Death and Mr. Pickwick (62 page)

‘Did Seymour have some grievance against the
New Sporting Magazine
?' I asked.

‘There is no evidence of that at all,' said Mr Inbelicate, instantly throwing off the performance, and calmly lifting the glass of crème de menthe. ‘The magazine praised his powers as an artist. Of course, Seymour was not whiter-than-white. As we know, he once used a roguish variation on Cruikshank's name. But the significant thing is that he was
stopped
from using it by McLean! That should have made him even less likely to use the name Nimrod. It would have been a warning about the dangers of using a name associated with someone else – once bitten, twice shy, Scripty.'

‘Let me ask you this. Did Seymour's family claim that he wanted to call his pet idea the Nimrod Club?'

‘They did not. And when I discovered that, I became very suspicious. The claim about the Nimrod Club comes from one person, and you know full well who that person is, Scripty.'

‘Chatham Charlie. Or the
Morning Chronicle
's reporter.'

‘It is a claim made
years
after these events. A claim made by a person who had no association with sporting circles, so in all probability would have had no knowledge of the legal restriction on Nimrod's name – and so did not realise the glaring improbability of the assertion he had made. He would have heard of Nimrod the writer, yes, for the man was famous, but not the details of Nimrod's career. But think about what is gained by suggesting that Seymour wanted to use Nimrod's name. It carries the suggestions of staleness and lack of originality, as though Seymour could not think of anything better. It is a rather useful slur.'

‘Why is this restriction on Nimrod's name not more generally known? You are the first person I have ever heard mention it.'

Though not French himself, Mr Inbelicate gave what Nimrod must have experienced in France – a Gallic shrug.

‘Let us bring Seymour and Chatham Charlie a little closer together. Suppose we are at the point when Chatham Charlie had just turned to creative writing. A few stories of his had been published, including one called “The Bloomsbury Christening”. Let us consider the circumstances under which this story became the very first of his works to be illustrated.'

 

*

NO PUBLISHER'S OFFICE IN LONDON
had a look, sound, smell or congestion like William Kidd's on Regent Street. In every spare nook was a cage devoted to the joys of canaries or linnets, if not already occupied by the consoling pleasures of goldfish.

‘Watch, Mr Seymour.'

The proprietor, with a look compounded of mischief and enthusiasm, proceeded to tear a morsel from a loaf, which he placed between his teeth. He dangled his head over a bowl upon his desk. A solitary goldfish rose within and took the bread straight from Kidd's mouth.

‘Ha ha!' He clapped his hands. ‘But you do not seem impressed.'

‘I was recalling a goldfish I had as a child,' said Seymour. ‘The day after I brought it home, it was found dead.'

‘They are here for much too short a time. As are we ourselves, of course.'

‘I found my childish picture of the goldfish among my mother's possessions when she died. It was deeply affecting to think she had kept it all those years.'

Kidd seemed embarrassed by this revelation, and tapped the glass, and the fish investigated the magnified fingertips. ‘I sometimes believe he watches me when I am snipping away. Perhaps he sees the glint of the scissor blades as my scales. That reminds me. There is a story I found for you yesterday. An anonymous piece, “The Bloomsbury Christening”. It was in the latest
Monthly Magazine.
'

‘A publication with a more distinguished past than present.'

‘I think we can put a bit of the story in the
Comic Album
we propose. One moment.' He picked up his scissors and cut a section from the story, which he passed to Seymour. ‘I'll just put the rest to use.' He gathered up the excluded part of ‘The Bloomsbury Christening' and approached a linnet's cage. ‘Something new for you to read, eh girl?' He made a kissing noise, opened the door in the bars, and carefully placed the paper on the floor of the cage. ‘Now let me just find some more pieces for you, Mr Seymour,' he said as he closed the miniature jail-like door.

At a bench were various piles of clippings extracted from publications such as
Blackwood's
,
The
Metropolitan Magazine
and
Chambers' Journal.
Kidd made a selection, paying attention to the principles of forming a pleasant illustrated miscellany while not giving a second thought to asking publishers or authors for permission to use their material at no charge.

Seymour read the paragraphs that Kidd had passed to him. They told of a miserable day in London, when it rained without cessation for three and a half hours. The story's protagonist, Nicodemus Dumps, was habitually as miserable as that day throughout the entire year, and he was persuaded – virtually abducted – by the conductor of the Admiral Napier horse-omnibus to come on board. The conductor seized Dumps by the waist, and thrust him into the middle of the vehicle, so as to reach the capacity of sixteen passengers inside.

*   *   *

At home, Seymour produced a small and simple sketch, showing the omnibus, rain, a bandy-legged conductor, and the unhappy and pot-bellied Dumps, all buttoned up in his waistcoat and carrying an umbrella. Afterwards, he worked on pictures for the various texts stolen by Kidd, which, together with the omnibus sketch, would form
Seymour's Comic Album.
Next, he considered a request from McLean to produce ‘something in the nature of a parable', as McLean had put it, to praise the work of temperance campaigners.

Seymour placed his hands behind his head, leant back, closed his eyes, and imagined himself as a boy, standing in the pulpit delivering a solemn sermon.

‘There were two fishermen,' the boy said to the pews of the empty church, looking occasionally towards the priest who sat cross-legged at the back. ‘One man fished in the stormy rivers of gin, and one man fished in the calm rivers of pure water.'

He made a few half-hearted attempts at sketches, but feeling uninspired, he turned to his pet idea instead. There was a portfolio in which he had stored his various drawings and notes, as they had been developed or abandoned, as well as published pictures, haphazardly included, for some element they might contribute to the whole. This portfolio he now opened.

*   *   *

For a while, the adventures of gardeners were included in the scheme – during the troubles with à Beckett, Jane suggested to her husband that if he spent more time in the garden, or merely cultivated a window box, it would take his mind off
Figaro
and would soothe him in general. Instead, he asked himself: what if a gardener were one of the members of the Daffy Club? The passing thought developed a life of its own, and comic drawings on the theme of gardening soon followed.

He conceived of a man retired from business. To occupy his days, this man had become a keen gardener, consulting the almanacs so that he knew when to plant. The man loved to sit in an arbour in the full heat of an English summer, admiring his work, and often fell asleep there with a bottle of beer in his hand; while in winter, the man read all the books on plants he could find, and would fall asleep in his armchair before the fire, clutching another bottle of beer, whose neck formed the handle of a dream-trowel.

Seymour had jotted down in the portfolio occasional notes concerning horticultural affectations. It amused him that London gardeners often painted everything in their gardens bright green, whether a bench, a fence, a shed, a trellis, or the frame of a summer house. Then the gardener would stand back, next to a paint pot, and admire his work, hands on hips, thinking himself quite the country gentleman, unaware of the clash between the startling hues produced by lead paint and the natural and subtle shades of vegetation. Seymour was also tickled by gardeners' passion for tall bellflowers, at least three feet high, with some towering to six or seven feet, blooms which they insisted upon calling ‘campanoolas'. Almost every little garden at the beginning of summer boasted such a thrusting of blue.

One picture in the portfolio showed a gardener in moleskin trousers and leather buskins, digging absurdly hard in his allotment, his brow pouring with sweat. The gardener commented to an onlooker: ‘D'ye see, I labours hard all the veek, and on Sunday I likes a little gardening recreation.' Seymour smiled again at that picture. He might sell it to Carlile. There were also pictures in which gardening mingled with the theme of sport. One showed men shooting at birds, to keep them away from a seedpatch, but shooting a neighbour by mistake. Another showed two sportsmen with guns, pursued by an angry gardener with a dog and a whip, shouting: ‘Get out of my grounds, you cockney rascals.' ‘Ve'r a-going as fast as ve can,' said the terrified sportsmen.

A brief note apparently signalled the end of the gardening theme: ‘More can happen to sportsmen.'

 

*

LEADING UP ONE WALL OF
this house's staircase is a series of six large plates that Seymour drew in 1829 for McLean,
A Search for the Comfortable, being the Adventures of a Little Gentleman of Small Fortune.
Each plate consists of a number of smaller captioned scenes, making fifty scenes in total, which describe the adventures of Peter Pickle, a thin bespectacled clerk. The plates form a loose narrative, and had originally been issued in a wrapper. They were added to the portfolio for the pet idea, and as Mr Inbelicate had written a summary of the plates in his youth, I present that now.

The Adventures of Peter Pickle

Peter Pickle was a lowly, humble clerk in the employment of Counsellor Puzzlewig, until he inherited from his Uncle Cramp a fortune of four hundred pounds a year.

The clerk abandoned the tedium of ledgers and pen, and was soon to be seen at a dancing school, jigging to the sound of a fiddle. Shortly afterwards, he immersed himself in the joys of drink and before long was staggering, arm in arm, with two new friends whom he had met at a public house. They taught him to play cards, and he lost. He lost at billiards as well. Not being used to such a life, he was soon ill from all the excess. Suffering from a headache, he resolved to start anew amid the quieter pleasures of the countryside.

Alas, Peter Pickle's rural retirement proved a savage disappointment. His sleeves were snagged on brambles. A dog grabbed his coat-tails. Geese honked at him. Pigs and bulls harassed him. The country yokels laughed at his plight. He
did
think he had found a friend in the village barber – but, sitting in the barber's chair, he learnt what his fellow villagers really thought of him. ‘One person believed you were mad,' said the barber. ‘Another that you were a fraudulent bankrupt hiding from your creditors. Mrs Maggot said you might be a papist conspirator. The beadle's wife feared you might hang yourself and cause trouble to the parish.'

Deciding to take a stroll, he asked for directions from a group of children, who deliberately sent him the wrong way: down the bank, over the moor, through Deadman's Lane – finishing up to his knees in a bog. Even there, the mischief of the children did not end – as suddenly he heard a whistle. He had been declared a thief on the run.

Peter Pickle sat in his cottage in abject misery. ‘Was ever any poor wretch as beset by the blue devils as I am?' he wailed. That night, he did contemplate the rope.

But instead of being a ‘trouble to the parish', he embarked upon a new course of action: seeking the fascinations of the arts and sciences. First, he became an antiquary – until he was fleeced by a scoundrel who sold him a home-made bust of a Roman emperor. Thus, he turned to aeronautics, and ascended in a hot-air balloon – until he fell out of the basket into a river. His next pursuit was music – until he faced the wrath of his neighbour, who did not appreciate Peter Pickle's horn practice in the middle of the night. Next came chemistry – until an experiment set his home on fire. Poetry was his new salvation – until, attempting to describe the beauties of the sky, he was stuck for a rhyme for ‘azure'. Portrait painting was his last hope – until his first subject, a woman, was so disgusted with his portrayal that she put her umbrella through the canvas.

Abandoning all these pursuits, Peter Pickle resolved to travel and see more of the world. Unfortunately, in a coach he was squashed to near-suffocation between two other passengers, a fat man and his equally voluminous wife. Deciding to cross the Channel to France, he boarded a paddle steamer – whose paddles broke, and he suffered the indignity of being rowed ashore at night. In Paris, it seemed that his luck had changed when he met two friendly gentlemen – until the association led to his arrest by the police at the Palais Royal, whereupon he was obliged to quit France within forty-eight hours.

Returning to England, Peter Pickle was out strolling, wondering what to do, when he saw a woman who had fallen in a ditch. He rescued her. He courted her. He married her. After so much disappointment and misery, had Peter Pickle finally found happiness?

The day after the wedding, his wife revealed: ‘I was a milliner, but as I found it very laborious, I thought it best to get married again.' Peter Pickle, to his horror, was introduced to her five children, whom it was now his responsibility to raise.

*   *   *

After a seasoning of
Peter Pickle
was added to the portfolio's pot, it was bubbling away nicely. Another addition came after a conversation with Edward Holmes, when he paid a visit to the Seymours.

‘I have accepted,' said Holmes, ‘an invitation to lecture on music at the Islington Literary and Scientific Society.'

‘That's exciting. I have seen the society's posters,' said Jane.