Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (20 page)

For a couple of years, Ainsworth’s star rose higher even than Dickens’s. ‘The sword’, his biographer melodramatically declares, ‘was drawn between them.’ In addition to aspiring to Scott’s mantle, Ainsworth also cultivated a Byronic dandyism with, as one ironist put it, the ‘chest of Apollo and the waist of a gnat’. So much for that cockney, Boz.
Jack Sheppard
(1839), the Fieldingesque tale of an
eighteenth-century cracksman, again with Cruikshank’s Hogarthian illustrations, enjoyed another immense success, at the height of which there were eight pirated dramatic versions running on the London stage. On the strength of it, Ainsworth set himself up in a fine house, Kensal Lodge, and held reign there over a literary salon of other ‘fashionables’.

Despite this welcome celebrity, Ainsworth was alarmed by the moral fury stirred up by
Jack Sheppard
. The novel was accused of being a formula for murder when a manservant, Francis Courvoisier, claimed he was inspired to slit his master’s throat after reading Ainsworth’s incendiary text. He was, none the less, hanged – fiction not being a strong defence in those days. Ainsworth, pusillanimous by nature, subsequently gave up ‘Newgate’ (i.e. crime) fiction and followed Scott’s example (
Kenilworth
) and Victor Hugo’s (
Notre-Dame de Paris
) by making famous historical places rather than notorious criminals the centre of his work. There followed such topographic bestsellers as
The Tower of London
(1840);
Old St Paul’s
(1841), his best novel, set amidst the Plague and Great Fire of London, with plentiful borrowing from Defoe; and the floridly illustrated
Windsor Castle
(1843). Although he churned out a flood of other historical romances over the next forty years, Ainsworth’s star fell inexorably. Bentley gave him £2,000 for
The Tower of London
. For wretched effusions such as
Beau Nash, or, Bath in the Eighteenth Century
, almost forty years later, he scraped a measly £100 from fifth-rate publishers.

Ainsworth was lucky, or unlucky, however you look at it, to live almost twice as long as his father. His decline from stardom to author’s garret is the subject of one of the most poignant literary anecdotes of the period, retold probably more than once by Percy Fitzgerald, one of Dickens’s smart young Bohemian set. ‘I recall’, said Fitzgerald, ‘a dinner at Teddington, in the sixties, given by Frederic Chapman, the publisher, at which were Forster and Browning. The latter said humorously, “a sad forlorn-looking being stopped me today, and reminded me of old times. He presently resolved himself into – whom do you think? – Harrison Ainsworth!” “Good Heavens!” cried Forster, “is he still alive?”’ Not just alive, but alive for another two decades. If the sword was ever drawn between Ainsworth and Boz, it drooped sadly in later life. But then, Scott himself had also died bankrupt and broken.

From hand to mouth.
Lever’s description of his artistic method

There are novelists whose sole function in literary life is to inspire greater novelists. Charles Lever ranks high in this minor inspirational league. He was born in Dublin, in 1806, the son of a building contractor from Lancashire, and brought up with the social advantages, and social ambiguities, of his Anglo-Irish class. After Trinity College Dublin, he bounced around Europe and North America, gaining the reputation of a good fellow and a wastrel in the making. He studied medicine in a desultory way, earning himself the sobriquet Dr Quicksilver.

Young Mercury settled down after marrying his childhood sweetheart, Kate, in 1836. Now well on in years, he was encouraged to apply himself to literature by the novelist William Hamilton Maxwell and duly took over the editorship of the
Dublin University Magazine
. Fifteen years older, Maxwell was, like Lever, the son of a prosperous merchant with little inclination to honest labour. He too had attended Trinity College ‘in a somewhat desultory manner’ and claimed to have seen action at Waterloo where he served as a captain of infantry. Maxwell subsequently married an heiress, took orders, and settled down to the comfortable existence of a hunting parson. His most popular work was the semi-autobiographical
Stories of Waterloo
(1829). Captain Maxwell would have a formative influence on his protégé’s later career. The Revd Maxwell less so.

The year 1836–7, when Lever turned to literature, was the high point of Bozmania. The proprietor of the
Dublin University Magazine
, William Curry, persuaded Lever to write a serial,
Harry Lorrequer,
in monthly ‘Dickensian’ parts. ‘Phiz’ (Richard Hablôt Knight Browne),
Pickwick
’s illustrator, was recruited to do the full plate etchings for
Lorrequer
’s monthly numbers. He and Lever would eventually work together on fourteen novels – one of the great partnerships in Victorian fiction. ‘You ask me how I write,’ Lever was once asked: ‘my reply is, just as I live – from hand to mouth.’
Harry Lorrequer
began as a single anecdote and its ad hoc continuation is a narrativeless sequence of Pickwickian picaresque episodes that take the military hero from Cork all over peacetime Europe. It hit the public taste, massively. Curry went on to suggest a variation on the theme. As Lever recalled, thirty years later: ‘my publishers asked me could I write a story in the Lorrequer vein, in which active service and military adventure could figure more prominently than mere civilian life, and where the achievements of a British army might form the staple of the narrative, – when this question was propounded me, I was ready to reply: Not one, but fifty.’

The first of the fifty was
Charles O’Malley
(1841). The hero is a bravo from Galway who duels and dissipates himself at Trinity before enlisting to fight in the Peninsula, rising to the rank of captain. By a series of unlikely adventures, Charley finds himself at the shoulder of Napoleon at the beginning of Waterloo and by the side of Wellington (to whom he gives battle-winning instruction) at the climax. Thereafter it is peace, prosperity and the obligatory heiress. It was logical for Lever to choose Waterloo. He was in Brussels while writing and O’Malley is a heroic version of his literary patron, Maxwell. Phiz’s father had also fought at Waterloo (the illustrations are wildly dramatic). It was a period when the Napoleonic Wars were being triumphantly crowed over in Britain: Nelson’s column was erected in 1843 and subscriptions were being gathered for the triumphal arch to Wellington, at the entrance to Hyde Park.

Thackeray, unlike Dickens and Lever, had still to make his mark as anything other than a penny-a-liner. He was hungry for fame and proposed to Chapman and Hall a volume of ‘Cockney Sketches of Ireland’ (clearly aiming at the success of the firm’s
Sketches by Boz
). Thackeray procured letters of introduction to Lever, currently residing in high style in his country house, Templeogue, outside Dublin. A convivial visit ensued in early June 1842 and the Waterloo chapters of
Charles O’Malley
, still fresh on the printed page, were an inevitable topic of conversation. ‘Thackeray seemed much inclined to laugh at martial might,’ it was later recalled, ‘although he still held to the idea that something might be made of Waterloo, even without the smoke and din of the action being introduced.’

Thackeray’s ‘Waterloo novel’,
Vanity Fair,
did not start serialising until January 1847. In the interim, Lever and Thackeray had fallen out catastrophically and descended to flinging satirical mud at each other. His new novel, Thackeray resolved, would be ‘a novel without a hero’, but also a Waterloo novel without Waterloo – an anti-Leveriad. It would mock war-glorifying romances like that damned
O’Malley
thing. The essence of
Vanity Fair
was the new gravity it brought to fictional depictions of war. It is expressed in the famous narrative defection in the ninth number: ‘We do not claim to rank among the military novelists. Our place is with the non-combatants. When the decks are cleared for action we go below and wait meekly. We should only be in the way of the manœuvres that the gallant fellows are performing overhead.’
Vanity Fair
created new parameters as to what was legitimate in the novel of war.

Eight years after the publication of
Vanity Fair
, the young artillery officer Leo Tolstoy was in besieged Sevastopol. He was meditating his first works of fiction – war stories, of course. His diary for 8–9 June 1855 records: ‘Laziness, laziness. Health bad. Reading
Vanity Fair
all day.’ The ‘Waterloo novel’ manifestly affected him. In the
story he was writing up, ‘Sevastopol in May’ (1855), we find the following blatant echo of
Vanity Fair
’s last paragraph (‘Ah
Vanitas Vanitatum
! Which of us is happy in this world?’) and
The Book of Snobs
:

Vanity! Vanity! Vanity! Everywhere, even on the brink of the grave and among men ready to die for a noble cause. Vanity! It seems to be the characteristic feature and special malady of our time. How is it that among our predecessors no mention was made of this passion, as of smallpox and cholera? How is it that in our time there are only three kinds of people: those who, considering vanity an inevitably existing fact and therefore justifiable, freely submit to it; those who regard it as a sad but unavoidable condition; and those who act unconsciously and slavishly under its influence? Why did the Homers and Shakespeares speak of love, glory, and suffering, while the literature of today is an endless story of snobbery and vanity?

It was not merely the Thackerayan rhetoric, but the Thackerayan tactic, the ‘sidestep’, which Tolstoy would absorb into his own narrative. The influence of Stendhal on the battle scenes in
War and Peace
has been commented on: that of
Vanity Fair
less so, and that of Charles Lever never. But Tolstoy’s constant deflection, or retreat, from the battlefield to what is going on with ‘the girl I left behind me’ (
chapter 30
,
Vanity Fair
) cannot but recall Thackeray and, by opposition, Lever. So too do the strategically brief, ironic and calculatedly unLeverian irruptions of Napoleon, as in his encounter (in Book III, Part 2,
Chapter 7
) with the drunken Cossack, Lavrushka:

Finding himself in the company of Napoleon, whose identity he had easily and surely recognized, Lavrushka was not in the least abashed but merely did his utmost to gain his new master’s favour.

He knew very well that this was Napoleon, but Napoleon’s presence could no more intimidate him than Rostov’s, or a sergeant major’s with the rods, would have done, for he had nothing that either the sergeant major or Napoleon could deprive him of.

No heroes in this novel. It is distinctly Thackerayan. And, for those whose ears are attuned to the sounds of very minor fiction, anti-Leverian. The Irishman had served his literary purpose. He had helped in the creation of two masterpieces:
Vanity Fair
and
War and Peace
. They also serve.

He is one of our most popular novelists, if not one of our best.
Edgar Allan Poe

Ingraham was born in Portland, Maine, into a shipbuilding family. In his teens he went off to sea and, if his own account is to believed, smelled gunpowder in South American revolutions. On his return, he studied at Yale – but there is doubt (as with other areas of his life) as to whether he graduated or whether, indeed, he was ever there. In 1830, he moved to Natchez, Mississippi, where he married the cousin of the episcopalian dignitary and author, Phillips Brooks. After a failed attempt at law, he settled down as a teacher of languages. His wife, Mary, was of planter stock, and brought money to the marriage.

Ingraham began his literary career with travel sketches, for which there was a lively market. His first novel,
Laffite: The Pirate of the Gulf
(1836), was an unexpected hit with the reading public, earning the novice novelist $1,000 from New York’s leading publisher, Harper Bros. It may be that readers associated him with his namesake, but unrelated, Joseph Ingraham, the national naval hero, lost at sea in 1800. In a characteristically witty hatchet job, Edgar Allan Poe observed: ‘The novelist is too minutely, and by far too frequently
descriptive.
We are surfeited with unnecessary detail … Not a dog yelps, unsung. Not a shovel-footed negro waddles across the stage … without eliciting from the author a
vos plaudite
, with an extended explanation of the character of his personal appearance – of his length, depth and breadth, – and, more particularly, of the length, depth and breadth of his shirt-collar, shoe-buckles and hat-band.’ Elsewhere, and later, Poe concluded: ‘He is one of our most
popular
novelists, if not one of our best. He appeals always to the taste of the
ultraromanticists
.’

His Harper windfall induced ‘Professor Ingraham’ (as the publisher mendaciously titled him – without authorial protest) to follow up with similar nautical adventure yarns, such as
Captain Kyd; or, The Wizard of the Sea
(1839), which circulated for decades as a dime novel and was, plausibly, a remote influence on Stevenson’s
Treasure Island
. Ingraham was sarcastic about what he called ‘rigidists’ – those who disapproved of fiction as a source of innocent fun. He himself was very flexible on the matter. In 1842 Ingraham was declared bankrupt and set out to remedy his finances with a flood of fiction for magazines, papers and ‘yellowback’ 10 cent library series – whoever would buy his wares at $100 (his normal price) apiece. In 1845 alone he claimed to have published twenty titles. It is estimated that in the early 1840s, 10 per cent of all the new novels produced in the US were ‘Ingrahams’. The sea and piracy remained staple subject matter, although there were
more salacious items, such as
The Beautiful Cigar Girl, or, The Mysteries of Broadway
. The ephemerality of these works, perversely, has made them high-value collectors’ items in modern times. Little other literary value has been found in this superheated second phase of Ingraham’s career.