Mysterious Wisdom (47 page)

Anne Gilchrist, left so suddenly to fend for herself and her several children, was grateful for their kindness, but she had little time to meditate upon her loss. Among the first tasks that faced her was the need to move house and, barely a month after the demise of the family breadwinner, she had left London and was renting a cottage near Haslemere, while she, like the Palmers, looked for a more permanent home. Though Palmer bombarded her with advice, when it came to practicalities he was completely ineffectual. When Anne was suddenly required at short notice to move he was too busy to help. Within two weeks, she had found a house on her own and by April 1862 she was ensconced in nearby Hindhead.

Palmer persuaded her that she should, with his help, complete the Blake biography left unfinished by her husband. The task would become a source of great solace in their shared grief. Roused from his lethargy, Palmer attended to it punctiliously, correcting anything from basic facts through philosophical meanings to punctuation marks. He was particularly keen to make sure that no indecent or coarse words or irreverent references would be included as Blake, he explained, had often been provoked to write by intense irritation with the result that some of his sentiments could appear blasphemous, and blasphemy, Palmer believed, would have blighted the chances of the book. As a result, the work of a hero whose fierce spiritual purity he had never really understood was subjected to a prudish censorship.
His attempts at bowdlerisation, however, were not always successful. There was a story often told by Blake's patron, Thomas Butts, who said that, calling round on the poet one day, he had found Blake and his wife sitting quietly in their summerhouse freed of ‘those troublesome disguises' which have prevailed since the Fall. ‘Come in!' Blake had cried: ‘it is only Adam and Eve, you know!' Husband and wife had, apparently, gone into character to recite passages from Paradise Lost in their little backyard Eden. Palmer had dismissed this tale. It was unlike Blake, he said. It would be better excised. It remained, however, though other passages did not.

Palmer's beloved Milton would have been outraged: in his
Areopagitica
he had launched a fierce attack on censorship. But Palmer was delighted by the results of all his efforts, shame-sparing asterisks included. He could hardly contain his effusions when, in November 1863, the finished volumes finally arrived. Cutting the pages, he read wildly all over the place, relishing every aspect of the work. ‘Surely never book has been put forth more lovingly,'
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he cried. He predicted many print runs and dreamt of debates carried on in periodicals. And even though these were not immediately to come about, Palmer, in collaborating so impassionedly with the Gilchrists on this biography, undoubtedly played a major part in setting off the process of reassessment which, over the ensuing years, was to turn a forgotten engraver into an exalted figure in British art.

After publication, however, his correspondence with Anne Gilchrist rapidly fell away. Perhaps she was too occupied with caring for her family, or maybe she had grown tired of his sententious outpourings on anything from child-rearing practices to the problems of country bakers. But the friendship had served its most important function, setting Palmer back on course to continue the next phase of his life. It was not that the Palmers would ever forget their eldest son: Hannah kept all his possessions – from a bookcase full of the bargain volumes that he had used to rummage for in the Farringdon Road market, to his old schoolboy essays. Palmer, in a drawer in his study, kept a handful of other treasured relics. He seldom dared look at them, but he liked to keep them near him. More remained an obsession. The nineteen-year-old whom a headmaster had praised in the prize-giving two weeks after his death as a boy of unusual promise, became elevated in his father's memory into a very paragon.

20

Redhill

 

Midnight has struck – and the hours – however slowly,

creep towards dawn

from
The Letters of Samuel Palmer

 

Palmer had dreamt all his life of a rural existence but in May 1862, as he packed up his paintings into a few small boxes to leave for his last ever home, it was not to some pastoral idyll that he found himself moving but to the suburban realities of Victorian life. The house was Hannah's choice. Palmer had spent seven months hunting fruitlessly, tramping – even in a weakened state when two miles a day was the most he could manage – fourteen miles of coach road from south to west Surrey; but nothing he found met his fastidious criteria. Hannah, wanting to be near her family, finally settled on a modest, detached house in Mead Vale, a suburb of Redhill, in the borough of Reigate.

Redhill, named after the local common that was itself named after the red fuller's earth – a clay used until the end of the nineteenth century for absorbing grease from natural wool in a process known as ‘fulling' – which was mined in the region, was a new town that, since 1818, had been gradually creeping across the waterlogged wastelands flanking the increasingly busy London to Brighton Road. With the opening of the railway in 1841 it had flourished and, by the time that the Palmers moved there, its population had risen to around 10,000. It was about ‘as ugly a town as you could find', declared Herbert, ‘with no history beyond the history of the railway, and no old association'.
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The same might be said of Redhill today: a soulless aggregation of Edwardian leftovers and harsh modern blocks with a pedestrianised shopping precinct instead of a heart. But nowadays, Palmer's leafy suburb of Mead Vale is more readily associated with the town of Reigate: the more appealing Georgian neighbour with which Redhill merges as it leaks down the A25.

It is still possible to follow – give or take a few traffic junctions – Palmer's instructions for how to get from Reigate Town station to his home. A road leads steadily uphill between lines of new houses and a sprinkling of prettier cottages that he would have known. Keeping the old stone wall of Reigate church to the right, as Palmer suggested, the walker follows the road round and then upwards into a world of big gardens and gravel driveways, double garages and magnolia trees. The solitary gas lamp which once marked the Palmers' lane has gone, but the house – at the top of a road that is now called Cronks Hill – is still there, tucked away at the end of the little right-hand turning. A big solid building on the corner was Palmer's landmark.

Palmer's home is now called the Chantry, but then it was called Furze Hill House and was marketed by the letting agents as a Gothic villa. It could hardly have felt further from the aesthetic that Palmer so loved. What today's buyer might covet as quirky seemed ridiculously pretentious to his tastes – not that he, in a state of depression, could rouse himself much to care. It met his requirements. It was built on high ground, standing about 400 feet above sea level, and yet was not lofty enough to be bleak. The soil was dry. ‘We see the evening reek stopping just below us,' he wrote, and if it often ‘strikes cold' just at the bottom of the hill, ‘all is dry and pleasant above'.
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It was cheerfully near to a town and, with two stations nearby, it would take only half an hour for Palmer to get into Charing Cross, while Brighton, where Hannah could go shopping, was also conveniently reached by rail. When the wind was in the right direction you could even smell the sea breezes, Palmer observed – or at least those who didn't take snuff professed that they could.

To stand there today – if the clutter of houses that have subsequently clambered up what used to be furze-covered slopes is disregarded – is still to appreciate the potential of this spot. Over the tops of the trees, panoramic views stretch across a wide valley to the distant South Downs in one direction, or along the gently undulating horizons of the sandy Kentish Hills.

 

 

Furze Hill, built in 1858 by a man called James Fisher whose initials along with the date still adorn a quatrefoil on one of the three bays that form the house front, is constructed of local Reigate stone. It is a curious not to say somewhat fantastical place. Its steep pointed gables and central arched door echo the architecture of the chapel which reputedly once stood on the site. A little bell tower and gargoyles add to the ecclesiastical effect though the further adornments of decorative ridge tiles, of carved wooden finials and fancy bargeboards, make it look as much like a gingerbread house. The visitor, entering through a neo-Gothic arch, finds himself standing in a dolls-house version of a medieval hall, its high roof open to the rafters, a big open grate inviting a fire. The three main reception rooms lead off from this hall, for the house was first built for an immobile old lady who wouldn't have been able to negotiate the stairs which lead down to the basement where the kitchen, scullery and servants' quarters would formerly have been found. These basement rooms, though small and low-ceilinged, do not feel too dingy or cramped as the house is built into a hillside and they open out airily onto sloping lawns at the back.

Hannah was delighted with this quaint if somewhat inconveniently organised home and even Palmer, for all that he would mock its gentility, endowing each of the rooms with a pretentious nickname (he called the drawing room ‘the saloon'; one bedroom ‘the boudoir'; another, which was damp, ‘bronchitis bower'; and a little downstairs closet where some of his old books had to be stored away ‘the butler's pantry'), could be persuaded to acknowledge its merits. ‘I sometimes think what a pretty little box it might be,'
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he admitted. Hannah set busily about making it so: arranging various ornaments on a heavy oak sideboard; placing a statue of Hercules on the marble mantelpiece; hanging the prized copy of the Titian that she had painted on her honeymoon; putting her husband's drawings in the dining room; piling Blake's engravings from Job and Dante on a grand piano, finding another spot for his Virgilian woodcuts and choosing only the gilded and leather-bound books for the stack on the table to create an elegant but learned effect. Palmer's less presentable treasures – the skull of a man said to have been killed in the Battle of Hastings, his shabbier volumes, or the parcel which, wrapped in grubby brown paper and found (after Palmer's death) to have contained the manuscript of an unpublished poem by Blake – were stuffed out of sight into closets and cupboards.

Palmer for the most part left his wife to arrange things as she liked. He had only ever known of three domestic establishments in his life in which Sarah obeyed Abraham, he said. She was the ‘Head of House' and ‘Tail wags placably', he declared.
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And so a man who considered a fine cat to be the only ‘really beautiful ornament of a living room'
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bent to his wife's bourgeois will. Life in what Palmer called ‘Filigree Folly' dictated that a nosegay should be placed right in the middle of the table and the books arranged in ‘solemn parallelism'
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to its sides; that geegaws should be arrayed on empty mantels and druggets laid down to indicate routes between doors. And though when Hannah was away Palmer would replace the gilded ‘fal-lals' on the dining table with a ‘mighty mass of Virgils'
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– ‘then indeed,' he told Herbert, ‘I felt that things looked “respectable” in the true sense of the word, and not in the sense of “keeping a gig”'
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– for most of the time he let his wife hold sway. His only caveat was that he should be allocated his own inviolate retreat, a place to which he could withdraw to work, read and sleep. A little fifteen foot square bedroom just off the main hall is the one that he chose. This room, shut away from the remainder of the house by a wood and ironwork door, became his den. It fell far short of the perfect painting room which he had long imagined he might one day work in – one which would have ‘glass at top and windows all round – closeable by shutters'
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– but at least he could make his own, even if sometimes it felt more like a trap. There being only one entrance, when visitors called round whom he did not want to meet, he would have to hole up there until they had finally left.

Palmer made the place snug – which to him meant happily disorganised. He crammed it with the hoarded treasures that he had only just managed to rescue, his wife having instructed the removal men to leave most of them behind. The furniture, from the rough-hewn shelves through the primitive palette racks to the decrepit armchair, was decidedly shabby and the house-proud Hannah, poking her head round the door from time to time but only rarely daring to make a domestic raid, deplored their very presence in her home. But Palmer stood stubbornly against her social pretensions. It was not that he could not afford better – his paintings were beginning to fetch higher prices and commissions were arriving in a more predictable flow – but he wanted his study to stand as a last protest against ‘cursed gentility'.
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Almost everything in that room was makeshift, his son remembered, and there was little that did not bear evidence of his father's clumsy tinkering.