The London Library Magazine Issue 33 Autumn 2016

Aquatint by J.C. Stadler after Joseph Farington’s painting of Nuneham Courtenay, from William Combe’s An History of the River Thames (1794–6).

HIDDEN CORNERS: OLD FATHER THAMES

Christina Hardyment’s quest for literature inspired by the River Thames began in Topography, England, Thames, but she soon discovered that the Library’s holdings on the river were concealed upstairs, downstairs and in the Atlas Cases.

When I was given the go-ahead to turn my lifelong love of the Thames into a book about its literature, Writing the Thames (Bodleian Library, 2016), The London Library was my first port of call. Which was odd, because I live in Oxford, and have the formidable Bodleian Library a ten-minute bike ride away. But, as all aficionados of our Library know, if one wants inspiration coupled with exercise, there is no better starting point than meandering along the shelfmark devoted to one’s subject. Once there, like Horace Walpole’s princes of Serendip, one will ‘make discoveries, by accident and sagacity, of things one was not in quest of’ .

Propinquity is as important as serendipity. Unlike coldly blinkered digital library catalogues, which only show you what you ask for, open shelves offer stimulating new acquaintances propped among familiar friends. The Library’s Topography, England, Thames holdings include the two heavy hitters of Thames history, Fred S. Thacker’s The Thames Highway: A History of the Inland Navigation (1914) and Peter Ackroyd’s Thames: Sacred River (2007), as well as a respectable range of books by enthusiasts and specialists. But to my mind its most interesting holdings reflect its mid-nineteenth-century beginnings, a time when railways were taking commercial traffic off the river. Pleasure-boating thus became safer and was hugely popular.

Trains also provided convenient holiday transport: frilly-eaved stations along the length of the river meant that sybaritic downstream boating could come into its own. All the requirements of a Victorian cabin library can be found in the Library, mainly in the Thames shelfmark.

The Irish poet and humorist John Fisher Murray completed A Picturesque Tour of the River Thames in its Western Course, including particular descriptions of Richmond, Windsor and Hampton Court (1845) soon after the Library was founded. It has over a hundred wood-engravings, four maps and a fine aerial view of Hampton Court. At Chertsey Abbey, Murray muses on the fate of the monks whose many monasteries once bordered the Thames, and quotes a macabre discovery described by the antiquary William Stukeley in his 1724 Itinerarium Curiosum (the Library has the 1776 edition in Ant., 4to.). In the grounds of the abbey, he found that ‘human bones of the abbots, monks, and great personages, who were buried in great numbers in the church and cloisters [were] spread thick all over the garden … so that one may pick up handfuls of bits of bones at a time’ .

James Thorne’s Rambles by Rivers: The Thames (1847) is a fat little dark green volume and easily overlooked, but take it out and enjoy its generous illustrations and caustic tone. Cricklade is ‘dull to live in, dull to look at, and dull to talk about’; Faringdon is ‘a wearisome place to spend a wet day’; Cumnor ‘has little to reward the visitor’; Abingdon is ‘quiet, clean and dull’; the ‘peasantry’ of the Chiltern Hills ‘are among the most uncouth in England’ ; and fishing from punts (then a hugely popular sport) is ‘monstrously monotonous’ .

Thorne was much thumbed by Samuel Carter Hall and his wife Anna Maria Fielding while writing The Book of the Thames from its Rise to its Fall (1859). They gratefully acknowledged their many debts to Thorne, ‘a scholar, a gentleman, a close observer, and a lover of nature’ . Carter Hall contributed grandiloquent comments on the river’s picturesque qualities as well as arcane historical and architectural information. A keen fisherman, he offered advice to fellow ‘brethren of the angle’ , and included the names of local experts. His wife Anna, then a popular novelist, wrote the book’s copious nature notes and its dramatic anecdotes about river folk. A succession of artists travelled with them on their expeditions, and the book is full of intriguing details of Thames life.

The Stream of Pleasure: A Narrative of a Journey on the Thames, from Oxford to London (1891) by the American novelist and travel writer Elizabeth Robins, and illustrated by her artist husband Joseph Pennell, is an account of the couple’s own experiences when they hired a stubby pair-oared skiff from Salters of Oxford, planning to camp in it during a three-week cruise downstream to Richmond. ‘It had a green waterproof cover which stretched over three iron hoops and converted it for all practical purposes into a small, a very small, houseboat … Salter’s men provided us with an ingenious stove with kettles and frying pans fitting into each other like the pieces of a Chinese puzzle, a lantern, cups and saucers and plates, knives and forks and spoons, a can of alcohol [for the stove] and, for crowning comfort, a mattress large enough for a double bedstead. It filled the boat from stern to bow, bulging out and through the rowlocks. It was clear that if it went, we must stay, and so we said, as if we rather liked the prospect of roughing it, that we could manage just as well and be just as comfortable if we slept on our rugs. ’

They soon discovered that the attractive riverside inns were much more comfortable than sleeping on board. Robins has a sense of humour, as well as being well up in the lore of the Thames, and is amusingly frank about the pouring rain, the perils of negotiating bridges, weirs and locks in a strong current, ‘those river fiends, the steam launches’ , and the unlovely aspects of houseboats on which ‘buckets, brooms and life-preservers were the only ornaments’ .

Since I have a camping punt, my own favourite among early guides to the Thames is George Dunlop Leslie’s Our River: Personal Reminiscences of an Artist’s Life on the River Thames (1888).

‘Captain Jinks of the “Selfish” and His Friends Enjoying Themselves on the River’, Frederick Walker’s cartoon of a steam launch, Punch, 21 August 1869.

It is a hymn in part to the Thames, but primarily to the punt. Leslie’s had a short mast so that he could hoist a lug-sail on occasion. At this time, passengers lounged against the flat sill in the bow, and the punter walked the boat’s length to pole it along. Leslie emphasised the importance of handling the pole ‘like a billiard cue, lightly in the hand’ . ‘Avoid carrying it bodily up the boat after a shove, as this tires you, ’ he continues. ‘The proper way is merely to carry the pole back, with the fingers of one hand loosely holding the thin end, allowing the other to trail in the water, which will bear the main weight. ’

Leslie was part of a circle of Royal Academicians who often gathered at Yewden Manor, the home of Gustav Schwabe, a wealthy patron of the arts, and a splendid group portrait of them by Henry Stamford Wells survives. Behind Leslie, shown elegantly posed in his punt, is Greenlands, a handsome white house which was owned by W.H. Smith. The most famous of all writers about the river, Jerome K. Jerome, refers to it in Three Men in a Boat (1889) as ‘the rather uninteresting residence of my newsagent’ . Finding his book and the similarly legendary Thames novels Alice in Wonderland (1865) and The Wind in the Willows (1908) requires more legwork: across to the Central Stacks Floors 2 (Fiction, Jerome) and 6 (Children’s Books, Carroll and Grahame). Mark Davis’s excellent Alice in Waterland: Lewis Carroll and the River Thames in Oxford (2010) is in L. English Lit., Carroll.

The most essential Victorian guide was Dickens’s Dictionary of the Thames, from its source to the Nore: An Unconventional Handbook by the son of the famous novelist. Updated every year between 1880 and 1896 (the Library has the 1888 and 1890 editions), it is an A to Z of quirky information as well as practical details of train and steamer times, special excursions, facilities for anglers, boat hire and inns along the river. Charley, of whose ‘indescribable lassitude’ his father often complained, may have acquired his affection for the river at Eton; he boasts of ‘a practical Thames experience of over twenty years’ . He gives several pages of recipes for ‘Cups, Cocktails and Grogs’ , all of which ‘have successfully passed the ordeal of personal experience’ , and the text often verges on the personal, as in this entry under B for Bathing: ‘Few things are pleasanter on a hot day than a plunge into one of the deep, quiet, shady pools in which the Thames abounds. Few things are more exhilarating than to rise after a scientific header in the rushing waters below some such weir as that at Marlow. ’

In modern acquisitions by the Library, there are many lush colour photographs of the river, but to my mind there is nothing to beat the atmospheric black and white of the images produced by Henry Taunt (1842– 1922). Oxford born and bred, Taunt began with short illustrated guides to villages and towns local to Oxford. You’ll find examples in Topography, England, under Iffley, Fairford and Goring; the last of these sports a very fine advertisement of Taunt’s wares in the form of a cartoon of Father Thames being photographed. Taunt loved the river, and travelled along it in a houseboat with a camera on a tripod on its roof. Photographs by both Taunt and his contemporary Francis Frith are a feature of John Leyland’s The Thames Illustrated: A Picturesque Journeying from Richmond to Oxford (1920, T. England, Thames, 4to.). Its reproductions seem a little drab at first glance, but there are some gems among them. ‘Kennington Reach: A Sailing Race’ is full of movement, ‘Boulter’s Lock’ predictably chaotic. Leyland supplies copious curious facts and literary references. I like the idea of Charles James Fox taking his ease in his house overlooking the river at Chertsey, ‘sitting on a haycock, reading novels, and watching the jays stealing his cherries’ .

To find the most interesting pre- Victorian accounts of voyaging along the Thames, you need to trek far from Topography. One of the earliest is well hidden in Biography, in a diametrically distant corner of the Library. Charles Mitchell’s Hogarth’s Peregrination (1952) is the edited and published version of a manuscript written and illustrated by William Hogarth and four friends; it told the story of a drunken excursion on the Thames which they made in 1732 from the city to the Isle of Sheppey and back.

‘Straw was our bed and a tilt [a hooped awning] our covering … we had much rain and no sleep for three hours. ’ They ate ‘hung beef’ and biscuits, washed down with gin, and admired the naval men-ofwar anchored in the Thames, which had been well defended since the daring raid made by the Dutch in 1667. After a night at Gravesend, they summoned a barber to shave them and powder their wigs, then drank coffee and ate buttered toast before setting off on foot for Rochester Castle. Pickled in liquor, they walked to Queensborough, behaving remarkably badly on the way. They chucked ‘sticks, pebbles and Hog’s Dung’ at each other and, at Hoo, Hogarth ‘untruss’d upon a Grave Rail in an unseemly Manner’ , and was duly punished by being thrashed with nettles ‘on ye part offending’ .

Grandest among books on the Thames is William Combe’s hefty two-volume folio An History of the River Thames, with splendid plates by Joseph Farington (1794–6, Atlas Cases), though sadly the Library’s copy is lacking many of the plates. Hundreds of other books that relate in one way or another to the Thames are scattered all over the Library. The houses of authors who chose to live by the river include William Morris’s Kelmscott, near Lechlade in the Cotswolds, Alexander Pope’s villa at Twickenham and Horace Walpole’s nearby gew-gaw of a house Strawberry Hill, as well as the homes of Shelley, Thomas Love Peacock and Leigh Hunt at Marlow: details of these abound in both Biography and Art. Poetic offerings are as varied as Thomas Burke’s The Song Book of Quong Lee of Limehouse (1920, Pamphlet 3579) and J.B. Firth’s The Minstrelsy of Isis (1908, L. English Anthols.). Sax Rohmer’s and his experiences in a blacking factory by fiendish Fu Manchu ‘always made his den off Shadwell Highway, the mansion upstream … the hulk lying off the marshes’ (The Mystery of Dr Fu-Manchu, 1913, Fiction). Izaac Walton sings the praises of the river and its eastern tributary the Lea in The Compleat Angler; the Library has a lovely 1904 copy illustrated by Edmund H. New in S. Fishing. Horticulturalists like John Tradescant and John Evelyn, both copiously referenced in the Library, gardened on its banks.

Many of the Library’s early members were particularly fond of the Thames. Its founder Thomas Carlyle lived close to the river in Cheyne Row; in 1874 he wrote a letter to John Ruskin exulting in the completion of Joseph Bazalgette’s embankment: ‘Miles of the noblest Promenade. The Thames pushing grandly past you, & even at low-water leaving a foot or two of pure gravel; a labyrinthic [sic] flower-garden, subsidiary walks, & grand pavements; Cheyne Walk looking altogether royal on you through the old umbrage & the new. ’

Illustration by Marcus Stone showing Gaffer Hexam, from Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend (serialised 1864).

Charles Dickens was a founder member of the Library; he wrote The Tale of Two Cities (1859) after Carlyle sent him a bundle of its books about the French Revolution. The Thames haunts many of his novels. As a child, he lived on the southern shores of its marshy estuary (immortalised in the opening chapters of Great Expectations), Hungerford Stairs by the Strand are recalled headquarters upon the river … the opium in David Copperfield. Oliver Twist’s Bill Sykes lives around Bermondsey, and Our Mutual Friend opens with Gaffer Hexam sitting in the prow of his boat ‘like a roused bird of prey’ , seeking out drowned bodies.

Henry James had a winter pied-àterre in Carlyle Mansions on Cheyne Walk. ‘This Chelsea perch, this haunt of sage and seagull, proved, even after a brief experiment, just the thing for me, ’ he wrote soon after leasing Flat 21 in 1912; he also enjoyed watching eights rowing: ‘great, white, water-skimming birds with eight-feathered wings’ (downstairs again to find both quotes in Peter Vansittart’s London: A Literary Companion in T. London). Another member, Bram Stoker, whose Dracula crosses the Thames at the tide’s ebb, lived close by James in Chelsea.

A lovely recent addition to the Library’s Thames holdings is Panorama of the Thames: A Riverside View of Georgian London by John R. Inglis and Jill Sanders (2015). Finally, no sweep across the literature of the Thames would be complete without mention of Robert Gibbings’ two much-loved books, Sweet My Song (1957), both on the Thames shelves. The first was written in wartime, and became so popular that it was issued in a special Forces edition. The second celebrates Gibbings’ retirement to Long Wittenham on the Thames in Oxfordshire.

It ends with the reflection that ‘The quiet of an age-old river is like the slow turning of pages of a well-loved book'.