Guest post: John Pym, ‘A bit of fun with Calderon’

On 7 May 2016 Patrick Miles wrote a post on George Calderon and William Caine’s pantomime The Brave Little Tailor in which he reproduced the cover of the published version (1923) and also Caine’s Preface – the first paragraph of which read:

During the winter of 1913 Calderon asked me to write a pantomime with him. Naturally I agreed, though I had little expectation of ever seeing the thing finished. That didn’t seem to matter. What did matter was that I should be engaged upon a bit of fun with Calderon. Together we were to concoct absurdities. There would be laughter.

And I should preface the following remarks – sparked by the sentence, ‘What did matter was that I should be engaged upon a bit of fun with Calderon’ – with the disclaimer that these remarks are no more than pure conjecture…

  *           *           *

What caught George Calderon’s fancy when he browsed the shelves of Horace Pym’s library at Foxwold, during his several visits with his wife Kittie to that large family house on Brasted Chart in Kent – on visits to Horace’s son Evey and his wife Violet, Kittie’s kinswoman – in the early years of the twentieth century? Horace, a successful London solicitor and passionate bibliophile, had died in 1896, aged 51, but the house he had built for himself and his family in the 1880s would have been fresh with his memory at the time of the Calderons’ visits – and the room in which it remained freshest was undoubtedly the large L-shaped library (or ‘Book Room’) filled with thousands of leather-bound volumes of literature, history and science that were bathed during the day in an almost soporific blue half-light from a row of leaded panes.

Perhaps George looked through Horace’s own guide to the library, A Tour round my Book-shelves (1891) – and there came upon an account of a visit to Foxwold by the Scottish folklorist and man-of-letters Andrew Lang on 14 December 1889. Lang, it appears, discovered that Horace’s close friend the novelist and humourist Anstey Guthrie had written a parody of Lang’s literary criticism and that this squib had found its way into a privately printed book called The Boy who fought for England (1886). Not to be outdone, Lang sat down on 15 December and dashed off a parody of a parody — as he noted, ‘much more like Andrew Lang than Guthrie’s’: a pre-Christmas jeu d’esprit that one of Horace’s heroes, Charles Dickens, would surely have applauded.

T. Anstey Guthrie (‘F. Anstey’)

Only one bound copy of The Boy who fought for England exists. For more than a hundred years it was kept in a place of honour in the library and if a guest happened to take it down Horace had thoughtfully added a few words explaining how the book had come about:

                           NOTE BY ONE OF THE PUBLIC

The Author of this little book is an invalid child of 8 years, and after a recovery from nearly three years of severe illness, he lately had a relapse, which necessitated his again lying flat on his back. During this time of retirement, he amused himself by writing little stories, which upon being read to him, he enlarged and amended in many ways.

On sending his first completed novelette to his beloved friend, the Author of “Vice Versâ” [the comic novel of 1882 in which a father and son exchange bodies], Mr. Anstey Guthrie most kindly had it printed, to the intense gratification of his small ally, and afterwards drew for him the capital illustrations bound up with this copy, as well as writing the following delightful press notices. A few additional pictures are added to complete this little Lad’s first attempt at a “Granger,” and his original MS. sketch before alteration is also added.
                                                                                  H.

To which Horace later wrote in pencil:

Dec 1889  Mr. Andrew Lang has since added a capital M.S. burlesque criticism on the book, written in delightful caricature of his own method.
                                                                                  H.

The Boy who fought for England is a breathless tale of derring-do cast as the memoir of an old man, Tom Wilkins. It involves accidental parricide, some short sharp sanguinary battles, the cursory slaying of several wild animals and the unexpected discovery of two long-lost brothers, and it was written by Julian Tindale Pym (1877–98), Horace Pym’s first-born son.

Julian Pym, 1880s

Mr Guthrie corrected Julian’s spelling but retained some of its more humorous examples, such as ‘grelor’ for gorilla – and also performed a little judicious silent editing. He wrote eleven parody press notices, some of them lengthy, sending up the style of among others John Ruskin and Julia Wedgwood (and not forgetting Andrew Lang). And he ended these with a droll report from The Brasted Intelligencer and Chevening Chanticleer: ‘Without being quite able to re-echo the tone of somewhat extravagant laudation which has been perhaps too hastily raised by our fellow-organs in the Metropolis, we find much in this book to commend and little, comparatively, to condemn.’

Julian was a keen naturalist and had, as his book-plate designed by the artist Molly Evans attests, a particular interest in reptiles and amphibians. He had been an invalid since the age of five, when the family was then living at 100 Harley Street in London. He fell, it is said, from a pony trap near the London Zoo and severely injured his back.

The book that Horace and Mr Guthrie contrived from Julian’s ‘novelette’ of nine short chapters is above all perhaps – as an artefact of the late nineteenth century – an expression of love, a most touching example of a wish to help and entertain an invalid child for whom medicine could do little, but it is also – more significantly, perhaps, when thinking about it in relationship to George Calderon, and the quote that sparked this conjecture – an example of a certain irrepressible desire of the Victorians to have fun, to scoff in the face of adversity, to embark, one might say, when the opportunity presented itself, on a Pickwickian adventure. This was the air George Calderon breathed as a child, and an aspect of the nineteenth century that he carried with him into the Edwardian era.

Julian’s book (27cm x 36cm) is bound in half-leather with swirling green, gold and blue endpapers and cover; and is thoroughly ‘Grangerised’ (i.e., extra-illustrated to the max) not only with Guthrie’s humorous pen-and-ink drawings, but W.P. Frith’s engraved portrait of Charles Dickens at forty-seven at the peak of his confidence, a watercolour of a sea scene by Edoardo De Martino, an engraving of a tiger by Thomas George Cooper, Mrs Gamp beside her hearth, and several more. Julian must have been delighted with it!

Illustration by Anstey Guthrie, with Foxwold in the distance

Horace reprinted The Boy who fought for England in full at the end of A Tour round my Book-shelves and included with it his own ‘Note by One of the Public’ – what he omitted, however, was a letter from Anstey Guthrie that he had bound in to his son’s Grangerised novelette.

Here is what Julian’s beloved friend wrote:

                                                              6 Phillimore Gardens
                                                              Kensington
                                                              5 : April : 1886

My dear Pym
              I am sending you with this the Tatter [Julian’s MS?] and some assorted Press notices of the work. If after looking them through, you have any doubts whether they may some day hurt Julian’s feelings in the least, please tear them up – I only did them at Mrs. Pym’s request & for the fun of the thing. Of course he will not be affected by them one way or the other at present.
             With kindest regards & best love to Julian, Evelyn, Carol & Via
                                                    Yours always very truly
                                                          T. Anstey Guthrie

If George Calderon had happened to take down The Boy who fought for England – and perhaps shown it to Kittie with a smile – he would have read Anstey Guthrie’s letter and he would, I am sure, have recognised the spirit in which it was written.

To which Patrick Miles adds a Footnote: As an aspiring young humourist himself, George Calderon would definitely have known and admired the work of F. Anstey (the name under which Guthrie wrote). Indeed, George recited Guthrie’s ‘Burglar Bill’ at a Trinity College, Oxford, Smoking Concert on 29 November 1890 and Guthrie’s parodies Mr Punch’s Pocket Ibsen probably influenced his own Cinderella: An Ibsen Pantomime. George and Kittie coincided with Guthrie at Foxwold on 27 December 1905, when the Calderons were perhaps staying with the Lubbock family at Emmetts in Ide Hill. Guthrie came to lunch with the Calderons at Heathland Lodge on 7 January 1912, and wrote Kittie a long letter when they were in Glasgow in the autumn of 1909 for the first commercial performance of The Fountain and the British premiere of The Seagull in George’s translation.

© John Pym, 2016