TOM HOOD’S HOUSE. ST JOHN’S WOOD.
The room in which he worked at 17 Elm Tree Road gave him a view of Lord’s Cricket Ground, and he complained that this was a drawback, because “when he was at work he could often see others at play.” He caricatured the landlady of the house, who had “a large and personal love of flowers,” and made her the heroine of his Mrs. Gardiner, A Horticultural Romance. From Elm Tree Road he went to attend the dinner at Greenwich that was given to Dickens on his second return from America; and describing this dissipation in a letter to a friend he says, “You will be pleased to hear that, in spite of my warnings and forebodings, I got better and betterer, till by dining, as the physicians did, on turtle soup, white-bait, and champagne, I seemed quite well.” He was to have been chairman at the dinner, but excused himself on the score of ill-health, and Captain Marryat took his place. The diners included, in addition to Dickens himself, Moncton Milnes, Forster, Clarkson Stanfield, Ainsworth, Landseer (another St. John’s Wood resident), Cruikshank, Cattermole, “Ingoldsby” Barham, and Barry Cornwall. Being called upon for a speech, Hood said he supposed they drank his health because he was a notorious invalid, but assured the company that the trembling of his hand was neither from palsy nor ague, but that their wishes had already so improved his circulation and filled him with genial warmth that his hand had a natural inclination to shake itself with every one present. Whereupon everybody within reach, and some who were not, insisted upon shaking hands with him. “Very gratifying, wasn’t it?” he finishes his letter. “Though I cannot go quite so far as Jane, who wants me to have that hand chopped off, bottled, and preserved in spirits. She was sitting up for me, very anxiously, as usual when I go out, because I am so domestic and steady, and was down at the door before I could ring at the gate, to which Boz kindly sent me in his own carriage. Poor girl! what would she do if she had a wild husband instead of a tame one.”
Dickens, at that date, lived at 1 Devonshire Terrace, Marylebone Road; they had probably driven up together from Greenwich, and the carriage had come the mile or so further on with Hood after leaving Dickens at his own door. Dickens was one of the many visitors who have helped to make Hood’s St. John’s Wood residence memorable; there is a record of his being there, with his wife and sister and Daniel Maclise, in December 1842. At Elm Tree Road, for all his broken health, Hood worked hard at editing and writing for the New Monthly Magazine, and, after resigning from that, for Hood’s Monthly Magazine. One letter of his, dated from 17 Elm Tree Road, on the 18th July 1843, is headed “From my bed”; for he was frequently bedridden for days and weeks at a stretch, but sat propped up with pillows, writing and sketching with unabated industry. He was contributing also in these days to Punch, and to Douglas Jerrold’s Illuminated Magazine. In November 1843 he wrote here, for Punch, his grim Drop of Gin:
“Gin! Gin! a drop of Gin!
What magnified monsters circle therein!
Ragged, and stained with filth and mud,
Some plague-spotted, and some with blood!
Shapes of misery, shame, and sin!
Figures that make us loathe and tremble,
Creatures scarce human, that more resemble
Broods of diabolical kin,
Ghost and vampyre, demon and Jin!...”
But a far greater poem than this, The Song of the Shirt, was also written at Elm Tree Road. “Now mind, Hood, mark my words,” said Mrs. Hood, when he was putting up the manuscript for the post, “this will tell wonderfully. It is one of the best things you ever did.” And the results justified her. The verses appeared in the Christmas Number of Punch for 1843, and not only trebled the circulation of that paper, but within a very short time had at least doubled Hood’s reputation, though Eugene Aram, The Plea of the Midsummer Fairies, and Lycus the Centaur, had long preceded it. Probably no poem ever stirred the national conscience more deeply or created a profounder sensation. Shortly after its appearance Cowden Clarke met Hood, and has left a vivid description of his personal appearance in those last months of his life. His worn, pallid look, he says, “strangely belied the effect of jocularity and high spirits conveyed by his writings. He punned incessantly, but languidly, almost as if unable to think in any other way than in play upon words. His smile was attractively sweet; it bespoke the affectionate-natured man which his serious verses—those especially addressed to his wife or his children—show him to be, and it also revealed the depth of pathos in his soul that inspired his Bridge of Sighs, Song of the Shirt, and Eugene Aram.”
THOMAS HOOD
There are many interesting points of resemblance between Hood and Lamb. Both were inveterate punsters; each had known poverty, and had come through hard experiences that had left their marks upon them, yet had never soured them or warped their sympathies. You may use the same epithets for both: they were homely, kindly, gentle, given to freakish moods and whimsical jesting; the one was as unselfishly devoted to his sister as the other was to his wife and children; and in descriptions of Hood, as of Lamb, stress is laid on the peculiar wistfulness and sweetness of his smile. But after the East India Company had handsomely pensioned him off, Lamb had no further financial anxieties; whilst Hood had to suppress his finer gifts, and to the end of his days turn his hand to all manner of inferior but more popular work, that would enable him to keep the family pot boiling. And he was all the while fighting against disease as well as poverty. He could not afford to go into exile, like Stevenson, and lengthen his days and foster his wasting strength in a healthfuller climate. He was never rich enough to have any choice but to die in the place where he had to earn his living, and no man ever worked more manfully, or died at his post bravelier or with a more cheery philosophy.
Read the humorous preface he wrote for the volume of Hood’s Own, whilst he lay ill abed there in his St. John’s Wood house: it is the sort of humour that makes your heart ache, for you cannot forget that he was racked with pain and slowly dying whilst he wrote it. He jests about the aristocratic, ghastly slenderness of his fingers; his body, he says, may cry craven, but luckily his mind has no mind to give in. “‘Things may take a turn,’ as the pig said on the spit.... As to health? it’s the weather of the body—it rains, it hails, it blows, it snows at present, but it may clear up by-and-by”; and in conclusion he mentions that the doctor tells him, “anatomically my heart is lower hung than usual, but what of that? The more need to keep it up!” Raised up in bed, with an improvised desk across his knees, he was hard at work, writing prose and verse and knocking off grotesque little drawings, and remained, as he said, “a lively Hood to get a livelihood,” almost to his last hour. When, towards the end, his wife was trying to relieve his sufferings by putting a poultice on his emaciated body, he laughed up at her quizzically, and asked if she didn’t think “it seemed a deal of mustard for such a little meat.” He had moved into Devonshire Lodge, and was within sixteen months of his death when he wrote The Haunted House, and The Bridge of Sighs. “I fear that so far as I myself am concerned,” he writes to Thackeray in August 1844, “King Death will claim me ere many months elapse. However, there’s a good time coming, if not in this world, most assuredly in the next.” When he was invited next month to attend a soirée at the Manchester Athenæum, he had to decline, and added, “For me all long journeys are over save one”; but a couple of months later he had written the Lay of the Labourer, for his magazine, and writing to Lord Lytton remarked that though the doctor had ordered him not to work he was compelled to do so, and “so it will be to the end. I must die in harness, like a hero—or a horse.”