All posts tagged Covent Garden

A Monarchy Transformed: Britain 1603-1714 by Mark Kishlansky (1996)

Mark Kishlansky (1948 – 2015) was an American historian of seventeenth-century British politics. He was the Frank Baird, Jr. Professor of History at Harvard University, editor of the Journal of British Studies from 1984 to 1991, and editor-in-chief of History Compass from 2003 to 2009.

Kishlansky wrote half a dozen or so books and lots of articles about Stuart Britain and so was invited to write Volume Six of the Penguin History of England covering that period, under the general editorship of historian David Cannadine.

I think of the history of Britain in the 17th century as consisting of four parts:

The first two Stuarts (Kings James I & Charles I) 1603 – 1642
The Civil Wars and Protectorate (Oliver Cromwell) 1642 – 1660
The Restoration (Kings Charles II & James II) 1660 – 1688
The Glorious Revolution and Whig monarchs (William & Mary, then Queen Anne) 1688 – 1714

Although obviously you can go by monarch:

James I (1603-25)
Charles I (1625-42)
Wars of the three kingdoms (1637-53)
Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell (1653-1660)
Charles II (1660-1685)
James II and the Glorious Revolution (1685-88)
William & Mary (1688-1702)

I appreciate that this is an English perspective, and Kishlansky is the first to acknowledge his history tends to focus on England, by far the largest and most powerful of the three kingdoms of Britain. The histories of Scotland and Ireland over the same period shadowed the English timeline but – obviously – had significant events, personnel and continuities of their own. From the start Kishlansky acknowledges he doesn’t have space to give these separate histories the space they deserve.

Why is the history of seventeenth century Britain so attractive and exciting?

The seventeenth century has a good claim to being the most important, the most interesting and maybe the most exciting century in English history because of the sweeping changes that affected every level of society. In 1600 England was still a late-medieval society; in 1700 it was an early modern society and in many ways the most advanced country on earth.

Social changes

business the modern business world was created, with the founding of the Bank of England and Lloyds insurance, cheques, banknotes and milled coins were invented; the Stock Exchange was founded and the National Debt, a financial device which allowed the British government to raise large sums for wars and colonial settlement; excise and land taxes provided reliable sources of revenue for the government
empire the British Empire was defined with the growth of colonies in North America and India
feudal forms of government withered and medieval practices such as torture and the demonisation of witchcraft and heresy died out
media newspapers were invented and went from weekly to daily editions
new consumer products domestic consumption was transformed by the arrival of new products including tobacco, sugar, rum, gin, port, champagne, tea, coffee and Cheddar cheese
the scientific revolution biology, chemistry and physics trace their origins to discoveries made in the 1600s – Francis Bacon laid the intellectual foundations for the scientific method; William Harvey discovered the circulation of the blood; Robert Boyle posited the existence of chemical elements, invented perfected the air pump and created the first vacuum; Isaac Newton discovered his laws of thermodynamics, the composition of light, the laws of gravity; William Napier invented logarithms; William Oughtred invented the multiplication sign in maths; Edmund Halley identified the comet which bears his name, Robert Hooke invented the microscope, the quadrant, and the marine barometer; the Royal College of Physicians published the first pharmacopeia listing the properties of drugs; Peter Chamberlen invented the forceps; the Royal Society (for the sciences) was founded in 1660
sport the first cricket and gold clubs were founded; Izaak Walton codified knowledge about fishing in The Compleat Angler; Charles II inaugurated yacht racing at Cowes and Queen Anne founded Royal Ascot
architecture Inigo Jones, Sir Christopher Wren, Nicholas Hawksmoor and John Vanbrugh created wonderful stately homes and public buildings e.g. Jones laid out the Covent Garden piazza which remains an attraction in London to this day and Wren designed the new St Paul’s cathedral which became a symbol of London
philosophy the political upheavals produced two masterworks of political philosophy, the Leviathan of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, which are still studied and applied in a way most previous philosophy isn’t
non conformists despite repeated attempts to ban them, Puritan sects who refused to ‘conform’ to the Restoration settlement of the Church of England were grudgingly accepted and went on to become a permanent and fertile element of British society – the Quakers, Baptists and Presbyterians

Political upheaval

At the centre of the century sits the great 20-year upheaval, the civil wars or British wars or Great Rebellion or the Wars of Three Kingdoms, fought between the armies of parliament and the armies of King Charles I, with significant interventions by armies of Scotland and Ireland, which eventually led to the execution of the king, the abolition of the House of Lords and the disestablishment of the Church of England – achievements which still form a core of the radical agenda to this day. These revolutionary changes were- followed by a series of constitutional experiments under the aegis of the military dictator Oliver Cromwell, which radicalised and politicised an entire generation.

Soon after Cromwell’s death in 1658, his regime began to collapse and elements of it arranged for the Restoration of King Charles II, who returned but under a new, more constitutional monarchy, restrained by laws and conventions guaranteeing the liberties of British subjects and well aware of the mistakes which led to the overthrow of his father.

But none of this stopped his overtly Roman Catholic brother, who succeeded him as James II in 1685, making a string of mistakes which collectively alienated the Protestant grandees of the land who conspired to overthrow him and replace him with the reliably Protestant Prince William of Orange. James was forced to flee, William was invited to become King of England and to rule according to a new, clearly defined constitution or Bill of Rights, which guaranteed all kinds of liberties including of speech and assembly.

All of these upheavals meant that by 1700 England had the most advanced, liberal and open society in Europe, maybe in the world, had experimented with a wide variety of political reforms and constitutions, and developed one which seemed most practical and workable – which was to become the envy of liberals in neighbouring France, and the basis of the more thoroughly worked-out Constitution devised by the founders of the American republic in the 1780s.

Studying the 17th century combines the intellectual excitement of watching these constitutional and political developments unfold, alongside the more visceral excitement of following the dramatic twists and turns in the long civil wars – and then following the slow-burning problems which led to the second great upheaval, the overthrow of James II. There is tremendous pleasure to be had from getting to know the lead characters in both stories and understanding their motives and psychologies.

Key features of 17th century England

The first two chapters of Mark Kishlansky’s book set out the social and political situation in Britain in 1600. These include:

Britain was a comprehensively patriarchal society. The king ruled the country and his word meant life or death. Le Roy le veult – the King wishes it – was the medieval French phrase still used to ratify statutes into law. The monarch made all political, legal, administrative and religious appointments – lords, ministers, bishops, judges and magistrates owed their position to him. In every locality, knights of the shires, justices of the peace administered the king’s laws. The peerage was very finely gradated and jealously policed. Status was everything.

And this hierarchy was echoed in families which were run by the male head of the household who had complete power over his wife and children, a patriarchal household structure endorsed by the examples in the Bible. Women might have as many as 9 pregnancies, of which 6 went to term and three died in infancy, with a further three children dying in infancy.

The family was primarily a unit of production, with all family members down to small children having specified tasks in the often backbreaking toil involved in agricultural work, caring for livestock, foraging for edibles in woods and fields, producing clothes and shoes. Hard physical labour was the unavoidable lot of almost the entire population.

Marriages were a vital way of passing on land and thus wealth, as well as family names and lineages. Most marriages were arranged to achieve these ends. The top responsibility of both spouses were the rights and responsibilities of marriage i.e. a wife obeyed her husband and a husband cherished and supported his wife. It was thought that ‘love’ would grow as a result of carrying out these duties, but wasn’t a necessary component.

Geography 80% of the population in 1600 worked on the land. Britain can be divided into two geographical zones:

1. The North and West The uplands of the north-west, including Scotland and Wales, whose thin soils encouraged livestock supplemented by a thin diet of oats and barley. Settlements here were scattered and people arranged themselves by kin, in Scotland by clans. Lords owned vast estates and preserved an old-fashioned medieval idea of hospitality and patronage.

Poor harvests had a catastrophic impact. A run of bad harvests in the 1690s led to mass emigration from Scotland to America, and also to the closer ‘plantations’ in Ulster.

It was at this point that Scottish Presbyterians became the majority community in the province. Whereas in the 1660s, they made up some 20% of Ulster’s population… by 1720 they were an absolute majority in Ulster, with up to 50,000 having arrived during the period 1690-1710. (Wikipedia)

2. The south and east of Britain was more densely populated, with villages and towns instead of scattered homesteads. Agriculture was more diverse and productive. Where you have more people – in towns and cities – ties of kinship become weaker and people assess each other less by ‘family’ than by achievements, social standing and wealth.

The North prided itself on its older, more traditional values. The South prided itself on being more productive and competitive.

Population The population of England rose from 4 million in 1600 to 5 million in 1700. There were maybe 600 ‘towns’ with populations of around 1,000. Big provincial capitals like Norwich, Exeter or Bristol (with pops from 10,000 to 30,000) were exceptions.

London was unlike anywhere else in Britain, with a population of 200,000 in 1600 growing to around 600,000 by 1700. It was home to the Court, government with its Houses of Lords and Commons, all the main law courts, and the financial and mercantile hub of the nation (Royal Exchange, Royal Mint, later the Bank of England and Stock Exchange). The centre of publishing and the new science, literature, the arts and theatre. By 1700 London was the largest city in the Western world. Edinburgh, the second largest city in Britain, had a paltry 40,000 population.

Inflation Rising population led to a squeeze on food since agricultural production couldn’t keep pace. This resulted in continuous inflation with foodstuffs becoming more expensive throughout the century, which reduced living standards in the countryside and contributed to periods of near famine. On the other hand, the gentry who managed to hang onto or increase their landholdings saw an unprecedented rise in their income. The rise of this class led to the development of local and regional markets and to the marketisation of agriculture. Those who did well spent lavishly, building manors and grand houses, cutting a fine figure in their coaches, sending the sons to university or the army, educating their daughters in order to attract wealthy husbands.

Vagrancy The change in working patterns on the land, plus the rising population, led to a big increase in vagrancy, which the authorities tackled with varying degrees of savagery, including branding on the face with a V for Vagrant. Contemporary theorists blamed overpopulation for poverty, vagrancy and rising crime. One solution was to encourage the excess population to settle plantations in sparsely populated Ireland or emigrate to New England. There were moral panics about rising alcoholism, and sex outside marriage.

Puritans Leading the charge to control immoral behaviour were the Puritans, a negative word applied to a range of people who believed that the Church of England needed to be further reformed in order to reach the state of purity achieved by Calvinists on the continent. Their aims included:

abolition of the 26 bishops (who were appointed by the king) and their replacement by Elders elected by congregations
reforms of theology and practice – getting rid of images, candles, carvings etc inside churches, getting rid of elaborate ceremonies, bells and incense and other ‘Roman’ superstitions
reducing the number of sacraments to the only two practiced by Jesus in the New Testament
adult baptism replacing infant baptism

Banning Closely connected was the impulse to crack down on all ungodly behaviour e.g. alcohol (close pubs), immorality (close theatres), licentiousness (ban most books except the Bible), lewd behaviour (force women to wear modest outfits, keep their eyes on the ground), ban festivals, ban Christmas, and so on.

Trans-shipping The key driver of Britain’s economic wealth was shipping and more precisely trans-shipping – where goods were brought in from one source before being transhipped on elsewhere. The size of Britain’s merchant fleet more than tripled and the sized of the cargo ships increased tenfold. London’s wealth was based on the trans-shipping trade.

The end of consensus politics

The second of Kishlansky’s introductory chapters describes in detail the political and administrative system in early 17th century Britain. It is fascinating about a) the complexity of the system b) its highly personal orientation about the person the monarch. It’s far too complicated to summarise here but a few key themes emerge:

Consensus Decisions at every level were reached by consensus. To give an example, when a new Parliament was called by the king, the justices of the peace in a county met at a session where, usually, two candidates put themselves forward and the assembled JPs discussed and chose one. Only very rarely were they forced back on the expedient of consulting local householders i.e. actually having a vote on the matter.

Kishlansky explains how this principle of consensus applied in lots of other areas of administration and politics, for example in discussions in Parliament about acts proposed by the king and which needed to be agreed by both Commons and Lords.

He then goes on to launch what is – for me at any rate – a new and massive idea: that the entire 17th century can be seen as the slow and very painful progression from a political model of consensus to an adversarial model.

The entire sequence of civil war, dictatorship, restoration and overthrow can be interpreted as a series of attempts to reach a consensus by excluding your opponents. King Charles prorogued Parliament to get his way, then tried to arrest its leading members. Cromwell, notoriously, was forced to continually remodel and eventually handpick a Parliament which would agree to do his bidding. After the Restoration Charles II tried to exclude both Catholics and non-conforming Protestants from the body politic, imposing an oath of allegiance in order to preserve the model of consensus sought by his grandfather and father.

the point is that all these attempts to purify the body politic in order to achieve consensus failed.

The advent of William of Orange and the Bill of Rights in 1689 can be seen as not so much defining liberties and freedoms but as finally accepting the new reality, that political consensus was no longer possible and only a well-managed adversarial system could work in a modern mixed society.

Religion What made consensus increasingly impossible? Religion. The reformation of Roman Catholicism which began in 1517, and continued throughout the 16th century meant that, by the 1620s, British society was no longer one culturally and religiously unified community, but included irreducible minorities of Catholics and new-style Calvinist Puritans. Both sides in what became the civil wars tried to preserve the old-fashioned consensus by excluding what they saw as disruptive elements who prevented consensus agreements being reached i.e. the Royalists tried to exclude the Parliamentarians, the Parliamentarians tried to exclude the Royalists, both of them tried to exclude Catholics, the Puritans once in power tried to exclude the Anglicans and so on.

But the consensus model was based on the notion that, deep down, all participants shared the same religious, cultural and social values. Once they had ceased to do that the model was doomed.

Seen from this point of view the entire history of the 17th century was the slow, bloody, and very reluctant acceptance that the old model was dead and that an entirely new model was required in which political elites simply had to accept the long-term existence of sincere and loyal but completely different opinions from their own.

Political parties It is no accident that it was after the Glorious Revolution that the seeds of what became political parties first began to emerge. Under the consensus model they weren’t needed; grandees and royal ministers and so on managed affairs so that most of them agreed or acquiesced on the big decisions. Political parties only become necessary or possible once it had become widely accepted that consensus was no longer possible and that one side or another in a debate over policy would simply lose and would have to put up with losing.

So Kishlansky’s long and fascinating introduction leads up to this insight – that the succession of rebellions and civil wars across the three kingdoms, the instability of the Restoration and then the overthrow of James II were all necessary to utterly and finally discredit the old late-medieval notion of political decision-making by consensus, and to usher in the new world of political decision-making by votes, by parties, by lobbying, by organising, by arguing and taking your arguments to a broader political nation i.e. the electorate.

In large part the English Revolution resulted from the inability of the consensual political system to accommodate principled dissension. (p.63)

At a deep level, the adoption of democracy means the abandonment of attempts to repress a society into agreement. On this view, the core meaning of democracy isn’t the paraphernalia about voting, that’s secondary. In its essence democracy means accepting other people’s right to disagree, sincerely and deeply, with what you hold to be profoundly true. Crafting a system which allows people to think differently and speak differently and live differently, without fear or intimidation.

The Old Bachelor by William Congreve (1693)

BELLMORE: Come, come, leave business to idlers and wisdom to fools; they have need of ’em. Wit be my faculty, and pleasure my occupation; and let Father Time shake his glass.

In his lengthy reply to the stinging criticisms of the contemporary stage contained in the polemical pamphlet, A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage written by the bishop and theologian Jeremy Collier, William Congreve tells us that he wrote his first play, The Old Bachelor, while recovering from ‘a fit of sickness’ aged just 19! It’s an astonishing achievement for one so young.

A few years later, in 1692, young William arrived in London and showed The Old Bachelor to the leading literary figure of the day, John Dryden who, with typical generosity, declared he had never seen such a good first play in his life, but that it needed a bit of work cutting down to length and re-ordering some of the scenes.

Once revised, The Old Bachelor was promptly accepted by the only theatre company then performing in London, the United Company, and opened in March 1693. It was a smash-hit and had an extraordinary run of fourteen nights, which was getting on for a record for a Restoration comedy; some new plays ran for the bare minimum of three nights!

If you think about it, these incredibly short runs tell you everything about the size of the audience for these plays. It was minuscule. Was it even in the thousands? And this puts in context the many prologues and epilogues to the plays. Often the playwright and the actors knew key members of the audience personally, and so were directly addressing known individuals in the prologues and epilogues.

The Old Bachelor‘s success was in part attributed to the skilful performances of veteran performers Thomas Betterton and Anne Bracegirdle in the roles of Heartwell and Araminta, respectively.

I was startled to learn in a footnote that the music for the play was composed by Henry Purcell.

Cast list

I find the cast lists of these plays not only useful, but sometimes amusing – the comic names and descriptions – in their own right:

MEN
Heartwell, a surly old bachelor, pretending to slight women, secretly in love with Silvia
Bellmour, in love with Belinda
Vainlove, capricious in his love; in love with Araminta
Sharper
Sir Joseph Wittol
Captain Bluffe
Fondlewife, a banker
Setter, a pimp
Tribulation Spintext, a Puritan preacher (who never actually appears in the play)
Mr Gavot, musician to Araminta
Servant to Fondlewife.

WOMEN.
Araminta, in love with Vainlove
Belinda, her cousin, an affected lady, in love with Bellmour
Lætitia, wife to Fondlewife
Sylvia, Vainlove’s forsaken mistress
Lucy, maid to Sylvia
Betty, maid to Belinda

It’s all set in London. As I’ve read more of the plays, I’ve realised that Aphra Behn’s setting her most successful play, The Rover, in Italy, is by far the exception not the rule of Restoration comedy. Almost all the comedies are set in the same city and the same time as the audience. They are completely contemporary.

Act 1

Bellmour and Vainlove are two weary rakes. Vainlove likes seducing women but is easily bored and actively dislikes it if they come on to him. He goes to show Bellmour but gives him the wrong one by mistake, it is a letter from Vainlove’s recently spurned lover, Sylvia, reproving him for abandoning her. It then comes out that Bellmour slept with her, apparently in disguise so she didn’t realise who he was! But she sincerely loves Vainlove and he has dumped her.

Next Vainlove gives Bellmour the letter he’d intended to show him, a love letter from Laetitia, the wife of the comic character Fondlewife – he paid her a few polite compliments and now she’s sent him a damn love letter telling him her husband will be out of town on business and to come and see her in disguise. He asks Bellmour to do him a favour and do it for him – but Laetitia’s lovely says Bellmour – yes, but I hate being forced into an affair, complains Vainlove. They discuss getting Vainlove’s tailor, Settler, to provide a disguise for Bellmour. They briefly discuss the feeble character of the husband, Fondlewife, then Vainlove leaves ‘on business’.

Bellmour complains that he is already in love with one woman, has a dozen or so mistresses, and now Vainlove is suggesting he take on his beloved, God it’s an exhausting business, being a libertine! He says this in the form of a soliloquy, alone onstage, at which point enter Sharper, whose role is to provide comic asides, and start with a good line:

SHARPER: I’m sorry to see this, Ned. Once a man comes to his soliloquies, I give him for gone.

Enter Heartwell who they both mock for being a grumpy old misanthropist who doesn’t believe in love. Heartwell in turn mocks Bellmour and Vainlove for expending so much energy in the pursuit of women, and has a particularly cynical speech about how, when you’ve finally gone through all this faradiddle in order to get married, your baby will end up looking like half the aristocracy of England because your wife will have been unfaithful with them all. Visitors coo and tickle the baby and say:

‘Ay, the boy takes after his mother’s relations,’ when the devil and she knows ’tis a little compound of the whole body of nobility.

Heartwell leaves ‘on business’ and Bellmour spots two stock comic characters, Sir Joseph Wittol, a foolish knight, and his companion, the cowardly bully, Captain Bluffe, who he points out to Sharper. Bellmour explains that the night before he came across Wittol being set upon by footpads and freed him, though Wittol ran off without identifying his rescuer.

Act 2 scene 1

Sharper follows Sir Joseph to the location where he was mugged the night before, then pretends to be his mysterious rescuer but says that, alas, he lost a hundred pounds in the affray, and starts trying to dun Sir Joseph for it. This blustering old fool is trying to find a way out, when his sidekick and defender turns up, the swaggering blustering bully Captain Bluffe, and there is a richly comic scene of Sharper egging both men on to silly heights of boasting and braggartry, Bluffe in particular being scandalised that his heroic escapades in the recent wars don’t seem to have been reported in the news gazettes!

Act 2 scene 2

Araminta, in love with Vainlove, squabbles with her cousin Belinda, who affects to despise men –

BELINDA: Oh, you have raved, talked idly, and all in commendation of that filthy, awkward, two-legged creature man.

But is secretly in love with Bellmour. Araminta says Belinda dreamed of Bellmour last night, called out his name and embraced her (Araminta) as if she was him. Stuff and nonsense, cries Belinda, and calls her servant to prepare her things to go out, but at that moment a servant announces that Bellmour and Vainlove are visiting. After some indecision, Belinda decides to stay after all, in order to protect her cousin’s reputation, of course – though her cousin teases her it’s solely to see Bellmour.

Prolonged repartee during which all sides wittily cap each other’s allusions and barbs, with generalised sententiae about love and devotion. Araminta emerges as the quickest-witted of them – all of these plays feature one strong, determined and clever woman. There is a passage of particularly barbed banter between Bellmour who extravagantly paints his devotion and Belinda who scorns him. In fact when he asks her what she can do for her, she says shut up, which leads to a comic sequence where Bellmour continues his conversation in sign language until Belinda is so exasperated she lets him speak again.

Their musician, Mr Gavot, performs a song Araminta has written. This happens in most of the plays. Did Restoration aristocrats write songs this glibly and easily for their lady loves or is it purely a theatrical convention?

Act 3 scene 1

Sylvia is the woman Vainlove has jilted, and Lucy is her maid who, as so often, impertinently tells her boss the true state of affairs, namely that Vainlove will never love her again. Sylvia is consumed with envy for her love rival, Araminta, but Lucy says she has a Plan to fix that – send Vainlove a cloying letter as if from Araminta – a woman’s enthusiasm always puts Vainlove off.

LUCY: Contrive a kind letter as from her, ’twould disgust his nicety, and take away his stomach.

Meanwhile, here comes Heartwell – Lucy encourages Sylvia to make the best of a bad job and hook him. Soon she’ll be old. She needs to get a husband before she can.

Vainlove and Bellmour have tailed Heartwell to Sylvia’s house. They watch as the ageing foo hesitates whether to in or not and commit himself to the snare of womanhood. He does, as Bellmour and Vainlove stifle their mirth. Then Vainlove’s tailor, Setter, arrives: he has prepared a full set of clothes which allow Bellmour to masquerade as the earnest Puritan preacher Spintext.

Bellmour tells Setter to meet him with the costume later and exits. Setter launches into a comically high-minded speech about the relative merits of a manservant and a pimp. Lucy comes upon him and, as so often, a lead male character’s manservant is in love with a lead woman’s maidservant, their working class love affair echoing their betters’ affair but more crudely.

Congreve gives this kind of set scene an extra spin by having Lucy put on a face mask before talking to Setter and, given that his soliloquy was already laughably pretentious, the couple then launch into a parody of highfalutin’ tragedy, complete with what were obviously obscure and archaic words to convey their eminence and lofty sentiments. Lucy extracts from Setter that his master will be in Covent Garden later, then manages to get away without being covered in slobbery kisses.

Wittoll and Bluffe enter. Bluffe is cross that Sir Joseph has given Sharper £100, and works himself up into a fury of vengeance, declaring that if only Sharper were here, he would take his revenge and… at that precise moment Sharper and Bellmour appear onstage and Bluffe performs a comic blustering retreat. Sharper quickly detects how angry they are with him but also what cowards they are – and so takes to kicking Wittoll and beating Bluffe who swears he will have vengeance, but not now, not here, it’s too public and various other excuses.

Sharper and Bellmour exeunt laughing.

Act 3 Scene 2 Silvia’s lodgings

Enter Heartwell, the ageing anti-love exponent, the old bachelor of the title, and Sylvia, Vainlove’s jilted lover. Heartwell has laid on a dance, music and the performance of a song to impress Silvia. He then jangles his purse full of gold coins at her. His wooing of her is done in the higher, more poetic style the play occasionally drops into. Heartwell combines high-flown rhetoric with emotional clumsiness, for example offering to buy Sylvia outright. But when she beings to talk about marriage, he is suddenly very reluctant to marry her – because he thinks marriage is a fool’s estate – suggesting instead that she become his licensed mistress. Which makes Sylvia cry that she doesn’t want to live as a whore and burst into tears.

But when he finally leaves, after grabbing a few kisses, Sylvia turns to the audience and says:

SILVIA: Ha, ha, ha, an old fox trapped –

Suggesting that everything she said in their scene together, all the sighs and tears, were a ploy, a trap to get him to marry her, to get her hands on his money. (Money is never far from the surface of these plays; they reveal what a major role it plays in human relationships.)

Sylvia’s servant Lucy enters and says she’s contrived a letter to Vainlove as if from Amarinta which will wreck their love.

Act 4 scene 1

Bellmour dressed up as the Puritan Spintext:

BELLMOUR: I wonder why all our young fellows should glory in an opinion of atheism, when they may be so much more conveniently lewd under the coverlet of religion.

Exits. Enter Fondlewife who, in a soliloquy, reveals he is jealous of his beautiful young wife, Laetitia. Then a scene in which he suspects her of adultery and she, in comic asides, reveals she is frightened he knows her true intent i.e. to be unfaithful with Vainlove, whilst to Fondlewife’s face playing the aggrieved wife. They both use baby talk which makes the scene more funny. Finally, she manages, with umpteen kisses, to pack him off on the overnight journey he’s taking on ‘business’.

It is an important fact that Fondlewife has arranged for a chaplain or preacher to be with her and instruct her while he is away. This is the content of the letter she had sent to Vainlove and which he showed Bellmour right at the start of the play i.e. ‘my husband is going away for the night, come in the disguise of a preacher.’

Vainlove and Sharper. They read the letter they’ve been sent, as from Amarinta, but in fact by Lucy. She has done her work well, correctly predicting that by making Amarinta come on strong, puts Vainlove off her:

VAINLOVE: I hate to be crammed. By heaven, there’s not a woman will give a man the pleasure of a chase: my sport is always balked or cut short. I stumble over the game I would pursue. ’Tis dull and unnatural to have a hare run full in the hounds’ mouth, and would distaste the keenest hunter. I would have overtaken, not have met, my game.

So they plan to meet Amarinta at Covent Garden that evening, but Vainlove will now spurn her. (Sharper thinks he’s a fool.)

Act 4 Scene 2

Bellmour, in disguise as Spintext the preacher, is shown into Mrs Fondlewife i.e. Laetitia’s rooms. No sooner has the servant left before he throws off his disguise and reveals himself to Laetitia who feigns shock and surprise, mainly because she was expecting Vainlove. But the scene is devoted to showing Bellmour’s formidable seduction technique as he slowly wins her round and by the end, by pretending to have a fainting fit, he gets her to agree he can lie on her bed to recover, and they exeunt into her bedroom.

Act 4 scene 3 St James’s Park

Setting for the afternoon rambles of the layabout aristocracy. Enter Belinda and Amarinta. It is much more obvious that Belinda is meant to be pretentious and affected and tells Amarinta how she took it upon herself to correct the manners of a country family up in town for the first time.

They put on masks as Sir Joseph Wittoll and the boasting soldier Captain Bluffe approach and there is some comic banter before the ladies spy Vainlove approaching, and tell the two buffoons to bugger off, although Sir Joseph realises Amarinta is heiress to a vast fortune and tells us in an aside he’d like to marry her.

The point of the scene is for Amarinta and Vainlove to be left alone, so he can act cold and in a roundabout way berate her for the letter she sent him. But since she didn’t send him the letter, she has no idea what is going on and quickly becomes angry, storming off.

Act 4 scene 4 Fondlewife’s house

Bellmour and Laetitia have had sex and emerge from the bedroom to hear Fondlewife’s voice coming up the stairs. Bellmour gathers up the preacher costume and Laetitia bundles him into the bedroom before opening the door to Fondlewife and Sir Joseph.

In this farcical scene, Fondlewife announces that he needs to go into the bedroom to collect the papers he forgot to take for his ‘business’ and Laetitia desperately tries to think up pretexts to stop him, at one point bundling into Sir John when Fondlewife’s back is turned and claiming the old bodger tried to molest her; which Fondlewife believes and pushes Sir John out the door with vivid Biblical imprecations.

But Fondlewife is still determined to enter the bedroom (where Bellmour is hiding) and so Laetitia suddenly has a brainwave and tells her husband the preacher came round and was giving her lessons in piety but had an attack of stomach ache and is lying on the bed. Fondlewife buys this, tiptoes into the bedroom, sees the form of Bellmour on the bed, gets his papers and tiptoes out, telling Laetitia they must get the maid to look after the poor preacher when… he sees the book. A book on the floor. The book Bellmour brought with him. And is it a book of devotion and piety? No. Fondlewife picks it up and realises that it is a French novel, The Innocent Adultery! No priest would carry this. Bellmour is busted!

Angrily, Fondlewife calls for the unknown man to come out of the bedroom, while Laetitia pleads she has no idea who he is or what he was doing there, wretched please which Fondlewife now brusquely dismisses.

But this scene turns into a further demonstration of Bellmour’s mastery as he manages to outface the situation. He comes out of the bedroom and confronts Fondlewife, declaring he is a whoremaster who pinched Spintext’s costume, then pretended to have colic in order to lie on her bed and was about to call her in when Fondlewife appeared – so he never got as far as seducing Laetitia.

Bellmour exudes confidence. Laetitia talks babytalk to Fondlewife. The latter softens. She faints. He believes her. Thus gullible husbands.

Act 5 scene 1 The street

Bellmour meets up with Setter and tells him the disguise worked a treat. Then they both see Heartwell arriving at Silvia’s house. Setter exits and Bellmour chats up Lucy, Silvia’s maid, with a kiss (seems like she’s one his many conquests) and some money, and asks her to keep up the pretence that he is a preacher, so he can marry the silly couple.

Enter Vainlove, Sharper and Setter. Setter tells them that the letter which upset Vainlove, the letter pretending to come from Amarinta, was in fact concocted by vengeful Silvia. This clears the way for Vainlove to be back in love with Amarinta!

The final scenes get confusing. Bellmour in the guise of the preacher falsely marries Heartwell and Silvia, then takes her aside, reveals his true identity and promises he will find her a better husband. He pops back into the street and tells Setter and Sharper to keep their eyes peeled for a replacement husband then exits. At this point Sir John and Captain Bluffe come along.

Setter and Sharper then have a whole series of machinations, some of which happen in whispers, or offstage, in some of which they pretend information to dupe Sir John and the Captain, and also Heartwell who Sharper appears to torment by dragging him towards his own house, promising him a fine young wench who’s up for a shag… until Heartwell realises it’s the wife he’s just married that Sharper is talking about. I got lost in the maze. I read this passage a couple of times and still didn’t understand the ins and outs. Partly because they don’t clearly state what they’re planning to do, they disappear into corners to mutter with the people they’re gulling…the schemes they’re cooking up only become clear as they emerge in the final scene.

In the penultimate passage, Bellmour and Belinda, Vainlove and Amarinta, are invited to Heartwell’s house. Somehow Sharper has got Silvia out of the house and conspired to convince Heartwell that his wife of half an hour is already off whoring. The four leads tease Heartwell about his stupidity in marrying and his cuckolded state: Belinda in particular emerges as sharp tongued and witty.

As Eric Rump points out in his introduction to the Penguin edition, this tormenting of Heartwell amounts to bullying and triggers him to give a speech which echoes Shylock’s in The Merchant of Venice:

HEARTWELL: How have I deserved this of you? any of ye? Sir, have I impaired the honour of your house, promised your sister marriage, and whored her? Wherein have I injured you? Did I bring a physician to your father when he lay expiring, and endeavour to prolong his life, and you one and twenty? Madam, have I had an opportunity with you and baulked it? Did you ever offer me the favour that I refused it?

At moments like this does the comedy topple into something much more serious, into something momentarily closer to tragedy? Is it that much more serious precisely because it emerges from comedy, rather than one of the era’s over-wrought tragedies?

Eric Rump points out that the role of Heartwell – the Old Bachelor of the title – was taken by Thomas Betterton, the ‘Laurence Olivier of his day’, who also played tragic leads and so would have given the role more depth and seriousness than a purely comic actor. However you judge the effect, it is extremely impressive of Congreve to have touched this deeper nerve when he was barely into his twenties.

Anyway, our boys and girls goad Heartwell into declaring he will do anything to be rid of his married state, which is what they’re conspiring for all along – and we, the audience, know that he is not in fact married at all, since the ceremony was carried out by Bellmour in disguise.

On the last three pages the elaborate scam is revealed. Sharper and Settle have married Sir John and Captain Bluffe to two women they thought were Amarinta and Belinda – except they aren’t. The real Amarinta and Belinda now take their masks off to reveal themselves – to the two braggart soldiers’ shock and surprise – and when they turn to the women they have married – they reveal themselves as Silvia and Lucy.

SIR JOHN: Pray, madam, who are you? For I find you and I are like to be better acquainted.
SILVIA: The worst of me is, that I am your wife—

So Lucy is married to Captain Bluffe – who announces he will no more to the wars – Silvia is married to the insufferable Sir John, but does at least acquire a title. And Heartwell breathes a huge sigh of relief to realise he isn’t married after all.

And Bellmour – with the abrupt reversal in attitude for which these plays are notorious – declares he is happy to acquire the fetters of marriage with acid-tongued Belinda. It only remains for Vainlove to marry Amarinta and all the loose ends are tied up but Bellmour notices Vainlove, given his contrary psychology, showing signs of reluctance to marry her and so announces that he and Belinda will get married first the next morning, to set an example to Vainlove and Araminta.

Then there’s the traditional music and dancing.

Animal imagery

There’s a lot of animal imagery. Vainlove is referred to as an ass, Bellmour an ape and a wolf in sheep’s clothing, Heartwell an old fox, Sir John a lion, women as hares to be hunted or partridges to be covered, cuckolded men are like stags with horns. The references add colourful imagery to the endless truisms about love and marriage and adultery.

Maybe they link to Belinda’s comment about ‘filthy, awkward, two-legged creature man’, but I don’t see that there’s anything very deep going on here. All the Restoration comedies are based on a worldview which sees human beings as amoral animals devoted to quenching animal drives, lust being topmost, but also drunkenness and gluttony, and using their God-given minds not to seek a devout and spiritual life, but to concoct fantastically complicated schemes for their own debauchery.

SIR JOSEPH: Nay, Gad, I’ll pick up; I’m resolved to make a night on’t… Adslidikins, bully, we’ll wallow in wine and women. Why, this same Madeira wine has made me as light as a grasshopper.

Quite often, reading these plays, you can sympathise with Bishop Collier and his characterisation of the plays as deliberately encouraging lust, avarice, greed, gluttony, jealousy, anger and sometimes violence.

VAINLOVE: Why did you not find me out, to tell me this before, sot?
SETTER: Sir, I was pimping for Mr. Bellmour.
SHARP: You were well employed.

More noticeable is Congreve’s way with extended metaphors, or with a metaphor which allows him to bring in colourful imagery. Thus at the very opening Bellmour has a little speech which in four clauses contains four images from the game of bowls:

BELLMOUR: Business is the rub of life, perverts our aim, casts off the bias, and leaves us wide and short of the intended mark.

This is so contrived I wonder if the actor paused and waited for a ripple of applause from the audience at the author’s cleverness.

At the start of Act Five, Bellmour bumps into Setter who asks him how things went in the plot to have sex with Laetitia, and both of them jokily use an extended naval metaphor to describe the result:

SETTER: Joy of your return, sir. Have you made a good voyage? or have you brought your own lading back?
BELLMOUR: No, I have brought nothing but ballast back – made a delicious voyage, Setter; and might have rode at anchor in the port till this time, but the enemy surprised us – I would unrig.

So Bellmour has unloaded his cargo.

Misandry

Woke modern critics attack the Restoration comedies for their misogyny e.g. Sharper describing Araminta as:

a delicious melon, pure and consenting ripe, and only waits thy cutting up.

But it seems to me that all the characters, regardless of gender, age or class, manipulate and denigrate each other on the basis of an utterly heartless and cynical worldview. And for every dismissive generalisation the men make about women, the women make one about men, and the aristocrats make about their servants, and the servants make about their stupid masters.

BELINDA: Oh, you have raved, talked idly, and all in commendation of that filthy, awkward, two-legged creature man.
LUCY: Man was by nature woman’s cully made:
HEARTWELL: Lying, child, is indeed the art of love, and men are generally masters in it
ARAMINTA to VAINLOVE: Thou hadst all the treachery and malice of thy sex

The plays may contain umpteen libels against women, but the biggest indictment is how the men talk and behave and Belinda has a vivid little speech about how, in the end, disappointing men are, after all the impressive wooing, once you actually marry them.

BELINDA:Thou art so troublesome a lover, there’s hopes thou’lt make a more than ordinary quiet husband.
BELLMOUR: Is that a maxim among ye?
BELINDA: Yes: you fluttering men of the mode have made marriage a mere French dish… You are so curious in the preparation, that is, your courtship, one would think you meant a noble entertainment – but when we come to feed, ’tis all froth, and poor, but in show. Nay, often, only remains, which have been I know not how many times warmed for other company, and at last served up cold to the wife.

The exhausted libertine

I think it’s Dorimant in The Man of Mode that critics point out sounds tired – or is it Belvile in The Rover? The point is that many of the plays start with the leading male character sounding exhausted.

Now, the critics I read appear to take this at face value as an indictment of the libertine lifestyle as a whole, as if the plays are observational documentaries. But something in Bellmour’s final words in this play made me realise there’s a simpler and less moralising interpretation.

Structurally, all the plays end with the lead characters marrying and many critics have pointed out the complete lack of psychological verisimilitude involved in witty, cynical characters who’ve spent four acts slagging off marriage as an institution for stubborn fools – suddenly decide marriage is a wonderful state and enter into it with boundless enthusiasm.

Seen from this perspective, the trope of the tired libertine makes more sense. It stands to reason that, in preparation for this last act about-face, hints should be dropped right from the start that the lead libertine is actually quite tired of his life of endless seduction and is, in fact, teetering on the brink of abandoning it.

And therefore that the male lead’s expression of these thoughts and feelings have little or no moral or psychological content, but are a structural necessity of the form, as formulaic as most other aspects of the plays.

In fact, almost all these Restoration comedies can be reinterpreted as the final acts in the libertine’s long career. They’re all plays about Life Changes and Conversions.

Reviews of other Restoration plays

The Country Wife by William Wycherley (1675)
The Man of Mode by George Etheredge (1676)
The Plain Dealer by William Wycherley (1676)
The Rover by Aphra Behn (1677)
The Old Bachelor by William Congreve (1693)
The Double Dealer by Congreve (1693)
Love For Love by William Congreve (1695)
The Relapse by John Vanbrugh (1696)
The Provoked Wife by Sir John Vanbrugh (1697)
The Way of The World by William Congreve (1700)

The Dorrington Deed-Box by Arthur Morrison (1897)

‘I may as well tell you that I’m a bit of a scoundrel myself, by way of profession. I don’t boast about it, but it’s well to be frank in making arrangements of this sort…’ (Horace Dorrington describing himself)

According to Wikipedia,

In contrast to Morrison’s earlier character Martin Hewitt, who one critic described as a ‘low-key, realistic, lower-class answer to Sherlock Holmes’, Dorrington was ‘a respected but deeply corrupt private detective,’ ‘a cheerfully unrepentant sociopath who is willing to stoop to theft, blackmail, fraud or cold-blooded murder to make a dishonest penny.’

Sounds like an interesting guy. Morrison wrote half a dozen short stories about his amoral detective and collected them into a volume titled The Dorrington Deed-Box. It contains:

The Narrative of Mr. James Rigby
The Case of Janissary
The Case of the ‘Mirror of Portugal’
The Affair of the ‘Avalanche Bicycle and Tyre Co., Limited’
The Case of Mr. Loftus Deacon
Old Cater’s Money

The stories

1. The Narrative of Mr. James Rigby

Gripping first-person memoir of James Rigby, born and raised in Australia who came on a visit to Europe with his mum and dad when he was young. They visited Italy where his dad hired a local guide who, once they were all up in the mountains, turned on him with a knife, planning to rob him. Rigby senior happened to have a gun on him which he pulled out and shot the brigand dead.

But over the next few days, as he deals with consuls and local police, several attempts are made on his life by the dead man’s relatives. Turns out the guide was a member of the infamous ‘Camorra’, who will stop at nothing to avenge him.

So Rigby’s family move on to London, where they stay in a posh, supposedly secure hotel. But they still have the feeling they’re being watched and one morning discover a little circle of paper with a logo of crossed knives attached to their door. Within days, Mr Rigby senior is stabbed to death in an alleyway. James and his mother return to Australia where he grows up, inheriting the land his father had shrewdly invested in. James wants to be an artist and, at length, realises he has to come back to Europe to study.

On the boat he gets chatting to a fantastically easy, charming, witty man, Horace Dorrington, who tells young James that he and his partner are private detectives who’ve had much experience with the Camorra and know how to handle them.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’ve no particular desire to have it known all over the ship, but I don’t mind telling you – you’d find it out probably before long if you settle in the old country – that we are what is called private inquiry agents – detectives – secret service men – whatever you like to call it.’

Dorrington persuades Rigby to skip docking at London and instead to travel directly from the ship’s first port of call, Plymouth, up to Scotland for the opening of the grouse season to be his guest. Rigby does this and is impressed by the man’s house and land and by Dorrington’s confident hosting of the young man. But one morning Dorrington is regrettably called back to London. He advises Rigby to go to London himself, but to take the opportunity to visit some old picturesque English towns along the way, that might inspire his art, such as Chester and Warwick.

Rigby does this but then, in each of the towns he visits, finds himself being followed. Shuffling footsteps follow him everywhere, in Chester, in Warwick, as he explores the old towns, no matter which way he turns, in sequences which begin to have some of the supernatural thrill of an Edgar Allen Poe story.

He is terrified when a dark face with a mop of black hair and ear-rings appears for a moment at his hotel window. Rigby’s conviction that he’s being followed crystallises when he finds a little paper circle with the crossed-knives logo of the Camorra pinned to his hotel door, packs his bags, and hastens to London.

Rigby turns and chases the source of the shuffling footsteps, but cannot find them

Here Rigby goes to Dorrington’s office, meets his rather withered assistant Hicks, tells Dorrington he’s being followed, and submits to Dorrington’s plan. Dorrington will take him to a safe house in Hampstead where he can lie low. Meanwhile Dorrington will assume Rigby’s identity and try to draw the assassins out into the open. Rigby gives Dorrington the letters from his London lawyer, Mowbray, as well as the deeds to his extensive landholdings in Australia, for safekeeping, and Dorrington bids goodbye.

(Incidentally, Dorrington’s offices are given as being in Bedford Street, Covent Garden – which still exists. They cannot, therefore, be very far from the offices of Morrison’s ‘good’ detective, Martin Hewitt, who has chambers ‘in a street by the Strand’. Chalk and cheese, living and working cheek by jowl.)

Once settled in at the ‘safe house’, Rigby is presented with a fine lunch prepared by the landlady, one Mrs Crofting. Next thing he knows he’s waking, awfully groggy, in the pitch-darkness, wet, lying in six inches of water! When he tries to stand up hits his head on a metal roof. He is inside a water cistern with water gushing in from two inlets in the top. He has been drugged, placed here and is going to drown!!!

Panic-stricken, Rigby tries to block up the inlets, then starts hammering at the metal sides and yelling his head off. This scene again reminded me of the genuine claustrophobia and horror generated by the best of Edgar Allen Poe’s horror stories. To Rigby’s immense relief the roof of the cistern suddenly slides off to reveal a grubby London workman looking down at him in amazement. He’d been working in the attic of the neighbouring house, heard all the commotion and come to investigate.

After receiving reviving spirits and reassurance with the neighbours, Rigby goes straight to the police who confirm that ‘Mrs Crofting’ has flown the coop, and so have Dorrington and Hicks. The entire thing appears to have been an elaborate hoax devised by Dorrington, as soon as Rigby let slip, in the middle of his story to him on the boat, that he owned land and money in Australia, a lot of land and money, worth millions.

Dorrington immediately conceived the plan to murder Rigby for the money. He wired to his assistant to rent a property in Scotland for the grouse shooting (designed to stop Rigby going to London and contacting his lawyer), then invented the excuse of having to dash back to London. It was Dorrington’s assistant who dressed up in Italian costume and followed Rigby in the shadows of Chester and Warwick. All the time Dorrington cannily preventing Rigby from meeting his London lawyer, Mowbray because he, Dorrington, intended to pass himself off as Rigby to the lawyer, to present all the letters and deeds, cash everything in as if he were Rigby, and walk away a multi-millionaire.

Wow! What a ripping yarn!

But as the story draws to a close, with Dorrington and all his accomplices disappeared – the police break into Dorrington’s offices and find – paperwork relating to numerous other criminal cases.

The business of Dorrington and Hicks had really been that of private inquiry agents, and they had done much bonâ fide business; but many of their operations had been of a more than questionable sort. And among their papers were found complete sets, neatly arranged in dockets, each containing in skeleton a complete history of a case. Many of these cases were of a most interesting character, and I have been enabled to piece together, out of the material thus supplied, the narratives which will follow this.

And these provide the basis for the rest of the stories in the volume. Hence the title of ‘Dorrington’s Deed Box’. These are the stories taken from ‘Dorrington’s Deed Box’.

2. The Case of Janissary

So this is the first of the ‘reconstructed’ Dorrington cases.

The extremely paranoid racehorse owner, Mr Telfer, contacts Dorrington because he suspects someone is trying to nobble his prize racehorse, Janissary, ahead of a big race, The Redfern Stakes. It might be his nephew, Richard, with whom he had a massive falling out a few weeks before, and has been seen around the stables slipping grooms sums of cash – or a big bloke with a red beard, also seen loitering.

Dorrington lodges in the nearby town of Redfern, at the local pub, During a riotous evening of drinking he befriends nephew Richard and also the leading horsetrainer stacked against Telfer, a Mr Bob Naylor.

Having identified Naylor’s room, Dorrington uses his nefarious skills to break into the room and rifle through a locked box. Here he finds a fake beard and a box containing powders and a syringe. Aha. So Naylor is up to something.

Dorrington returns to the boisterous bar where he befriends Naylor over a few more beers and tells him, casually, that he’s seen the favourite, Janissary, being walked every day at two pm, by a rather dim stable boy.

Dorrington goes back to Telfer, explains that the red-haired man is Naylor and his decoy story of the 2 o’clock walking. Now it just so happens that Telfer owns a horse which looks remarkably like Janissary but is a poor racer. So next day at 2 o’clock, Telfer and Dorrington hide in the stables with a view of the walking ground and watch a stable boy walking this inferior horse, well wrapped up in covers so as to be indistinguishable from the favourite.

Up comes the red-bearded man, chats a bit with the stable boy and goes to stroke the horse under the cover – which suddenly rears and whinnies. The red-bearded man backs off, apologises and walks on. So. Dorrington and Telfer both saw him inject something into the poor horse, which by the time it’s returned to its stall, is already shivering and weak.

The red-bearded man backs off after the horse he’s surreptitiously injected rears up

Overnight the betting against Janissary is big, which is why there are many appalled faces when Janissary finishes an easy first and Telfer cleans up on the betting. Telfer congratulates Dorrington, pays him his fee, and the latter returns to London.

The narrator explains that Naylor is pretty much cleaned out, but still owes the single biggest payout to Telfer’s nephew, Richard. We watch Naylor paying out his customers at his London club, then meeting Richard and telling him he’s temporarily out of cash, and to come round to his house in Gold Street, Chelsea that evening.

Outside the club Richard bumps into Dorrington, who he already knows as a fellow drinker from the Crown pub in Redbury, and who chaffs him about how heavy his pockets must be with winnings. ‘Not yet,’ replies Richard. ‘I’m meeting Bob Naylor tonight to collect them.’ ‘Really?’ thinks Dorrington. He vows to loiter around Naylor’s house and see what develops.

From the pub across the road, Dorrington sees a skinny lady setting up a step-ladder in the house’s top room. Suddenly the penny drops. Dorrington puts on some shoe-silencers, silently breaks into the house’s cellar, and sneaks up to that top room.

He hasn’t too long to wait before Richard arrives. He hears greetings and good fellowship on the ground floor, drinks and food and then the making of a cup of coffee (aha, the same kind of drugged coffee – the reader realises – as was used to drug Rigby in the opening story). Sure enough, we soon hear the bump of Richard falling off his chair and then the sound of two people manhandling an unconscious body upstairs.

They back into the top room to find … Dorrington waiting for them with a revolver! He explains that he understands their scam. They were going to drown Richard in the cistern then throw his body into the Thames. Except that now they aren’t. Now they are going to dump Richard anywhere, Dorrington doesn’t care where, because Naylor is going to pay up whatever he owes, because he is now going to retire from betting, and enter Dorrington’s employ as a full-time ‘disposer of bodies’.

Now we realise the significance of the newspaper cutting Rigby had quoted at the start of the story, an account of a dead man brought out of the Thames, with an empty pocket book and some bruising, suggesting manhandling.

Dorrington had read this, too, and, putting two and two together, had guessed the drowned man had been drowned by the Naylors using the cistern technique. He had caught them in the act preparing to do the same to another inconvenient creditor – Richard. And with that knowledge he blackmails them into becoming his assistants and disposers of bodies.

Having read the full ‘case’, Rigby is left to bleakly wonder how many others met a horrible watery death this way, before he was lucky enough to break out of the cistern (in the first story), sound the alarm, and break up the gang for good.

3. The Case of the ‘Mirror of Portugal’

The ‘Mirror of Portugal’ is, as so often in these 1890s detective stories, a jewel of unimaginable beauty, perfection and price. The narrator tells the traditional cock-and-bull story about its passage through the hands of the Portuguese royal family, into the English royal family, then onto the French royal family and then on into the hands of French revolutionaries of 1789, one of whom was the great-grandfather of the Léon Bouvier who keeps a little café in Soho, after his father was shot during the Franco-Prussian War.

Dorrington is approached by Léon’s cousin, Jacques Bouvier, who was working at a charcoal works in France until he came over to get a job with his cousin in his Soho café. Here he’s discovered Léon’s big secret. That he keeps a massive diamond in a small box under his armpit. Jacques thinks that, as a poor relation, he is entitled to a share of its value.

Dorrington dismisses Jacques, but then strolls round to the Soho café to poke around for himself. He arrives just after some kind of scuffle has taken place, and discovering someone running at top speed from the muddy alley where the café is located. Dorrington follows this runner who, a bit oddly from the reader’s point of view, runs all the way to Dorrington’s own offices in Covent Garden. Dorrington arrives soon after him to discover that it is none other than Léon – who has been mugged.

Léon now takes Dorrington back to the Soho alleyway, where Dorrington pokes around and easily finds shards of glass from a shattered bottle which, judging by the smell of the cork, once contained choloroform.

Someone must have crept up behind Léon, put a knee in his back and a chloroformed cloth over his face, waited till he passed out, cut the straps holding the box with the diamond in place under his armpit, then legged it. Léon is furiously certain that it is his jealous cousin, Jacques, but Dorrington is not so sure.

Because among the many complaints about his cousin that he made on his visit to Dorrington’s office, Jacques had mentioned that Léon had recently started frequenting Hatton Gardens and had been toying with the idea of buying and selling diamonds in a small way, trying to get to know the trade before cashing in his own monster diamond. He had got as far as renting some office or shop space off a certain Mr Ludwig Hamer. Aha.

Next morning Dorrington pays Mr Hamer a visit and, noticing the array of medicine bottles on the shelves of his office, calmly confronts Hamer with the accusation that it was he who mugged Bouvier the night before. Hamer denies it but Dorrington produces the bottle, identical to some on Hamer’s shelves, reveals that he saw the footprints of a woman’s narrow-heeled shoe, probably of Hamer’s wife, who kept watch while Hamer did the deed.

There’s a policeman outside. Dorrington sarcastically asks Hamer whether he should call the copper in and present him with all the evidence that Hamer is a crook? With bad grace Hamer admits it all, and says the jewel is at home with his wife who, he warns, has a furious temper.

Dorrington hails and cab and takes Hamer to the latter’s house in Pimlico. Here Dorrington confronts feisty little Mrs Hamer with the evidence. She is furious with her husband for not overcoming Dorrington. ‘But he had a gun’, Hamer whines. The redoubtable Mrs Hamer says the jewel is safe at another location, and sets off leading them across Vauxhall Bridge. Half way across the bridge she announces, ‘There’s your jewel, you crook, you thief’ and before Hamer or Dorrington can do anything, throws it into the Thames. Oh.

‘There’s your diamond, you dirty thief!’ (Dorrington on the right)

4. The Affair of the ‘Avalanche Bicycle and Tyre Co., Limited’

Remember the dot com bubble of 2001? Well, I bet you didn’t know about the Bicycle Bubble of the 1890s.

Cycle companies were in the market everywhere. Immense fortunes were being made in a few days and sometimes little fortunes were being lost to build them up. Mining shares were dull for a season, and any company with the word ‘cycle’ or ‘tyre’ in its title was certain to attract capital, no matter what its prospects were like in the eyes of the expert. All the old private cycle companies suddenly were offered to the public, and their proprietors, already rich men, built themselves houses on the Riviera, bought yachts, ran racehorses, and left business for ever. Sometimes the shareholders got their money’s worth, sometimes more, sometimes less – sometimes they got nothing but total loss; but still the game went on. One could never open a newspaper without finding, displayed at large, the prospectus of yet another cycle company with capital expressed in six figures at least, often in seven. Solemn old dailies, into whose editorial heads no new thing ever found its way till years after it had been forgotten elsewhere, suddenly exhibited the scandalous phenomenon of ‘broken columns’ in their advertising sections, and the universal prospectuses stretched outrageously across half or even all the page – a thing to cause apoplexy in the bodily system of any self-respecting manager of the old school.

Everyone’s investing in bicycle companies. Dorrington goes along to the time trials featuring an exciting new competitive bike rider, Gillett, at a purpose-built velodrome.

Gillett is representing the ‘Indestructible Bicycle Company.’ Dorrington chats up a representative of the IBC who introduces him to the paunchy owner, Paul Mallows. They explain that Gillett will be competing against Lant, who is representing the new and much-talked-about ‘Avalanche Bicycle Company’. The ABC is about to launch on the stock market and is likely to be hugely subscribed in this time of bicycle bubbles.

The sun sets and the velodrome becomes dark as the cyclists do their last couple of laps. Suddenly there is a tremendous accident, as Gillett crashes into two other bikes, breaking his arm. Mallows is hopping mad, swears it’s sabotage, and offers a hundred pound reward on the spot to whoever can find the culprits..

Dorrington takes him up and goes over the crash site very carefully. In the dark someone had placed an old rusty chair smack bang in the middle of the track, it being so dark the approaching cyclists couldn’t see it till too late. Dorrington picks up evidence that it was Mallows who planted the chair.

To confirm his suspicions he catches a train that night to Birmingham, where the prospectus for the Avalanche Bicycle Company claims to have its factory. In fact, he discovers that the ‘factory’ is a disused warehouse in the corner of which are piled a bunch of knackered second-hand bikes, with a nearby oven used for making enamel badges with the ABC’s logo. The company’s business plan is to buy up old bikes, pin the labels to them, and turn over business just long enough for the board of the company to do a bunk with the money raised when the company floats on the stock market.

His suspicions confirmed, Dorrington telegraphs Mallows, pretending to be an employee and saying something important is happening at the Birmingham factory. Now, before he had left London, Dorrington had hired a snoop to watch Mallows’ house. Within minutes of getting the telegram, this spy reports that Mallows leaves his house and goes to a disguise and wig shop, emerging looking a lot different, before getting a train to Birmingham.

The disguised Mallows makes his way to the bike factory where Dorrington is waiting.

Dorrington confronts him and taunts and teases Mallows, saying he easily sees through his disguise, saying he knows it was him who planted the chair which caused the Gillett crash.

Why? In order to remove him from the Big Race and ensure that Lant wins. Lant winning will enormously boost the share launch of ABC on Monday. Mallow features in the prospectus for ABC under a false name. He and partners will pocket the cash raised by the stock market flotation, then abscond, leaving the company to crash and a couple of titled aristocrats, who put their names down as directors without bothering to learn the details, to take the flak.

But Dorrington is not going to turn him into the police for fraud. No, Dorrington wants a cut, not just any old cut either, but 50% of Mallows’s takings,

During this edgy confrontation Mallows has been manoeuvring Dorrington closer and closer to the oven where the bikes are melted down. Now, in a sudden desperate move, Mallows pushes Dorrington into the oven, bolting the door, and turning on the gas.

Most of these stories are fairly languid in pace with, at most, a chase through streets being the most exciting it gets. But this is a genuinely tense, cinematic moment, with Dorrington beginning to lose consciousness from the gas, beating futilely at the door. Luckily, he discovers a loose spar of metal inside the oven which he uses as a lever to prise open the door a fraction, repositions the spar to prise it open some more, and so on until it eventually bursts open and Dorrington staggers out half-gassed.

Now Dorrington goes for Mallows like a murderer and is dragging him by the collar across the floor with a view to locking him in the oven when – the escaping gas reaches a naked candle and there’s a Big Explosion. Mallows is half buried in bricks and has a broken leg. Dorrington is thrown clear and makes an escape before locals and the police turn up.

Dorrington dragging Mallows

5. The Case of Mr. Loftus Deacon

Deacon is an elderly bachelor who collects Japanese objets d’art. (The descriptions of them have extra resonance because we know that Morrison was himself an expert on Japanese artefacts, which explains why the descriptions of Deacon’s works are long and informative.)

Deacon’s proudest object is a rare katana or longsword by the famous Japanese swordsmith, Masamuné. One day Deacon sets off for his club for lunch at a quarter to one, observed by the ever-vigilant hall porter. This same porter is surprised when, a few minutes later, Deacon reappears in a fluster at one o’clock. Turns out he’d forgotten something and lets himself into the flat. Moments later the porter hears ‘a shout followed in a breath by a loud cry of pain, and then silence.’

The door is locked from the inside so the porter has to call up to the housekeeper, who comes running with the spare keys, and they both find Deacon lying in a pool of blood with two fierce gashes to the head. He is dead. They search the room. It is locked, the windows closed from the inside etc.

Next morning Dorrington is hired to investigate the murder by Deacon’s only friend, Mr. Colson, ‘a thin, grizzled man of sixty or thereabout’. Colson takes Dorrington to survey the scene of the crime. It is only now that Colson realises that the famous Masamuné sword is missing.

There follows the usual fol-de-rol of distractions and false leads – for example, that the only window in Deacon’s apartment opened into a well, at the bottom of which a workman was doing some painting and repairs. Upon investigation, it turns out that this decorator had a criminal record and has now disappeared, just the kind of obvious lead the police like. But the reader, having read a few detective stories, suspects this is a red herring.

A much bigger red herring is the fact that for the past months Deacon has been besieged by a polite but determined Japanese man, Keigo Kanamaro. Kanamaro is the son of a Japanese warrior who had fallen on hard times and so was forced to sell the katana which Deacon prizes so much.

Colson gives a long, comprehensive explanation of the way that, for Japanese Samurai and other warriors, their weapons had a spiritual value. It was thought that when they were made by the swordsmith a guardian spirit entered the metal, and looked over its fate. There is no shame worse than being separated from your sword. A traditional Samurai would starve to death rather than barter it away. Nonetheless, that’s what Kanamaro’s father had been forced to do, and now his son – Kanamaro – is back to reclaim his father’s sword so that he can take it back to Japan and bury it with his father in his tomb, and his spirit can finally rest easy.

Deacon refuses but Kanamaro won’t give up, returning again and again, and slowly losing his impeccable Japanese manners.

It is only now that Colson notices – that the sword has gone!! So now Kanamaro is the obvious suspect, and when Colson goes to find him, all his suspicions are confirmed for Kanamaro has checked out of his London hotel in a hurry, and is returning to Japan.

When questioned, Kanamaro says that he has finally retrieved the sword but ‘at great cost’, shows no flicker of emotion upon hearing that Deacon is dead, and is generally cold and dismissive. It must be him! He must have recovered the kanata through violence.

But having read a dozen or so of these stories in quick succession, I recognised a number of the subtle contra-indications pointing towards the real culprit – most notably that Deacon’s body was found lying beneath an impressive statue of a Japanese god,

at the foot of a pedestal whereupon there squatted, with serenely fierce grin, the god Hachiman, gilt and painted, carrying in one of his four hands a snake, in another a mace, in a third a small human figure, and in the fourth a heavy, straight, guardless sword.

This is the kind of grotesque or Gothic detail which characterises the best Sherlock Holmes stories, and almost always turns out to be significant. And so it is here. And when, a lot later in the story, Colson tells Dorrington that the little god figure only arrived in the last few days my suspicions were aroused.

All these stories are divided into four or five logically discrete sections. In the final section of this one Dorrington reveals all: most of Deacon’s collection had been transhipped over the years at a huge warehouse full of all sorts of treasures down on the docks, owned by one Mr Copleston. Copleston employs all kinds of casual labour. One of the most notable employees is a short hunchback nicknamed Slackjaw. Dorrington speculates that the following is what took place.

The statue of the Japanese god arrived in Copleston’s warehouse and sat there for a week or more. During this time Slackjaw discovered that you can open it up and get inside. It was designed for a priest or someone to get inside back in Japan and breathe fire or make prophecies or whatnot from within.

But, having discovered that he could pop inside and lock it from the inside, Slackjaw did so one day, waited until everyone had left the warehouse, and then emerged to steal precious stuff then get a decent night’s kip in the warm.

This explains why Coplestone had told Colson that the men had begun to think the statue was cursed – because objects left near it overnight either disappeared or were found smashed in the morning. It was no ghost. This was just Slackjaw either nicking things, or being clumsy and knocking nearby objects over.

Anyway, when Slackjaw learned that the statue was to be shipped off to Deacon’s he reflected that it might be an opportunity for more plunder, so he stowed away inside and was carried into Deacon’s flat.

Here he waited a night, until Deacon left for work the next day, then crept out and was beginning to prise open a case holding precious gold objects, when Deacon unexpectedly returned. Panic-stricken Slackjaw bolted back to the statue but got there at the same moment as Deacon walked in the door. Slackjaw looked around him for a weapon and, unfortunately for both of them, his hand fell on the display of ornamental swords and he happened to grab the heaviest, sharpest one to whack Deacon with.

Hearing the porter rattling the door, Slackjaw quickly wiped the sword clean and climbed back into the statue. There he spent the rest of the day while the police crawled all over the place, but that night he finally climbed out of the statue, lightly opened the door and snuck away.

Slackjaw

Corroborating evidence is the fact that Dorrington found knife marks on the case of gold, as of someone who had only just started trying to open it when they were disturbed.

Most compelling of all, though, is the fact that Dorrington found a little bottle inside the statue, obviously there to refresh Slackjaw, which he forgot to take with him and on which was written the name of the publican of the pub where it was bought.

Going down to the docks Dorrington ascertains that the pub is the nearest one to Coplestone’s warehouse. So Dorrington had returned there with the police and spotted Slackjaw. The moment the hunchback saw Dorrington and the cops he had turned pale, put down his glass and nipped out the back of the pub.

There was then a brief chase: Slackjaw dropped onto a barge then went jumping from one barge to the next, but suddenly slipped and fell between two. The slow movement of the barges always creates perilous suction. By the time the police got there, the hunchback had disappeared under the murky Thames water and Dorrington had left them dragging the river for his body. Case solved.

6. Old Cater’s Money

Rigby (or Morrison) ends the volume by telling a story from Dorrington’s early career.

Old Jerry Cater lived in the crooked and decaying old house over his wharf by Bermondsey Wall, where his father had lived before him. It was a grim and strange old house, with long-shut loft-doors in upper floors, and hinged flaps in sundry rooms that, when lifted, gave startling glimpses of muddy water washing among rotten piles below.

Old Cater has been a miserly usurer all his life. He had bamboozled his long-suffering secretary Sinclair, by lending him £40 at 200% compound interest to get married with, thus throwing him into a life-long debt he could never repay. Now, broken-spirited Sinclair and his gaunt wife are Cater’s debt slaves. The shabby derelict household where they live also includes ‘Samuel Greer, a squinting man of grease and rags, within ten years of the age of old Jerry Cater himself’.

Old Cater is dying. He takes to his death-bed while Greer fusses about him, rummaging through cupboards for anything to steal. All this has the vibe of Morrison’s stories of Mean Streets and the Jago, i.e. describing people who have almost nothing, who live hand to mouth from day to day, for whom the discovery of one penny is a highlight of the day. This story is the most colourful, lively and interesting of the set.

Greer’s face, with its greasy features and its irresponsible squint, was as expressive as a brick.

Old Cater finally passes away, attended by a local poor doctor. Now just before he passed, Greer had been rummaging in the cupboard and found a jar containing the old man’s will. He spies a money opportunity and goes to see Cater’s nephew, Paul Cater in Pimlico. the two take a cab back to Bermondsey during which Greer slimily reveals that he has the old miser’s will – but will only part with it for £20. Cater has a tenner in his wallet. That’ll do, says Greer, and hands over the will, which Paul Cater sees, gives him ownership of all the old man’s belongings.

However, Cater had another nephew, a certain Jarvis Flint, and Greer had also found a codicil to the main will which is in Jarvis’s favour. So Greer now goes and parlays with Flint, demanding £50 for knowledge of the codicil’s whereabouts. Flint throws him out and – here we finally get to Dorrington – has the young Dorrington, who’s working for him as a general dogsbody, follow Greer and try to ascertain the codicil’s whereabouts.

Many of Morrison’s detective stories hinge on sheer luck and this might be the most egregious example of this trait. Dorrington follows Greer around the streets until the latter decides to pop into a barber’s for a penny shave. One of the other customers is a drunk docker. There’s much ribaldry among the customers as this docker finishes his shave, grabs his hat and staggers out into the street. It’s only when Greer has himself finished being shaved and gets up to leave, that he realises that the drunken docker has taken his hat – the hat in which he has hidden the precious codicil.

Greer runs out of the barber’s crying ‘Stop thief’, pursued by the barber who he hasn’t paid yet, and all the other customers for the fun of it.

Now Dorrington had been watching from across the street and saw which way the drunk docker went. While Greer and the mob run off in one direction, Dorrington runs to catch up with the docker. As he catches up with him, he sees the docker getting into a fight: leaning over a wharf his hat fell off and when a helpful sailor brought it up to him, the drunk docker protests that it’s not his hat (which is, of course, true) and accuses the helpful sailor of having stolen his hat. And they fall to fighting.

And while they’re doing so, Dorrington picks up Greer’s hat, which has rolled to one side and saunters off. And as he suspected, it contains the codicil to Old Cater’s will.

The drunk docker and the sailr fight while Dorrington (with moustache) takes the hat

The drunk docker and the sailor fight while Dorrington (with moustache) takes the hat

Greer keeps returning to the barber’s but never sees the hat again. Reluctant to give up, he returns to Jarvis Flint to offer the next best thing, his sworn testimony as to the content of the codicil (which handed over all Old Cater’s property to Flint, valued at ten thousand pounds).

Meanwhile, Dorrington has a copy of the codicil made and legally witnessed. Then he calls on Paul Cater. He coolly demands £1,000 to hand it over. Cater is outraged. Dorrington points out that he will still make £9,000 on the deal and threatens to take a cab to Jarvis Flint to give him the codicil. Cater caves in, takes Dorrington to his bank in Pimlico, takes out £1,000 in gold and notes, and gives it to him in return for the codicil. Jarvis then takes a cab back to Old Cater’s house and promptly burns the codicil. He doesn’t know Dorrington has made a copy of it.

Now, Dorrington had intended to take the copy of the codicil over to Flint’s house and extract another thousand pounds from Jarvis in return for handing it over. But Dorrington leaves it for a day or two – which turns out to be a bad mistake.

For on the day of Old Cater’s funeral, Flint and his sleazy lawyer, Lugg, along with Greer as witness, all go to see Paul Cater and confront him with the fact that Greer – though he doesn’t have a physical copy of the codicil – will testify to its content i.e. that the entire estate goes to Flint.

So the scene is that Cater, Greer, Lugg and Flint are at old Cater’s place, making threats and counter-threats, when the lawyer Lugg reaches over to get the Bible which Old Cater had kept around him in his last days, with a view to then and there getting Greer to testify under oath to the contents of the codicil. But –

As he opens it, Lugg discovers writing scribbled onto its opening pages, and realises that on his very last day, Old Cater changed his will again. And left everything to… neither Jarvis nor Paul, but to Sinclair, the poor broken bondsman who has served him faithfully all this time.

The two nephews are thunderstruck and immediately start trying to bribe the lawyer. But Lugg sees that Greer has witnessed everything and would likely resort to blackmail him in the future, plus he sees the prospect of an extremely grateful new client (Sinclair) and so he promptly adopts a high tone of Pecksniffian morality, and insists that he must ‘perform his duty’ and report this new, final version of the will to authorities.

With the result that when Dorrington calls on Flint to carry out part two of his plan (to blackmail Flint) he, Dorrington, finds himself met with insults and abuse. When the new situation is explained to him, he doesn’t care. He’s already made £1,000 and it is with this money – the narrator tells us – that Dorrington is then able to set up, live and dress as a gentleman, and to begin his life as a detective and crook.

Indeed, when he hears about tCater’s final will scribbled in the Bible, Dorrington bursts out laughing.

The story ends with a comic flourish as a disgruntled Samuel Greer goes to the nearest pub for a wet, and bumps into the drunk docker who took Greer’s hat by mistake. Greer, failing to find the docker, had returned to the barber’s and taken the hat which the docker left behind. Now, finding Greer wearing his long-lost hat, the docker beats Greer up.

It is a very entertaining and comic story – but only if you accept that every single character in it is motivated by shameless greed, and is prepared to lie, cheat and betray everyone, in order to make money.

Thoughts

Being an anti-hero makes Dorrington much more appealing to modern tastes than Morrison’s squeaky clean ‘good’ detective, Martin Hewitt.

And whereas the Hewitt stories seemed to copy the basic Sherlock Holmes formula with slavish conformity, the fact that Dorrington doesn’t mind resorting to breaking and entering, theft and blackmail, and is prepared to do more or less anything when he sees private advantage, makes the stories much more unpredictable.

Sometimes he carries out his client’s wishes perfectly straight, but sometimes he spies an opening for skulduggery and goes over to the dark side – and sometimes he does both – as in the bicycle story where he both gains his reward from Mallows by good detective work, but then goes on to confront Mallows at the ABC factory, and nearly kills him.

And sometimes he does neither, as in the case of the Japanese sword, where he behaves like a perfectly straight and respectable detective.

But there is always the dark and Gothic threat that Dorrington might at any moment pull out his revolver and blackmail someone. And that makes the yarns from Dorrington’s Deed-Box immeasurably more entertaining than the Hewitt stories.

Information is power

Many of the stories bring out the fact that it’s not only always been important to have as much information as possible about your enemies (hence the long tradition of spies) – but also to gather information about people in general – who are neither friends nor enemies. Especially compromising information. You never know when it will come in useful. This is core to Dorrington’s modus operandi. Knowledge is power.

It was an important thing in Dorrington’s rascally trade to get hold of as much of other people’s private business as possible, and to know exactly in what cupboard to find every man’s skeleton. For there was no knowing but it might be turned into money sooner or later.

Knowledge of people’s foibles and secrets was as important then as it is now. The difference is that, in our time, several billion people have been happy to turn over their most intimate secrets to social media, email, phone and internet companies free and gratis, for them to use and exploit any way they see fit. Strange days.

Reviews of other fiction of the 1880s and 1890s

Joseph Conrad

Rudyard Kipling

Henry Rider Haggard

Sherlock Holmes

A Study in Scarlet (1887)
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (stories 1891–1892)
The Sign of the Four (1890)
The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (stories 1892–1893)

The Shadows of Sherlock Holmes (detective stories influenced by Conan Doyle)

Arthur Morrison

Robert Louis Stevenson

Bram Stoker

Dracula by Bram Stoker (1897)

H.G. Wells

Oscar Wilde

Monet and Architecture @ the National Gallery

This is a staggeringly brilliant exhibition for a number of reasons.

1. It is about an aspect of Monet’s work – the importance of all kinds of buildings to his art throughout his career – which has never been explored before but turns out to shed fascinating light on his art.

2. It brings together 78 works loaned from an astonishing variety of galleries across America and Europe to create a unique opportunity to see so many, and so varied, Monets together in one place. Sometimes big exhibitions are based largely on a gallery’s own collection, but not here: I counted over forty galleries and collections that works have been borrowed from. And not only that; almost a quarter are loaned from private collections. This really is a once in a lifetime opportunity to see so many works – from all round the Western world – all in one place.

3. Monet really was a genius. The first three or so rooms are interesting and contain good things, but the last two rooms, full of the works of his maturity, are quite stunning – spaces in which you feel you should be on your knees praying to the more-than-human brilliance of this complete master of oil painting.

4. They’ve really gone to town on the extras for the exhibition, with not only a fascinating audioguide but in the cinema room off to one side, a long film explaining the importance of architecture in Monet. The free printed guide contains not only a detailed timeline of Monet’s life but maps of France, Italy, London and Venice showing the precise locations where many of the paintings were made.

And the gallery has co-operated with Google Arts to produce a dedicated website / online experience which allows you to see the paintings in digital clarity, alongside text explaining their creation, all playfully titled Monet Was Here.

Monet Was Here on Google Arts and Culture

Seven rooms

There are seven rooms. The first three look at different ways Monet used rural and village buildings, buildings set in landscapes, to point and focus the composition. The next two look at his depictions of Paris and the Paris suburbs, from the smoky railway station of the Gare St Lazare, to the new bridge being built at Argenteuil, to busy scenes at seaside resorts, to some wonderful street scenes in Paris.

Then the last two, the Temples of Monet – the penultimate room has a wall of paintings depicting the facade of Rouen cathedral in changing light with, opposite them, a wall of wonderfully atmospheric paintings of London, Waterloo bridge and the Houses of Parliament.

And the final room is devoted to ten shimmering, magical paintings of the queen of the Adriatic, Venice.

The village and the picturesque

At the start of his career Monet used strong designs, powerfully constructed. In this example, bright colours (green grass, aquamarine sea) boats and distant smoke, but all crystallised by the hut in the foreground.

In the 1870s Monet visited Holland where he played with the influence of the great 17th century Dutch painters of landscapes and interiors. This is a rare example of a Monet where the viewer is entirely enclosed by buildings.

Footbridge at Zaandam, 1871 by Claude Monet. Musées de Mâcon © photo Pierre Plattier, Musées de Mâcon

Thus the first few rooms explore numerous aspects and experiments with buildings, in townscapes, by the sea, amid fields, from close up, seen on a shimmering horizon, playing with the impact and focus they bring to a composition.

By the sea

All through his life Monet painted sequences showing the same view, or different views of the same subject, like a chemist repeating the same experiment, trying to get at the core of a reaction.

Monet spent a lot of 1882 on the Normandy coast and painted a number of works which feature a modest custom officer’s cottage on the cliffs. Sometimes centre stage, sometimes tucked away or almost hidden, the exhibition includes three of these works to show how Monet took a building as the central focus around which he could experiment. In two of them it dominates the composition but – can you see it in this picture?

The Cliff at Varengeville (1882) by Claude Monet. Private Collection, USA, Courtesy of Richard Green Gallery, London © Photo courtesy of the owner

In 1888 Monet travelled to the south of France, staying at Antibes which he painted from the spit or ‘cap’ across the bay. This vantage point allowed endless experimentation with the effect of the shimmering sunlight on the blue Mediterranean.

Antibes from la Salis (1888) by Claude Monet. Private collection © Photograph courtesy of Sotheby’s

These Antibes paintings include recognisable landmarks – the tower of the cathedral and the medieval castle of the Grimaldi family – but the commentary points out how, in many of his paintings, Monet very deliberately chose not to include more modern elements. For example, there’s a cluster of paintings he made of the picturesque Italian town of Bodighera, which he visited and painted in 1884, and from which he quietly excised newly built holiday homes or the new railway line.

Mist and snow

But Monet isn’t all Mediterranean sunlight. One very vivid painting is a depiction of his home village of Giverny, a few miles west of Paris, in the snow.

Monet is always conscious of the effet, the effects of changing light and weather and even of the clarity or mistiness of the air. In this snowscape it is the dimly visible buildings of Giverny, the architectural elements, which give the painting a sense of depth and volume, and the composition a focus for the eye, while the paint does the work of creating a mood.

Snow Effect at Giverny (1893) by Claude Monet © New Orleans Museum of Art

Impressions not precision

At about this point I should mention that Monet isn’t a particularly accurate painter of architecture. His buildings are not mathematically precise renditions of the squares and angles which modern buildings and bridges must necessarily consist of.

I recently visited the Dulwich Picture Gallery’s excellent exhibition of Edward Bawden and I very much enjoyed the way that, whether he’s doing a watercolour of his back garden or a linocut print of Covent Garden market, Bawden’s lines are all clearly defined and mathematically precise.

Albert Bridge (1966) by Edward Bawden. Trustees of the Cecil Higgins Art Gallery © Estate of Edward Bawden

Monet’s buildings are never this precise, even when he is painting bridges or railways stations or other highly engineered structures.

Monet’s buildings, like his trees and other elements, are created by shimmering and often vague daubs of paint, overlaid and juxtaposed to create an atmosphere, a mood, an impression, rather than efforts at precise delineation.

Because I, personally, tend to like clear defined lines, I felt ambivalent about the series of big paintings Monet did of the new Gare St Lazare in Paris in 1877, a cluster of which hang here.

The commentary makes the clever point that they are a subtle subversion of the landscape genre, with a metal and glass roof replacing the sky and the shimmers of steam replacing the foliage of trees.

Maybe so. But after looking for some time I realised that I actively dislike the inaccurate draughtsmanship of the engineered roof, lamps and above all of the beautiful and ornate steam engines. All this is a kind of lost opportunity to show gleaming metal, precisely engineered structures, rivets, pistons and coupling rods. They seem to me a kind of acknowledgement of modernity which somehow misses the point of modernity.

The Saint-Lazare Railway Station (1877) by Claude Monet © The National Gallery, London

Monet’s use of urban motifs

Monet’s use of contemporary urban subjects in a manner more appropriate to his style is demonstrated in The Boulevard des Capucines, Paris painted in 1873.

The commentary makes the interesting point that the painting captures the view from the first floor of the building where the first ever Impressionist Exhibition was to be held the following year, and where this very painting would be exhibited. Always interesting to learn snippets of art trivia.

And I couldn’t help thinking that there’s a large amount of L.S. Lowry in the way Monet paints his people, or at least his crowds of tottering nine-pin-like figures.

But the real visual interest is obviously in the shadow which casts a great diagonal line across the composition. It is the contrast between light and shade which really pulls Monet’s daisy, the drama it gives to the composition, the way your eye is pulled in by the great diagonal and then wants to explore the different effets of shade and direct sunlight.

So much so that if you look closely at the big buildings on the opposite side of the boulevard, you notice that they are leaning backwards – they are not accurately and strictly vertical. Architectural accuracy is not what he’s about.

The Boulevard des Capucines, Paris (1873) by Claude Monet © The State Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow

This slight wonkiness is a feature of many of the paintings. It was apparent in one of the earlier seaside paintings where an enormous white cliff seemed to be bulging out and threatening to collapse onto the beach below. The walls of the rural buildings in a number of the early village scenes seemed to meet at odd angles as if about to topple over. There’s a striking early painting of rural houses with Dutch gables reflected in the river (Houses on the Banks of the Zaan, Zaandam) where the wall of the left is leaning outwards at a perilous angle. In all of them the lines are wonky and unvertical, hazy, not ‘true’ in the engineering sense.

The point is – who cares, when he paints like this?

On the Boardwalk at Trouville (1870) by Claude Monet © Photo courtesy of the owner

In this, as in several other seaside paintings shown side by side, the point is not the mathematical precision of the booth on the left, or the hotels on the right, of the steps down to the beach or of the planking of the boardwalk – these are all elements which go to create the overall effet.

In both boardwalk paintings the important thing is not the precision but the tremendous dynamism given by the plunging perspective of the boardwalk itself, which draws you quickly right into the heart of the painting which is all about vibrant colour, space and life.

Rouen, London, Venice

The previous five rooms have contained 50 or so good and sometimes outstanding paintings – for me the Trouville paintings and Giverny in the snow stood out, and there’s a painting of the Japanese bridge over Monet’s world-famous lily pond for fans of his garden paintings – all accompanied by fascinating and insightful commentary.

But walking into the last two rooms is like walking into a different world. Here you are brought face to face with half a dozen examples each of his famous series of paintings of the facade of Rouen cathedral, opposite a selection of the series of paintings he made of the Thames in London, before you enter the final room devoted entirely to his late paintings of Venice – and it is as if you have died and gone to art heaven.

I have rarely felt so overwhelmed and awed by such an array of astonishingly beautiful artworks.

Rouen

By the 1890s Monet had perfected his technique of having multiple canvases of the same view on the go at once, and painting each of them at a specific time of the day, switching to the next one at the clock moved on, the sun rose, and the play of light and shadows changed.

Cities were easier to do this in since he needed the space to house quite a few wet canvases and all his equipment, somewhere he could leave it all overnight. The three cities represented here – Rouen, London, Venice, were all tourist resorts famous for their great architecture.

Monet painted some 30 canvases in Rouen, between February and April 1892 and the same months of 1893. He rented various rooms from shop owners opposite the cathedral which explains why there are two distinct points of view. The five massive paintings of the facade of Rouen cathedral show that slight difference in vantage point but above all Monet’s godlike ability to capture the changes in light and colour on this elaborate and detailed architectural facade, with quite stunning results.

Rouen Cathedral (1894) by Claude Monet. Private collection © Photo courtesy of the owner

London

Monet first stayed in London in 1870 to 1871 to escape from the violence of the Franco-Prussian War and the civil war in Paris which followed (a historical moment documented by the recent Tate Britain exhibition Impressionists in London).

In September 1899 he returned and stayed on the 6th floor of the Savoy Hotel overlooking the Thames Embankment, returning for another visit in January to April 1902. In total Monet made an impressive 100 canvases of London.

He painted the view from the Savoy he painted the view west towards Waterloo Bridge. Later he got permission to paint the houses of Parliament from the newly built St Thomas’s Hospital on the opposite bank of the Thames. In both views what interested him was the play of light.

This was made much more interesting but sometimes frustrating, by the high level of pollution in London’s air not to mention the erraticness of the English weather which made capturing exactly the same light at the same hour on successive days a challenge.

This section about London included one of the many half-finished canvases Monet made, a strikingly vague sketch of the Embankment including Cleopatra’s Needle. The commentary points out that with his London paintings, as with those of Rouen cathedral and Venice, Monet developed the paintings up to a certain point, alongside extensive sketches and notes, and then finished the paintings back home at Giverny.

Two of the Parliament paintings really stood out for me, one where the sun is flaming red and the Thames is on fire. Right next to it the exact same view at night with the moon a divided into fragments by cloud and reflecting shivers of silver all over the river surface.

But the one I really couldn’t tear myself away from was this stunning painting of an orange sun struggling through the London smog to glimmer and fleck red-gold highlights on the Thames. The painting is all about light and colour, it is a masterpiece of what oil painting can do to fill the visual cortex with pleasure – and yet the vague architectural structure of London Bridge with its neat arches, just barely visible through the smog, is a vital part of the composition in the way it enables the light to exist, to function, to perform.

Waterloo Bridge, Sunlight in the Fog by Claude Monet

Venice

Monet visited Venice in 1908, staying for two months in apartments on the Grand Canal. The floating city under a Mediterranean sun was crying out to be depicted by the greatest impressionist of all. He produced 37 canvases, of which nine are on show here.

No people. No human activity is portrayed. Just the play of unearthly pink and eggshell blue in this watery paradise. (On a practical note, observe how the buildings on the right have the characteristic Monet lean; to my eye all of them look out of ‘true’, bulging out slightly over the water – but, as mentioned before, who cares.) they are quite staggeringly, luminescently transcendent works of art.

The Grand Canal (1908) by Claude Monet © Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

Scholarly conclusion

The rational, historical, art scholarly conclusion is that Monet used a very wide range of buildings, more than has previously been recognised, as motifs in his paintings:

as the basis of designs and patterns and compositions
as symbols of modernity and the bustling city
or to emphasise rural tranquillity or isolation

In all cases using buildings to create, point and highlight his subtle emotional and psychological effects. Then, later in his career, he uses buildings as the subjects of some of his most dazzling, experimental and awe-inspiring works, the London, Rouen, Venice paintings.

Emotional conclusion

Often by the end of an exhibition I’m full to overflowing with facts and impressions and a little relieved to walk back out onto the street, but I found it genuinely difficult to leave this one, in particular to leave the room full of Monet’s London paintings.

I spent a good ten minutes looking from one to another and back again, walking out the room then finding myself drawn back in, to marvel all over again at Monet’s unprecedented handling of paint and the breathtaking creation of gorgeous, transcendent, shimmering works of art.

I’ve rarely encountered such a feeling of pure, unalloyed beauty and wonder in an art exhibition.

Exhibition videos

This is an introduction to the role of architecture in Monet’s life by Christopher Riopelle, The Neil Westreich Curator of Post 1800 Paintings at the National Gallery in London.

And here is Richard Thomson, exhibition curator and Watson Gordon Professor of Fine Art at the University of Edinburgh, introducing The Credit Suisse Exhibition: Monet & Architecture.

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