"'Which I never touches, Mr. Wilson,' I says out loud—I couldn't have helped it, Mrs. Harris, if you'd took my life for it—'which I never touches, Mr. Wilson, on account of the lemon!'"
From the nature of Leech's work, he was never able to take a holiday in the true sense of the word. To say nothing of the numberless works which he had engaged himself to illustrate, the inevitable Punch must appear every week, and almost equally inevitable was the appearance of one or two of Leech's drawings in it. Proof is abundant of the rapidity with which those inimitable works were executed; but it must be borne in mind that they were the outcome of a sensitive organization—a power of seeing and seizing the humorous and the beautiful in the everyday incidents of life; in short, of a mind always on the watch for subjects for illustration.
When one thinks of the constant wear and tear of such a life, it is scarcely a matter for wonder that it was so lamentably short.
The localities of Leech's so-called holidays can easily be recognised by his drawings, or rather by their backgrounds, which showed, in admirable truthfulness, whether the artist was at Scarborough or Broadstairs, at Folkestone, Dover, Lowestoft, or Ramsgate, or, by their unfamiliarity to us, at some less frequented place.
It was in 1848, and while Mr. and Mrs. Leech were staying with the Dickens family at Brighton, that a very unpleasant incident of the visit took place: no less than the sudden insanity of the landlord of the house in which the party lodged, resulting in as sudden an exeunt of the lodgers. But before the people still in their senses could take themselves off, there was a duty to be done. A doctor must be fetched; and no sooner did he appear than the madman attacked him, and would very soon have made a vacancy in the list of M.D.'s if Dickens and Leech had not rushed to the rescue. In a letter to Forster, Dickens gives a humorous description of Mrs. Leech and Mrs. Dickens doing their best—in their fear for their husbands' safety—to assist the maniac in his murderous endeavours by pulling their husbands back just as the doctor had fainted from fear. More assistance, however, arrived, and the mad landlord was soon rendered harmless.
I vividly recollect the alarm that the news of an accident to Leech—in which it was rumoured that he had been seriously, even dangerously, injured—caused to everyone, and acutely to his friends. A huge wave was said to have struck him while bathing—killing him on the spot, according to some reports; fracturing his skull, or producing concussion of the brain, from which recovery was hopeless, according to others. These alarming accounts came to us from the Isle of Wight, where Leech was staying with Dickens in the autumn of 1849. The fact was, that one of the tremendous waves that, under certain atmospheric conditions, roll in upon the shore at Bonchurch, struck Leech on the forehead, and rendered him senseless.
"He was put to bed," said Dickens, "with twenty of his namesakes upon his temples."
The day following, congestion of the brain became unmistakable, accompanied by great pain; ice was applied to the head, and bleeding again was thought necessary, this time in the arm. For some days Leech was in great danger, Dickens sitting up with him all night on more than one alarming occasion. He says, in a letter to Forster:
"My plans are all unsettled by Leech's illness, as of course I do not like to leave this place so long as I can be of any service to him and his good little wife. Ever since I wrote to you he has been seriously worse, and again very heavily bled. The night before last he was in such an alarming state of restlessness, which nothing could relieve, that I proposed to Mrs. Leech to try magnetism. Accordingly, in the middle of the night, I fell to, and, after a very fatiguing bout of it, put him to sleep for an hour and thirty-five minutes. A change came on in his sleep, and he is decidedly better. I talked to the astounded Mrs. Leech across him, when he was asleep, as if he had been a truss of hay."
Whether from Dickens' magnetic efforts or the efforts of Nature, Leech gradually, but very slowly, recovered. On being questioned about his accident, Leech is reported to have said that he remembered an enormous angry, white-topped wave coming at him, and, in what seemed to him the next moment, he found himself in bed in great pain—the interval having been some days.