I, Hogarth Read online

  ‘I shall fetch him something soothing for that wound.’

  ‘Richard! You know very well we do not have the money for an apothecary.’

  ‘Mr Reynolds sells it.’

  Mr Reynolds kept the toy shop, a magnificent emporium, an Aladdin’s cave of wonders. Mama was still refusing her consent when pater, without another word, trod softly to the door and left the room. I smiled defiance at mama.

  ‘Stubborn boy!’

  Pater was gone for what seemed to me a long time, but mama was not concerned. When he finally returned, he had an earthenware pot in his hand.

  ‘How is it, outside?’ said mama.

  ‘Great destruction, sad to say. Whole houses down, or sometimes just the tops. Many chimneys down. The streets calf-deep in debris.’

  ‘Everywhere?’

  ‘Strange to say, not. Some places on the lee side have escaped untouched.’

  ‘And people abroad?’ For the first time a flicker of fear crossed mama’s flat face.

  ‘A few. Only a few.’

  She looked relieved. ‘We are not the only ones left then.’

  ‘No, no …’

  She nodded to herself. ‘I feared we may be another Noah family. The only ones left on God’s earth.’

  Pater smiled. ‘Or like Deucalion after Zeus’s flood. No, no. All will be well, and all will be well. And every good thing will be well.’

  ‘Oh, will it, now?’

  Pater grimaced comically as he took the wax paper off the top of the small earthenware pot. I laughed and held his hand tight. The salve for my wound turned out to be a thick brown ointment which stank and put me in mind of animal dung.

  Papa squeezed my hand, then gently said, ‘I say, little chap, nothing wrong with your little grip is there? Tight as a vice. Odysseus clung to the ram’s belly no tighter than you!’

  ‘O Richard! For heaven’s sake …’

  Mama tried to seize the pot of balm, but pater merely smiled, gently turned aside, slowly disengaged my grip and applied the balm himself, tenderly, with two fingers.

  ‘I say, little chap, that’s quite a groove you’ve got there. On your poor little forehead. A valley, a veritable chasm, indeed. William … my little Bill, say you are all right because … to be frank with you, little chap, I don’t think I could bear it if …’

  My eyes filled with tears. ‘I am well, pater, aside from pain in the head. I am myself, as ever was!’

  ‘O Billy Boy, my little chap. Thank God … Oh, thank God for it!’

  Pater began to weep. Mama sent him from the room, on the excuse of coddling baby Anne. Even then, I do believe, as early as that, with caked blood still new on my groove, I began to wonder at the meaning of what papa called ‘The Finger of God’ laid on my forehead.

  Did ‘The Finger of God’ make me special?

  3

  IN THE EVENINGS, pater worked in our room at his hack jobs. One of these was correcting the Latin in books, before they were published.

  ‘I am cleaning the Augean Stable of error, little chap!’ he would cry to me, as his pen swooped on some error or infelicity in conjugation or declension.

  I can recall the title of one of these books, it was Opera Posthuma. If you ever see this book, please remember that its immaculate Latin is entirely due to my pater, and to none other. And remember him please, remember him for it, for he was a good man and the purest soul I was ever to meet in my life.

  Only late at night did my pater turn to his latest magnum opus as he always called it. This was sometimes a textbook for schools, sometimes a play. I would sneak from my bed while my little sisters slept, to watch him write.

  With a half-smile of fulfilment playing round his face, the quill resting elegantly in a languid hand, he scratched his head under his wig, just behind the right ear, as he wrote: whether to ease the head lice or for greater inspiration I never knew. But I hear him to this day:

  ‘This is the one that will make our fortune, little chap!’

  Mama sometimes sat opposite him as he worked, mending and patching our clothes or doing the household accounts with a tally-stick. She flicked sly glances at him over her sewing, sometimes muttering to herself: ‘Looking for gold in the mines of Peru.’

  I never understood this expression, though I suspect that Peru is devoid of gold mines.

  When I was older, papa used to take me with him to book shops, printers and coffee houses, looking for publishers for his latest gold from the mines of Peru. Overton, the print seller, was at The White Horse. Wyat sold at The Golden Lion, St Paul’s Churchyard; Charles Ackers at St John’s Close. Another I remember especially was one called Bowles, who I was to have dealings with myself, some years later.

  We would trudge round Paternoster Row, Ave Maria Lane, Warwick Lane, listening to the same refusals, most of them cordial. Everyone knew Richard Hogarth, everyone liked him; nobody gave what he said much credence.

  A visit to a coffee house stays in my mind, Fenton’s in Charing Cross. Pater, as ever, had his manuscript with him, in a sprawling pile on the table. I was draining a sludgy bowl of coffee like the lower reaches of the Thames, happy to be part of pater’s schemes. I, like he, scoured the tables for printers and booksellers, though with only a hazy idea of how I would recognise them.

  We were approached by a handsome woman and a child. The woman was buxom. Something about her made me take her for a bawd at first sight, young though I was. The child was waif thin, exquisitely pretty, although her nose was running. She was about seven or eight, I thought.

  I glanced at pater, whose face had stiffened, one hand protectively on his manuscript. I had always taken him for a moral man, and so it proved. But, to my horror, the bawd offered not herself but the child.

  ‘Come sir, this pretty girl would like to make your closer acquaintance. Say hello to the man, Lavinia.’

  Lavinia sniffled and said hello.

  ‘Please go away, madam,’ pater said. ‘We have matters to discuss here.’

  The bawd laughed. I noticed her heaving bosom, under a red apron. ‘Town matters or country matters?’ laughed the bawd.

  ‘Madam, please desist with this.’ Pater sounded miserable rather than angry.

  ‘Perhaps the young man,’ persisted the bawd, meaning me. ‘What do you think, young sir? She will make a man of you for a guinea.’

  I said nothing, though secretly I would rather have had the bawd than the girl.

  Pater, however, stood, one hand still on his manuscript, as near to anger as I believe he would ever reach. ‘Madam! That girl should be with her mother!’

  The bawd put her hands on her hips and laughed fit to split her stays. ‘She is with her mother, sir. That she is.’ And with that the bawd, seeing there was no sale to be had with us, swept off to another table, the daughter in her wake. Though as she walked off the daughter gave me the sweetest smile, shrugging her shoulders slightly, a gesture I was to remember clearly the next time I saw her. I found her fascinating.

  Pater’s mood was quite spoiled. We left Fenton’s without even finishing our coffee, spending the rest of the afternoon visiting printers and booksellers, with pater failing to interest any of them in his manuscript.

  ‘One should not undertake selling in a sour mood,’ pater muttered, as we trudged round Crag’s Court and then Scotland Yard and then White Hall, from one establishment to the next, being shown the door pretty smartly at every one.

  But by that evening he was fully restored to his usual sunny humour, perhaps even more so than usual, as if his optimism and joy at life had even been boosted by that day’s adversity.

  Pater and I were supping coffee at Tom King’s Coffee House, a ramshackle shed just about holding itself up in a corner of Covent Garden. It was well after midnight; I was struggling to stay awake.

  I had started to bridle when pater called me ‘little chap’, especially in public, so, sensitive as ever to the feelings of others, he had elevated me to ‘old chap’. I was, after all, old enough to
be sitting in the midst of this company of bucks and their bawds, even having some idea why the couples kept leaving the premises together. And so it was as ‘old chap’ that I accepted a second bowl of stygian coffee from Moll King herself, having made the first one last over an hour, as had pater.

  ‘I’ve changed tactics, old chap.’

  I nodded with sagacious interest, though pater had explained this point several times already.

  ‘The plays are … problematic. I am perhaps ahead of my time. So I intend to make my name with the pedagogic works first. Not only Disputationes. There’s my Compendium of Geography, my Thesaurium for use with no teacher – radical stuff, that. Then, when the printers and booksellers know me, I get copies of the play printed, then approach a theatre manager with a whole set. The theatre manager can mount the play within a week, the next day if he likes. You see, old chap?’

  ‘Mmm,’ I gave the appearance of wisdom, sipping at my coffee, trying to stay awake.

  ‘Meanwhile, there’s good old Disputationes Grammaticales.’

  He smacked the manuscript of the grammar book with the flat of his hand, as it sat on the table. I was reminded of a rake smacking the rump of a bawd or a courtesan. I was plagued by such thoughts of late, some considerably more vivid, raw and rude than that.

  ‘I’m going to get the good old Disputationes/ into the church schools. It will last a generation. We’re all going to be very, very rich, old chap; you’d better start getting used to that fact.’

  ‘I wouldn’t say that to mama, if I were you.’

  Mama was fond of saying he would have us all in Beech Lane. It was years before I learned that this was a workhouse.

  ‘Eh? What? My my, you are growing up, aren’t you?’

  ‘I’m thirteen, papa.’

  ‘Are you? Good lord!’

  At that point the auction finally started. A reedy voice from the front of the coffee house started bawling out wares, while simultaneously an urchin distributed copies of a bookseller’s catalogue. Pater opened the catalogue, a glazed dreamy look spreading on his face. I understood that his tactic was to wait for the auction to finish, and then beard the bookseller, face to face.

  Meanwhile, as the reedy voice piped on, I glanced at the frontispiece. The catalogue, it seemed, was that of a printer and bookseller – one Edmund Curll. His emblem was a partridge in full plume, drawn sideways on, with neat hatching round the feet to give depth. Well done, but I could do as well, if not better. His emporium was out at Temple Bar. We had not yet traipsed so far, father and I, in our badgering of booksellers as they went about their business. So this Curll was unknown to me.

  But not for long. Oh, no, not for long. My father was turning the pages of Bibliotheca Selecta, as the catalogue was called, clearly imagining his own works proudly taking their place within it. He whistled to himself.

  ‘Close on nine hundred works, here. Just think of that, old chap. Bladen’s translation of Caesar’s Commentaries. That’s good … that’s very good. Sound man, Bladen. I’d be keeping good company.’

  ‘Mmm.’

  Father turned the pages of the catalogue faster. ‘The Devout Christian’s Companion, Archbishop Tillotson. Well, that should sell. Sell by the wheelbarrow-load, I shouldn’t wonder. Or at least by the congregation-load. That’s what you want, you see, old chap, a captive audience. Some sort of group of people of the same mind. Preferably a large group.’

  The auction was nearly over; the urchin was passing among the tables collecting up the catalogues. Father slipped a silver penny in his grubby hand. ‘Please tell your master, Mister Curll, that Richard Hogarth wishes to discuss a business matter with him, if he would be so good as to join us at this table.’

  Nothing happened. I wondered if father had wasted his silver penny, but after a goodly while, a slight wisp of a fellow with inky fingers and a brown doublet that had seen better days introduced himself as Edmund Curll. My father introduced himself then said ‘And I am proud to say that this fine chap here is my son.’

  Curll gave no reaction to that, but joined us at the table, his shoulders askew, his squint so pronounced he seemed to be looking out at the Covent Garden whores rather than at us.

  My first impression was that he was one of those hilarious creatures who had grown to be like his name; his body curlled, his gaze curlled, his demeanour curlled – Curll was anything but straight. But he proceeded to business quickly enough.

  ‘What have you got for me, then?’ He looked down at the manuscript, his mandibles circling beneath the squint like a praying mantis about to devour a frog.

  My father launched into a breathless and somewhat rambling account of the work he was trying to sell: how he divided words into syllables to aid the learning of them, how he tried to bring joy to learning by the playing of games, how he always had an element of study without the teacher. Curll, head down over the manuscript, nodded in agreement. My father nodded at his nodding. We all nodded.

  Father was still talking. I willed him to be silent, to give Curll a chance to assimilate the material in front of him. But I understood, too, that father had spoken to dozens, perhaps scores, of booksellers who had not given him the time of day. By considering the manuscript, or at least giving the appearance of so doing, Curll had undammed torrents of frustration from my poor artistic father’s being.

  ‘This is very good.’ Curll patted the manuscript much as father often did, perhaps more gently. ‘I’d be pleased to take this on for you, Mr Hogarth. Then we’ll see about any other work you may have.’

  There were tears in father’s eyes. My eyes, too, were moist. I took father’s hand and squeezed it.

  ‘I … This is a splendid moment for me, Mr Curll. A moment looked forward to, no, more, longed for, I may say, all my life. It is the culmination of much hard work. My dear son William knows …’

  Curll was pulling a tangle of yellowing documents from inside his old-fashioned doublet (I wondered if it were second-hand – Curll himself did not cut much of a figure, but the original owner, if there was one, must have been even smaller).

  ‘Standard letter,’ the bookseller announced briskly. ‘Same for everybody: prince or pauper, bishop or thief. Although come to think of it we ought to pay the thieves more, or at least the ordinaries who write their life stories. You wouldn’t believe how many copies we’re selling of that sort of thing, once the thief has gone to Tyburn.’

  My father and I laughed politely. Curll’s urchin had appeared like a genie from a bottle and Curll sent him for pen and ink. These artefacts arrived so quickly that the urchin must have fetched them from the table at the front of the coffee house, from which Curll had conducted the auction.

  Father had started to read the standard letter.

  ‘Three guineas, Mr Hogarth. That’s for the first one thousand copies of your book. And one further guinea for reprinting. Would you like the money now?’ A teasing smile, wavy naturally, was curling round Curll’s lips.

  ‘Oh. Well … If that’s …’

  Curll fished for the coins in a leather purse tied with a thong round his waist. ‘Best bit of Spanish gold for you there, Mr Hogarth, on the production of your fair signature, sir.’

  My father smiled and signed, the coins were handed over. Father left them on the table, as if afraid they might vanish if he did not constantly watch them.

  ‘I would usually baptise our agreement with you, Mr Hogarth, but on this occasion I have to rush to another meeting. However, it’s been a pleasure and there will be many other times, I’m sure.’

  Curll stood, bent into a question mark, and pumped father’s hand. ‘A pleasure,’ he repeated. ‘And young Mr William Hogarth, too.’ Curll attempted a look in my direction, which was about as accurate as a Frenchie broadside at one of our great ships. And then he was gone.

  Father slowly picked up the coins, even then not putting them away, merely smiling at them in his hand. Tom King, the coffee house owner, was beaming at him, having witnessed the transaction
.

  ‘Do you want a glass of gin, Mr Hogarth?’ he said. He spoke like a real gent, as if his mouth were full of fruit. ‘Have it as my guest, on me and Moll,’ he went on. ‘And young William’s surely old enough to join you, now?’

  ‘Why thank you, Tom!’ My father was crying.

  I was pleased, naturally I was. More than pleased. I was thrilled for my dear father. Delighted. But I did wonder why he did not have a copy of whatever it was he had signed.

  4

  FATHER SUCCUMBED to a delirious euphoria, redolent of far-away places and exotic, elevated people. He paced our dingy set of rooms on the second floor of the house in Bartholomew Close in a reverie of imagined success, living who knows what dreams of the author-life in who knows what locations. Sometimes his lips moved as the conversations in his mind nearly broke into the real world.

  And as for me, the darling son and heir, he broke into Curll’s three guineas to buy me drawing materials and paid for lessons for me with our neighbour, John Dalton, the painter. Some things were also bought for my little sisters, but I no longer remember what they were. Toys, no doubt. Pater enjoyed going to the huge and glorious toy emporiums. (Emporia! I can hear the gentle correction from the grave – my apologies, pater.)

  At any rate, Curll’s three guineas did not disturb the trudge of our lives at Bartholomew Close for very long, before they were almost gone. Then, at some point, it occurred to my father to wonder what had happened to the copies of his masterpiece, presented to Curll at Tom King’s Coffee House. There was no sign of them, but my father, a heady optimist if ever there was one, was not too concerned.

  ‘I’m sure Mr Curll’s terribly busy, old chap. A successful man like him … Don’t like to bother him.’

  It was me who pressed him to visit Curll to enquire how matters stood. We set off to Curll’s premises in Temple Bar, the proud author and son, merely paying a courtesy visit to the publisher, no thought of complaint. In such a spirit I imagine country squires visit the palaces of the local magnate to discuss fishing rights, or some such.