At the library table

by Adrian H. Joline

WILLIAM HARRISON AINSWORTH

Reviewers, critics and students of literature are inclined to resent the assertion with respect to a writer once eminent, that he is substantially forgotten. But it is safe to say that if we regard the millions of readers in this country whose literary nutriment is made up chiefly of works of fiction or of biography of the lighter sort, as “the reading public of America”, the name of William Harrison Ainsworth is by no means familiar in the United States. There are many book-owners who keep his “Works” upon their shelves, and know the backs of the volumes, and some of the omnivorous have doubtless read “Jack Sheppard”, “Crichton”, “The Tower of London”, and perhaps “Rookwood”; yet thousands who are well acquainted with their Scott, their Dickens and their Thackeray would be sorely puzzled if they were asked to tell us who Ainsworth was, and exactly when he lived, or to give a synopsis of the plot of a single one of his numerous stories; and he has been dead not quite thirty years.

Allibone gives him but fourteen lines of biography, mostly bitter censure, with a few words of qualified praise for such historical tales as “St. Paul’s” and “The Tower”. The indifference to him is not limited to general readers or to America. Chamber’s Encyclopædia of English Literature begrudges him twenty-nine lines of depreciative comment, conceding to him dramatic art and power, but denying to him “originality or felicity of humor or character”. He is not even mentioned in Mr. Edmund Gosse’s Modern English Literature, and Taine does not condescend to give his name. In the History of Nicoll and Seccombe no reference to him can be found. In the pretentious volumes of the History of English Literature edited by Garnett and Gosse a portrait of him is given with a rough draft of a Cruikshank drawing; and this is what is said of him: “A very popular exponent of the grotesque and the sensational in historical romance was William Harrison Ainsworth (1805–1882), a Manchester solicitor, who wrote Rookwood, 1834, Jack Sheppard, 1839, and The Tower of London, 1840. He was a sort of Cruikshank of the pen, delighting in violent and lurid scenes, crowded with animated figures”. This is rather an absurd mess of misinformation. One would scarcely believe that there was a time when he was esteemed to be a worthy rival of Charles Dickens, and when in the eyes of the critics and of the public he far outshone Edward Lytton Bulwer.

In a note to the sketch in the Dictionary of National Biography, Mr. W. E. A. Axon says that “no biography of Ainsworth has appeared or is likely to be published.” The fact is correctly stated, but the prediction may not be fulfilled. In 1902, Mr. Axon himself expanded the Dictionary article and made it into an excellent memoir of forty-three pages, but only a few copies were printed. It contains five portraits. A devoted admirer of Ainsworth has been for some years engaged in the preparation of an extended biography. I do not give his name, for he probably prefers to make the announcement at his own time and in his own way. A few years ago I became the possessor of a considerable number of autographic relics of Ainsworth, including a memorandum book and a manuscript volume containing an account of his travels in Italy in 1830, dedicated to his wife, with a poem; some letters to him from Cruikshank; thirty-six pages of the draft of “Jack Sheppard”, and more than two hundred of his own letters. It is gratifying to know that my friend who is at work on the “Life” has been aided by this little collection.

The only published records of Ainsworth’s life, other than those to which I have referred, are, as far as I have been able to discover, a brief memoir by Laman Blanchard which appeared in the Mirror in 1842 and was reproduced in later editions of “Rookwood”; a chapter in Madden’s Life of Lady Blessington; a sketch by James Crossley contributed to the Routledge edition of the Ballads in 1855; and an account of him by William Bates, accompanying a semi-caricature portrait in the Maclise Portrait Gallery.

Ainsworth was born in his father’s house on King Street, Manchester, February 4, 1805. His family was “respectable” in the English sense, for his grandfather on his mother’s side was a Unitarian minister, and his father a prosperous solicitor. It was from the mother that he inherited in 1842 some “landed property” to use another distinctively English phrase, and it is amusing to observe the pride of Madden when he boasts that Ainsworth’s name appears in Burke’s Landed Gentry. He attended the Free Grammar School in Manchester, where it is said that he was proficient in Latin and Greek, and as he was expected to succeed to his father’s practice, he became an articled clerk in the office of Mr. Alexander Kay, at the age of sixteen. He was a handsome boy, full of ambition, but his ambition did not lead him in the dull and dusty paths which solicitors tread. He had already written a drama, for private production, which was printed in Arliss’s Magazine, and a number of sketches, translations and minor papers for a serial called The Manchester Iris, and he subsequently conducted a periodical styled The Boeotian, which had a short existence of six months. Before he was nineteen, he was a regular contributor to the London Magazine and the Edinburgh Magazine. Some of these youthful efforts were collected in “December Tales” (1823), which also contained sketches by James Crossley and John Partington Aston. In 1822 he issued a pamphlet of “Poems, by Cheviot Tichborn”, which as Mr. Axon informs us, is quite distinct from another pamphlet called “The Works of Cheviot Tichborn”, printed in 1825, apparently for private circulation.

The Tichborn book of verses was dedicated to Charles Lamb. The author was a devoted admirer of Elia, and as early as 1822 Lamb had lent him a copy of Cyril Tourneur’s play or plays. On May 7, 1822, Lamb wrote to him a letter, (printed in The Lambs, by William Carew Hazlitt, 1897) referring to the book and saying, among other things, “I have read your poetry with pleasure. The tales are pretty and prettily told. It is only sometimes a little careless, I mean as to redundancy.” The letter mentions the proposed dedication deprecatingly and modestly.

Talfourd, Canon Ainger and Fitzgerald in their collections give two other letters, written respectively on December 9 and December 29, 1823, one thanking Ainsworth for “books and compliments,” and the other giving Lamb-like excuses for not leaving beloved London to pay a visit to Manchester.[^[6]] It was something of an honor for a lad of seventeen to receive the praise of Charles Lamb, who appears to have discovered one of his young correspondent’s besetting sins—redundancy. But it may not have meant much, for in those days they exchanged compliments more profusely than is customary at the present time.

All these excursions in the field of authorship were fatal to the grave study of the law, for which he had no taste, and although when his father died in 1824 he went to London to finish his term with Mr. Jacob Phillips of the Inner Temple, it was a foregone conclusion that, whatever his career might be, it would not be that of a solicitor. About 1826, one John Ebers, a publisher in Bond Street, and also manager of the Opera House, brought out a novel called “Sir John Chiverton,” which received the favor of Sir Walter Scott, who said of it in his diary (October 17, 1826), that he had read it with interest, and that it was “a clever book,” at the same time asserting that he himself was the originator of the style in which it was written. For many years it was supposed that Ainsworth was its sole author, but it was claimed in 1877 by Mr. John Partington Aston, a lawyer, who had been a fellow-clerk of Ainsworth’s in Mr. Kay’s office, and the book was probably the result of collaboration. The dedicatory verses are supposed to have been addressed to Anne Frances Ebers, John Ebers’ daughter, whom Ainsworth married on October 11, 1826. Soon afterwards he seems to have been occupied in editing one of those absurd “Annuals” so common in those days, for we find Tom Moore recording in his journal in 1827, that he had been asked to edit the Forget-Me-Not to begin with the second number, “as the present editor is Mr. Ainsworth (I think), the son-in-law of Ebers.” The compensation offered to Moore was £500, which indicates that such work was paid for liberally, but it is not likely that Ainsworth received as much. A year or so after the marriage—within a year in fact—he followed his father-in-law’s advice and became himself a publisher and a bookseller; but at the end of eighteen months he decided to abandon the business.

If we may judge by one of the letters in my collection, it is not surprising that he was not overwhelmingly successful. He writes to Thomas Hill for a notice in the Chronicle of a book the copyright of which he had recently purchased, adding, “the work is really a most scientific one—indeed the only distinct treatise on Confectionery extant.” Perhaps this was the work of Ude, the cook, whose publisher he was; but he also “brought out” Caroline Norton as an author, of whom he writes to Charles Ollier, in his graceful, rather lady-like chirography: