A Book for a Rainy Day; or, Recollections of the Events of the Years 1766-1833. John Thomas Smith
AUTHOR’S PREFACE
The highly flattering manner in which my work, entitled Nollekens and his Times, was generally received, induced me to collect numerous scattered biographical papers, which I have considerably augmented with a variety of subjects, arranged chronologically, according to the years of my life.
Some may object to my vanity, in expecting the reader of the following pages to be pleased with so heterogeneous a dish. It is, I own, what ought to be called a salmagundi, or it may be likened to various suits of clothes, made up of remnants of all colours. One promise I can make, that as my pieces are mostly of new cloth, they will last the longer. Dr. Johnson has said:
“All knowledge is of itself of some value. There is nothing so minute or inconsiderable, that I would not rather know, than not.”
Lord Orrery, in a letter to Dr. Birch, dated November, 1741, makes the following observation:
“I look upon anecdotes as debts due to the public, which every man, when he has that kind of cash by him, ought to pay.”
J. T. Smith.
THIS EDITION
The first two editions of A Book for a Rainy Day appeared in 1845, twelve years after John Thomas Smith’s death, and a third appeared in 1861. As these editions do not contain half a dozen notes other than Smith’s own, this may claim to be the first annotated edition. It is also the first in which numerous original misprints have been (as I hope) corrected.
The lapse of seventy years has made many notes necessary. I have endeavoured to write these in the spirit of the book, making them something more than brief categorical answers to questions suggested by Smith’s journal. His own notes were interesting after-thoughts, and for this reason, and to avoid confusion, the great majority are now incorporated in his text. Where any are retained as footnotes, Smith’s authorship is indicated. If my additions to the book seem profuse, I can only plead that the Rainy Day offers to the annotator that abundance of material which has long pleased and bewildered its “Grangerisers.” And our climate has not improved.
I wish to acknowledge the use I have made of the Dictionary of National Biography, Notes and Queries, Mr. Wheatley’s London Past and Present, Mr. George Clinch’s Bloomsbury and St. Giles’s, and his Marylebone and St. Pancras, Mr. Warwick Wroth’s London Pleasure Gardens of the Eighteenth Century, Mr. Percy Fitzgerald’s Life of Garrick, Mr. Austin Dobson’s Hogarth, Mr. Laurence Binyon’s Catalogue of Drawings by British Artists in the Print Department, the Gentleman’s Magazine, the works of Cunningham and Redgrave, and such autobiographies as those of Henry Angelo, Thomas Dibdin, John Taylor, W. H. Pyne, Sir Nathaniel Wraxhall, B. R. Haydon, Madam D’Arblay, Dr. Trusler, and Letitia Hawkins. It is remarkable how John Thomas Smith’s own books supplement each other. His Nollekens and his Times is an inexhaustible budget of facts, and its usefulness has been increased by the index provided in Mr. Gosse’s edition of 1895.
It should be remembered that the year-dates which Smith uses as chapter headings do not represent the times at which the respective chapters were written. I judge that Smith was engaged on the Rainy Day only in the last three years of his life. His chronology is rather happy-go-lucky. For example, it must not be supposed that Dr. Burgess, of Mortimer Street, wore his cocked hat and deep ruffles in 1816, or that in that year Alderman Boydell might have been seen putting his head under the pump in Ironmonger Lane. These men died some years earlier. In accordance with the text of the third edition, Smith’s curious mention of the death of Dr. Johnson will be found under the year 1803.
W. W.
June 1905.
JOHN THOMAS SMITH
John Thomas, or “Rainy Day,” Smith was born in a London hackney coach, on the evening of the 23rd of June 1766. His mother had spent the evening at the house of her brother, Mr. Edward Tarr, a convivial glass-grinder of Earl Street, Seven Dials, and the coach was conveying her back with necessary haste to her home at No. 7 Great Portland Street. Sixty-seven years later, the man who had entered thus hurriedly into the world left it with almost equal unexpectedness in his house, No. 22 University Street, after holding for seventeen years the post of Keeper of the Prints at the British Museum.
As a writer John Thomas Smith takes no high rank; but he is a delightful gossip, full of his two subjects: London and Art. We know him when he exclaims to a visitor in the Print Room, “What I tell you is the fact, and sit down, and I’ll tell ye the whole story.” Smith’s narrative manner is always that: “Sit down, and I’ll tell ye the whole story.” Such historians are often found in life, mighty recollectors before the Lord, who talk books which no one can inspire them to write. And it is well that when Smith did write he took small pains to be fine or literary. Writing as a man, and not as the scribes, he produced in his Nollekens and his Times one of the most entertaining harum-scarum biographies ever seen, and in his Book for a Rainy Day, or Recollections of the Events of the Years 1766–1833, a budget of memories which has perhaps been less read and more quoted than any book of its kind.
Smith’s valuable quality is his interest in the life he lived and saw lived. He was zealous to record those trivial facts of to-day which become piquant to-morrow, a habit that reveals itself in the way he mentions his birth as happening “whilst Maddox was balancing a straw at the Little Theatre in the Haymarket, and Marylebone Gardens re-echoed the melodious notes of Tommy Lowe.” In a friend’s album he wrote—
“I can boast of seven events, some of which great men would be proud of:
“I received a kiss when a boy from the beautiful Mrs. Robinson;
“Was patted on the head by Dr. Johnson;
“Have frequently held Sir Joshua Reynolds’s spectacles;
“Partook of a pint of porter with an elephant;
“Saved Lady Hamilton from falling when the melancholy news arrived of Lord Nelson’s death;
“Three times conversed with King George the Third;
“And was shut up in a room with Mr. Kean’s lion.”
These events are more curious than fateful, and, indeed, Smith’s career is little more than a record of plates etched and books published. He is entertaining because he was out and about in London for sixty years, and looked upon anecdotes as “debts due to the public.”
Almost as soon as Mrs. Smith’s hackney coach had brought her to No. 7 Great Portland Street—a house whose site is now covered, as I reckon, by No. 38—Dr. William Hunter, brother of the great John Hunter, arrived from Jermyn Street, and performed his duties with the skill of a Physician-Extraordinary to the Queen. The attendance of such a man proves the material comfort of the Smith family. Nathaniel Smith, the flustered father, was principal assistant to Joseph Nollekens, the sculptor, and he had worked for Joseph Wilton and the great Roubiliac. For Wilton he carved three of the