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Theodore Watts-Dunton featured in augmented reality app Tell us More. Groups Novelists and authors Poets Writers and critics. Tell us more back to top Can you tell us more about this person? Please note that we cannot provide valuations. Help What can you tell us? Chambers, for permission to make certain quotations from the works of Watts-Dunton ; and to Messrs. Smith, Elder and Co. We further acknowledge our indebtedness to Mr. Sir James Knowles , Mr. Meredith George Meredith , Mr. William Sharp William Sharp , Mr. Hueffer Ford Madox Brown , Mrs. Jack John Nichol , Mr.
George Richard Burton, Mr. Coulson Kernahan, for permission to make use of certain letters to Watts-Dunton. Watts and Theodore Watts-Dunton ; to Mrs. Coulson Ker- nahan, and Mr. John Laurence Lambe, for their recollec- tions placed at our disposal ; and to Miss Elizabeth Lee, who generously devoted much time and care to the work of verification. We have also to express, on behalf of Mrs. Wise ; to Mrs. William Dowsing ; to Mr. Churton Collins ; to Mr. Anderson and to Mr. Mackenzie Bell, for permission to make use of quotations from their poems ; and also to Mr.
James Douglas, for permission to quote from his book on Theodore Watts- Dunton. Should we have failed to make acknowledgment for the use of any quotations in these volumes, we trust the omission will not be regarded as a discourtesy, but as having occurred through inadvertency. Early Childhood 17 ii. Schooldays 21 iii. The Literary Student At Bognor ii. At Herne Bay iii. At Birchington-on-Sea X. Gordon Hake from a crayon drawing by D. Rossetti 64 Dante Gabriel Rossetti aet.
A SMALL boy, slight in build, with luminous dark brown eyes and black hair, is standing spell- bound before his father's bookcase. His inquiring gaze has been held captive by a title that makes his pulse beat quickly, for before him he sees those promising words The Faerie Queene. The boy is Walter Theodore Watts, son of the prosperous country solicitor, John King Watts ; the place a large, old-fashioned residence facing the market- place of St. Newton viewed poetry, when he called it " ingenious nonsense. But generally speaking the novelist found no resting-place among J.
The sight of this stray reveller, with a title suggestive of poetic fiction, filled young Watts with ecstatic expectation. Let the expe- rience be continued in his own words. When I opened it, the frontispiece, an admirable en- graving of the best portrait of Spenser, captured me at once, and even now the romantic beauty of that face seems to make all other faces inferior. I was a little disappointed at first to find that the Faerie Queene was a long poem, for it was through Charles Lamb's prose that I had become acquainted with Shakespeare's fairy stories.
And again, I was a little disappointed to find that the orthography was so strange and eccentric. However, he went on reading stanza after stanza until " the incidents and the pictures, and above all the glorious music of the grandest stanza in the world," lifted him into Paradise. I became so absorbed in it that I grew quite unconscious of the external world.
Some- times a younger brother or sister would come into the room, and I would see them as in a dream, but no more. In- deed, the dominance of Spenser threatened to become a tyranny. And years afterwards, when it became his business to write a great deal of prose, his one great difficulty was that of keeping his prose from falling into verse rhythm instead of prose rhythm.
Theodore Watts was born on October 12, His father's mother was a dark woman, small of stature, from whom the boy inherited his physique. Mentally also he resembled her in several particulars, for she had a quick, alert, and intensely active brain, and a marked poetic temperament. As regards his mother's family, the Duntons were pure East Anglian.
The grandmother Dunton was a very religious woman, romantic in temperament and intensely interested in gypsies and gypsy life. Like his mother, she was small and dark. Watts, a man of extraordinary learning in the academic sense of the word, possessed still more extraordinary general knowledge. He lived for many years the strangest kind of hermit life, surrounded by his books and old manuscripts. His two great passions were philology and occultism. His method of learning lan- guages was unlike that of George Borrow, for he made great use of grammars, and was wont to express con- tempt for Borrow 's method of acquiring a tongue from dictionaries only.
When he died, from four to five hundred treatises on grammar were found among his books. Although he never wrote poetry, he translated a good deal from the Spanish and Portuguese poets. His fervent admiration of Shelley and his knowledge of the Elizabethan dramatists constituted a link between him and Swinburne, whom in after years he frequently met at The Pines.
Walter Theodore Watts-Dunton - Wikisource, the free online library
In short, there is no doubt that this uncle's considerable knowledge of literature must have been of inestimable advantage to his young nephew, Theodore, in early days. When about ten years old, Theodore was sent to a private school at Cambridge. Here he received a comprehensive education Latin, Greek, French, German and mathematics, music, art and physical science.
Neither Latin nor Greek attracted him par- ticularly ; nor did his acquaintance with German in the original ever become considerable, but he read voraciously in translation. Robbers, Lessing, especially Nathan the Wise, attracted him at school and in after years. For French he had a decided penchant, mastering the grammar when quite young in scholarly style. His opportunities for learn- ing to speak the language were, however, very limited, but he gained a considerable knowledge of the literature.
All through life he was an enthusiastic admirer of Dumas. He never grew tired of reading his romances, and there is no doubt that after Walter Scott the great French novelist was his special favourite. Guy Mannering and Monte Cristo were the stories in prose fiction he most admired. But his opportunities for novel reading were never extensive, and he would frequently deplore his com- parative ignorance of prose fiction when he himself began to turn his attention to the writing of romance. At the " Academy for Young Gentlemen " he was a distinct favourite.
The principal at the school, who soon discovered that he was a boy of undoubted pre- cocity, took a great fancy to him, and began to treat him more as a companion than a pupil, taking him about with him when going for walks or drives on visits to friends in the neighbourhood. He has described his introduction to this gentleman when taken to the school by his father, in one of his unpublished works. Here he relates how they were ushered into " a large and crowded kind of drawing room, where on a table stood two enormous globes, terrestrial and celestial.
I've never seen a perfect globe, and never shall. It was said of him that he could have drawn a fairly accurate map from memory of almost any country. When Wyld was building his " Great Globe" in Leicester Square in , a panorama re- garded in the fifties as the most wonderful " show " in London, many a wrinkle was given by that learned Fellow of the Geographical Society, John King Watts.
This seems odd, but it is true. It was the boys who spoilt me in a curious way a way which will not be understood by those who went to public schools like Eton, where the fagging principle would have stood in the way of the development of the curious relation between me and my fellow-pupils which I am alluding to. There is an inscrutable form of the monarchic instinct in the genus homo which causes boys, without in the least knowing why, to select one boy as a kind of leader, or rather emperor, and spoil him, almost unfit him indeed for that sense of equality which is so valuable in the social struggle for life which follows schooldays.
This kind of emperor I had been at this school. It indicated no sort of real superiority on my part, for I learnt that immediately I had left the vacant post was filled by another boy filled for an equally inscrutable reason. The result of it was that I became as I often think when I recall those days the most masterful-going urchin that ever lived. He soon hit upon the most effective way in which to " hold his own " against any show of pug- nacity among his companions. To take lessons of this " coloured gentleman," however, required more pluck than is possessed by most lads.
It was considered a serious affair, as every one, big as well as small, who had ever stood up against him in a sparring match could fully attest. Sambo, although he wore gloves that were soft enough when confront- ing a youngster, took a grim delight in punching his boy pupils upon the cranium with even greater spite- fulness than he condescended to punch the cranium of a university man or any such like harder-headed opponent. This artfully delivered " punch " of Sambo's had a distressful effect upon the brain ; it never failed to produce at the moment of contact a bewildering sense of dizziness that resulted in a splitting headache a headache which lasted for hours after the " punish- ment " was over.
But what was still more exasperat- ing at the moment of receiving the punch, one could perceive behind a mist, which the dizziness instantly brought before the eyes, the dusky face of the colossal negro, with a look upon it of immense exhilaration, his black, laughing eyes, his glittering white teeth be- tween his thick red lips, forming a grim picture of diabolical amiability. Holiday trips to London were memorable events. His father had legal connections in Bedford Row and Lincoln's Inn Fields ; and business matters necessi- tated periodical visits to the metropolis, the boy occa- sionally accompanying him to town on these excur- sions.
In those days a journey to London from St. Ives was no easy affair. The nearest railway station was Bishop Stortford, in Hertfordshire, nearly half-way to town, which could only be reached by stage coach. These excursions to London made a vivid and lasting impression upon the lad. There were the numerous pigeons and pigeon-cots on the house- tops owned by bird fanciers, visible from the railway carriage windows when the train was approaching that crowded and poverty-stricken East-end suburb of Lon- don near the Bishopsgate terminus.
It was a sight that fairly fascinated him, and for which he was always on the lookout. Then there was that panoramic exhi- bition " The Great Globe " which his father never tired of describing. This extensive building occupied the whole of the central space in Leicester Square, now transformed into a recreation ground. Then, again, " The Royal Colosseum " flaunted its glories in Regent's Park, where a still more absorbing panoramic performance took place: And what delighted simple-minded Victorian schoolboys par- ticularly were the pasteboard avalanches that met the eye on every side in the Colosseum grounds.
Nor did the immortal drama, " Punch and Judy," which might be seen almost at every quiet corner in the streets of London and there was many a quiet corner to be found in those days of sixty-five years ago ever fail to arrest his attention.
Theodore Watts-Dunton
Another " show " which he loved to talk about all through life was Madame Tussaud's Wax Work Show, which in its early Baker Street period was perhaps the most widely patronized of all the shows of that " prehistoric " age. Even as late as he wrote to a friend, " The name of Madame Tussaud is a name to conjure with. At my very first visit to London, the first sight I clamoured to be taken to was Madame Tussaud's Exhibition ; and I have a distinct recollection of seeing the great Madame Tussaud herself, a beautiful young woman, selling tickets in the entrance hall with her own delicate hands.
I wonder whether Napoleon's carriage is still there. Some day I should like to go and see it again. To me it is one of the most thought-inspiring relics now extant. This was his visit to Jamrach's, the trading naturalist in Ratcliffe Highway. With such a keen student of zoology at his elbow as J. Watts during that walk through Jamrach's shop, the youthful biologist received an object lesson so full of interest and novelty that every detail was remembered for many a day. The fact that the family resi- dence looked out upon the market-place proved a joy in this matter.
For it was there that the famous St. Ivian fairs were held. No town in England is more re- nowned for fairs than his birthplace. Michael in the nth century," to quote from the Chronicles of St. Ives, and a century later " King Henry the First gave to St. Ives a fair to be hoi den on Whitsun Monday, to con- tinue eight days till the next Monday and all that day.
Ives a habit which became more and more deep-rooted as the years rolled on.
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He was never regarded as a " trespasser " by the local farmers. They all knew " Lawyer Watts's lad " and his attraction for cornfield and meadow, and he was let to wander freely wherever he chose. See also Hunts County Sketches. One field alone, flat as a billiard table, covered an area of more than one hundred and sixty acres. During these rambles by mead and stream the impulse to turn his attention to poetic composition became irresistible, and began to find expression.
As far back as November 22, , when ten years of age, he wrote some verses To my Sister on her Birthday, which are still extant, though more remarkable for fraternal feeling than for poetic gift. But these poetic impulses during holiday- time were naturally few and far between. A healthy, though romantic-minded, schoolboy would grow weary of con- stant countryside quietude, where the silence is only broken at the best of seasons by the song of the birds and the bleating of the sheep ; consequently, he would on many an occasion turn his steps towards the black- smith's forge by way of antidote, and listen to the local gossip and the rusticities of St.
Ivian yokels, watching the while the bright sparks flying upwards from the anvil. The picture that met his sight at every turn in this Huntingdonshire home was the ever widen- ing extent of Fenland, where the sunrise over the " drain-cut levels of the marshy lea " rivals in beauty the sunset to be seen, on the other hand, across the broad expanse of the North Sea, the shores of which he often visited during the bathing season.
On all sides, in fact, East Anglia made an indelible mark in the schooldays one that proved of inestimable value in after years. One among the many incidents con- nected with his childhood in these East Anglian sur- roundings, was the eventful meeting, for the first time in his experience, with that fascinating tribe of gypsies known as the gryengroes or horse-dealers.
He has himself described in graphic detail this picturesque encounter. The unexpected sight of a gypsy encampment was the most memorable event at that romance making period, as a later chapter in the story of his life will make evident. My father used to drive in a dogcart to see friends of his through about twelve miles of Fen country, and used to take me with him.
For on every occasion when we reached the wayside inn, before we partook of our mid-day meal, my father looked to it that his horse was not cheated of his feed of oats. Instead of leafy, quick hedgerows, as in the Midlands, or walls, as in the North Country, the fields are divided by dykes ; not a tree is to be seen in some parts for miles and miles.
This gives an importance to skies such as is observed nowhere else except on the open sea. Before you start, merely give your horse a couple of handfuls of corn and a little water, somewhat under a quart ; and if you drink a pint of water yourself out of the pail, you will feel all the better during the day. Take care of your horse, as you would the apple of your eye I am sure I would if I were a gentleman, which I don't ever expect to be, and hardly wish, seeing as how I am sixty-nine, and am rather too old to ride yes, cherish and take care of your horse, as perhaps the best friend you have in the world.
Feed him every day with your own hands ; give him three-quarters of a peck of corn each day, mixed up with a little hay chaff, and allow him besides one hundredweight of hay in the course of the week. Some say that the hay should be hard-land hay because it is wholesome ; but I say let it be clover hay, because the horse likes it best.
If on a journey on a horse of your own, chat with the ostler at the inn two or three minutes till your horse has taken the shine out of the oats, which will prevent the ostler taking any of it away when your back is turned ; for such things are sometimes done not that I ever did such a thing myself when I was at the inn at Hounslow ; oh, dear me, no! And as to sunsets, I do not know any, either by land or sea, to be compared with the sunsets to be seen in the Fen country. The humidity of the atmosphere has, no doubt, a good deal to do with it.
The sun fre- quently sets in a pageantry of gauzy vapour of every colour, quite indescribable. And then I saw some tents, and then a number of dusky figures, some squatting near the fire, some moving about. So far from the mare starting, as she would have done at such an invasion by English people, she seemed to know and welcome the gypsies by instinct, and seemed to enjoy their stroking her nose with their tawny but well- shaped fingers, and caressing her neck.
Among them was one of the prettiest little gypsy girls I ever saw. The page in which the description of her is given is beyond doubt a page out of his own schoolboy experience: Graylingham Wood and Rington Wood, like the entire neighbourhood, were favourite haunts of the gypsies. The business of these gypsies was to buy ponies in Wales and sell them in the Eastern counties and the East Midlands. Thus it was that Winnie had known many of the East Midland gypsies in Wales. Compared with Rhona Boswell, who was more like a fairy than a child, Winnie seemed quite a grave little person. Rhona's limbs were always on the move, and the movement sprang always from her emotions.
Her laugh seemed to ring through the woods like silver bells, a sound that it was impossible to mistake for any other. The laughter of most gypsy girls is full of music and of charm, and yet Rhona's laughter was a sound by itself, and it was no doubt this which afterwards, when she grew up, attracted my kinsman, Percy Ayl- win, towards her.
It seemed to emanate not from her throat merely, but from her entire frame. If one could imagine a strain of merriment and fun blending with the ecstatic notes of a sky- lark soaring and singing, one might form some idea of the laugh of Rhona Boswell. Ah, what days they were! Rhona would come from Gypsy Dell, a romantic place in Rington Manor, some miles off, especially to show us some newly-devised coronet of flowers that she had been weaving.
Outside the tents in front of the fire, over which a kettle was sus- pended from an upright iron bar, which I afterwards knew as the kettle-prop, was spread a large dazzling white tablecloth covered with white crockery, among which glittered a goodly number of silver spoons. I afterwards learnt that to possess good linen, good crockery, and real silver spoons was as passionate a desire of the Romany chi as of the most ambitious farmer's wife in the Fen country.
It was from this little incident that my intimacy with the gypsies dated. I associated much with them in after life. And so the schooldays passed happily away, and at last, when he was in sight of his twentieth birthday, came to an end. But the wanderings by the sluggish, dreamy Ouse, the walks over the Fenlands, and the occasional visits to the shores of the North Sea con- tinued, indeed, for another twenty years. He now settled down in his home at St.
But his education was by no means at an end. Its preliminary phase alone was over. He began to teach himself. He embarked on a varied course of studies, based no doubt on some of the subjects in the curriculum which he had already pursued at school, including science, literature, and even music. Fresh from the Cambridge school, well equipped in the rudiments of science, and with an inborn love of natural history, he soon found his father's library more fascinating than ever, and hours each day were spent among the inexhaustible stock of knowledge to be imbibed there.
Watts took great pleasure in reading aloud of an evening after office hours, when the trammels of legal affairs had been cast aside and he had taken his easy-chair beside the library table. His wife, for whom he had the deepest affection, had been during those hours in the library his sole com- panion hitherto, but now the seventeen-year-old son a schoolboy no longer became a welcome addition.
By means of these readings he gained an acquaint- ance with most of the literary and scientific books and journals of current interest ; even the quarterlies were subscribed to regularly by J. Watts, and all articles therein dealing with the latest transactions in science, and the reviews of erudite works in literature, were read and discussed.
The pursuit of science, however, never got beyond the amateur stage ; and as to music, upon which he be- stowed years of study from boyhood to middle age he abandoned it entirely, and at a moment when, having reached considerable proficiency, he seriously enter- tained the project of a professional tour as a pianist.
There was, however, a strong reason why he should adopt neither science, literature, nor music as a profession. Watts, with all his love of intel- lectual pursuits, had a keen eye to the main chance. This cultured youth was the eldest son of his father: And so it came about, in the natural course of events, that the son took a seat at the desk in his father 's office in the old market town of St.
Thus was he launched into the prosaic life of the office, and under more favourable conditions than fall to the lot of most men. But to one with a temper so romantic, the ordeal was severe. However, he con- templated his destiny with commendable philosophy, notwithstanding the tantalizing fact that the office windows looked out upon a wooded lane leading to- wards those very meadows through which he still LIFE AT ST.
But the dry study of the law proved more tolerable than he had at first anticipated. A brother some two or three years younger than himself, also destined for the legal profession, had just left school. They read law books together. This brother, Alfred Eugene Watts, was one of the most companionable of men. No two law students ever worked together in more perfect harmony. They even extracted humour out of the uninspiring pages of the law. The elder brother, being short- sighted, made a compact with the younger that he the younger should read the necessary law books aloud while the other did all the " coaching.
The result proved highly successful. Throughout this time Theodore Watts-Dunton was busily occupied working at stories or poems, or else writing articles for the Cambridge Chronicle, never looking for any remuneration. One day he chanced, while crossing the market place, to encounter a parson who had known him since he was a boy, and who had just been reading one of these contributions to the local newspaper. The work accumulated and was always undergoing revision, for he suffered then, as in after life, from a highly sensitive artistic conscience which in his case, as will presently be seen, almost amounted to a curse.
While applying himself diligently during these years to a study of the law, he continued to take an active part in everything of any local interest in the least de- gree worthy of attention, whether it happened to be of a political or social character. He took no slight part in the famous Volunteer movement in the early sixties, being one of the first to join the Volunteer corps at St. Ives, a unit of the Huntingdonshire corps, of which Lord Sandhurst was colonel. This corps adopted the Robin Hood colours green and gray for their uniform, with a bugle on the metal buttons.
He even went so far as to write a pamphlet which still exists with regard to a jealousy that arose concerning the appointment of ensign in the corps, describing how the appointment brought about the disbandment of the unit. The militant note showed itself in other ways. In a letter to the editor of the Cambridge Chronicle, dated September 13, , signed " W. To the Editor of the Cambridge Chronicle. An instance of this has just occurred, which I will cite. The main reason brought forward in support of the argument was a very cogent and a very simple one, there are more unrepresented people in the counties than in the towns.
But this reasoning is much too liberal for the liberal Daily News, and accordingly the following piece of Yankee sarcasm is put out: It means, virtually, neither more nor less than this: In , Birmingham, Sheffield, and Manchester were for the first time permitted to send to Parliament the members taken from Gatton and Old Sarum ; there- fore in , when you disfranchise places like St. Albans and Sudbury, give additional members to the brilliancy of Dorsetshire, and the independent boors of Salop and of Huntingdon. In , the alterations in our representative system were in favour of progress in , l et our changes tell of re-action.
But the logic of the quotation is really too rich to be passed by without a word.
Ives, at which he chanced to be present. After referring, in this article on " Old Books," to the lecturer's remark that he was " no advocate for vora- cious reading," he introduces as his own opinion that the same idea might be extended to travelling in search of wisdom. What do we really know of Shakespeare's travels, save that he journeyed from Stratford to London, and from London to Stratford? And yet, did not the know- ledge of human nature belong to this man surpassingly almost miraculously?
Has he not said the best things often the only things worth saying upon every subject bearing upon this insoluble problem of life? Not that he expressed any serious regret in after years for allowing some of the best days of his life to slip away in dreamy contemplation at St. Ives ; indeed, he often talked of the immense advantage to a novelist born in the country over one born in a vast city like London. Ives that his journeyings were strictly limited.
But this article in the Cambridge Chronicle clearly shows that he occasionally pondered regretfully, though with a touch of self-sophistication, over his narrow and stagnant surroundings. Ives and the neighbouring towns? It strikes me you are not ; therefore I am sure you will feel extremely grateful to me for apprising you in the friendliest spirit possible of that fact ; and if, by-the-bye, you should feel a desire to coin your gratitude into something tangible, allow me, with all delicacy, to suggest the presentation of a silver inkstand at Christmas.
Let a man's intellect be what it may until he has trained it to think, and to enunciate thought, its utterings must, of necessity, be rude and imperfect. One week your discussions are reported by Mr. Broad- nibs, the copyist I am putting an imaginary case, be- cause I abominate personalities , who assures the world that that eminent draper's assistant, Mr.
At this time he was only twenty- three years old. It brings into the field other and meaner incentives than the pure desire for self-improvement. Depend upon it that Wisdom may be woo'd, but she will never be won by suitors who do not seek her for herself alone she will ' shake her golden locks ' and fly to more ardent, more faithful devotees. You have too much good sense, I am sure, to suspect me of wishing to debar you from the expression of your opinions however outre upon the weighty questions which are agitating the great world around us.
Micawber's mythical good luck. I do not dispute the right of Mr. Nor do I quarrel with Mr. Somebody else for believing that 4 this war is one void of principle. In swimming, Borrow clawed the water like a dog. I had plunged into the surf and got very close to the swimmer, whom I per- ceived to be a man of almost gigantic proportions, when suddenly an instinct told me that it was Lavengro himself, who lived thereabouts, and the feeling that it was he so entirely stopped the action of my heart that I sank for a moment like a stone, soon to rise again, however, in a glow of pleasure and excitement: I ought to say, however, that Borrow was at that time my hero.
From childhood I had taken the deepest interest in proscribed races such as the Cagots, but especially in the persecuted children of Roma. I had read accounts of whole families being executed in past times for no other crime than that of their being born gypsies, and tears, childish and bitter, had I shed over their woes. Now Borrow was the recognized champion of the gypsies the friend and companion, indeed, of the pro- scribed races of the world.
Nor was this all: I saw in him more of the true Nature instinct than in any other writer or so, at least, I imagined. Al- though I would have given worlds to go up and speak to him as he was tossing his clothes upon his back, I could not do it. Indeed, there is little doubt that his dream, even in early days, was to succeed in that literary province in which George Borrow, " Prince of Gypsydom," at that time held full sway. It was a romantic figure, different in every respect from the poetic figures which subsequently claimed his devo- tion. But it was not only his worship of Borrow, the " lord of gypsy lore ; " it was not only that first sight of his hero in the sea at Yarmouth that led to the con- ception and evolvement of his own gypsy romance, that would seem in his boyhood to have half-unconsciously taken root in his brain.
That sombre expanse of gray North Sea had on previous occasions appealed to him. I love that lonely seashore. Her- bert Jenkins, Much of the fascination as well as the charm of both inland and maritime Norfolk is naturally to be found in Aylwin. The author himself had more than once witnessed one of those landslips which are the dread of the region, and readers of his romance will recall the description of the collapse of the cliff front beyond the old church's ruins. And now, having completed his articles, the trips to London with his father, or on his father's behalf, became more frequent.
These trips were naturally made in pursuit of business rather than pleasure. Its literary associations were irresistibly attractive to the young solicitor as well as to the father. Dickens, Thackeray, John Leech, Mark Lemon, and the staff of Punch generally, besides many other literary celebrities of that time, loved the old place, and often dined there on plain British fare.
But there was another reason a prosaic one why J. Watts and his son usually made the " Old Bell " their headquarters in London. It was, in fact, in Bedford Row, in one of those old-fashioned houses with oak-panelled rooms, that the London agents of J. Watts had their offices. It happened during the bathing season at a cer- tain town on the East Anglian coast that he made the acquaintance of a novelist at the Assembly Rooms an acquaintance that ripened into friendship.
Through this chance meeting can be indirectly traced Watts- Dunton's introduction to the Rossetti circle, which subsequently led to the famous companionship with Swinburne at The Pines. Watts-Dunton met his new friend several times before he realized that he had formed the acquaint- ance of one of the best-known novelists of the day.
The discovery came about in this wise. He happened one morning to take up a copy of the Saturday Review at his hotel ; the number contained an appreciative notice of a novel by his friend, just published. The name of this writer was F. Robinson, author of Grand- mother's Money and a number of other successful works of fiction.
Robinson was thoroughly acquainted, as Watts-Dunton was not long in discovering, with " Grub Street " life and its fraternity, being on intimate terms, indeed, with a number of leading Fleet Street jour- nalists. I shall go back presently to my old happy hunting-grounds. He had never sufficiently recognized how " provincial " was his old native town, where a writer of considerable vogue among novel readers had been actually unknown to him even by name.
Obviously his acquaintance with the author of Grandmother's Money was one to cultivate, and during his next stay in London he paid a visit to Robinson's house in Brixton. The two men soon grew intimate, and a lasting friendship sprang up between them. Robinson was proprietor and editor. In it was proposed that Aylwin should appear in it in serial form, but the project fell through. He told his friend in confidence that he had written more than one novel, but had never yet attempted to " nobble a publisher ; " and Robinson, in his good-natured way, asked to see some specimen of his friend's attempts at novel-writing suggesting that, if found suitable, he would willingly submit the manuscript for consideration to his own publishers, for whom he was at that time acting as " reader.
Robinson read it with that businesslike promptitude which was one of his chief characteristics. His verdict upon this literary effort was exception- ally favourable ; he went so far as to offer to " nego- tiate " for its publication. But Watts-Dunton could not make up his mind as to what course to pursue whether to accept or refuse. In this case a chance was given him a chance, maybe, of seeing his dream of literary fame realized at one stroke. For many years Watts-Dunton acted as Robinson's legal adviser, as he acted for Rossetti, Morris, Swin- burne, and other literary friends.
When pressed for a decisive answer he still wavered, but finally he declined putting forward as an excuse for his refusal that in this novel he had failed to satisfy his artistic conscience. But he went on to confess that his decision was not arrived at without a still stronger reason: I think it would go How long will it take to publish? Ay, there's the rub.
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If you are going to press with it on your own account, or with a London publisher, you must insist upon despatch. There is a story of a three- volume book being printed and published in three days, but three weeks could see it done if publishers were energetic. After the middle of July the libraries are slack; all the best books are supposed to be out by that time, or put off till October. I should like to read it before you have made up your mind to anything. Can't you send me the copy as far as you have gone?
Never mind about ' fair ' copy, and let me sit in judgment on the story concerning the merits of which I am sanguine, for know I not of what sterling stuff T. When are you coming to town? I should like to see you immensely, to talk of the novel and of your extraordinary dash into two volumes out of three since I last heard from you. Your hard work makes me shudder. Here, on the flat of my back in a shady corner of my study, let me con- gratulate you on your industry.
Everything depends on your striking before the Lothair fever has burned itself out. Work of another kind has not turned up, and made another torso of Balmoral, has it? I hardly wonder he has lived, after being impressed by every ' gal ' in his way from the first chapter. It is interesting to note that Robinson's letter about Balmoral was written twenty-eight years before Ay twin was published.
I wait patiently for the New Novel by T. Robinson's opinion of its merits was unequivocally favourable. Whatever may have been the cause, whether it was that " other work turned up," as sug- gested by Robinson, " and made another torso of Bal- moral" or whether, as before, he was overruled by force of " the artistic conscience," who shall decide? The latter reason would seem the most probable, for this novel was, at the time of his decease, still extant in its old manuscript form the precise form in which it was read by his friend forty-five years before.
Doubt- less in this instance, as in every other instance in the days that followed those early days, the imaginative work he achieved never satisfied him always fell short, in fact, of his lofty ideal of literary perfection. In his friend F. Robinson he had found an experienced writer of fiction, a man recognized by publishers as an excellent judge of the market value of a novel. But the author of Balmoral, whether he realized or not that he was letting a prize slip from his grasp, refused, as before, to listen to persuasion.
He let twenty-eight years go by following upon this period, and in fact he reached the mature age of sixty-six before he de- cided reluctantly even then to publish a novel. In- deed, after having toiled over Ay twin intermittently for more than twenty years, he was heard to say, on the very day upon which he parted with the last slips, " If I had only kept back the proofs for another month, what a masterpiece I could have made of this novel! Robinson, Watts- Dunton began to visit London at shorter intervals.
The inducements for these visits were becoming stronger every year. His vivacious brother, Eugene, was a successful solicitor in London ; one of his sisters had recently married the junior partner in the house of his father's agents, Mason and Sons, solicitors in Bedford Row ; and his favourite uncle, Orlando Watts, occupied an important position in a large legal firm in Buckingham Street, Strand. In addition to these family links between London and St.
Theodore Watts-Dunton was a vital figure in the literary world of Victorian London
Ives, a far stronger inducement for widening and cementing his connection with London was the decline of his father's business at St. In fact, the prospect of inheriting the remunerative business anticipated by father and son, in the first instance, seemed to be getting some- what problematical. At this very moment his brother Eugene, the London solicitor, died suddenly at his house at Sydenham, from heart-trouble contracted from rheumatic fever in early life, and there is little doubt that the death of this favourite brother influ- enced him as much as anything else in his decision to quit St.
Ives and start practising for himself as a solicitor in London. This decision, however, was not immediately carried into effect. He divided his time between severing his legal connections with St. Ives and seeking in London for a new set of clients. Indeed, it was during one of these lengthy business visits to the metropolis in search of clients that his noteworthy introduction into the Rossetti circle took place. It changed the entire course of his career, and finally decided him in his choice of London as a per- manent home. The walk led them in the direction of Dr.
Gordon Hake's house in Kingston Vale. Latham was a friend of Hake's, and seized the opportunity of introducing Watts- Dunton ; for he had lent him a copy of Hake's book The World's Epitaph a book which Watts-Dunton had quite recently read, casually expressing to Latham a wish to meet the author. This meeting was the means of bringing Watts- Dunton into touch with Rossetti, and consequently with the whole of that famous circle of artists and men of letters among whom the " mysterious poet-painter of Cheyne Walk " was at the time the most distinguished. Latham, vide Athenceum, March 17, Gordon Hake, and how that meeting had an immense influence upon the whole of his future career.
This is how it came about. His studies on the Continent ran in two parallel lines artistic and scientific. He knew Tre- lawney and Landor, whom he met, among others of literary fame, at Florence in In art he had some- thing new to tell the world about the secret of " pose " and the following of the drapery in antique sculpture ; in science he had formed theories so startling at that time as to be alarming, though they are now suffi- ciently familiar to us all under the name of " evolution " and " the survival of the fittest.
Being at that time friendly with Harrison Ainsworth, and also with the Landseers, all of whom had turned to art, he was in- vited by Ainsworth to publish the story in Ainsworth's Magazine, to be illustrated by one of Edwin Landseer's brothers. This was done, and instalments of a romance as original as anything of Blake's began to appear in that journal. While the ordinary reader of Ainsworth' s Magazine stood bewildered before such a work, there were a few who were fascinated by it.
Among these latter was a young artist and poet as yet almost unknown in London, who was in the habit of reading the magazines and news- papers in a coffee-house in the vicinity of Fleet Street. After studying this remarkable production, he turned to the text, and found that to be still more remarkable.
- Strange Beasts in a Small Town;
- Ive Got Something To Say;
- Main Content.
- Theodore Watts-Dunton?
- Theodore Watts-Dunton.
Month after month he hurried to the coffee-house to read a fresh instalment. This young; artist was Dante Rossetti. He now wrote to Gordon Hake inquiring whether Valdarno was an original work or a translation from an Italian romance, though, as Rossetti himself admitted to Watts-Dunton in after years, he never regarded it as a translation, but used this subterfuge as an excuse for writing.
Years passed away, and while Hake remained obscure, Rossetti had become famous. He recalled to mind the letter he had received from Rossetti, and being quite unaware that the poet-painter was at that time the most exclusive man in London, he boldly rapped at the door in Cheyne Walk that door at which even old friends of Rossetti 's were half afraid to rap.
Many have had the good fortune of hearing this famous interview described by Gordon Hake on the one hand and by Rossetti on the other- each among the most original humorists of our time. Watts-Dunton has often described that meeting as told to him by D. When Rossetti found that the quiet, dignified Eng- lish gentleman who towered benignly over his head was the author of the " weird and wonderful " romance Valdarno, and that he had come to answer in person the letter written so many years before, he was con- quered, and received his new friend with open arms.
An intimacy of the closest kind was the result. He fell into the habit, in fact, of quoting his " encyclopaedic friend " on nearly every topic that chanced to crop up in conversation. This habit of his led Rossetti, with his lively sense of humour, to refer at last to " Theodore Watts " as the " Oraculum of the hayfield. Surely, if Watts-Dunton had made his own particular choice of the man whom he wished above all others to introduce him to Dante Gabriel Rossetti, he would have appreciation of Madeline that he wrote a review of it in the Aca- demy.
This was in Watts-Dunton was also a great admirer of this dramatic poem. No better test of Watts-Dunton's magnetism his extraordinary tact and personal charm could have been found than the crucial one: From the day on which they became acquainted, Rossetti ceased to speak in ironical terms of " Theodore Watts. At the beginning of the year only a few months before Rossetti's first meeting with Watts-Dunton that half- forgotten affair of the Buchanan pamphlet, called The Fleshly School of Poetry, was published.
He was the victim of chloral, and had been for years, and this drug working perni- ciously upon strained nerves, had thrown him into a state of hypochondria. Rossetti's Letters and Memoirs, Vol.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti act. The Buchanan affair had dis- turbed the mental balance as any other powerful incen- tive might have done when the mind was overwrought by large and frequent doses of chloral resulting in deep melancholy and weakness of will. On one of these visits Watts-Dunton began to expatiate upon the difficulty that budding novelists experience in securing a publisher.
With an air of mystery in his manner, he presently touched upon the subject of a novel in manuscript which a friend of his had lent him to read, with a request for a candid criticism. James Douglas, in his volume Theodore Watts-Dunton: Poet, Novelist, Critic, that Dr. Gordon Hake acted as Rossetti's physician. This is a misconception. Gordon Hake retired from practice some ten years before he met Rossetti. In fact, the more he talked about it the more did he rouse their curiosity. He had promised to spend the day at Roehampton on the fol- lowing Sunday, and Gordon Hake urged him to bring the manuscript with him.
He consented, at the same time giving his friends very pointedly to understand that he was not at liberty to disclose the author's name ; and this naturally increased the eagerness of every one present to hear the story read. The reading of the opening chapters of this novel in manuscript was given with a keen sense of dramatic effect, and made a deep impression.
But before Watts- Dunton had finished, the doctor began to entertain a shrewd notion as to the authorship. It was not, how- ever, until Watts-Dunton had bid his friends good-night that his audience ventured to cast an inquiring glance into each other's faces to find out whether each of them had come to the same conclusion. The merry laugh that resulted convinced them that on this point there was complete unanimity. A mock round-robin a docu- ment still preserved by his sister, Miss Theresa Watts was posted to Watts-Dunton on the following day, charging him with the authorship.
The discovery ex- cited a good deal of badinage, which no one could have taken in better part than did the unmasked author. Of course not a single word of the manuscript was in his own handwriting. It was not from any recognition of the caligraphy, therefore, that the clue to the author had been discovered. Those chapters written and read in manuscript were the opening chap- ters of Aylwin. A short time before the sudden and unexpected journey of Dante Rossetti into Scotland, Gordon Hake had invited a number of literary friends to a garden party at his Roehampton house.
In his forced absence from home on a visit to Rossetti the duties of host devolved upon his eldest son, Thomas Hake. Much to his relief, Watts-Dunton, who had just arrived at Putney from St. Ives, came across to Roehampton, and accepted an invitation to stay there for a few days and assist Gordon Hake's young son in facing the ordeal of the garden party during the absence of his father. Watts- Dunton proved a brilliant acquisition ; and it was on this occasion that he met many of those famous men in literature and art, such as Ford Madox Brown, Westland Marston, Franz Hueffer, and others, with whom afterwards he came to be on such intimate terms.
O sooner had Rossetti settled down at Kelmscott after his beneficial sojourn at Crieff than Watts- Dunton went there on his first visit to the poet-painter at this picturesque old manor house. Kelmscott is a seventeenth-century building, at that time in the joint occupancy of Rossetti and Morris. It is a rare example of antiquity, with its many gables and its massive gray walls, the windows having square case- ments with stone mullions. From the front of the house there is an extensive view of meadow-land, and the garden is mostly remarkable for its yew-tree hedges cut in fantastic shapes.
This visit of Watts-Dunton's to Kelmscott was made the occasion for advising with Rossetti upon an affair that required delicate handling. Watts-Dunton had been introduced into the Pre-Raphaelite circle not merely as a man of literary attainments, but as a skilled lawyer ; and the affair in question bore reference to a forgery of Dante Rossetti 's name on a cheque by one against whom Rossetti, for private reasons, shrank from taking legal action. The matter was soon settled, and in a way that satis- fied Rossetti ; for in a letter to his brother, dated from Kelmscott Manor, September , he writes: Watts's friendly offices, the cheque business seems in a fair way of being quashed.
Watts-Dunton had not been many hours at the manor house before he began to realize the truth of Gordon Hake's remarks in the letter to him some months before while with Rossetti in Scotland, that he would find the poet-painter surprisingly devoid of that interest in Nature one usually looks for in an artist. Indeed, during those two years' residence at Kelms- cott from to where Watts-Dunton was a frequent visitor, the contrast between his own nature- loving mind and the art-loving mind of Rossetti was so obvious that the poet-painter one day remarked to his friend, as he looked round him with the sun shining over the meadows and the river: It's a great loss being born in a big city, where my youth was passed a great loss.
Ives, as I began to learn art in my youth in London. As a natural consequence, the most frequented room in the old manor house was Rossetti 's Tapestry Room, as the studio was called, with its quaint old furniture, and walls everywhere covered with pictures, more especially with chalk drawings of female heads.
It is seen in Sunset Wings, written at Kelmscott ; for this poem " embodies a habit of the starlings," to use Rossetti's own words, " most beautiful and interesting in summer and autumn. In fact, the irresistible im- pulse to puzzle out the biblical sequence of incidents proved somewhat depressing to an -artist of Rossetti's temperament. If taken down it might go to pieces! More satis- fying in its romantic suggestion was the view from the south window, where you could get not only a glimpse of the Thames with its meadows of clover and the elm- covered hill beyond, but see a picturesque barn, and the dovecot, and the flank of the earlier house, with its little gables and gray scaled roofs.
In his autobiographical " Notes " on his visits to Kelmscott, Watts-Dunton remarks: At the time of Watts-Dunton 's first visit, the poet-painter was deeply interested in Dumas. He had taken down to Kelmscott a complete edition of the novels in French the well-known edition in green covers. He persuaded himself that every one of them was written by the great romancer, and it was delight- ful to hear him talking about one Dumas novel after another, showing an intimate knowledge of the plot and characters in each. While talking he was very much given to using the expression mon cher y which, as he confessed, he had caught from a French painter, who always began his remarks in this style when in a chaffing mood.
And what splendid artistic work he produced while at his easel during those memorable days in the " tapestry room "! It was there that Prosper ine was achieved. It was a constant source of wonder to every one especially to Watts-Dunton, who was sensitive to in- terruption when over his literary work that Rossetti, while talking and laughing, was achieving masterpieces in art. He had at times, however, fits of deep depression, when he would roll about in a restless manner on the big sofa covered with holland, lost in thought, seemingly quite unconscious of any one's presence.
Watts-Dunton witnessed many examples of Ros- setti's sense of humour, which he made use of in Aylzvin. And in this novel he has said of D'Arcy, who is, of course, Rossetti to the life, that " when his spirits were at the highest he was without an equal as a wit, without an equal as a humorist. At such moments painting, reading, or writing became essential until this sense of deep depression fled. He had not the precious faculty, possessed on occasion by some poetic minds, of " letting the world slide. Morris could put aside all the worries of preoccupation attaching to any work as soon as he had left that particular work for some other phase of activity.
Therein lay the secret of his amazing thoroughness. He brought a fresh unruffled mind to the consideration of the fresh project. Rossetti 's William Morris Photo by Fred. The worry, the irritation, the regret, remained like a ground swell long after the storm had passed ; and upon its troubled waters other matters were tossed restlessly about.
One day the studio was unceremoniously invaded by Rossetti's housekeeper a somewhat querulous person while the poet-painter was standing at his easel en- gaged in a talk about his beloved Dumas with Watts- Dunton. Rossetti flew into a rage, but presently calming down told the woman to send the servants upstairs into the studio.
When they had assembled, he ordered them to stand in a row.