by Michael Dean
Temple Bar is just off Fleet Street, a stiffish walk from Spitalfields. But papa eased the way with his usual running commentary on the throng as we made our way through it, or a digression on something he had read, or a digression from the digression about some musing on life, such as whether character was a product of the emotion or the mind.
This particular perambulation is marked on my memory, no doubt forever, partly because of what happened when we got there, partly because we stopped to watch the masons putting the finishing touches to St Paul’s Cathedral. Sir Christopher Wren’s masterpiece, especially the curve of the dome, has long formed my ideal of pleasing symmetry and beauty, and on that day I imbibed it, nourished by it, given life by it, as if by my mother’s breast.
We finally reached Curll’s establishment. It was a large bookshop, with prints, woodcuts and engravings in the window as well as books. I was much struck by a woodcut by Albert Duerer of a woman with a naughty smile. He had caught much of the woman’s life, let alone her character, in her face. It was an admirable work.
I felt father’s usual bonhomie, borne of the energy of the artist, desert him as we entered Curll’s workplace. He was pale, father was, his slightly prominent nose pointier, his narrow lips tight as he looked round the courtroom of his dreams.
An assistant was dispatched to fetch Curll, who duly appeared from the print works behind the bookshop, wiping his inky hands with a rag. He stood due north of us, his squinty gaze somewhere to the south-east.
‘Ah, Mr Hogarth. What have you been up to? I was just about to contact you.’
I smile wryly as I recall these words of Curll’s, to write them, from the vantage of passed time. I was about to learn, at the age of thirteen in the year 1710, that it is the fate of the artist to be patronised, as well as cheated, by those of lesser talents than he.
For make no mistake, my dear father was an artist, in his inner being, just as much as Albert Duerer or Raphael or Milton or Fielding, come to that. But he was the saddest form of artist, one who never found his metier, so expression of his artistic soul remained trapped within him.
‘Ah!’ said my father, in innocent relief. He was beside himself with nerves before this fellow not fit to lick his boots. ‘About to contact me? About the copies no doubt …’
‘In a manner of speaking, yes,’ said the Curll churl glibly, wiping one inky hand round his face. ‘The next thing to discuss is the transportation.’
‘The transportation? Of … er …?’
‘The transportation of the copies, Mr Hogarth. To the schools which will buy them. They won’t, sad to say, get there of their own accord.’ Curll chuckled merrily at this witticism.
‘Where are the copies, then?’ said father, sounding stupid in his desperation to stop his dream coming crashing down around him. I believe he even looked round Curll’s bookshop, peered through the open door through to the printworks, even up at the ceiling.
Curll gave a dry, mirthless chuckle, like paper tearing. ‘We can’t make the copies until we’ve arranged the transport, can we now, Mr Hogarth? Otherwise the copies would be here, where there isn’t room for them. You’ve brought the six guineas, I take it?’
My father’s face crumpled. ‘What … the what?’
‘Six guineas, Mr Hogarth. For the transportation of books to the schools. And that’s throughout the country, even as far as Edinburgh. It’s in your agreement.’
‘I didn’t … I haven’t got it … the agreement … six guineas? The agreement doesn’t say six guineas. Does it? I’m sure it doesn’t. I’ve read it. Where is it?’
‘Calm yourself, Mr Hogarth. Calm yourself. The author undertakes to pay any transportation costs. No figure is mentioned. It’s right at the end of the agreement. Do you want me to go and fetch it?’
‘Oh, I’ve no doubt you’re right, Mr Curll.’ The first traces of bitterness were entering father’s voice. ‘But six guineas is three guineas more than you paid me. Is it not?’
‘Initially, yes. But don’t forget, Mr Hogarth, that under the terms of the agreement, after the initial printing, you earn another guinea every time more copies are demanded and printed.’
‘But six guineas …? I should take my manuscript back, then.’ Pater’s eyes were moist, his voice unconvincing.
‘I’m afraid you’ve already sold me the manuscript, Mr Hogarth. For the very fair sum of three guineas. The manuscript, sir, is mine.’
‘All that work. I spent years … It took me … years.’
‘No doubt it did, Mr Hogarth. And a very scholarly work it is, too.’
As my poor dear father was being destroyed before my eyes, my mind was racing. I perceived instantly that the nub of the matter was to get the manuscript into print.
I pulled father by the arm and whispered in his ear. ‘I’m sure Mr Curll could be persuaded to initiate printing for four guineas,’ I said.
Curll shot me a sharp look. ‘A wise head on young shoulders you have there, Mr Hogarth junior. Can’t do it for four, though. Five guineas. Five guineas might be a possibility. I say might, mind.’
‘We would not be able to achieve that, sir,’ I said, before my father could agree to it. ‘It’s impossible. Come, four gives you a guinea profit on the original transaction and you can recover more as we go along.’
Curll gave me a look I have come to recognise over the years – grudging respect won from initial contempt. He would take a guinea profit, a handful of copies would be printed and there the matter would end. The city of Edinburgh would no more see copies of father’s book than Mr Curll would see heaven on Judgement Day.
‘The deal is done, at four guineas,’ said Curll abruptly, turning on his heel to go back to his printing.
I now needed to get father home to see how much of Curll’s coffee house money, as we had come to call the initial three guineas, we had left; as we now had to find four to have any hope even of recovering father’s manuscript.
Back in our rooms, my mother’s reaction was even worse than I had feared. She had always been sharp-tongued, with more than a touch of the shrew about her, but no sooner had I explained the ins and outs than she flew at my father, beating him on the breast with her fists.
‘You fool! You bloody fool! Oh, why did I marry such a gull? My father told me to have nothing to do with a simple country bumpkin. Would that I had listened to him.’ (This recalled father’s lodging with mother’s family when he first arrived in London from Westmoreland. He had won the hand of the eldest daughter of his landlord, as mama then was.)
My little sisters were screaming, comprehending, naturally, only the anger and the sad coming apart of our family, not the issue of it.
‘How much of Curll’s three guineas do we have left?’ I said to mother, as much to calm her as anything.
She went to the kitchen to find out. ‘Just under half a guinea,’ she said, coming back into our living room, sounding calmer.
‘Then we need to find three and three-quarter guineas,’ I said.
‘Why?’ mother said. ‘Suppose we don’t? Suppose we just keep Curll’s money? What’s to stop us?’
‘The booksellers all act together,’ father said. ‘They control prices and work. If Curll is not paid what he takes to be his due, he will blacken my name with the others. They keep lists. All writing work will stop; you can take my word on that.’
We moved from Bartholomew Close to a smaller place in St John Street. It was so close to the Smithfield Market we could hear the lowing of the cattle day and night. If you shut your eyes, you could imagine yourself surrounded by fields; open them, peer through a grimy square of window, and you saw a tumble of wood and lathe houses leaning towards each other in a foetid alleyway.
I remember the changes in our board the most keenly. Beef, indeed meat of any sort, became a distant memory. Even fish was beyond our means, save for the occasional Yarmouth herring. We kept life and limb together with broths of peas and beans, bulked out with carefully measured cuts of bread and
cheese.
To add to our woes, that winter was a cruel one, with biting winds which ripped through our thin clothes and snow so high and wet it made leaving the house like wading calf-high through an icy river. Some ragamuffins made a snow house in the distillers’ courtyard, I recall, which stood for months and was so commodious a group of ten could stand around in it in comfort.
My young sisters seemed to have no future or prospects; the drudgery of servitude hung over them, coming very soon. But as for me, I could dimly discern a future course; I continued to struggle through the snow to John Dalton’s studio in Duck Lane, where he taught me the rudiments of line and plane and copying.
I do not believe he was paid for his work with me, for as I have described, there was now nothing to pay him with. He was a Nonconformist, like father, and that may have been the reason for his charity towards my family.
He would set me a copying task, usually part of a plaster statue of Diana or Flora or Zeus, then resume his own work. At the end, I would show him what I had accomplished. He silently and patiently corrected my line by guiding my hand with his own. There was little encouragement, but little blame either. I visited him twice a week, on Monday and Wednesday, towards midday when what little light there was in our quarter during the winter was at its best.
My father’s frame was always lean, but about this time he appeared gaunt, almost skeletal. His dealings with my mother became fractious; the love in their voices slowly fading from impatience, blame and occasional spite all brought on by the grinding blight of poverty.
His dealings with my sisters, which formerly could be summarised as cordiality tinged with indifference, were now marked by a new anger, with storms bursting from him at intervals. He smacked little Anne occasionally when she cried, and Mary, too. He withdrew a little, even from me. I was more often ‘William’, less often ‘old chap’.
Mother had stomach pains to contend with these days, and hardly ate at all. She enlisted my help in trying to get father to complete the scraps of hack work which still came in. Neither mother nor I could follow the details of his work, but it was clear that he neglected it every time a fresh idea or scheme came upon him, so jobs were more and more often taken away from him and given to other hacks to finish.
His latest scheme was a reform of the alphabet, involving the removal of the letters F, G, H, K, Q, W, X, Y and Z. In support of this scheme, he not only wrote letters, which was expensive, but tramped the streets proselytising to printers and booksellers, including the egregious Curll.
At mother’s insistence I went with him. I believe she did not trust him to act rationally in his dealings, or perhaps even to return home. Curll received us cordially enough, even offering refreshment – food and drink we were sorely in need of. But needless to say there was no progress on any front in our dealings with him.
Mother and I had a long discussion, deciding in the end that we should at least try to recover all the money owed to father by the booksellers, for they were slow in paying and often did not pay at all unless continually nagged to. At mother’s insistence, I set off for the booksellers without father.
Armed with the names of booksellers and the places where they could be found in my head, I resolved to ask for ‘payment for Richard Hogarth for work already done, if you please.’ The booksellers, as I recall, were Richard Smith, John Pemberton, Jakob Le Blon and Francis Gosling. I made a plan in my head of my route, starting with the most distant and ending with the nearest.
I found John Pemberton at the Golden Buck in Fleet Street. He told me that monies due to father would be paid ‘any day now’. This was not to be the last time I was to hear this refrain. Francis Gosling had premises at The Flying Horse in Grub Street. He gave me a sixpence. Richard Smith, who plied his trade in Drury Lane, said he was only days from bankruptcy. He asked me for a loan of money, no doubt with satirical intent. Jakob Le Blon promised payment to Richard Hogarth as soon as his colour printing process brought him the profits which he expected of it.
At the end of the day I gave Francis Gosling’s sixpence to mother, who kissed me on the top of the head. As she did so we heard an ominous thundering of boots on the stairs. It was a tipstaff flanked by two burly fellows in leather jerkins. The curled cur of a bookseller, Curll, had played the outraged creditor, mobilising other creditors into the bargain. Mother and I knew nothing of this, until the tipstaff told us.
They took father off to prison, telling him roughly he was now a debtor. Mother left my little sisters with the woman next door, so we could go with him.
5
WE WERE taken by cart to the debtor’s prison at The Fleet. We floated in a bubble of silence through the Belphegor’s concert of noise that echoed and bounced off the houses of east London. The tight-packed throng itself parted ahead of us, closing behind us, already exiling us from worthy citizens not in debt.
We reached the vast stone walls garlanded with lichen and mould, and in through the iron gates we went. Disembarking from the cart, we crossed the Press Yard, where offenders who refused to plead were crushed to death with due ceremony. In better days, how father would have loved to explain the Latin for the punishment – peine forte et dure.
Even out here, the stench was making my stomach rise to my throat. It was said that no chairman would take a customer who had so much as visited the Fleet, as the stink soaked the clothes and lingered in any trapped air.
The tipstaff led the way down stone stairs to dungeons beneath the pavement, the two roughs in leather jerkins bringing up the rear. Here we all stopped, while my mother and father were bidden to look through a grille in the dungeon door. I could just see through it myself, standing on tiptoe, peering between them. The grinning tipstaff encouraged my viewing.
There were upwards of twenty wretches in the cell, ankle deep in foetid water. Opposite me, one fellow had his hands trapped in stocks built against the stone wall. The top plank of the stocks had the improving motto ‘Better to Work than to Stand Thus’ carved into it. A shirker then, this poor fellow. And indeed all those around him were beating hemp with wood mallets. One plank behind an old fellow working there was carved with yet another motto: ‘The Wages of Idleness’.
Outside the door, my father was white in the face but composed. I thought him brave. I felt a surge of love for him, laced with defiance on his behalf.
‘Am I to be among them?’ father asked the tipstaff.
He spoke in hope. There was something about the official’s manner which indicated the cell was being offered only as a spectacle.
‘That’s up to you, sir,’ said the tipstaff. ‘Follow me.’
With relief, we were led away, back across the Press Yard to quarters off a dingy alley. This was a spunging house, rooms within the prison precinct which, while not exactly salubrious, were not so much worse than what we had just left and called our own. The other prisoners in this spunging house, ten or so men and two or three women, looked up when we came in, then ignored us.
My spirits rose a little, as they always tend to do, until an under-keeper produced fetters and shackled father to the wall. Only then did I notice that two of the other prisoners were also chained. The others were free.
At that moment a short, square figure in a worn broadcloth coat and grubby cravat stumped in through the open door. This strutting personage introduced himself as Mister Huggins, the keeper, or, as he called himself, the governor of the prison. Speaking in the fluting tones of one who would like to be a gentleman, but was not, Huggins demanded a garnish of £1 6s 8d for the fetters, meaning, I supposed, for their removal.
‘You shall have it by the end of the day, sir,’ mother said. ‘Please release my husband.’
‘That is not how the system works, madam,’ said this Huggins. ‘Action follows on the payment of cash. My men will give you the tariff for food here, and for bedding, too. I look forward to our further acquaintance.’
And with that he strutted out again.
‘Your footing here is a six
shilling bowl of punch, madam,’ intoned the tipstaff, who had the name of Corbett, with obvious boredom at the repetition of his litany. ‘A shilling a day for food and bedding, thereafter.’
A dreadful scream broke in on us from outside, as if to tell us what tortures awaited father if we did not pay. I caught sight of his face, mute, frozen pleading, his shoulders already slumped from the shackles.
Touching me on the arm to bid me follow, mother turned on her heel and left, neither of us looking at father, as much for his sake as our own.
‘What are we going to do?’ I said to mother, as soon as we were outside again.
Mother was seized by a coughing fit, answering me in a breathless voice when she had finished. ‘Get the money,’ she said. ‘We need the garnish now, today, or they will only spunge more from us. We can have him moved from the spunging house to better quarters when they have the first monies.’
I nodded, relieved she knew what to do. ‘You mean a money-lender?’
‘Yes. There’s no other way.’
‘A Jew?’ I said.
‘Yes,’ mother said. ‘I know one. He is a good fellow. Many in Spitalfields trust him.’
Mother led me to Great Montagu Court, one of the passageways off Little Britain, near where we used to live. Here, surrounded by tumbledown shacks, was a flat-fronted brick house of the better sort.
‘Moses da Costa lives here,’ mother murmured to me.
She boldly rang the bell, explaining our business to a maid who answered. The maid wordlessly led us along a passageway to a wondrous, richly appointed parlour. There was yellow silk wallpaper with an embossed pattern picked out in red, plush green velvet draperies, a coffee table and a dressing table hung with a patterned, fringed cloth.
I recognised the paintings on the wall from my bible studies with father: Jonah outside Nineveh, and David and Uzzah dancing before the ark. I had never before seen such beauty, such luxury, such taste.
