“Is it not possible [to] get me a short notice of the enclosed into the new Monthly? By so doing you will infinitely oblige one of the most beautiful women in the world—the Hon. Mrs. Norton, the granddaughter of Richard Brinsley Sheridan.”
In 1827 he published for Thomas Hood two volumes of “National Tales,” which are said to be the poorest books written by Hood. Christopher North said of them: “I am glad to see that they are published by Mr. Ainsworth to whom I wish all success in his new profession. He is himself a young gentleman of talents, and his Sir John Chiverton is a spirited and romantic performance.”[[7]]
It was for an annual issued by him that Sir Walter Scott wrote the “Bonnets of Bonnie Dundee,” and the story is told by Mr. Axon that Sir Walter received twenty guineas for it, but laughingly handed them over to the little daughter of Lockhart, at whose house he and Ainsworth met. He wrote some fragmentary and miscellaneous prose and verse, not of much importance; and in 1828 he travelled through Belgium and up the Rhine, going to Switzerland and Italy in 1830. The manuscript note-books which lie before me, the paper foxed and the ink faded, comprise a diary of the Italian part of the journey. I have toiled over the one hundred and sixty-eight pages, not always easily decipherable, but have found little which exceeds in value the ordinary guide-book of our own time. It was, we must remember, written only for his wife—whom he considerately left at home—and the dedicatory poem to her, consisting of fifty-eight unrhymed lines, written in Venice in September, 1830, is quite as commonplace as might be expected from a man of twenty-five, with little poetic inspiration but endowed with much verbal fluency, who was not writing for publication.
Soon after his return from the Continent, Ainsworth began the work from which he was to derive his chief title to fame—the composing of novels. It has been said that he was inspired by Mrs. Radcliffe, whose gloomy mysteries, weird scenes, and supernatural machinery once made her a favorite with fiction-lovers, and that he sought to adapt old legends to English soil. Others have ascribed his impulse to the influence of the French dramatic romancers, Eugène Sue, Victor Hugo, and Alexandre Dumas. I question whether he owed his inspiration to any particular source, although all these writers may have affected his temperament. Perhaps he unconsciously divined the needs of the reading public, of which his editorial experience may have taught him much. The inane, fashionable novel had become tiresome. Moreover, it was a time, in the early thirties, when the nation of England was absorbed in the growth of her material prosperity, and when a country is engrossed in commerce and manufactures, in the production of wealth, tales of adventure seem necessary to stimulate flagging imagination. We have seen the evidence of it in our own land during the past ten years, when casting aside the metaphysical, the psychological, the long drawn-out analyses of character, the public eagerly devoured story after story of fights and wars, and daring deeds, whose lucky authors bore off rewards of fabulous amount and grew rich upon the royalties earned by their hundreds of thousands of copies.
We are told by Mr. Axon that “the inspiration came to him when on a visit to Chesterfield in 1831”. He had visited Cuckfield Place, thought by Shelley to be “like bits of Mrs. Radcliffe”, and it occurred to Ainsworth that he might make something of an English story constructed upon similar lines. Begun in 1831, his “Rookwood” was published in 1834. It has generally been considered by critics to be a powerful but uneven story, and it leaped at once into popularity, carrying with it the youthful author. “The Romany Chant” and “Dick Turpin’s Ride to York” were the chief features; but the Ride was the thing, like the chariot race in Ben-Hur. It was actually dashed off in the glow of enthusiasm, the white heat of imagination. It was, says George Augustus Sala, “a piece of word painting rarely if ever surpassed in the prose of the Victorian Era,”[[8]] and he said this sixty years after the novel appeared. Ainsworth has told us the circumstances. “I wrote it” he said “in twenty-four hours of continuous work. I had previously arranged the meeting at Kilburn Wells, and the death of Tom King—a work of some little time—but from the moment I got Turpin on the high road, I wrote on and on till I landed him at York. I performed this literary feat, as you are pleased to call it, without the slightest sense of effort. I began in the morning, wrote all day, and as night wore on, my subject had completely mastered me, and I had no power to leave Turpin on the high road. I was swept away by the curious excitement and novelty of the situation; and being personally a good horseman, passionately fond of horses, and possessed moreover of accurate knowledge of a great part of the country, I was thoroughly at home with my work, and galloped on with my pet highwayman merrily enough. I must, however, confess that when my work was in proof, I went over the ground between London and York to verify the distances and localities, and was not a little surprised at my accuracy.” This tour de force—the composition of a hundred novel pages in so short a time, was performed at “The Elms,” a house at Kilburn where he was then living. It brings to mind the familiar story of Beckford, writing Vathek in French, in a single sitting of three days and two nights, which is more or less apocryphal.
It is a proof of the merit and of the success of this chapter that, like many other successful literary efforts, it was “claimed” by some one else. Mr. Bates refers rather indignantly to an assertion of R. Shelton Mackenzie, made upon the authority of Dr. Kenealy, and contained in the fifth volume of an American edition of the Noctes Ambrosianæ, that Doctor William Maginn, of convivial fame, wrote the “Ride” as well as all the slang songs in “Rookwood.” But Maginn was seldom sober and doubtless he bragged in his cups. Kenealy believed in Arthur Orton, the Tichborne “claimant,” and was capable of believing in any claimant, particularly if he was an Irishman; while Mackenzie was not celebrated for acumen or accuracy. Sala says of the absurd tale: “As to the truth or falsehood of this allegation I am wholly incompetent to pronounce; but looking at Ainsworth’s striking and powerful pictures of the Plague and the Fire in his ‘Old St. Paul’s,’ and the numerous studies of Tudor life in his ‘Tower of London,’ I should say that ‘Turpin’s Ride to York’ was a performance altogether within the compass of his capacity.”
In the light of later years, it is interesting to observe the comparisons made between Bulwer and Ainsworth. In Fraser’s Magazine for June, 1834, there is a review of “Rookwood” in which the author is praised far beyond the writer of Eugene Aram and Paul Clifford. Bulwer, according to Sala, was fated “to be beaten on his own ground by another writer of fiction very much his inferior in genius; but who was nevertheless endowed with a considerable amount of melodramatic power, and who had acquired a conspicuous facility for dramatic description.” It may be that the defeat drove Bulwer to those other fields in which he won the reputation which has preserved his name while that of his conqueror of seventy years ago has faded sadly.
It was erroneously believed by many that Ainsworth must have had some personal acquaintance with low life in London because of the ease with which he dealt with the thieves’ jargon, but his knowledge of it was but second-hand for he obtained it from the autobiography of James Hardy Vaux.[[9]] A second edition of “Rookwood” illustrated by George Cruikshank, appeared in 1836.
Ainsworth was now a conspicuous man, and his celebrity as an author, combined with his personal attractions, made him a welcome guest at many houses, notably at Gore House, where Lady Blessington so long held sway—“jolly old girl”, he calls her in one of my letters, written in 1836. The beauty at forty-seven was as fascinating as ever. “Everybody goes to Lady Blessington’s”, says Haydon in his Diary. The effervescent Sala tells of meeting Ainsworth there in a later time. “I think”, he says, “that on the evening in question there were present, among others, Daniel Maclise, the painter, and Ainsworth, the novelist. The author of “Jack Sheppard” was then a young man of about thirty, very handsome, but somewhat of the curled and oiled and glossy-whiskered D’Orsay type”. The D’Orsay type was by no means distasteful to my lady. Sala relates at second-hand the anecdote about Lady Blessington placing herself between D’Orsay and Ainsworth, and saying that she had for supporters the two handsomest men in London.
He was a favorite contributor to Fraser’s Magazine, and his portrait appears among “The Fraserians”, indeed a goodly company, for there are Coleridge, Southey, James Hogg, Lockhart, D’Orsay, Thackeray, Carlyle, Washington Irving, Sir David Brewster, and Theodore Hook, with many others. In the letter-press which accompanied the portrait,—supposed to have been written by Maginn—the Magazine says: “May he turn out many novels better, none worse, than ‘Rookwood’; may he, as far as is consistent with the frailty of humanity, penetrate puffery, and avoid the three insatiables of Solomon, King of Israel.”