PUTTING up for the night in one of the chiefest towns of Staffordshire, I
find it to be by no means a lively town. In fact, it is as dull and dead
a town as any one could desire not to see. It seems as if its whole
population might be imprisoned in its Railway Station. The Refreshment
Room at that Station is a vortex of dissipation compared with the extinct
town-inn, the Dodo, in the dull High Street.
Why High Street? Why not rather Low Street, Flat Street, Low-Spirited
Street, Used-up Street? Where are the people who belong to the High
Street? Can they all be dispersed over the face of the country, seeking
the unfortunate Strolling Manager who decamped from the mouldy little
Theatre last week, in the beginning of his season (as his play-bills
testify), repentantly resolved to bring him back, and feed him, and be
entertained? Or, can they all be gathered to their fathers in the two
old churchyards near to the High Street—retirement into which churchyards
appears to be a mere ceremony, there is so very little life outside their
confines, and such small discernible difference between being buried
alive in the town, and buried dead in the town tombs? Over the way,
opposite to the staring blank bow windows of the Dodo, are a little
ironmonger’s shop, a little tailor’s shop (with a picture of the Fashions
in the small window and a bandy-legged baby on the pavement staring at
it)—a watchmakers shop, where all the clocks and watches must be stopped,
I am sure, for they could never have the courage to go, with the town in
general, and the Dodo in particular, looking at them. Shade of Miss
Linwood, erst of Leicester Square, London, thou art welcome here, and thy
retreat is fitly chosen! I myself was one of the last visitors to that
awful storehouse of thy life’s work, where an anchorite old man and woman
took my shilling with a solemn wonder, and conducting me to a gloomy
sepulchre of needlework dropping to pieces with dust and age and shrouded
in twilight at high noon, left me there, chilled, frightened, and alone.
And now, in ghostly letters on all the dead walls of this dead town, I
read thy honoured name, and find that thy Last Supper, worked in Berlin
Wool, invites inspection as a powerful excitement!
Where are the people who are bidden with so much cry to this feast of
little wool? Where are they? Who are they? They are not the
bandy-legged baby studying the fashions in the tailor’s window. They are
not the two earthy ploughmen lounging outside the saddler’s shop, in the
stiff square where the Town Hall stands, like a brick and mortar private
on parade. They are not the landlady of the Dodo in the empty bar, whose
eye had trouble in it and no welcome, when I asked for dinner. They are
not the turnkeys of the Town Jail, looking out of the gateway in their
uniforms, as if they had locked up all the balance (as my American
friends would say) of the inhabitants, and could now rest a little. They
are not the two dusty millers in the white mill down by the river, where
the great water-wheel goes heavily round and round, like the monotonous
days and nights in this forgotten place. Then who are they, for there is
no one else? No; this deponent maketh oath and saith that there is no
one else, save and except the waiter at the Dodo, now laying the cloth.
I have paced the streets, and stared at the houses, and am come back to
the blank bow window of the Dodo; and the town clocks strike seven, and
the reluctant echoes seem to cry, ‘Don’t wake us!’ and the bandy-legged
baby has gone home to bed.
If the Dodo were only a gregarious bird—if he had only some confused idea
of making a comfortable nest—I could hope to get through the hours
between this and bed-time, without being consumed by devouring
melancholy. But, the Dodo’s habits are all wrong. It provides me with a
trackless desert of sitting-room, with a chair for every day in the year,
a table for every month, and a waste of sideboard where a lonely China
vase pines in a corner for its mate long departed, and will never make a
match with the candlestick in the opposite corner if it live till
Doomsday. The Dodo has nothing in the larder. Even now, I behold the
Boots returning with my sole in a piece of paper; and with that portion
of my dinner, the Boots, perceiving me at the blank bow window, slaps his
leg as he comes across the road, pretending it is something else. The
Dodo excludes the outer air. When I mount up to my bedroom, a smell of
closeness and flue gets lazily up my nose like sleepy snuff. The loose
little bits of carpet writhe under my tread, and take wormy shapes. I
don’t know the ridiculous man in the looking-glass, beyond having met him
once or twice in a dish-cover—and I can never shave _him_ to-morrow
morning! The Dodo is narrow-minded as to towels; expects me to wash on a
freemason’s apron without the trimming: when I asked for soap, gives me a
stony-hearted something white, with no more lather in it than the Elgin
marbles. The Dodo has seen better days, and possesses interminable
stables at the back—silent, grass-grown, broken-windowed, horseless.
This mournful bird can fry a sole, however, which is much. Can cook a
steak, too, which is more. I wonder where it gets its Sherry? If I were
to send my pint of wine to some famous chemist to be analysed, what would
it turn out to be made of? It tastes of pepper, sugar, bitter-almonds,
vinegar, warm knives, any flat drinks, and a little brandy. Would it
unman a Spanish exile by reminding him of his native land at all? I
think not. If there really be any townspeople out of the churchyards,
and if a caravan of them ever do dine, with a bottle of wine per man, in
this desert of the Dodo, it must make good for the doctor next day!
Where was the waiter born? How did he come here? Has he any hope of
getting away from here? Does he ever receive a letter, or take a ride
upon the railway, or see anything but the Dodo? Perhaps he has seen the
Berlin Wool. He appears to have a silent sorrow on him, and it may be
that. He clears the table; draws the dingy curtains of the great bow
window, which so unwillingly consent to meet, that they must be pinned
together; leaves me by the fire with my pint decanter, and a little thin
funnel-shaped wine-glass, and a plate of pale biscuits—in themselves
engendering desperation.
No book, no newspaper! I left the Arabian Nights in the railway
carriage, and have nothing to read but Bradshaw, and ‘that way madness
lies.’ Remembering what prisoners and ship-wrecked mariners have done to
exercise their minds in solitude, I repeat the multiplication table, the
pence table, and the shilling table: which are all the tables I happen to
know. What if I write something? The Dodo keeps no pens but steel pens;
and those I always stick through the paper, and can turn to no other
account.
What am I to do? Even if I could have the bandy-legged baby knocked up
and brought here, I could offer him nothing but sherry, and that would be
the death of him. He would never hold up his head again if he touched
it. I can’t go to bed, because I have conceived a mortal hatred for my
bedroom; and I can’t go away, because there is no train for my place of
destination until morning. To burn the biscuits will be but a fleeting
joy; still it is a temporary relief, and here they go on the fire! Shall
I break the plate? First let me look at the back, and see who made it.
COPELAND.
Copeland! Stop a moment. Was it yesterday I visited Copeland’s works,
and saw them making plates? In the confusion of travelling about, it
might be yesterday or it might be yesterday month; but I think it was
yesterday. I appeal to the plate. The plate says, decidedly, yesterday.
I find the plate, as I look at it, growing into a companion.
Don’t you remember (says the plate) how you steamed away, yesterday
morning, in the bright sun and the east wind, along the valley of the
sparkling Trent? Don’t you recollect how many kilns you flew past,
looking like the bowls of gigantic tobacco-pipes, cut short off from the
stem and turned upside down? And the fires—and the smoke—and the roads
made with bits of crockery, as if all the plates and dishes in the
civilised world had been Macadamised, expressly for the laming of all the
horses? Of course I do!
And don’t you remember (says the plate) how you alighted at Stoke—a
picturesque heap of houses, kilns, smoke, wharfs, canals, and river,
lying (as was most appropriate) in a basin—and how, after climbing up the
sides of the basin to look at the prospect, you trundled down again at a
walking-match pace, and straight proceeded to my father’s, Copeland’s,
where the whole of my family, high and low, rich and poor, are turned out
upon the world from our nursery and seminary, covering some fourteen
acres of ground? And don’t you remember what we spring from:—heaps of
lumps of clay, partially prepared and cleaned in Devonshire and
Dorsetshire, whence said clay principally comes—and hills of flint,
without which we should want our ringing sound, and should never be
musical? And as to the flint, don’t you recollect that it is first burnt
in kilns, and is then laid under the four iron feet of a demon slave,
subject to violent stamping fits, who, when they come on, stamps away
insanely with his four iron legs, and would crush all the flint in the
Isle of Thanet to powder, without leaving off? And as to the clay, don’t
you recollect how it is put into mills or teazers, and is sliced, and
dug, and cut at, by endless knives, clogged and sticky, but
persistent—and is pressed out of that machine through a square trough,
whose form it takes—and is cut off in square lumps and thrown into a vat,
and there mixed with water, and beaten to a pulp by paddle-wheels—and is
then run into a rough house, all rugged beams and ladders splashed with
white,—superintended by Grindoff the Miller in his working clothes, all
splashed with white,—where it passes through no end of machinery-moved
sieves all splashed with white, arranged in an ascending scale of
fineness (some so fine, that three hundred silk threads cross each other
in a single square inch of their surface), and all in a violent state of
ague with their teeth for ever chattering, and their bodies for ever
shivering! And as to the flint again, isn’t it mashed and mollified and
troubled and soothed, exactly as rags are in a paper-mill, until it is
reduced to a pap so fine that it contains no atom of ‘grit’ perceptible
to the nicest taste? And as to the flint and the clay together, are they
not, after all this, mixed in the proportion of five of clay to one of
flint, and isn’t the compound—known as ‘slip’—run into oblong troughs,
where its superfluous moisture may evaporate; and finally, isn’t it
slapped and banged and beaten and patted and kneaded and wedged and
knocked about like butter, until it becomes a beautiful grey dough, ready
for the potter’s use?
In regard of the potter, popularly so called (says the plate), you don’t
mean to say you have forgotten that a workman called a Thrower is the man
under whose hand this grey dough takes the shapes of the simpler
household vessels as quickly as the eye can follow? You don’t mean to
say you cannot call him up before you, sitting, with his attendant woman,
at his potter’s wheel—a disc about the size of a dinner-plate, revolving
on two drums slowly or quickly as he wills—who made you a complete
breakfast-set for a bachelor, as a good-humoured little off-hand joke?
You remember how he took up as much dough as he wanted, and, throwing it
on his wheel, in a moment fashioned it into a teacup—caught up more clay
and made a saucer—a larger dab and whirled it into a teapot—winked at a
smaller dab and converted it into the lid of the teapot, accurately
fitting by the measurement of his eye alone—coaxed a middle-sized dab for
two seconds, broke it, turned it over at the rim, and made a
milkpot—laughed, and turned out a slop-basin—coughed, and provided for
the sugar? Neither, I think, are you oblivious of the newer mode of
making various articles, but especially basins, according to which
improvement a mould revolves instead of a disc? For you must remember
(says the plate) how you saw the mould of a little basin spinning round
and round, and how the workmen smoothed and pressed a handful of dough
upon it, and how with an instrument called a profile (a piece of wood,
representing the profile of a basin’s foot) he cleverly scraped and
carved the ring which makes the base of any such basin, and then took the
basin off the lathe like a doughy skull-cap to be dried, and afterwards
(in what is called a green state) to be put into a second lathe, there to
be finished and burnished with a steel burnisher? And as to moulding in
general (says the plate), it can’t be necessary for me to remind you that
all ornamental articles, and indeed all articles not quite circular, are
made in moulds. For you must remember how you saw the vegetable dishes,
for example, being made in moulds; and how the handles of teacups, and
the spouts of teapots, and the feet of tureens, and so forth, are all
made in little separate moulds, and are each stuck on to the body
corporate, of which it is destined to form a part, with a stuff called
‘slag,’ as quickly as you can recollect it. Further, you learnt—you know
you did—in the same visit, how the beautiful sculptures in the delicate
new material called Parian, are all constructed in moulds; how, into that
material, animal bones are ground up, because the phosphate of lime
contained in bones makes it translucent; how everything is moulded,
before going into the fire, one-fourth larger than it is intended to come
out of the fire, because it shrinks in that proportion in the intense
heat; how, when a figure shrinks unequally, it is spoiled—emerging from
the furnace a misshapen birth; a big head and a little body, or a little
head and a big body, or a Quasimodo with long arms and short legs, or a
Miss Biffin with neither legs nor arms worth mentioning.
And as to the Kilns, in which the firing takes place, and in which some
of the more precious articles are burnt repeatedly, in various stages of
their process towards completion,—as to the Kilns (says the plate,
warming with the recollection), if you don’t remember THEM with a
horrible interest, what did you ever go to Copeland’s for? When you
stood inside of one of those inverted bowls of a Pre-Adamite
tobacco-pipe, looking up at the blue sky through the open top far off, as
you might have looked up from a well, sunk under the centre of the
pavement of the Pantheon at Rome, had you the least idea where you were?
And when you found yourself surrounded, in that dome-shaped cavern, by
innumerable columns of an unearthly order of architecture, supporting
nothing, and squeezed close together as if a Pre-Adamite Samson had taken
a vast Hall in his arms and crushed it into the smallest possible space,
had you the least idea what they were? No (says the plate), of course
not! And when you found that each of those pillars was a pile of
ingeniously made vessels of coarse clay—called Saggers—looking, when
separate, like raised-pies for the table of the mighty Giant Blunderbore,
and now all full of various articles of pottery ranged in them in baking
order, the bottom of each vessel serving for the cover of the one below,
and the whole Kiln rapidly filling with these, tier upon tier, until the
last workman should have barely room to crawl out, before the closing of
the jagged aperture in the wall and the kindling of the gradual fire; did
you not stand amazed to think that all the year round these dread
chambers are heating, white hot—and cooling—and filling—and emptying—and
being bricked up—and broken open—humanly speaking, for ever and ever? To
be sure you did! And standing in one of those Kilns nearly full, and
seeing a free crow shoot across the aperture a-top, and learning how the
fire would wax hotter and hotter by slow degrees, and would cool
similarly through a space of from forty to sixty hours, did no
remembrance of the days when human clay was burnt oppress you? Yes. I
think so! I suspect that some fancy of a fiery haze and a shortening
breath, and a growing heat, and a gasping prayer; and a figure in black
interposing between you and the sky (as figures in black are very apt to
do), and looking down, before it grew too hot to look and live, upon the
Heretic in his edifying agony—I say I suspect (says the plate) that some
such fancy was pretty strong upon you when you went out into the air, and
blessed God for the bright spring day and the degenerate times!
After that, I needn’t remind you what a relief it was to see the simplest
process of ornamenting this ‘biscuit’ (as it is called when baked) with
brown circles and blue trees—converting it into the common crockery-ware
that is exported to Africa, and used in cottages at home. For (says the
plate) I am well persuaded that you bear in mind how those particular
jugs and mugs were once more set upon a lathe and put in motion; and how
a man blew the brown colour (having a strong natural affinity with the
material in that condition) on them from a blowpipe as they twirled; and
how his daughter, with a common brush, dropped blotches of blue upon them
in the right places; and how, tilting the blotches upside down, she made
them run into rude images of trees, and there an end.
And didn’t you see (says the plate) planted upon my own brother that
astounding blue willow, with knobbed and gnarled trunk, and foliage of
blue ostrich feathers, which gives our family the title of ‘willow
pattern’? And didn’t you observe, transferred upon him at the same time,
that blue bridge which spans nothing, growing out from the roots of the
willow; and the three blue Chinese going over it into a blue temple,
which has a fine crop of blue bushes sprouting out of the roof; and a
blue boat sailing above them, the mast of which is burglariously sticking
itself into the foundations of a blue villa, suspended sky-high,
surmounted by a lump of blue rock, sky-higher, and a couple of billing
blue birds, sky-highest—together with the rest of that amusing blue
landscape, which has, in deference to our revered ancestors of the
Cerulean Empire, and in defiance of every known law of perspective,
adorned millions of our family ever since the days of platters? Didn’t
you inspect the copper-plate on which my pattern was deeply engraved?
Didn’t you perceive an impression of it taken in cobalt colour at a
cylindrical press, upon a leaf of thin paper, streaming from a
plunge-bath of soap and water? Wasn’t the paper impression daintily
spread, by a light-fingered damsel (you know you admired her!), over the
surface of the plate, and the back of the paper rubbed prodigiously
hard—with a long tight roll of flannel, tied up like a round of hung
beef—without so much as ruffling the paper, wet as it was? Then (says
the plate), was not the paper washed away with a sponge, and didn’t there
appear, set off upon the plate, _this_ identical piece of Pre-Raphaelite
blue distemper which you now behold? Not to be denied! I had seen all
this—and more. I had been shown, at Copeland’s, patterns of beautiful
design, in faultless perspective, which are causing the ugly old willow
to wither out of public favour; and which, being quite as cheap,
insinuate good wholesome natural art into the humblest households. When
Mr. and Mrs. Sprat have satisfied their material tastes by that equal
division of fat and lean which has made their _ménage_ immortal; and
have, after the elegant tradition, ‘licked the platter clean,’ they
can—thanks to modern artists in clay—feast their intellectual tastes upon
excellent delineations of natural objects.
This reflection prompts me to transfer my attention from the blue plate
to the forlorn but cheerfully painted vase on the sideboard. And surely
(says the plate) you have not forgotten how the outlines of such groups
of flowers as you see there, are printed, just as I was printed, and are
afterwards shaded and filled in with metallic colours by women and girls?
As to the aristocracy of our order, made of the finer clay-porcelain
peers and peeresses;—the slabs, and panels, and table-tops, and tazze;
the endless nobility and gentry of dessert, breakfast, and tea services;
the gemmed perfume bottles, and scarlet and gold salvers; you saw that
they were painted by artists, with metallic colours laid on with
camel-hair pencils, and afterwards burnt in.
And talking of burning in (says the plate), didn’t you find that every
subject, from the willow pattern to the landscape after Turner—having
been framed upon clay or porcelain biscuit—has to be glazed? Of course,
you saw the glaze—composed of various vitreous materials—laid over every
article; and of course you witnessed the close imprisonment of each piece
in saggers upon the separate system rigidly enforced by means of
fine-pointed earthenware stilts placed between the articles to prevent
the slightest communication or contact. We had in my time—and I suppose
it is the same now—fourteen hours’ firing to fix the glaze and to make it
‘run’ all over us equally, so as to put a good shiny and unscratchable
surface upon us. Doubtless, you observed that one sort of glaze—called
printing-body—is burnt into the better sort of ware _before_ it is
printed. Upon this you saw some of the finest steel engravings
transferred, to be fixed by an after glazing—didn’t you? Why, of course
you did!
Of course I did. I had seen and enjoyed everything that the plate
recalled to me, and had beheld with admiration how the rotatory motion
which keeps this ball of ours in its place in the great scheme, with all
its busy mites upon it, was necessary throughout the process, and could
only be dispensed with in the fire. So, listening to the plate’s
reminders, and musing upon them, I got through the evening after all, and
went to bed. I made but one sleep of it—for which I have no doubt I am
also indebted to the plate—and left the lonely Dodo in the morning, quite
at peace with it, before the bandy-legged baby was up.