Richard Altick

Anthony Trollope was a self-confessed workaholic. ‘If my success were equal to my energy,’ he remarked at the age of 55, ‘I should be a great man.’ He was also a compulsive writer. Ten years later, aware of advancing age, he told his son: ‘I finished on Thursday the novel I was writing, and on Friday I began another. Nothing really frightens me but the idea of enforced idleness. As long as I can write books, even though they may not be published, I think that I can be happy.’ He had retired 13 years earlier from the responsible position of travelling Post Office surveyor which he had held during most of his wage-earning life. The only complaint he voiced about this and his other money-making occupation was that they left insufficient time for his true passion, which was hunting. ‘I have been trying to hunt three days a week,’ he wrote his friend and publisher George Smith. ‘I find it must be only two. Mortal man cannot write novels, do the Post Office, and go out three days.’ ‘In some coming perfect world,’ he said on another occasion, ‘there will be hunting 12 months in the year.’

The celebrated Victorian solicitor George Lewis began his career of more than half a century in the law shop of his father, whose waiting-room was constantly crowded with supplicants for his services. As John Juxon suggests, the elder Lewis could have served as a model for the abrasive Mr Jaggers in Great Expectations, who suspended his moral judgment when dealing with his greasy, grimy riffraff of clients – cracksmen, fences, thieves – and then, in revulsion, went to a washbasin and scrubbed his hands with water and scented soap and even, in extreme cases, gargled. But in the course of time his son was transformed into the type of lawyer who occupies the other end of the Dickensian gamut: a gentleman ‘surrounded by a mysterious halo of family confidences, of which he is known to be the silent depository. There are noble Mausoleums … which perhaps hold fewer noble secrets than walk abroad among men shut up in the breast’ of such a person. This is Dickens, introducing the solicitor Tulkinghorn in Bleak House. But it might equally well be John Juxon, describing George Lewis.–

Toward the end of their correspondence, which spanned years 1851-79, John Ruskin, who hitherto had addressed Thomas Carlyle more or less in terms of deferential formality (‘Dear Mr Carlyle’), suddenly shifted to ‘Dearest Papa’, signing himself ‘Ever your loving disciple-son’. Whatever the immediate reasons for the change, it simply made explicit Ruskin’s steady conception of his relation to Carlyle, the older man by 24 years. In 1866, indeed, as if he were not busy enough, he had offered to become Carlyle’s amanuensis. ‘I have a notion it would be very wholesome work for me, & it would be very proud & dear for me.’

Once convicted, the greatest forgers of English literary documents have stayed convicted. In two famous cases, those of the 17-year-old Thomas Chatterton, who fabricated poems he attributed to a mythical 15th-century Bristol monk, and the equally immature William Henry Ireland, who forged manuscripts by Shakespeare before which Boswell knelt in adoration, apologists have found a degree of extenuation in claiming that theirs were the follies of ambitious but misguided youth. Still, their guilt remains unquestioned, as does that of the monarch of them all, the diabolically clever Thomas J. Wise. When the Wise scandal erupted in 1934, only two or three quavering voices were raised in his defence and then were heard no more. John Payne Collier also had a few defenders at the outset of his ordeal, but after his presumed exposure was complete, no one publicly doubted his guilt, or that his purposes in committing his sensational hoax were an unforgivable breach of scholarly integrity.

‘There’s no art to find the mind’s construction in the face,’ said King Duncan in the fourth scene of Macbeth. But there was, and Shakespeare knew this. Almost at the moment he was writing the play, a new law required that anybody who professed ‘a knowledge of phisnognomie’ – one version of the name by which the practice of reading character in facial features was known to the learned – was to be ‘openly whipped untill his body be bloudye’. Obviously, physiognomy was then regarded with some scepticism. But Francis Bacon, the harbinger of modern science, was not among the doubters. He thought physiognomy had ‘a solide ground in nature’ so long as it was not ‘coupled with superstitious and fantasticall arts’ such as astrology and even sorcery, with which, as the Elizabethan prohibition implies, it was often associated.