The Pattern in the Carpet: A Personal History With Jigsaws (16 page)

Many writers (including W. H. Auden, Georges Perec, Julian Mitchell, Julian Barnes, Ronald Harwood and Jonathan Raban) have been addicted to crossword puzzles, but I have never taken to them either. The hours of freedom from words are a relief to me, though of course I acknowledge that, paradoxically, I then seem to feel the need of words to try to analyse the nature of this freedom.

That's because writing is an illness. A chronic, incurable illness. I caught it by default when I was twenty-one, and I often wish I hadn't. It seemed to start off as therapy, but it became the illness that it set out to cure.

Some writers admit that they find writing therapeutic, others (like Julian Barnes) strongly deny it. Angus Wilson said that he began writing fiction on the advice of his analyst in Oxford while he was recovering from a breakdown, although he was not always happy in later years to be reminded of this. The protagonist of Doris Lessing's
The Golden Notebook
suffers from writer's block and starts to write again at the suggestion of her analyst. Sylvia Plath in
The Bell Jar
wrote out of revenge, and Wordsworth wrote some of his greatest and most enigmatic lyrics (the Lucy poems) out of what he calls 'self-defence'. Writing is a protection, a cure, an affliction. It makes you ill, and it offers to cure you. Writers need a rest from writing and from words, words, words.

Before I return to the historic jigsaw, I offer a description of a modern, 750-piece jigsaw, purchased in 2007 from the RSC shop in Stratford-upon-Avon, that is a true challenge to the prosopagnosis sufferer. The image says it is 'based on the Flower Portrait of William Shakespeare', and it is composed of hundreds of tiny, head-and shoulder photographs of real people, forming a mosaic that represents the playwright's well-known bust. Pale and underexposed people make up his noble forehead and his collar; darker and more red-faced people his hair and his jacket. At first sight I thought this puzzle, because brightly coloured, would be easy to assemble, but it is not, because the juxtapositions are completely arbitrary, and there is no overlap from one little square to the next.

I had assumed that the photographs would be of famous actors and actresses in Shakespearean roles, illustrating the verse on the side of the box that tells us that all the world's a stage, yet they are of 'ordinary people', of diverse ethnic origins but probably all British, in contemporary dress. It took me a while to work out that a few faces are cunningly repeated, sometimes identically, sometimes reversed – the chap in the jaunty, seafaring cap, the yellow-haired clown, the boy with his baseball hat at a funny angle, the royal-looking lady in a dark-blue hat. As I laboured away at this task, I found myself giving identifying labels to the faces, much as I have to do in real life, memorizing them as 'big white face with glasses','Mother Teresa', 'bearded cleric','evil baby','disco type', or 'nice lady in grey V-neck with pearls'. Of particular appeal was the 'generic Oxford academic', a style that I identified with my son Adam – all variations on a wry, cheerful, bespectacled, smiling face, which one may see any day attached to young men walking or cycling along the street in Oxford, but never ever in Ladbroke Grove. You could walk for a year without seeing that face in Ladbroke Grove.

My father also suffered from prosopagnosis and frequently offended friends and neighbours by failing to recognize them. As I was walking along the beach with him one summer at Filey, a woman in a flowered bathing suit greeted him warmly and tried to
engage him in conversation. It was obvious that he had no idea who she was. In the end she told him her name, and he appeared to recognize it, and chatted politely for a few moments. As he walked away he kept muttering to himself, 'The penny didn't drop, the penny didn't drop', an interesting phrase that I had never heard before, and that I connected with the penny-operated, cement-block pebble-dashed lavatories on the seafront, and the more thrilling slot machines in the amusements arcade.

The woman had lived next door to us during the war in Pontefract, but of course I hadn't recognized her either. She didn't wear a flowered bathing suit in Pontefract.

There is no information or educational content in that brightly coloured, demotic, multicultural, RSC jigsaw, and its connection with the Spilsbury maps in the Map Room is almost as remote as its connection with Shakespeare. One could gain little virtue or knowledge from its assembling: it is 'just a game', a pastime. The jigsaw has come a long way from its schoolroom origins, both in appearance and in function. Its instantly recognizable, interlocking pieces, with their familiar, standardized, die-cut shapes, bear little resemblance to the pale, thin, smooth, sliding, aristocratic, wooden slices in Lady Cecilia's mahogany box, with its swelling pink imperial theme. Yet these devices have a common ancestor, a common descent.

The innovative concept of dissection caught on rapidly, spreading throughout England and beyond, as the British Empire spread. Imitations of the early Spilsbury geography puzzles soon became familiar objects in upper-middle- and upper-class schoolrooms. John Wallis, the Darton family, James Izzard, Robert Sayer, Elizabeth Newbery and other members of the growing army of publishers of children's books began to produce a wide variety of tempting designs, and as they became more widely disseminated,
they became cheaper. Scholars have recently been searching assiduously for references to these puzzles in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century correspondence, educational literature, fiction, and art, and I have trawled, less assiduously, in their wake, following their markers. I enjoyed the quest, and have made some discoveries of my own.

The most widely known mention, and one that I must have read many times, is to be found near the beginning of Jane Austen's
Mansfield Park
(1814), where we discover Maria and Julia Bertram looking down on their poor little cousin Fanny Price because she is not acquainted with the dissected map of Europe. In the first weeks of Fanny's residence at Mansfield Park, evidence of her prodigious ignorance is brought regularly in fresh reports to Lady Bertram in the drawing room: 'Dear mamma, only think, my cousin cannot put the map of Europe together – or my cousin cannot tell the principal rivers in Russia – or she never heard of Asia Minor – or she does not know the difference between water-colours and crayons! – How strange! – Did you ever hear of any thing so stupid?'

It is not surprising that there were no dissected maps in Fanny's simple Portsmouth home; they were not cheap, though models could be bought more cheaply without the sea. Spilsbury's prices ranged from 9s to £1 1s, making these objects more expensive than the vast numbers of children's books that were now pouring into a rapidly expanding market. Like du Val's Le Jeu de France pour les Dames and the playing cards designed for Louis XIV a century earlier, they were playthings for the privileged, educational aids for the advantaged. The poet William Cowper, writing to his friend William Unwin in September 1780 with advice about Unwin's son's education, invokes an aristocratic precedent, in the form of Lord Spencer (the first Earl Spencer) and his son's geography lessons:

I should recommend it to you therefore ... to allot the next two years of little John's Scholarship, to Writing and Arithmetic, together with which for Variety's sake and because it is capable of being formed into Amusement, I would mingle Geography. A Science which if not attended to betimes, is seldom made an Object of much Consideration. Lord Spencer's Son when he was 4 years of Age, knew the situation of every Kingdom, Country, City, River & remarkable Mountain in the World. For this Attainment, which I suppose his Father had never made, he was indebted to a Plaything; having been accustomed to amuse himself with those Maps which are cut into several Compartments, so as to be thrown into a Heap of confusion, that they may be put together again with an exact Coincidence of all their Angles and Bearings so as to form a perfect Whole.

'A Heap of confusion' is a good phrase.

The second Earl Spencer, incidentally, remained a credit to his enlightened education; although born into a fast-living family where card games and gambling were far more popular than books, he became a dedicated bibliophile and collected one of the greatest private libraries in Europe.

Geography, as Cowper here notes, was often an overlooked or despised element in the school curriculum and not taken very seriously. My father thought geography 'a soft option' and teased my son Joe for pursuing it at school, but I enjoyed trying to answer Joe's O-level questions with him. ( Joe Swift's solution to global population control was appropriately Swiftian: shoot the babies.) But many have equally plausibly maintained that maps are more fun for little children than algebra, Greek and Latin. Thomas Fuller dedicated the first book of his popular
A Pisgah-Sight of Palestine
(1650) to 'The Right Honourable Esme Stuart, Earl of March and Darnley, Lord Leighton, etc' whose 'tender months' at that point
had not yet completed a year, but who, Fuller trusts, might in due course grow into the book, as he would grow into his clothes. And meanwhile, Fuller hoped, he might 'take pleasure in the maps which are here presented'.

The fifth book of
A Pisgah-Sight
is dedicated to another titled infant, the Right Honourable John Lord Burghley, and Fuller again fondly mentions his maps, explaining that he is hoping to plant a ripening nursery of patrons. And his maps of the Holy Land are indeed quaint and wonderful, full of whales, ships, mountains, camels, ravens, angels, cities and soldiers, with a splendid depiction of the dark Dead Sea (M
ARE
M
ORTUUM
, M
ARE
S
ALSUM
, M
ARE
A
SPHALTITIS
) and the blazing towers of Sodom, Gomorrah, Zeboim and Admah. Mount Pisgah itself is proudly shown, with Moses, aged 120 years, standing aloft upon it and surveying the whole land of Canaan. (Fuller slyly remarks that Moses could see Palestine so well because he had a clear view from the top and enjoyed miraculous eyesight for his age.)

These maps are far more friendly and entertaining than the notorious illustrations in that other staple of children's pre-Enlightenment Sabbath reading, Foxe's
Book of Martyrs.
John Day's woodcuts for the
Book of Martyrs,
which were recut and recopied and reprinted for three hundred years, terrified generations with their graphic portrayals of tortures, whereas seventeenth-century pictorial maps of the counties of England, decorated with heraldry and scenery, offered harmless, peaceable and instructive visual pleasure. Fuller's Palestine was a playful and entertaining land, full of miniature wonders and, although Biblical, happily free from religious gloom and exhortation.

Children used to enjoy inventing imaginary countries, before they had virtual worlds to play with. Fanny Burney's nephew created a land called Protocol, and she entertained the daughters of George III with stories of this place. Thomas Malkin, a child
prodigy who died in 1802 at the age of six, also invented an imaginary kingdom, of which we have a fuller record: he created a detailed map of the island of Allestone, together with an account of its history, treaties, kings, customs and folklore. We know about Thomas through a memoir written by his father, Benjamin Heath Malkin, schoolmaster, antiquarian and topographer, which records the brief life and death of this remarkable infant.
A Father's Memoirs of his Child
is distinguished by a frontispiece designed by Malkin's friend William Blake, and includes a memoir of Blake as well as a generous selection of his poems, made available to a wider public for the first time – another signpost in the dawning recognition of the singular state of infancy. Malkin describes his son's precocious achievements and quotes at length from his letters. The child, he writes, has a 'most happy art in copying maps' and 'a remarkable habit of inventing little landscapes ... cutting up waste paper into squares and drawings.'

Like the young Brontës and, many years later, the adult J. R. R. Tolkien, Tom created a well-charted realm. He also played with ready-made, dissected maps in the Spilsbury fashion. In one of his letters, dated 18 January 1799, little Thomas writes: 'I have a new map. Thomas can put it together and when Mama takes some counties out Tom can tell what they are.' His father assures the reader that 'His dissected maps, from which he had very early acquired his knowledge of geography, afforded him pleasure and interest to the last. He had some Counties of England in his hands, reading the names of the towns in them, within half an hour of his dissolution.' However, he also, interestingly, tells us that 'he ceased to talk of the imaginary country' during his illness. The father was relieved that the child's brain, dissected after his death, showed no sign of abnormality. He had feared that his son had died of some form of brain fever, and clearly worried that he had been subjected to excessive mental stimulation.

This is a very sad story. The death of children was commonplace at this period, but it is still a sad story. And, sadly, we don't have a picture of little Thomas Malkin playing with a dissected map, although we can witness him being borne up to heaven by one of Blake's angels. But we can more happily see Masters Thomas and John Quicke at work on a map of Europe in a pastel portrait by William Hoare, dated c.1770, which may be the earliest image of a jigsaw in art. In this newly post-Locke, family-oriented age, portraits of children engaged in natural activities were popular. Hoare, a Bath-based artist, specialized in portraits of young people, and drew his own daughter in many informal poses. In this portrait of the Quicke children, he portrays the younger boy holding the stubby shape of Italy in his hand and looking up to his brother for approval or affirmation. Family groups of this period often show educational scenes, with parents reading to children, or children holding books or sketching, with books strewn casually (but not carelessly) upon the nursery or drawing room floor. Little dogs remained the most favoured accessory (Hoare painted a fluffy little girl in a fluffy white dress holding a fluffy little white dog, where the substance of animal and child merge in a worrying manner) but the portrayal of pursuits that illustrated parental concern and interaction also became popular. Some of these ostentatiously affectionate groupings may protest a little too much, but the Quicke children playing quietly with their map, without visible adult interference, seem to me to be happy with their task.