The Mudfog Papers Page 10

  “Ah, Mr Murgatroyd! What’s all this about striking with double force?” said the object of the above remark, as he entered. “I never excuse a man’s getting into a rage during winter, even when he’s seated so close to the fire as you are. It is very injudicious to put yourself into such a perspiration. What is the cause of this extreme physical and mental excitement, sir?”

  Such was the very philosophical address of Mr Robert Bolton, a shorthand writer, as he termed himself – a bit of equivoque passing current among his fraternity, which must give the uninitiated a vast idea of the establishment of the ministerial organ, while to the initiated it signifies that no one paper can lay claim to the enjoyment of their services. Mr Bolton was a young man, with a somewhat sickly and very dissipated expression of countenance. His habiliments were composed of an exquisite union of gentility, slovenliness, assumption, simplicity, newness and old age. Half of him was dressed for the winter, the other half for the summer. His hat was of the newest cut, the d’Orsay;* his trousers had been white, but the inroads of mud and ink, etc., had given them a piebald appearance; round his throat he wore a very high black cravat, of the most tyrannical stiffness; while his tout ensemble was hidden beneath the enormous folds of an old brown poodle-collared greatcoat, which was closely buttoned up to the aforesaid cravat. His fingers peeped through the ends of his black kid gloves, and two of the toes of each foot took a similar view of society through the extremities of his high-lows.* Sacred to the bare walls of his garret be the mysteries of his interior dress! He was a short, spare man, of a somewhat inferior deportment. Everybody seemed influenced by his entry into the room, and his salutation of each member partook of the patronizing. The hairdresser made way for him between himself and the stomach. A minute afterwards he had taken possession of his pint and pipe. A pause in the conversation took place. Everybody was waiting, anxious for his first observation.

  “Horrid murder in Westminster this morning,” observed Mr Bolton.

  Everybody changed their positions. All eyes were fixed upon the man of paragraphs.

  “A baker murdered his son by boiling him in a copper,” said Mr Bolton.

  “Good Heavens!” exclaimed everybody, in simultaneous horror.

  “Boiled him, gentlemen!” added Mr Bolton, with the most effective emphasis. “Boiled him!”

  “And the particulars, Mr B.,” enquired the hairdresser, “the particulars?”

  Mr Bolton took a very long draught of porter, and some two or three dozen whiffs of tobacco, doubtless to instil into the commercial capacities of the company the superiority of a gentleman connected with the press, and then said:

  “The man was a baker, gentlemen.” (Everyone looked at the baker present, who stared at Bolton.) “His victim, being his son, also was necessarily the son of a baker. The wretched murderer had a wife, whom he was frequently in the habit, while in an intoxicated state, of kicking, pummelling, flinging mugs at, knocking down and half-killing while in bed, by inserting in her mouth a considerable portion of a sheet or blanket.”

  The speaker took another draught, everybody looked at everybody else, and exclaimed, “Horrid!”

  “It appears in evidence, gentlemen,” continued Mr Bolton, “that on the evening of yesterday, Sawyer the baker came home in a reprehensible state of beer. Mrs S., connubially considerate, carried him in that condition upstairs into his chamber, and consigned him to their mutual couch. In a minute or two she lay sleeping beside the man whom the morrow’s dawn beheld a murderer!” (Entire silence informed the reporter that his picture had attained the awful effect he desired.) “The son came home about an hour afterwards, opened the door and went up to bed. Scarcely (gentlemen, conceive his feelings of alarm), scarcely had he taken off his indescribables, when shrieks (to his experienced ear maternal shrieks) scared the silence of surrounding night. He put his indescribables on again, and ran downstairs. He opened the door of the parental bedchamber. His father was dancing upon his mother. What must have been his feelings! In the agony of the minute he rushed at his male parent as he was about to plunge a knife into the side of his female. The mother shrieked. The father caught the son (who had wrested the knife from the paternal grasp) up in his arms, carried him downstairs, shoved him into a copper of boiling water among some linen, closed the lid, and jumped upon the top of it, in which position he was found with a ferocious countenance by the mother, who arrived in the melancholy wash house just as he had so settled himself.

  “‘Where’s my boy?’ shrieked the mother.

  “‘In that copper, boiling,’ coolly replied the benign father.

  “Struck by the awful intelligence, the mother rushed from the house, and alarmed the neighbourhood. The police entered a minute afterwards. The father, having bolted the wash-house door, had bolted himself. They dragged the lifeless body of the boiled baker from the cauldron and, with a promptitude commendable in men of their station, they immediately carried it to the station house. Subsequently, the baker was apprehended while seated on the top of a lamp-post in Parliament Street, lighting his pipe.”

  The whole horrible ideality of the Mysteries of Udolpho,* condensed into the pithy effect of a ten-line paragraph, could not possibly have so affected the narrator’s auditory. Silence, the purest and most noble of all kinds of applause, bore ample testimony to the barbarity of the baker, as well as to Bolton’s knack of narration; and it was only broken after some minutes had elapsed by interjectional expressions of the intense indignation of every man present. The baker wondered how a British baker could so disgrace himself and the highly honourable calling to which he belonged; and the others indulged in a variety of wonderments connected with the subject; among which not the least wonderment was that which was awakened by the genius and information of Mr Robert Bolton, who, after a glowing eulogium on himself and his unspeakable influence with the daily press, was proceeding, with a most solemn countenance, to hear the pros and cons of the Pope autograph question, when I took up my hat, and left.

  Note on the Text

  The text in the present edition is based on the first one-volume edition, published in 1880. The spelling and punctuation have been standardized, modernized and made consistent throughout.

  Notes

  p.3, Bentley’s Miscellany: A literary periodical founded by Richard Bentley (1794–1871) in 1836, and of which Dickens himself was the first editor (until 1839). The pieces that make up The Mudfog Papers originally appeared in the magazine in 1837–38.

  p.3, Our Mutual Friend: The last novel completed by Dickens, published in 1864–65.

  p.3, Mr Lupton… so unrivalled a teacher: The English calligrapher Thomas Tomkins (1743–1816) was a writing master at St Paul’s School in London. Joseph Hirst Lupton (1836–1905) was a later surmaster (deputy headmaster) of the same institution.

  p.3, George Bentley: George Bentley (1828–1895) was the son of Richard Bentley, the original publisher of Bentley’s Miscellany. This preface was written in 1880 to accompany the first publication of The Mudfog Papers in book form.

  p.6, Limehouse and Ratcliff Highway: Ratcliff Highway, known today simply as “the Highway”, is a road that runs between the City of London and Limehouse in the East End. In the nineteenth century it was synonymous with crime and vice, not least because of a series of vicious killings in 1811 that became known as “the Ratcliff Highway murders”.

  p.8, Whittington: A reference to the English folk tale about Dick Whittington, a poor orphan who, accompanied by his cat, travels to London and rises to be lord mayor. The character is named after the real-life Richard Whittington (d.1423), who served as lord mayor of London four times.

  p.14, two-pair-of-stairs’ windows: Meaning a window two floors from the ground. A “pair” is an old-fashioned name for a flight of stairs.

  p.14, Captain Manby’s apparatus: The English sea captain George William Manby (1765–1854) was the inventor of the “Manby Mortar”, a d
evice that fired a line from the shore to a sinking ship, enabling crew and passengers to be brought to safety.

  p.16, seventy-four pounder: A cannon firing shot of this weight.

  p.16, eight-day clock: A clock that only needs to be wound once every eight days.

  p.19, court card: A king, queen or jack in a deck of playing cards.

  p.20, Life Guardsman’s sabre: The Life Guards is the household division of the British army, the troops employed to protect the king or queen.

  p.26, like the anonymous vessel… till next day: In the poem ‘The Bay of Biscay’ by the Irish writer Andrew Cherry (1762–1812), the speaker describes how he and his shipmates are forced to weather an overnight storm in the notoriously tempestuous gulf between the western coast of France and the northern coast of Spain: “The night both drear and dark, / Our poor devoted bark, / Till next day, there she lay, / In the Bay of Biscay O!”

  p.32, Full Report… Advancement of Everything: This piece and the one that follows are intended as satires on the British Association for the Advancement of Science, founded in 1831, an organization regularly ridiculed in the press as the “British Ass”. The correspondent’s reports that constitute the two stories are parodies of the accounts of the British Association’s meetings that appeared in the literary magazine the Athenaeum.

  p.45, ‘The Industrious Fleas’: The Extraordinary Exhibition of the Industrious Fleas was a flea circus on Regent Street, which opened in 1832. A flea circus was a sideshow in which real insects were made to perform feats such as pulling miniature chariots, rowing miniature boats and fighting duels with one another.

  p.48, M. Garnerin: André-Jacques Garnerin (1769–1823), pioneer of the parachute.

  p.48, Vauxhall Gardens: Pleasure garden in Kennington, on the south bank of the Thames.

  p.49, Somers Town: An area of north London.

  p.52, MRCS: Member of the Royal College of Surgeons.

  p.55, He found that… Simple Simons gave the same result: The Hermit: Or, the Unparalleled Sufferings and Surprising Adventures of Mr Philip Quarll, an Englishman (1727) was a popular adventure story, generally attributed to Peter Longueville, about the eponymous Quarll’s fifty years of isolation on a South Sea island. As this description suggests, it was highly derivative of Robinson Crusoe (1719) by Daniel Defoe (1660–1731). Valentine and Orson is a medieval French romance about two twins separated at birth, one of whom is raised as a knight, the other of whom is raised by bears. It was known to British readers in several English versions, the earliest of which dates from around 1550. The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes, a variation on the Cinderella legend, was published anonymously in 1765 by John Newbery (1713–67), “the Father of Children’s Literature”, and became one of the best-known children’s stories of its day. “Seven Champions” probably refers to The Famous Historie of the Seaven Champions of Christendom (1596) by Richard Johnson (1573–c.1659), which tells the stories of seven patron saints of European countries, including St George, patron saint of England. ‘Simple Simon’ is a traditional English nursery rhyme.

  p.56, Mungo Park: Mungo Park (1771–1806), Scottish explorer of Africa, famous for following the course of the Niger River.

  p.58, Bank: The Bank of England, in the City of London.

  p.62, Boz: The pseudonym used by Dickens in his early writings.

  p.63, Oldcastle: Possibly the town of this name in County Meath, Ireland.

  p.64, New Burlington Street: Off Regent Street in the West End of London. New Burlington Street was the location of the office of Richard Bentley, the publisher of Bentley’s Miscellany.

  p.68, has just called ‘woman’: According to Dickens himself in the second chapter of The Pickwick Papers, the dragon depicted on a gold sovereign being slain by St George was referred to as a woman: “‘Not worth while splitting a guinea,’ said the stranger, ‘toss who shall pay for both – I call; you spin – first time – woman – woman – bewitching woman,’ and down came the sovereign with the dragon (called by courtesy a woman) uppermost.”

  p.73, savans: “Savan” is an old spelling of “savant”, meaning a learned and scholarly person.

  p.83, glee singers: A glee was an English song for at least three men’s voices, usually unaccompanied, popular in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

  p.86, Four-in-hand Clubs: A four-in-hand was a carriage driven by horses and controlled by one person. The eighteenth-century “Four-in-hand Club” was made up of reckless, well-to-do young men who would bribe carriage drivers to let them take the reins of their vehicles and drive them at great speeds. By the nineteenth century recreational driving had evolved into a respectable leisure pursuit, and many membership clubs existed.

  p.87, Signor Gagliardi: Apparently the owner of a real exhibition of mechanical figures in the period. One notice for this spectacle boasted that it was a “Splendid mechanical museum of 200 automaton figures”, in which were represented “His late Majesty William IV, Queen Victoria the 1st and her most gracious mother the Duchess of Kent, as they appeared in their box at Her Majesty’s Theatre, on the 18th of July, 1837”.

  p.92, Sir William Courtenay… recently shot at Canterbury: Born in Cornwall, John Nichols Thom (1799–1838) was an imposter who assumed the name of Sir William Courtenay and claimed the earldom of Devon. An eccentric and outlandish figure, he gained something of a following and stood for Parliament in Canterbury, though failed to win a seat. He was shot and killed in a fight between his band of supporters, which consisted mainly of disgruntled rural labourers and artisans, and some soldiers at Bossenden Wood in Kent.

  p.94, Newgate Market: A meat market in the City of London, demolished in 1869.

  p.95, spavined: Bone spavin is a form of osteoarthritis of a horse’s hock, resulting in lameness.

  p.95, Professor John Ketch: Named after Jack Ketch (d.1686), executioner under Charles II.

  p.95, the late Mr Greenacre: James Greenacre (1785–1837), known as the “Edgware Road murderer”, killed his fiancée and was hanged at Newgate on 2nd May 1837.

  p.98, Pantaloons… Harlequins and Columbines: Pantaloon, Harlequin and Columbine were stock characters from the Italian commedia dell’arte, a form of comic theatre popular from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century. Along with two other characters, Clown and Pierrot, they became part of the English pantomime tradition known as the harlequinade, acting out the same basic plot in which Pantaloon, the father of Columbine, attempts to separate his daughter from her lover, Harlequin.

  p.102, Grimaldi: Joseph Grimaldi (1778–1837) was a famous Regency actor and comedian, best remembered for his performances as the Clown in the harlequinade, a role with which he became synonymous. He wrote an autobiography that was edited (and in effect rewritten) for publication by Dickens himself in 1838.

  p.102, C.J. Smith as did Guy Fawkes, and George Barnwell at the Garden: The story of Guy Fawkes and the 1605 Gunpowder Plot to destroy Parliament was the subject of a pantomime, titled Harlequin and Guy Fawkes, or, the Fifth of November, performed at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden in 1835. Another pantomime from around the same time, Harlequin and George Barnwell, or, The London ’Prentice, seems to have been a comic send-up of playwright George Lillo’s (c.1693–1739) tragedy The London Merchant, or, The History of George Barnwell, first performed in 1731. C.J. Smith was an actor involved in both productions.

  p.102, Brown, King and Gibson, at the ’Delphi: Apparently a famous trio of performers of the period. The Adelphi Theatre is on the Strand in London.

  p.102, Popish conspirator: Guy Fawkes and his fellow would-be terrorists were Catholic fanatics.

  p.107, immediately after the change too, the parallel is quite perfect: Traditionally, the harlequinade occurred at the end of a pantomime or other theatrical presentation, which consisted of an entirely unrelated story and characters. The change from one to the other was signified by
an extravagant transition scene, in which the characters from the first play were magically transformed into the stock figures of the harlequinade. Dickens is here comparing this spectacle to a change of government resulting from a general election.

  p.108, summersets: An old spelling of “summersaults”.

  p.108, the late Mr Richardson: The actor and impresario John Richardson (1766–1836), who was the founder of an itinerant fairground theatre that performed in and around London. Dickens provides a description of Richardson’s Theatre in ‘Greenwich Fair’ in Sketches by Boz (1836).

  p.110, All the world’s a stage, / And all the men and women merely players: The opening words of Jaques’s famous speech in Shakespeare’s As You Like It, Act ii, Sc. 7.

  p.112, the Zoological Gardens: A reference to the zoo in London’s Regent’s Park, established in 1826 by the Zoological Society of London. Originally accessible only to members of the society, it opened to the public in 1847.