19
The Catastrophe of My Life
from The Letters of Samuel Palmer
Even as Palmer’s dreams were being ground down to dust, his hopes for his son mounted higher and higher. Hardly a letter passed between them which was not burdened with educational, moral or religious advice – and usually all three at once. Little wonder that More often yearned to escape. For a while, he dreamt of going to sea. The life of a mariner must have felt far more enticing than the career of a clergyman which his father had in store but, discouraged from the other side by a disapproving mother, nothing ever came of his nautical plans.
More did make one spirited bid for freedom. At the age of fourteen, he and Richmond’s son, Willie, ran away from the homes where they were ‘nurtured like cucumbers’,1 and, with four pence between them, set off to seek their fortunes alone. Many years afterwards, Willie (by then Sir William Richmond Blake) described what happened in the adventure that became known to both families as ‘The Escapade’.
He and More were great friends and, since early childhood, had spent many happy hours in each other’s company, sharing a piano teacher and reading books together, making suits of armour out of paper and glue and playing chess secretly late into the night. But, Willie said, they felt restricted by the artificiality of town life and so decided one day to escape to Windsor. It was March when they set off in a pair of greatcoats purloined from their parents, getting as far as Hammersmith before, remembering that they had no money to pay for their supper, they decided to call in on some nearby Palmer relations to borrow half a crown. They then trotted determinedly on and, though questioned by police on Barnes Common, were not detained. As they crossed Bushey Park, they imagined that they were living the free life of their fathers at Shoreham.
At Teddington they spent the night at an inn and, waking the next morning, More ordered shaving water, even though there was not a hair on his smooth pink cheeks. Meanwhile Willie, turning up his Eton collars, cut off their corners to make them look like the fashionable stand-ups of the day. The pair then set off again, practising a sermon which they intended later to deliver for money and, eventually reaching a small village, they walked about advertising their upcoming performance before retiring to a pub. Willie sketched a portrait of the landlady in return for their lunch and it was while he was doing so that the pair were finally apprehended and returned by the police to their panic-stricken parents.
Their punishments were stern. Cope was called in to deliver a two-hour lecture to More, while Willie was made to learn by heart the letters sent by friends condemning his selfish flight. The incident, though it did nothing to affect the friendship between the two families, was accorded a disproportionate gravity. The two boys were forbidden from meeting and a short while later, when by chance they passed in the street, More turned his head and looked the other way.
He was set firmly back on his unrelenting path. By the age of sixteen he had won a place at a first-rate grammar school in Kensington. He is ‘a diligent student . . . never idle for a moment . . . a very pleasant and intellectual companion’,2 his father recorded; William Haig Brown, the headmaster – known as Old Bill to the boys – concurred. He and Palmer join pedagogical forces. As they saw it, they were arming their pupil for life. But More must more often have felt that he had a hydra-headed monster to battle. No sooner was one task completed than the next cropped up. No sooner had one discipline been mastered than another awaited. Even on holiday, he was pressed to rise early and dedicate two hours to Homer before breakfast had been prepared.
Palmer set intellectual achievement over everything. ‘Skill in music and cricket will not in the least avail you in a college examination,’ he warned.3 He discouraged most sport. More did not like it much anyway: boxing, in those days a regular part of a schoolboy’s curriculum, made his head feel fuzzy. He preferred more gentle amusements. Inspired most probably by the publication of Philip Henry Gosse’s Evenings at the Microscope in 1859, he wondered about getting such an instrument of his own. But Palmer was not to be persuaded. He was distrustful of science. Even if More were to find a flea as big as a mastiff, he said, he doubted that it could hop so far into the invisible world as if he watched his morals instead. He was far happier when he found his own enthusiasms reflected in his son. The boy ‘foams with the book mania’,4 he proudly informed a friend – though he and his son never communicated more nearly than when they found themselves sitting in the drawing room at Douro Place, playing the upright piano with its red, pleated silk front. More’s piano teacher, Mr Woolman, became an admired family friend and, as so often with people who were struggling to make ends meet, Palmer went out of his way to help him to find work.
One of More’s favourite pastimes was grangerism, a hobby involving the taking apart of a book so as to reconstruct it with lots of additional illustrations collected from other volumes that had been cut up. More had been introduced to this activity – named after the Reverend James Granger because his 1769 Biographical History of England proved a much-favoured volume for illustration in this manner – by his friend Mrs George, a woman who had once been admired for her beauty and her ability to drive a four-in-hand, but was now ancient and massive with black gleaming hair and brilliant white teeth. She lived a reclusive life amid a profusion of eighteenth-century treasures, with only ‘Old Tub’ her maid and her youthful memories for company. But More would spend hours in her Mayfair home, snipping and sticking as he chatted away.
Mrs George was an eccentric choice of friend for a teenage boy, but at school More had been bullied. Had he been stronger and fitter he might have stood up to his classmates. He was funny and lively, clever and daring, but his health was failing and, at the beginning of 1859, he fell dangerously ill. Palmer, though concerned, did not cease to push his son and before long More was confined to his bed with a writing desk balanced on his knees and his schoolmaster visiting, inviting him to borrow any books that he required. More penned poems to his classmates, which apparently brought tears to their eyes when they read them. He clearly had his father’s taste for sentimental verse.
That summer, on holiday in Hastings, More was constantly badgered by letters from his father. Though he was not idle, Palmer told him, his danger was ‘aliud agere’5 – a propensity to let the mind drift away from the matter immediately in hand. More kicked against the traces. A man with no ‘aliud agere’ was likely to be a mere animal, he replied. His father was determined to keep him firmly in harness. Concentration, accuracy and ‘painstaking’ were indispensable, he insisted and the ensuing holiday which More took in Berkshire was punctuated by reminders that he was about to enter his decisive year; that his chances of going to college – and he needed to win an open scholarship – would depend entirely on the next few months. He must not just do the requisite work, but do it as if he liked it. He must measure himself only against the very best.
More entered his final school year, but that December, first he, then his brother, contracted scarlet fever. Hannah spent hours in the sick room with sponges and compresses, potions and broths. This time it was Herbert who caused the greater concern. But by the next term More was off school again, recuperating in Surrey from a bout of rheumatic fever. Fretful letters arrived from his father: ‘If you go in to the garden without a cap your complement of life will be ended,’6 he admonished. And yet, even as he warned him neurotically against damp shoes and long walks, he goaded him to keep up with his work. More went on to come second only to the head boy in his end of term exams.
If More had won a place at Oxford, his father would have been prepared to follow him, to make a new start himself; but during the ensuing term the boy’s energy began seriously to flag. Several times, overcome by sudden drowsiness after his three o’clock dinner, More fell asleep at his desk. He was mortified to find that these lapses offended his master, a teacher with whom he would often stroll, arm in arm. He penned his apology in verse:
St Paul was preaching, Entychus
Unhappy fell asleep
Unable though attentive all
His wakeful sense to keep.
He fell from the window – and if I
From prized favour fall,
Would choose to sleep as he had slept
Unless awaked by Paul.
But, though the master quickly forgave him, the dreadful tiredness did not pass.
In the summer of 1860, More took a walking holiday with a school friend, Arthur Symonds. They toured Surrey and Kent, and, even if the trip was somewhat less impulsive that the infamous ‘Escapade’, the pair enjoyed some fairly lively boyish adventures all the same. One day they had a narrow escape when, dashing for shelter from a sudden downpour, they found themselves struggling to get through a gate. At that moment a great fork of lightning struck the road just ahead of them. Had it not been for the obstacle, they would have been standing at the exact point which it hit, More told his mother, who had already been quite enough alarmed by the fact that he had not carried an umbrella, without a frazzling lightning fork being added to her fears. More revelled in the freedom of his tour and wrote a poem which he illustrated with little sketches afterwards. But his father, who believed that two hours of work in the morning were worth four in the evening, was anxious that his Greek was being left until too late in the day. He was as much relieved as delighted when his beloved boy was safely back and, ensconced at the home of a Mrs Hodges in Kent, had resumed a more sedentary life. ‘I trust your legs sowed their wild oats and that you will see the folly of fatiguing yourself,’7 Palmer wrote testily, as though a few days spent wandering about the home counties without galoshes had been some perilous adventure.
In March 1861, More’s health again broke down. Cadaverously thin, he left school to stay with friends in Slough while his father set off, trawling the country with sketchbooks and carpet bag, to find some suitable spot for the boy to recover. After much tramping, he alighted on High Ashes, a small farmhouse perched on the brow of a steep heathland slope a few miles from Abinger in Surrey. Palmer’s artist friend, Redgrave, had a country cottage nearby. Linnell, although he never visited, considered it too bleak a spot for a convalescent, but to More’s eight-year-old brother it seemed an earthly paradise. Herbert ran amok, playing with the local boys and riding the shaggy-hooved farm horses, until eventually his mother had to rein him back in.
Soon the invalided More was also out of bed and, though too weak to do much more than just vegetate – he was living discreetly ‘à la cabbage’,8 he joked – he passed the time gazing out of the window towards pearly horizons of a hue that would have been familiar from his father’s work. He pressed spring flowers and started learning the violin. His father, who had lent him his fiddle, teased that he would frighten the pigs with his tuneless scrapings.
As More grew stronger, he started to ramble about in the knee-deep heather, to follow the threads of silvery brooks or shoot rabbits in the furze. His father was predictably alarmed, fearing that he would either blow off his hand or fall foul of game laws. He recounted the story of a man who had shot dead his sister by mistake. Palmer had no time for country sports. ‘How few are out of their teens at sixty!’ he once wrote to Reed. ‘How few people have put away their toys. They have only changed them – grown out of their pellet and popgun into partridge shooting.’9 Meanwhile a chest full of Latin and Greek books, rail-freighted down from London at considerable expense, awaited More’s attention.
Palmer, throughout More’s rural sojourn, was kept by his work in London where the discovery of the bodies of two dead cats in his garden further added to the city’s more general miasma. He had caught a spring cold and felt fit for nothing but lying on the sofa and dozing. Every now and then he would dispatch fretful missives to his family, ticking More off for addressing a letter incorrectly, pontificating on the benefits of fresh milk, recommending shin-of-beef soup simmered down into a delicious jelly, reminding Herbert, who on first arriving in the country had been temporarily struck blind by a bad case of sunstroke, to remember always to carry his parasol.
In May the weather took an abrupt turn for the worse. As a damp eastern wind set in and a dirty yellow fog descended over the capital, Palmer began to grow fearful that his son was in too exposed a spot. Anxious letters fluttered back and forth between Kensington and High Ashes as Palmer discussed the possibility of joining his family, worrying that there would be no space for him in the cramped accommodation, vexed by the cost of renting an extra room and dispatching More to the neighbouring farm to inquire about empty lofts.
While he was in the country, More received a congratulatory letter from a school friend to tell him that, on top of other awards, he had won the Latin prize, even though he had written only fifty of the hundred lines set. It was better news than his father could send. At the Old Watercolour Society exhibition his works had been dismally hung. The committee excused itself by saying that his pictures were so powerful that nothing could stand against them; but the outcome was that only three of the seven works submitted had been sold. The painter was in low spirits. ‘If this should be the last time I write to you – let me beseech you to “remember your Creator in the days of your youth”,’10 he wrote morbidly to his son. He could not have known that this would indeed be the last letter he would ever send his son. Instead of growing stronger, More suffered a relapse.
Many years later Hannah still recalled the morning of her husband’s arrival at High Ashes farm. More, sitting at the table, had looked suddenly up and said: ‘I fear I shall not be able to stand up to receive my father when he comes.’11 He had rallied a little however in the ensuing days and found that, with the help of a stick, he could walk. A little donkey chaise was procured and, twice a day, propped up with pillows and with his mother walking beside him, he was jogged along through the shade of the pines. Meanwhile, Palmer’s spirits also began to pick up. He strolled through the woods to watch the sheep being washed in a mill pond and sketched the shearing and branding that was taking place at the farm. He wandered the high slopes and looked out across vaporous views. He was beginning to feel happy in this rural spot.
Embarking on a series of watercolours, he started dreaming of extending his stay – he could get twice as much work done when away from Kensington, he said. He made inquiries as to renting a cottage for the winter and, writing to the Gilchrists who lived in Guildford and to James Clarke Hook, a nautical painter and Etching Club member who lived in Hindhead, he asked if either of them had heard of anywhere. Typically, the brief became progressively more fastidious: it was not just a cottage he needed, but one which was high, with a dry soil, a westerly aspect and a railway close by. But soon he had other concerns to distract him. More took a sudden turn for the worse again. ‘Pray excuse the . . . incoherent scrawl,’ Palmer ended a letter to Gilchrist: ‘Poor More’s illness quite upsets my brain.’12
By the time Palmer had consulted an eminent surgeon and fellow Etching Club member, Sir Francis Seymour Haden, it was far too late. As he marshalled his thoughts with a few hasty memoranda, it was plain quite how grave More’s condition had become. In ‘frequent and distressing pain’, Palmer scribbled: ‘unable to walk but by effort. Dreadfully depressed irritable and nervous . . . frightened . . . talks of his grave and his shroud – asks us to let him alone that he may die . . . Complains of tender breezes on a hot day as chilly.’13 For more than a year he had shown an extreme sensitivity to noise, Palmer reported, and for even longer than that his hands had been trembling. When out in the donkey chaise, he had begged to come home after three-quarters of an hour. Even the slightest toss of the animal’s head had seemed to startle him. He complained of a dull pain. Hannah saw in his eyes the distressed look of an epileptic she knew.
Sir Francis Haden’s answer is lost. It is possible that More was suffering from severe heart disease following his attacks of rheumatic and scarlet fever, or that he had a cerebral tumour or a leak of blood in the brain. It is doubtful whether a diagnosis from Haden would have helped: and even if it could have, arriving on 11 July, it arrived too late.
In the evening of Wednesday 10 July, Thomas More fell into a dreadful and protracted fit. His parents were distraught. A farm lad was dispatched to fetch the Redgraves and, though the artist was away, his wife Rose roused a garden boy to carry the lantern and made her way quickly through the dark pine woods. Doctors were sent for; but High Ashes was isolated. Nothing could be done in the interim. Rose stayed up with the family all night. But shortly before dawn, More slipped into a coma and by quarter to six on the morning of 11 July 1861, without ever waking, he had died.
Palmer was not beside him at the moment that he finally passed away. On hearing that his first-born was dead he uttered an awful ringing cry and rushed from the house in a bewildered agony, never to re-enter again. The doctor, arriving too late to do anything for the original patient, was by now more concerned about his parents. Palmer, forced into a carriage, was driven to the house of his brother-in-law James Linnell, and Herbert too was taken there. But the grief-stricken Hannah remained. Even after her father arrived, trying to persuade her to come back to Redstone, she stayed by More’s side. ‘Leave the dead to bury their dead,’ Linnell told her. But Rose Redgrave stood firm against his bullying: ‘I will not allow you to carry off your daughter till her son is buried,’ she said.
Palmer could not bear to attend his son’s funeral. It took place a few days later in the nearby village of Abinger. ‘The lark has risen, and birds are singing in the oak wood, but this . . . is the last day on which anything of the dear one whom I have cherished will appear above earth,’ he wrote as he sat at his window, watching the dawn breaking, his heart aching with loss. ‘Our birthday was the same . . . Jany. 27. O! that today I could be laid beside him,’14 he cried.
The loyal George Richmond was there at the graveside; his son Willie was beside him. The boy had come down a little earlier to try to comfort Hannah and, bidding a final farewell to his childhood companion, had sketched a last portrait as a memento for his parents. It was a gift for which Palmer would always be grateful. ‘I would not lose it for the world,’15 he said. But it would be a long time before he could even bring himself to look at it and he was later to ask Willie if he would make another drawing, only this time showing More as if he were still living – ‘if it were only a pencil line that might keep before me his living look’, he implored.16 Calvert and Gilchrist were also there in the churchyard and, though it wasn’t the custom for women to attend funerals, Hannah crept down in the twilight that evening to stand by the side of the newly filled grave.
The gravestone was chosen after much discussion with Gilchrist. The mourning Palmer, welcoming the distraction offered by this small employment, managed to rouse a faint spark of his former spirit and began searching for masons, discussing the prices and haulage costs of pieces of Portland stone and weighing the tasteful simplicity of a London designer with the cheaper local productions of a Guildford stone yard. But it was Hannah who did most of the travelling to Surrey to make arrangements for this monument, and it was Gilchrist who planted the flowers around it. Palmer would not visit the grave or even go near it, he said, until it was opened to place him forever at his boy’s side.
Palmer’s heart had been torn up by the roots. From the depths of his despair he cried out to his friends, writing on black-edged paper first to Calvert – for it had been he who had been ‘first in kindness when dear little Mary was called away’17 – then to Richmond and Finch. Their love came to feel doubly precious to him in his time of grief. But though there were many – from the tactful and attentive Gilchrist to the bereft Mrs George – to offer their condolences, each fresh reminder only rubbed his wounds raw. ‘Here is the consummation of all our twilight walks and poetic dreams,’18 he wrote bitterly to Richmond. He had been smitten by a blow from which he could never fully recover and, but for his last son, dear Herbert, he said, he and Hannah could only hope that their own lives should soon end.
Every morning he would rise to an appalling sense of absence. He would struggle through his days searching only for distraction. And even in sleep he could find little rest: he was tormented by dreams in which he saw his son alive again, felt his arms round his neck or heard his voice singing. The whole terrible scenario had been only a nightmare, the boy would say, and for a second, after waking, a sense of surging joy would remain before reality seeped back in and the knell of despair rang once again in his head: ‘More is dead More is dead’.19
Palmer had never assumed that his life would be easy, but he had believed that honest industry would lead him to a tranquil old age; he had dreamt of the ‘attachment and veneration of children’20 and yearned to leave behind him at least one who might ‘grow up to atone by a wise and useful life for all the bread and beef I have eaten’.21 Now all this had been snatched away from him: ‘swallowed up in “a darkness that may be felt”’.22 ‘What can we do who are left behind?’23 he pleaded. Turning to Richmond, helpless as a child in his ‘low grovelling agony’, he bared his grief. ‘We are . . . like wrecked sailors on a spar drifting we know not whither,’24 he wrote. ‘The great deep of the heart and the understanding is broken up . . . and strange dark shapes move about like those said to have been seen in that first eruption of Vesuvius.’25 Palmer was tempted to ‘moral suicide’, to a doubting of divine goodness. Who could tell how much more suffering he could bear, he wondered? His eyelids had become stiff with weeping. Who could plumb the empty depths of human misery, he cried?
For month after month, he stumbled helplessly on. His health began seriously to flag. By September the doctors had become gravely concerned. Palmer was ordered to drink strong beef tea every four hours day and night. But life to him had become an insupportable burden. He felt crushed by its weight and, though occasional echoes of his former self survived – ‘Affectionately yours, A Vapour’26 he subscribed a letter to Richmond, just one of several almost playfully self-deprecating monikers (‘the eel’, the ‘crushed worm’, ‘sand of the desert’) that he at this time adopted – his letters, crossed with erasures, scattered with staccato exclamations, were outpourings of pure grief. ‘O! that the dead could speak to us,’27 he mourned. But they couldn’t: and the silence was almost too much for him to bear.
He was the ‘most wounded crushed and insignificant of human beings’,28 he said: ‘a blighted palsied parboiled creature’; ‘a poor crazy carcass’29 ‘worthless other than as a curiosity’.30 ‘I have said unto the worm thou art my sister,’ Palmer wrote.31 He could not settle to his painting and yet every hour unoccupied drove him further towards madness. When he caught flu, he was pleased to be at least stupefied; when he recovered, his health felt like a curse for it only left him more sensible to the pain of his grief. On hearing that ‘dearest dearest Finch’32 had suffered a stroke (his second) he wished that he could die instead of his old friend. It was only after many weeks had passed that he could even say: ‘Yesterday was the only day a part of which I have not passed in bitter weeping.’33
The father’s anguish would only have been heightened by the appalling suspicion that he, at least in part, might have been at fault. The doctors decided that More had died of a sudden effusion of blood on the brain. ‘Over-work!’ Palmer blurted out to Richmond in his first dreadful rush of despair. Yet if he feared that his relentless study programme had been too much for his son, it was a secret remorse, never openly acknowledged but left to fester and nag. ‘I really did treat the dear boy liberally and handsomely,’34 he later told Julia Richmond. ‘I always discouraged head work for a long while after dinner – and at one time played a game or two at backgammon every afternoon with him to keep him from study,’35 he informed Gilchrist. The death of his son was the fault of the climate, he later insisted. ‘Had we and the grammar school been in a dry bracing air I think my dear one would have been with us now,’36 he wrote. But it was not his correspondents who needed such assurances; it was Palmer himself.
Palmer and Hannah returned only briefly to London. Neither could bear the idea of remaining at Douro Place. They could never have gathered again in that cosy parlour without the ghost of their dead son drifting among them; they could never have played the silk-fronted piano without seeing his pale hands moving over the keys. Besides, as Palmer told Richmond, they did have one child left and – even if they seemed almost to have given up on him already – they still wanted to do the best for him, which would entail finding ‘a tolerably bracing spot’37 out of town where Palmer could get on with the work which would provide for what remained of his family.
Where to go, was the problem. The grieving Palmer was too sad to care about scenery: a beautiful view gave him ‘no more pleasure than the contemplation of the kitchen sink’.38 But while his wife wanted only to linger in the place where she had last seen her son, to have remained at High Ashes would have been more than Palmer could bear and so, two weeks after the death, the Palmer family were to be found in a cramped, rented cottage on Redhill Common, close by to the Linnells, where they planned to stay while they looked for somewhere else. The banalities of house-hunting at least offered Palmer a sense of pragmatic purpose. He was not unaware of the bathos of the situation: ‘The drooping head over which angels watch must be lifted up amidst this unfeeling hard world of ours and – degraded in men’s eyes by the sorrow which should make it sacred – peer about and “look sharp” and go on the tramp after hideous boxes with stuccoed sides and slated roofs – called Houses! And we must frequent the sweet society of house agent and pore over their mystic books.’39
He wanted a healthy rural place, within easy train distance from London, near to Hannah’s family and with a grammar school for Herbert, who, he said, must be educated and not left to run with the village boys. Redhill seemed to offer a solution, except neither of them liked the place: even the sight of the railway line, down which their dear boy had gone to die, was harrowing, wrote Palmer, and the view it offered towards the slopes of Leith Hill where their son lay buried was dreadful to his sight. And so, despite all the help and advice of the many friends to whom the Palmers had recourse, the search for a home for the time being proved fruitless. By the end of the summer they had moved into another set of rented lodgings in Reigate.
Palmer crept into that cottage, Herbert remembered, ‘like a sorely wounded animal no longer able to meet his kind’.40 ‘All that is left untouched by the finger of woe is the black cat who was found this morning purring in the copper with two kittens,’41 Palmer told Julia Richmond. Soon this contented feline would be his only companion, for the cottage was not only incommodious, but damp and, at the doctor’s recommendation, the rheumatic Hannah and delicate Herbert retired to Redstone. It was a return which would surely have been encouraged by Linnell, not least since his own wife had fallen ill that summer. He also extended the hand of friendship to Palmer, sending him (as he had once done to Blake) a ton of coal so that he would not be cold. The gesture, however, though thoughtful, was not sufficient to re-warm the relationship between them and the occasional letters Palmer wrote to Linnell during this period are brief, businesslike dispatches. The last token strands of the friendship between them were being allowed to snap.
With nobody but Herbert’s old nursemaid to care for him, Palmer was abandoned to his solitary grief. The six months that followed were probably the most melancholy of his life; but he struggled against depression, resolving at the very least to do his duty, to get on with the work that he could not afford to neglect, especially since More’s illness had incurred heavy medical costs. When not painting, he tried to ‘ward off the ghastly thoughts’ among his ‘dear kind books’.42 It proved a fairly effective policy. Not only did five drawings by him appear in the 1862 summer show but, in the ‘sweet society’ of the authors he loved, he found himself ‘as little miserable as one can be who, in the world, must never more be happy’.43 He found in the Bible – particularly in the morose narratives of Job and the laments of Exodus – emotional fellowship. And though, when the gospels of two Sundays in succession could proffer nothing more comforting than first the parable of the barren fig tree and then the story of the buried talent, his mind was driven to ever more painful meditations, his faith in the long run stood firm. We may sail in an egg shell, with a straw for a mast and a cobweb for a rope, he wrote, quoting from Ben Jonson; but ‘then comes the voice from Heaven, bidding us open our eyes and see, and stretch out our hands and grasp the ANCHOR OF THE SOUL . . .’44
The people he most loved provided another source of consolation. ‘Having nothing left which I do not expect to lose, my entire earthly solace must henceforth be in the wellbeing of my friends,’ he told young Julia Richmond, and he implored her ‘whenever another little budget of events accrues’ to write. ‘Do not “wonder” in future whether “I shall care to hear from you” for though you are a very young lady you are a very old friend.’45 It must have tugged at his heart strings to hear that her brother Willie was winning prizes at the Royal Academy, but he still sent the boy a message to say how much he would like him to visit – though, since it was December and he knew how valuable daylight becomes in winter to artists preparing work for Academy exhibition, he would understand if he did not have the time. He fussed over the news that his old friend Richmond had a cold, putting it down to the dampness of the clay he was sculpting, recommending that he light a fire in his studio two hours before he enters so that he may go into warm vapour rather than the chill dank.
Palmer missed his family. When he felt lonely at tea time, he would set out a chair for his little cat Trot. ‘Up jumps poor puss and between us we make a segment of the circle,’ he told Mrs George. ‘Even the dumb creatures have gratitude and love in their measure, and the time will come when we shall know that the sagacity which finds a new planet is less essential to the perfection of our nature than gratitude and love.’46 He was sympathetic when his brother William yet again presented a problem. After more than twenty years working at the British Museum, William had lost his job in the Department of Antiquities, having been absent through illness (he was suffering a disease of the cranial bones and rheumatism, the minutes of a museum sub-committee record) for almost a year. He was facing imminent beggary, said Palmer, who, having apparently forgiven his deceitful sibling for pawning all his pictures, set about trying to contact trustees who might be persuaded to secure more than the basic superannuation allowance for a man who had four mouths to feed. ‘The future of my poor brother’s children rankles within me,’ for they are ‘clothed with all the desolateness and none of the poetry of sorrow’,47 he told Richmond who in his turn, as so often, tried to help out. For a while, it was hoped that William’s son might be employed in his place as a museum attendant, but although by January of the following year the father was receiving his £46 pension, there is no record of his boy having been given the job.
Palmer had always been generous but the deep sense of charity that characterised his later years was engendered by sorrow. ‘Perhaps without sorrow there is little sympathy for others,’ Palmer suggested; ‘for by sympathy I do not mean any amount of good nature, but fellowship in suffering.’48 Affliction, he wrote, ‘acts like a vigorous stonebreaker upon the flint of our hard hearts’.49 And yet, beyond all the brave efforts to rebuild his life, his sadness always lay waiting; often he could do nothing to fight but gave way to his grief. ‘Today the first snow has fallen upon our dear boy’s grave!’ he wrote that winter to Mrs George as he sat alone by his fireside, the wind moaning round the house. ‘It is a foolish fancy; but I have always felt it very sad that, while we are warm by our winter fireside, those precious limbs, mouldering though they be, of our lost dear ones, should be far away from us, unhoused and in the damp, cold earth, under the wind, and rain, and frost.’50
The single greatest help to Palmer’s recovery came in the form of another death. At the end of November, Alexander Gilchrist passed away. Palmer had grown close to him over the five or so years that he had spent working on his Life of William Blake and had enjoyed many hours at his family home in Cheyne Walk. He had helped to nurse him through the bout of scarlet fever that had eventually killed him. By shifting his focus from his own loss to a fellow sufferer’s predicament, Palmer may have been saved from a more prolonged personal collapse. He proved a staunch friend to Gilchrist’s wife, Anne, doing whatever he could to console her, to sustain her spirits and offer her new hope. The letters he sent her were his longest and most philosophical meditations on the process of mourning and Hannah joined him in sending messages of support. ‘Women who have suffered your bereavement,’ she told the new widow, ‘are said to be under the peculiar protection of the Almighty – subject to his peculiar care tenderness and love.’51
Anne Gilchrist, left so suddenly to fend for herself and her several children, was grateful for their kindness, but she had little time to meditate upon her loss. Among the first tasks that faced her was the need to move house and, barely a month after the demise of the family breadwinner, she had left London and was renting a cottage near Haslemere, while she, like the Palmers, looked for a more permanent home. Though Palmer bombarded her with advice, when it came to practicalities he was completely ineffectual. When Anne was suddenly required at short notice to move he was too busy to help. Within two weeks, she had found a house on her own and by April 1862 she was ensconced in nearby Hindhead.
Palmer persuaded her that she should, with his help, complete the Blake biography left unfinished by her husband. The task would become a source of great solace in their shared grief. Roused from his lethargy, Palmer attended to it punctiliously, correcting anything from basic facts through philosophical meanings to punctuation marks. He was particularly keen to make sure that no indecent or coarse words or irreverent references would be included as Blake, he explained, had often been provoked to write by intense irritation with the result that some of his sentiments could appear blasphemous, and blasphemy, Palmer believed, would have blighted the chances of the book. As a result, the work of a hero whose fierce spiritual purity he had never really understood was subjected to a prudish censorship. His attempts at bowdlerisation, however, were not always successful. There was a story often told by Blake’s patron, Thomas Butts, who said that, calling round on the poet one day, he had found Blake and his wife sitting quietly in their summerhouse freed of ‘those troublesome disguises’ which have prevailed since the Fall. ‘Come in!’ Blake had cried: ‘it is only Adam and Eve, you know!’ Husband and wife had, apparently, gone into character to recite passages from Paradise Lost in their little backyard Eden. Palmer had dismissed this tale. It was unlike Blake, he said. It would be better excised. It remained, however, though other passages did not.
Palmer’s beloved Milton would have been outraged: in his Areopagitica he had launched a fierce attack on censorship. But Palmer was delighted by the results of all his efforts, shame-sparing asterisks included. He could hardly contain his effusions when, in November 1863, the finished volumes finally arrived. Cutting the pages, he read wildly all over the place, relishing every aspect of the work. ‘Surely never book has been put forth more lovingly,’52 he cried. He predicted many print runs and dreamt of debates carried on in periodicals. And even though these were not immediately to come about, Palmer, in collaborating so impassionedly with the Gilchrists on this biography, undoubtedly played a major part in setting off the process of reassessment which, over the ensuing years, was to turn a forgotten engraver into an exalted figure in British art.
After publication, however, his correspondence with Anne Gilchrist rapidly fell away. Perhaps she was too occupied with caring for her family, or maybe she had grown tired of his sententious outpourings on anything from child-rearing practices to the problems of country bakers. But the friendship had served its most important function, setting Palmer back on course to continue the next phase of his life. It was not that the Palmers would ever forget their eldest son: Hannah kept all his possessions – from a bookcase full of the bargain volumes that he had used to rummage for in the Farringdon Road market, to his old schoolboy essays. Palmer, in a drawer in his study, kept a handful of other treasured relics. He seldom dared look at them, but he liked to keep them near him. More remained an obsession. The nineteen-year-old whom a headmaster had praised in the prize-giving two weeks after his death as a boy of unusual promise, became elevated in his father’s memory into a very paragon.