A cholera epidemic which had swept across Europe finally broke out in this leafy London borough. Inhabitants were warned not to wander along the Serpentine. ‘Noxious effluvia’ were ‘reeking from its lovely ripples’,10 Palmer said. Hannah and More, fortunately, were away holidaying in Balcombe but the fearful Palmer hastily equipped himself with a medicine to be administered at the first hint of a symptom. Consisting of opium, fennel and black pepper compressed into a tablet to be crumbled or chewed with a tablespoon of brandy or water, it sounds an improbable prophylactic, not least when accompanied by tight ligatures of tape tied just above the knees and elbows to prevent the blood from rushing to the extremities; but the father of his friend Charles West Cope (one of the artists whom Palmer had first met in Wales) had apparently been saved in this way.
Palmer’s anxieties mounted. ‘How the gratings smell tonight,’ he informed the perennially sympathetic Julia Richmond as he sat down to reply to an invitation she had sent him that evening. ‘The drains in London are of themselves enough to breed a plague.’ And, if the prospect of a deadly epidemic was not bad enough, he whipped up more worries, fretting over the health of a society in which crime had ‘reached its ackme’: ‘women in Essex [were] murdering their husbands by wholesale’ and an eight-year-old boy had dispatched his little sister, neatly tidying away his instruments before his mother came home.11 Palmer had clearly been brooding over lurid newspaper reports. But the next day, as he finished his letter to Julia, the morning had dawned bright and clear and he laughed at his morbidity of the previous night.
His other problems, however, were less easily solved. He felt, he said, ‘MISERABLY HAMPERED’ by his duties.12 Whenever he tried to get away to the country, ‘some horrid teaching engagement’ would ‘snare him by the leg’.13 How could the omnibus office at Paddington be compared with Devon’s Mount Edgecombe, or the Kilburn Road with the ‘thunder fraught’ Hamoaze (the estuary of the Tamar)? he wondered.14 The warm weather that delighted those holidaying in the country seemed to him, stuck in the capital, more like a glaring and uncomfortable heat.
‘I must, D.V. [Deus Vult or Deo Volente meaning ‘God willing’ is a medieval acronym that peppers Palmer’s letters and notes] strike out at once into a NEW STYLE. SIMPLE SUBJECT; BOLD EFFECT; BROAD RAPID EXECUTION,’15 he resolved after a sketching trip in 1847. From the late 1840s a new energy infused his work. He visited King Arthur’s Castle at Tintagel: a huge bluff of ‘tumbled about’16 rock that Turner in 1815 had painted, assaulted by powerful shipwrecking storms. Discovering a little hut in which he could shelter, he sketched the rocky masses heaving upwards like waves against his horizon; a sudden rainy squall blowing across the slopes, tossing glittering seagulls and fragments of light.
Palmer also embarked around this time on a series of literary scenes. He painted the departure of Ulysses from the sea-nymph Calypso’s rocky home: their sad farewell set against the sinking sun’s gold. He depicted Christian’s descent into the Valley of Humiliation: a lowering drama that discovers a lone hero on the brink of his greatest battle. Accounting meticulously for every literary detail – the red cloak that falls from Christian’s shoulder reveals that his back is unprotected by armour which is why he will later stand and fight the foul fiend Apollyon rather than flee – Palmer worked for hours on each of these pieces. Yet, exhibited at the Old Watercolour Society in 1848, his image from Pilgrim’s Progress was returned unsold. The picturesque formulas of such fellow members as Thomas Miles Richardson and William Collingswood Smith (both elected associates in the same year as Palmer) were far more widely preferred. A disappointed Palmer vowed to ‘foreswear HOLLOW compositions’ such as Calypso; to stop painting ‘great spaces of sky’ and ‘TAKE SHELTER in TREES’. ‘Directly poetical subjects are less saleable,’17 he decided. But his tastes were too deeply engrained to abandon. He was stranded on rocky islands of romance. In 1850, he chose a subject from Robinson Crusoe, a novel which must have appealed particularly to a painter who had been all but marooned.
Like the famous literary outcast, he made the best of what he had: which was watercolour. Working on large pieces of board, he continued to test the capacities of this medium, tackling his ambitious subjects with panache, infusing his elaborate compositions with light. He still harboured yearnings to become an oil painter and, though for a while these were encouraged by his close friend, the enthusiastic amateur artist and deaf mute John Reed, for all his persistent efforts, for all the notes that he kept so punctiliously in a portfolio devoted to the mysteries of this material, his hopes were consistently frustrated. Palmer ran down an analytical dead end. The stacks of stretched canvases, primed panels and never completed pictures that were discovered after his death in his lumber room bore a sad testimony to his failed dreams.
Palmer, however, was learning to work a little more quickly, for, though he compared his paintings to ‘apples which will not ripen till they have been kept a long while in the cupboard’, he no longer ‘pored and bored’18 over them as he used to, he said, but instead worked on four or five at once. In 1852 he sold everything at the Old Watercolour Society exhibition and afterwards received a commission from a Mr White – albeit a small one to be sold at a third of the exhibition price – who subsequently asked him to do a further seven pieces. Then at last, in 1854, after an eleven-year wait in which the continuing appearance of his name in the lower list – the list of associate rather than full members – had come to feel like an annual stigma, he was elected a full member of the Old Watercolour Society. He was as relieved as he was delighted. ‘Almost every member said I ought to have been in before,’ he wrote.19
The family can hardly have looked forward to Christmas 1848 as they approached the first anniversary of little Mary’s death, but it was to turn out to be even unhappier than they had anticipated. On 17 December, Palmer’s father died. The generous if chaotic old man who had been so much a part of Sam’s carefree childhood, of the dreams and delights of his rural Shoreham days, had rather faded from his married existence, his paternal role supplanted by the more competent Linnell. His sudden death stirred up deep sediments of memory, unsettling emotions of gratitude and regret. ‘The first gush of tears came with the thought, “How he loved my childhood’s soul and MIND – how he laboured to improve them, sitting in the house and walking in the fields!”’ Palmer wrote.20 He had lost his gentlest and most faithful ally. That spring he was to lose another when, in April 1849, Henry Walter, his boyhood friend and fellow Ancient, also passed away. Palmer, recovering from a protracted bout of illness, felt ‘worn through with the dejection of the sudden news and the prostration of utter fatigue’,21 he told Richmond. He could not even get down to Torquay to pay his last respects for he had cried off from so many teaching obligations that he could do so no more.
Thomas More must have wished that Palmer had taken a leaf from his own father’s book for, where the young Sam had been set free to discover his own course, More found himself forced upon an ever more narrowly prescriptive path. Intense religiosity was part of every Victorian upbringing. Achievement was highly valued in a progressive age. Contemporary attitudes to education were caricatured by Charles Dickens in his Dombey and Son, in which the unfortunate scion of the eponymous Dombey is put into the hands of a teacher whose system is ‘not to encourage a child’s mind to develop and expand itself like a young flower; but to open it by force like an oyster’.22
‘Education,’ said Palmer, ‘including at its foundation the fear and love of God, is all in all.’23 He regarded the process as a personal hobby, if not a holy calling. Schoolwork he believed to be ‘nothing short of divine’.24 There was nothing on earth more delightful, he declared, than the training of one’s child. His son, even more precious now that Mary was gone, was his guinea pig. He set about giving More a thorough education with nothing ‘loose or slippery’ and no ‘show or parade’. Palmer, who admired Milton for knowing Homer by heart before he was sixteen, saw difficulty as a challenge and diligence as the veh
icle by which one could rise to meet it. It is ‘very difficult to do anything well from the blacking of shoes upwards’,25 he said, but by taking pains one could achieve things both wisely and well. He believed firmly in the advantages of parental influence. He would not, he insisted, hand over his first born to some hired pedagogue, to some crinoline-clad nurse bawling angrily at her charges. ‘While ladies say they can’t trust their servants with their keys,’ he wrote to Miss Twining (who, having written a pamphlet on workhouse schooling, was always prepared to discuss such matters), ‘we see that they can trust them with their children: trust them at a most impressible age to take their shape and bent of mind and soul from hirelings! What then is the momentous business that can drag the mother from those dearest hours of her life, her mornings with her children? No business at all. You have answered the question. It is the hatred of conscientious painstaking in which and through which alone comes the delight of duty.’26 ‘Home influence is maternal influence and that we know has formed the best and greatest men,’27 he concluded.
Palmer, however, believed with Locke that children’s constitutions could be ‘either spoil’d or at least harm’d by Cockering and Tenderness’.28 He vigorously espoused the virtues of beating. ‘Flog on!’ as his great aunt had said when an uncle, who had run away from home to enjoy the 1780 riots, had been found asleep among the cavalry horses in the Royal Exchange. Palmer would sometimes tell the story of one of his cousins who, though he had known perfectly well how to spell a word in his school book, had stubbornly refused to prove it to his parents. ‘They gave him a cold bath, whipped out the demon for a time,’ Palmer remembered. But it always came back. Once, Palmer had managed to coax the boy into spelling the word privately. He had done so correctly, and his cousin had reported as much; ‘But soon after he was up the next morning he was playing hare to the hounds round the garden, till they caught him at last and brought him in for a birching.’ That ‘birching was blest’ Palmer had concluded, for ‘I saw him the other day, a worthy, cheerful old gentleman’.29
The ‘most calamitous of our birthdays’, Palmer once declared, was that on which we ‘become too old for whipping’,30 while ‘the disuse of those few moderate twigs of birch in our nurseries’, he told a friend many years later, ‘is a patent infatuation’.31 And yet, for all his strenuous advocation of the virtues of corporal punishment – ‘Will boys learn at home without the distant probability of the strap?’32 Palmer wondered – the rod remained in his house for the most part a mere threat. He rarely punished and, when he did, the penalties imposed were slight. Indeed, looking back many years later on his efforts to educate his son, he declared paradoxically that ‘the peculiar excellence of home teaching’ lay ‘in the earliest lessons being made pleasant’, that a child should be beguiled and not beaten and that – bar an occasional correction for idleness – for every cuff given by an ill-tempered parent, the parent deserved to receive a dozen back – ‘and pretty hard ones too’.33
The foundations of More’s future were dauntingly solid. ‘I do think a boy should know by heart and understand some short Latin Grammar – the Eton say – and should go through the first book of Euclid with a private tutor before going to school,’ Palmer said.34 Latin was fundamental – ‘for without it I do not think the best English has ever been written or spoken: and as speech pre-eminently distinguishes us from the brutes . . . we ought surely to speak well’35 – so, though prosody could be deferred for a while, irregular verbs and syntax needed to be ‘thoroughly mastered so that they can never be forgotten – and syntax wants the pains of home teaching that it may be understood as well as got by rote’.36
More was encouraged to draw. He was taught to read aloud, enunciating properly so that he could entertain his mother while she was sketching or amuse the family as they gathered round the fire. He shared his father’s love of music and played the piano; one day, when their piano tuner failed to turn up, Palmer worried terribly that the jarring notes might do his son’s ear lasting damage. More particularly liked the organ. As a fourteen-year-old, on holiday in Margate, he would rise at half past six to spend his mornings playing Handel and Corelli on the instrument at the town baths. A year later, officiating temporarily as an organist at a church in Earl’s Court, he proved highly proficient, playing the congregation out with a rousing Hallelujah Chorus. He and his father filled happy hours discussing ‘fugues, stop-diapasons, open-diapasons, double-diapasons, the swell, swell-couplers, principals, fifteenths, sequialteras, bourdon, and double sets of 32-feet pipes!’37 Palmer recalled. And, in 1858, he took his son to Crystal Palace where they drifted happily about amid the displays of pictures ‘while from the distant, great organ, sweet streams of melody spread like perfume through the halls’.38
Lessons were not always plodding for More. His father knew how to kindle the imagination. As he lectured his son on the evils of cruelty, he reminded him of the biblical story of Jezebel. ‘I wonder what Jezebel was like when she was a little girl,’ he wrote. ‘You may try to draw her’; and there followed the sort of imaginative contemplation that must have informed his own narrative works. ‘I should make her with proud-looking eyes – turning up her nose at everybody and in very fine clothes. She was fond of dress to the last – but while she was painting her cheeks and making herself so fine that morning – she little thought of the hungry dogs that would tangle their fangs among her laces and gimcracks.’39
Palmer was prepared to sacrifice everything for the sake of his son’s education. A landscapist could make a better living in the country, but he remained in the capital because it was the best place for schools. His efforts paid off. Having finished his preparatory education under the auspices of a Kensington clergyman, in 1858, at the age of sixteen, More went on to gain a place at Kensington Grammar School where he not only won several prizes but became a great favourite of the headmaster. He got into the highest class, Palmer told Miss Wilkinson proudly. It would still be some time before he looked back on this moment with the bitterest of regrets.
While Palmer had limped impecuniously on through the late 1840s and into the 1850s, Linnell had continued to take great strides as a painter. His 1848 Noah: The Eve of the Deluge works like a powerful vortex, sweeping the eye inwards with its glowing force. Ruskin noticed it at the Royal Academy exhibition of that year and though he misread its subject, referring to it as The Retreating Storm, he nonetheless mentioned it in an updated edition of Modern Painters as ‘characterised by an observance of nature scrupulously and minutely patient . . . only to be understood by reference to the drawings of Michelangelo’.40 By the early 1850s, Linnell was being hailed as one of Britain’s most collectable landscapists. Dealers were buying up any work that they could. A picture of quoit players which Linnell had first sold to Sir Thomas Baring (the father of John Baring who had commissioned Palmer in Rome) in 1811 for seventy-five guineas was sold by Christie’s in 1848 for a thousand. Problems with forgeries would soon arise and, before long, Linnell would find himself being asked to verify a work so often that he began to charge a £5 fee.
Soon, no longer tied to the capital by the financial necessities of portrait commissions, he was planning to leave Bayswater. In May 1849, on their way to Edenbridge to inspect a possible site for a new home, Linnell and his son James found themselves waiting at Redhill, in Surrey, to change trains. Energetic as ever, Linnell filled the time with a brisk walk up the nearby Redstone Hill where he was so taken by the views that stretched outwards in all directions that he decided on the spot that this was where he would live. Eleven acres had been put up for sale by a London stockbroker. Linnell bought them at once.
Picking a vantage point on the brow of a well-timbered hill sloping down towards the west, he set about designing and building a substantial Reigate-stone house, adding sixty-three more acres to his original eleven, personally supervising every stage of the construction himself. By the time he had finished, Redstone was an impressive mansion with terraced grounds and magnificent views. It was
near enough to London for him to take the train in easily, and also to Brighton for his wife to make trips to the shops or the beach. In July 1851, the Linnell family finally moved.
Redstone was organised around work. Two huge painting studios of the sort that Palmer could only have dreamt of took up the entire first floor; one was Linnell’s, the other for the use of his sons, both by then also practising as professional artists. A lobby lined with plaster casts separated them. Downstairs there was a large sixty-foot drawing room with two entrances, so that it could be divided if necessary with a partition, while the windows of a spacious library offered an ample view over flowerbeds and lawns towards the wilder vistas of Linnell’s own woods. In the evenings Linnell would gaze through these windows out over the sunsets which, famously glorious because of the red earth in the area, he would paint. How Palmer, who had studied a sunset ‘over the same piece of rock and sea’41 for three weeks in Cornwall, would have loved such a view! Instead, back in London, he had to climb up to the attic and, standing on tiptoe, strain his neck out of the nursery maid’s window to get even the tiniest glimpse of the sky.
Linnell was lord of all he surveyed at Redstone. No one could arrive at the front door without him throwing up the sash and issuing his challenge. He might not have been quite as ferocious as his hound, Niger – it had to be shot after biting a girl who was delivering eggs – but still regular tradesmen preferred to dodge round under cover of the trees to the entrance at the back of the house. The local hunt was also upset. Used for decades to drawing cover in the mature oak woods, they resented the territorial fences that Linnell put up. A long battle ensued which Linnell won in the end. His house remained a stronghold, an empire over which he presided. There, unimpeded, he could pursue his painting, pore over his books of Hebrew and Greek, grind his corn, bake his bread, brew his ale and thunder forth his opinions to a well-disciplined family which increasingly seldom dared venture dissent.
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