The Meaning of Night

extended my own experience of what this place – unique on God’s earth – could offer a man of passion and imagination.

I have no intention of laying before you my many amorous adventures; such things are tedious at best. But one encounter I must mention. The female in question was of that type known as a dress-lodger.^§ It was not long after the affair of Madame Mathilde, and I had returned to Regent-street to look again at the wares of Messrs Johnson & Co. She was about to cross the street when she caught my eye: well dressed, petite, with a dimpled chin and delicate little ears. It was a dull, damp morning, and I was close enough to see tiny jewels of moisture clinging to her ringlets. She was about to join a small group of pedestrians on a swept passage across the street. On reaching the opposite pavement she stopped, and half turned back, fingering an errant lock of hair nervously. It was then that I saw an elderly woman, crossing the roadway a few yards behind her. This, I knew by now, was her watcher, paid by the girl’s bawd to ensure that she did not abscond with the outfits provided for her. Girls such as she were too poor to deck themselves out in the finery required to hook in custom, like the sharp bobtails of the theatre porticos and the Cafe Royal.

I began to follow her. She walked with quick steps through the crowds, sure of her way. In Long Acre, I drew level with her. The business was swiftly concluded, her watcher retired to a nearby public-house, whilst the girl and I entered a house on the corner of Endell-street.

Her name was Dorrie, short for Dorothy. She had become what she was, she said afterwards, to support her widowed mother, who could now find no regular employment of her own. We talked for some time, and I found my heart begin to go out to the girl. At my request, she took me, with her watcher still a few paces behind us, to a cramped and damp chamber in a dreary court hard by. Her mother, I guessed, was only some forty years of age herself, but she was bent and frail, with a harsh wheezing cough. When I saw the evident signs of perpetual struggle and weariness on her face, I was immediately put in mind – though the cases were very different – of my own mother’s constant labours, and the toll that they had taken on her.

Almost without thought on my part, an arrangement was made. I never regretted it. For several years, until circumstances intervened, Mrs Grainger came two or three times a week to Temple-street, to sweep my room, take my washing away, and empty my slops.

As she entered of a morning, I would say: ‘Good-morning, Mrs Grainger. How is Dorrie?’

‘She is well, sir, thank you. A good girl still.’ And that is all we would ever say.

Thus I became a kind of benefactor to Dorrie Grainger and her mother. Yet even this unpremeditated act of charity on my part was to become a connective strand in that fatal web of circumstance that was already closing round me.

^*[This lady appears to have been a precursor of the more famous Rachel Leverson, extortionist and thief, who was prosecuted in 1868 and sentenced to five years’ penal servitude for exactly the same activities as Madame Mathilde. Ed.]

^*[Hatters to the Queen. Ed.]

^*[i.e. ‘criminal conversation’ – adultery. Ed.]

^*[Types of pickpockets. Ed.]

^†[Violent street robbers. Ed.]

^‡[Used in the contemporary sense of ‘immoral’, not in the modern sense. Ed.]

^§ [‘A prostitute who was provided with expensive-looking clothes by her keeper. Ed.]

GREAT LEVIATHAN

ON WAKING, FEBRUARY, MDCCL^*

O City! Deep and wide!

Womb of all things!This Sun, this Moon, these stars – I touch and feel them.

I burn. I freeze.

These mountains I grind to powder under my hand.

These torrents I consume, these forests I devour.I live in all things, in light and air, and music unheard.

O City of blood and bone and flesh!

Of muscle and sinew, of tooth and eye!Theatre of all vanity, the hell for which I yearn:

Wild and raging beneath my feet. My life.

My death.

^*[As with the passage on the Iron Master (p. 102), these lines have been pasted onto the page at this point. The reason for their inclusion here is not immediately obvious, though they were clearly of significance to the author, and we may perhaps further conjecture that they were written under the influence of opium. Ed.]

III

Evenwood

After taking up residence in Temple-street, and commencing my employment at Tredgolds, my photographic ambitions had languished for a while, though I continued to correspond with Mr Talbot. But, once settled, I constructed a little dark-room within a curtained-off space in my sitting-room. Here also I kept my cameras (recently purchased from Horne and Thornethwaite),^* along with my lamps, gauze, pans and bowls, trays and soft brushes, fixing and developing solutions, beakers, glasses, quires of paper, syringes and dippers, and all the other necessary paraphernalia of the art. I worked hard to familiarize myself with the necessary chemical and technical processes, and on summer evenings would take my camera down to the river, or to picturesque corners of the nearby Inns of Court, to practise my compositional techniques. In this way, I began to build up my experience and knowledge, as well as amassing a good many examples of my own photographic work.

The satisfaction of close and concentrated observation; the need to perceive minute gradations of light and shadow, and to select the correct angle and elevation; the patient scrutiny of backdrop and setting – these things I found gave me intense fulfilment, and transported me to another realm, far away from my often sordid duties at Tredgolds. My principal partiality, artistically speaking – the seed planted by seeing a photogenic drawing that Mr Talbot had made of Lacock Abbey – was to seek to capture the spirit or mood that certain places evoke. London offered such a variety of subjects – ancient palaces, domestic dwellings of every type and age, the river and its bridges, great public buildings – that I soon developed a keen eye for architectural line and form, shadow and sky, texture and profile.

One Sunday, in June 1850, feeling I had attained to a good level of competence, I decided I would show Mr Tredgold some examples of my photographic work.