As Mayer’s circle of friends grew, there were inevitably other women to whom he was attracted, and who understood his devotion to collecting. Not long after moving into Pennant House, he spent some weeks working with Elizabeth Meteyard, who was writing a biography of Josiah Wedgwood. Elizabeth was bright and appealing in her middle age. She was studious and she shared Mayer’s taste in ceramics and his fascination with the past. Mayer was delighted to be in such company and gave Elizabeth free access to all his papers, helped fund her research and offered her the benefit of introductions to his long list of useful acquaintances, including members of the Wedgwood family. Elizabeth also noted demurely, that he ‘permitted me to work for a fortnight under his personal guidance’ and entertained her with stories.2 There is no doubt that he found her a charming and knowledgeable companion. He may, for a moment, have thought of more. But Elizabeth had a career and was as committed to her work as Mayer was to his collection. Her biography was soon to be followed by five other books on Wedgwood. Making her way as a professional writer, she contributed articles and short stories to numerous periodicals under the pen-name ‘Silverpen’ and she also found success as a popular novelist. She could not spend too much time at Pennant House, no matter how pleasant it was, and she was unwilling to be distracted by Mayer. For each of her ceramics books, she drew on the resources of Mayer’s collection, and over the years she became a familiar face in Bebington, attending the opening of an art exhibition there in September 1871 and visiting again to research Wedgwood books that were published in 1873 and 1875. Such visits seem to have been no more than an agreeable interlude for them both, and all too quickly she returned to London. Meteyard clearly retained a lifelong admiration for Mayer and his work, however, and at her death in 1879 her will bequeathed all her personal papers to Liverpool Museum; the wish was not respected by her executors.
In the summer of 1863, Mayer’s sixtieth year, he finally became engaged. He wrote delightedly to all his closest friends, announcing his forthcoming marriage with pride, and they wrote back in turn, expressing their surprise and sharing in his pleasure. ‘I am very happy to think that you have partially weaned yourself from things antique. . . that you have distracted your attention from coats of mail and bent it upon crinoline,’ wrote Joseph Clarke, adding that he was ‘in high glee at the pleasure of paying my most ardent but humble respects’ to the new Mrs Mayer.3 The wedding plans, it seems, were quickly set – there was little reason for delay. At Mayer’s age, he could dispense with the reticence of youth.
We don’t know who it was that Mayer was so close to marrying. All we know is that she lived in Kent, some 300 miles away. It is possible that Mayer had known her a long time and I believe he may have met her during the negotiations to buy the Faussett collection ten years earlier when he had spent time in and around Heppington. He may have been wooing her for a decade, or he may have had to shelve his advances until the way finally became clear on the death of a father or a husband. Nor do we know why the marriage never took place. There might have been last-minute nerves or a disagreement. The lady who Mayer had chosen for a wife may have faltered at the thought of uprooting herself and moving so far from familiar things. They may have been cheated, in the end, by death, leaving Mayer to mourn the woman he should have married. All we know for sure is that he was left alone.
The Victorians were inclined to think of avid collectors as life’s losers. Although there was money to be made from collecting, and a certain prestige too for those who, like Mayer, managed to earn a prominent position within the community, it was difficult to resist the idea that a singular devotion to things was the mark of a man who had failed in other ways. Collecting was increasingly being seen as a means of expressing identity – or of compensating for personal shortfalls. In literature, the stereotype of the collector was associated with the withdrawn, the anti-social and the strange, like Wilkie Collins’s Mr Fairlie in The Woman in White, a character portrayed as living in ‘profound seclusion’ and completely preoccupied with his possessions.4 In popular journals like Punch, the collector was drawn as weak, obsessive and comical. A cartoon from the Punch Almanack of 1875 shows a ‘pale enthusiast’ in the grips of ‘Chronic Chinamania (incurable)’ and so absorbed by his collection that he is apparently oblivious to the charms of the young women encircling him. Similalry, a set of French caricatures features M. de Menussard, an imaginary collector who lives alone, never goes out, has no friends and is ‘a little old man, dry, wrinkled, worn down, patched up’.5 Even among collectors themselves, there could be ambiguity and embarrassment about their activity: The Connoisseur: A Collector’s Journal and Monthly Review noted defensively that its readers might well display ‘amiable weaknesses’, and might even be in the grip of an ‘unwise but never despicable passion’.6
The idea that collecting was somehow ‘unwise’ harked back to a more widespread discomfort with art, and how it might encourage potentially disruptive, or even immoral, pleasures. The behaviour of avant-garde artists such as the Pre-Raphaelites only reinforced this uneasiness. In 1850, John Everett Millais’ work, Christ in the House of His Parents, was attacked as blasphemous, while the unconventional lives and loves of the painters attracted continual attention and at times caused outrage: John Millais’ relationship with Effie, the wife of John Ruskin, her subsequent divorce and remarriage to Millais was the subject of a public scandal. Those of a religious turn of mind could be suspicious of art’s appeal to the senses, and its portrayal of unpredictable emotional and psychological states. The emphasis on the utility of art objects – Henry Cole’s commitment to proving their relevance to industry and manufacturing – was one way of divorcing them from desire or sensual pleasure, removing them from the domain of aesthetic pleasure to the less unsettling and more pragmatic structure of commerce.
The anxieties about such unhealthy passions were particularly evident when the Victorians thought about men collecting the decorative arts or antiquarians in their cluttered studies. Science collections were typically regarded as scholarly and progressive; paintings, sculpture and classical antiquities were respectable and had long been valued by the leisured and landed classes. Robinson’s fondness for historical works, especially Renaissance masterpieces, was considered properly intellectual and cultured – but a preoccupation with what became known as the ‘lesser’ arts was more suspect. Modern manufactures carried the taint of the factory and warehouse; china, glass, silverware and textiles were a matter for household affairs and were associated with excess, decoration and femininity. As we have seen with the collecting of china, men who chose to collect these things risked being seen as odd, emotionally deficient or even effeminate.
For some Victorians – and for later psychoanalysts such as Sigmund Freud – there was something about collecting that suggested abnormality, sexual impotence and personal failure.7 Writers like Henry James and George Meredith peopled their novels with collectors who turned to their objects as a substitute for love. In James’ The Portrait of a Lady, the relationships of one of the central characters, Gilbert Osmond, are described in terms of collecting: ‘We knew that he was fond of originals, of rarities, of the superior, the exquisite. . . he perceived a new attraction in the idea of taking to himself a young lady. . . in his collection of choice objects.’ Osmond’s emotional inadequacy and cold sexuality are directly linked to his collecting, which is seen as an impulse that disengages him from the more normal passions of those around him. During the collapse of his marriage, he turns to his objects, breaking off from an emotional scene with his wife to study some of his favourite pieces: ‘He got up, as he spoke, and walked to the chimney, where he stood a moment bending his eye, as if he had seen them for the first time, on the delicate specimens of rare porcelain with which it was covered. He took up a small cup and held it in his hand. . .’ Elsewhere in the same novel, another character, Ned Rosier, pursues love in a similarly frigid way, unable to dissociate his collecting from his emotional life: ‘She was admirably finished
,’ he notes, on finding the woman of his dreams. ‘She had had the last touch: she was really a consummate piece. He thought of her in amorous meditation a good deal as he might have thought of a Dresden-china shepherdess.’ In The Egoist, Meredith explores similar ideas. The wealthy aristocrat at the heart of the novel, Sir Willoughby Patterne, is a collector. His overwhelming urge to collect people as well as things is presented not in terms of sexual desire but as a more insidious and general obsession with control. His collecting impulses become all-embracing – and dangerous – reducing him finally to ‘a stone man’.8 With such precedents all around in popular culture, it seems likely that knowing nods would have been exchanged in Liverpool drawing rooms when a man like Mayer, failing to marry, immersed himself instead in his collection.
With the knowledge that he would never now be a family man, Mayer threw himself so vigorously into collecting that, despite its size, Pennant House was soon full of objects, papers, letters and ledgers. Having already given his Egyptian Museum to the public, he now accumulated a second collection, one that was even more personal. In the quiet garden rooms that might in other circumstances have been used by his wife, he accumulated packets of autographs from famous people whom he admired. In cabinets and on tables were displayed over 200 engraved gems and rings. There were illuminated manuscripts, wood engravings, ivories, enamels and embroideries. There were calendars of plays performed at Covent Garden and the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, during the early 1740s and the seventeenth-century manuscript of John Crowne’s play Darius, King of Persia. The greatest solace was all kinds of papers and objects relating to pottery.
The house began to feel small under the pressure of the expanding collection, and so Mayer was forced to extend. First a two-storey bay was added, but it was almost immediately filled and, just a few months later, in the autumn of 1873, Mayer added a new wing on each side of the house, as well as a high tower. He set himself the monumental task of writing a history of art in England, drawing on his collection for material, and he collaborated with his nephew Frederick Boyle on two books: Early Exhibitions of Art in Liverpool: With some Notes for a Memoir of George Stubbs R.A., which he published in 1876, and Memoirs of Thomas Dodd, William Upcott and George Stubbs R.A., three years later. The great art history was never completed and neither of Mayer’s published collaborations was particularly remarkable: both were almost certainly ghosted by Boyle on his uncle’s behalf. It was a much less ambitious work, a paper on the ‘History of the art of pottery in Liverpool’, first contributed to the Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire in 1855, and revised by Mayer in 1873 during this period of learned writing, that proved that his lifelong lack of confidence in his own scholarly credentials was misplaced. It became the definitive text on the subject, and is still significant today.
As the years passed and he retired from his business, finally, at the age of seventy-one, as his friends became too old to travel, too tired to collect or too ill to spend time with him – and as loneliness proved ever harder to keep at bay – Mayer must have seemed at times like the archetypal collector, shuffling around rooms piled high with the past, obsessed with the minutiae of history. But he was not one to shut himself away. His collecting had always been a sociable activity, a way to make friends and meet colleagues, and even in old age he displayed no desire to become reclusive. His nature was philanthropic and he spent his last years looking beyond the collection at Pennant House. When the evenings closed in, quiet and dark, he relished the hours reading his papers or writing notes, but he was proud, too, that his days were active and generous and useful. The village of Bebington was thriving, and Mayer was, by and large, responsible for its orderly growth.
With the construction of the railways and new roads, and the introduction of a ferry boat link with Liverpool, the population of Bebington more than trebled between 1841 and 1871. But whereas, in cities, the rapid mid-century rise in the number of inhabitants frequently resulted in overcrowded slums and desperate poverty, Bebington’s growth saw an influx of professional people, rather than unskilled labourers, and, thanks to Mayer, there was a sustained programme of investment. ‘Without losing its rustic air, the village has gained advantages such as many a town might envy,’ boasted a local paper, The Standard, in 1878. ‘A very few years since. . . it had neither gas nor pavements, its younger population went barefooted and women fetched water from two miles distance.’ Now, however, the paper noted proudly, ‘Bebington may be held up as a model village [and] the honour is chiefly due to Mr Joseph Mayer.’9
Mayer’s involvement with the local people started simply enough, and had its roots in his collection. Arms, armour and things military had always fascinated him. At the age of twelve, he had a brief taste of army life, marching from his home in Newcastle-under-Lyme to Macclesfield as a drummer boy with the 34th Regiment of Foot in the weeks before Waterloo. As an adult, flintlocks, swords, daggers, axes, crossbows, suits of armour, powder flasks and spurs were prominent in his museum and he developed a particular interest in the history of local defence. In 1860, he was appointed Commanding Officer of the Liverpool volunteer borough guard. Four years later, he established a volunteer company of the 1st Cheshire Rifles: he became captain of the 4th Bebington Company, which he supported financially and presented with two challenge cups for shooting. Within six months, over a hundred men had enrolled to be part of Mayer’s troop and he took satisfaction from serving as their commander. Mayer enjoyed the expeditions: the would-be soldiers camped together at Hooton, further along the Wirral, telling stories in the smoke of camp fires, testing themselves against the cold and trapping animals for food.
The 4th Bebington Company was one of many. The Victorian volunteer movement was a phenomenon which began in the 1860s, when fears of war with France were at their height. In 1858, reprisals were expected after a failed assassination attempt on Napoleon III was traced back to exiled French conspirators based in England. In March 1860, France annexed Nice and Savoy. Such territorial ambitions on the part of the French raised the spectre of invasion and were regarded as a threat to national security. A programme of coastal fortification led to the construction of defences such as Fort Nelson, near Portsmouth, and many towns began to establish local volunteer Rifle Corps.
The idea was an eighteenth-century one: volunteers were called upon between 1797 and 1805, before the Battle of Trafalgar brought to an end, for that period at least, the French naval threat. To a new generation, it proved a popular and sociable way to be seen to do one’s duty. According to the report of a Royal Commission in 1862, the Volunteer Force consisted of 162,681 men including engineers, light horse and mounted rifles and, by the 1870s, one in twelve men throughout England had joined up.10 Across the country, drill halls, training grounds and rifle ranges were quickly established. The attraction, as at Bebington, was not just military protection: musical, sporting and recreational activities were commonly organized for members, local teams travelled to take on rival corps, and men from all walks of life came together for target shooting, cricket and football. Each corps had its own character, depending on the area in which it was based and the type of men it attracted. One of the more well known was the 38th Middlesex (Artists’) Rifle Volunteers, founded in 1860 by an art student called Edward Sterling. Consisting largely of painters, sculptors, engravers, musicians, architects and actors, the corps’ first commanders were the painters Henry Wyndham Phillips and Frederic Leighton, and the regiment became celebrated in time as it attracted members such as William Morris, John Everett Millais, Edward Burne-Jones and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The battalion was not finally disbanded until 1945: during the First World War, over 15,000 men fought under its banner, including the poets Wilfred Owen and Edward Thomas, the artist Paul Nash and the sculptor Frank Dobson.
As Mayer got to know his men, discovering how they lived and what it was they valued, he gradually immersed himself in their welfare. It was a small step from the needs of the volunteers of the 1st Cheshire R
ifles to the needs of their families. Convinced that physical activity and fresh air were to everyone’s benefit, Mayer founded bowling, cricket, quoits and football clubs, as well as starting a horticultural society and setting aside land for allotments. But he also heard from the men in his company how difficult and uncertain working life could be, and how everyday chores were unnecessarily exhausting and demoralizing. So he raised funds for a village hospital and campaigned for the introduction of gas and water. The obvious next move, in the tradition of the great Victorian patrons, was, of course, to open a school, but there was already a schoolmaster in the village doing an adequate, if modest, job, and, in any case, Mayer believed strongly in the value of informal, self-directed education, the kind of learning that had allowed him to take his place alongside scholars. He chose instead to invest in a public library. ‘He who reads lives in a larger world, and has a knowledge and grasp of possibilities far wider than he who is without the art, and even prospers when the latter would succumb,’ he informed the village, and to make this larger world of literacy available to as many local people as possible, he rented a house, stocked it with 20,000 volumes on travel, poetry, history, natural sciences and art, as well as a good number of novels, appointed a librarian and a team of volunteers, established evening opening hours for study after work and set out the arrangements for borrowing books.11
Magpies, Squirrels and Thieves Page 24
