Mysterious Wisdom (2 page)

Hat-making in England at this time was a lucrative business. In 1795, in order to raise money to fund a war against France, the government had imposed a tax on hair powder with the result that, almost immediately, the modishly puffed coiffeurs of the era had gone out of fashion to be replaced by a taste for millinery. Soon the British ‘topper' would be reaching a foot in height. The unfortunate beavers whose pelts were required for these towering adornments did not prosper – the animal was rendered all but extinct – but members of the Worshipful Company of Feltmakers, the city livery company to which hatters belonged, flourished. Palmer's paternal grandfather, Christopher, was of this thriving breed. He married the daughter of one of his business partners and, setting a precedent for the longevity which his son and his grandson would later enjoy, lived until the ripe old age of eighty-two. He had a ‘most excellent natural constitution', Palmer later recorded, adding with what was to become an obsessive interest in digestive functions, that ‘he would have seen a hundred if he had minded his bowels'.
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Christopher Palmer had five children: three sons, Edward, Nathanial and Samuel, and two daughters, Sarah and Mary. Little is known of the girls. The eldest son, Edward, owned property in Ireland which, after he was killed in 1830 by an overturning hackney carriage, was sold out of the family. The second boy, Nathanial, became a corn factor at a time when a corn factor was a force to be reckoned with, for first the Napoleonic Wars had prevented cereals from being brought in from the continent and then, when foreign trade was finally resumed, the newly passed Corn Laws would place punitive tariffs on imported grain. The price of Britain's staple food soared, not least in the wake of an appalling 1816 harvest. There were riots and, at the heart of the fray, stood the profiteering factor: the intermediary without whom no business could be carried out. The third son Samuel, Palmer's father, would not prove so shrewd. Too squeamish to follow the surgeon's career which he had initially contemplated, he had embarked on a career in the family hatting firm, purchasing his Freedom of the City of London as a feltmaker before, realising that he far preferred folios to animal furs, he had decided to set himself up as a bookseller instead. His family, considering trade a grave slur on its gentlemanly credentials, had tried to discourage him but he was of stubborn disposition and had remained resolute. Palmer's father was always to put personal fulfilment above fiscal ambition or social status.

 

 

Palmer was proud of his paternal heritage. As a young man he liked to seal letters with his armorial crest: a bowed arm grasping a spear. But when it came to more practical matters – particularly monetary ones – his mother's half of the family played the more important role.

Palmer was descended on the maternal side from the Yorkshire-born William Giles who, having travelled extensively in his youth and visited China, had returned to London to work briefly as a hatter before taking up stockbroking instead, a career in which he would find great success, boasting friendships with such esteemed figures in the field as Sir William Forbes, the pioneering founder of a private banking firm.

Giles's interests, however, extended beyond the financial. He was a committed member of the Baptist Church – a congregation which, finding its roots in post-Reformation Europe had, until the eighteenth century, been much persecuted. By Giles's day it was rapidly expanding, however, not least in Britain where ordinary people were growing increasingly critical of the corruption and complacency of the Established Church. The name Baptist, originally coined as a term of mockery for the initiatory rite involving total immersion in water, was eventually adopted by members of the faith themselves. They were also in the nineteenth century commonly known as ‘dissenters' or ‘Nonconformists'. The Church of England, the dissenters argued, had moved much too far from its original forms; pomp and ceremony had come to play too large a part; it was to the Bible and not the bishop that the faithful should turn; the Church should be constituted of true believers not of just anyone born into a parish and these believers should be free to follow their hearts.

In 1773, Giles married Martha Covell, a fellow Nonconformist. Martha was born in Margate, the daughter of one of the town's first dissenters, a Mary Covell who, initiated at the age of almost sixty, had, despite the jeers of a husband who nicknamed her ‘Nanny Baptist', remained steadfast in her loyalty to her new creed. The pair established themselves in a comfortable home on the fringes of south London, looking over leafy gardens towards far-off Dulwich slopes. Here Giles could pursue not only his business dealings but his cultural ambitions, entertaining such eminent contemporaries as Thomas Stothard and Thomas Uwins, the most sought-after society painters of the day, and indulging his talents as a writer, producing several books which, though now entirely forgotten, had that tone of didactic piety which particularly appealed to the religious sensibilities of his times. Such titles as
The Refuge
,
The Victim
,
Thoughts on the Sufferings of Christ
or
A Guide to Domestic Happiness
went through several editions and the last was included in a collection of English classics. Giles also compiled a volume of British poetry, composed music, particularly psalmodies (one of which made its way into a Wesleyan hymn book) and tried his hand at humorous sketches, claiming authorship of one of
Mrs Caudle's Curtain Lectures,
a popular series of comic monologues published in
Punch
which purported to be the outpourings of a poor henpecked shopkeeper who, unable to sleep after the death of his wife, lay in bed nightly recalling her protracted rants. Unlike this browbeaten fellow, however, Giles was a man of overbearing character. His word was law to a wife who meekly obeyed him and, revering his literary talents, would refer to him deferentially as ‘The Author'. She bore him four children: William, Martha, Thomas and Mary. It was the second of these, Martha, who, born on 3 November 1778, was to fall in love with the bookish youngest son of the mercantile Palmer family.

 

 

Palmer's father was twenty-eight years old when, in October 1803, he took Martha as his wife. He had joined her Baptist faith but, since law at that time required all marriages to be conducted in church, the ceremony took place at St Mary's in the parish of Newington in which the young couple were to live. They could have walked home afterwards to their new house in Surrey Square; it would have made a pleasant stroll. The area was still semi-rural, a place of lush gardens in which day-trippers could wander, of fields and orchards, flower nurseries and vegetable plots. Newington Butts, now part of the traffic clot of the Elephant and Castle, was famous in those days for cultivating luxury fruits. The pineapples, grapes and nectarines which furnished grand London tables were nurtured in the conservatories of a parish that could boast its very own exotic species: the Newington peach made a sweet, summer treat when it ripened around Bartholomewtide.

In
1801, the year of the first London census, there were 14,847 people recorded as living in the south London parish of Newington
, but suburbia was already beginning its inexorable creep. Thirty years later that number had almost trebled; by the end of the century the parish's pleasurable green acres would be all but completely buried beneath sprawling brick. This was the sort of development that Palmer was to come to detest; and yet his first home was a herald of its approach.

Surrey Square had been the first of several housing projects to be undertaken by the architect Michael Searles. Its construction had been quick. Within two years of the first stone being laid in 1792, all the houses had been occupied. They had appealed to a well-off sector of mercantile society which, keen to keep up with fashion, had liked Searles's cut-price copies of current architectural tastes.

Surrey Square was never actually a square. It was a terrace of houses with an elegantly laid out communal garden to the front. Each residence, with two principal rooms on each floor, a kitchen tucked away in the basement and a long narrow garden running out at the back, was possessed of exactly that air of gentrified respectability that its residents would have desired. It must have suited the newlywed Samuel and Martha: small but smart and just around the corner from the bride's old family home. Maybe Martha's father had helped them to choose it. He had probably paid. Certainly, the dowry that he settled on his daughter provided the couple with a modest independence and, as they set out on their married future, their lives bore little sign of any troubles to come.

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Early Years

 

The gate into the world of vision

from Samuel Palmer's 1824 sketchbook

 

Samuel Palmer was born on 27 January 1805. It was a wintry night. The weather all over England had been bad all week. In the country thick snowfalls had left villages stranded. The stones of the cities were encrusted with ice. And in the capital, on the corner of Adam Street,
The Times
reported, the house of a tallow chandler had caught on fire, forcing a terrified serving girl to leap for her safety from a second-floor window only to break both her legs on the cobbles below.

Apart from this mildly sensational episode, nothing considered of public note had troubled the peace. But in one quietly respectable Surrey Square dwelling, the residents would not have slept that night. A small upper room – lit by the glow of the visiting doctor's lantern, warmed by the flicker of a sea-coal fire, disturbed by the bustle of a midwife with her kettles of hot water – must have been the scene of much anxious fluster as a fragile young woman went into her first labour. At five o'clock on Sunday morning she finally gave birth. She would have been pleased to discover that her first-born was a son.

 

 

The world into which Palmer arrived was a world at war. In 1789 the storming of the Bastille by an enraged Parisian mob had raised the curtain on a revolutionary drama, the repercussions of which were to affect the entire century in which he lived.

Many in Britain had at first welcomed this rebellion. France's
ancien regime
had been greedy, cruel and corrupt and it was hoped that something more like a parliamentary system might replace it, that over-gorged empires and rotten dynasties would be followed by a fairer, more democratic form of rule. But optimism soon faded as aristocratic heads rolled. Political panic flared. Would France's revolutionary fervour prove contagious? The British Establishment felt under grave threat.