Death and Mr. Pickwick Read Online Free Page B

horror.
    â€˜The boy is mad! Utterly mad!’
    â€˜It is not my fault, sir,’ said Elizabeth. ‘I had nothing to do with this. Robert, you mustn’t!’
    But the boy came closer to the landlord, and placed his tiny hand upon the cover of the rent book, touching the man’s finger with his own. The book was instantly drawn upwards to the man’s chin. In response, the boy stroked the landlord’s fat leg through the fabric of the breeches.
    Oh! Take me to your hospitable dome,
    Keen blows the wind, and piercing is the cold!
    Short is my passage to the friendly tomb,
    For I am poor, and miserably old.
    The landlord hurried downstairs, as though dragged down by his own weight. ‘I shall come back, be sure of it!’
    When the door was shut, Elizabeth did not scold the boy, but hugged him, and he became instantly brighter in the face.
    â€˜I don’t think,’ said Elizabeth to her other children, ‘that we shall begrudge the orange being given to Robert on this occasion.’
    He retreated to a corner with a pencil and paper as he ate the segments of fruit. His drawings were as any child’s: a man of simple straight arms and a circle for the head. But today he added feet, and bent knees, and the figure ran.

 
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    MR INBELICATE DREW MY ATTENTION to two more incidents in the early life of Robert Seymour. He called them snapshots, but he did not mean in the photographic sense – he meant in the early-nineteenth-century sense, of a quick shot by a hunter at a fast-moving target.
    It seems that one day, when he was about five, Robert Seymour’s mother stopped at a grubby bookstall outside the Angel Inn in Islington and purchased his education: a torn and imperfect copy of Chinnery’s Writing and Drawing Made Easy. Robert soon sat studying Chinnery at the table, copying the pictures and memorising the verses – the latter recited by his mother, as she stood behind his shoulders. ‘G’ was for grasshopper:
    In mirth the grasshopper spends all spring
    But is a giddy, thoughtless, lazy thing.
    Robert reproduced the insect, as well as an indolent country fellow of the same page, who slept against a haystack. He copied too the picture’s decorative border, made from knotted scythes, rakes and hoes.
    The second snapshot refers to a summer afternoon, of roughly the same period, when Robert carried home two prizes from Bartholomew Fair: a goldfish in a glass jar, and a poster advertising the fair, torn down from a tree. The poster was soon tacked to the door in the family’s dwelling: a display of jugglers and tumblers, supposedly at the fair, but none of whom had actually appeared.
    Elizabeth suggested he place the jar on the window ledge, and Robert, with his intense stare, watched the fish; then, having a thought, he positioned the bowl on the table in the centre of the room – he precisely chose his position from which to sketch, so that the poster was shown in the background, and his drawing thus hinted at how the goldfish was acquired.
    When the fish was found floating on the surface the next morning, his mother knelt and wiped away the tears. ‘At least you did the picture to remind us of the fish. And I will keep it.’
    But Mr Inbelicate, in advising me on the way this work might proceed, laid particular emphasis upon a manuscript he had acquired, which he believed was a key document for the understanding of the early life of Robert Seymour. Even so, there has been a considerable leap in time, of some seven or eight years, since the snapshots.
    The manuscript is untitled, anonymous, and incomplete, for it lacks beginning and end, but gives every indication of being autobiographical. One small section is relevant. I shall therefore stand back, and allow the author to speak for himself.

 
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    I OFFER NO OPINION ON WHAT turned Gillray’s mind. Except this – what strain must it be to produce picture after picture to make people