Tennyson’s Gift

‘But I must contrive to meet this Daisy,’ he decided, and produced his small notebook again. He wrote down her name. He also wrote it in letters down the page – D-A-I-S-Y-B-R-A-D-L-E-Y – ready for an instant acrostic poem, which he could sometimes complete in five minutes or less. Twelve letters! Excellent! Three stanzas of four! Two stanzas of six! What a charming child, to have such a convenient name, numerologically speaking! With several days planned at Freshwater Bay, there was plenty of time to make friends with the little girls, and get their addresses, and campaign for their photographs, and send them love poems. But he had discovered it was a great advantage to know names in advance, without asking.

‘I love my love with a D because she is D-D—Daring,’ he mused. ‘I hate her because she is Demanding. I took her to the sign of the Dr—Dromedary, and treated her with Dumplings, Dis-sss—temper and D-D—Desire. Her name is Daisy and she lives –’

Indeed, he was just envisaging the scene on the gusty beach – the little girl paddling with a shrimp net; himself nearby pretending not to notice her, but doing fascinating bunny-rabbit tricks with a pocket handkerchief to ensnare her attention (it never failed) – when he heard the approaching trundle of the Yarmouth cart, and looked up to see Tennyson, the great literary lion of the age, dressed as usual in copious cloak and broad hat, holding a book of his own poems directly in front of his face for better reading, but evidently catching a vague myopic passing blur of Dodgson nevertheless.

There was no time to hide, no time to frame a polite greeting before – ‘Allingham!’ boomed the laureate, as the cart passed Dodgson (pretty closely). Dodgson jumped.

Allingham? He glanced behind him, but could see nobody.

‘Allingham, we dine tomorrow at six! Come afterwards – not before, there’s a good fellow – and I shall read my Enoch Arden, and explain it to you, line by line! We shall confound the critics!’

And before Dodgson could voice a word of protest, the poet had passed by. The rush of air pulled Dodgson’s boater from his head and left it dusty in the road.

This was not the welcome Dodgson had anticipated. He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. How could he make a visit now? He picked up his hat again, and touched his head carefully with each hand in turn. Still there, still there; still Dodgson, not Allingham. He looked up at the old man, who now appeared (no, surely not) to be dancing with glee.

On the breeze, Dodgson smelled the ozone from the sea, the scent of roses, fresh lead paint, hot buttered toast and potassium cyanide, all mixed together with the lobster curry. He looked up the lane towards Tennyson’s home, and then back to the blue sizzling bay, where children would soon be packing their shrimp nets. Salty and sandy, and with their hair in pretty rat-tails, they would head home for tea at the nearby hotels.

Absently, he flicked through his manuscript.

Dear oh dear, how late it’s getting …

Mary Ann, Mary Ann, fetch me a pair of gloves …

I shall sit here, on and off, for days …

You? Who are you?

As he pondered Mrs Cameron’s interesting corner of the Isle of Wight, another glass plate whizzed across her garden and broke with a shattering sound like someone falling into a cucumber frame. At Freshwater Bay, he reflected, whichever direction you went in, the people were mad.

‘Which way?’ he said quietly to himself. ‘Wh-Wh—Which way?’

Two

When Lorenzo Fowler woke on Thursday morning to the sound of waves and seagulls, and the scream of a maddened beach dragged down by the wave, he had trouble initially guessing where he was. He normally woke to the sound of London traffic and coster boys. Freshwater Bay had been an impulsive decision, prompted by little Jessie complaining of the fug of Ludgate Circus (‘Pa, this heat!’) and accomplished with a spirit of ‘What are we waiting for?’ that had ‘yankee’ written all over it.

Lorenzo as a caring father needed no other incitement than his little daughter’s cry. She was a pale, freckly child with orange ringlets, and he still felt guilty at transplanting her to England – such a backward land in terms of diet, clean water and fresh air. So at her first complaint, he shoved a few heads in boxes, packed his charts and silk blindfold in violet tissue, selected some hot, progressive Fowlers & Wells pamphlets (subjects included anti-lacing, temperance, tobacco, octagonal architecture and hydropathic cholera cures) and took the earliest train to the New Forest.

Even in a mercy dash, it seemed, a phrenologist did not travel light. For phrenology was Lorenzo Fowler’s lifelong pursuit, and after thirty years he was not so much proud of this highly dodgy profession as still busting the buttons of his fancy satin waistcoat. Some people grow tired of fads, but not Lorenzo Fowler. For him, phrenology was the fad that would not die. Talk to him ignorantly of phrenology as the science of ‘bumps’ and he might throw back his magnificent head to laugh (baring his excellent white teeth) before genially setting you straight for half an hour, dazzling you with his specialist vocabulary, and at the end of it selling you a special new demountable model of the brain for the knock-down rate of two and nine.

Of course, for practising the craft of head-feeling, all you needed were a pair of hands, a good spatial sense, and a map of the mental organs fixed firmly in your mind. But Lorenzo Niles Fowler was more than a phrenologist. He was also showman and evangelist, whose personal belief was that the market for phrenology had never been so vigorous, not even in its heyday in his native United States. Why, already on this trip to the Isle of Wight he had used a cursory reading to pay the carter from Yarmouth, telling him, ‘Such a large Self Esteem you have! And what Amativeness!’ Gratified by this mysterious, flattering talk from an exotic foreigner, the normally morose carter had gladly waived the fee when he dropped his passengers at the Albion Hotel, right on the edge of the bay. Lorenzo smiled. It worked every time. Tell people they have abnormally large Amativeness (sexuality by a fancier name) and they are well disposed to phrenology – and phrenologists – for ever after. It’s just something they happen to enjoy hearing.

Jessie was awake and dressed already, playing with heads in the chintzy sitting room. She was eight, and precocious, and though the scene might strike an outsider as altogether gruesome, she was happy enough, having known no other dollies in her life save these big bald plaster ones with nothing below the neck. Poor kid. She had no idea how it looked. Not only were there detached heads all over the floor, but she had on a thick dress of red tartan – a tragically bad choice when you consider the ginger hair.

‘Pa?’ said Jessie. ‘Oh there you are, Pa! Ada and I breakfasted already, but we made them save you some brains!’

‘My favourite!’

This was the Fowlers’ daily joke. It was funny because they were vegetarians as well as phrenologists – and looking on the bright side, at least it was generally dispensed with quite early in the day.

‘Brains! Ha ha, ho ho!’ laughed Lorenzo, slapping his knees, while the nun-like Ada, their British maid, wordlessly unpacked some pamphlets from a trunk, and tried not to count how many times she’d heard this one before. You have to look at it from Ada’s point of view. A family of American freaks that delighted in brain jokes? No, the gods of domestic employment had not exactly smiled upon Ada.

‘Test me on the heads, please, Pa! Ada can’t do it, she’s too silly. She’s too British!’

‘Try not to be rude about Ada, dearest,’ said Lorenzo, while he blindfolded his horrid little daughter, as though it was the most natural thing in the world.

‘Tight enough? Not too tight? We are guests in this country, Jessie,’ he continued, as he secured the strings with a dainty bow at the back of the little girl’s well formed head. He was a big man with deft fingers. His hands were always warm.

‘We have a duty to behave with the very best of manners. In particular we should lead the way in courtesy to the lower orders.’

‘But what if our hosts are all sillies and nincompoops like Ada?’ asked Jessie.

Ada left the room, and slammed the door.

‘Well, I agree, dearest,’ said Lorenzo. ‘That sometimes makes it hard.’

Lorenzo had brought a selection of plaster heads on holiday, the way another man might bring a selection of neck ties. Spreading them on the rug in a semi-circle, he handed them one by one to the blindfolded Jessie, who sat with her legs out straight, bouncing her calves alternately up and down.

‘Take your time,’ he said, as her little hands swarmed over the polished plaster. But his breath was wasted. Time was something Jessie clearly did not need.

‘It’s too easy, Pa,’ pouted the little girl.

‘No, it is not. Phrenology is a high science.’

‘Well, this one’s the Idiot of Amsterdam, aged twenty-five, I know that.’

‘Very well. I take away the Idiot of Amsterdam, aged twenty-five. But first tell me about him. How do you ascertain his idiocy, Oh little clever one?’

‘But it’s so obvious! The flat, short brow, indicating no reflective or perceptive qualities! A cat could tell you that! I mean, if a cat had the Organ of Language, which of course it doesn’t. A cat has a large Organ of Secretiveness!’

Jessie never stopped showing off. It was one of the reasons why she had so few friends. (The other reason was that she never minced words about other people’s cranial deficiencies.)

She picked up another head, felt it quickly, and cast it aloft. ‘You can take away the Manchester Idiot, too, Pa, while you are about it.’

Lorenzo caught the head before it fell to the floor. Jessie was getting over-excited.

‘Now, now, child,’ he said. ‘These things cost money.’ He handed her another. ‘Who’s this?’

Jessie whooped. ‘It’s the Montrose Calculator! Papa, you brought the Montrose Calculator! With the enormous Organ of Number!’

‘What’s the story we tell about the Montrose Calculator, Jessie?’

‘That when asked how he could calculate the number of seconds a person had been alive, he’d say’ (and here she assumed a terrible Highlands accent) ‘I dinna ken hoo I do’t. I jest think, and the ainsa comes inta ma heed!’

He patted her shoulder, partly to congratulate her, partly in the hope of slowing her down.

‘That’s enough for now,’ he said, but ‘No! One more! One more!’ she pleaded, and blindly reached out her chubby arms. How could he resist his darling? Especially when she looked so lovely – so right – in that violet blindfold? Lorenzo opened a special, individual box, and handed her a new head.

‘Who’s this, Pa?’ she asked in a lowered tone, her face tilted upwards as she eagerly mothered the head in her lap, like something run mad by grief in a Jacobean tragedy. Lorenzo smiled but said nothing. His ruse had worked; the little girl was intrigued. The original owner of this head was no murderer, or idiot, or cunning boy.

‘Is he an artist, Papa?’

‘He is, you clever child. What makes you say so?’

‘He has Constructiveness and Ideality very large. Who is he, Pa?’ She stroked the head, as though smoothing away its cares. ‘He seems to lack Firmness completely, what a shame. I’ve got enormously big Firmness, haven’t I?’

Lorenzo smiled. It was true. There was no denying it.

‘Can we feel my enormously big Firmness later, Pa?’

Jessie removed her blindfold to look at the name on the base.

‘Benjamin Robert Hay-don,’ she read. She stuck out a lip. ‘Haydon. Who’s he?’

‘Mr Haydon was an English painter of great historical canvases and murals, Jessie, who killed himself before you were born.’

‘Killed himself?’ She opened her eyes wide. ‘Oooooh.’

Lorenzo felt very proud. This kid was such a chip off the old block.

‘Was he famous?’ she asked.

‘Famous, but poor. Artistically, some might have called him rich – but no, I’m lying. To be honest, even artistically Haydon was very, very poor. In other words, a useful case for lecturing purposes! He was also a phrenologist, Jessie – from the earliest days of our great science, when few people believed.’

Jessie was intrigued. Her whole life revolved around the heads of dead people, and mostly odd, sad, idiotic or self-slaughtering ones at that. Any other eight-year-old would have changed the subject to Humpty Dumpty or twinkle-twinkle-little-star, but Jessie wanted the full grisly biography. She knew as well as her father did: this stuff would be dynamite on stage. ‘So why did he kill himself?’

‘Indebted. Disappointed. Nobody wanted his paintings, except a back view of Napoleon –’

‘Did you bring Napoleon? I love doing Napoleon!’

‘– Except a back view of Napoleon on St Helena,’ continued her father (whose Organ of Firmness was more than equal to Jessie’s), ‘which he was obliged to paint again and again, some twenty-three times.’

Jessie tried hard to imagine the disappointment that drove Benjamin Robert Haydon to kill himself. It didn’t work. After a short pause, she tried again.

‘That’s silly,’ she said, at last. ‘To kill yourself just because you have to keep doing the same thing, again and again.’

‘I agree,’ said Lorenzo. He had been doing the same thing, again and again, since 1834. He absolutely loved it. He looked out of the window to the deserted morning bay, with its bathing machines drawn up on the sand, its cheerful patriotic flags straining in the stiff breeze. He cracked his knuckles. ‘But luckily for us, my darling, there are a lot of very confused and unhappy people out there.’

As Jessie had said, it was hot in London. Queen Victoria had already quit for Osborne, this being the first and last period of history when the Isle of Wight had a fashionable cachet, and well-appointed people longed – positively longed – for an invitation to East Cowes. The centre of London stank, and even in the relatively rural Kensington setting of Little Holland House, it was hot enough to broil lobsters without putting them in pans. On Thursday evening, the renowned, long-bearded painter G. F. Watts and his pretty young wife Ellen were sticky and agitated, and had reached the usual point in their near-to-bedtime arguments when the noted painter pleaded ‘Stop being so dramatic!’ – which was a reasonable enough entreaty until you considered that the wife in question was that glory of the London stage, the sixty-guineas-a-week juvenile phenomenon, Miss Ellen Terry.

Watts was fed up; Ellen was fed up. He was forty-seven; she was sixteen, so they both had their reasons. But it was a bit rich to call Ellen ‘dramatic’ in the derogative sense, even so. ‘Dramatic’ had been a continual reproach from this weary grey-beard husband ever since that overcast day in February when foolishly they wed. Ellen wished ‘artistic’ carried the same force of accusation, but somehow it didn’t. Yelling ‘Don’t be so artistic!’ – though perfectly justified when your dreamy distant husband seriously calls himself ‘England’s Michelangelo’ and affects a skullcap – never sounded quite as cutting.

On the other hand, theatricality was certainly in the air. ‘Drrramatic, am I?’ demanded Ellen in a deep thrilling voice (the sort of voice for which the word timbre was invented). She clutched a tiny butter knife close to her pearly throat, with her body leaned backwards from the waist. It looked terribly uncomfortable, and Watts was at a loss, as usual. He stroked his beard. He adjusted his skullcap. Something was clearly ‘up’.

‘I only said Mrs Prinsep is very kind!’

Ellen groaned and whinnied, like a pony.

‘But she is our host, my patron. Really, Ellen, surely you see how lucky we are to live at Little Holland House! I hope I may live peacefully here for the remainder of my life.’

‘Painting huge public walls when they fall available, I suppose?’ she snapped. ‘For no money?’

‘Yes, painting walls. What insult can be levelled at the painting of walls? You make it sound trivial, Ellen. Yet when I beat Haydon in the Westminster competition –’

‘I know, you told me about Haydon and the Westminster competition, you told me so many times!’

‘Well, then you know that the poor man died at his own hand. Painting walls is of significance to some people, my dear. My designs for the Palace of Westminster were preferred to his, and Haydon was shattered, poor man. Walls let him down! Walls collapsed on him!’

Ellen narrowed her eyes.

‘But on the main point, my dear,’ continued Watts, ‘Why – why – should I want to earn an independent living from my art when we can abide here quite comfortably at someone else’s expense?’

And then Ellen screamed. Loud and ringing from the diaphragm, exactly as Mrs Kean had trained her. Watts ran to the door and locked it. This wayward Shakespearean juvenile was always transforming the scene into some sort of third act climax, butter knife at the ready. (The effect was only slightly ruined by the knife having butter on it, and crumbs.)

Watts collapsed on one of Little Holland House’s many scented sofas. He had married this young theatrical phenomenon in all good faith, assured by his snooty patrons that she would thank him for his protection; he had been in love with her profile, her stature – in short, her beauty with a capital B! But within five months he looked back on that marriage with confusion and even horror. This beauty was a real person; she was not an ideal form. She expected things from him that he could not even name, let alone deliver. This regular money argument, for example: it always went the same way. Here they were, comfortably adored and protected, and Ellen had to show off about it.

‘If you would let me work, George –’ she would say. And then all this sixty guineas nonsense would be rolled out again. Watts did not want sixty sullied guineas a week. He did not want to paint lucrative portraits, either. No, Watts was the sort of chap who loses his invoice book down the back of the piano and doesn’t notice for four and a half years. Watts wanted to live with the Prinseps, conceive great moral paintings of an edifying nature, sip water over dinner, and be told with comforting regularity that he was the genius of the age.

The sad thing was that when he married Ellen, he assumed she wanted the same release from her own career. After all, her career was the theatre. But he had learned that while you can take the child out of the theatre, it is a more difficult matter to extract the theatre from the child. She still dressed up quite often. She danced in pink tights. A couple of times she had sat next to him at dinner, dressed as a young man, and he had talked to her for two hours without in any way piercing her disguise, or noticing the absence of his wife.

‘My dear,’ he began, ‘If you continue with this, I shall have a headache.’ But she drew away from him and took a deep breath, so he gave up. If experience was to be trusted, Ellen would probably forge into a famous speech now, and – ah, here it was. ‘Make me a willow cabin.’

Make ME a weell-ow cabin

(so Ellen began, in the thrilling voice again, with fabulous diction)

at yourrr gate!,

(emphatic, with a little stamp of the foot)

And call-ll-ll

(this bit softly cooed) uppon my SOUL (a plaintive yowl of longing)

with-in the HOUSE!

(no nonsense)

Such a shame it was from Twelfth Night, Watts reflected, as the recital progressed. Watts had been rather touchy about Twelfth Night ever since he painted a huge allegorical picture for the wall of a railway terminus on the theme ‘If music be the food of love’ which had too much delighted his critics. A naked Venus with a bib at her neck sat down to a hearty lunch of tabors, fiddles and bagpipes. He still didn’t see what was so damned roll-on-the-floor funny about it. The bagpipes – the exact size of an Aberdeen Angus – looked particularly delicious. Venus burped behind her hand. The knife and fork were four feet long.

Meanwhile, Ellen continued:

Writeloyalcantonsofcontemned love

(breathless, fast)

And sing them … LOUD!

(long pause)

even in the dead of night

(airy, throwaway)

Halloooooooo your name to the Rreverrberrrate hills

(welsh R-rolling)

And make the babbling ‘gossip’ of the air

(an arch curtsey to Mistress Gossip, that rare minx)

Cry out!

(sharp)

‘Olivi-aaaaa!’

Watts liked Shakespeare, but only as stuff to read in bed. All this prancing about was too tiring. Acting was the lowest of all arts. Still, he thought Ellen’s performance was going rather well, and he had in fact just got his eyes closed, the better for listening to the poetry with, when the emotional undercurrent turned abruptly again and his wife burst into tears. She flung down the butter knife and left the room.

‘What’s wrong now?’ Watts asked, jerked awake. It was all beyond him. Settling back on his sofa, with skullcap pulled over his eyes, he thought hard about what he had just heard from Ellen’s lips. Yes, he thought hard. But on the other hand it would be fair to say that the expression ‘sub-text’ meant even less to Watts than to any other Victorian luminary you could mention. So what preoccupied him now was not the underlying tenor of Ellen’s theatrical performance, in particular its expression of tortured young female longing. Instead it was the following: should the ‘babbling gossip of the air’ wear a hat? Should she sit on a gold-trimmed cloud, to indicate the airiness of her babble? And pondering these important questions Il Signor Michelangelo Watts arranged himself comfortably – though unconsciously – in a well-practised foetal position.

If it was hard to keep up with Ellen’s stormy emotions, it was also impossible to contain them. The temperament of Mrs Watts was alarmingly dissimilar from Watts’s own. For his own part, any vexation might be healed by the gentle removal of whatever thorn was temporarily in his paw (usually a big bill for buckets of gouache, which the Prinseps paid with their usual handsomeness); whereas Ellen turned hell-cat when offered assistance, especially in the form of Watts’s edifying proverbs. Alas, he was a man who dearly loved a verity. ‘Youth’s a stuff will not endure,’ was the sort of thing. ‘Fine words butter no parsnips,’ the great allegorical painter now consoled himself, for instance – and was instantly preoccupied conceiving an enormous fresco for Covent Garden Market, of tough root vegetables turning their ungreased backs, perhaps, on a bunch of spouting poets with long hair and big shirts.

Ellen had let her nose go red, which was too bad. Such a ruddy child was quite wrong for the Victorians’ popular aesthetic of alabaster flesh. In ‘Choosing’, his latest portrait of her, Watts had allowed her a certain pinky flush, to reflect the surrounding camellias, but he now believed this a profound mistake, and intended to overpaint with a light green at the earliest chance. Overhearing two grand comic novelists at Little Holland House discussing the flesh tones in the picture, he had been quite wounded by their remarks.

‘Know what she’s been doing,’ said one great comic novelist, nudging with his elbow.

‘Very good, I must remember that,’ said the other. Dickens and Trollope, someone said they were.

Despite its lovely pinkness, then, ‘Choosing’ had few happy associations for Watts. For one thing, it had been a tremendous bother to get the violets into the picture (in Ellen’s awkwardly raised left hand), and in any case the allegory failed. Not since ‘Striking a Careless Pose’ (in which a tall king cuffed a young servant who had dropped something), had one of G. F.’s notions misfired so badly. Ellen was supposed to be choosing between the big scentless showy camellia and the humble perfumed violet, yet it was quite clear from the composition of the picture that her preference for the camellias was pretty strong already. Meanwhile the humble symbolic violets were so extremely shy and retiring that whatever they represented in the picture (marriage? humility? Watts?) got no look-in whatsoever.