Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives

by John Sutherland

  When his father died in 1824, aged only forty-six, Ainsworth, freed from the scrivener’s pen, travelled south to London – ostensibly to read law at the Inner Temple. He promptly threw himself into the literary world. Shrewdly he married Fanny Ebers, the daughter of his first publisher, in 1826. Dashing as he was, Ainsworth was unlucky in love and both his marriages would end unhappily.

  In 1831, inspired by a visit to Chesterfield, he began writing Rookwood. Following the French – principally Hugo’s – model, he introduced into his gothic tale, which features the highwayman exploits of Dick Turpin (notably the legendary ride from London to York on Black Bess, which Ainsworth invented), chansons d’argot and ‘flash’ or low slang. Dickens would borrow Ainsworthian feathers for the low-life scenes of Oliver Twist. Richard Bentley brought Rookwood out to huge sales success in 1834 and Ainsworth was hailed as the new Scott. The novel was illustrated, sumptuously, by George Cruikshank. The two men would forge a useful partnership over a series of novels. Later in life, Cruikshank would claim to be the ‘inventor’ of the narratives. He was certainly the more gifted of the two.

  For a couple of years, Ainsworth’s star rose higher even than Dickens’s. ‘The sword’, his biographer melodramatically declares, ‘was drawn between them.’ In addition to aspiring to Scott’s mantle, Ainsworth also cultivated a Byronic dandyism with, as one ironist put it, the ‘chest of Apollo and the waist of a gnat’. So much for that cockney, Boz. Jack Sheppard (1839), the Fieldingesque tale of an eighteenth-century cracksman, again with Cruikshank’s Hogarthian illustrations, enjoyed another immense success, at the height of which there were eight pirated dramatic versions running on the London stage. On the strength of it, Ainsworth set himself up in a fine house, Kensal Lodge, and held reign there over a literary salon of other ‘fashionables’.

  Despite this welcome celebrity, Ainsworth was alarmed by the moral fury stirred up by Jack Sheppard. The novel was accused of being a formula for murder when a manservant, Francis Courvoisier, claimed he was inspired to slit his master’s throat after reading Ainsworth’s incendiary text. He was, none the less, hanged – fiction not being a strong defence in those days. Ainsworth, pusillanimous by nature, subsequently gave up ‘Newgate’ (i.e. crime) fiction and followed Scott’s example (Kenilworth) and Victor Hugo’s (Notre-Dame de Paris) by making famous historical places rather than notorious criminals the centre of his work. There followed such topographic bestsellers as The Tower of London (1840); Old St Paul’s (1841), his best novel, set amidst the Plague and Great Fire of London, with plentiful borrowing from Defoe; and the floridly illustrated Windsor Castle (1843). Although he churned out a flood of other historical romances over the next forty years, Ainsworth’s star fell inexorably. Bentley gave him £2,000 for The Tower of London. For wretched effusions such as Beau Nash, or, Bath in the Eighteenth Century, almost forty years later, he scraped a measly £100 from fifth-rate publishers.

  Ainsworth was lucky, or unlucky, however you look at it, to live almost twice as long as his father. His decline from stardom to author’s garret is the subject of one of the most poignant literary anecdotes of the period, retold probably more than once by Percy Fitzgerald, one of Dickens’s smart young Bohemian set. ‘I recall’, said Fitzgerald, ‘a dinner at Teddington, in the sixties, given by Frederic Chapman, the publisher, at which were Forster and Browning. The latter said humorously, “a sad forlorn-looking being stopped me today, and reminded me of old times. He presently resolved himself into – whom do you think? – Harrison Ainsworth!” “Good Heavens!” cried Forster, “is he still alive?”’ Not just alive, but alive for another two decades. If the sword was ever drawn between Ainsworth and Boz, it drooped sadly in later life. But then, Scott himself had also died bankrupt and broken.

  FN

  William Harrison Ainsworth

  MRT

  Jack Sheppard

  Biog

  S. M. Ellis, William Harrison Ainsworth and his friends (1911)

  31. Charles (James) Lever 1806–1872

  From hand to mouth. Lever’s description of his artistic method

  There are novelists whose sole function in literary life is to inspire greater novelists. Charles Lever ranks high in this minor inspirational league. He was born in Dublin, in 1806, the son of a building contractor from Lancashire, and brought up with the social advantages, and social ambiguities, of his Anglo-Irish class. After Trinity College Dublin, he bounced around Europe and North America, gaining the reputation of a good fellow and a wastrel in the making. He studied medicine in a desultory way, earning himself the sobriquet Dr Quicksilver.

  Young Mercury settled down after marrying his childhood sweetheart, Kate, in 1836. Now well on in years, he was encouraged to apply himself to literature by the novelist William Hamilton Maxwell and duly took over the editorship of the Dublin University Magazine. Fifteen years older, Maxwell was, like Lever, the son of a prosperous merchant with little inclination to honest labour. He too had attended Trinity College ‘in a somewhat desultory manner’ and claimed to have seen action at Waterloo where he served as a captain of infantry. Maxwell subsequently married an heiress, took orders, and settled down to the comfortable existence of a hunting parson. His most popular work was the semi-autobiographical Stories of Waterloo (1829). Captain Maxwell would have a formative influence on his protégé’s later career. The Revd Maxwell less so.

  The year 1836–7, when Lever turned to literature, was the high point of Bozmania. The proprietor of the Dublin University Magazine, William Curry, persuaded Lever to write a serial, Harry Lorrequer, in monthly ‘Dickensian’ parts. ‘Phiz’ (Richard Hablôt Knight Browne), Pickwick’s illustrator, was recruited to do the full plate etchings for Lorrequer’s monthly numbers. He and Lever would eventually work together on fourteen novels – one of the great partnerships in Victorian fiction. ‘You ask me how I write,’ Lever was once asked: ‘my reply is, just as I live – from hand to mouth.’ Harry Lorrequer began as a single anecdote and its ad hoc continuation is a narrativeless sequence of Pickwickian picaresque episodes that take the military hero from Cork all over peacetime Europe. It hit the public taste, massively. Curry went on to suggest a variation on the theme. As Lever recalled, thirty years later: ‘my publishers asked me could I write a story in the Lorrequer vein, in which active service and military adventure could figure more prominently than mere civilian life, and where the achievements of a British army might form the staple of the narrative, – when this question was propounded me, I was ready to reply: Not one, but fifty.’

  The first of the fifty was Charles O’Malley (1841). The hero is a bravo from Galway who duels and dissipates himself at Trinity before enlisting to fight in the Peninsula, rising to the rank of captain. By a series of unlikely adventures, Charley finds himself at the shoulder of Napoleon at the beginning of Waterloo and by the side of Wellington (to whom he gives battle-winning instruction) at the climax. Thereafter it is peace, prosperity and the obligatory heiress. It was logical for Lever to choose Waterloo. He was in Brussels while writing and O’Malley is a heroic version of his literary patron, Maxwell. Phiz’s father had also fought at Waterloo (the illustrations are wildly dramatic). It was a period when the Napoleonic Wars were being triumphantly crowed over in Britain: Nelson’s column was erected in 1843 and subscriptions were being gathered for the triumphal arch to Wellington, at the entrance to Hyde Park.

  Thackeray, unlike Dickens and Lever, had still to make his mark as anything other than a penny-a-liner. He was hungry for fame and proposed to Chapman and Hall a volume of ‘Cockney Sketches of Ireland’ (clearly aiming at the success of the firm’s Sketches by Boz). Thackeray procured letters of introduction to Lever, currently residing in high style in his country house, Templeogue, outside Dublin. A convivial visit ensued in early June 1842 and the Waterloo chapters of Charles O’Malley, still fresh on the printed page, were an inevitable topic of conversation. ‘Thackeray seemed much inclined to laugh at martial might,’ it was later recalled, ‘a
lthough he still held to the idea that something might be made of Waterloo, even without the smoke and din of the action being introduced.’

  Thackeray’s ‘Waterloo novel’, Vanity Fair, did not start serialising until January 1847. In the interim, Lever and Thackeray had fallen out catastrophically and descended to flinging satirical mud at each other. His new novel, Thackeray resolved, would be ‘a novel without a hero’, but also a Waterloo novel without Waterloo – an anti-Leveriad. It would mock war-glorifying romances like that damned O’Malley thing. The essence of Vanity Fair was the new gravity it brought to fictional depictions of war. It is expressed in the famous narrative defection in the ninth number: ‘We do not claim to rank among the military novelists. Our place is with the non-combatants. When the decks are cleared for action we go below and wait meekly. We should only be in the way of the manœuvres that the gallant fellows are performing overhead.’ Vanity Fair created new parameters as to what was legitimate in the novel of war.

  Eight years after the publication of Vanity Fair, the young artillery officer Leo Tolstoy was in besieged Sevastopol. He was meditating his first works of fiction – war stories, of course. His diary for 8–9 June 1855 records: ‘Laziness, laziness. Health bad. Reading Vanity Fair all day.’ The ‘Waterloo novel’ manifestly affected him. In the story he was writing up, ‘Sevastopol in May’ (1855), we find the following blatant echo of Vanity Fair’s last paragraph (‘Ah Vanitas Vanitatum! Which of us is happy in this world?’) and The Book of Snobs:

  Vanity! Vanity! Vanity! Everywhere, even on the brink of the grave and among men ready to die for a noble cause. Vanity! It seems to be the characteristic feature and special malady of our time. How is it that among our predecessors no mention was made of this passion, as of smallpox and cholera? How is it that in our time there are only three kinds of people: those who, considering vanity an inevitably existing fact and therefore justifiable, freely submit to it; those who regard it as a sad but unavoidable condition; and those who act unconsciously and slavishly under its influence? Why did the Homers and Shakespeares speak of love, glory, and suffering, while the literature of today is an endless story of snobbery and vanity?

  It was not merely the Thackerayan rhetoric, but the Thackerayan tactic, the ‘sidestep’, which Tolstoy would absorb into his own narrative. The influence of Stendhal on the battle scenes in War and Peace has been commented on: that of Vanity Fair less so, and that of Charles Lever never. But Tolstoy’s constant deflection, or retreat, from the battlefield to what is going on with ‘the girl I left behind me’ (chapter 30, Vanity Fair) cannot but recall Thackeray and, by opposition, Lever. So too do the strategically brief, ironic and calculatedly unLeverian irruptions of Napoleon, as in his encounter (in Book III, Part 2, Chapter 7) with the drunken Cossack, Lavrushka:

  Finding himself in the company of Napoleon, whose identity he had easily and surely recognized, Lavrushka was not in the least abashed but merely did his utmost to gain his new master’s favour.

  He knew very well that this was Napoleon, but Napoleon’s presence could no more intimidate him than Rostov’s, or a sergeant major’s with the rods, would have done, for he had nothing that either the sergeant major or Napoleon could deprive him of.

  No heroes in this novel. It is distinctly Thackerayan. And, for those whose ears are attuned to the sounds of very minor fiction, anti-Leverian. The Irishman had served his literary purpose. He had helped in the creation of two masterpieces: Vanity Fair and War and Peace. They also serve.

  FN

  Charles James Lever

  MRT

  Charles O’Malley

  Biog

  L. Stevenson, Dr Quicksilver, the Life of Charles Lever (1939)

  32. J. H. Ingraham 1809–1860

  He is one of our most popular novelists, if not one of our best. Edgar Allan Poe

  Ingraham was born in Portland, Maine, into a shipbuilding family. In his teens he went off to sea and, if his own account is to believed, smelled gunpowder in South American revolutions. On his return, he studied at Yale – but there is doubt (as with other areas of his life) as to whether he graduated or whether, indeed, he was ever there. In 1830, he moved to Natchez, Mississippi, where he married the cousin of the episcopalian dignitary and author, Phillips Brooks. After a failed attempt at law, he settled down as a teacher of languages. His wife, Mary, was of planter stock, and brought money to the marriage.

  Ingraham began his literary career with travel sketches, for which there was a lively market. His first novel, Laffite: The Pirate of the Gulf (1836), was an unexpected hit with the reading public, earning the novice novelist $1,000 from New York’s leading publisher, Harper Bros. It may be that readers associated him with his namesake, but unrelated, Joseph Ingraham, the national naval hero, lost at sea in 1800. In a characteristically witty hatchet job, Edgar Allan Poe observed: ‘The novelist is too minutely, and by far too frequently descriptive. We are surfeited with unnecessary detail … Not a dog yelps, unsung. Not a shovel-footed negro waddles across the stage … without eliciting from the author a vos plaudite, with an extended explanation of the character of his personal appearance – of his length, depth and breadth, – and, more particularly, of the length, depth and breadth of his shirt-collar, shoe-buckles and hat-band.’ Elsewhere, and later, Poe concluded: ‘He is one of our most popular novelists, if not one of our best. He appeals always to the taste of the ultraromanticists.’

  His Harper windfall induced ‘Professor Ingraham’ (as the publisher mendaciously titled him – without authorial protest) to follow up with similar nautical adventure yarns, such as Captain Kyd; or, The Wizard of the Sea (1839), which circulated for decades as a dime novel and was, plausibly, a remote influence on Stevenson’s Treasure Island. Ingraham was sarcastic about what he called ‘rigidists’ – those who disapproved of fiction as a source of innocent fun. He himself was very flexible on the matter. In 1842 Ingraham was declared bankrupt and set out to remedy his finances with a flood of fiction for magazines, papers and ‘yellowback’ 10 cent library series – whoever would buy his wares at $100 (his normal price) apiece. In 1845 alone he claimed to have published twenty titles. It is estimated that in the early 1840s, 10 per cent of all the new novels produced in the US were ‘Ingrahams’. The sea and piracy remained staple subject matter, although there were more salacious items, such as The Beautiful Cigar Girl, or, The Mysteries of Broadway. The ephemerality of these works, perversely, has made them high-value collectors’ items in modern times. Little other literary value has been found in this superheated second phase of Ingraham’s career.

  Under the influence of a pious brother, Ingraham was increasingly drawn to the church. In 1852 he was ordained as an Episcopalian priest and went on to serve in a number of ministries in the South. His fiction changed drastically with this change of life. He became, to use his own term, a ‘rigidist’. No more jolly-rogering. In 1855 he published what was to be a perennial bestseller among religious readers, The Prince of the House of David. It was followed in 1859 by The Pillar of Fire, or Israel in Bondage. Ingraham’s third biblical romance, The Throne of David, was published in 1860, completing a trilogy on the Holy Land. The novels were epistolary (like the gospels), enabling them to be more easily broken up for Sunday school. In 1859 Ingraham received an honorary LL.D. from the University of Mississippi. Never a professor, he was now, legitimately, a doctor.

  By the end of the 1850s, Ingraham had perceptively seen the oncoming war. The most interesting novel of his third, holy, phase is The Sunny South (1859), a narrative written from the South by a governess born and brought up in the north. Conceived as a response to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the novel pleads for mutual understanding. Ingraham was himself, of course, a Northerner transplanted to the South. But Ingraham did not live to suffer the war. He shot himself in December 1860. He always kept a loaded pistol in the vestibule of his church at Holly Springs, Mississippi (this was, after all, the American South). It seems to have been an accident, although the details
are unclear. More twentieth-century readers know Ingraham than think they do. His book The Pillar of Fire is the credited source of Cecil B. DeMille’s movie starring Charlton Heston, The Ten Commandments (1956).

  FN

  Joseph Holt Ingraham

  MRT

  The Pillar of Fire (or watch the movie)

  Biog

  R. W. Weathersby II, J. H. Ingraham (1980)

  POSTSCRIPT

  33. Prentiss Ingraham 1843–1904

  The extraordinary side of his work is of a nature that appeals to the statistician rather than to the literary critic. The American Bookman’s verdict