Untold lives blog

Dickens’ trademark ‘door knocker’ beard didn’t appear until he was in his 40s, but clues from his correspondence suggest he took to the cultivation of facial hair in earnest and in doing so was truly a man of his time.

 Charles Dickens from John Forster, The Life of Charles Dickens  © The British Library Board  Images Online

The 1850’s saw the advent of the ‘beard movement’. The Victorians believed that manliness was directly linked to facial hair. Beards promoted impassivity, health and epitomised the successful and distinguished Victorian male. Household Words, a periodical edited by Dickens even ran an article entitled ‘Why shave’ – a veritable declaration of the rights of all men to shun the razor.

Dickens first began to experiment with facial hair around 1844 – with the addition of a moustache. He can be heard praising it in a letter to his friend Daniel Maclise: "The moustaches are glorious, glorious. I have cut them shorter, and trimmed them a little at the ends to improve their shape. They are charming, charming. Without them, life would be a blank".

In 1844 he can be found expressing his dismay in a letter to his wife Catherine that his brother Fred had grown a moustache: “He has a moustache … I feel (as the Stage Villains say) that either he or I must fall. Earth will not hold us both.”

A few years later in 1853 Dickens (sporting moustache and ‘Newgate Fringe’ (hair under the chin) was travelling in Italy with Wilkie Collins and Augustus Egg who, in the spirit of competition were both attempting to cultivate facial hair: “Collins’s moustache is gradually developing … He smooths it down over his mouth, in imitation of the present great Original …” Dickens compares Egg’s to those of the Witches in Macbeth and expresses chagrin that his valet has also begun to grow one.

Dickens’ friend John Forster took especial issue with the new moustache and called for a portrait of the author which he’d had commissioned to be delayed because of the ‘hideous disfigurement’. He mistakenly assumed it was a mere passing fancy on Dickens’ part but, as portraits from the time suggest, it was a stepping stone to greater things; the moustache foreshadowed the beard.

When friends expressed concern that it aged him, and disguised his precious expressions, Dickens responded that "the beard saved him the trouble of shaving, and much as he admired his own appearance before he allowed his beard to grow, he admired it much more now, and never neglected, when an opportunity offered, to gaze his fill at himself”.  He also joked that some people liked it because it meant they saw less of him.

By 1858 Forster had accepted that the beard was there to stay and quickly re-commissioned the portrait before the author’s face became covered entirely by hair.

Andrea Lloyd
Curator, Printed Literary Sources 1801-1914

Further reading:

Forster, John. The Life of Charles Dickens (London: Chapman & Hall, 1872-74) [010854.e.22.]

Letters of Charles Dickens to his wife Catherine, née Hogarth [BL Add MS 43689]

House, Madeline & Storey, Graham (eds.). The letters of Charles Dickens (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965-2002) [X.0900/46]

‘Why Shave?’ in Household Words (15th August 1853, v.7, pp.560-563) [P.P.6004.g. and now also free to access online]

On 7 February 1864 Charles Dickens should have been celebrating his 52nd birthday.  However on that day he received the tragic news that his son Walter had died in Calcutta on New Year’s Eve at the age of only 22.

Walter Landor Dickens had been serving as a military officer in India after being granted a cadetship in the East India Company’s Bengal Army in 1857.  Cadets had to secure nomination by a Company director.  Each director had a limited number of civil and military nominations in his gift each year and patronage networks often determined who should receive favour. In Walter’s case, Angela Burdett Coutts used her influence with director John Loch. 

IOR/L/MIL/9/241 f.495

Nomination was just the first step in being appointed an officer in the Company armies.  Direct entry cadets such as Walter who had not attended the Company’s Military Seminary at Addiscombe had to pass a number of tests which had been introduced in June 1851:

• Write English correctly from dictation.
• Have a ‘competent knowledge’ of the rules of arithmetic.
• Be able to translate passages from Latin into English.
• Be able to parse and show a knowledge of grammar and syntax.
• Pass a translation test from French to English, or from Hindustani to English.
• Pass an exam on the history of Greece, Rome, England, and British India.
• Know the modern divisions of the world, the principal nations of Europe and Asia, the names of European capitals and of the chief cities of India, and of the main rivers and mountains of the world.
• Have an elementary knowledge of fortification and some instruction in drawing.
• Submit a declaration of being a confirmed member of the Church of England, otherwise a certificate from a minister to prove they had been well instructed in the principles of religion in which they were raised.
• Produce testimonials of good moral conduct from their place of education.

The education Walter had received from Rev John Brackenbury at Wimbledon equipped him to succeed in these tests which were administered by professors from Addiscombe.  He was also given a medical and was certified as being free from ‘any mental or bodily defect whatever’. Unfortunately Walter’s health failed in India and he was on his way back to England on sick leave when he died.  His burial certificate in the India Office Records gives the cause of death as hematemesis (vomiting of blood).  He was interred on 1 January 1864 in the military burial ground at Fort William Calcutta. The childhood nickname of ‘Young Skull’ given to him by his father sadly proved to be all too appropriate.

Margaret Makepeace
Lead Curator East India Company Records

Further reading:
Dick Kooiman ‘The short career of Walter Dickens in India’ in Jos Gommans and Om Prakash (eds) Circumambulations in South Asian History (Brill, 2003).

Army papers for Walter Landor Dickens IOR/L/MIL/9/241 ff.493-498; IOR/L/MIL/9/273; IOR/L/MIL/9/285; IOR/L/MIL/10/65/696; IOR/L/MIL/10/105.

Rules for Army cadet examinations IOR/B/221 Court Minutes 22 Jan and 5 Feb 1851.

Burial entry 1864 IOR/N/1/106 f.159.

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The recent financial crisis has seen the collapse of many businesses, but similar tragedies are very common in history.  In 18th century London, neither the Poor Laws nor the parish workhouses were of any use to failing bookbinder Richard Smith who found himself confined for debt in the King’s Bench in 1732 together with his wife, Bridget, and their two year old child. 

The binder “had been always industrious and frugal, invincibly honest, and remarkable for conjugal affection” but had been afflicted by what he described as “a train of unlucky accidents”. Unable to escape their situation, the husband and wife committed suicide after having killed their daughter to prevent her from remaining “friendless in the world, exposed to ignorance and misery”.  The letters they left behind can be read in the Library’s copy of The Gentleman's magazine (Volume 2 p.722).  A later article in the Library’s copy of Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser  (Tuesday, September 21, 1779; Issue 3226) also covered the event (see the Burney Collection Database).

The Smiths were confident that God would take care of their “unbodied natures”, resigning themselves to him “without any terrible apprehensions”,  and left letters addressed to their landlord and to their cousin (the successful bookbinder John Brindley) which give a heart- rending description of their sufferings.  The contents show Smith to have been a sympathetic man who was careful to apologise for causing trouble to his friends, and who was sincerely sorry to have wronged Mr Brooks his creditor. He had settled his rent and was even concerned for the future of his pets “if you can find any Chap for my dog and antient cat, that would be kind”.

The impact of the suicide on contemporary society was wide ranging, and was discussed by Voltaire, Oliver Goldsmith and Tobias Smollett, all of whom admired Smith’s calm and rational explanation of his plight.  The story even found its way across the Atlantic via The Rhode Island Gazette (1732 BL microfilm M.misc.686) where it inspired an anonymous pamphlet An Appeal for the Georgia Colony (1732) which questioned the sense of sending debtors to gaol - thus effectively preventing them from paying their debts at all - and suggesting that a transfer to the colonies might be more useful.

This painful episode may have had a positive outcome. A newspaper cutting of the story is to be found in a scrap book, part of a Library collection compiled by the Victorian bookbinder, John Jaffray, who cannot fail to have been affected by it (see more on the Jaffray Collection).  Jaffray worked tirelessly for the well-being of his fellow craftsmen and to ensure that nothing like this could happen again he promoted the establishment of unions, pension societies and charitable establishments such as the Bookbinders’ Provident Asylum shown in this illustration from the Jaffray Collection.

Philippa Marks 
Curator, Bookbindings; Printed Historical Sources

Among the thousands of manuscripts uncovered from a walled up library cave at Dunhuang, northwest China, at the turn of the twentieth century, were a group of Buddhist scrolls copied by a man in his eighties.  The texts are all linked by a similar colophons, identifying the old man as the scribe and documenting his advancing years.  One of the scrolls, S.5451, today held at the British Library, shows the man at 83 years old demonstrating his piety by copying out a Buddhist scripture in his own hand, using ink mixed with his own blood. The colophon reads:

Copied by an old man of 83, who pricked his own hand to draw blood [to write with], on the 2nd of the 2nd month of 'bingyin', the 3rd year of Tianyou (27 February, 906).

  BL, S.5451

These documents illustrate a widespread belief in Buddhist cultures that by copying, or commissioning a copy of a Buddhist sutra, individuals would demonstrate their piety and devotion to the Dharma, or Buddhist doctrine, and in so doing accrue merit for their passage to the next life. 

 Not only was it believed that by replicating the words or image of the Buddha one could demonstrate and build on one’s own piety but also that doing so might improve the karmic lot of one’s relatives or loved ones, alive or already passed.  To this end, wealthy donors and patrons commissioned artists and craftsmen to decorate caves, create elaborate murals, and copy out Buddhist scriptures.  More modest individuals achieved similar ends by spreading the word via the oral traditions of storytelling and music, or by copying out scriptures in their own hand. The most pious sometimes gave their own blood to do so, as a particularly demonstrative and efficacious means of accruing religious merit.

The practice of blood-writing seen in this scroll seems to have been uncommon in other Buddhist cultures; while in China it actually predated the appearance of Buddhism. Acts of self-mortification also extended to more extreme practices of self-mutilation such as the amputation of fingers, and even self-immolation (burning oneself alive) as a means of demonstrating devotion and piety.  The example shown in our scroll S.5451 is not common among the Dunhuang manuscripts held at the British Library but it demonstrates an important phenomenon among pious Chinese Buddhists, which continued through to the seventeenth century.

Abby Baker
Education & Training Coordinator, The International Dunhuang Project

Further reading:

Jimmy Y.Yu, Bodies of Sanctity: Ascetic Practices in Late Imperial China

James Baskind, Mortification Practices in the Obaku School, Essays on East Asian Religion and Culture, Edited by Christian Wittern and Shi Lishan, Kyoto 2007

Inspired both by a favourable review in The Independent and an eye-catching poster pinned up on the Asian & African Studies Reading Room notice board, I visited The Flamboyant Mr. Chinnery exhibition at Asia House. Such opportunities very rarely arise, this being the first major display of his art in the UK in more than half a century. Two works from the India Office Prints and Drawings collection are included in this show.

An example of Chinnery's work from BL/WD 3385 Album of Drawings of Bengal f.27: Studies of a brick kiln and of a group of men sawing a plank 1821-1825. Images Online

While not a household name, George Chinnery (1774-1852) is now acknowledged as one of the foremost European artists based in Asia in the first half of the nineteenth century. He was nothing if not versatile, producing during the course of a long career spent largely in India and southern China a range of portraits, landscapes and street scenes in oil, watercolour and pencil. An exhibition caption states that he himself preferred creating landscapes. While there are several very fine examples of these in the show, this viewer liked best the portraits, especially a pair of dignified Chinese officials in exotic costume and above all the Anglo-Indian children of the East India Company administrator James Kirkpatrick. Kirkpatrick was the subject of the writer William Dalrymple's award-winning book White Mughals, published in 2002. Interestingly, a number of his sketches still have the original notes he wrote on them in shorthand, details of which the curators have incorporated into the exhibition catalogue.
 
Chinnery's life is as fascinating as his art. A Londoner by birth, he studied at the Royal Academy Schools but moved to Ireland when in his early twenties, marrying in Dublin in 1799. His elder brother William also left his native country, but in his case he fled to Sweden to avoid imprisonment for fraud. Leaving his wife and two infant children in Europe, in 1802 George Chinnery set out for Madras on the Gilwell, later transferring to the centre of British power in the sub-continent, Calcutta. His establishing himself among the British community and gaining patrons and commissions may have been assisted by his membership of the 'Star in the East' Masonic Lodge, but nevertheless he fell heavily into debt and left India altogether in 1825 to go to Macao. Apart from regular visits to Canton and a stint in Hong Kong he spent the rest of his life in this small Portuguese colony, being buried in the Old Protestant cemetery there. His name lives on to this day in the 'Rua George Chinnery', a photograph of which is to be found among the exhibits. 
 
The Flamboyant Mr. Chinnery runs until 21 January at Asia House, 63 New Cavendish Street W1, and is free of charge.

Hedley Sutton
Asian & African Studies Reference Team Leader

The professional dancers of the 18th-century London stage, like all but a few of the actors and actresses of the period, have almost entirely disappeared from view. Among those now emerging from undeserved obscurity is Hester Santlow Booth, who was both a leading dancer and a leading actress at Drury Lane between 1706 and 1733. Her acting roles, which may be traced through newspaper advertisements and printed playtexts surviving in the British Library’s collections, ranged from the title role in Charles Shadwell’s The Fair Quaker of Deal (which owed its initial success to her performance) to Ophelia in Shakespeare’s Hamlet (a part she played for much of her career).

Dancing is the most ephemeral of the performing arts, yet some of Hester Booth’s dances can successfully be reconstructed because they were recorded in one of the earliest forms of dance notation. Many of these notated dances can also be found in the Library. One of the rarest such works, A New Collection of Dances by the choreographer Anthony L’Abbé published in the mid-1720s, includes four of her dances. Among them, the solo Passagalia of Venüs & Adonis is remarkable for its length and its virtuosity. In performance, it brings fully to life the description of Mrs Booth’s dancing to be found in a poem by her husband, the much-admired actor and Drury Lane Theatre manager Barton Booth, published shortly after his death. Booth compared her to Venus, Daphne and Diana, writing of her ‘Sweetness with Majesty combin’d’ and her ‘Harmonious Gesture’ and exclaiming at how ‘She whirls around! she bounds! she springs!’. Such was his wife’s power in performance, that Booth was moved to ask ‘Can Eloquence herself do more?’. Dance, it seems, left drama behind when it came to a truly great dancer.

Moira Goff
Curator, Printed Historical Sources 1501-1800

Further Reading:
Booth, Barton. ‘Ode. On Mira, Dancing’, in Victor, Benjamin. Memoirs of the Life of Barton Booth, Esq; (London: John Watts, 1733), pp. 49-51

L’Abbé, Anthony. ‘Passagalia of Venüs & Adonis performd by Mrs Santlow’, in A New Collection of Dances ([London]:  Mr Barreau and Mr Roussau, [1725?]), plates 46-56

In the early 15th century the powerful Duchy of Burgundy with its huge territories in the Southern Netherlands, was a political and cultural rival to France. Into the magnificent Burgundian court circle, Jean de Wavrin was born in around 1398, bastard son of Robert, Count of Wavrin, who is believed to be the ancestor of King Juan Carlos of Spain and HRH the Prince of Wales.

Jean made his military debut as a young squire at the battle of Agincourt. He took part in numerous military expeditions for the Burgundians, and their English allies until 1435, when he married a wealthy widow from Lille, and was legitimised by the Duke of Burgundy. As Lord of Le Forestel, he performed numerous official duties for successive dukes, including embassies to the Pope and the English court.

© The British Library Board: Royal 15 E iv vol 1, f. 14

Image no: G70026-79  Discover more images from the Bl collections

In the last twenty-five years of his life Wavrin compiled his multi-volume chronicle of England from its legendary beginnings to 1471. Though his stated purpose was to please his nephew and to avoid idleness, his true motives will never be entirely clear. Wavrin was certainly an anglophile and probably met John of Lancaster, Anthony Woodville, brother-in-law of Edward IV and maybe the king himself during his temporary exile in Flanders. The later volumes provide a unique view from Europe of the Wars of the Roses, based on his personal knowledge of the events as they took place and on information he obtained from those involved on both sides. Edward IV owned a magnificent copy of the chronicle and two luxurious manuscripts to be displayed in the British Library’s Royal Manuscripts exhibition are part of his set.  The first contains a picture of Wavrin presenting his work to the English king.  However Wavrin died at about the age of 75, before the volume was completed in c.1475.

Chantry Westwell

On Remembrance Sunday, we are sharing a story about librarians who lost their lives serving in the First World War.

In 1923 The Library Association commissioned the calligraphers Edward Johnston and H Lawrence Christie to design a roll of honour commemorating the British librarians who fell in the Great War.  Johnston, a renowned calligrapher best-known for designing an alphabet used on London Underground signs until 1980, was familiar with the British Museum Library having studied its manuscript collections as a young man.  Christie was one of the co-founders of the Society of Scribes & Illuminators and had already designed other memorials to the 1914-1918 war, including the bronze panel in the House of Commons commemorating the five Committee Clerks who were killed in action.

Letter from H Lawrence Christie to W R B Prideaux, Secretary of the Library Association, showing the 1923 design for the roll of honour

The original design was for a roll of honour on a series of vellum panels behind glass and framed in oak, to be written and gilded by Edward Johnston and H Lawrence Christie, and framed at the Hampshire House Workshops in English Oak.  The Library Association contacted libraries across the United Kingdom asking for information about staff killed during the First World War.  When the replies came in it soon became clear that there were too many names to be easily accommodated by the original design.  Following the advice of Christie, it was decided that the entire memorial would be made of a series of wood panels incised in gilt.  English oak was chosen because, in the words of Christie “the wood seems to be thoroughly British and to symbolise Britain”.  The memorial was made by the workshops of Harry Hems and Sons of Exeter, ecclesiastical sculptor and wood carver.

The memorial, which was erected in the corridor leading to the Round Reading Room of the British Museum, was officially unveiled at a ceremony in Museum on the evening of Friday 24th October 1924.  The memorial remained at the British Museum until 1998 when it was moved to its current site in the British Library.

What is less well-known is that the Library Association also collected service details for each of the librarians named on the memorial.  Many of the forms returned included photographs, which are now held in the British Library Corporate Archive.  A selection of these has been made available on the BL Facebook pages.  More will be added during the coming week.

Unfortunately, we have very little information about the memorial or the librarians mentioned on it, and only have images for 30 of the 142 people named.  Please help us to tell the stories behind these ‘untold lives’ by using this blog or our Facebook gallery pages to share any information you have about the memorial or the librarians named on it.

Lynn Young
British Library Corporate Archivist