Death and Mr. Pickwick (42 page)

Don Giovanni grimaced from the cart, and sang in a cracked voice: ‘Come let all be mirth and gladness! Deeply quaff the draught of pleasure!'

‘He'll sell even fewer if he keeps on like that,' said à Beckett. ‘Figaro here, Figaro there!'

A gentleman walking along the street paid à Beckett a penny for a copy, and then, gloating all over his face, à Beckett pointed to the buyer, for the benefit of Don Giovanni. ‘It's not really “
Figaro
here,
Figaro
there!” you know, Mr Seymour. It is
Seymour
here,
Seymour
there – Seymour
everywhere
! You are the
ubiquitous
Seymour!'

The artist stood against a wall, observing, with some amusement, the operatic vendor on the cart. For once, he did not tell à Beckett that he was embarrassed by fulsome praise. He
was
the ubiquitous Seymour. He believed it.

After selling more copies of
Figaro
, they were just turning to depart when a hand tapped à Beckett on the shoulder.

‘Excuse me, before you go.'

The thumb and forefinger of the tapping hand held out a penny, and when à Beckett looked round, he saw a man in early middle age, with piercing eyes, neat, grey hair curling over his ears and a bulbous nose.

‘You're lucky to catch us – you've made a good choice, sir,' said à Beckett. ‘The popular choice. You wouldn't want to read the rubbish over there.'

‘The dangerous popularity of your paper is the only reason I keep an occasional eye on its contents,' said the man. ‘I do not wish to encourage fledgling publications of the same contraband kind.'

With that remark, the man rolled up the
Figaro
into a scroll so its masthead could not be seen, and he walked away. ‘He still bought it,' said à Beckett, smiling at Seymour.

The man, meanwhile, walked a few hundred yards to Fleet Street. He noticed, as he went along: a chap descending from a cab, with his thumb marking a page in the middle of
Blackwood's Magazine
; a shop window offering miscellanies of verse and prose; a youth boiling a kettle on a brazier, reading a
Newgate Calendar;
and many other sights relating to the act of reading. He inserted a key in a door beside a brass nameplate which stated: ‘Charles Knight, Publisher'.

On every stair of the staircase, he planted his shoe next to a stack of books. He entered a book-lined office, and nodded to a young man with a long, inquisitive face, sitting at a desk whose perimeter was hidden under additional piles of books.

Knight sat at his own similarly book-enriched desk, and spent a minute casting a disapproving eye over
Figaro
. ‘Another for the coarse and dangerous pile,' he said to the young man, as he tossed the
Figaro
on a yard-high accumulation of pamphlets and magazines, at which a picture of a murder was previously uppermost, showing a woman, with the help of two accomplices, holding a man down and hacking off his head so that it fell into a bucket.

The young man nodded in a wise-beyond-his-years way. He returned to examining proofs of woodcuts, whose pictorial bias was towards antiquated buildings and exotic animals. He then took a book from the pile at his side and attempted to find explanatory material relating to the achievements of the Egyptians.

Charles Knight rested his chin upon his fist, and sat watching the young man at work. The fact he saw him every morning did not make any difference to the pleasure. He observed the scratching of the head. The slight changes of posture in the chair. The lighting of a churchwarden, whose long stem allowed a perfect view of the page. Charles Knight simply had a habit of watching people read – a habit he had practised since boyhood.

He had been known to state to bookshop owners, in their very bookshops, that people read differently these days. Yes, there were still those who buried their faces in a book in intense study. But there had been a change, particularly in relation to the newly literate – people nowadays snatched a few minutes of reading here and there, whenever they had a chance.

‘The great concern for the country,' he had said recently in a rousing speech at a meeting of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, ‘is to ensure that those who are newly literate read material which is worthwhile. One cannot avoid seeing the lower classes drooling over pictures of horrific crimes and other unedifying matter. It is the pictures that attract them. Our mission is to channel that desire for pictorial stimulation into decent and proper courses.' (Cries of ‘Hear, hear.') ‘In the stolen moments when people read,' he continued, ‘they should improve themselves by acquiring a little useful knowledge – whether by absorbing well-written words, or by looking at good-quality pictures. You know as well as I, gentlemen, that to read more is to know more, and to know more is to improve one's position in society.' (‘Hear, hear.') ‘Our object is to enlarge the reader's range of observation, and to add to his store of facts. We must awaken his reasoning faculties and lead his imagination into agreeable and innocent trains of thought. A man who sits and pursues knowledge of this kind will not destroy property and machines. He will improve his moral judgement.'

The many more cries of ‘Hear, hear' and the subsequent applause proved that Charles Knight enjoyed the full and enthusiastic support of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge in his endeavour to publish the
Penny Magazine
, a publication embodying the principles of his speech, and the publication indeed upon which the young man at the desk opposite then worked.

Upon the young man's desk were examples of the pictorial stimulation that Charles Knight thought decent and proper – woodcuts of quality, to inform readers about the world. Here was the elaborate carving of the Charing Cross; the villas of Pompeii before the eruption; a crocodile caught by the natives of the Dongola; a dormouse awakened from its hibernation to eat beech mast; the monastery of the Grande Chartreuse; the statue of the Memnon in the British Museum; the horse armour displayed in the Tower of London; and the extraordinary natural bridge in the Valley of Shenandoah. All to be accompanied by explanatory text, which the young man would also supply.

*   *   *

‘This is
twaddle
,' said Seymour to his wife as he entered the kitchen. She was using a table-mincer, turning yesterday's beef into rissoles, but Seymour's outburst referred to the latest issue of the
Penny Magazine
. ‘Is a labouring man supposed to be satisfied with
this
?' He held the magazine open to a woodcut of antlers, heading a piece on the fossil elk of Ireland. ‘All this twaddle about useful knowledge. It just means facts without understanding or depth. No fiction – no news – no politics – no religion. Nothing to
care
about. Nothing to amuse or interest people.'

‘It seems to be doing very well,' she said. ‘When I go to the shops, I see it everywhere.'

‘I do not deny that. It is even starting to outsell
Figaro
. It's the pictures that sell it, of course. But
useful
knowledge?
I
give people useful knowledge – about the scoundrels in the state and the church. I have to do something.'

Soon his drawing was done: it showed a mincer the size of a shed, hand-cranked by two politicians associated with the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, Brougham and Althorp. Poured into its hopper were foaming tankards marked ‘whiggery' and ‘wood-block illustrations', as well as a pulp of ‘wondrous condescension' and ‘affability'. From the mincer gushed two flows: ‘The Proprietor's Pipe', supplying pennies for the publisher, and ‘The Public's Pipe', from which papers marked ‘Twaddle' emerged. This drawing he called
The Patent Penny Knowledge Mill
.

‘I am pleased that I could inspire the idea,' said Jane, looking at the picture. ‘The next time you are stuck for inspiration, you should come to the kitchen and chat to me while I make a pudding or an apple pie, or something else.'

‘Well – I have a new client to see tomorrow, and I don't think he'll want illustrations of puddings and pies. He is launching a magazine, the
Book of Sports and Mirror of Life
, which he thinks I might do work for.'

‘And who is he?'

‘A gentleman of great standing in the world of sporting journalism. His name is Pierce Egan.'

 

*

‘DO YOU REMEMBER THE FIRST
meal we had together, Scripty?'

‘The shot in the pie?'

 

*

BEFORE SEEING EGAN, SEYMOUR WENT
for a drink in the Queen's Arms in Cheapside, a house down a dark little court, which he knew from experience served excellent food, and which Joseph Severn had first recommended to him. It was nearly five o'clock.

Diagonally across at the next table sat a man whose fringe hung as a long and perfect row of tassels, so that it was a wonder he had any vision at all. He chewed away happily on a portion of apple pie – until he made a noise, and spat the contents of his mouth on to the plate.

He held back his tassels, enabling a close examination. The landlord was already on his way over.

‘That nearly broke my tooth!' said the man, pointing to a piece of black shot. ‘How did that get there?'

‘I cannot apologise enough – it's never happened before,' said the landlord, whose cleanliness, particularly a pair of snow-white stockings, suggested he was telling the truth. ‘Probably some cockney sportsman taking a shot at a bird in an orchard, and missing.'

‘Sportsmen!' said a bald man in a butcher's apron on the other side of the room, who slapped the table and stood up. ‘Don't get me going on sportsmen.' But he
was
going, and he brought himself and his tankard over, and without invitation sat at the table of the tasselled man. ‘You tell me – what's going to happen to supplies of game? Cockneys and their guns! Bad enough the mischief they did when they used to shoot sparrows, but once they let 'em have a go at game! Do they have any interest in breeding for the future? They do not! They trespass and they take.'

‘Legalised poachers,' said the biter of the missed bird.

‘Who's to say they
are
legal?' said the butcher. ‘I don't believe half of them have their certificates. While good sportsmen, sportsmen of the old sort, are laying down their guns in disgust.'

‘Don't buy from them, then,' said the tasselled man.

‘What can I do?' said the butcher. ‘That's what makes me so angry. They make me as bad as them. A sportsman asks for less than a breeder, and if I said to him, “No, I don't deal with your sort,” he'd go straight to the butcher down the road, get a sale, and that butcher would sell it for less than me, and before I knew it I'd be driven out of business. Where would it end?'

Seymour listened. Ten minutes later, he saw.

It was then that a man appeared in the Queen's Arms bearing a gun, a hunting hat and a broad smile. He was dressed in a shooting outfit which looked brand new: a short green frock coat with numerous pockets, some with showily buttoned flaps and some slashed. His right breast pocket bulged, probably with percussion caps.

His appearance provoked a slow shaking of the bald and the tasselled heads. They shook again, with a whispered ‘Not another!' when, minutes afterwards, a second sportsman appeared at the bar, dressed in much the same manner as the first. The two shook hands and a conversation ensued, on which Seymour and everyone else were obliged to eavesdrop, as the pair showed no hushing tendencies at all.

‘I'm going to fill these tomorrow,' said the first sportsman, exposing the lining of his coat to reveal two large pockets.

‘What shot do you use?' said his friend.

‘Number Two Patent is the best, of course.'

‘Of course.'

The apple-pie table then displayed the peculiarly English trait of hating the enjoyment of others.

‘Low clerks, most of 'em,' said the butcher, ‘leaving their ledgers and thinking that buying a gun and a jacket makes 'em a country gentleman.'

‘No good will come of it, you can be sure of that,' said the tasselled man. ‘When someone starts copying his betters, it's one stage from wanting to
be
his betters.'

 

*

‘STRANGE WORD, “COCKNEY”,' SAID MR
Inbelicate. ‘It now refers to working-class people of a particular district in the East End of London – but this is recent. In the time that concerns us, “cockney” was usually an insult. It meant pretentious, affected – the sort of person who aspired to be a gentleman. A cockney might be considered physically weak – perhaps even effeminate, pampered, childish.'

‘So how did the word come to be associated with Londoners?'

‘Because pretentious men were often found in the city. So cockneys, over the course of time, became Londoners, and then East End Londoners. So when a man in Seymour's time spoke of “cockney sportsmen”, he meant would-be sportsmen, whether they were Londoners or not.'

 

*

OVER TEN YEARS HAD PASSED
since the publication of
Life in London
. Egan still had a coxcomb of hair, turned grey, although the original reddish-brown lingered in the thick, arched eyebrows, stuck in an expression of great interest as he shook hands with Seymour in the office at Cheapside. Egan proceeded to confess to an unbounded admiration for Seymour's drawings, and Seymour in return confessed to a similar admiration for Egan's writing, especially
Life in London
.

Then Egan said: ‘There is a gallery, if I may call it that, I want to take you to tonight, Mr Seymour.'

‘If it may be
called
a gallery?'