The Pattern in the Carpet

by Margaret Drabble

  Mrs Southey, Mrs Coleridge and Mrs Lovell were sisters, and Southey liked to describe the hill on which Greta Hall was built as ‘the aunt-hill’. As well as aunts and nephews and nieces, Greta Hall also housed successive generations of cats, including Lord Nelson, Ovid, Virgil, Prester John and Hurlyburlybuss; it was Southey’s belief that ‘a house is never said to be perfectly furnished for enjoyment, unless there is a child in it rising three years old, and a kitten rising three weeks.’

  (Southey and the three Fricker sisters spoke with a West Country accent; Wordsworth, however, presumably pronounced ‘aunt-hill’ as ‘anthill’, and when I was little I always called Auntie Phyl ‘Antie’. I knew no other pronunciation.)

  Southey has been credited with writing one of the best-known of all children’s stories, The Three Bears, which survives in a prettified version. The character we know as Goldilocks was originally an old female vagrant, destined for committal to the House of Correction. Southey wrote this tale to be read aloud, preferably by several voices, by Mamma, or Papa, or, as he said, ‘some fond Uncle, or kind Aunt’. The picture of a happy family gathered round a fireside reminds us of the long hours Southey spent as a boy lying painfully bored and lonely in bed, longing for the day to begin.

  Not many writers describe boredom as well as Southey did. It is an ignoble and shaming state to which few are confident enough to admit. Graham Greene and Alberto Moravia admitted to it, and so, as I have noted, did my father. But most do not. (In 1960 Moravia published a novel, La Noia, which has recently reappeared in translation with the title Boredom; it originally appeared in English as The Empty Canvas, because his English-language publishers were, wrongly, afraid that boredom would not sell. I snapped it up on the strength of the title alone, and although it did not prefigure Perec’s obsession with jigsaws, as I had hoped it might, it had some interesting material about an artist destroying his own canvases, which connects with the allied theme of the ephemeral sandcastle.)

  The woodcuts in Little Goody Two-Shoes portray a vanishing world, and Newbery’s productions mark a transition from an England still largely rural, to a country increasingly dominated by the purchasing power of the metropolis. The Newberys originally came from Berkshire and John Newbery’s father, like the father of Little Goody Two-Shoes, was a farmer. The woodcuts remind me of the simple landscape I thought I could see in the deeply rural, flat, agricultural countryside round Bryn, where the cows and bullocks are to this day known as ‘beasts’, and where until recently the watermill by the river was used to grind flour. But these Newbery books were purchased for town children, who would enjoy the farmyard pictures of animals with which they were no longer necessarily familiar at first-hand. Children’s toys and books have always harked back to the idyll of Home Farm. We learn our letters from building blocks that represent a way of life that has gone, and children who have never seen a live cow or a pig may discover them in illustrated alphabets and board games.

  The Newberys moved to London in the 1740s and established themselves in the busy heart of eighteenth-century book production. A Little Pretty Pocket-Book was published at the sign of the Bible and Crown, but Newbery soon moved to the more famous Bible and Sun, near the Chapter House in St Paul’s Churchyard. John Spilsbury, the mapmaker and the first puzzle maker, operated from Russell Court, off Drury Lane, a neighbourhood that is still home to cartographers, as well as to antiquarian and second-hand book dealers. The book and toy trade had its own well-defined territory, much of it within the City of London; it encompassed St Paul’s Churchyard, Holborn, Covent Garden, Cheapside, the Strand, Fleet Street, Cornhill and Clerkenwell. Here many of the significant figures in the history of children’s publishing were clustered, including the Newberys, their successor John Harris, John and Edward Wallis, and the Darton family. The geography of this neighbourhood was a board game of its own, with its interlocking lanes and alleys and rows and terraces and courtyards. J. H. Harvey Darton, the distinguished historian of children’s literature, writing nearly two hundred years later in 1932 in the Cornhill Magazine, describes Ludgate Square as ‘a small recondite Square… a kind of rectilinear maze, such as I liked to contrive on paper when I was a boy. It can be reached only by narrow one-way traffic lanes, and half-secret footpaths under archways.’ He edited The Chatterbox story-book and annual from a building as ‘elusive as Todgers’s and as neat as a nest of Chinese boxes’.

  And even today, after sixty years of blitz and demolition and grandiose post-modern reconstruction, some memories of the old region linger; there are still arches and byways and terraces and footpaths and courtyards and dank areas sprouting with stubborn buddleia. You can still get lost in the urban maze. But in the third millennium the only shop approaching a print shop or a bookshop in St Paul’s Churchyard is a branch of Clinton Cards, witness, some would claim, to a new illiteracy. All the bookshops have gone. (Paternoster Row was wiped out in all but name on the night of 29 December 1940, along with six million books.) Two hundred years ago, this was the centre of the new world of juvenile literature. Everybody knew exactly where to go in London for children’s books and games. Here is an extract from Dame Partlet’s Farm (1804) published by John Harris, who succeeded John Newbery’s widow Elizabeth Newbery as publisher:

  At Harris’s, St Paul’s Churchyard,

  Good children meet a sure reward;

  In coming home the other day

  I heard a little master say,

  For every penny there he took

  He had receiv’d a little book,

  With covers neat, and cuts so pretty,

  There’s not its like in all the city;

  And that for twopence he could buy

  A story-book would make one cry;

  For little more a book of riddles:

  Then let us not buy drums or fiddles,

  Nor yet be stops at pastry-cooks,

  But spend our money all in books;

  For when we’ve learnt each book by heart

  Mamma will treat us with a tart.

  A book rewarded by a tart: a pleasant bribery, the best of both worlds.

  The publishers who followed in the Newberys’ footsteps became more and more inventive. They made little boxed collections and cabinets of booklets that appealed to the eyes and to the fingers as well as to the mind. Movable books with ‘turn up’ or ‘lift the flap’ devices, peepshows, harlequinades and dress-the-doll books proliferated. Printers S. and J. Fuller, operating from a shop fancifully called the Temple of Fancy in Rathbone Place, London, created a dress-the-doll book in 1810 titled The History of Little Fanny, in which the head of Fanny could be inserted in seven different, hand-coloured, cut-out costumes, to the accompaniment of a moral verse telling us that Fanny will come to no good if she insists on playing with her doll instead of reading a good book – another device that has its cake and eats it. F. C. Westley’s The Paignion (c.1830) is a slot-book with sixty-five cut-out, movable figures of adults, children, nurses and babies, and twelve delicately coloured, hand-painted scenes from everyday life such as the Pastry Cook’s, the Chemist’s, the Bazaar and the Drawing Room, with which a child could create many varied narratives and tableaux.

  These were expensive items intended to be treasured, but the cut-out, like the jigsaw, may also provide one of the easiest and cheapest of home-made entertainments. You don’t have to aspire to the artistry of Mrs Delany to gain satisfaction from this activity. In the opening section of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, six-year-old James Ramsay is amusing himself on his summer holidays by cutting out a picture of a refrigerator from the illustrated catalogue of the Army and Navy Stores, while Mrs Ramsay sits by him knitting a brown stocking. When he has finished the refrigerator, and it has been duly admired, she tries to find him a rake or a mowing machine, which would need ‘great skill and care in cutting out’, and thus distract him from his father’s gloomy weather forecast. Children still like cutting out, as did little King Louis XIII. We can all remember those blunt-ended scissor
s.

  I have a clear recollection of sitting under the privet hedge of Auntie Phyl’s house in wartime Doncaster, playing with a paper doll that I could dress up in a Shirley Temple outfit, or in paper garments snipped out of fashion magazines or sewing patterns. The hedge towered above me, and I made myself a little house in its sour earthy roots. And when my children were much the same age as I was then, I made them two paper dolls, called Pierre and Cinabelle, which I persuaded them were so precious that they could only be taken out of their cabinet drawer as a reward for excellent behaviour. They were a special treat. The children entered into this bizarre collusion with surprising enthusiasm. We were in Paris at the time, living on a travel bursary, which is why the dolls had French names, and why we had no television. We had to make our own bedtime amusements in the rue Blomet.

  XXXII

  Booksellers, book dealers, printmakers and cabinetmakers have always encouraged the habit of collecting. Cabinets inspire a sense of order, which parents are keen to encourage, and a manufacturer who unites an appeal to the collecting impulse with an attractive container has hit on a winning combination. Children are notoriously bad at putting their toys away (see the controlling Mrs Sherwood for a vivid description of an untidy nursery, littered with ‘English, French and Dutch toys, which generally lie pell-mell in any corner where the careless, listless, toy-saturated child may have thrown or kicked them’) but some containers are so attractive that the act of restoring their contents may be presented as a pleasure in itself.

  It is probable that Lady Charlotte Finch encouraged the little princes and princesses to take the responsibility for returning the pieces of their Spilsbury maps to the correct drawers of the mahogany cabinets with their own royal hands – though this in fact is not an easy task, as they have to be fitted in with great care, or the drawers won’t shut. One of Lady Charlotte’s successors, Miss Planta, bore witness to the fact that ‘Princess Elizabeth is a lovely little fat sensible thing and so tidy that she never leaves her needles, or scrap of work without putting them all in a tiny bag, for the purpose’, so one imagines that efforts towards discovering the fun of tidiness were considered part of a girl’s education.

  Jane Austen made a tiny bag for her sister-in-law, inside which was ‘a little rolled up housewife’, furnished with minikin needles and fine thread. In the housewife was a tiny pocket, and in the pocket was a slip of paper written as with a crow quill, with a little dedicatory poem. Austen’s nephew wrote: ‘It is the kind of object that some benevolent fairy might be supposed to give as a reward to a diligent little girl.’

  Auntie Phyl, it has to be admitted, was not a tidy person. She let things lie. Her kitchen table was home to scores of objects, and must have been the despair of Joyce as she tried to introduce order and cleanliness to Bryn. My mother, who was a tidy person, found visits to Bryn in later years trying on this score, and occasionally remarked that the exemplary neatness of Joyce’s cottage made her feel ashamed of her sister’s squalor. In The Peppered Moth I described Auntie Dora’s table:

  The kitchen table, once a plain wood, was covered with an unappealing pink-check stick-on badly fitted plastic coating, which began to peel round the edges, but stuck there, barely wiped, for decades. Biscuit tins gave way to – or rather, alas, were joined by – plastic boxes, Tupperware, melaware, polythene. Drawers burst and shelves buckled with hoardings. The new post-war rubbish was more durable than the old. It did not perish.

  Auntie Phyl had many of the characteristics of the Good Aunt, but an old-maid neatness was not one of them. There was an anarchic streak in her. In later years one of our entertainments was to go up the rickety ladder to the apple-loft bedroom, where she stored apples from the orchard, and throw those that had gone rotten out of the window into the garden below. The loft smelled of cider and fermentation, and the soft, brown, decaying, apples smashed and splashed into the grass and weeds beneath.

  The garden was too big for her. Without Joyce and Eddie she would never have kept it under any kind of control.

  One of the most extraordinary of my childhood memories is of the day when we were allowed to set the field behind the house on fire. The grass had grown high and dry and yellow, and we were let loose in it with a box of matches. Even at the time I thought this was odd, and now it seems unbelievable, but it was so. We ran around, igniting clump after clump, and watching the flames spread and the grass flicker and then scorch and then blacken. It was thrilling. It was arson and anarchy. The flames flickered in my sleeping vision all night long.

  Auntie Phyl was not as conventional as she looked. One day she told me about her walk to the village dump by the river. I remember that dump: it was, when I was a small child, full of archaeological treasures, like old marbles and patterned bits of broken crockery, but as the throwaway society flourished it began to receive larger and less attractive detritus. One day, walking the dog (at that time a bad-tempered Staffordshire bull terrier named Hanley), Auntie Phyl reported that she had discovered a large, brand-new brassiere, ‘just my size’, but that she had resisted taking it home with her. More worryingly, she also found a horse’s head. ‘I let Hanley have a bit of it,’ she said, calmly. ‘And when I took her back the next day she had a bit more.’

  I can’t remember now whether I ever put this dump incident in a novel. I don’t think I did. I don’t think I found a place for it. When you can’t remember whether or not you’ve written about something before, it’s time to stop.

  XXXIII

  Atiny bag, a tiny box, a baby house, a doll’s thimble, Tom Thumb, Thumbelina. A cherry stone carved with scenes from the Old Testament, a minuscule, medieval, ivory sphere containing minuscule ivory figures playing chess, an antique intaglio the size of a thumbnail cut with nymphs by a fountain. Miniaturization is an industry of its own, beloved of connoisseurs, collectors, craftsmen, souvenir manufacturers and tourists, and it is also well represented in the book trade. At the turn of the eighteenth century John Marshall marketed a variety of boxed books and cards, for which he favoured titles like ‘The Doll’s Library’ or ‘The Doll’s Casket’. His Infant’s Library, manufactured around 1800, is a model bookcase containing sixteen little volumes. Adults today remember with affection their Nutshell and Thimble Libraries and their boxed sets of Beatrix Potter. Alison Uttley, who loved the diminutive, possessed miniature volumes of Shakespeare, the Iliad and the Greek New Testament as well as dolls’ teasets.

  Princes and popes and scholars of the Renaissance assembled Kunstkammer and cabinets and studioli housing paintings, miniatures, shells, sculptures, minerals, coins, jewels, games and scientific instruments, sometimes with the avowed ambition of bringing all the world’s learning into a single space. The cabinet (like Auntie Phyl’s kitchen table, but in a more orderly though sometimes in as random a manner) would contain everything. In 1782, a singular experiment in educational publishing on these principles was conducted by a German theologian named Johann Siegmund Stoy, who came from Nuremberg, the home of toys. He created a Picture Academy for the Young, which purported to offer a comprehensive view of the world’s knowledge. It consisted of a compartmented box measuring seventeen by twelve inches, containing 468 copperplate engravings. It was an illustrated encyclopaedia in miniature, but an interactive one that you could rearrange using a complicated system of cross-references. This elaborate and unique object does not seem to have found any imitators in England, but the book dealers of St Paul’s Churchyard appealed to some of the same instincts with their miniature pocket books and boxes, their curiosities and novelties. And Spilsbury, with his maps, put the world in a mahogany drawer.

  The theme of pictures-within-pictures, of gallery paintings showing walls thickly plastered with densely hung pictures, and floors stacked with plaster casts and curiosities, has a lasting attraction for jigsaw-puzzle manufacturers. The puzzle solver gets many paintings for the price of one, and the satisfaction of being able to complete each small area separately, and then join the pieces into a pre-des
igned whole.

  In 2006 the Courtauld Gallery mounted an exhibition based on a book titled The Theatre of Painting or Theatrum Pictorium, compiled by the Dutch painter and curator David Teniers the Younger. This handsome volume, published in 1660, is the first known illustrated catalogue of a collection of paintings, and it contains etchings and engravings of masterpieces by artists who include Titian, Raphael, Veronese and Giorgione. These works, which had been acquired by Archduke Leopold Wilhem of Habsburg, were copied from the originals in oil on wood (with one or two in oil on canvas) by Teniers, and Teniers’ copies were in turn copied by engravers and etchers for the printed catalogue. This Borgesian replication provides food for speculation about the strange attractions of reproduction and miniaturization. Teniers was clearly captivated by the notion of pictures-within-pictures, and copies of copies, for he also painted large gallery paintings showing rooms crowded with wall-to-wall masterpieces being viewed by fashionable cognoscenti, idle spectators and the inevitable little dogs. His versions of the Old Masters are works of art in their own right, often adding a more sombre (and perhaps more secular) gloss to the Italian originals.

  The Courtauld exhibition also contained a small portrait of an oil-on-canvas Doge, which scholar Margaret Klinge has suggested may have been cut out of a larger gallery painting of grouped figures, now lost. It is, perhaps, the surviving missing piece of a now dispersed and irrecoverable jigsaw. And the archduke’s collection was in itself a collection of dispersed pieces, assembled from the spoils of earlier collectors forced to sell because of wars and disasters. Teniers captured and preserved all these works doubly and trebly, in a complex study in refraction.