Death and Mr. Pickwick Page 23

  *

  In his studio, now at White Conduit Fields, Seymour began copying in earnest the lines of Cruikshank: the Cruikshank curves, the Cruikshank straights, the small lines, the long lines, hundreds of lines, thousands of adjustments, all to make a single picture, developing in the process the confident freedom of Cruikshank, in drawings of buildings, trees, people, smirks.

  From the Gallery of the Fine Arts in Rathbone Place, Seymour purchased aqua fortis, twenty copper etching plates, needles, and the ingredients to make wax – everything to turn Cruikshank-like pictures into Cruikshank-like etchings. There came the moment he moved the needle firmly against the wax’s resistance, and for the first time in his life he looked down upon a line he had cut. The gleam of copper underneath met his eyes.

  There was no short cut to mastery of etching, only the long road of practice: the acid ate his cuffs, his throat was sore from fumes, his eyes smarted and his fingertips turned a shade of yellow. Yet he did not stop, he knew he must practise and practise some more, and often he hummed ‘John Barleycorn’ as he did so. During the day, he pinned tissue paper over his windows to soften the light and see the lines better in the wax. After sundown, he filled a bowl with water and placed it before his oil lamp to diffuse the illumination. Eventually he would lie down, and close his eyelids. By that time, he could barely see from the strain of concentration and the soreness of his eyes.

  This regime continued until the day his fingers controlled the needle with a lightness and quickness of touch as he cut the miniature furrow through the wax – he knew just the right combination of pressures to produce a line that was at first thick, like darning thread, and then thinned to the fineness of a hair. He acquired, too, the judgement of knowing precisely how long the plate should be immersed in the acid bath. He stood guard, watching the pattern of bubbles rising – and if bubbles appeared without a corresponding line, he knew the biting of the plate was foul. He also brushed away with a feather any accumulation of bubbles on a line, for this would disrupt the acid’s work and produce a ragged drawing when printed. He had read that the great etcher Hollar of Prague used only a duck’s feather for clearing bubbles, and so Seymour made a trip to the banks of the Hampstead Ponds to acquire a supply. When all these techniques had been learnt, he could etch any line at all, from the most delicate scratch to the deepest trench, and with the aid of his duck feather he could cross-hatch any shade of bird, from gull-grey to rook-black, as would be evident when the plate was inked and passed through a printing press.

  Seymour was a master etcher! He loved the speed and the freedom as the needle moved through the wax like a skater; he loved the bold lines etching gave to trees, architecture and skies. Yet, even when confident as an etcher, he would not rest.

  For there was another technique to be learnt: the new lithography. He explained it to Jane on one of her frequent visits as she leant over his desk and watched.

  ‘You take a fatty crayon and you draw on a flat stone,’ he said, doing exactly that, as he embarked on a picture of a beagle. ‘Later you throw on some oily ink and water, and the ink sticks to the fat, and the water gets out of the way. And then you can print from the stone. Be careful! You’ll ruin it!’

  She started at the sudden ferocity.

  ‘I’m sorry, my love. But you were leaning too close. One tiny drop of sweat, or just one fleck of skin falling on the stone will show up in the printing.’

  ‘I am so sorry, Robert. I had no idea.’

  ‘No, of course you didn’t. It was my fault, I should have told you. But – I shall not continue with this.’

  ‘I am truly sorry, Robert. I just wanted a closer look at your work.’

  ‘I will start another lithograph another day.’

  With its grey, crayony tones, lithography suggested a morning mist upon the Thames, and so Seymour took himself to Wapping to find a fitting scene.

  It came when the prow of a boat rowed by a middle-aged man broke the mist. The rower blew a shrill whistle. Seymour heard a shiphand shout ‘It’s Boatswain Smith!’ and the call was taken up by other men, on other ships, and by those standing beside the mooring posts. Men sitting in the dockyard, drinking from bottles and rolling dice, stood as well, and held the bottles behind their backs, and left the dice by their shoes. Wherever Seymour looked, men stood to attention by the river, having ceased whatever they were doing, and all looked towards the man in the rowingboat. Putting his whistle in his pocket, and holding a Bible, the beaky, square-jawed man delivered a sermon on the Good Samaritan – a subject on which Seymour had himself sermonised as a boy, but never in such a style.

  ‘The Good Samaritan was a welcome craft,’ said the man in the boat, ‘that bore down to help a poor lubber who fell amid landsharks that took away his cargo and left him adrift on the highway.’

  Seymour sketched the good boatswain in the grey morning light, with the men listening on the docks and the decks, the mist encroaching upon hulls and rigging.

  Upon completing the lithograph of that scene, he drew an advertisement for his artistic services, stating that he could produce ‘Embellishments of all Kinds’. The accompanying drawing itself showed ‘all kinds’: an image of a pencil and an etching needle protruding from a pile of books; a bust of Shakespeare alongside Falstaff, Lear and Puck; a woman being wooed on a couch; a monkey in clothes; a globe, maps and charts; and a border with fronds, a fox, a stag and a pheasant – and, as a vertical within this border, a fishing rod, with a fish hanging down from a line and a net on the end of a pole.

  ‘What do you think?’ he said, passing a copy of the advertisement to Jane the next time she visited, as she leant by his desk. She moved her lips awkwardly.

  ‘Is something wrong, Jane?’ he said, turning round in his seat to look at her. ‘I can see you are not impressed.’

  ‘You had better change it a little – look at your surname, Robert.’

  To his embarrassment, he saw that the ‘Embellishments of all Kinds’ were designed by ‘R. Seymore’.

  *

  The corrected advertisement brought in many orders for etchings and lithographs. One of the first commissions was for etchings in a slim book, Snatches from Oblivion, Being the Remains of Herbert Trevelyan Esq., Edited by Piers Shafton, Gent. This book purported to be derived from the papers of a man of genius, a deceased poet, Herbert Trevelyan, killed by a cough he had contracted in winter, but not before he had entrusted his papers to his landlady with strict instructions to pass them to an editor. One part fascinated Seymour – a story called ‘The Serious Afflictions of a Good Appetite’, which concerned the poet’s late friend, Ezekiel, a thin man with a vast capacity for eating, who sucked in food and still did not show the benefit in inches around his stomach. Seymour portrayed a dream of Ezekiel’s, in which all the food Ezekiel had eaten in his life came back to haunt him – Seymour drew a sheep with missing ribs, and limbless cows and trotterless pigs, all still alive and all circulating in the dream of the sleeper.

  ‘It is most odd,’ he told Jane. ‘I have an uncanny feeling I have drawn this work before. I can almost hear the bleats of the sheep and the squeals of the pigs. Yet I have never drawn such a thing in my life.’

  ‘Perhaps you had a dream like this when you were at Smithfield.’

  ‘You must be right. I was troubled by the animals sometimes. It’s a strange story in any case – but I suppose anything might be found among a poet’s papers.’

  *

  AS I TOLD MR INBELICATE, I too was sometimes troubled by nightmares of food. For my mother, before her death, had become exceedingly thin. Her breasts had all but disappeared. I told her she looked like a Belsen victim. Yet, she always complained that she was given too much to eat: ‘Too much food! Too much! Much too much food!’ I can hear her now. I have heard her saying this in my nightmares.

  I tried, God knows how I tried, to make her eat more. She said that her stomach had shrunk, and could not accommodate large meals. Her diet was, by then, a few spoonfuls of t
hin porridge. Her last Christmas dinner, by choice, was one potato the size of a costume bead, a teaspoon of peas, and a tiny section of sausage not much larger than the joint of a finger – and this was ‘Too much food!’

  *

  When she died, I found among her possessions a note to me. ‘So we come to the parting of the ways,’ she wrote. ‘I hope you think I have been a good mother. I tried my best. I wish you success in whatever you do.’

  I do not know the circumstances of the death of Robert Seymour’s mother; nor do I know whether he found a letter from his mother after her death. I know that she died in 1827. There was an Elizabeth Bishop who died in Southwark in that year, and perhaps that is her. There is silence among the papers I have to work from and I do not have Mr Inbelicate to ask now.

  The next significant record I have from 1827 is a copy of the register of weddings at St Bride’s church, for 13 August: Robert Seymour had married Jane Holmes. I have a scribbled recollection from a guest that Robert Seymour said he felt ‘Taller than Canonbury Tower’. There is nothing apart from that. There would be children from this union: a girl, Jane, in 1829, a boy, Robert, in 1830. They shall not concern us for now.

  The third significant event of 1827 occurred shortly after the wedding, when Mr and Mrs Seymour attended a matinee of a comedy, ’Twould Puzzle a Conjuror, at the Haymarket Theatre.

  *

  JOHN LISTON WAS BORN FOR comic roles. Among his congenital blessings were his bulging, divergently staring eyes – the mask of tragedy itself could not look into such orbs without laughing – and just for good measure the eyes were separated by a piggish nose. Moreover, he was so fat that stage directions commanded that he turn round on stage just to show off his gigantic posterior, made even more substantial by baggy breeches. In the role of Van Dunder, burgomaster of Saardam, in ’Twould Puzzle a Conjuror, Liston’s expansion in the horizontal plane was supplemented upwards: already the tallest member of the cast, a conical hat turned his head into a towering steeple.

  The Seymours watched as Van Dunder, with orders to arrest foreigners, entered a tavern, accompanied by six guards. Unfortunately, the French, Russian and German ambassadors drank within, and Van Dunder, not knowing their diplomatic status, proceeded to insult the French ambassador by calling him a rogue, and the Russian by calling him a scoundrel. Now he approached the German ambassador. Here, surely, was a foreigner to arrest.

  Van Dunder: Who are you, you dirty dog? Your name, you rascal, your name!

  German ambassador: Baron Von Clump, ambassador from the Emperor of Germany.

  Van Dunder: I shall go out of my wits!

  Officer: Why, Burgomaster, you appear to be rather puzzled.

  Van Dunder: Puzzled? Don’t talk to me of puzzled! ’Twould puzzle a conjuror! They set me angling for rogues, and I catch nothing but ambassadors!

  No matter that the script was mediocre – Liston always won applause.

  ‘I think,’ said Jane as she clapped, ‘he would look even fatter if you saw him in tights.’

  ‘I am sure you’re right,’ said her husband. ‘The baggy breeches do make him enormous, but in tights it would be like two great sausages for thighs.’

  ‘Also he needs a much shorter shirt, to show off his stomach.’

  *

  When they left the theatre, it was early evening, and the gaslit streets of the Haymarket teemed with rouged and powdered prostitutes, half drunk and in gaudy shawls. These women worked the cafés, gin palaces and oyster shops. The Seymours chose the almost-respectable establishment of Barn’s for a coffee, and here Robert Seymour began sketching.

  He conceived of the king dressed as Van Dunder, complete with conical hat and baggy breeches, but with a sceptre poking from the pocket. The talk in London was of a pet giraffe that had just been presented to His Majesty, and so Seymour drew the animal on the picture’s left with a crown upon its horns.

  ‘Now let me add the best bit,’ he said.

  Seymour drew the personification of Britain, John Bull, as penniless, with his pockets hanging out. Bull’s gaunt cheeks and thin frame demonstrated that a long time had passed since a decent meal. Behind Bull stood his starving wife and sons, as the family made an appeal to the king by presenting a petition. In the caption below, Bull dared to suggest that there were more important concerns for a king than caring for exotic pets. ‘If it may please Your Worship’s glory,’ said Bull, ‘to spare a moment from your pastimes, and read how bad times are with us, perhaps you’d have the goodness to mend ’em.’ The king was as puzzled as Liston’s conjuror: ‘Mend ’em indeed? It’s easily said, mend ’em!!’

  ‘There is one more thing I need to add,’ said Seymour. ‘I have decided upon a pseudonym.’ He signed the picture ‘Shortshanks’.

  ‘I adore the drawing,’ said Jane, ‘but I am not altogether sure I like that. Why Shortshanks?’

  ‘To suggest Cruikshank,’ he said, very softly, plainly and quickly.

  ‘To suggest Cruikshank?’ she said.

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘But why the plural, Shortshanks? Shouldn’t you be Shortshank?’

  ‘If I were a one-legged man, yes.’

  The explanation ended there, for she had no chance of uncovering the coded game her husband played, and, for that matter, loved to play.

  *

  ‘SHORTSHANKS, IT IS TRUE, DOES suggest Cruikshank,’ said Mr Inbelicate, leaning forward in his armchair, ‘but it also makes one think of another eminent person, King Edward I, better known as Longshanks, on account of his height. And if the king was Longshanks, then his son, who eventually became Edward II, might easily be considered, by virtue of his junior status as prince, a smaller version of the king, or Shortshanks. What do you know of these two royal shanks, short and long?’

  ‘The father was known as the Hammer of the Scots.’

  ‘And the son?’

  ‘He was the most famous homosexual in English history.’

  ‘To those who appreciated caricatures in a print-shop window, the signature “Shortshanks” would certainly suggest an upcoming artist comparing himself to the great Cruikshank. To those who used print shops for other purposes, the signature might just as well have said “Undo your flap”. It was not only his services as an etcher and lithographer that Seymour liked to advertise.’

  *

  ‘I THINK,’ SAID JANE, ‘THERE WILL come a time when people will believe that Cruikshank is named after Shortshanks, rather than Shortshanks after Cruikshank – you will outdo him, Robert, I know you will.’

  *

  IT WAS A DRAWING. But to describe the impression it created in a print-shop window its frame should be thrown away, and its lines treated as life.

  It was a colossal mechanical steam-powered man, its body made of printing presses, its head of stacked books, its hat shaped in the architecture of the University of London. Its piston-arms swept with a giant-sized broom, brushing away mouse-sized opponents in its path: medical quacks, unreformed vicars, dishonest lawyers – these were the dust and rubbish to be cleansed by society’s advance. The mechanical man’s broom had a pun as its handle: the sculpted head of Henry Brougham MP, the force behind the University of London. This university was known for bringing educational opportunity to those denied it, including Catholics and Jews – but with every detail Seymour added to this picture, the terrible engine of progress became more disturbing and gigantic. He made its eyes sinister glowing gaslights.

  To viewers gathered outside the Haymarket print-shop window, this Shortshanks etching announced that there was a new force among London caricaturists, one that would sweep all rivals away.

  Soon afterwards came an entertaining diptych, Night and Morning. In the half of the picture entitled Night, a reveller and his mates raised their glasses, swallowing sherry and port to excess, and then in the Morning half, cloven-footed devils, wearing wine labels around their necks, conducted their torture – the mallet of the Sherry-devil crashed on the drinker’s brow as he lay moani
ng in bed, while the Port-devil prodded at the abdomen with a red-hot poker. The signature to this diptych was another Seymourian game: signed by Seymour as the artist, while Shortshanks was the etcher – Seymour del, Shortshanks sculpt. This was followed in the window by John Bull’s Nightmare, echoing the picture by Fuseli, but now turned into a commentary on the state of the nation. On a bed lay a sick and miserable John Bull, while around were the phantoms of his nightmare – notably, a bearded demon with twisted horns sitting on his chest, accompanied by a bag that bulged with ‘National Debt’.

  The window that hosted these pictures belonged to the print-shop owner Thomas McLean, of whom one must say more.

  There was lingering about McLean, as he stood behind the counter of his shop, an overwhelming impression of respectability. His hair receded to a respectable quantity of forehead; he peered through sober glasses; and all mannerism, deportment and dress were present in the appropriate degree. It may seem strange, therefore, that he located his print shop in one of the least respectable parts of London; it was true that he enjoyed the patronage of the very highest classes of society, but many of the women who lingered outside his shop were prostitutes, as colourful in their appearance as the prints he displayed in the windows. His motives were, apparently, twofold. First, an already respectable man will appear the founder of the very academy of respectability in such degraded circumstances; second, this thriving part of the city was likely to generate a substantial sale of humorous prints, not least to the very respectable customers of the prostitutes, who sought a moment’s levity after a heavy session with a whore.

  Robert Seymour approached McLean with the preliminary sketch of the first Shortshanks picture, ’Twould Puzzle a Conjuror, minutes after it was completed. To McLean’s question ‘When did you do this drawing?’ the answer was ‘Just now.’ The commission followed for the etching – and anything else that Shortshanks wished to supply.