Kept (51 page)

W
hen in want of recreation I will cheerfully own that my delight is to peruse the “miscellaneous advertisements” column of a certain newspaper. To be sure, such a wealth of interest—pathos—human sentiment—is contained within their pages that a day would not be sufficient to extract it. There is, for example, the gentleman who undertakes to supply sherry straight from the casks of Don Juan de la Frontera himself in his great distillery at Cordoba. I declare I should almost like to purchase a bottle of that sherry simply to learn how the gentleman came by it. Then there are the goods that a great number of the advertisers are continually trying to dispose of for which there would seem to be no apparent need. Who is there, to particularise, who feels himself in urgent want of a basket of miscellaneous crockery, the
Annual Register
for 1843 or certain spars of timber supposedly taken from the hull of HMS
Victory
as she lay awaiting refurbishment in dry dock at Chatham? Yet most fascinating of all, I propose, is the little clump of items—sometimes burgeoning to the size of a whole column, more often to be counted on the fingers of one hand—that some ingenious compiler has thought to arrange under the legend
Missing
.

Missing! So much of life, it seems to me, is taken up in a quest for that which formerly lay at our side, so discreetly that we scarcely noticed its presence, and is now unconscionably taken from us. Things great and small: string, sealing wax, a woman’s love and the honest affections of one’s child—all are gone rolling away into a kind of phantasmagorical wainscoting from which no power can ever wrest them back. As a boy I had what was popularly represented as a genius for losing things, to the extent that this propensity was remarked on, became as much a part of the face I presented to the world as the colour of my hair. Sweetmeats, combs and schoolbooks passed through my hands like
the rising wind. I lost a fourpenny piece, with which my mother had commissioned me to buy a quartern loaf. (Heavens but there was a row about that, whose remembrance sizzles in my brain forty years later.) I lost an ornamental silver locket, which contained a portrait of a late aunt, and was soundly beaten. (The locket was later discovered on a bough of the apple tree—how it got there I know not to this day.) I lost half the bundles of clothing I was ordered to take to that respectable gentleman who trades under the sign of the three brass balls—but this is perhaps to reveal too much of our domestic circumstances—and I lost the tickets that I was intended to bring back.

To glance at the three or four, or six or seven, or on certain wonderful days even nine or ten supplications addressed to the world by those who have mislaid something close to their heart is, then, to be reminded with particular force of the circumstances of one’s own life. The situation is entirely that of the young man bent over a novel from the circulating library, reading of the faithful Lothario separated from his fair Rosina by a baleful parent, a romantic baronet or the Catholic Church, who looks up to exclaim, “Yes, that is exactly how my precious Jane and I were parted, d——them all!” There is, for example, the case of the gentleman out walking with his dog on Hampstead Heath, a basset hound answering to the name Tip, the dog seeing a rabbit, the gentleman quite unable to check its natural propensities, &c. How I felt for the gentleman in the depths of his abandoned misery! How I longed to present him with a four-legged substitute, were it not that the gift would surely inflame, rather than subdue, the spark of his remembrance! Then there is the lady travelling from Kensington to Fulham by omnibus, lulled by the balmy air into a light repose, waking to find the box beside her gone and the silver teapot inside it, “a most valuable and exquisite heirloom,” in transit to the menders on account of a fractured spout, vanished—well, my heart yearns to strike at the wretch who now puts Bohea into it. All this, as I say, has the effect of returning me to my youth and the days when no purse or satchel was safe in my hands, when a hat could not remain on my head a minute before disappearing into the very ether, and umbrellas were like oversized toothpicks, such was the promptitude with which I flung them from me. I lost a corkscrew once, in a room eight feet by six which
contained, in addition to myself, only a bottle of wine, a table and an empty sideboard. Another time I lost a sovereign given to me by an old gentleman of blessed memory even before he quit the house at which he visited me.

All this was no doubt very bad of me, very illustrative of certain grave defects in my character. And yet, for myself, I think there is much to be said in mitigation. I was, for example, quite discriminating in my mislayings and confined myself, for the most part, to inanimate objects. I lost a pair of white duck trousers and a pie dish (the look on my mother’s face when that receptacle was shown to have vanished from my tender care!), and yet I never, I think, lost a cat, a dog or a person. I certainly never lost a young lady of seven-and-twenty, confided into my care by the terms of her husband’s will, which is what a parcel of Lincoln’s Inn lawyers appear to have done this twelve months past.

The case is so widely known—brought to us by way of a dozen hints and suggestive nudgings—that it is perhaps superfluous to restate its particulars. A young lady living on an estate in Suffolk—not of sound mind, we regret to say, in fact a young lady of whom society has seen nothing these last two years—is widowed by an unhappy accident. In anticipation of this unfortunate possibility, her husband’s will provides very suitably for a trustee, the settlement of capital for all manner of prudent schemes, meant to secure, if not that young lady’s happiness, then her decent and proper care in circumstances in which, it may be devoutly hoped, she might recover her reason. And then what happens? Why like Tip the basset hound, or the antique silver teapot in the Kensington omnibus, or the corkscrew that so frustrated me in my vinous youth, the young lady vanishes.

Where has she gone? The lawyers—Sir Ezekiel Foodle, QC and Solicitor Noodle—don’t know. The trustees—Baron Doodle and His Honour Judge Quoodle—can’t precisely say. There is talk of a house in the country at which the young lady may or may not be sequestered, of discreet medical establishments at which she may or may not be lodged. But where is she? Where can she be found, and if not heard—for we believe the young lady’s afflictions to be of a very grievous nature—then at least seen? I declare that if I were the young lady’s
relative I should feel like inserting a half column in the newspaper of which I have spoken under the heading “Lost, Stolen or Strayed: On a Vanished Young Lady,” giving full particulars and an address for return. Such a course might not produce the young lady, but it might, as in the case of poor Tip or the Kensington teapot, realise an outpouring of public sympathy that were at least as valuable as Sir Ezekiel Foodle’s professional indifference or His Honour Judge Quoodle’s manifest neglect of his duty.

—ALL THE YEAR ROUND,
August 1864

I
was born a varmint, and I’ll die one, I daresay. I was born in Nottingham, the year the old king died. I don’t remember my father. I remember being in a barn, in the rain, with a man as was supposed to look after me but didn’t. Perhaps that was my father. I don’t know. When I was four, my mother took us to London and we lived in Limehouse, where she had a little shop and sold greenstuff and sprats to the people that passed by on their way to work, but it never prospered. Nothing ever prospered with my mother. After that she took ill and lay in bed, and the rest of us—for I had a sister and a little brother—had to make shift as best we could. Most days I went mudlarking at King James’s Stairs or Limehouse Hole, waiting till the tide had run out and seeing what I could find. There wasn’t ever much. A length of rope, maybe, or a handful of coals. The best thing was the copper nails that came from the ships in dry dock, but even if you found one, chances were a big boy would take it from you. When I was twelve, a man as bought stuff from the mudlarks took a shine to me and give me a job and I went out with him in his cart, but I didn’t like it and I stole whatever I could. I stole a watch that a man had left on a shop counter. I stole the man that I worked for’s hat and pawned it. That was the kind of chap I was.

My mother had died by now. Did I miss her? I don’t rightly know. I remember her face above the coverlet and her asking how much I’d brought home, that’s all. After she’d died I didn’t care to stay with my sister and brother no more, and I went to live with some chaps as lodged in an old blacking factory by the river. That was nice company, I can tell you! Most of what I know I learned there, and that’s a great deal. When I was fourteen, I stole a pig from a market garden down at Woolwich and got sent to the House of Correction. What did I do
there? Well now, I stole a cake from the kitchen as had been baked for the warden”s birthday and a handkerchief from the parson as came to preach over us on Sunday morning—that was the correction I got. When I came out, a gentleman as was connected with the place—one of those soft coves in the charitable line—got me a job in a newspaper office in the Strand, but I didn’t take to it. I stole the type that the printers had left out on the desks and sold it, and the pocketbooks of the men that left their jackets hung up outside the washroom, but bless you, no one suspected me. I was living with Maria Chitty by this time, which was a girl I’d found agreeable, and she me, at Bethnal Green, and we spent the money on whatever took our fancy: toy dogs perhaps, or a hat with a feather, or half a dozen faggots from the cookshop. I was good to Maria after my fashion, never struck her above thrice or sent her out when the funds were low. The Gentleman knows that, and will tell you, for he knew her too.

All that was a long time ago, and there’s a part of me that doesn’t like to remember it. I saw my sister once in the Whitechapel Road when I was mooching about that way, but I never went up to her. Poor Janey! I daresay she’d have been pleased to see me, for she was always fond of her brother, but that sort of thing never pays, you know. As for me now, I’m a sporting character. Cocks. Bull terriers. Prizefighting. I’ll go twenty miles into the country to see a match if I’ve a mind to, and have the funds. The Derby too is a place I’m often to be found. The Tutbury Pet, the Coalheaver, the Chicken—I’ve seen them all in my time, aye, and shaken hands with them and stopped for refreshment, for I’m a warm man when I’ve money in my pocket. I had forty pound once, that the Gentleman put there. Don’t ask me how he came by it, but it was soon gone, for that’s the manner of man I am. Some folks’ destinies is to save, and some to spend, and I’m one of the spending ones. There’s no point in crying over what’s gone, but if I had my time again I’d have the forty pound and Maria, that was always agreeable to me, and be living at Bethnal and looking out for my opportunities. Else I’d be away in Prague or Hamburg with the Gentleman, living high, as we did in those days. But that’s all behind me. I ain’t a young man now, but I ain’t so very old neither, and there’s life in me yet as my friend Bob Grace can tell you, for when a man’s
born a varmint he’s liable to remain one and that’s a fact. I’m not above stealing lives as well as property if the occasion demands it, and there’s a gentleman down in the eastern counties who could swear to that if you was to ask him. Truth to tell, I’m a sad man sometimes and could wish that I was back in Bethnal piling into Maria, and her with her poonts rolling everywhere and her legs a-wound around me, but that sort of thing doesn’t bear thinking about. Like the chap whose life I stole down in Suffolk, and seeing Janey in Whitechapel, and so I don’t, or not for long.

I
acknowledge the direct influence of Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, George Gissing, Jack London, Mary Mann, Henry Mayhew, George Moore, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Anne Thackeray Ritchie, W. M. Thackeray and Anthony Trollope.

For full descriptions of the first Great Train Robbery of 1855, from which this account is substantially derived, see George Dilnot, ed.,
The Trial of Jim the Penman
(1930) and Donald Thomas,
The Victorian Underworld
(1997), pp. 204–50.

I have taken much useful information from Moss Taylor, Michael Seago, Peter Allard and Don Dorling,
The Birds of Norfolk
(Robertsbridge, 1999).

In the notes that follow, the place of publication is London, unless otherwise stated.

I. EGGMEN

Highland Line through Inverness-shire:
The original Highland line from Aviemore to Torres was opened in August 1863. See C. J. Gannel,
Scottish Branch Lines
(Oxford, 1999).

Lewis Dunbar:
Together with other gentlemen adventurers of the period, such as his brother William, Edward T. Booth, John Wolley and Roualeyn Gordon Cumming, Dunbar was a notable exterminator of the Highland ospreys. See Richard Perry,
Wildlife in Britain
(1978), pp. 206
^N
–7 which, additionally, quotes from one of his letters.

“
Not for a hundred years and more”:
The last wolf in the Scottish Highlands was killed at Findhorn in 1743, having previously devoured two children whom it had waylaid on the high road in broad daylight. See Anthony Dent,
Lost Beasts of Britain
(1974), chap. 4, “The Last of the Wolf.”

II. MR. HENRY IRELAND AND HIS LEAVINGS

Black care had waylaid him:
See Horace,
Odes
, 3.1.40.

Eccleston Square:
This area south of the modern-day Victoria Station represented the outer limit of Victorian bourgeois respectability. “For
heaven’s sake, my dear, don’t let him take you anywhere beyond Eccleston Square,” a friend counsels Lady Alexandrina de Courcey shortly before her marriage to Adolphus Crosbie in Trollope’s
The Small House at Allington
(1864), 40.

Dr. John Conolly:
John Conolly (1794–1866) has been described as “one of the most ambiguous figures in nineteenth-century medicine.” After qualifying at the University of Edinburgh he failed as a general practitioner, but in 1830 he published an influential treatise,
An Inquiry Concerning the Indications of Insanity
. This advocated radical reform of the treatment of lunatics and a system of patient care known as “nonrestraint.” The measures introduced at the Hanwell Asylum, which he governed from 1839 to 1843, made Conolly a celebrated public figure. Dickens admired him, and the character of Mr. Dick in
David Copperfield
was intended as a tribute. Thereafter his reputation declined, and by the mid-1850s he was operating as a freelance “alienist,” or lunacy consultant. There were difficulties with money, and in 1859 an action was brought against him for false imprisonment. For a suggestive, if somewhat overstated, account of Conolly’s literary connections, which attempts to link him to the very different marital troubles experienced by Thackeray, Dickens and Bulwer-Lytton, see John Sutherland, “Dickens, Reade,
Hard Cash
and Maniac Wives,” in
Victorian Fiction: Writers, Publishers, Readers
(Basingstoke, 1995), pp. 55–86.

Irish Sketchbook:
An account of W. M. Thackeray’s journey around Ireland in the summer and early autumn of 1842, originally published in May 1843.

Mr. Hutton:
R. H. Hutton (1826–1897) had become joint proprietor and literary editor of the
Spectator
in June 1861. “Mr. Arnold’s Last Words on Translating Homer” appeared in the issue of 22 March 1862.

Mr. Masson:
Perhaps David Masson (1822–1907), at this time professor of English Literature at University College, London, editor of
Macmillan’s Magazine
and at work on his seven-volume
Life of Milton
(1859–1894).

“quite demented”:
For a similar case, see the accounts of the derangement of Thackeray’s wife, Isabella. Her descent into madness reached its climax on a ferry plying between Bristol and Cork. Mrs. Thackeray never recovered her reason and lived for a further half century in a state of semiautistic self-absorption. For Thackeray’s letters describing the voyage and its aftermath, see Gordon N. Ray, ed.,
The Letters and Private Papers of William Makepeace Thackeray, volume 1, 1817–1840
(Oxford, 1945), pp. 482–83.

“One of Mr. Smith’s novels”:
Presumably Albert Smith (1816–1860),
author of
The Adventures of Mr. Ledbury
(1844) and
The Struggles and Adventures of Christopher Tadpole
(1847).

“Mr. Procter”:
Bryan Waller Procter (1787–1874), barrister, poet and dramatist (under the pseudonym “Barry Cornwall”) and between 1832 and 1861 a metropolitan Commissioner of Lunacy.

All the Year Round
: Dickens’s weekly magazine, which began publishing in 1859 following the demise of
Household Words
.

“Lord John”:
Lord John Russell (1792–1878), third son of the sixth Duke of Bedford, created Earl Russell in 1861; he was Prime Minister in 1846–1852, and again, briefly, in 1865.

Russell Square:
A popular Victorian (and pre-Victorian) residential area for prosperous City figures; for example, the Sedley and Osborne families in
Vanity Fair
.

III. SOME CORRESPONDENCE

“specie”:
Coin, as opposed to paper money.

IV. THE GOODS ARE DELIVERED

shiny widow’s weeds of black bombazine:
A worsted or worsted-and-cotton dress material dyed black.

a copy of the
St. James’s Chronicle
:
A weekly magazine of impeccable Anglican tone, with a large circulation among the well-to-do and clerical classes. It was, for example, much enjoyed by the genteel spinsters of Mrs. Gaskell’s
Cranford
(1853).

pattens:
Wooden soles, fastened with a strap over the wearer’s shoes, worn in wet weather.

dealt with at Snow Hill by Mr. Ketch:
Jack Ketch, public executioner from c. 1663 to 1686. As a result of his barbarity at the executions of William, Lord Russell, the Duke of Monmouth and others, the name became synonymous with
hangman
.

V. ESTHER’S STORY

cadder:
Or
caddow
, a jackdaw. See Peter Trudgill,
The Norfolk Dialect
(Cromer, 2003), p. 40.

“
Bow Bells
”: A popular Victorian fiction magazine, aimed at the working-class female audience.

“shot a seraph that happened to be flying across Easton Wood”:
A similar hoax is played upon the Honourable Mrs. Jamieson by Peter Jenkyns in Gaskell,
Cranford
, chap. 16.

“in China with the army”:
Following minor hostilities throughout the 1850s, British forces had captured Canton in 1859. A full-scale war broke out in the following year.

VI. SINGULAR HISTORY OF MR. PARDEW

Astley’s:
Philip Astley (1742–1814), the celebrated equestrian performer, opened Astley’s Royal Amphitheatre in London in 1798.

the nature of the ravens that fed him:
An allusion to the ravens that fed the prophet Elijah by the brook Cherith (1 Kings 17:5–6).

no more had been known of Mr. Pardew’s whereabouts, or his undertakings, than Captain Franklin’s:
The Arctic explorer Sir John Franklin (1786–1847) set out on his final, disastrous, voyage of discovery in the ships
Erebus
and
Terror
in 1845 in search of the Northwest Passage.

Eldon, Coke and other luminaries:
Lord Eldon (1751–1838), chief justice; Sir Edward Coke (1552–1634), chief justice 1613–1616, the last three books of whose
Institutes
form the basis of British constitutional law.

“the poor wretch who shot at Her Majesty in the park”:
There were several attempts on Queen Victoria’s life. Mr. Guyle is probably referring to the incident of 10 June 1840 in which the Queen was shot at by a weak-minded boy of eighteen named Edward Oxford as she was driven in her carriage up Constitution Hill. Her attacker, who spent twenty-seven years in a civil lunatic asylum, was apprehended by Mr. Millais, whose schoolboy son—later the artist J. E. Millais—had just raised his cap to the Queen.

copies of pictures by Frith and Etty:
William Powell Frith (1819–1909), famous for his large-scale canvases of Victorian scenes. His
Ramsgate Sands
(1854) was bought by Queen Victoria. William Etty (1787–1849), painter of historical and classical subjects, and renowned for his nudes.

Pall Mall Gazette:
An influential and Liberal-supporting evening newspaper founded by the publisher George Smith and his associate Frederick Greenwood in 1865.

VII. CURIOUS BEHAVIOUR OF MR. CRABBE

one of Miss Edgeworth’s novels:
Maria Edgeworth (1767–1849), author, whose first novel was
Castle Rackrent
(1800); among her other books were
The Absentee
(1812) and
Ormond
(1817).

VIII. JORROCKS’S CART

Suffolk Fencibles:
A militia regiment composed of volunteers who undertook military service in times of domestic emergency.

Bradshaw:
A general name for the series of railway guides inaugurated by the Manchester mapmaker George Bradshaw (1801–1853) in 1839.

Shoreditch Railway Station:
Forerunner of the modern Liverpool Street.

that engraving in which a man, journeying down a country road at night, finds himself pursued by a fearful fiend:
By Thomas Bewick (1753–1828).

The story of Mr. Le Fanu’s:
In Sheridan Le Fanu’s
Uncle Silas
(1864) the sinister governess Madame de la Rougierre is first observed by her charge, Maud Ruthyn, through the garden window at twilight.

Mr. Chinnery’s pictures:
George Chinnery (1794–1852), a celebrated portrait and landscape painter who specialised in oriental subjects.

“
Omphalos
”: Philip Henry Gosse (1810–1888), the distinguished naturalist, published in 1857
Omphalos: or The Geological Knot Untied
, in which he attempted to reconcile Scripture with current evolutionary theories by proposing that God had created fossils at the same time that he had created man. The book was widely ridiculed. See Ann Thwaite,
Glimpses of the Wonderful: The Life of Philip Henry Gosse
(2002).

“The American war”:
The American Civil War had by this time reached its closing stages. By January 1865 Sherman’s Union forces were ravaging South Carolina. On 6 February the Confederate Congress appointed Robert E. Lee to command all that was left of the rebel army.

IX. ESTHER’S STORY CONTINUED

“The Volunteers”:
Volunteer regiments had been created by the Militia Bill of 1757. The Volunteer Act of 1863 allowed the sovereign to call out volunteer help if an invasion was anticipated, rather than—as had previously been the case—if the enemy had actually landed on British soil.

“mawther”:
A girl, here used with a neutral meaning, rather than the more recent “large, awkward girl”; see Trudgill,
Norfolk Dialect
, p. 45.

X. THE CONFIDENTIAL CLERK

Limehouse Hole, where Rogue Riderhood dwelt deep and dark:
The sailor who blackmails Bradley Headstone in Dickens’s
Our Mutual
Friend
(1865) and is drowned struggling with him in the Thames.

any redeeming features:
For a detailed description of the Clerkenwell of a slightly later period, see George Gissing,
The Nether World
(1889), chap. 2.