ARTISTS AND WRITERS.
MEN who are not supposed to be mercenary often make a great deal of
money. Most of our artists rose from very humble beginnings. Turner was
the son of a hair-dresser. Wilkie was desperately poor; so was Barry;
and William Etty, that great colourist, was the son of a baker in
York—was bound apprentice, wholly against his will, to a printer in Hull;
but he released himself from the shackles of so uncongenial a pursuit.
He was greatly self-taught, for the help he derived for a hundred
guineas, as a private pupil of Sir Thomas Lawrence, seems rather to have
baffled him with despair; yet he became the most surprising and effective
flesh-painter of his age. The nude style of his figures has often been a
topic of remark with a certain order of critics. Etty himself was wont
to say, “‘To the pure in heart, all things are pure.’ My aim in all my
great pictures has been to paint some great moral on the heart.” He
lived, in 1849, to find all his great works—130 pictures—in the great
room of the Society of Arts: he died that year. By the universal
acclamation of artists he is regarded as our English Titian, and some
claim for him a still higher place, for his canvases have not only the
wonderful colour of that master, but the splendour of Paul Veronese. He
died in his beloved and native city of York; and the poor baker’s boy, by
his industry and genius, had become the master of a considerable fortune.
Actors and actresses also have made much money. Amongst the money-making
men may emphatically be placed David Garrick, who was fond of money, and
careful about it to the last. Some of our earlier circus people seem to
have made much money.—Batty was reputed to have died worth half a
million.—Ducrow gave himself extraordinary airs. When the Master Cutler
and Town Council of Sheffield paid Ducrow a visit, with the principal
manufacturers and their families, Ducrow sent word that he only waited on
crowned heads, and not upon a set of dirty knife-grinders.—Philip Astley
was born in 1742, at Newcastle-under-Lyme, where his father carried on
the business of a cabinet-maker. He received little or no education, and
after working a few years with his father, enlisted in a cavalry
regiment. His imposing appearance, being over six feet in height, with
the proportions of a Hercules, and the voice of a Stentor, attracted
attention to him; and his capture of a standard at the battle of Emsdorff
made him one of the celebrities of his regiment. While serving in the
army, he learned some feats of horsemanship from an itinerant equestrian
named Johnson, perhaps the man under whose management Price introduced
equestrian performances at Sadler’s Wells, and often exhibited them for
the amusement of his comrades. On his discharge from the army, he was
presented by General Elliot with a horse, and thereupon he bought another
in Smithfield, and commenced those open-air performances in Lambeth which
have already been noticed.
After a time he built a rude circus upon a piece of ground near
Westminster Bridge, which had been used as a timber-yard, being the site
of the theatre which has been known by his name for nearly a century.
Only the seats were roofed over, the ring in which he performed being
open to the air. One of his horses, which he had taught to perform a
variety of tricks, he soon began to exhibit, at an earlier period of each
day, in a large room in Piccadilly, where the entertainment was eked out
with conjuring and _ombres Chinoises_—a kind of shadow pantomine.
Having saved some money out of these performances, Astley erected his
amphitheatre. At the same time he had to contend with a fierce
competition from what was then the Royal Circus, which afterwards was
called the Surrey Theatre. Astley’s, however, soon became the popular
place of amusement, and as such was visited and described by Horace
Walpole. The fame of the place received a further illustration in the
remark of Dr. Johnson, who, speaking of the popularity of certain
preachers, and the ease with which they get a crowd to hear them, said,
“Were Astley to preach a sermon standing on his head, or on a horse’s
back, he would collect a multitude to hear him, but no wise man would say
he had made a better sermon for that.”
Let us now turn to a master of homely English—a man whose name was, at
one time, in every one’s mouth, and an author, whose books, at one time,
every one read. His moral works excel in descriptive power. In politics
his savage personalities encircle sarcasm; his faculty for inventing
national nick-names, and mastery of a Saxon style of inimitable raciness,
have given his writings historical reputation. He has never been
equalled among political writers in his capacity of explaining what he
understood. He was the first journalist who called attention to the
condition of the working classes, I mean William Cobbett.
William Cobbett was born at Farnham, in Surrey, in 1776. His father was
a very poor farmer, who knew enough to teach his boys to read, and had
enough of intellectual originality to think that the triumph of
Washington in the American War of Independence was just. William began
as a mere child to do something towards earning his own livelihood, and
took great delight in the flowers which, while weeding in great folks’
gardens, he saw. When eleven years old, he heard some one speak of the
splendid flowers in the Royal Gardens at Kew. Without a word of
announcement, and with sixpence-halfpenny in his pocket, he set off to
seek employment in that irresistible Paradise. When he reached Richmond
his funds were reduced to threepence, and he was very hungry. In a
shop-window, however, he saw the “Tale of a Tub,” price threepence. Mind
triumphed over body; he bought the tale; and sat under a hay-stack
reading it till he fell asleep. He was delighted beyond measure with the
piece, and continued to read and re-read it for many years. The
circumstance was not of happy omen. Swift’s terrible tale we should
pronounce to be as well-fitted to sap the moral and religious principles
of a lad as any book in the English language; and lack of moral principle
was the fatal defect of Cobbett throughout life.
He found employment at Kew, and no doubt gloated over the floral
splendours which he had come to see; but he returned to Farnham, and grew
up in his father’s house. He made an appointment one day to meet some
young friends and accompany them to Guildford Fair; but coming upon the
high road as the London coach was passing in full career, he made up his
mind on the spur of the moment to start for London. He arrived at the
foot of Ludgate Hill with half-a-crown in his pocket. An honest
hop-seller, who knew his father, took him by the hand, and he found work
as an Attorney’s clerk. He speaks with unlimited abhorrence of the
roguery he witnessed and the misery he endured in this place. “No part
of my life,” he says, “has been totally unattended with pleasure except
the eight or nine months I passed in Gray’s Inn. The office—for so the
dungeon was called where I wrote—was so dark that on cloudy days we were
obliged to burn candles. I worked like a galley-slave from five in the
morning till eight or nine at night, and sometimes all night long. * * *
When I think of the _saids_ and _so forths_, and the counts of tautology
that I scribbled over—when I think of those sheets of seventy-two words,
and those lines of two inches apart—my brain turns. Gracious Heaven! if
I am doomed to be wretched, bury me beneath Iceland snows, and let me
feed on blubber; stretch me under the burning Line, and deny me Thy
propitious dews; nay, if it be Thy will, suffocate me with the infected
and pestilential air of a democratic club-room; but save me, save me from
the desk of an attorney!” Anything seemed better than this. William,
acting again on the spur of the moment, enlisted. For more than a year
he did duty at Chatham. Here he mastered grammar—an acquisition which he
always regarded as the basis of his fortunes. He read also in a
circulating library, swallowing enormous quantities of useful or useless
knowledge, and laying it up in a memory of great tenacity. His father
meanwhile was treated by him with heartless neglect. The old man had
been offended by his running away, and appears to have made no effort to
release him from the bondage of the attorney’s office. When he enlisted,
however, his father relented, and wrote saying that the last hay-rick or
pocket of hops at Farnham would be sold off to buy his discharge. But
William vouchsafed no reply.
Cobbett’s regiment was ordered to Canada, and he accompanied it to St.
John’s, New Brunswick. Here his conduct as a soldier was exemplary. His
talent and activity made him conspicuous, and he became sergeant-major,
raised, though he was still but about twenty, over the heads of thirty
sergeants. In 1791 the regiment returned to England, and he procured his
discharge “in consideration of his good behaviour, and the services he
had rendered his regiment.” Then occurred one of the most strange and
ambiguous episodes in his life. He lodged charges of pecuniary
defalcation against four of his late officers. A day was appointed for
their trial by court-martial. The functionaries met, the accused were
present, all was ready for commencement, when it transpired that Cobbett
was missing. As he was the accuser, the trial was adjourned to a stated
day in order that an opportunity might be afforded him to appear. The
court again met; he was again absent; the accused officers, accordingly,
were acquitted. They made some show of a wish to proceed against
Cobbett, and what looks very like a feint of arresting him in his refuge
at Farnham. But the upshot was that he escaped to France, and passed
from France, when the revolutionary atmosphere became too hot for him, to
America. Mr. Watson very properly devotes a good deal of attention to
these circumstances, and we are bound to say that we agree with him in
thinking that Cobbett was bribed with a good round sum to suppress his
charges. It was, of course, an act of flagrant and base dishonesty; but
there is nothing in Cobbett’s life to prove that he shrank from
dishonesty, or was superior to temptation. He was a most affectionate
husband and father, and many of his advices to young men and to the poor
are excellent. His talent was of a coarse kind, but very great. His
activity and indomitable spirit deserve all admiration. He boasted,
probably with truth, that he had never passed an idle day.
Cobbett first distinguished himself in America by publishing a fierce
pamphlet against Priestley. He was soon a noted political writer, taking
the side of ultra-Toryism, and denouncing with furious emphasis all that
savoured of Radicalism or Republicanism. His talent was indubitable; and
as vehement and able rhetoric on the Church-and-King side was then in
demand, he attracted attention. On returning to England, he was welcomed
by the authorities as an out-and-out Tory, and became the most violent,
uncompromising, and popular of writers on the ministerial side. It is
worthy of recollection that William Cobbett had his windows broken by the
mob for the vehemence of his anti-popular utterances. According to his
own account he met Pitt at dinner in Mr. Windham’s house; and the fact is
not impossible, so highly did ministers at that time prize the aid of any
one who could fight for them against the patriots.
By what steps it is needless to trace, Cobbett gradually sidled round,
and left the cause of the king for that of the mob. His circumstances
became embarrassed, and he fled to America, leaving behind him debts to
the value of upwards of £33,000. He resided at Long Island, near New
York, and continued to edit his _Register_. In a few years the
irrepressible giant—he stood six foot two, with shoulders and chest and
girth to match—returned to England. He had once denounced Tom Paine as a
miscreant whom no words could blacken. He now brought Tom Paine’s bones
with him, bent upon having a grand monument built over them in England.
In this instance he signally misunderstood his countrymen. The dead
man’s bones were laughed at, and declared to be those of an old nigger.
Cobbett proposed to sell 20,000 hair-rings at a sovereign a-piece, with
some of Paine’s hair in each; and he was reminded that when Paine died he
was almost bald. Cobbett had at last to shuffle the bones underground,
no one knows where. His own eloquence and sarcasm made him popular, and
procured him a seat in parliament. He was now the fiercest of democrats.
He assailed Protestantism and detested ministers of religion. His
quackery grew worse and worse until he died in 1835.
Sir Francis Chantrey was a poor lad. He began his career by being a
carver on wood. Rogers used to say—“One day Chantrey said to him, ‘Do
you recollect that about twenty-five years ago a journeyman came to your
house from the wood-carver employed by you and Mr. Hope, to talk about
these ornaments (pointing to some on a mahogany sideboard), and that you
gave him a drawing to execute them by.’ Rogers replied that he
recollected it well. ‘Well,’ said Chantrey, ‘I was that journeyman.’”
Chantrey practised portrait-painting both at Sheffield and after he came
to London. It was in allusion to him that Lawrence said—“A broken-down
painter will make a very good sculptor.”
In 1823, London society was much exercised on the subject of literary
gains. Miss Wynn writes in her “Diaries of a Lady of Quality”—“I heard
to-day from Mr. Rogers that Constable, the bookseller, told him last May
that he paid the author of ‘Waverley’ the sum of £110,000. To that may
now be added the produce of ‘Red Gauntlet,’ and ‘St. Ronan’s Well;’ for I
fancy Quentin Durward’ was at least printed, if not published. I asked
whether the ‘Tales of my Landlord,’ which do not bear the same name, were
taken into calculation, and was told they were, but of course the poems
were not. All this has been done in twenty years.” In 1803, an unknown
Mr. Scott’s name was found as the author of three very good ballads in
Lewis’s “Tales of Wonder.” This was his first publication.—Pope, who
until now had been considered as the poet who had made the most by his
works, died worth about £800 a-year.—Johnson, for his last and best work,
his “Lives of the Poets,” published after the “Rambler” and the
“Dictionary” had established his fame, got two hundred guineas, to which
was added one hundred more. Mr. Hayward, in a note, adds—“‘Waverley’
having been published in 1814, the sum mentioned by Constable was earned
in nine years, by eleven novels in three volumes each, and three series
of ‘Tales of my Landlord,’ making nine volumes more; eight novels
twenty-four volumes, being yet to come. Scott’s first publication,
‘Translations from the German,’ was in 1796. During the whole of his
literary life he was profitably engaged in miscellaneous writing and
editing; and whatever the expectations raised by has continued popularity
and great profits, they were surpassed by the sale of the collected and
illustrated edition of the novels commenced under his own revision in
1829. Altogether, the aggregate amount gained by Scott in his lifetime,
very far exceeds any sum hitherto named as accruing to any other man from
authorship. Pope inherited a fortune, saved and speculated; and we must
come at once to modern times to find plausible subjects of comparison.
T. Moore’s profits, spread over his life, yield but a moderate income.
Byron’s did not exceed £20,000. Talfourd once showed me a calculation,
by which he made out that Dickens, soon after the commencement of
‘Nicholas Nickleby,’ _ought_ to have been in the receipt of £10,000
a-year. Thackeray never got enough to live handsomely and lay by. Sir
E. B. Lytton is said to have made altogether from £80,000 to £100,000 by
his writings’. We hear of 500,000 francs (£20,000) having been given in
France for Histories—to MM. Thiers and Lamartine for example; but the
largest single payment ever made to an author for a book, was the cheque
for £20,000, _on account_, paid by Messrs. Longman to Macaulay soon after
the appearance of the third and fourth volumes of his History, the terms
being that he should receive three-fourths of the net profits.” This
note of Mr. Hayward’s, it should be remembered, was written in 1864.
Macaulay cleared a fine sum by his History, and so did the publishers.
During the nine years, ending with the 25th of June, 1857, Messrs.
Longman disposed of 30,978 copies of the first volume of the History;
50,783 copies during the nine years ending with June, 1866; and 52,392
copies during the nine years ending with June, 1875. Within a generation
of its first appearance, upwards of 150,000 copies of the History will
have been printed and sold in the United Kingdom alone.
It is to be questioned, when her life comes to be written, whether any
author has been more successful, in a pecuniary point of new, than Miss
Braddon, whose “Lady Audley’s Secret” at once placed her on the pinnacle
of fame and fortune, and yet she began the world as a ballet-girl.
Few Irishmen, in a literary and political point of view, did better than
the Right Hon. John Wilson Croker. In his “Memoirs,” Charles Mayne Young
thus speaks of his rise and progress:—
“I suspect few people now alive are aware of the commencement of
Croker’s career in London. Horace Smith, James’s brother, and one of
the joint authors of ‘Rejected Addresses,’ told me that he, his
brother, and Cumberland, formed the staff of the _Morning Post_ when
Colonel Mellish was its sole proprietor. On a certain quarter-day,
when he was in the habit of meeting them at the office and paying
them their salary, he took occasion to pass them unqualified
commendation for the great ability they had brought to bear upon his
journal. He assured them that the circulation of the paper had
quadrupled since their connection with it; ‘but—but—that he was,
nevertheless, under the necessity of dispensing with their pens for
the future.’ The two Smiths were so utterly unprepared for such a
declaration, that they were tongue-tied. Not so the testy
Cumberland, who took care to make himself as clearly understood as if
he had been the veritable Sir Fretful Plagiary.
“‘What,’ he asked his employer, ‘the d—l do you mean? In the same
breath in which you laud your servants to the skies, and express your
sense of obligation to them, you discharge them oven without the
usual month’s warning!’
“Mellish, quite unmoved, replied—‘You must know, good sirs, that I
care for my paper, not for its principles, but as an investment; and
it stands to reason, that the heavier my outgoings, the less my
profits. I do, as I have said, value your merits highly; but not as
highly as you charge me for them. Now, in future, I can command the
services of one man, who will do the work of three for the wage of
one.’
“‘The deuce you can,’ said Cumberland. ‘He must be a phœnix. Where,
pray, may this omniscient genius be met with?’
“‘In the next room! I will send him to you.’
“As he left, a young man entered, with a well-developed skull, a
searching eye, and a dauntless address.
“‘So, sir,’ screamed out Cumberland, ‘you must have an uncommon good
opinion of yourself! You consider yourself, I am told, three times
as able as any one of us; for you undertake to do an amount of work,
single-handed, which we have found enough for us all.’ ‘I am not
afraid,’ said the young man, with imperturbable _sang froid_, ‘of
doing all that is required of me.’ They all three then warned him of
the tact, discretion, and knowledge of books and men required—of the
difficulties of which he must expect to find an enterprise of such
magnitude beset, &c., &c. They began then to sound his depth; but on
politics, belles lettres, political economy, even the drama, they
found him far from shallow. Cumberland, transported out of himself
by his modest assurance, snatched up his hat, smashed it on his head,
rammed snuff incontinently up his nose, and then rushed by Mellish,
who was in the adjoining room, swearing, and saying as he left,
‘Confound the potato. He’s so tough, there’s no peeling him!’ The
tough potato was John Wilson Croker.”
That Charles Dickens made a great deal of money, all the world is well
aware. That in the tale of “David Copperfield,” a little of his childish
life was outlined, was known, or rather suspected; but till his life
appeared, no one had the least idea how low down in the world he and his
family were, and how much more creditable to him was his rise.
If it is good for a man to bear the yoke in his youth, Dickens certainly
had this advantage. We have seldom read a more touching picture than
that which is given of the life of the neglected, untaught, half-starved
boy at this time. It is tragic and affecting enough in itself, but it is
still more impressive as suggesting the possible lot of hundreds and
thousands in this great London of ours. The one boy, by means of
marvellous genius, forces his way to the front; but who is to tell the
story of the obscure multitude who perish in the struggle? What
imagination has ever pictured scenes as tragic as the following
experiences?—
“It is wonderful to me how I could have been so easily cast away at
such an age. It is wonderful to me, that even after my descent into
the poor little drudge I had been since we came to London, no one had
compassion enough on me—a child of singular abilities, quick, eager,
delicate, and soon hurt, bodily or mentally—to suggest that something
might have been spared, as certainly it might have been, to place me
at any common school. Our friends, I take it, were tired out. No
one made any sign. My father and mother were quite satisfied. They
could hardly have been more so if I had been twenty years of age,
distinguished at a grammar-school, and going to Cambridge.
“The blacking warehouse was the last house on the left-hand side of
the way, at old Hungerford-stairs. It was a crazy, tumble-down old
house, abutting of course on the river, and literally overrun with
rats. Its wainscotted rooms, and its rotten floors and staircase,
and the old grey rats swarming down in the cellars, and the sound of
their squeaking and scuffling coming up the stairs at all times, and
the dirt and decay of the place, rose up visibly before me, as if I
were there again. The counting-house was on the first floor, looking
over the coal-barges and the river. There was a recess in it, in
which I was to sit and work. My work was to cover the pots of
paste-blacking; first, with a piece of oilpaper, and then with a
piece of blue paper; to tie them round with a string; and then to
clip the paper close and neat, all round, until it looked as smart as
a pot of ointment from an apothecary’s shop. When a certain number
of grosses of pots had attained this pitch of perfection, I was to
paste on each a printed label; and then go on again with more pots.
Two or three other boys were kept at similar duty down stairs on
similar wages. One of them came up, in a ragged apron and paper cap,
on the first Monday morning, to show me the trick of using the string
and tying the knot. His name was Bob Fagin; and I took the liberty
of using his name, long afterwards, in ‘Oliver Twist.’
“Our relative had kindly arranged to teach me something in the
dinner-hour—from twelve to one, I think it was—every day. But an
arrangement so incompatible with counting-house business soon died
away, from no fault of his or mine; and for the same reason, my small
work-table, and my grosses of pots, my papers, string, scissors,
paste-pot, and labels, by little and little, vanished out of the
recess in the counting-house, and kept company with the other small
work-tables, grosses of pots, papers, string, scissors, and
paste-pots, down stairs. It was not long before Bob Fagin and I, and
another boy whose name was Paul Green, but who was currently believed
to have been christened Poll (a belief which I transferred, long
afterwards, again to Mr. Sweedlepipe, in ‘Martin Chuzzlewit’), worked
generally side by side. Bob Fagin was an orphan, and lived with his
brother-in law, a waterman. Poll Green’s father had the additional
distinction of being a fireman, and was employed at Drury-lane
Theatre; where another relation of Poll’s, I think his little sister,
did imps in the pantomimes.
“No words can express the secret agony of my soul as I sank into this
companionship; compared these every-day associates with those of my
happier childhood; and felt my early hopes of growing up to be a
learned and distinguished man, crushed in my breast. The deep
remembrance of the sense I had of being utterly neglected and
hopeless—of the shame I felt in my position—of the misery it was to
my young heart to believe that, day by day, what I had learned, and
thought, and delighted in, and raised my fancy and my emulation up
by, was passing away from me, never to be brought back any
more—cannot be written. My whole nature was so penetrated with the
grief and humiliation of such considerations, that even now, famous
and caressed and happy, I often forget in my dreams that I have a
dear wife and children—even that I am a man—and wander desolately
back to that time of my life.
“My mother and my brothers and sisters (excepting Fanny in the Royal
Academy of Music) were still encamped, with a young servant-girl from
Chatham workhouse, in the two parlours in the emptied house in Gower
Street North. It was a long way to go and return within the
dinner-hour; and, usually, I either carried my dinner with me, or
went and bought it at some neighbouring shop. In the latter case it
was commonly a saveloy and a penny loaf; sometimes, a four-penny
plate of beef from a cook’s shop; sometimes a plate of bread and
cheese, and a glass of beer, from a miserable old public-house over
the way—the ‘Swan,’ if I remember right, or the ‘Swan’ and something
else that I have forgotten. Once I remember tucking my own bread
(which I had brought from home in the morning) under my arm, wrapped
up in a piece of paper like a book, and going into the best
dining-room in Johnson’s alamode-beef-house in Charles Court, Drury
Lane, and magnificently ordering a small plate of alamode-beef to eat
with it. What the waiter thought of such a strange little
apparition, coming in all alone, I don’t know; but I can see him now,
staring at me as I ate my dinner, and bringing up the other waiter to
look. I gave him a halfpenny, and I wish, now, that he hadn’t taken
it.”
It was thus Dickens was trained to fight the battle of life. After this
one feels inclined to say, “How great are the blessings of poverty!”
What an impulse it gives the man to raise himself above it, somehow or
other. Hazlitt used to say that “the want of money often places a man in
a very ridiculous position.” There is no doubt about that. It is also
equally clear, that, without money, there can be little comfort, little
independence of thought or action, little real manliness. Poverty is a
wonderful tonic. Volumes might be written in its praise. Almost all the
wonderful things that have been done in the world have been accomplished
by men who were born and bred in poverty. She is the nurse of genius,
the mother of heroes. She has garlanded the world with gold. Luxury and
wealth have ever been the ruin alike of individuals and nations. The
world’s greatest benefactors have been the money-getting men. Of course
there are a few exceptions; but they are the exceptions that confirm the
rule.