Death and Mr. Pickwick (30 page)

‘And now we come to
these
,' said Mr Inbelicate.

They were volumes of bound journals from the 1820s – the
Economist and General Advisor, The Chemist
, the
Art of Beauty
– as well as miscellaneous works on engineering, with diagrams of machinery.

‘These were all published by Knight and Lacey of Paternoster Row. You'll find nothing even signed by Seymour, and so we cannot say for sure which pictures are his. He probably did not even care.'

I looked at an illustration of a fishmonger in the
Economist and General Advisor
, which showed the tricks of the traders to fool the public about the freshness of fish – such as squeezing bullock's blood into a fish's eyes and gills, and even pumping them up with a blowpipe. This was one in a series of articles,
The Annals of Gulling.

‘The artful devils could make a salmon look like it was fresh off the hook,' said Mr Inbelicate. ‘They called it painting.'

He showed me one more work from this period,
The New Picture of London
, with a Seymour illustration of the grand entrance to Hyde Park. I saw the statue of the naked warrior with a shield.

‘And it was around this time,' he said, ‘that Seymour started to visit the gymnasium.'

 

*

THE GYMNASIUM AT PENTONVILLE, NEAR
the New River Head, was a capacious reservoir of muscular instruction, built to supply the needs of Londoners thirsting for gymnastic knowledge.

The first notice, of three by the door, announced to the nobility, gentry and public in general that that great expert in exercise, Professor Voelker, would hold classes on Tuesdays and Fridays. The second notice, for those requiring historical context, told of the origins of gymnastic exercises in the practices of the ancient Greeks. The third notice, in large black letters, announced: ‘Boys! Become more elastic and strengthen your bodily powers!'

In the hall, Robert Seymour took a short run and vaulted over the wooden horse, landing with his arms raised above his head. A bell rang, the signal to change exercise, and he proceeded to the ropes. Around him were men hanging from the trapeze, lifting themselves to the neck at the bar, ascending poles, walking on beams, scaling ladders, or scoring a hit with a foil. There were spectators on the edges, some of whom Seymour recognised from their regular visits to the print-shop windows. Seymour bent an arm, displaying his biceps, as he clung to the rope with a single hand. An underdeveloped weakling on the rope next to Seymour's was breathing heavily. ‘Gets you out of the office,' said this fellow.

The bell rang again, and having completed a circuit, Seymour descended and strode towards the changing room, confident that his physique was admired.

*   *   *

As he wiped his neck with a towel, Seymour cast discreet glances at the men in the changing room, in their different stages of muscularity. When rubbing his chest, he heard the attendant say: ‘Towel, Mr Cruikshank?'

‘Just Cruikshank. Thank you.'

Seymour turned to the man with the whiskers and the alert eyes. He had already noted this man's physique at the apparatus.

‘Are you staring at me, sir?' said the man.

‘Are you
George
Cruikshank, the artist?'

‘I am. And what of it?'

‘I have long admired your work. My name is Robert Seymour. I am an artist myself.'

‘What sort of artist?'

‘I would be delighted if you would join me for a drink, and perhaps I can show you.'

‘I choose my drinking companions carefully.'

‘I mean you no harm, sir.'

‘Perhaps there will come a time when I shall be familiar with your work. Now I wish to change, and I would prefer you not to stare at me while I do so.' Cruikshank walked to the other side of the room where he began chatting to a slim man who had a towel wrapped around his waist. Seymour noticed nods and glances aimed in his direction.

*   *   *

In his studio, now at White Conduit Fields, Seymour began copying in earnest the lines of Cruikshank: the Cruikshank curves, the Cruikshank straights, the small lines, the long lines, hundreds of lines, thousands of adjustments, all to make a single picture, developing in the process the confident freedom of Cruikshank, in drawings of buildings, trees, people, smirks.

From the Gallery of the Fine Arts in Rathbone Place, Seymour purchased aqua fortis, twenty copper etching plates, needles, and the ingredients to make wax – everything to turn Cruikshank-like pictures into Cruikshank-like etchings. There came the moment he moved the needle firmly against the wax's resistance, and for the first time in his life he looked down upon a line he had cut. The gleam of copper underneath met his eyes.

There was no short cut to mastery of etching, only the long road of practice: the acid ate his cuffs, his throat was sore from fumes, his eyes smarted and his fingertips turned a shade of yellow. Yet he did not stop, he knew he must practise and practise some more, and often he hummed ‘John Barleycorn' as he did so. During the day, he pinned tissue paper over his windows to soften the light and see the lines better in the wax. After sundown, he filled a bowl with water and placed it before his oil lamp to diffuse the illumination. Eventually he would lie down, and close his eyelids. By that time, he could barely see from the strain of concentration and the soreness of his eyes.

This regime continued until the day his fingers controlled the needle with a lightness and quickness of touch as he cut the miniature furrow through the wax – he knew just the right combination of pressures to produce a line that was at first thick, like darning thread, and then thinned to the fineness of a hair. He acquired, too, the judgement of knowing precisely how long the plate should be immersed in the acid bath. He stood guard, watching the pattern of bubbles rising – and if bubbles appeared without a corresponding line, he knew the biting of the plate was foul. He also brushed away with a feather any accumulation of bubbles on a line, for this would disrupt the acid's work and produce a ragged drawing when printed. He had read that the great etcher Hollar of Prague used only a duck's feather for clearing bubbles, and so Seymour made a trip to the banks of the Hampstead Ponds to acquire a supply. When all these techniques had been learnt, he could etch any line at all, from the most delicate scratch to the deepest trench, and with the aid of his duck feather he could cross-hatch any shade of bird, from gull-grey to rook-black, as would be evident when the plate was inked and passed through a printing press.

Seymour was a master etcher! He loved the speed and the freedom as the needle moved through the wax like a skater; he loved the bold lines etching gave to trees, architecture and skies. Yet, even when confident as an etcher, he would not rest.

For there was another technique to be learnt: the new lithography. He explained it to Jane on one of her frequent visits as she leant over his desk and watched.

‘You take a fatty crayon and you draw on a flat stone,' he said, doing exactly that, as he embarked on a picture of a beagle. ‘Later you throw on some oily ink and water, and the ink sticks to the fat, and the water gets out of the way. And then you can print from the stone.
Be careful!
You'll ruin it
!'

She started at the sudden ferocity.

‘I'm sorry, my love. But you were leaning too close. One tiny drop of sweat, or just one fleck of skin falling on the stone will show up in the printing.'

‘I am so sorry, Robert. I had no idea.'

‘No, of course you didn't. It was my fault, I should have told you. But – I shall not continue with this.'

‘I am truly sorry, Robert. I just wanted a closer look at your work.'

‘I will start another lithograph another day.'

With its grey, crayony tones, lithography suggested a morning mist upon the Thames, and so Seymour took himself to Wapping to find a fitting scene.

It came when the prow of a boat rowed by a middle-aged man broke the mist. The rower blew a shrill whistle. Seymour heard a shiphand shout ‘It's Boatswain Smith!' and the call was taken up by other men, on other ships, and by those standing beside the mooring posts. Men sitting in the dockyard, drinking from bottles and rolling dice, stood as well, and held the bottles behind their backs, and left the dice by their shoes. Wherever Seymour looked, men stood to attention by the river, having ceased whatever they were doing, and all looked towards the man in the rowingboat. Putting his whistle in his pocket, and holding a Bible, the beaky, square-jawed man delivered a sermon on the Good Samaritan – a subject on which Seymour had himself sermonised as a boy, but never in such a style.

‘The Good Samaritan was a welcome craft,' said the man in the boat, ‘that bore down to help a poor lubber who fell amid landsharks that took away his cargo and left him adrift on the highway.'

Seymour sketched the good boatswain in the grey morning light, with the men listening on the docks and the decks, the mist encroaching upon hulls and rigging.

Upon completing the lithograph of that scene, he drew an advertisement for his artistic services, stating that he could produce ‘Embellishments of all Kinds'. The accompanying drawing itself showed ‘all kinds': an image of a pencil and an etching needle protruding from a pile of books; a bust of Shakespeare alongside Falstaff, Lear and Puck; a woman being wooed on a couch; a monkey in clothes; a globe, maps and charts; and a border with fronds, a fox, a stag and a pheasant – and, as a vertical within this border, a fishing rod, with a fish hanging down from a line and a net on the end of a pole.

‘What do you think?' he said, passing a copy of the advertisement to Jane the next time she visited, as she leant by his desk. She moved her lips awkwardly.

‘Is something wrong, Jane?' he said, turning round in his seat to look at her. ‘I can see you are not impressed.'

‘You had better change it a little – look at your surname, Robert.'

To his embarrassment, he saw that the ‘Embellishments of all Kinds' were designed by ‘R. Sey
more
'.

*   *   *

The corrected advertisement brought in many orders for etchings and lithographs. One of the first commissions was for etchings in a slim book,
Snatches from Oblivion, Being the Remains of Herbert Trevelyan Esq., Edited by Piers Shafton, Gent
. This book purported to be derived from the papers of a man of genius, a deceased poet, Herbert Trevelyan, killed by a cough he had contracted in winter, but not before he had entrusted his papers to his landlady with strict instructions to pass them to an editor. One part fascinated Seymour – a story called ‘The Serious Afflictions of a Good Appetite', which concerned the poet's late friend, Ezekiel, a thin man with a vast capacity for eating, who sucked in food and still did not show the benefit in inches around his stomach. Seymour portrayed a dream of Ezekiel's, in which all the food Ezekiel had eaten in his life came back to haunt him – Seymour drew a sheep with missing ribs, and limbless cows and trotterless pigs, all still alive and all circulating in the dream of the sleeper.

‘It is most odd,' he told Jane. ‘I have an uncanny feeling I have drawn this work before. I can almost hear the bleats of the sheep and the squeals of the pigs. Yet I have never drawn such a thing in my life.'

‘Perhaps you had a dream like this when you were at Smithfield.'

‘You must be right. I
was
troubled by the animals sometimes. It's a strange story in any case – but I suppose anything might be found among a poet's papers.'

 

*

AS I TOLD MR INBELICATE,
I too was sometimes troubled by nightmares of food. For my mother, before her death, had become exceedingly thin. Her breasts had all but disappeared. I told her she looked like a Belsen victim. Yet, she always complained that she was given too much to eat: ‘Too much food! Too much! Much too much food!' I can hear her now. I have heard her saying this in my nightmares.

I tried, God knows how I tried, to make her eat more. She said that her stomach had shrunk, and could not accommodate large meals. Her diet was, by then, a few spoonfuls of thin porridge. Her last Christmas dinner, by choice, was one potato the size of a costume bead, a teaspoon of peas, and a tiny section of sausage not much larger than the joint of a finger – and this was ‘Too much food!'

*   *   *

When she died, I found among her possessions a note to me. ‘So we come to the parting of the ways,' she wrote. ‘I hope you think I have been a good mother. I tried my best. I wish you success in whatever you do.'

I do not know the circumstances of the death of Robert Seymour's mother; nor do I know whether he found a letter from his mother after her death. I know that she died in 1827. There was an Elizabeth Bishop who died in Southwark in that year, and perhaps that is her. There is silence among the papers I have to work from and I do not have Mr Inbelicate to ask now.

The next significant record I have from 1827 is a copy of the register of weddings at St Bride's church, for 13 August: Robert Seymour had married Jane Holmes. I have a scribbled recollection from a guest that Robert Seymour said he felt ‘Taller than Canonbury Tower'. There is nothing apart from that. There would be children from this union: a girl, Jane, in 1829, a boy, Robert, in 1830. They shall not concern us for now.

The third significant event of 1827 occurred shortly after the wedding, when Mr and Mrs Seymour attended a matinee of a comedy,
'Twould Puzzle a Conjuror
, at the Haymarket Theatre.

 

*

JOHN LISTON WAS BORN FOR
comic roles. Among his congenital blessings were his bulging, divergently staring eyes – the mask of tragedy itself could not look into such orbs without laughing – and just for good measure the eyes were separated by a piggish nose. Moreover, he was so fat that stage directions commanded that he turn round on stage just to show off his gigantic posterior, made even more substantial by baggy breeches. In the role of Van Dunder, burgomaster of Saardam, in
'Twould Puzzle a Conjuror
, Liston's expansion in the horizontal plane was supplemented upwards: already the tallest member of the cast, a conical hat turned his head into a towering steeple.