“Few men had experienced more to sour them, or had gone through the author’s hardening ordeal of narrow circumstances, of daily labour, and of that disappointment in the higher aims of ambition, which must almost inevitably befall those who retain ideal standards of excellence to be reached but by time and leisure, and who are yet compelled to draw hourly upon immatured resources for the practical wants of life.”
Blanchard’s father was a painter and glazier in Southwark, who doubtless practised no little self-denial to give his son a good education, which could not but, as Sir Bulwer Lytton said, with a faint tinge of an old-world prejudice in his words, “unfit young Leman for the calling of his father;” “for it developed the abilities and bestowed the learning which may be said to lift a youth morally out of trade, and to refine him at once into a gentleman.” He began life at the desk as a clerk in the office of Mr. Charles Pearson, a proctor in Doctors’ Commons, and soon began to contribute some promising characteristic sketches to a publication called The Drama. As a clerk, he was not satisfactory nor satisfied; and his father was about to take him from it, and teach him his own trade, to avoid which Blanchard tried through the influence of the actor, Mr. Henry Johnston, to find an opening on the stage. The histrionic friend, however, painted the miseries and uncertainties of his profession in such gloomy and terrible colours, that the poor boy’s heart sank within him, and he had turned with despair to obscurity and trade when the manager of the Margate Theatre offered him an engagement, which he accepted. “A week,” says Mr. Buckstone, who was then on intimate terms with him, “was sufficient to disgust him with the beggary and drudgery of the country player’s life, and as there was no ‘Harlequin’ steaming it from Margate to London Bridge at that day, he performed his journey back on foot, having on reaching Rochester but his last shilling—the poet’s veritable last shilling—in his pocket.”
Buckstone also wrote:
“At that time a circumstance occurred which my poor friend’s fate has naturally brought to my recollection. He came to me late one evening in a state of great excitement, informed me that his father had turned him out of doors, that he was utterly hopeless and wretched, and was resolved to destroy himself. I used my best endeavours to console him, to lead his thoughts to the future, and hope in what chance and perseverance might effect for him. Our discourse took a livelier turn, and after making up a bed on a sofa in my own room I retired to rest. I soon slept soundly, but was awakened by hearing a footstep descending the stairs. I looked towards the sofa and discovered he had left it. I heard the street-door close. I instantly hurried on my clothes and followed him. I called to him, but received no answer. I ran till I saw him in the distance, also running. I again called his name, I implored him to stop, but he would not answer me. Still continuing his pace, I became alarmed, and doubled my speed. I came up to him near Westminster Bridge; he was hurrying to the steps leading to the river. I seized him, he threatened to strike me if I did not release him. I called for the watch, I entreated him to return; he became more pacified, but still seemed anxious to escape from me. By entreaties, by every means of persuasion I could think of, by threats to call for help, I succeeded in taking him back.”
After that desperate attempt, Blanchard obtained work as a printer’s reader with Messrs. Bayliss, of Fleet Street.
Thackeray summed up his poor friend’s condition at this time thus briefly:
“The young fellow, forced to the proctor’s desk, quite angry with the drudgery, theatre-stricken, poetry-stricken, writing dramatic sketches in Barry Cornwall’s manner, spouting ‘Leonidas’ before a manager, driven away starving from home, penniless and full of romance, courting his beautiful young wife.... Then there comes that pathetic little outbreak of despair, when the poor young fellow is nearly giving up, his father banishes him, no one will buy his poetry, he has no chance on his darling theatre, no chance of the wife that he is longing for. Why not finish life at once? He has read ‘Werter,’ and can understand suicide. ‘None,’ he says in a sonnet,
‘None, not the hoariest sage, may tell of all
The strong heart struggles, wills, before it fall.’
If respectability wanted to point a moral, isn’t there one here? Eschew poetry—avoid the theatre—stick to your business—do not read German novels—do not marry at twenty: and yet the young poet marries at twenty in the teeth of poverty and experience, labours away not unsuccessfully, puts Pegasus into harness, rises in social rank and public estimation, brings up happily an affectionate family, gets for himself a circle of the warmest friends, and thus carries on for twenty years, when a providential calamity visits him and the poor wife almost together, and removes them both.”
The “providential calamity” came in the beginning of 1844, when Mrs. Blanchard, the most tenderly-loving of wives, and a devoted mother, was attacked by paralysis, which affected the brain, and terminated in madness, speedily followed by death. Partial paralysis seized her husband, and in a burst of delirium, “having his little boy in bed by his side, and having said the Lord’s prayer but a short time before, he sprang out of bed in the absence of his nurse (whom he had besought not to leave him), and made away with himself with a razor.... At the very moment of his death his friends were making the kindest and most generous exertions on his behalf.” Thackeray, whom I have quoted, adds: “Such a noble, loving, and generous creature is never without such. The world, it is pleasant to think, is always a good and gentle world to the gentle and good, and reflects the benevolence with which they regard it.” This is comfortable doctrine, and I would I were sure of its truthfulness. I wonder what poor Gerald Griffin would have said of it in the year 1825, when he was residing at 15, Paddington Street, Regent’s Park, London, and, writing to his mother in Ireland, said: