Lost and Found

Epitaphs are a genre unto themselves. And here is a particularly intriguing one belonging to a Mr George Routleigh, watchmaker of Lydford, Devon.

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Here lies, in a horizontal position, the outside case of George Routleigh, Watchmaker, whose abilities in that line were an honour to his profession. Integrity was the Mainspring, and Prudence the regulator of all the actions of his life. Humane, generous and liberal, his hand never stopped until he had relieved distress; so nicely regulated were all his movements that he never went wrong except when set a-going by people who did not know his Key. Even then, he was easily set right again. He had the art of disposing his Time so well that he Hours glided away in one continual round of Pleasure and Delight, till an unlucky moment put a Period to his Existence. He departed this life November 14^th 1802, aged 57, wound up in hope of being taken in his hand by his Maker, and of being thoroughly Cleaned, Repaired, and Set a-going in the World to come.

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Image credit: Silver Rose

(Remembrance of Sir Francis Beaufort - how many dinners can a midshipman consume in a day? c 1790s)

We were talking of a midshipman’s appetite, as a thing which bears a high character for energy and punctuality, and Captain Beaufort said it had never been tried how many dinners a midshipman could eat in a day.

‘I,’ said he, got as far as three. I had eaten my dinner at the midshipman’s table, and a very good one, as I always did. After it, the captain’s steward came up and said –

‘The captain’s compliments, and desires the favour of your company to dinner’

‘But I’ve dined,’ said I.

‘For mercy’s sake, don’t say that, sir,’ said he, ‘for I shall be in a scrape if you do. I ought to have asked you this morning but I forgot.’

So I thought I must go; and two hours afterwards I did go, and I dined, and I think I made my good usual dinner. Just as we rose from the table, a signal was made by the admiral to send an officer on board, and as it was my turn, I had to go off the boat. When I got on board the admiral’s ship, the admiral said to me.

‘Ah, Mr Beaufort, I believe?’

‘Yes, sir,’ said I.

‘Well, Mr Beaufort, said he, ‘the papers you are to take back will not be ready this half hour, but I am just sitting down to dinner, and shall be glad of your company.’

Now as to a midshipman refusing to dine with the admiral, there are not the words for it in the naval dictionary. So I sat down to my third dinner, and I am sure I did very well; and I got back to my ship just in time for tea.’

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Image credit: kaptain kobald

Today’s Charles Dickens’ bicentenary and I thought I’d mark the occasion by posting a favourite passage. It is a bit of comedy from the Pickwick Papers, early on in his career, that demonstrates his brilliant powers of observation. It begins with the Pickwickians watching a military parade or ‘a grand review… on the Lines.’ And here they get entangled in the action with unfortunate results.

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‘Hoi!’ shouted the officers of the advancing line.

‘Get out of the way!’ cried the officers of the stationary one.

‘Where are we to go?’ screamed the agitated Pickwickians.

‘Hoi – hoi – hoi!’ was the only reply. There was a moment of intense bewilderment, a heavy tramp of footsteps, a violent concussion, a smothered laugh; the half dozen regiments were half a thousand yards off, and the soles of Mr Pickwick’s boots were elevated into the air.

Mr Snodgrass and Mr Winkle had each performed a remarkable somersault with remarkable agility, when the first object that met the eyes of the latter as he sat on the ground, staunching with a yellow handkerchief the stream of life which issued from his nose, was his venerated leader at some distance off, running after his own hat, which was gambolling playfully away in perspective.

There are very few moments in a man’s existence when he experiences so much ludicrous distress, or meets with so little charitable commiseration, as when he is in pursuit of his own hat. A vast deal of coolness, and a peculiar degree of judgement, are requisite in catching a hat. A man must not be precipitate, or he runs over it; he must not rush into the extreme opposite, or he loses it altogether. The best way is, to keep up with the object of pursuit, to be wary and cautious, to watch your opportunity well, get gradually before it, then make a rapid dive, seize it by the crown, and stick it firmly on your head; smiling pleasantly all the time, as if you though it as good a joke as anybody else.

There was a fine gentle wind, and Mr Pickwick’s hat rolled sportively before it. The wind puffed, and Mr Pickwick puffed, and the hat rolled over and over as merrily as a lively porpoise in a strong tide, and on it might have rolled, far beyond Mr Pickwick’s reach, had not its course been providentially stopped, just as that gentleman was on the point of resigning its fate.

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Reading this again it’s striking to think how well it would work as a piece of stand-up comedy – with a Peter Kay, perhaps, narrating the action. And then there are the beautiful images, the moment of intense bewilderment’ or the vision [the hat] ‘gambolling playfully away in perspective’.

All very vivid and all very funny. Happy birthday Boz.

Where, if not from the impressionists, do we get those wonderful brown fogs that come creeping down our streets, blurring the gas lamps and changing the houses into monstrous shadows? To whom, if not to them and their master, do we owe the lovely silver mists that brood over our river, and turn to faint forms of fading grace curved bridge and swaying barge. The extraordinary change that has taken place in the climate of London during the last ten years is entirely due to a particular school of Art. At present people see fogs, not because they are fogs, but because poets and painters have taught them the mysterious loveliness of such effects. There may have been fogs for centuries in London. I dare say there were. But no one saw them, and so we know nothing about them. They did not exist until Art had invented them. Now, it must be admitted, fogs are carried to excess.

Oscar Wilde, The Decay of Lying

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Image credit: pixelhut

"The head, at some distance, resembles that of a dog, with his ears cut close; but when near you see it has a long thick snout, a wide mouth, and the eyes sunk within the head. Altogether it has a most horrid look; insomuch, that if one were to paint a Gorgon’s head, I think I could not find a more frightful model. As they swim, the head, which is high above the water, is continually moving from side to side to discover danger. The body is horizontally flattish, and covered with a hairy skin, often very finely varied with spots. Beneath the skin is a deep spongy fat, something like that of the skinny part of a leg of mutton: from this they chiefly draw the oil. The fins, or feet, are very near the body, webbed like a duck, about twelve inches wide, but in shape very much like the hand of a man; when they feed as they swim, they stoop the head down to the fore foot. When they dive, they swim under water, I think I may say a quarter of a mile together; and they dart after their pray with a surprising velocity, considering their bulk and the element they divide."

(Elizabeth Spence, Letters from the North Highlands during the Summer 1816)

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Image credit: ucumari

Apologies to anyone who doesn’t care, but it’s all Dickens at the moment. Today the Museum of London opens its Dickens in London exhibition (there’s a preview here) and yesterday, as part of the opening fanfare, the Guardian published a little feature on a rare manuscript of Great Expectations that’s going on display.

The manuscript reveals a number of things. Among them is Dickens’ (and I quote guardianbooks)’ ‘terrible’ handwriting – thick black ink, small cramped letters, all sloping over to the right.

I don’t know whether writers should be expected to have better handwriting than other members of society. I seem to remember that in Angela’s Ashes Frank McCourt was taken on to write firm letters on behalf of a solicitor in Limerick because he had a good, firm hand – some evidence that people do link a neat writing style with literary ability.

This is a theme that George Orwell took up in his As I Please column in February 1947 (75B Manchester Evening News for Tribune), when he observed that ‘A handwriting which is both pleasant to look at and easy to read is now a very rare thing.’ He went on:

I must say that the modern examples I am able to think of do not seem to prove much. Rebecca West has an exquisite handwriting, and so has Mr Middleton Murray. Sir Osbert Sitwell, Mr Stephen Spender and Mr Evelyn Waugh all have handwritings which, to put it as politely as possible, are not good.

Orwell noted that Arnold Bennett cultivated a ‘beautiful tiny hand over which he took great pains’, that H. G. Wells was ‘attractive but untidy’ and that Carlyle’s writing was so woeful ‘one compositor is said to have left Edinburgh in order to get away from the job of setting it up.’

Of course the quality of a person’s handwriting doesn’t matter much nowadays. With computers and smart phones and, even, chip and pin, you could quite easily go for months without having to pick up a pen at all.

This is doubtless a small mercy as we’re all saved from the physical toil of producing and deciphering words ourselves. But there’s still something fascinating about seeing an author’s work in their own hand – a hurried dispatch perhaps, a pristine composition, a scruffy note – and, as the Dickens manuscript proves, it makes life in Calibri Size Ten seem rather dull in comparison.

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Image (dis)credit: gusset

Claire Tomalin: Charles Dickens, A Life

Claire Tomalin’s biography of Charles Dickens is many things, but above all it’s fast. She fits Dickens’ 58 frantic years, 20 novels/novellas/Christmas books, his raft of journalism, parties, speeches, tours and benevolent projects into just over 400 pages. It’s an admirable achievement: bewildering occasionally but nonetheless satisfying.

Tomalin has done well to strip off much of the surrounding baggage, leaving us with a fine portrait of Dickens the man. This is no mean feat. As she notes herself Dickens could be approached variously as a satirist, actor, mesmerist, country squire, journalist, despairing father, novelist and from a hundred other angles, all valid books in themselves. She doesn’t do this and doubtless many of his most ardent fans will be disappointed as a result. Instead Tomalin sticks to the essence of Dickens’ character.

This is, of course, his pulsing energy and burning talent which propel him from one enterprise to another. In the third part of the book a brooding darker side emerges. He turns against his wife Catherine, orders a wall to be built between their bedrooms and then separates from her entirely, allowing him to embark on a mysterious relationship with young Nelly Turnan. (Another book in its own right and one Tomalin wrote 20 years ago.)

This third part adds texture and depth to Dickens, changing his image from the loveable Boz – what his daughter Katey called a jolly man with a plum pudding and a bowl of punch – to something more rounded and real: fallible, insecure, duplicitous.

There’s plenty to think about there, but for me all the best bits come in snatched details of Dickens immersed in his daily routines. He invented his very own ‘artful sandwich’ – French roll, butter, parsley, hard-boiled egg and anchovy – prone to head colds, he described his symptoms in typically vivid prose ‘My chest is raw, my head dizzy, and my nose incomprehensible.’ And there is a particularly good scene of a Christmas spent with his family at Gad’s Hill in 1865. Over to Tomalin:

The food was lavish, with cigars for the men, champagne and other wines, and Dickens specially prepared gin punch. On Christmas Day Higham neighbours were invited, a Mr and Mrs Malleson with their daughter, and there was an unexpected arrival, Will Morgan, son of an American sea captain, another of Dickens’ old friends. The great Christmas dinner culminated as usual in a flaming pudding, after which he proposed the toast in the words of Tiny Tim, ‘God bless us every one’. After this there was dancing from nine until two in the morning.

The jovial party-thrower was one of Dickens’ many sides. But, for me, Dickens the writer is more of an allure. It’s interesting to read not just of his successes but also his failures: the many drab Christmas stories that followed Christmas Carol, the sentimental travel books and so on. One of the lessons with Dickens is that he kept ploughing on with great energy regardless. This is the point Tomalin uses to close her narrative. It’s told through a wonderful anecdote.

After he had been writing for long hours at Wellington Street, he would sometimes ask his office boy to bring him a bucket of cold water and put his head into it, and his hands. Then he would dry his head with a towel and go on writing.

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Image Credit: Kevin Dooley

Get Claire Tomalin's book here or watch a YouTube video here

A festive outing? Dickens at the Museum of London

Hedge-shunter

I’m not a gambling man. The two proper bets that I’ve placed in my life both went on a brute called Hedgehunter to win the National. The first time out he was among the leaders till he ploughed into the final fence, and the following year my Spanish bank took so long to process a telephone bet the race had finished before they did. This, of course, was 2005 when Hedgehunter thundered home by a dozen lengths.

Informally though, it’s a different matter. Wagers, predictions, boasts, they all seem to be part of the British psyche. I’ve currently got running bets on 1) a friend proposing before the end of 2011, 2) that a newly married couple with conceive before the Olympic opening ceremony (a useful arbitrary moment) and 3) Aston Villa finishing in the top half of the table – most dubious of all. On Twitter the other day I noticed Malcolm Coles ruminating on a bet about the Euro breaking up and, at work, my girlfriend has developed a passion for football after winning £75 on the NewsQuest Premier League sweepstake.

And while I’ve been tidying my writing notes up, I’ve found some good proof that this informal bet-making is nothing new. Here’s a few historical wagers from way back when.

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“Boy Eats Cat”

‘On Tuesday evening a country lad, about 16, for a trifling wager, ate, at a public house in this town, a leg of mutton which weighed near eight pounds, besides a large quantity of bread, carrots, &c. The next night the cormorant [a type of bird] devoured a whole cat smothered with onions.'

(Bristol Chronicle, 13 September, 1779)

“Quick Tea-Drinking at St Ives”

‘On Tuesday last the Mountebanks performed at St Ives, when the quick art of tea drinking was proposed by Mr Andrew as a method of drawing a company together for his benefit. He produced a pound of the best green tea for the first woman who could drink five cups boiling hot the quickest; this proposal set many mouths watering, as well as wishing for so great a prize; accordingly three women mounted the stage with Mr Andrew, in order to perform that which they are well accustomed to, tea drinking. When the noble entertainment began it was amusing enough, but presently over, and the pound of tea was clearly won by an old practitioner, who drank five cups boiling hot off the fire in precisely eight minutes, with as much unconcern and ease as possible, to the no little astonishment and good amusement of every spectator.’

(Cambridge Chronicle, 8 February, 1794)

“Famous Run by Farmer Tiffin”

‘On Thursday se’nnight, Mr Robert Tiffin, farmer, at Outwell, in this county, undertook, for a wager of £20 to run from the mile stone near Outwell toll-gate, five miles on the road to Wisbech and back again in an hour and a half, which he accomplished with ease in one hour and eleven minutes.’

(Bury and Norwich Post, 18 March, 1801)

“Trial of Strength”

‘An extraordinary trial of strength took place at Godalming, Surrey, on Tuesday morning, the 23^rd ult. A man named William Giles, aged 50, for a wager of 2s, only, undertook to carry a sack of flour, weighing 285 lbs., the distance of a mile without resting. This he actually accomplished, taking up his load at Eshing Mill, in the above parish, and carrying it up a steep hill, rendered slippery by the snow which had fallen just before, over a stile and a gate, and returning by the high road to the mill again. Giles effected his task with so much ease that he offered to repeat the wager within an hour after he had set down the load, but the spectators were so well satisfied with his prowess that no one could be found to accept the challenge.’

(County Chronicle, 9 March 1819)

“Pinching Match”

‘At the Bell Inn, at Widford, in this county, a delightful amusement has sprung up, quite novel, and which may vie with any of the present day entertainments of “the fancy”. It is that of a set to between two persons which can bear the most pinching, and continue to pinch his opponent for the longest time; observing that if during the engagement any party betray any angry feeling, or swear, the party so offending to forfeit whatever wager depended on the issue. A set-to of this sort occurred on Tuesday last at the above place, between a Knight of the Thimble of small stature and puny appearance, and a stout athletic husbandman. They held on pinching each other, with great pleasure, for upwards of an hour, chiefly upon the fleshy parts of the arm, when at length the arms of the stout man fell powerless by his side, and he was obliged to give in from exhaustion and pain. The gallant Knight immediately offered to combat with any man in England for the championship of pinching,’

(Hertfordshire Mercury, 20 August, 1825)

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Image Credit: Valter Venturelli

Anyone connected, however loosely, with Durham over the last ten years will probably have heard the following Bill Bryson quote: ‘If you have never been to Durham before, go there at once. Take my car, it’s wonderful.’

This tidy, pretty couple of sentences were lifted from Bryson’s Notes From a Small Island by the university and local tourist board shortly after the turn of the century. Thereafter they were plastered everywhere. It was just the pithy recommendation they were after, and it sprouted up in all imaginable places during my time in the city: on prospectuses, on billboards, in magazines and flyers. For the trouble of his seventeen words, Bryson was rewarded with the chancellorship of the university in 2005 (his stint has just ended) and a permanent display at the front of the local Waterstones.

I left Durham in the summer of 2004 and had forgotten all about this until a month or so ago, when I was reading Humphry Clinker, an eighteenth century picaresque novel. Here Tobias Smollett provided a description that forms the perfect antidote to Bryson’s. On reaching Durham, the book’s acerbic central character, Squire Matthew Bramble, writes:

‘The city of Durham appears like a confused heap of stones and brick, accumulated so as to cover a mountain, round which a river winds its brawling course. The streets are generally narrow, dark and unpleasant, and many of them almost impassable in consequence of their declivity. The cathedral is a huge gloomy pile; but the clergy are well-lodged.’

Smollett is a recent discovery, and a new favourite. George Orwell called him ‘Scotland’s finest novelist’ and Dickens, no less, has David Copperfield resorting to a chest full of his books – especially the roving Augustan masterpiece Roderick Random – for solace when he is locked up in his bedroom at Blunderstone by the horrible Murdstones. Later on, Copperfield wins Steerforth’s friendship by reading him Smollett out loud.

Pigeonholed, Smollett would perhaps come out as the Scottish Cervantes. His novels are filled with humour and truth, and they sweep across countries and landscapes, bumping into the bizarre characters the eighteenth century so often threw up. I don’t agree with his description of Durham, which I still think has a unique, magical charm, but I love the blunt intemperance of Smollett’s characters – especially Matthew Bramble who had much the same misanthropic outlook two hundred years ago that Charlie Brooker has today.

Another lively passage from Humphry Clinker describes a meeting of London writers:

‘In my last, I mentioned my having spent an evening with a society of authors, who seemed to be jealous and afraid of one another. My uncle was not at all surprised to hear me say I was disappointed in their conversation. ‘A man may be very entertaining and instructive on paper (said he), and exceedingly dull in common discourse. I have observed, that those who shine most in private company, are but secondary stars in the constellation of genius – A small stock of ideas is more easily managed, and sooner displayed, than a great quantity crowded together. There is very seldom any thing [sic] extraordinary in the appearance and address of a good writer, whereas a dull author generally distinguishes himself by some oddity or extravagance. For this reason, I fancy, that an assembly of Grubs* must be very diverting.

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* Grubs as used here refers to those journalists who worked in Grub Street. The term corresponds, more or less, to the modern term ‘hacks.’

Image credit: Grumpy Mick

On a week when questions of personal privacy have been flooding the press, the Guardian managed to shamelessly crane its neck into Downing Street through an open window. This open window, of course, was not of the conventional variety and instead came in the shape of a photograph – posted on the Official Whitehouse Flickr stream.

The foreground of the image depicted Michelle Obama and Samantha Cameron engaged in a seemingly rosy conversation, on a spongy mustard-yellow sofa in the Cameron’s flat above 11 Downing Street. Behind them, plain for all to see, the living area opened out into a spotless kitchen and to the right of Samantha Cameron’s head stood one of the Prime Minister’s bookshelves – crammed with DVDs and books.

‘Inside Sam and Dave’s pad: help us catalogue the Downing Street bookshelf,’ the Guardian declared when they noticed the image (which was last Wednesday). Here they were indulging in their two favourite current pastimes, viz. lassoing their readers into the journalistic process (something which has been going on since the MPs expenses scandal) and, secondly, sounding worryingly like a tabloid.

I’m not sure how successful the experiment was – though it was certainly a fun and provocative idea. Just as the photograph was a window into the Cameron’s flat, the journalists hoped that the bookshelf, in turn, would be a window into David Cameron’s mind. Perhaps careful scrutiny would reveal a liking for a particular author or certain genre. And what deductions could we make if only we knew that the man steering the government liked science fiction, or hardboiled crime, or Irvine Welsh or (god forbid) Katie Price?

I don’t blame the Guardian for attempting this. It’s relatively fair to judge a person you don’t properly know on their bookshelf. Unlike other things that we remain saddled with from childhood, like our accents or social classes, at least we can control the contents of our bookshelves and build them up slowly over time. As we don’t tend to throw old books away they become a silent testimony to who we are, charting our emotional and intellectual evolution through the years.

This is perhaps why I find bookshelves fascinating things and a similar argument could be made for a record or CD collection. As far as bookshelves go, the Guardian has a Flickr group for readers to post photographs of their own and, if you’d like to judge me, then a bit of mine is at the top of this piece – or can be seen on Flickr here.