A Book for a Rainy Day; or, Recollections of the Events of the Years 1766-1833. John Thomas Smith
remained his friend through life. He was a widower, childless, and enormously rich. No artist had known better how to make art profitable. His purchases of antiques in Rome had been most prudent; so, also, his investments. As a sculptor of portrait busts he stood alone, and in his long working life he had “chopped out” the heads of many hundreds of wealthy and illustrious persons. When he died in April 1823, no one was surprised that his estate was declared to be of the value of £300,000. But very little of it went to “Tom,” who, to his intense chagrin, received a bare hundred pounds as one of the three executors.
Five years later, Smith brought out his hit-back biography. Its general veracity cannot be doubted. It is a veracity sharpened, not deflected, by malice. But it is clear that Smith found other satisfactions in writing the book than that of exposing the weaknesses of his old friend. He enjoyed the long and minute chronicle of life in Mortimer Street and in the studios and galleries he had frequented. Nollekens comes and goes in a world of gossip about London, art, and people. True, at any moment a mischievous gust may blow aside the veils to show us Mrs. Nollekens, in second-hand finery, beating down the price of a new broom or a chicken with cunning affability, or the sculptor pocketing nutmegs at the Royal Academy dinners to be added to the Mortimer Street larder. If you protest against these and worse freedoms, you are grateful for the hundred little touches of locality and custom that accompany them. The daily life of the eighteenth century is before you: the parlour, the street, the print shop.
Of Smith’s reign in the Print Room not much can be gathered. He was much liked and respected by those who consulted him in his department. We are told that he was kind to young artists of promise, and gently candid to those of no promise. His recollections and anecdotes were the delight of his visitors, one of whom has left us a racy specimen of his flow of humour and gossip. I refer to the following passage of Boswellian reminiscence, appended to the second and third edition, of the Rainy Day.
“His two old friends, Mr. Packer, who had been a partner in Combe’s brewery, and Colonel Phillips, who had accompanied Captain Cooke in one of his voyages round the world, were constant attendants in the Print Room, and contributed towards the general amusement. Of the former of these gentlemen, who died in 1828, at the advanced age of ninety, Mr. Smith used to tell a remarkable story, which we are rather surprised not to find recorded in his Reminiscences. It was our fortune to be the first to communicate to Mr. Smith the fact of his old friend’s decease, and that he had bequeathed to him a legacy of £100. ‘Ah, Sir!’ he said, in a very solemn manner, after a long pause, ‘poor fellow, he pined to death on account of a rash promise of marriage he had made.’ We humbly ventured to express our doubts, having seen him not long before looking not only very un-Romeo like, but very hale and hearty; and besides, we begged to suggest that other reasons might be given for the decease of a respectable gentleman of ninety. ‘No, Sir,’ said Mr. Smith; ‘what I tell you is the fact, and sit ye down, and I’ll tell ye the whole story. Many years ago, when Mr. Packer was a young man employed in the brew-house in which he afterwards became a partner, he courted, and promised marriage to, a worthy young woman in his own sphere of life. But, as his circumstances improved, he raised his ideas, and, not to make a long story of it, married another woman with a good deal of money. The injured fair one was indignant, but, as she had no written promise to show, was, after some violent scenes, obliged to put up with a verbal assurance that she should be the next Mrs. Packer. After a few years the first Mrs. P. died, and she then claimed the fulfilment of his promise, but was again deceived in the same way, and obliged to put up with a similar pledge. A second time he became a widower, and a third time he deceived his unfortunate first love, who, indignant and furious beyond measure, threatened all sorts of violent proceedings. To pacify her, Mr. P. gave her a written promise that, if a widower, he would marry her when he attained the age of one hundred years! Now he had lost his last wife some time since, and every time he came to see me at the Museum, he fretted and fumed because he should be obliged to marry that awful woman at last. This could not go on long, and, as you tell me, he has just dropped off. If it hadn’t been for this, he would have lived as long as Old Parr. And now,’ finished Mr. Smith, with the utmost solemnity, ‘let this be a warning to you. Don’t make rash promises to women; but if you will do so, don’t make them in writing.’ ”
Had John Thomas Smith been granted the scriptural span of life, he might have read the Pickwick Papers. But the implacable call came in March 1833, and he left various enterprises unfinished. He had collected the materials for a gossipping history of Covent Garden; these have never been edited. The well-known Antiquarian Rambles in the Streets of London, published in 1846, originated in Smith’s notes, but four-fifths of the book was certainly written by its editor, Dr. Charles Mackay.
The book from which Smith has his sobriquet was published in 1845. A Book for a Rainy Day places its author in that line of London’s watchful lovers which began with John Stow and has not ended with Sir Walter Besant. Now, when London’s streets are changing as they have not changed since the Great Fire, he lies in that bare field of the dead behind the Bayswater Road, where, on the grave of a greater writer, you read the words, “Alas! poor Yorick.”
W. W.
A BOOK FOR A RAINY DAY
The Reader is requested to keep in mind that those events which I relate of myself when “mewling in my nurse’s arms,” and until my fourth year, were communicated to me by my parents, and that my statements from that period are mostly from my own memory;—Miranda proved to Prospero that she recollected an event in her fourth year.
1766.
My father informed me, that in the evening of the 23rd of June 1766, which must have been much about the time when Marylebone Gardens echoed the melodious notes of Tommy Lowe,[2] and whilst there was The Devil to Pay at Richmond with Mr. and Mrs. Love,[3] my mother, on returning from a visit to her brother, Mr. Edward Tarr,[4] became so seriously indisposed, that she most strenuously requested him to allow her to return home in a hackney coach, whilst he went to Jermyn Street for Dr. Hunter.[5] Upon that gentleman’s arrival at my father’s door, No. 7, in Great Portland Street,[6] Marylebone, he assisted the nurse in conveying my mother and myself to her chamber. Although I dare not presume to suppose that the vehicle in which I was born had been the equipage of the great John Duke of Marlborough, or Sarah his Duchess, at all events I probably may be correct in the conjecture that the hack was in some degree similar to those introduced by Kip, in his Plates for Strype’s edition of Stowe.[7]
Hackney chairs were then so numerous, that their stands extended round Covent Garden, and often down the adjacent streets;[8] these vehicles frequently enabled physicians to approach their patients in a warm state. The forms of those to which I allude are also given in Kip’s prints above mentioned; and who knows but that they, in their turn, have conveyed Voltaire from the theatre to his lodging in Maiden Lane?[9]
That sedans were of ancient use I make no doubt, as I find one introduced in Sir George Staunton’s Embassy to China.[10] Pliny has stated that his uncle was much accustomed to be carried abroad in a chair.[11] My parents, after a fireside debate, agreed that I should have two Christian names: John, after my grandfather, a Shropshire clothier, whose bust, modelled by my father, was one of the first publicly exhibited by the Associated Artists in 1763, before the establishment of the Royal Academy;[12] and Thomas, to the honour of our family, in remembrance of my great-uncle, Admiral Smith, better known under the appellation of “Tom of Ten Thousand,”[13] of whom I have a spirited half-length portrait, painted by the celebrated Richard Wilson, the landscape painter, previous to his visiting Rome, when he resided in the apartments on the north side of Covent Garden, which had been occupied first by Sir Peter Lely, and afterwards by Sir Godfrey Kneller.[14] From this picture there is an excellent engraving in mezzotinto, by Faber.