The Pattern in the Carpet: A Personal History With Jigsaws

by Margaret Drabble

  Most of Mary Russell Mitford's nineteenth-century prose sketches would translate easily into twentieth-century Heritage jigsaws. When South Africa-born novelist Barbara Trapido in Brother of the More Famous Jack (1982) describes a house in Sussex as being 'like a house one might see on a jigsaw puzzle box, seasonally infested with tall hollyhocks. The kind one put together on a tea tray while recovering from measles', she could be describing many of the dwellings described by Mitford or painted by Helen Paterson Allingham – images of archetypal, timeless, modest, rural tranquillity, still faithfully reproduced and sold in village shops in the third millennium, despite the advent of more upmarket art jigsaws.

  When Mitford was writing about her universal village for the Lady's Magazine, she seems conscious, like Gaskell in Cranford, of describing a vanishing Golden Age (and one that would vanish all the more rapidly if others were to continue to uproot and replant wild flowers as vigorously and profligately as she). Does the brightly coloured jigsaw box cast a shadow and a question over what was or was not the Real Thing? Elizabeth Gaskell solved this problem with exceptional tact and grace in Cranford and Cousin Phillis, where the lament for a passing way of life is securely placed in a context of inevitable progress and change, but Mitford, writing to stay afloat (and writing village sketches because they paid better than the poetry, tragedies and historical dramas that she had considered her true métier), was pushed (like Alison Uttley, though for different reasons) into some kind of falsity of sweetness that strikes us uneasily now. She wrote for the market. It was her father's fault.

  Helen Allingham (a family connection of Mrs Gaskell) also painted for the market, to support her ailing husband and her three children; her watercolours of Surrey cottages were for some years very popular, although they went out of fashion during her lifetime. But they lived on as jigsaws in the 1920s and 30s, enjoyed in an age when urban sprawl was destroying some of her subjects and vastly inflating the prices of others.

  Mrs Sherwood would have disapproved intensely of Dr Mitford and his gambling, if not of his daughter's filial loyalty. She was by nature evangelical, censorious and dogmatic, and maybe her descriptions of the card parties of her grandparents' era are exaggerated. Yet her popular The History of the Fairchild Family is not an austere work, and it strikes a more lurid note than the cool, enlightened and rational tales of her contemporary Maria Edgeworth. Mrs Sherwood's stories were popular with children not for their moral lessons and interpolated hymns and prayers, but for their sadism and gluttony. They are packed with racy descriptions of childish naughtiness, violent retribution and sudden death, accompanied by tempting descriptions of roast fowls, venison, currant-and-raspberry pies, buttered toast and damascene plums. It is a rich and unwholesome mixture.

  Children like unpleasant stories, and I was very fond of (though rather frightened by) some punitive tales called The Misfortunes of Sophy (Les Malheurs de Sophie), translated from the French of the Comtesse de Ségur (1799–1894) by Honor and Edgar Skinner. These volumes had a little of the Fairchild family spirit; they are full of horrors, which is why I remember them so well. Sophy was a greedy, hot-tempered, disobedient, rash and bold four-year-old, who stole sweets and tormented animals and let her wax doll melt. She was a bad little girl and a bad mother to her doll. Sophy was naughtier than I could think of being. Her worst misfortunes are associated with the disgrace of cutting off the heads of her mother's goldfish, and drowning her tortoise while trying to give it a bath. I was appalled and frightened by these events, for I would never knowingly have been unkind to animals, and continue to be shocked by the fact that Maggie Tulliver in The Mill on the Floss let her brother's rabbits die. I am surprised these Sophy stories were given to me when I was so little. I was still at East Hardwick when I first read them; the book was presented to me at Christmas 1944, 'for good progress', by N. Royston, Head Teacher. I was five years old.

  Is it significant that Miss Royston described herself as Head Teacher, not as headmistress?

  De Ségur's morality tales were very popular in France. They are part of Georges Perec's enormous tapestry. Madame Marcia, antique dealer, has a varied collection of wares in her shop, including lubricious animated watches, 'trinkets, curios, scientific instruments, lamps, jugs, boxes, porcelain, bisque ware, fashion plates, accessory furniture, etc.', and a clockwork mechanical toy that 'could have come straight out of Le Bon Petit Diable, that Victorian children's story-book by the Comtesse de Ségur: a horrible old hag, spanking a little boy'. In de Ségur, in the French style, the sadistic/erotic and the pedagogic meet. In Sherwood, there is no such overt recognition.

  I was never exposed to the Fairchilds as a child, for they had already been out of fashion for a century, though I discovered one of Sherwood's popular evangelical stories in a tiny bijou edition hidden away in a drawer in Grandma Bloor's bedroom at Bryn. It was titled Little Henry and his Bearer, and it was a missionary work set in India. I wonder whether my grandmother had ever read it. She was not a religious woman, and she was not much of a reader. I don't think I ever saw her reading a book. I don't know what she would have made of the literary interests of so many of her direct descendants.

  My grandmother preferred a game of cards. We used to play a game called Nap (after Napoleon) at Christmas, when Grandma and Auntie Phyl came to stay in Sheffield, and later, in Wylam-on-Tyne, where we lived when my father became county court judge of Northumberland. This, I think, was the only card game we ever played under my parents' roof. Grandma loved her game of Nap. We played for halfpennies, which was unusually exciting and seemed slightly irregular and un-Quakerly, but we never came to blows over the spoils of the kitty.

  My father used to encourage me, a moody adolescent, to stop sulking in my bedroom reading books and to join the family card game. 'You shouldn't look down on games,' he said. 'What's the point of admiring Jane Austen, and then despising the way her characters spend their time? Come and play.' He actually said that, in more or less those words. It was a reproof that left its mark. He also confided, that same Christmas, that he dreaded taking Grandma Bloor her early morning cup of tea. 'Every morning, I think I'm going to find her dead in her bed,' he said. And she did look, had always looked, remarkably unhealthy – overweight, and with a bad yellowish colour. But she didn't die under his watch. She went home to Bryn, after that last family Christmas, and died in the brass bedstead from Leeds in the care of Joyce and Auntie Phyl.

  My father always brought me an early morning cup of tea when I was staying as an adult at my parents' home, first in Northumberland, and then in Suffolk. I don't like an early morning cup of tea, I much prefer coffee at that hour, but I was touched by his kindness, so I always drank it, in gratitude. I could never have said I didn't want it.

  Mrs Sherwood disapproved of cards, and she would have disapproved of halfpenny Nap, but she approved of geography, Biblical maps and the jigsaw. These were all classified as educational. The Fairchild children, Henry, Emily and Lucy, are instructed by their father in the use of the globe and the locations of Europe, Africa, America and the Garden of Eden (which, we are firmly told, is to be found upon the borders of the river Euphrates), and they are also introduced to dissected maps. Visiting a richer friend with a very tidy and well-stocked nursery ('enough to furnish a toyshop'), the children are asked to select a toy each. Henry seizes upon a Noah's ark; Lucy 'chose a dissected map of England and Wales, and another which formed a picture, and Emily, a box of bricks and doorways, and pillars and chimneys, and other things for building houses'.

  The dissected puzzle is condoned, and its subject matter is no longer confined to maps. It did not take publishers long to realize that the rapidly expanding market for children's books and games could be profitably exploited by the Spilsbury concept of deconstruction and reconstruction. You didn't have to stick with geography. If you could cut up maps for entertainment, you could cut up anything. You could teach Bible stories or the history of the kings and queens of England. You could illustrate Pilgrim's Prog
ress or Robinson Crusoe or the adventures of John Gilpin. You could teach the alphabet, or natural history, or mathematics. Or you could provide pictures that had patriotic rather than purely educational content; soon the first royal images in a long tradition of royal jigsaw subjects began to appear, featuring Queen Victoria's coronation, and Queen Victoria and her consort riding in Windsor Park. Pictures of great events, such as the conflagration at the Tower of London (1841) or the Great Exhibition (1851), or the exploits of General Gordon were not bought principally for their instructional aspects.

  Queen Victoria, like her successor Queen Elizabeth, did jigsaws. Whether she ever attempted those portraying herself is not, as far as I know, recorded. (Jigsaws of royal figures now tactfully avoid dissecting the royal face, and it is no longer fashionable to stitch the royal face in loyal wool-work as it was in Gaskell's and Mitford's day, though I did once attempt a tapestry cushion of Anne of Cleves. It remains unfinished because I did not like it much and, anyway, the wool ran out.) We do know that one evening the young queen co-opted Lord Melbourne and her Lord Chamberlain Lord Conyngham to help her with a puzzle. 'The pleasantest gayest evening I have passed for some time', she notes in her journal. 'I sat up until half past 11.' She also played Fox and Geese, very happily, with her betrothed, Prince Albert. This once-popular board game is classified by Irving Finkel as a hunting game, and may or may not have some resemblance to the game of 'marelles', which Edward IV played some four hundred years earlier, featuring 'two foxes and forty-six hounds of silver overgilt'. Edward played for high stakes, forcing him to borrow from the Medici to finance his games and his wars, but Victoria and Albert were more prudent.

  The tension between edifying and unedifying games reflects the tension between edifying and unedifying books, and is deeply rooted in the history of publishing for children. For many years I remained uninterested in children's literature as a genre (although, of course, like Francis Spufford I remembered my own early reading with pleasure and gratitude) and I have watched its rise to critical prominence over the past fifteen years with some surprise. Danny Hahn, who knows this field well, has helped me to cope with the growing mass of material, and was invaluable in the updates of The Oxford Companion to English Literature when it was still under my surveillance. But through my quest for jigsaws, and my memories of East Hardwick and of Auntie Phyl as village schoolteacher, I have been led into a subject that, like the life of Alison Uttley, has provided several surprises.

  XXXI

  I don't think it was Auntie Phyl who taught me to read. She taught me many other skills, but I don't think reading was one of them, although, of course, she did teach several generations of Long Bennington children. I can't remember how I learned. Possibly I learned with Miss Cooper at East Hardwick. One story has it that when my father came back from the war, he spent time getting to know me by sitting with me to spell out the words of The Radiant Way, a popular children's primer of the day. This may or may not be true. 'Pat can sing. Mother can sing. Sing to Pat, Mother. Sing to Mother, Pat.' Many people of my age were brought up on those simple syllables.

  My mother was good at teaching grammar to older children (she loved grammar) but she was impatient with the younger ones. She was better with her grandchildren, and one of my happiest memories of her is her story about my son Adam, a hyperactive little lad who, when admitted to her bed very early one morning when she was staying with us in our first London house in Highbury, asked her to read to him. She groaned and said it was too early for her to open her eyes. Never mind, said Adam, I know my letters, I'll read you out the letters, and you can tell me what they say. My mother admired his spirit.

  The name of the archetypal village schoolteacher, Goody Two-Shoes, is still well remembered, though not many people know who she really was. She has taken on another meaning. In February 2007, sitting at a pavement café in the Canaries, I overheard one Englishwoman say to another, of an absent third party, 'She's a bit of a Goody Two-Shoes, isn't she?' I was pleased to hear her name, even if it was being taken somewhat in vain, because I had recently tracked down the story of which she is the eponymous heroine.

  She appears in a miniature sixpenny volume published in 1765 by John Newbery, the first publisher to realize the commercial potential of the juvenile market. It's a tiny book, small enough to fit in the palm of an adult hand, and a copy of it raises a smile even from the blasé staff at the issue desk of the Rare Books Room in the British Library. (It would be very easy to pop into your pocket.) It has been attributed to Oliver Goldsmith, and the opening chapter, lamenting Farmer Meanwell's eviction by Mr Graspwell, does indeed have an echo of the indignant, elegiac mood and simple world of The Deserted Village. It tells the tale of the poor orphan Margery Meanwell, who, after the death of her parents, sleeps rough in barns, lives on berries from the hedges, wears rags and has only one shoe; she earns the name of Goody Two-Shoes when a benefactor provides her with a whole pair, which she shows off to the village, crying 'Two shoes, see two shoes!' She learns her letters diligently and then teaches them to other little children, becoming 'a trotting tutoress', travelling from cottage to cottage, until eventually she is given a schoolroom of her own.

  The booklet, which is in part a reading primer in disguise, is illustrated by charming rustic woodcuts of farms, cottages, children, birds and beasts, playfully attributed to 'Michael Angelo of the Vatican'. The child reader is addressed informally as each new picture appears. As Ralph the Raven is introduced the narrator prompts, 'and a fine bird he is. Do look at him.' We sense the comfortable presence of a kind aunt, pointing at the pictures as the pages turn. Alphabet games are introduced into the schoolroom plot, and it emerges that Ralph the Raven and Tom the Pigeon can learn to distinguish their letters too, thus anticipating the research of physiologists in Cambridge in the 1970s, who established that a pigeon could indeed learn the letters of the alphabet, even when they were disguised by different typefaces.

  (The possibility of teaching animals to read and write has long fascinated humans. Pliny, in an affecting section on the sensibilities and talents of elephants in his Natural History, describes one that could write in Greek: 'Thus have I written, and made an offering of the Celticke spoils' is the sentence attributed to this clever beast in Philemon Holland's elegant translation. It must have taken some mastering. In 1785, a wonderful pig 'well versed in all languages' became the talk of London town, where his skill was portrayed in a fine print by Thomas Rowlandson. Robert Southey, in 1807, recalled that 'the learned pig was in his day a far greater object of admiration to the English nation than ever was Sir Isaac Newton'. Wordsworth also knew this pig.)

  The tender-hearted story of Goody Two-Shoes is one of the best known but by no means the first of Newbery's productions for children. A Little Pretty Pocket-Book, which appeared some twenty years earlier in 1744, claims that place. It too had a brightly coloured jacket of Dutch flowered and gilt paper, and it consisted of a medley of rhymes and songs and alphabet games 'intended for the Instruction and Amusement of Little Master Tommy and Pretty Miss Polly, with Two Letters from Jack the Giant-Killer and also a Ball and a Pincushion'. (If you bought it without the ball and the pincushion, it cost twopence less.) Jack the Giant Killer was the monster-hero of earlier unedifying stories, loved by children but deplored by governesses, and here Jack is enlisted in the cause of virtue, instructing Tommy and Polly how to stick pins into either the red or the black side of their toy in order to gain merit. The book contains woodcuts showing children's games, each (somewhat randomly) attached to a letter of the alphabet, in a 'New Attempt to teach Children the Use of the English Alphabet, by Way of Diversion'. There are pictures of cricket, kites, maypoles, marbles, and shuttlecock, as well as many other sports and diversions, but there are, of course, at this early date no pictures showing children doing dissected puzzles. The nearest we get to this kind of activity is a picture of three characters sitting round a table playing a game of'Squares', which looks like a card game but was probably a con
cealed advertisement for another of Newbery's educational games, the 'Sett of Fifty-Six Squares'.

  The sticking of pins into balls and pincushions cunningly added to the pretty pocket book an element of interaction and physical activity for fidgety fingers. Alphabet lottery books also exploited this teaching method by encouraging children to learn their letters by sticking pins through the pages. A little alphabet book published by P. Norbury instructed that 'As soon as the Child can speak, let him stick a Pin through the side of the Leaf where the Pictures are, at the Letter on the other side, which you would teach him; thus let him do till he has by many trials run the Pin through the Letter.' In this manner, the child could learn C for Cock and Crocodile, or even X for Xerxes and Xantippe. I didn't find the instructions on where to stick the pins very clear, and it would have been unwise to experiment with a British Library copy, but no doubt a helpful schoolteacher or mother or governess or aunt would have showed you the technique. And as I was staring at Norbury's booklet, I suddenly remembered Auntie Phyl's sewing cards at Bryn. With a large needle and thread you could stitch the outline of a horse, or a dog, or a tulip. This was curiously satisfying, if not especially creative or intellectual. The products were not objects of beauty.