18
O! this grinding world
from The Letters of Samuel Palmer
‘Life,’ said the erstwhile mariner, Edward Calvert, ‘is like the deck of a battle ship in action – there is no knowing who will go next.’1 After the death of Mary, Palmer’s old friend came round to Grove Street every evening to keep him company in his grief. ‘Bitterest anguish would have been less bearable but for your . . . sympathy and vividly remembered kindness,’2 Palmer would later write. He mourned the loss of his ‘dear sweet’3 girl. ‘Words of comfort sound very hollow,’ he wrote three years later to Richmond when he also lost a baby daughter. ‘The blow has fallen; the affections are lacerated,’ the ‘wisest words’ can only be ‘miserable comforters’.4
But if Palmer was left desolate, it was even worse for his wife. She desperately gathered every last relic of her lost child, stitching a cushion cover from her baby clothes, caressing the casts that had been made of her tiny hands and feet. Sorting through every fragment that would bear testimony to her daughter’s brief life, she turned up a letter from her husband. ‘If Mary is going to be naughty,’ he had instructed More, ‘call out “Mary take care of the wolf!”’5 ‘I cannot remember one single instance in which dear Mary shewed any disposition to be “naughty”. She was most loving and kind to everyone,’6 Hannah scribbled in the margin. Private recriminations may have followed this loss.
For the sorrowing parents, every room of Grove Street was haunted by memories. They no longer wished to live there and, within a few months, decided to make a new start. It would be as good for the family’s health as it would be for his profession, thought Palmer, for Lisson Grove with its damp clay soil and disreputable neighbours was becoming an increasingly insalubrious place and soon he was consulting Linnell on a cottage in Kensington that he and Hannah were hoping to rent.
Kensington in those days was still separate from the capital. An outlying town that had grown up in the seventeenth century around the palace to which William III had decamped because of his asthma, it had long been considered a desirable spot, and though by the time the Palmers moved there it was already far from rural, it still remained pleasantly peaceful in parts – its quiet lanes lined by little wooden fences, its cottages pretty and its gardens lush. In March 1848, the Palmers moved into Number 1A, Victoria Road, a picturesque if rather rickety dwelling with a thatched roof, uneven floors that threatened to collapse into the cellar and a garden which boasted its own apple tree. A few minutes’ walk away were Kensington Gardens which, with their gently lilting pastures, their calm ponds and spreading trees, offered a far better apology for the country than what Palmer had described as the ‘dank’ and ‘consumptive’7 Regent’s Park. These would provide not only a good sketching spot but a pleasant place for Hannah to wander and a fine playground for the six-year-old More.
‘I look out of the window – several birds are singing – the sun shines so brightly upon the slates – and the white houses look as virtuous as Vesta,’8 an uplifted Palmer told Julia Richmond a few months after moving. ‘I sit and think of you every morning under the cedars in Kensington Gardens,’ Hannah wrote fondly to her father. ‘The sheep [are] so tame that they come all round us and the birds sing gloriously overhead. I take my work and my camp stool and we are out 3 hours every morning.’9 But just as the Palmers on honeymoon in Italy had greeted every new staging post with panegyrics of delight before finding only too quickly that its novelties had palled, within a few months of moving neither of them was feeling so cheerful and Palmer was subsiding into one of his periodic glooms.
A cholera epidemic which had swept across Europe finally broke out in this leafy London borough. Inhabitants were warned not to wander along the Serpentine. ‘Noxious effluvia’ were ‘reeking from its lovely ripples’,10 Palmer said. Hannah and More, fortunately, were away holidaying in Balcombe but the fearful Palmer hastily equipped himself with a medicine to be administered at the first hint of a symptom. Consisting of opium, fennel and black pepper compressed into a tablet to be crumbled or chewed with a tablespoon of brandy or water, it sounds an improbable prophylactic, not least when accompanied by tight ligatures of tape tied just above the knees and elbows to prevent the blood from rushing to the extremities; but the father of his friend Charles West Cope (one of the artists whom Palmer had first met in Wales) had apparently been saved in this way.
Palmer’s anxieties mounted. ‘How the gratings smell tonight,’ he informed the perennially sympathetic Julia Richmond as he sat down to reply to an invitation she had sent him that evening. ‘The drains in London are of themselves enough to breed a plague.’ And, if the prospect of a deadly epidemic was not bad enough, he whipped up more worries, fretting over the health of a society in which crime had ‘reached its ackme’: ‘women in Essex [were] murdering their husbands by wholesale’ and an eight-year-old boy had dispatched his little sister, neatly tidying away his instruments before his mother came home.11 Palmer had clearly been brooding over lurid newspaper reports. But the next day, as he finished his letter to Julia, the morning had dawned bright and clear and he laughed at his morbidity of the previous night.
His other problems, however, were less easily solved. He felt, he said, ‘MISERABLY HAMPERED’ by his duties.12 Whenever he tried to get away to the country, ‘some horrid teaching engagement’ would ‘snare him by the leg’.13 How could the omnibus office at Paddington be compared with Devon’s Mount Edgecombe, or the Kilburn Road with the ‘thunder fraught’ Hamoaze (the estuary of the Tamar)? he wondered.14 The warm weather that delighted those holidaying in the country seemed to him, stuck in the capital, more like a glaring and uncomfortable heat.
‘I must, D.V. [Deus Vult or Deo Volente meaning ‘God willing’ is a medieval acronym that peppers Palmer’s letters and notes] strike out at once into a NEW STYLE. SIMPLE SUBJECT; BOLD EFFECT; BROAD RAPID EXECUTION,’15 he resolved after a sketching trip in 1847. From the late 1840s a new energy infused his work. He visited King Arthur’s Castle at Tintagel: a huge bluff of ‘tumbled about’16 rock that Turner in 1815 had painted, assaulted by powerful shipwrecking storms. Discovering a little hut in which he could shelter, he sketched the rocky masses heaving upwards like waves against his horizon; a sudden rainy squall blowing across the slopes, tossing glittering seagulls and fragments of light.
Palmer also embarked around this time on a series of literary scenes. He painted the departure of Ulysses from the sea-nymph Calypso’s rocky home: their sad farewell set against the sinking sun’s gold. He depicted Christian’s descent into the Valley of Humiliation: a lowering drama that discovers a lone hero on the brink of his greatest battle. Accounting meticulously for every literary detail – the red cloak that falls from Christian’s shoulder reveals that his back is unprotected by armour which is why he will later stand and fight the foul fiend Apollyon rather than flee – Palmer worked for hours on each of these pieces. Yet, exhibited at the Old Watercolour Society in 1848, his image from Pilgrim’s Progress was returned unsold. The picturesque formulas of such fellow members as Thomas Miles Richardson and William Collingswood Smith (both elected associates in the same year as Palmer) were far more widely preferred. A disappointed Palmer vowed to ‘foreswear HOLLOW compositions’ such as Calypso; to stop painting ‘great spaces of sky’ and ‘TAKE SHELTER in TREES’. ‘Directly poetical subjects are less saleable,’17 he decided. But his tastes were too deeply engrained to abandon. He was stranded on rocky islands of romance. In 1850, he chose a subject from Robinson Crusoe, a novel which must have appealed particularly to a painter who had been all but marooned.
Like the famous literary outcast, he made the best of what he had: which was watercolour. Working on large pieces of board, he continued to test the capacities of this medium, tackling his ambitious subjects with panache, infusing his elaborate compositions with light. He still harboured yearnings to become an oil painter and, though for a while these were encouraged by his close friend, the enthusiastic amateur artist and deaf mute John Reed, for all his persistent efforts, for all the notes that he kept so punctiliously in a portfolio devoted to the mysteries of this material, his hopes were consistently frustrated. Palmer ran down an analytical dead end. The stacks of stretched canvases, primed panels and never completed pictures that were discovered after his death in his lumber room bore a sad testimony to his failed dreams.
Palmer, however, was learning to work a little more quickly, for, though he compared his paintings to ‘apples which will not ripen till they have been kept a long while in the cupboard’, he no longer ‘pored and bored’18 over them as he used to, he said, but instead worked on four or five at once. In 1852 he sold everything at the Old Watercolour Society exhibition and afterwards received a commission from a Mr White – albeit a small one to be sold at a third of the exhibition price – who subsequently asked him to do a further seven pieces. Then at last, in 1854, after an eleven-year wait in which the continuing appearance of his name in the lower list – the list of associate rather than full members – had come to feel like an annual stigma, he was elected a full member of the Old Watercolour Society. He was as relieved as he was delighted. ‘Almost every member said I ought to have been in before,’ he wrote.19
The family can hardly have looked forward to Christmas 1848 as they approached the first anniversary of little Mary’s death, but it was to turn out to be even unhappier than they had anticipated. On 17 December, Palmer’s father died. The generous if chaotic old man who had been so much a part of Sam’s carefree childhood, of the dreams and delights of his rural Shoreham days, had rather faded from his married existence, his paternal role supplanted by the more competent Linnell. His sudden death stirred up deep sediments of memory, unsettling emotions of gratitude and regret. ‘The first gush of tears came with the thought, “How he loved my childhood’s soul and MIND – how he laboured to improve them, sitting in the house and walking in the fields!”’ Palmer wrote.20 He had lost his gentlest and most faithful ally. That spring he was to lose another when, in April 1849, Henry Walter, his boyhood friend and fellow Ancient, also passed away. Palmer, recovering from a protracted bout of illness, felt ‘worn through with the dejection of the sudden news and the prostration of utter fatigue’,21 he told Richmond. He could not even get down to Torquay to pay his last respects for he had cried off from so many teaching obligations that he could do so no more.
Thomas More must have wished that Palmer had taken a leaf from his own father’s book for, where the young Sam had been set free to discover his own course, More found himself forced upon an ever more narrowly prescriptive path. Intense religiosity was part of every Victorian upbringing. Achievement was highly valued in a progressive age. Contemporary attitudes to education were caricatured by Charles Dickens in his Dombey and Son, in which the unfortunate scion of the eponymous Dombey is put into the hands of a teacher whose system is ‘not to encourage a child’s mind to develop and expand itself like a young flower; but to open it by force like an oyster’.22
‘Education,’ said Palmer, ‘including at its foundation the fear and love of God, is all in all.’23 He regarded the process as a personal hobby, if not a holy calling. Schoolwork he believed to be ‘nothing short of divine’.24 There was nothing on earth more delightful, he declared, than the training of one’s child. His son, even more precious now that Mary was gone, was his guinea pig. He set about giving More a thorough education with nothing ‘loose or slippery’ and no ‘show or parade’. Palmer, who admired Milton for knowing Homer by heart before he was sixteen, saw difficulty as a challenge and diligence as the vehicle by which one could rise to meet it. It is ‘very difficult to do anything well from the blacking of shoes upwards’,25 he said, but by taking pains one could achieve things both wisely and well. He believed firmly in the advantages of parental influence. He would not, he insisted, hand over his first born to some hired pedagogue, to some crinoline-clad nurse bawling angrily at her charges. ‘While ladies say they can’t trust their servants with their keys,’ he wrote to Miss Twining (who, having written a pamphlet on workhouse schooling, was always prepared to discuss such matters), ‘we see that they can trust them with their children: trust them at a most impressible age to take their shape and bent of mind and soul from hirelings! What then is the momentous business that can drag the mother from those dearest hours of her life, her mornings with her children? No business at all. You have answered the question. It is the hatred of conscientious painstaking in which and through which alone comes the delight of duty.’26 ‘Home influence is maternal influence and that we know has formed the best and greatest men,’27 he concluded.
Palmer, however, believed with Locke that children’s constitutions could be ‘either spoil’d or at least harm’d by Cockering and Tenderness’.28 He vigorously espoused the virtues of beating. ‘Flog on!’ as his great aunt had said when an uncle, who had run away from home to enjoy the 1780 riots, had been found asleep among the cavalry horses in the Royal Exchange. Palmer would sometimes tell the story of one of his cousins who, though he had known perfectly well how to spell a word in his school book, had stubbornly refused to prove it to his parents. ‘They gave him a cold bath, whipped out the demon for a time,’ Palmer remembered. But it always came back. Once, Palmer had managed to coax the boy into spelling the word privately. He had done so correctly, and his cousin had reported as much; ‘But soon after he was up the next morning he was playing hare to the hounds round the garden, till they caught him at last and brought him in for a birching.’ That ‘birching was blest’ Palmer had concluded, for ‘I saw him the other day, a worthy, cheerful old gentleman’.29
The ‘most calamitous of our birthdays’, Palmer once declared, was that on which we ‘become too old for whipping’,30 while ‘the disuse of those few moderate twigs of birch in our nurseries’, he told a friend many years later, ‘is a patent infatuation’.31 And yet, for all his strenuous advocation of the virtues of corporal punishment – ‘Will boys learn at home without the distant probability of the strap?’32 Palmer wondered – the rod remained in his house for the most part a mere threat. He rarely punished and, when he did, the penalties imposed were slight. Indeed, looking back many years later on his efforts to educate his son, he declared paradoxically that ‘the peculiar excellence of home teaching’ lay ‘in the earliest lessons being made pleasant’, that a child should be beguiled and not beaten and that – bar an occasional correction for idleness – for every cuff given by an ill-tempered parent, the parent deserved to receive a dozen back – ‘and pretty hard ones too’.33
The foundations of More’s future were dauntingly solid. ‘I do think a boy should know by heart and understand some short Latin Grammar – the Eton say – and should go through the first book of Euclid with a private tutor before going to school,’ Palmer said.34 Latin was fundamental – ‘for without it I do not think the best English has ever been written or spoken: and as speech pre-eminently distinguishes us from the brutes . . . we ought surely to speak well’35 – so, though prosody could be deferred for a while, irregular verbs and syntax needed to be ‘thoroughly mastered so that they can never be forgotten – and syntax wants the pains of home teaching that it may be understood as well as got by rote’.36
More was encouraged to draw. He was taught to read aloud, enunciating properly so that he could entertain his mother while she was sketching or amuse the family as they gathered round the fire. He shared his father’s love of music and played the piano; one day, when their piano tuner failed to turn up, Palmer worried terribly that the jarring notes might do his son’s ear lasting damage. More particularly liked the organ. As a fourteen-year-old, on holiday in Margate, he would rise at half past six to spend his mornings playing Handel and Corelli on the instrument at the town baths. A year later, officiating temporarily as an organist at a church in Earl’s Court, he proved highly proficient, playing the congregation out with a rousing Hallelujah Chorus. He and his father filled happy hours discussing ‘fugues, stop-diapasons, open-diapasons, double-diapasons, the swell, swell-couplers, principals, fifteenths, sequialteras, bourdon, and double sets of 32-feet pipes!’37 Palmer recalled. And, in 1858, he took his son to Crystal Palace where they drifted happily about amid the displays of pictures ‘while from the distant, great organ, sweet streams of melody spread like perfume through the halls’.38
Lessons were not always plodding for More. His father knew how to kindle the imagination. As he lectured his son on the evils of cruelty, he reminded him of the biblical story of Jezebel. ‘I wonder what Jezebel was like when she was a little girl,’ he wrote. ‘You may try to draw her’; and there followed the sort of imaginative contemplation that must have informed his own narrative works. ‘I should make her with proud-looking eyes – turning up her nose at everybody and in very fine clothes. She was fond of dress to the last – but while she was painting her cheeks and making herself so fine that morning – she little thought of the hungry dogs that would tangle their fangs among her laces and gimcracks.’39
Palmer was prepared to sacrifice everything for the sake of his son’s education. A landscapist could make a better living in the country, but he remained in the capital because it was the best place for schools. His efforts paid off. Having finished his preparatory education under the auspices of a Kensington clergyman, in 1858, at the age of sixteen, More went on to gain a place at Kensington Grammar School where he not only won several prizes but became a great favourite of the headmaster. He got into the highest class, Palmer told Miss Wilkinson proudly. It would still be some time before he looked back on this moment with the bitterest of regrets.
While Palmer had limped impecuniously on through the late 1840s and into the 1850s, Linnell had continued to take great strides as a painter. His 1848 Noah: The Eve of the Deluge works like a powerful vortex, sweeping the eye inwards with its glowing force. Ruskin noticed it at the Royal Academy exhibition of that year and though he misread its subject, referring to it as The Retreating Storm, he nonetheless mentioned it in an updated edition of Modern Painters as ‘characterised by an observance of nature scrupulously and minutely patient . . . only to be understood by reference to the drawings of Michelangelo’.40 By the early 1850s, Linnell was being hailed as one of Britain’s most collectable landscapists. Dealers were buying up any work that they could. A picture of quoit players which Linnell had first sold to Sir Thomas Baring (the father of John Baring who had commissioned Palmer in Rome) in 1811 for seventy-five guineas was sold by Christie’s in 1848 for a thousand. Problems with forgeries would soon arise and, before long, Linnell would find himself being asked to verify a work so often that he began to charge a £5 fee.
Soon, no longer tied to the capital by the financial necessities of portrait commissions, he was planning to leave Bayswater. In May 1849, on their way to Edenbridge to inspect a possible site for a new home, Linnell and his son James found themselves waiting at Redhill, in Surrey, to change trains. Energetic as ever, Linnell filled the time with a brisk walk up the nearby Redstone Hill where he was so taken by the views that stretched outwards in all directions that he decided on the spot that this was where he would live. Eleven acres had been put up for sale by a London stockbroker. Linnell bought them at once.
Picking a vantage point on the brow of a well-timbered hill sloping down towards the west, he set about designing and building a substantial Reigate-stone house, adding sixty-three more acres to his original eleven, personally supervising every stage of the construction himself. By the time he had finished, Redstone was an impressive mansion with terraced grounds and magnificent views. It was near enough to London for him to take the train in easily, and also to Brighton for his wife to make trips to the shops or the beach. In July 1851, the Linnell family finally moved.
Redstone was organised around work. Two huge painting studios of the sort that Palmer could only have dreamt of took up the entire first floor; one was Linnell’s, the other for the use of his sons, both by then also practising as professional artists. A lobby lined with plaster casts separated them. Downstairs there was a large sixty-foot drawing room with two entrances, so that it could be divided if necessary with a partition, while the windows of a spacious library offered an ample view over flowerbeds and lawns towards the wilder vistas of Linnell’s own woods. In the evenings Linnell would gaze through these windows out over the sunsets which, famously glorious because of the red earth in the area, he would paint. How Palmer, who had studied a sunset ‘over the same piece of rock and sea’41 for three weeks in Cornwall, would have loved such a view! Instead, back in London, he had to climb up to the attic and, standing on tiptoe, strain his neck out of the nursery maid’s window to get even the tiniest glimpse of the sky.
Linnell was lord of all he surveyed at Redstone. No one could arrive at the front door without him throwing up the sash and issuing his challenge. He might not have been quite as ferocious as his hound, Niger – it had to be shot after biting a girl who was delivering eggs – but still regular tradesmen preferred to dodge round under cover of the trees to the entrance at the back of the house. The local hunt was also upset. Used for decades to drawing cover in the mature oak woods, they resented the territorial fences that Linnell put up. A long battle ensued which Linnell won in the end. His house remained a stronghold, an empire over which he presided. There, unimpeded, he could pursue his painting, pore over his books of Hebrew and Greek, grind his corn, bake his bread, brew his ale and thunder forth his opinions to a well-disciplined family which increasingly seldom dared venture dissent.
In 1851 the Palmers also moved house, taking up residence in 6, Douro Place. It was only a short walk from their previous cottage, but it was considered an upward move. Douro Place was a pretty cul-de-sac. The then fashionable sculptor, John Bell – his dramatic Eagle Slayer was to stand at the heart of the Great Exhibition that year – had a house on the corner. But, if a succession of social luminaries arrived at that end of the street, the other, where the Palmers lived, was blocked by a high brick wall.
Number 6 – now singled out by an English Heritage plaque as the home of Samuel Palmer – is, by current standards, a substantial residence: a four-storey Georgian building set in quiet seclusion, it would be far out of the financial reach of an unsuccessful artist today, but in Palmer’s era it was considered a modest establishment. The visitor, arriving through a green wicket gate, would follow the path through a shady patch of garden which was cheered up in summer by abundant marigolds, to a flight of steps with a tangle of white roses growing around its railings, leading up to the front door. It was dark inside, the daughter of their neighbour, Charles West Cope, remembered, with a long low room on the left as you entered, the floor of which sloped steadily down towards the windows. There was no studio. Palmer used a corner of the drawing room. It had a southerly aspect, which he liked, even though it looked onto the houses opposite. Palmer tried to make the best of this far-from-perfect set-up, settling down amid his clutter of artist’s materials, mended picture frames and homemade portfolios and, in memory of Shoreham, planting a root of hops among the garden’s lilac bushes.
Many happy hours were spent in that home. Cope’s daughter would much later describe them, recalling how Hannah would caution the guests about the sloping flagstones, remembering her ‘pretty gentle way and voice’ and how Palmer would sing as he played the tall silk-fronted piano or tell the children blood-curdling stories about wolves in which the creatures’ far-off howling seemed to draw nearer and nearer and nearer as the children clustered about him, half-frightened, half-thrilled. She particularly remembered the magnificence of his voice ‘rolling out By the waters of Babylon’.42 This psalm of exile must have meant a lot to him. He was a suburban outcast of his rural dreams. And it would only get worse. The green spaces of South Kensington were being rapidly buried under stucco. ‘They have so built us up with great houses,’ Palmer mourned, ‘as to destroy the elasticity of the air.’43 Sometimes he would burn blotting paper that had been soaked in saltpetre in his bedroom so that he could breathe better. The acrid vapours helped to clear his lungs.
His health was declining. Throughout the 1850s he was regularly ailing. Appointments were frequently cancelled or postponed. He blamed his impaired constitution on the transition from Italy’s dry summer climates to London’s damp clay. Coughs, colds and wheezes seemed constantly to plague him and, by 1856, he was referring to himself – albeit mockingly – as ‘a wretched invalid’.44 The enthusiastic young visionary who had used to ramble all night across the Kentish Weald was now entering his fifties. Winter, with its ‘bitter weather and untoward rains’,45 herded him towards his hearth; but in summer it wasn’t much better. ‘I DREAD the DUST of town, which withers me whenever I go out,’46 Palmer moaned. Hannah would apply mustard plasters to his chest. But she was not well herself. She had suffered several miscarriages before finally, in September 1853, giving birth to a third and last child, a son who was christened Alfred Herbert: Alfred after the king and Herbert in honour of the poet. For some time his father called him the former and his mother the latter; but in the long run it was Hannah who won out. The boy was known as Herbert, or Hub for short. Cope and Reed were his godfathers.
From the beginning the infant was sick, succumbing to fevers, convulsions and fits. Dr Macintyre once more became a frequent – sometimes a daily – visitor, and Mrs Linnell, with whom Palmer shared few other interests, became a medical confidante, privy to the details of every symptom and remedy. The baby was prone to squinting, Palmer told her in 1854. ‘We . . . have noticed it all along at intervals.’ ‘[Dr McIntyre says] it might proceed merely from wind or from a very serious cause, congestion of the brain.’47 Within such wide parameters, there was plenty of room for anxieties to run amok and the unfortunate infant was subjected to an assortment of unpleasant treatments that ranged from the administration of grey powders to the lancing of its gums.
Later that year, Hannah, the baby and his nurse, went to stay at Redstone while Palmer, freed for a few days from teaching commitments set off – with the help of £5 from Linnell – for a holiday with More. Herbert grew temporarily stronger but by 1855 he was seriously ill again and, had it not been for the advice of Dr McIntyre, would have been ‘laid by the side of his still dear little sister’,48 Palmer wrote. By the time the baby had recovered the whole family was exhausted: Hannah had sat up with him every night but one for six weeks, while the nurse had never got to bed before two in the morning. Preparations were once more made for a recuperative trip to Redstone. ‘We have indeed much reason for thankfulness,’ a relieved Palmer wrote, ‘when after fever and insensibility we see our poor Herbert amusing himself with his old playthings and playing his old tricks.’49
It was around this time that Palmer developed a fascination for homeopathy. This system of medicine, based on treating a patient with highly diluted substances which trigger the body’s natural system of healing, had been introduced into Britain in the 1830s by an Edinburgh trained medic, Dr Quin, who while travelling in Europe had met Samuel Hahnemann, the founder of this holistic discipline. By 1850 he had founded a homeopathic hospital in London and by 1858 had negotiated an amendment to the Medical Act as a result of which homeopathy became not only tolerated but in many cases preferred to traditional treatments – perhaps hardly surprising in an era when mainstream practitioners regularly advocated such measures as bloodletting, purging and the administration of Venice Treacle: a mixture made up of sixty-four substances among them opium, myrrh and viper’s flesh.
Palmer invested in a homeopathic box containing sixteen different medicines: – ‘all that are wanted for domestic practice’,50 he announced with satisfaction – and from this time on would self-medicate enthusiastically. Pulsatilla taken alternatively with Aconite, he informed Julia Richmond, had done wonders for his eyes. Vision which had grown bleared from hours of close work had been suddenly and almost miraculously restored. He sent her Chamomilla for the colds of her children: he had twice cured a three-year-old by administering six globules dissolved in water, he assured her, and he himself, recently caught out in the driving rain without an overcoat, would surely have succumbed to one of his frequent flus had he not happened to have had his box of medicines in his pocket. ‘2 globules of Dulcamava made me as safe as if I had been sitting by the fire!’51 Palmer believed in homeopathy, much as he believed in haunting, he said: ‘because, if you sift both questions till you sift your arms off, there is still a residuum of evidence that cannot be got rid of’.52 Besides, he insisted, the practice saved him money. By curing a miserable cold in the head in just a few hours he was enabled to start work again immediately and so save himself not just ten stupefying days of miserable snuffling but a considerable amount of money too.
Money continued to be a trouble to the Palmers. Doctors – and towards the end of the 1850s there were sometimes two in attendance – had to be paid for, quite apart from Herbert’s illnesses, Thomas More was never strong. The rent at Douro Place was higher than that at their previous cottage. The income from Palmer’s Shoreham houses was small and though, in 1851, Linnell, who was party to all his son-in-law’s pecuniary arrangements, had helped him to increase the rents, this did not always have quite the desired effect. A Mr Foreman, who until then had paid regularly, fell as a consequence into arrears.
Economies had to be practised at Douro Place. They came fairly easily to Palmer who, though occasionally tempted by some fine old book or print, was a man of simple habits. But Hannah found them far harder to bear. Having lost all confidence in her own talents as an artist, she was not far from losing faith with those of her husband too. Her father had already done so and when, in 1850, Hannah’s younger sister Polly had got engaged to Calvert’s son, Linnell, anxious that the same mistake should not be repeated, persuaded her to break the betrothal off.
‘Women, well governed, are dear charming creatures,’ Palmer confided to Richmond in 1851. ‘Though (between ourselves),’ he added, they are ‘wonderfully feline’ and most to be doted upon ‘when their claws are in’.53 But Anny’s claws were now more often unsheathed. The woman whom he had once affectionately called ‘Bantam’ now took the nickname ‘My Lady Superior’54 or ‘Head of the House’ to his ‘tail’. ‘My timidity has left me in a minority of one,’55 Palmer wrote. Hannah, comparing her humble circumstances with the comforts of Redstone, felt increasingly dissatisfied. She yearned for a fashionable lifestyle of the sort that a successful Academician would provide. She wanted a smart house with elegant furnishings and so set about creating it, investing in the sort of accoutrements that could ill be afforded. ‘I could have bought all the books it is good for anyone to read for the money this table and these chairs have cost – have furnished an immortal mind for what will not half-furnish a room,’ Palmer wailed to his father-in-law after one of her sprees. ‘Groaning under mahogany’,56 the letter is signed off.
Instead of the single, part-time maid that Hannah had once thought would be sufficient, she now employed two servants who, as often as not, only added to their problems. The cook acquired so much money while working for this penurious family that she bought herself a watch, while an Irish girl, upset by an argument over the baby’s milk, stormed out at an hour’s notice and demanded a full month’s wages, thereby shoring up all Palmer’s prejudices against Roman Catholics.
These maids became Hannah’s cohorts in her unremitting battle to keep up appearances. Periodically, even the reluctant Palmer would be winkled out of his study as they set about a vigorous cleaning in which closets were emptied, books dusted and sometimes disposed of and plaster casts all too often carelessly smashed. ‘I am getting used to it, and have ceased to feel much annoyed at the reckless destruction,’ Palmer wrote to his wife who had gone away (to Redstone presumably) leaving her husband to cope with the domestic onslaught. But even he found it hard to maintain an air of peaceful resignation when, visiting a friend, he spotted a bas-relief identical to one that his maids had recently broken placed on prominent display above the parlour door. ‘What egregious blockheads we must become if we ever more attempt to vie with people who have fifty times our income!’57 he mourned.
Palmer enjoyed going to parties, especially those involving gatherings of artists, for artists he believed had a great deal of humour. His wife, however, wanted him to attend the sort of ‘midnight dissipations’ which he hated – smart social gatherings in which cards and music were considered more important than conversation and in which, when people did talk, they engaged in the sort of gossip which Palmer most deplored. Gossips, he remarked, were like flies, settling ‘with satisfaction on every little heap of filth and refuse’,58 whereas we should be more like bees, collecting honey as we roam.
Far too often for his liking, Palmer would find himself lurking on the sidelines of some social gathering, a small, bespectacled figure pulling a capacious snuff box, rubbed to the warm glow of an aged Titian painting, from the pocket of a dishevelled coat and blinking myopically at the melee before him. He got far more pleasure, he said, from the few tranquil moments that he and his wife would spend afterwards at home, she reading aloud to him from a life of George Herbert before bed. ‘What poor, fun-loving babies we are – here upon the verge of eternity,’ he wrote bemusedly to Reed. ‘All is puzzle and a heterogeneous heap of inconsistencies so wild and strange that, but for their daily experiences they would be incredible. Thousands lavishing, thousands starving; intrigues, wars, flatteries, envyings, hypocrisies, lying vanities, hollow amusements, exhaustion, dissipation, death – and giddiness and laughter, from the first scene to the last.’59
Hannah hero-worshipped her father. ‘You live on a hill in more senses than one,’ she told him in 1858: ‘standing on the vantage ground of truth higher up it seems to me than anybody else in the world . . . I long to toil up after you though to reach your height would be impossible even with your helping hand.’60 She began to spend more and more time at Redstone. Linnell, always ready to encourage her visits, might have been suspected of wilfully undermining her marriage had he not also been the provider of the funds that kept her household afloat.
Where once Hannah had defended her husband against the accusations of her family (‘I find Mr Palmer so different, from the misrepresented accounts of his opinions and practices in London,’61 she had written from Italy), she was now more likely to concur with their criticisms. One evening, having tucked up his trousers to keep them clean as he walked to the Richmonds’, Palmer had forgotten to untuck them again and had spent all evening wandering about with his socks on show. It was obviously a faux pas. ‘Had I maintained three wives at once, had I sent my children to boarding school at Sierra Leone, I verily believe I should have committed no crime so capital in the eyes of my beloved countrymen as that which I perpetrated last night at your house,’62 he wrote in self-mocking apology. But where Julia, his hostess, was quick to laugh off such solecisms, his wife Hannah was mortified.
Other more serious problems arose. At one point a religious spat broke out between Palmer and Linnell: injuries were aired, resentments nurtured, tales carried, taunts delivered and theological minutiae picked over in petulant detail. Hannah even risked injuring Palmer’s relationship with Giles on the grounds that so many members of his family (though not Giles himself) were Roman Catholic and, if there was one thing on which Palmer and Linnell could agree, it was that Catholics were suspect and not to be tolerated. Another time an argument blew up over a minor indiscretion in which Hannah had gossiped to her father about the private affairs of the Old Watercolour Society. Towards the end of the 1850s, Thomas More became the cause of a huge family row.
More, by then in his late teens, was often refractory. He could be conceited and wilful and he also had a penchant for practical jokes which – though no specific examples were mentioned (except his buying a peashooter, unbeknownst to his mother, with which he ended up hurting his mouth) – were clearly the sort of pranks which would not have gone down well in Redstone’s regimented world. ‘I have known for long that More is too much indulged, but my being at home makes very little difference in that respect,’ Hannah wrote to her father, who considered her son spoilt. One day More invited his friend Charles Cope over for an impromptu lunch at his grandfather’s, a meal at which Linnell, who planned his time precisely, liked to meet dealers and do business. He got very unsettled – and would even fly into a rage – if his routine was disturbed. Another time Linnell, who was inordinately proud of having taught himself Latin and Greek, had laid a classical trap for More from which the boy had extricated himself with self-confident arrogance. Linnell had been greatly irritated, not least because he suspected that all the effort that went into More’s education would only prepare another Anglican clergyman. ‘You have saddled your hobby of scholastic learning with a worldly object like Balaam,’ Linnell wrote to More. ‘You do not see the messenger of God blocking up your path but keep spurring on the exhausted flesh . . . Seek a living apart from all ecclesiastical dignity which is no dignity but a degradation.’63
The initial cause of the controversy that in 1859 arose over More remains unclear, but the animosity that resulted was only too manifest. The boy had been sick but the Linnells refused to have him to stay at Redstone. The Palmers, it was hinted, did not show proper gratitude. A favour had been followed, it would seem, by reproachful taunts. Letters passed back and forth. ‘I wish I knew in what way More has offended you; for every grandfather’s house is open to his grandchildren: no mother is left to beseech it as a favour especially for a convalescent child,’64 wrote a placatory Palmer. Linnell remained unconvinced. Hannah’s brother James entered into the fray and eventually the whole affair was superficially settled, though lingering resentments continued to simmer. When Linnell sent a soothing letter, inviting Palmer and his son to stay, the offer was stiffly turned down. A few months later, More was ill again and was sent to recuperate with friends in the country. Linnell dispatched a present of home-brewed beer and was whole-heartedly thanked by the boy who bore no lasting grudge. But the relationship between Palmer and his father-in-law had been irreparably damaged. Where Palmer used to sign off his letters to him with affectionate subscriptions, now they tended to end coolly with a standard: ‘yours truly’.
Hannah, however, whose ‘filial reverence’, said Palmer, amounted ‘almost to worship’,65 stayed more and more frequently at Redstone, leaving her husband alone to the companionship of his cats. Palmer was more or less contented. He loved listening to the ‘furry orchestra’66 that these creatures would strike up at night in the streets and for a truly peaceful evening, he told his friend Reed, ‘there must be a cat upon the rug – a sedate well conducted tabby – contemplative of temperament – shutting her eyes or blinking as she muses upon her last mouse’.67 But he missed the warmth of the family circle, with its singing tea kettle (he always preferred the vociferous kettle to the silent urn) and its piano playing, its poetic recitations and its fireside chat and he often felt sidelined and defeated, as if he merely plodded on for the sake of his children. ‘I am prepared to lead a life hopeless of any earthly good, and to persevere to the utmost of my power in patient well-doing, unappreciated and ridiculed,’68 he wrote miserably to Hannah in 1856. When his former pupil Louisa Twining returned some sketches he had lent her, he was pathetically grateful that they had been of use. ‘I shall value them the more for having afforded you some quiet recreation,’69 he told her. He must have wished that his wife was more like this highly motivated woman. When men tend upwards, he wrote to Miss Twining, they move towards ‘hallowed intelligence’, while women aspire to ‘seraphic love’. But ‘when they tend downwards the man falls towards brutality, the woman towards trumpery’.70 Occasionally his resentments towards Hannah found a direct voice. I have been ‘ill-used and unjustly neglected as an artist, as well as in many other ways’,71 he told her in 1856. But he didn’t elaborate.
Palmer must greatly have missed the company of Blake, a man who, like Socrates, he said, had declined the common objects of ambition. His old mentor was much in his mind at this time because, in 1855, Palmer was approached by Alexander Gilchrist, a young writer and art critic who, embarking upon a biography of Blake, was looking for people who had known him personally. Palmer responded enthusiastically and he and Hannah spent many evenings reminiscing while Gilchrist took notes. On one occasion they became so absorbed in looking at portfolios of drawings that they lost track of time. Dawn had broken by the time that the party disbanded. The Palmers’ servants had got into a terrible state, fearing that their employers had both been murdered and their bodies disposed of in a roadside ditch. Palmer, however, must have treasured this opportunity to talk. It gave him, albeit temporarily, a renewed sense of relevance, especially when Linnell, who had expected also to contribute, had had his offer turned down. He had wanted to take control of the project but Gilchrist had not been prepared to hand over his editorial independence.
Work had always provided a refuge for Palmer in times of trouble and in the 1850s he discovered a new outlet for his talents. He turned to etching for the first time. It is surprising, perhaps, that he had never tried it before. Small-scale monochromes were suited to his way of working; but, until he first took up the etcher’s needle as a middle-aged man, he had not suspected quite how perfectly this scrupulous discipline would suit the proclivities of his mind, body and soul. It rekindled not just his enthusiasm but the visionary spirit of his art.
In February 1850, Palmer became a member of the Old Etching Club, a small association of professional artists (many of them Academicians) that had been founded twelve years previously with the aim of promoting a practice that, until then, had been seen principally as a means of reproduction rather than as a way to do original work. Members met regularly to share expertise, exchange criticisms and opinions, and occasionally to quarrel – not least about the division of the money that accrued when, having pooled their resources as they did periodically to publish a small collection of etchings, they found themselves in possession of a modest profit.
Palmer’s probationary plate was a picture of a willow bending over a river. He had already painted a watercolour of the same tree, bringing to it the vivid sensibilities of someone who has lain down and dreamt under those very leafy branches, followed the sweep and the twist of their pliable limbs, listened to the wind as it twisted through the silvery foliage, the water as it slipped beneath a shadowing trunk. This is the mood that he captured in his etching plate. On the strength of it, Palmer was unanimously elected to the Society.
In the etcher’s studio, inhaling the smell of nut oil and varnish, beeswax and lamp black; surrounded by iron pots for boiling, flat pans for warming and tallow candles for blackening; by racks of needles and burins and scrapers and burnishers; by stacks of translucent paper and copper etching plates; by old rags for wiping, pumice for polishing, silk for spreading, feathers for smoothing and muslin for drawing up the ink, he found a milieu in which he felt at home.
Etching is a laboriously complicated and painstaking process that demands precision and patience. An extract from William Faithorne’s 1702 The Art of Graving gives an idea of quite how arduous it can be. ‘Use water and a grinding stone for polishing your plate, then go over it with a pumice stone, then again with a fine smooth stone and some water. Then go over it with charcoal, and remove any small strokes or scratching with a steel burnisher. Then clean it with stale bread or chalk. Smooth the varnish over the plate. Take a great tallow candle with a short snuff, then apply the flame to the varnish with the snuff of the candle,’ instructs Faithorne; and all that before the art of designing has even begun. His advice continues: ‘Dry the plates on a fire, place your needle in firm wood of six inches or less; whet the needle with an oilstone and prepare for the graving. You must place the knob or ball of the handle of your graver in the hollow of your hand and, having extended your forefinger towards the point of your graver, laying it opposite to the edge that should cut the copper, place your other fingers on the side of your handle, and your thumb on the other side of the graver flat and parallel with the plate.’72 Palmer, pursuing the all but interminable stages of this discipline, was set on an often perplexing, frequently frustrating and occasionally heartbreaking path. But learning by a process of trial and error that error and accident themselves could be turned to account, he gradually progressed in his art.
His early attempts he described as ‘a scramble of uncertainties from beginning to end’.73 Working on his second etching, an 1850 copy of his Skylark, he passed ‘a whole day in nearly burnishing out a sky that was overbitten’ for ‘the perverse acid would bite skies and nothing else’ and ‘the delicate upward flush of early dawn over thin vaporous cloud’ was achieved only at a painstaking second attempt in which he went ‘half through the copper’.74 His Christmas or Folding the Last Sheep, done in the same year, in which a homecoming shepherd fastens the hurdle that encloses his huddled flock, makes skilled play with the contrasts between the softness of the moonlight and the window’s welcoming glow. It is a fine piece of work. But many years were still to pass before Palmer had truly mastered the practice. Even a decade later he was still tackling obstreperous technical difficulties, recording how he had just spent several tedious days working ‘in a ghastly frame of mind’ trying to prove a plate that he had etched on some detestable old second-hand Club copper from which a previous image had already been scraped. ‘I gave myself up for lost on Saturday at 5.30,’ he noted, ‘but, by a desperate perseverance, had singed the last neck of the hydra by 6.15.’75 Palmer was prepared to labour on and, with the example of Blake a guiding beacon, with the shadowy mazes of Rembrandt and Dürer to inspire him and the advice and encouragement of his fellow Club members, his great skills as a printmaker slowly became manifest.
Palmer had the right temperament for an etcher: success in the medium, he wrote, ‘depends on delight in solitude and locked doors, a contemplative mood and intense concentration’.76 Alone in his studio, images dropping gently into his imagination, sinking down gradually through layer upon layer of thought until they came finally to rest in the sediments of his mind, he would work slowly and patiently for hour upon hour. Years could be passed developing a single copperplate. His Weary Ploughman, begun in 1858, was worked on until 1865, by which time it had gone through eight states. At that point the copper was finally abandoned (though only destroyed ten years later when his son discovered a publisher on the verge of reissuing it without his father’s consent and destroyed it as Palmer had requested). Occasionally the changes he made would alter an image fundamentally: an etching begun in 1861 as a picture of Hercules chasing the cattle-rustler Cacus was transformed over time into an image of a kneeling peasant girl and a boy washing sheep. More often, however, Palmer’s alterations involved the minute tuning of tones, the tiniest adjustments of balances of dark and light as, penning endless minutely complicated annotations for printers, he tried to coax out the subtlest poetic effects.
Palmer had fallen under the spell of the ‘teasing, temper-trying, yet fascinating copper’.77 Its difficulties, he wrote, ‘are not such as excite the mind to “restless ecstasy”, but are an elegant mixture of the manual, chemical and calculative, so that its very mishaps and blunders . . . are a constant amusement’, and although ‘the tickling’, sometimes amounted to torture, on the whole the practice kept ‘a speculative curiosity’78 alive: very like gambling, he said, except without the guilt or the ruin. Etching spared Palmer the ‘death grapple with colour which makes every earnest artist’s liver a pathological curiosity’,79 he told Philip Gilbert Hamerton, the author of Etching and Etchers, a popularising book on the subject which would eventually help lead to a renaissance of this much neglected form.
Palmer – to whom a whole chapter of this seminal volume was devoted – became one of the keenest proponents of this so-called ‘etching revival’. If he could have made the practice remunerative, he said, he would have been happy to do nothing else. But he couldn’t. He had to restrict the practice to intense periods squeezed in between the demands of his watercolour painting, his teaching and his family life. He was only ever to finish thirteen plates in his life.
In 1856, Palmer showed two large watercolours, both inspired by Milton’s Comus, at the Old Watercolour Society. ‘Works of high imagination and extraordinary power,’ declared a critic in the Guardian.80 ‘Compositions of this imaginative kind are rare among our watercolour artists, and make an agreeable contrast to the general realism which prevails,’ declared a writer in the Critic.81 Such praise inflamed Palmer’s hopes. He pored excitedly over the copy of the newspaper that Julia Richmond had sent him via one of his pupils. But the pictures never found a buyer.
Such moments of optimism were inevitably followed by disappointments and glooms. ‘One day he finishes a castle in the air – the next he mourns over its ruins,’82 his son Herbert said. ‘My whole life . . . has been little more than one continued punishment – flogging upon flogging – each before the last “raw” was healed,’83 Palmer groaned. He was only half in jest. Sometimes he felt as if his work was ‘a yoke and a burden’: ‘I feel as if I were repeating myself and have very little impulse or enjoyment in it,’84 he told Hannah. And although, periodically, he would make a concerted attempt to pull himself together, getting up thirty minutes earlier so that he could have breakfast over and done with by half past seven and, vowing to continue this reform, bringing his whole schedule forward by yet another half hour, none of his efforts would better his plight.
As a painter he was passed over – and most pointedly by his father-in-law who in 1852 sought out the Pre-Raphaelites one varnishing day at the Royal Academy and invited them over to Redstone for lunch. William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais both accepted and many years later the former was to describe the visit to Linnell’s first biographer. ‘The house was new; the fare was simple but most liberal, and the host was reigning in patriarchal state. After the midday dinner taken in a large hall with the door open to the breezy hills, some choice wine was brought up from the cellar, and over this he assured us of his admiration of particular works which we had done.’85 Palmer, in contrast, was not encouraged either to come often or stay long at Redstone. Indeed, Linnell seems seldom to have passed over an opportunity to ridicule or humiliate his son-in-law. When Palmer told him excitedly of how, by chance, he had just met Calvert in the street – ‘It was so delightful to roll along arm in arm at the old pace. How truly learned he is on Art!’86 reported Palmer – the acerbic Linnell copied out the passage and illustrated it with a sketch showing two stout figures, one leaning upon the other, staggering from a doorway upon which he had printed in large letters the sign ‘Pure Gin’. A pawnbroker’s shop is depicted nearby. And when a drip of snuff dropped from Palmer’s nose, staining his letter paper, Linnell burnt it fastidiously before penning a mocking note of complaint. Palmer received the criticism good-naturedly, countermanding accusations in farcical legalese, but Linnell’s reply, scorning the vicious habit of stuffing noses with the nasty weed, transformed a trivial matter into a spiteful attack.
Herbert thought his father would have been better if he had remained unmarried. ‘Imagine the results if, unhampered [by] a Kensington villa, two servants and an idol,’ he wrote – the idol being Thomas More – ‘he had been able to depart each spring, carefree and happy, and practically rich to new beauty and old associations.’87 Palmer would probably have concurred, albeit for very different reasons. Parental anxiety, which began, he wrote, ‘when a child begins to walk, for beginning to walk is beginning to tumble’,88 turned a screw on the heart. When, at the end of 1859, the family was struck down by scarlet fever, he grew almost demented with worry. The ‘pain suffered for sick children, of anxiety terror and sometimes inconsolable grief – are a very very abundant offset to the desolateness of celibacy,’ he told Richmond. ‘We should by no means persuade those to marry who are content to be single.’89
‘O! this grinding world there is no Leisure for anything,’90 Palmer, in 1843, had cried out to his wife. Now, fifteen years later, he felt completely crushed. He began commending mournfully sentimental poems about death to Hannah. ‘I could go quietly,’ he told her, ‘like a poor sheep under the first hedge and lie down and die.’91 To Richmond, he described himself as ‘a squashed worm’.92 ‘I seem doomed never to see again that first flush of summer splendour which entranced me at Shoreham,’93 he lamented. He was in his mid-fifties. His dreams were all past. He had become nothing but ‘a living flour mill which has to grind corn for others’,94 he wrote.