On the Saturday following his death, an inquest was held at the Hope public house. Before the coroner, Mr T. Stirling, Mrs Walker, the landlady at 24 Pitt Street, explained how JS had come to lodge with her a week before his death, making nightly appearances at the theatre until the Monday night when he had been seized with violent vomiting. She had called for Dr Langley, who in turn told the jury how he had found JS in ‘a very weak and debilitated state’, which had been caused, in his opinion, by ‘violent vomiting and inflammation’. Shortly thereafter he was taken by a delirium in which he insisted on dressing himself for the theatre and, convinced that he was before an audience, began to drift in and out of the characters of Oroonoko and Scaramouch, his own speech interleaved with the parts he had been hired to play. A distressed Mrs Walker and Mr Langley forcibly restrained him as he tried to leave the house, attempting to put him back to bed, but it was no use. JS kept rising, as if mesmerised, acting ‘snatches of the parts to which he had been most accustomed’. For the next several hours, his hallucinations became increasingly vivid, his mumbling speech an epigrammatic lattice of quotation and incoherence. In the early hours of the following morning he died.
The events that had immediately preceded JS’s sudden illness were described by Mr Burton, the box-keeper at the Tottenham Street theatre, Catherine Elliot, a fellow performer there, and her sister, the stage manager. The night before he had died, JS had asked Burton to provide him with a pass for a female friend. Burton had agreed, and ‘allowed an elegantly attired lady to pass to the boxes’. A little later JS reappeared in a state of breathless excitement, begging for a private box where he and his lady friend ‘would not be publicly observed’. At rehearsal the following morning, JS approached Catherine Elliot with the words, ‘Old woman, I was nicely in for it last night,’ to which she replied that she supposed he was, even though she was unable to decipher exactly what he meant and simply assumed he’d been drunk. ‘It was a great row,’ continued JS, at cross-purposes, ‘but I was not aware it could be heard onstage.’ If Miss Elliot now realised that something violent had transpired in the boxes, her suspicions were confirmed when JS removed a piece of material from his sleeve that looked to have been torn from a lady’s nightgown. ‘That,’ he said, ‘unless a dickey [shirt]… was all the linen she had on.’
Having boasted of an apparent sexual conquest, he next began to complain of pains in his left side, which he asked Miss Elliot to feel, but could not bear the pressure of her hand when she did. They were injuries for which her sister, the stage manager, offered an explanation: earlier that day, JS had slipped down the ladder going through a trap and fallen on his side, bruising his ankle, ribs and knee. Mr Langley, the surgeon, then told the court that, even though he had not made a detailed examination of the body, he did not consider these injuries to have been of significance in the matter of his death.
Having heard the available witnesses, Mr Stirling, the coroner, seemed satisfied with Langley’s opinion. He asked the jury whether they required any further information. They declined, and he discharged the court. The press, however, was more sceptical, largely because JS’s body had been buried a day before the inquest had begun. As one journalist wrote:
This is a strange business. Pray what does Mr Stirling mean by holding an inquest where there is no dead body? There were marks of violence externally, and every symptom of violence internally: yet neither for the aidance of justice, nor for the interests of medical science did the said surgeon Langley seek to examine the lesion. How did Mr Langley know that the bruises did not occasion the death of the deceased? And if they did not, what did? Poison? We have only to say that the public have a right to know more about the matter. The cause of Grimaldi’s death has not been inquired into, and he did not die a natural death.
This was not the only paper to voice suspicion, and its invocation of poison seems particularly suggestive, given the events of 1827 that had left JS at his parents’ door in a state of intense agitation. Poison had been a factor then, insanity and hallucinations similarly preceded by high passions and violent arguments, and though JS had a history of mental illness, the onset of the vomiting and delirium that prefigured his death would certainly be consistent with sudden toxicity. A similar thing had happened to Thomas Ellar in 1835, when a jealous lover poisoned him with mercury, the effects of which turned his face blue for the remainder of his life. Who, though, might have poisoned JS? Was the ‘elegantly attired lady’ whom he had taken into the boxes that evening, possibly one of the many prostitutes who did business in the theatre, exacting revenge for an assault in which he had literally ripped the clothes from her back? Or was she, perhaps, the same ‘young lady’ of 1827, a long-term mistress with whom he was locked in a sadistic and mutually destructive passion?
The Gentleman’s Magazine certainly seemed to think so, although it offered quite a different account of the death, claiming it was common knowledge that JS had died of the bruises Langley was so ready to dismiss, acquired in ‘a drunken fight with a professed pugilist, the lover of his pretended wife, who was a young courtezan of excessive vulgarity and little pretension to beauty’. No clarification ever came forward, as while the Morning Chronicle reported that JS’s body had been exhumed from its resting place in the burial ground of Whitefield’s Tabernacle, Tottenham Court Road, on 17 December, an autopsy report was never filed. The case closed, and the sordid mystery of J. S. Grimaldi’s death at thirty faded quickly from public view, barely commemorated save for the appearance of an anonymous little verse that spat the same venom on his memory that Anthony Pasquin had once expended on his grandfather. Its final stanza ran,
Ev’ry act of each day brings thee hatred and Shame,
Strews thy path with the thorns of disgrace,
In Infamy’s books writes the tale of your fame,
And bids us retreat from your deeds and your name!
The debts paid – if you can – rest in peace.
JS was the last of the Grimaldi line, but he left no will, no possessions, and a theatrical legacy that amounted to three small prints of himself in character and a bust of his likeness that his parents kept in their front room, covered with a sheet. Yet four years after his death (and two years before he edited Joe’s Memoirs), Charles Dickens remained sufficiently affected by his fate to grant him a cameo appearance in a story called ‘The Stroller’s Tale’, which comprised one of the earliest instalments of The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club. In this story, the assembled Pickwickians are listening to a character called ‘Dismal Jemmy’, himself a down-at-heel actor, recalling the fate of a fellow performer, ‘enfeebled by dissipation and emaciated by disease’, who has squandered his talent and destroyed his career through drink. All the details are consistent with the facts of JS’s life – the wasted promise, the intractable alcoholism, the downward mobility and serial expulsions from increasingly depressing venues – although in Pickwick, his fictional double, ‘John’, is embellished with a wife he habitually beats and a child he neglects to the point of starvation. One night, Jemmy comes across him on the stage. It is late and the theatre is dark. Jemmy recalls,
I was dressed to leave the house and was crossing the stage on my way out, when he tapped me on the shoulder. Never shall I forget the repulsive sight that met my eye when I turned round. He was dressed for the pantomime, in all the absurdity of a clown’s costume. The spectral figures in the Dance of Death, the most frightful shapes that the ablest painter ever portrayed on canvas, never presented an appearance half so ghastly. His bloated body and shrunken legs – their deformity enhanced a hundred fold by the fantastic dress – the glassy eyes, contrasting fearfully with the thick white paint with which the face was besmeared: the grotesquely ornamented head, trembling with paralysis, and the long skinny hands, rubbed with white chalk – all gave him a hideous and unnatural appearance of which no description could convey an adequate idea, and which, to this day, I shudder to think of.
John asks Jemmy for alms and, being grant
ed them, disappears until a few days later when Jemmy receives word that John is dangerously ill. He goes to his bedside and discovers him raving and insensible and on the brink of death, menaced by phantom insects, frightful reptiles and faces peering from the walls ‘searing him with heated irons, and binding his head with cords till the blood started’. Convinced that his wife was planning to murder him to avenge herself for his mistreatment, he begs Jemmy to keep her at bay, though all Jemmy can do is watch in pity as he dies, writhing through agonies and menaced by delusions that re-enacted the final hours of JS – quoting lines of verse, reciting parts from melodramas, singing snatches of songs and, most unsettling of all, laughing ‘the clown’s shrill laugh’.
That Dickens found a theme of deep personal significance in the circumstances of JS’s death is demonstrated by the fact that this episode in The Pickwick Papers is but the first of countless images of derelict performers that wend their sorry way through his fiction, as lost and beggarly as a solitary note wobbling across an empty auditorium. Like many boys of his generation, Dickens had idolised Joe in his childhood, fondly recalling trips up to London where he would offer his applause ‘with great precocity’, all the while storing up impressions that would come to influence his early work – his first book, Sketches by Boz, had been commended for demonstrating the ‘spirit of Grimaldi’. The fall of JS not only represented the desecration of those honey-hued pleasures, but perfectly distilled what would become one of his major themes: a contemplation of the distance between the imaginative world of children and the mottled realities of adult life. But Dickens also conceded that his memories of Joe were ‘shadowy and imperfect’, liable to misrepresentation, and it could be that the homunculus emerging from the darkness and shivering with delirium tremens represented an alternative memory, the other side of childhood that is full of threats and terrors.
Either way, it’s an important juncture for a clown’s reputation inasmuch as its over-emphatic contrast of laughter and vice colludes to produce the very first example in British culture of clowns as dangerous and troubling figures. In other words, in his portrayal of the death of JS, Dickens invented the scary clown, the menacing predator pushing pleasure beyond its tipping point and curdling into something more twisted and sinister. In this respect, JS is with us even to this day.
It was the season for dying. Charles Dibdin died a month after young Grimaldi, and was buried next to his mother, his grandmother, his wife and five of their children in the churchyard of St James’s, Pentonville. Dissipation completed its death work on Edmund Kean the following May, the polestar of celebrity denied a place next to Garrick in Westminster Abbey. The promising young Tom Ridgeway, ‘allowed to be the best clown we have seen since the days of the celebrated Grimaldi’, was next, succumbing to a lung infection at only twenty-eight years old, followed by Paulo, who died at forty-eight, leaving his wife and family ‘totally unprovided for’. In an instructive contrast to the professional silence that followed the death of JS, such was Paulo’s standing that, within a fortnight of his passing, a committee had been formed to provide his widow with an annual pension. ‘Some may think the sufferings of buffoons unworthy of sympathy,’ wrote the Morning Chronicle, as it sympathetically reported the news, ‘but every man who devotes his mind or body energetically to the production of excellence in his art, if it be not a bad one, is deserving of esteem. A capital fool must be a very clever fellow; he must exercise high qualities of energy and resolution, to endure the strains, and kicks and thumps, which Clowns are heir to.’
Joe and Mary decided it was time for them to go too. The shock of their son’s death, combined with their joint disabilities, sent them both into a mournful depression. Mary had not fully recovered from her stroke, and Joe had suffered another attack of the spasms, incurring a doctor’s bill for £54 that he had to ask John Hughes, secretary of the Drury Lane Theatrical Fund, to help him discharge. Finding their lives bleak and burdensome, they also turned to poison, making a pact to end it all. According to the illustrator George Cruikshank, they made their farewells, drank a fatal dose and lay side by side to await their deaths. Minutes passed and nothing happened. Many more minutes passed and still nothinghappened, until at last Mary turned to her husband and said, ‘Joey, are you dead?’
‘No, Mary,’ he replied. ‘Are you?’
‘No.’ The only symptoms were wind and an upset stomach, which they cured with a good, warm supper, over which they agreed to forbear from suicide and endure their lives a little longer.
Mary did not have long to wait. She died some time in 1834, although the exact month and day remain vague. This uncertainty emanates from the Memoirs themselves, which mention her death only in passing, thereby remaining consistent in their rendition of Mary Grimaldi as the mistiest of vignettes, even though she and Joe were married for more than thirty years. Joe seems to have viewed her death as something of a reprieve, for as soon as she was gone he desired to leave Woolwich and ‘return from Transportation’, as he put it to Ellar, asking an old servant of the Hughes family to find him a house in Islington where he could receive visits from friends and be closer to his beloved Wells. The servant, Mrs Arthur, rented to him the house next to hers at 33 Southampton Street, Pentonville, for the modest rent of twenty-eight pounds per year, although the deal turned out to be too good to be true Joe was soon involved in a dispute with the landlord, Mr Proctor, over who was responsible for the property’s Land Tax. ‘I am not to be duped or imposed upon,’ Joe wrote high-handedly, after receiving an unexpected bill and issuing a half-hearted threat to vacate.
Annoyances aside, he was glad to be home in Islington. It was, said the New Monthly Magazine, ‘sacred ground to him’, conjuring the romantic view that he ‘was wont to wander up and down beside the tall poplars and the narrow river and cogitate upon his by-gone glories’. In truth, Joe was largely immobile, and while he retained good use of his arms and upper body, his legs were completely paralysed. In retrospect, he wished he had withdrawn from the stage in 1819 after his stint in management, believing that if he had given himself one or two years to recover properly he would have been able to resume some kind of career. Idleness, though, had been beaten out of him in childhood, the threats of the Signor so internalised that they had crippled him through a compulsion to please.
At Southampton Street, he was alone save for his housekeeper, Susannah Hill, although there was a fairly constant stream of visits from friends, who included Richard Hughes, Richard Norman, Alfred Bunn, Edward Cross, Tom Ellar, to whom he sold a pair of fiddles for five pounds, and Fanny Kelly, who sought his advice when she considered adopting a baby girl. He also kept in touch with old comrades like Charles Farley, himself ageing and obscure and living in Hart Street, Bloomsbury, where his accomplishments were overlooked by a younger generation of dramatists for whom he had paved the way. ‘The … name of Joseph Grimaldi is dear to all, who like myself remember you in your glory,’ Farley wrote consolingly to Joe, ‘a glory that must take an age since it can pass away.’ Every night he was called for by William Cooke, the landlord of the Marquis of Cornwallis, who put him on his back and carried him the few doors down to his pub, where he would entertain the drinkers and enjoy a nightly nip of scotch ale or gin and water.
This still left many empty hours which he passed in penning short, maudlin letters that he assured his friends were agony to write – ‘I am afflicted with rheumatism so severely as to be scarcely able to lift my pen’ – and filled with complaints about ill health, poor finances and with requests for advances on his pension, bottles of soothing ‘mixture’ and cheering visits to ‘talk of old times when life was young and no one was happier than your old and true chum’. As the benefit season approached he would still be assailed with requests to appear, in spite of his well-publicised disabilities. To one applicant he wrote,
I am sorry I shall not be able to oblige you this year by even making an appearance for an hour. I am very ill – so ill indeed that I can scarcely hold the pen in
my hand to write this to you. I am rheumatised – goutised – puffised – and generally done up. No more for poor Joey the larks and games, the sausage and baggy breeks, the Little Old Woman and Hot Codlins. Eheu! My foot is swathed in bandages, my body is wrapped in flannel, and my heart is bandaged in calico. I am always in pain.
‘Poor Joey’s laid up in lavender,’ he wrote to another, ‘and will never again make Christmas folk grin with his anticks, his buffooneries, and his quips and cracks. No more concealment of sausages in his capacious pockets – no more bottles stowed away – no more merry songs and sayings and jibes.’ ‘O my heart grieves!’ he wailed, concluding his letter with a performative gesture reminiscent of the Signor’s famous skeleton scene: ‘Oh that pain, it is coming on again, and I must drop the pen that quivers in my hand – come and see poor Joey – come dear friend, and talk of the day of yore. The sight of your jolly rubicund mug will mayhap ease me and drive for the nonce “dull care away”, Yours as ever, Joey Grimaldi (“Grim-all-day”) Joking till the last you see.’
In these idle hours, Joe began writing, or rather dictating, his memoirs, completing them on his fifty-eighth birthday, 18 December 1836. An 1874 auction catalogue describes the manuscript (sadly lost) as ‘filling 400 closely-written pages’ and being ‘as genuine and faithful an autobiography as ever was written, full, frank, and delightfully clownish, childlike and simple’. A month later, Sadler’s Wells put on a revival of Mother Goose, with Joe appearing in the bills as patron. They still called out for ‘Hot Codlins’ there, irrespective of what was playing on stage, exasperating the management to the degree that in 1832 they had taken the extraordinary step of banning it, announcing to the patrons that ‘It being customary … for some few persons to call for an obsolete song called “Hot Codlins”, much to the annoyance of the generality of the Audience … no Song, or Performance of any description, will be allowed to be introduced, but such as is announced in the Bills of the Day.’ That night it was permitted, although Jefferini faltered in his part as Clown, for when he sang ‘Hot Codlins’ in the presence of the great man, the reviews denounced it as ‘the least humorous we have ever heard’.
The Pantomime Life of Joseph Grimaldi Page 31
