Death and Mr. Pickwick (32 page)

‘Am I mistaken,' said Heath, taking a seat opposite the man, without asking if he minded, ‘but is that a poppy?'

The man looked up. ‘Not a normal poppy. I found it today.'

‘It is very curious.'

‘Once you are aware of the possibility of aberrations in plants, you see them all the time. There's rarely a ramble when I don't see a plant with an extra petal, or with no petals at all, or with petals sprouting out of other petals.'

‘Is it something in the Scottish soil that does it?'

‘Why no!' he laughed. ‘Though I
have
seen a thistle with flattened roots, like ribbons. Are you interested in plants yourself?'

‘Anything odd catches my eye. I am an artist.'

Heath always carried examples of his work with him in an army backpack, and so he took out his illustration
The Battle of Albuera
: the smoke from cannon mingled with the clouds he had drawn in the sky, and now also with the tobacco smoke that drifted across the table.

The gentleman put down his poppy and examined a pictorial ragged banner with his magnifying glass, and by various noises and nods, showed a keen enthusiasm.

‘I've done a lot of military pictures, I have,' said Heath, bringing out a cavalry charge, ‘but the demand has gone. I came to Glasgow to do city pictures in oils; and I have also sketched a few caricatures and amusing scenes.'

‘You may be surprised to learn that I have an interest in pictures myself. I operate the only lithographic press in Glasgow.'

‘Why, you must be Mr Hopkirk!' said Heath, pulling back in astonishment. ‘I was going to call on you tomorrow!'

‘Well this is
most
auspicious. Come, do join me in a rum, sir. Let me shake your hand!'

*   *   *

The Scotia public house in Glasgow was known for its secretive, lamplit alcoves; and, located close to the last stage of the penny ferry on the Clyde, men from downriver called in before going home. Joined by sailors, these men swallowed malt liquor and swapped yarns. Shortly after the meeting between William Heath and Thomas Hopkirk, the alcoves at the Scotia found a new entertainment to accompany the drinks: an illustrated publication whose like had never been seen before, the
Glasgow Looking Glass
.

The customers of the Scotia read over each other's shoulders and handed round the latest issue. A sailor laughed at a picture of a funeral club, at which men, driven by fear of the pauper's grave, banded together to contribute pennies to a common fund for decent burials – but drank themselves senseless at a meeting and lay draped over chairs, on the table and on the floor, while thieves came in and looted their coffer. Down the page was a picture called
Pious Jaw Breakers
, of a church congregation singing with unnaturally gaping mouths – an allusion, some readers realised, to a Glasgow man who dislocated his jaw in the full sway of devotion to the Lord. Then came an image everyone understood: the wheezing citizens on Glasgow's streets, forced to breathe in the fumes from factory chimneys, groping their way along, barely able to see in the smoke, while the birds fell dead from the sky and the trees stood leafless from lack of sun.

The publication's premise was simple – so simple it seemed impossible that it had not been done before, but it needed Hopkirk and Heath to bring it into the world. For the fortnightly
Glasgow Looking Glass
was like a floral mutation, a humorous magazine of
many
pictures per page, not just one, or none.

The artist himself drank in the Scotia every day, working on ideas for drawings, as the atmosphere was more conducive to creativity than the Cheap and Nasty; but when the
Glasgow Looking Glass
had been going barely two months, Heath became unaccountably absent for ten days. ‘Have you seen Heath?' was asked every evening in the Scotia, but no one seemed to know his whereabouts.

On the tenth day, Heath returned. His whole demeanour was altered. Heath had not been shy before, but never had he shown such an easy confidence as he strode into the Scotia. It was as though he believed he was twice as handsome.

‘Where have
you
been?' said a retired sailor, standing cross-legged at the bar.

‘Northumbria. My family home. A bereavement. Ah!' he said, looking at a stuffed fox in a wall-mounted display case. ‘I can hardly wait for the hunting season. There is nothing like chasing a fox to sharpen one's wits for war. The best men I served with had all ridden to hounds.'

The sailor and a younger drinking partner looked at each other. ‘You have never mentioned hunting before,' said the sailor.

‘You have never even mentioned
serving
before,' said his companion.

‘Have I not? Captain. Dragoons.' In the air he made a cut and slash with a movement of his wrist. ‘After the funeral I took the opportunity to collect my old uniform.' He opened the backpack in which he usually carried his art and tugged at the collar of a military tunic.

‘Where did you see action?' said the sailor's companion.

‘Albuera. Many theatres of war.'

‘You must have been young at Albuera,' said the sailor.

‘I wasn't a dragoon then. There was always work for boys loading cannon.'

‘May I have a look at your uniform?' said the sailor.

‘I am just going to the privy,' said Heath, ‘but by all means have a look.' He asked the landlord to set a drink on the bar, ready for his return.

The uniform was held up. ‘It's surely too large for him,' said the sailor's companion. ‘I'm about his size. I'm going to try it on.' The sleeves travelled halfway down his hands. ‘He never wore this uniform. And look at how loose it is. The dragoon this belonged to was a barrel-chested man.'

At the other end of the bar, a grim and unsociable drinker had noticed these goings-on. The one fact known about this man was that he had fought with the Scots Greys at Waterloo, and this was not offered up idly, but had emerged when a party of military veterans came to the Scotia, and they toasted the glorious victory of Wellington and the gallant Prussians. This was the sole conversation the man was ever known to have had. Now he put down his glass with a resolute placement and crossed to the opposite end of the bar to examine the tunic. He listened to the men's opinions – one suggested that Heath had had a knock on the head in Northumbria, the other that funerals are funny things, a time when you think of what you have and haven't done in your life, and you see people you haven't seen for a long time, and that was always difficult. To these explanations, the man of the Scots Greys said nothing except a grim and determined: ‘I'll find out.'

When Heath returned, there was an onslaught of questions on his personal military history, none of which he answered to the grim man's satisfaction. A finger was prodded into Heath's chest, and everyone in the Scotia heard the accusation: ‘You're a fraud, man! You're a fraud!'

All conversations stopped; all eyes fell upon Heath.

‘The only service you've done is reading books of military history!' said the grim man. ‘You're an utter disgrace!'

Heath bolted from the Scotia, leaving the unpaid drink on the bar.

‘From Northumbria is he?' said the man of the Scots Greys. ‘He's as likely to have fought at Maserfield with old King Oswald as at Albuera. A disgrace! But don't think he'll get away with this. I'll find him.'

The Scotia never saw William Heath again. It was the case, too, that shortly afterwards the
Glasgow Looking Glass
relocated to Edinburgh, under the new name the
Northern Looking Glass
. Six months later, the magazine closed completely, and whether to escape creditors, or because he feared the wrath of the Scots Greys, William Heath fled south to London.

 

*

HEATH HAD JUST SHOWN THOMAS
McLean his picture of the Battle of Albuera. He now produced an issue of the
Northern Looking Glass
, and pointed to a humorous scene of army surgeons at work on the battlefield, piecing together the maimed: the head of a decapitated man was sewn back on, but so that the eyes looked towards the rear.

‘You obviously have a fondness for military matters,' said McLean.

‘I get that from an uncle of mine. He was a captain in the Dragoons. Always had an audience for the accounts of his exploits, pretty women especially. Never had to wait long before someone bought him a drink. He died not so long ago.'

Mclean turned the pages. ‘I have seen the
Northern Looking Glass
before, in Ackermann's windows.'

‘My former partner, Mr Hopkirk, arranged a deal with him, to be the London agent.'

‘You personally are not tied to Ackermann in any way?'

‘I considered paying him a visit.'

‘You are wise to come to me first. I can use a man of your undoubted talents. I believe we could do something with this
Looking Glass
magazine. Put your faith in me, Mr Heath, and you won't go wrong.'

 

*

A MENTION OF ACKERMANN, TO SAY
nothing of maimed soldiers, reminds me of the way in which
Dr Syntax
, and then
Life in London
, originally appeared: in parts.

As Mr Inbelicate put it to me once, standing beside a bookcase: ‘If a book is
written
page by page, and
read
page by page, why may it not be
sold
page by page?'

Or, at least – as I pointed out, in a correction which annoyed him, judging from a specific tightening of his mouth – sold in convenient
bundles
of pages, within a magazine, or as a separate part in its own right.

‘Yes, yes, but in any case, broken up into serial divisions, before publication as a book,' he said.

Mr Inbelicate had devoted the entire bookcase to historical examples of this phenomenon, and now he showed off its contents to me.

He reached for the top left-hand item, which possessed a thin paper spine – it was a late-seventeenth-century treatise, published piecemeal, on the subject of printing. Onwards his finger moved, to the
Select Trials of the Old Bailey
, published fortnightly, with accounts of sodomy, murder and highway robbery. Then works on astronomy, architecture, biography, herbs. Then
Johnson's Dictionary
and
The Pilgrim's Progress.
Tobias Smollett's
The Life and Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves
came next, published in twenty-five magazine instalments and completed in 1761. ‘Worthy of special mention,' he said. ‘A novel which had the audacity for its beginning to be printed before the end was even written.' Here too were remaindered works, such as one on the French Revolution which had failed to make a profit as a single volume, and so was cut up into parts and resold.

‘It is a bookcase of seething economic forces,' said Mr Inbelicate. ‘A work produced in twenty monthly numbered parts needs an initial outlay of just one-twentieth of the total cost,' he said, with his voice betraying an obsessive fascination which is not usually to be found in a sentence containing the words ‘outlay' and ‘total cost'. ‘And when put on to the market, the receipts come in within a month, and are used to finance the next part!'

My personal favourite among the items in the bookcase is the partwork Bible, which I have taken down now, to examine again as I type. The woodcuts make me smile for their crudeness, and for their interpretation of Scripture which, shall we say, is somewhat literal. I have in front of me an illustration from the Gospel of Matthew, of a man removing a splinter from another man's eye – ignoring the huge wooden plank which is embedded in his own.

There was a second bookcase, opposite the one devoted to publication in parts, which Mr Inbelicate had dedicated to another publication method. It consisted of early-nineteenth-century novels published in three weighty and handsome volumes, usually priced at thirty-one shillings and sixpence in total.

‘Now why publish in
three
volumes?' he said. ‘I will tell you. For the reason there were not
two
blind mice, Scripty. For the reason you don't stop after saying “Friends, Romans”. For the reason that stories have a beginning, a middle and an end. There was no real reason, Scripty! It was a pattern that publishers were stuck into.'

To be fair to Mr Inbelicate, he did go into historical detail, to explain how the novel in three volumes had come to be. Sir Walter Scott had enjoyed success with the three-volume format, and so, naturally, others thought they could as well; while greedy libraries saw they could make three times as much money by lending out a novel in thirds. The cause of the tradition is not as important as its effect, which was pernicious – authors felt the need to fill three volumes. The result was fat novels for an age of fat.

Mr Inbelicate showed me volumes with a superfluity of chapters – each new chapter starting a fresh page, with a lengthy quotation at the start, simply to add bulk. Novels with astonishingly long prefaces, and an abundance of footnotes, printed on pages notable for their broad white margins. The style of writing itself was compromised, with long-winded explanations and rambling characterisations. ‘And this,' he said, with a small, triumphant giggle, ‘is my favourite item in the entire bookcase – the greatest folly of the era of three volumes.'

He opened a novel and showed me a chapter consisting of a one-line quotation from Shakespeare, a character's name, and
a block of 104 widely spaced exclamation marks
.

He closed the book with a loud clap of its pages, as though closing the era itself.

‘There was one man who helped to sweep away all this nonsense, who truly saw the potential of the work published in parts. His name was Thomas Kelly.'