by Toby Litt
I can’t describe William’s desolation any better than this.
How beautiful this scene! sea, land, and sky
Are calm alike and motionless, save when
Some light and fleecy cloud skims o’er the high
Cerelean arch, o’ershadowing it, and then
Diffusing breaks, and all looks gay again, –
Borrowing a passive splendour from those beams
Imperial, which, alike o’er lawn and fen,
Scatter the radiance of their silver streams,
Till earth awhile like some sweet spot of poesy seems.
How softly on the meditative mind
Comes the deep influence of external things!
When some sweet thought, within the heart enshrined
For years, at one remembered object springs.
E’en now the syren memory o’er me flings
Her magic robe, as at thy feet I lie,
Majestic mountain! And the thoughts she brings
Are those which rose when, first a wanderer, I
Beheld thy rugged form fade in the eastern sky.
The fears – the hopes – the chaste regret which steals
On all whose home-land lessens to the view
In tears and gloom, – when first the wanderer feels
His heart sink, and hopes vanish in the dew
Of distance dim. Can ever prospect new
Gladden his heart as this hath done? What though
The Iris of his youth has melted now,
Life is not all a desert path – there grow
Some flowers ever on the wildest spots below.
Hail rugged mount! that, frowning o’er the main,
Art still to those who wander o’er the sea
That laves thy feet, a mine whose every vein
Is of deep thoughts and feelings – now to me
A fountain of pure song! How few there be,
Wanderers from Cumbria’s soil, who have not proved
How they adored her, as they wept to see
Thy lessening form! The lovely or the loved,
Aged or young – none, none may gaze on thee unmoved.
Yet not alike the feelings all that pour
At sight of thee. You little barque whose prow
Is pointing now to Fleswick’s glassy shore,
Bears on her deck, I wean, a goody row
Of manly forms, and hearts whose pulses flow
Denotes their ecstasy: for they have felt
What ’tis from home, and love, and friends to go,
We know not where; – and now with hopes they melt
To press those household gods to which they oft have knelt.
Muse we no more; – for see! the evening sun
Hath tinged the mountain with a golden haze –
The distant cottages are waxing dun –
The deer now leave the covert side to graze
In silence undisturbed – the cotter’s gaze
Is homeward bent – the heron leaves the stream
Where Esk meandering its tribute lays
At ocean’s mighty feet, – and all things seem
To borrow from the time the halo of a dream.
And I, whose soul hath melted into song
In gazing on this prospect, now must turn
To home and cold reality. Too long
Perhaps the time now spent in thoughts that burn.
Yet why so? He whose heart hath been an urn
Long time for buried joys, may deem it well
If out delay the hour when he must mourn.
I love and thank thee, then, majestic Fell!
And feel a sweet regret in bidding thee Farewell.
18th August 1840
William’s longing is pure. Away from the sight of his native hills, he was an incomplete man; life elsewhere was less meaningful, less alive. In Canada, he felt an addenda to himself.
But we can be sure that he returned – Canada is where William lived out the sad remainder of his life, and where he died and was buried.
There’s no account of his return journey. It was probably much the same as his first sea voyage to Montréal – with the big difference that William must have known he would never see Cumberland again.
Cold reality, indeed.
*
It can’t be said other than directly: William never mentions his children. He seems, on all written evidence, to have longed for Cumbria more than for his daughters and sons. A conventional poet, in many ways, he didn’t publish the conventional poem this would seem to call for – or, if he did, I haven’t found it. The closest he came was in the line:
What, ’tis from home, and love, and friends to go, …
But it is some words quoted in Wrestling and Wrestlers, and the sentiments that preface them, which seem to catch William best:§
Suffering, however, from ‘home sickness’ — a craving often fatal to natives of mountainous regions — his mental as well as bodily powers began failing before attaining his sixtieth year.
“I gaze on the snow clad plain, see the cataract’s foam,
And sigh for the hills and dales of my far distant home.
“Dearly lov’d scenes of my youth, for ever adieu,
Like mist on the mountains ye fade from my view,
Save at night in my dreams.”
These words are from a poem apparently called ‘The Emigrant’. I wasn’t, in all my librarying and Googling, able to trace it, but it seems to me to have William’s tone, and the geography is correct for St Anne’s Parish.
The area surrounding Montréal is fairly flat – although the city, of course, centres on Mount Royal. This wasn’t anything like William’s native hills. It was a very distant cousin, three-peaked, climbable for a view of a slightly bumpy horizon. North of Montréal, William would have felt both agoraphobic and claustrophobic. He would have felt terribly homesick.¶
I wanted to assume that it wasn’t just neglect – that William’s feelings for his children were too strong to find expression in verse. This is not even to mention what he might or might not have wanted to say to his wife, Betty.
I have heard there were letters home; they did survive into the twentieth century, but were in such a tattered state they were destroyed.
* Cumberland Pacquet, 12 February 1839. This was the poem that helped me describe William’s wedding.
† I knew they could not be the bells of Hensingham Old Church, because it did not have bells in the tower. It was too poor. At most it had a single bell to call parishioners to service. Gordon Gray, a local expert, asserts that ‘our local peals of bells have all been installed since the date of the poem’. The Carlisle Diocesan Guild Bell Ringers’ Newsletter, p. 17. Hensingham Old Church, becoming derelict, was demolished in 1949.
‡ E.g., ‘My heart leaps up’ and ‘Calm is all nature as a resting wheel’.
§ Wrestling and Wrestlers: Biographical Sketches of Celebrated Athletes of the Northern Ring, Wordsworth Press, 1893, pp. 69–70.
¶ The Wikipedia entry on ‘Homesickness’ is fascinatingly exact: ‘The term was coined in 1688 by Johannes Hofer (1669–1752) in his Basel dissertation. Hofer introduced nostalgia or mal du pays “homesickness” for the condition also known as mal du Suisse “Swiss illness” or Schweizerheimweh “Swiss homesickness,” because of its frequent occurrence in Swiss mercenaries who in the plains of lowlands of France or Italy were pining for their native mountain landscapes. Symptoms were also thought to include fainting, high fever, indigestion, stomach pain, and death. Military physicians hypothesized that the malady was due to damage to the victims’ brain cells and ear drums by the constant clanging of cowbells in the pastures of Switzerland’, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nostalgia, retrieved, 2 November 2016, 10:52.
21
PASS ON TO THE END
The Memoirist wrote that ‘… the author of Wrestliana sleeps “the sleep that knows no breaking”, far from the tombs of his fathers and the homes of h
is friends and his family’, and quoted these sad lines by Felicia Dorothea Hemans as William’s epitaph:*
He was the loved of all, yet none
O’er his low bed may weep.
As William emerges from the landscape of Cumbria, so he disappears into the landscape of Canada.
When I visited Ile Jesus, staying in a chain motel beside an eight-lane highway, eating in a nearby supermall, I found it hard to see beneath the dusty concrete sprawl.
Dark details of wood and frozen mud against white and yet more white, canals with vast rafts of logs floating seawards, farms pluming woodsmoke above plains of stripland – this is where William fades.
All final accounts of him, and his last poems, have William full of nostalgia for the hills of home.
Why then did he stay? My only explanation is, because he could not return. Either it wasn’t safe for him, or however modest a Canadian schoolmaster’s income, it was still more than he would have earned in Whitehaven. What could he have done? By this time, the mines and factories of Industrial Revolution were employing most of the workers that weren’t farming. A gentleman couldn’t do that. William was no longer strong enough for manual labour.
I sensed that one of the things Canada afforded William was privacy: he didn’t want those who had seen him as Champion of the Green to witness his physical decline. In other words, he properly retired – from the ring, from society, from view.
Silence, then the ‘Letters’, thousands of words between the 1st and the 11th of June 1840, then again silence.
William had always produced his words and his works intermittently, rapidly, manically.
On this evidence, it would be easy to say William was ‘clinically depressed’, or that he suffered from ‘bipolar disorder’. I preferred to try to see him through the words of his own time.
The chance the ‘Letters’ gave him, of once again speaking to the people he cared about most, those who lived where he had grown up and perhaps had seen him wrestle – this chance ‘galvanized’ William. We still talk of being ‘galvanized into action’ without always realizing the origin: the application of electrical currents to stimulate dead muscles. This was a great scientific discovery of William’s time. Remember the twitching frog in the biology lab at school? An electrical current – the idea that he could still flow, had currency – brought William back from the dead. His great energy surged through him one final time.
Then, as far as I could find out, it failed.
Is it possible for a man to die of homesickness? I have already quoted Wrestling and Wrestlers that it is a ‘craving often fatal to natives of mountainous regions’.
There are several accounts of William’s decline.
For some time before his death, they who knew him best had observed a gradual failure of his intellectual powers. He did not appear to suffer from any particular disease, but died quietly and tranquilly of something like a general break-up of the system. Sixty-two, it may be said, is scarcely the age of natural decay; but in his case the constitution had been heavily tried in the fullness of his strength, and his long exile from all that were near and dear to him must necessarily have hastened the consummation.†
We can be a little more specific about the onset: ‘his mental as well as bodily powers began failing before attaining his sixtieth year’. This gives a date of around 1844 or 1845.
He seems to have been looked after. The Memoirist said,
… the last few years of his life were spent in the house of a Cumberland family of the name of Forster, at a place called La Chine, about nine miles distant from Montreal, …
Mrs Cubby, William’s granddaughter, disagreed.
When William Litt died, … he was living with some people hailing from the Ewe and Lamb, Padstow. They were relations of his. I believe their name was Ewart.‡
Whilst in Montréal, I spent a lot of time in libraries, trying to trace the Ewarts or Hewitts, the Forsters or Fosters. I couldn’t find them. Church records had plenty of Fosters, a few Ewarts, no Forsters or Hewetts – but none of them were in the right place at the right time.
I came to think it likely that William was last heard of, by the Memoirist, in Lachine – near the canal, where he’d gone soon after arriving. This was down to the South west of Montréal city. Later, he moved up to Saint-Eustache, then down to Laval, but for some reason the Memoirist didn’t hear about this.
Mrs Cubby, reporting the names of the family he lived with, gets the date of his death wrong by three years. If nothing else, it suggests that William’s last private letter was sent around that time.
I wanted to find the best medical explanation I could for William’s cause of death.
The best person I could ask was my cousin John. The eldest son of my father’s elder brother,§ he’s an eminent doctor in Australia. He has taught physicians at the University of Flinders, and been an A&E specialist for decades.
When I sent John all the evidence I had, of William’s final years, he replied with a long, detailed email – including some possible diagnoses. He said William did not die young. In fact, ‘dying at age 62 years would be better than the general population in the 1840s’.¶
William’s mental decline was probably dementia, and this might be linked to diabetes, high cholesterol or high blood pressure. ‘These do tend to run in the current Litt generations, although not in their 60s’.
As I read this, I was thinking of my father, as I knew John was. His decline sounds just like William’s – ‘a general break-up of the system’ – and that makes me think that’s what’s likely to happen to me, too.
After living a long while in 99 Dunstable Street, my parents down-sized. They sold all the Georgian furniture, tea caddies and teapots. They moved to a small house a few houses along from where my mother’s mother once lived. Meanwhile, they had my father’s old antiques workshop converted – according to my mother’s strict vision – into a comfortable home with big sofas and a large kitchen.
When she died, we sprinkled some of my mother’s ashes on the flowerbeds that surround the house on three sides.
My father lives inside whatever is left of my mother.
He watches antiques shows, and a lot of other shows, on the TV. He has diabetes, high cholesterol and high blood pressure. He doesn’t get as much exercise as he should. He eats Waitrose ready meals.
My father wanted me to write about William, and followed my research with great interest, but was always distanced from it. I think he formed an idea of William that he wanted to keep.
When I asked him once to sum up William in one word, he said, ‘Tough’.
My father wanted a hero, not a man falling apart.
However much I and my sisters visit or phone, I think my father feels as isolated as William did in Canada.
If William had diabetes, said my cousin John, he would have suffered muscle wasting. He would also ‘have been noticeably thirsty and drinking a lot of fluid and weeing a lot’.
Against the starkness of John’s diagnosis, I put Bill and Margaret’s suggestion. They have read and thought about William more than anyone, much more than I have.
‘William Litt,’ they write, ‘did not die of any particular illness. He died of a broken heart, full of regret for his loved ones and his forced banishment’.
‘William Lett, Schoolmaster of the Parish of St Rose County of Terrebonne & District of Montreal died on the 5th day of November in the year One thousand Eight hundred and Fifty and was buried by me in the seventh day of the same year.’ Witnesses present, C. Smallwood M.D., W. Ol. Stephens, T.A. Young, Missionary.||
T.A. Young wrote this in the record he kept of births, deaths and marriages in his parish.
With Vicki’s help, I was able to turn the initials into names – Charles Smallwood M.D., William Oliver Stephens, Thomas Ainslie Young – and then turn the names into people.
Dr Charles Smallwood was born in Birmingham, England, and moved to Saint-Martin in the early 1830s. Of all the people who lived
in that area, he was the one I most hoped had been William’s good friend – he was the one I would have chosen to have at the bedside on the 5th of November 1850 when William died, aged sixty-four.
Charles Smallwood was a great scientific pioneer. He was the first man to observe the structure of snowflakes.
In one his ‘Letters’, already quoted, William gave very detailed yearly high and low temperatures for the area where he lived, he also mentioned ‘the thermometer’;** I was delighted when I found the obvious source for this precise scientific information – Charles Smallwood’s weather observatory in Saint-Martin.
William couldn’t have missed it. Everyone on the island must have known it as a landmark – the mast for collecting atmospheric readings stood eighty feet high.
Charles Smallwood’s ‘Meteorological Register 1849 to 1855’ is kept in the archives of McGill University, in Montréal. It is a big, beautiful, water-damaged ledger, using sewn-together pages printed for double entry bookkeeping. I felt extremely privileged to be allowed to handle it.
We have nothing else of William’s last day but facts and omissions. Smallwood made very regular entries at 7, 9, 12, 3, 6 and 9 o’clock every day. On November 5th, he missed two. Perhaps he was at William’s bedside.
There is no entry for 7 am on William’s final day. At 9 am there was ‘Rain’, by three it was ‘Clear,’ by 6 pm, ‘Mostly clear’ and at 9 pm ‘Overcast’. The wind was east–north–east. The temperature around 46,3 Fahrenheit. Winter had not started. The first snow shower came on November 22nd.
The day of William’s funeral, the 7th, was colder – only rising to 41 F. The wind had shifted to the north-west. It started ‘Clear frosty’ and stayed clear into the evening.
