Mysterious Wisdom (39 page)

Palmer's attitude to his son's education was similarly unsparing. ‘As you read every day with your Mother I shall expect to find you improved when I return – therefore
take pains
or I shall be sadly disappointed,'
79
he wrote in 1845. Even as More was learning to read – and he was told to read very clearly attending to punctuation – it was suggested that he should also try to write; as soon as he could write well enough to send his father a letter he was being pushed to embark on a journal – a journal that, moreover, he ought to keep up every day. As soon he had mastered his own lessons, More was enjoined to start instructing his little sister, passing on to her everything that he had himself been taught. First he was simply asked to show her the alphabet – ‘play at PEEP BO with the letters',
80
Palmer suggested – but soon he was expected to teach her also the errors of naughtiness. Next Palmer instructed More that he must look after his mother as well, to be kind and take care of her when she was ill. ‘What a high ladder is that of Christian perfection!' Palmer had declared;
81
his poor son was placed on the first rung and set struggling to get to its top.

 

 

A similarly narrow path was being prepared for little Mary. She was barely three when Palmer wrote to her brother who was holidaying at the seaside: ‘Tell Mary that I love her dearly and that when you dig a grave, a deep wide grave in the sands, she must help you to bury the giant Naughtiness.'
82

The family had gone to Margate for the sake of More who was a sickly child, but it was the strong little Mary who, a short while after their return, fell desperately ill. ‘What would you do if you were in my case?' Palmer wrote frantically to Linnell. He was in a state of ‘horrible perplexity' about the incompetence and high fees of the pair of doctors attending. They offered conflicting opinions. One told Palmer that if his daughter managed to live through the next twenty-four hours, she might get through her illness. But ‘I am cut to the heart to see how they have begun,' Palmer wrote, for the little girl had spent a sleepless night, coughing incessantly. The other doctor assured him that the girl would recover: ‘But how comes it then that the old cough has returned with redoubled violence?' the stricken father asked. ‘Every cough is a dagger to me,'
83
he wrote. Palmer had tried to turn his Lisson Grove study into an artistic haven, decorating it with paintings and etchings and classical busts, but none of these could mean anything now. Cancelling a work trip, even though the doctor had told him that it would be fine to go, he sat in a torment of anxiety. ‘I EARNESTLY trust Mrs Linnell will be able to see us today – I have sent for both doctors – I remain in an agony of distress,'
84
he wrote.

‘
Could
Mrs Linnell do us the great kindness of coming
immediately
?
' a panicking Palmer implored. ‘Dr Mackenzie gave 6 drops of laudanum last night which Anny thinks has caused the sad state of Dear Mary this morning – We have both with one consent – dismissed Dr Mackenzie and depend up Dr Mackintyre – but alas I fear too late.'
85
The last words of the letter are almost illegible. Palmer was distraught. And though his earnestly awaited mother-in-law did eventually arrive, she was too late to help. ‘My dear daughter Mary Elizabeth
died
at 25 minutes to 6 p.m.,' he recorded on 15 December 1847. ‘She was three years and nine months old.'

Eleven days later, Palmer recounted the details. ‘Her mother was sitting at the end of the bed when Mrs Linnell said “I think she is gone.” Anny put her face close to Mary's, but could hear no sound of breathing. Her eyes were open and fixed, but her face turned deadly pale . . . SHE WAS DEAD. Mrs Linnell closed her eyes. The last I saw of her dear grey eyes was in the afternoon, when I watched them. The lids closing a little over them made it seem like a mournful and clouded sunset. She had appeared for the most part unconscious for two or three days, but on the morning of the day she died Anny was going to bed, when she held up one trembling arm and then the other. Anny put her head down between them, when she held her tightly round the neck for about a minute, and seemed to be thus taking a last leave of her mother. She had done so to me about two days before.'
86

Palmer and his cousin Giles were there when Mary was buried in All Saints' Cemetery, a peaceful private burial ground in Nunhead in the then still undeveloped outreaches of Camberwell, where mourners could wander among neoclassical monuments, along meandering paths overlooking leafy views. ‘It was not until some time after dear Mary's death that we had any notion as to the cause of her illness,' Hannah would much later write. ‘The doctors could not understand the seizure, and asked several times if we knew of her having swallowed anything. At the time the questions were
asked
we did
not
know – but afterwards dear More remembered having seen his dear Sister suck (when playing in the field adjoining the house) a poisonous weed which when the stalk is broke yields a fluid which looks exactly like milk.'
87
It is possible that Mary had found a Euphorbia, the milky latex of which is an extreme irritant, blistering skin and burning the throat if even its fumes are inhaled. When ingested, it can lead to death, especially in a young child. Post-mortem examinations of victims have revealed severe inflammation, and sometimes even perforation, of the stomach wall.

Palmer felt completely defeated. As he bent over his paintings or sat through his teaching engagements, his eyes would blear over and his voice start to choke as memories of his golden-haired daughter drifted through his head.

18

The Years of Disillusion

 

O! this grinding world

from
The Letters of Samuel Palmer

 

‘Life,' said the erstwhile mariner, Edward Calvert, ‘is like the deck of a battle ship in action – there is no knowing who will go next.'
1
After the death of Mary, Palmer's old friend came round to Grove Street every evening to keep him company in his grief. ‘Bitterest anguish would have been less bearable but for your . . . sympathy and vividly remembered kindness,'
2
Palmer would later write. He mourned the loss of his ‘dear sweet'
3
girl. ‘Words of comfort sound very hollow,' he wrote three years later to Richmond when he also lost a baby daughter. ‘The blow has fallen; the affections are lacerated,' the ‘wisest words' can only be ‘miserable comforters'.
4

But if Palmer was left desolate, it was even worse for his wife. She desperately gathered every last relic of her lost child, stitching a cushion cover from her baby clothes, caressing the casts that had been made of her tiny hands and feet. Sorting through every fragment that would bear testimony to her daughter's brief life, she turned up a letter from her husband. ‘If Mary is going to be naughty,' he had instructed More, ‘call out “Mary take care of the wol
f
!”'
5
‘I cannot remember one single instance in which dear Mary shewed any disposition to be “naughty”. She was most loving and kind to everyone,'
6
Hannah scribbled in the margin. Private recriminations may have followed this loss.

 

 

For the sorrowing parents, every room of Grove Street was haunted by memories. They no longer wished to live there and, within a few months, decided to make a new start. It would be as good for the family's health as it would be for his profession, thought Palmer, for Lisson Grove with its damp clay soil and disreputable neighbours was becoming an increasingly insalubrious place and soon he was consulting Linnell on a cottage in Kensington that he and Hannah were hoping to rent.

Kensington in those days was still separate from the capital. An outlying town that had grown up in the seventeenth century around the palace to which William III had decamped because of his asthma, it had long been considered a desirable spot, and though by the time the Palmers moved there it was already far from rural, it still remained pleasantly peaceful in parts – its quiet lanes lined by little wooden fences, its cottages pretty and its gardens lush. In March 1848, the Palmers moved into Number 1A, Victoria Road, a picturesque if rather rickety dwelling with a thatched roof, uneven floors that threatened to collapse into the cellar and a garden which boasted its own apple tree. A few minutes' walk away were Kensington Gardens which, with their gently lilting pastures, their calm ponds and spreading trees, offered a far better apology for the country than what Palmer had described as the ‘dank' and ‘consumptive'
7
Regent's Park. These would provide not only a good sketching spot but a pleasant place for Hannah to wander and a fine playground for the six-year-old More.

‘I look out of the window – several birds are singing – the sun shines so brightly upon the slates – and the white houses look as virtuous as Vesta,'
8
an uplifted Palmer told Julia Richmond a few months after moving. ‘I sit and think of you every morning under the cedars in Kensington Gardens,' Hannah wrote fondly to her father. ‘The sheep [are] so tame that they come all round us and the birds sing gloriously overhead. I take my work and my camp stool and we are out 3 hours every morning.'
9
But just as the Palmers on honeymoon in Italy had greeted every new staging post with panegyrics of delight before finding only too quickly that its novelties had palled, within a few months of moving neither of them was feeling so cheerful and Palmer was subsiding into one of his periodic glooms.

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.