Death and Mr. Pickwick (35 page)

‘You have been drinking.'

‘Does it matter?'

‘Let us go to bed.'

‘I am going to work.'

He drew
A Prescription for Scolding Wives
. A husband forced the nozzle of the laughing-gas tube into his wife's mouth, holding fast to her neck so she could not escape, her face and hands expressing all her terror as she was forced to take the tube deep into her throat. With that drawing done, he moved on to the next, with no pause.

He sketched an apparatus to undress and cover up a man when tired, a machine which pulled off breeches, put on a nightshirt, and finished by drawing a sheet over the sleeper. Now he was truly under way, as absurd and wonderful ideas flowed into his mind.

Next came the riding apparatus for timid horsemen, in which the movements of the horse's legs were restrained within slots. Then the duelling apparatus for gentlemen of weak nerves: after a plentiful dose of laudanum and brandy, the reluctant duellist was fixed into a frame which held him up, along with his pistol – even the act of firing was easy, for a string attached to the trigger was tugged by the duellist's second.

Seymour felt hungry, and he made himself a chicken sandwich. As he chewed, he drew a scrawny roast lark upon a dinner plate, which a magnifying glass enlarged to the size of a fine capon. Then came a picture of tubes, which would convey the smell of food from the tables of the rich to the nostrils of the poor – he showed the poverty-stricken lined up to sniff, and wrote underneath that such charity tubes were particularly recommended for the philanthropy of those who had made fortunes by machinery.

Finally that night came
The March of Intellect
. He showed ordinary working people in the street, intent upon improving themselves. A bricklayer sat on his hod to read, a woman played a harp in public, a café had all the classics and periodicals for its customers. Posters on hoardings announced: ‘Useful Knowledge',
Mechanics' Magazine, Every Man's Book
and a play
The Great Elephant of Exeter 'Change
. A man carried a placard which said ‘New Patent Steam Carriage'. Everywhere people were reading, playing musical instruments, intending to watch a drama or taking part in the technological advances of society. But a baby in the foreground lay on the cobbles, utterly neglected and about to be stepped on by a man with his nose in a book.

*   *   *

An unstoppable flow of drawings by Robert Seymour was the boast and the pride of Thomas McLean's Haymarket window until the end of 1829. On New Year's Day 1830, when the pavement was glassy with ice, Seymour approached McLean's shop with careful steps and his latest collection. It was not altogether with joy that he saw a new entertainment in the window, attracting a small crowd of frosty-breathed spectators, among them an assortment of the area's prostitutes, whose rouge seemed a manifestation of warmth. There on display was the
Looking Glass
, drawn and etched by William Heath, billed as the author of the
Northern Looking Glass
, and on sale at the price of three shillings plain, six shillings coloured, for four pages. The opening page, displayed in the window in the six-shilling form, showed an unprecedented thirteen humorous pictures on a single sheet.

Seymour entered the shop and, after the briefest of pleasantries, asked McLean if he might examine a copy.

‘The artist slows down after the first page,' said Seymour. The second page consisted of only two large pictures.

‘He picks up his pace again,' said McLean. There were ten pictures on the third page.

‘Then he goes to three for the last.'

‘He's establishing a rhythm.'

Seymour placed his own pictures upon the counter in silence.

‘This will not detract from your work,' said McLean. ‘But –
twenty-eight pictures
in total. No one has ever put so many in a single publication.'

‘If you are selling it on the basis of the number of pictures, there could be more of them. Now, if these poor pictures of mine happen to meet with your approval, I hope you will be good enough to pay me, please.'

*   *   *

Some hours after Seymour left the shop, Heath called upon McLean. In contrast to Seymour, whose appearance was always neat and tidy, Heath's clothes looked slept-in. He reeked of strong liquor and tobacco.

‘Thought I'd come to wish you a Happy New Year, Mr McLean.'

The wish was returned, but not with any enthusiasm.

‘I was out celebrating with a few friends last night,' said Heath, ‘but don't you go thinking that I have forgotten the next
Looking Glass
. I even got a good idea while I was with them, which I am sure we can use in a number sometime.' He fumbled in a stained and torn pocket and pulled out a dirty piece of paper which he held in front of McLean, whose hand did not attempt to take it, so Heath placed the paper on the counter and smoothed out its many creases. At the bottom of the paper, Heath had scribbled ‘Members of Parliament'. The drawing itself showed a face, marked in the appropriate positions AYES, NOES, HEAR HEAR. ‘Clever, don't you think, Mr McLean? My friends liked it.'

‘This is but one picture of course. I presume that you have ideas for more.'

‘Don't you worry, Mr McLean.'

But McLean
did
worry.

*   *   *

At home, Robert Seymour's production of drawings not only continued unabated – he stood on the threshold of a grand new project.

On a shelf above his desk was a volume of Shakespeare, which had been a wedding gift from Edward Holmes. Jane had remarked, when dusting and while her husband drew, that it was a shame to see such a volume unread. So that evening Seymour sat in the parlour, the Shakespeare upon his knees, while Jane sat darning linen.

In the front of the book, Holmes had written a quotation from
Richard III
: ‘Was ever woman in this humour wooed? Was ever woman in this humour won?' Seymour did not move beyond this page, but looked down, pondering the quotation.

‘You are quiet,' said Jane.

‘Not in my head.' He stood up. ‘I must begin drawing.'

‘No, Robert, not tonight. You said that we would sit together.'

‘I cannot let this idea go.'

At his desk, he began work on his own interpretation of the quotation. His picture showed an abomination – a woman with tiny cows pullulating like boils all over her face and forearms. Yet, in spite of her loathsomeness, an ardent suitor kissed the woman's hand, as though she were a great beauty. On the table in the foreground, Seymour drew the explanation for the woman's physical state – a book entitled
Treatise on Vaccination
, implying she had been syringed with infected milk. Next to the treatise, he added the explanation for the suitor's courtship: the woman's certificates for large holdings of bank stocks and consols. The suitor gave a knowing look, right towards Seymour as he drew the face, even as the lips were planted on the revolting hand. The suitor was
proud
to be a fortune-hungry scoundrel.

It was now that Seymour embarked upon a frenzy of creation, wrenching Shakespeare from the bondage to conventions of meaning. He would open Holmes's wedding gift and run his eye down the page, until a line stimulated his mind's eye, and then he drew.

From
Romeo and Juliet
he chose the three words ‘The Mangled Tybalt' – and showed Tybalt passing himself through a mangle, his body squeezed as flat as paper between the rollers, his limp fingers draped upon the handle. For
A Midsummer Night's Dream
the title itself produced the illustration: a fat sleeper, lying in bed in the sweltering heat of June and enduring the anguish of a nightmare in which he roasted before a fire with a gigantic hook stuck through his stomach. Then from
Henry V
the line ‘Gloster, 'tis true we are in great danger' inspired the whimsy of two Gloucester cheeses speaking to each other as they were about to be eaten.

He did not stop.

Macbeth
's ‘I have supp'd full with horrors' led to a man entering a cellar, with a ladle in his hand, while two cat carcasses hanging in the larder revealed the nature of the stew that would be supp'd that night. And, not content with the monstrous woman he had created for
Richard III
, Seymour illustrated a line from
Othello
– ‘There is no such man, it is impossible' – with another abomination, a creature with vast eyes on the sides of the head, a nose from which twigs grew, fangs for teeth, feet three times normal size, and the largest human belly in pendulous existence.

He did not stop.

There was another belly-bearer, of special significance, that he drew next, to interpret a line in
Lear
, ‘Nay, good my Lord, your charity o'ershoots itself.' On the paper, there emerged a bespectacled fat man, the obvious descendant of the character he had produced for Robert Stuart's book, and of his own steam-powered boot-wearer in the
Locomotion
picture, but now fully developed; in a gentle scene which proved the benevolence of the fat man, Seymour showed him holding an umbrella in pouring rain as he knelt at a pond feeding a family of ducks. In the man's pocket, to emphasise his benevolence and kindness to all creatures, was a copy of the book
The Man of Feeling.

He still did not stop.

Now the scheme became even grander in Seymour's mind: perhaps
other
authors might be included, as well as Shakespeare. He brought down a volume of Byron.

Over the next weeks and months, he produced 260 complicated lithographic pictures, and this in addition to work for McLean, and many other commissions.

If his wife passed the open doorway, she would see him hunched over the paper, and often she heard moans as he rubbed his neck, though even as he rubbed he did not cease drawing. When she eventually saw her husband at meals, he would massage his eyes as he chewed. She would talk about a letter from her mother, and then she would ask his opinion, and he would say ‘On what, Jane?' Sometimes on his way back to drawing Shakespeare, he would steady himself against the wall. He smiled and told her: ‘Just a moment's dizziness.'

One night in bed he cried out in agony from a headache, and in the morning as he attempted to rise, the movement of simply throwing back the covers and standing on the floor was too great a strain.

A venerable doctor came to the bedside, who listened to the artist's chest, and then pronounced his verdict: ‘There is no doubt in my mind – you need a complete rest from drawing.'

‘I cannot,' said the artist, ‘I need to finish my drawings from Shakespeare. And then the English poets.'

‘Mr Seymour, you will finish yourself first,' said the doctor. ‘You
must
stop drawing. You
must
put yourself in pleasant circumstances for a few weeks, with good air.' The doctor looked towards Jane, suspiciously eyeing her necklace, as though he suspected her husband worked primarily to pay for her personal adornment. ‘I would recommend a break from everything familiar,' said the doctor, turning back to Seymour. ‘I suggest you go alone. Please yourself in any way, forget all your responsibilities. Enjoy the sun. Do nothing. Or do anything, as long as it does not involve a pencil.'

*   *   *

In the summer of 1830, the doctor's recommendation sent Robert Seymour to Richmond. He stood on the bridge in the sunshine and gazed at the water, and at the families who picnicked in the meadows nearby. He wandered on Richmond Green, and along the gravelled High Walk, and paused to admire the deer in the distance. In the evening he approached the theatre, but decided
not
to attend a performance of Shakespeare's
Comedy of Errors.
He strolled in the afternoons in the Terrace Gardens, between the closely gathered elms, where scarcely a ray of sun could penetrate and old bachelors endeavoured to walk in as sprightly a manner as they could manage. He would simply sit on the grass and gaze down at Petersham Wood and the Thames Valley. Then he lay back with the sun upon his face. After a while, he descended to the Star and Garter public house, and cast glances at the well-tanned bargemen who drank outside.

He had already pledged to make reading – with no purpose other than pleasure – part of his convalescence. A book which accompanied him to Richmond was the sequel to
Life in London
. This sequel had not been the hurricane of success that was the original work, and Seymour had not even inspected the volume until the moment he sat in the garden of the Star and Garter.

Now he smiled as he read of the cousin from the country, Jerry, leaving the metropolis after the adventures of
Life in London
, having decided to return home. The stagecoach reached Speenhamland, and stopped at a hotel to pick up passengers. Here, a fat bachelor whose dimensions were larger than the width of the coach door was forced to travel upon the roof. ‘There should be an Act of Parliament which regulates the size of coach doors,' said the bachelor, ‘and when the House next sits, I shall certainly petition on the great importance of this matter.' The bachelor began chatting to Jerry. This man, the reader learnt, was Sir John Blubber, retired from business, and radiating benevolence. Then, to Seymour's delight, the coach stopped at the very village he knew: Pickwick.

Pleasant memories of the village returned, inseparable from the desire to produce works of art, and involved the Hare and Hounds, and that peculiar publican and coaching proprietor, Moses Pickwick.

The day afterwards, Seymour bought pencils and paper, having convinced himself that if he became frustrated and anxious merely because he could not draw, he would make himself ill again. As a concession to the doctor's orders, he resolved to draw new subjects, unrelated to his work in London.