was cool, verging on cold, with iron-tinted clouds above the Whiteheads, as they sat upon their luggage upon Liardet's Beach, waiting for a wagon to Melbourne.

Most of the disembarked had found transport in the preceding two hours, but of the few still sitting on the beach among the boxes, packing cases, trunks and exasperated looks, the Whiteheads were, by an informal courtesy, next in line for wheels.

Mrs Whitehead suddenly stood, as a two-horse vehicle appeared in the distance. ‘Come on, come on,' she said, as though talking to the horses. When it was a little closer, she saw it was laden with vegetables: ‘It's the dirtiest cart I have ever seen,' she said.

‘It will have to do,' replied Whitehead.

The waggoner stopped, took out a pipe, and cast an assessing eye over the two prospective passengers. ‘Well, you're lucky today. Melbourne at two shillings and sixpence for each of you, and a shilling for each of those bags.' When he saw the dismay on the Whiteheads' faces, he added: ‘If you don't want it, I'm sure the people behind you will.'

‘All right,' said Whitehead. They climbed up beside the driver, who tossed their bags on a pile of potatoes at the rear.

‘Now the next thing,' said the waggoner as the horses moved, ‘is a place to stay.' He contemplated with the help of his pipe. ‘I could take you to a nice place, two rooms, big enough, furnished, six pounds a week.'

‘Six pounds!' exclaimed Whitehead.

‘Well, let's think again.'

The driver spoke of various accommodations, one after another, of ever increasing wretchedness, and diminishing – yet still extortionately high – rent.

When all were rejected by the Whiteheads, the waggoner blew out a sustained puff of smoke and said that there was a publican he knew, who had turned a disused horse's stall into accommodation, with all the straw a person could need, and a rug and blankets. Five shillings a night would secure a third of the stall.

‘If you're lucky,' said the waggoner, ‘you might not have to share with anyone else.' When he saw the disgust on Mrs Whitehead's face, the waggoner added: ‘It would do nicely until you got on your feet.'