The Pattern in the Carpet: A Personal History With Jigsaws (17 page)

(Can it be possible that little Miss Hoare was the artist who later drew the obscene cartoon of 'A modern Venus', which survives in Horace Walpole's collection? This is reproduced in Diana Donald's
The Age of Caricature
(New Haven, 1996) where she describes it as 'a playful visualisation of the physique suggested by the "pouter pigeon" fashion of the 1780s, with its puffed out bosom and rump.' I disagree. I find it more repulsive than playful.)

Maria Edgeworth, one of the most influential of educational theorists after Locke, endorses the use of the jigsaw, manifesting as she does so her characteristic attention to closely observed details of child behaviour, worthy of a Tavistock-trained child psychotherapist. In
Practical Education
(1798), written with her father Richard Lovell Edgeworth, she observes:

Whoever has watched children putting together a dissected map, must have been amused by the trial between Wit and Judgement. The child who quickly perceives resemblances catches instantly at the first bit of the wooden map, that has a single hook or hollow that seems likely to answer his purpose; he makes perhaps twenty different trials before he hits upon the right; whilst the wary youth, who has been accustomed to observe differences, cautiously examines with his eye the whole outline before his hand begins to move; and, having exactly compared the two indentures, he joins them with sober confidence, more proud of never disgracing his judgement by a fruitless attempt, than ambitious of rapid success. He is slow, but sure, and wins the day.

Auntie Phyl and I were much given to fruitless attempts, and not inclined to sober confidence; it was more fun that way. We were keener on resemblances than differences.

Maria Edgeworth also introduces puzzle maps into her
Early Lessons
(1801), where she provides a lively description of young Frank's struggle to reassemble his older brother Henry's dissected maps, and his loss of the 'little crooked country of Middlesex', for which he searches everywhere: 'under the tables – under the chairs –  upon the sofa – under the cushions of the sofa – under the carpet – everywhere he could think of'. He is happy when at last he finds it, on a table where it had been concealed by a large book of prints,
and the next morning he succeeds in hooking every county into its right place: 'He was much pleased to see the whole map fitted together – "Look at it, dear mama," said he, "you cannot see the joining, it fits so nicely."

Not to see the joining – that is satisfying.

The 'lost county' is a recurrent motif in jigsaw lore. It is the little land of lost content.

In an age when theories of education were so widely discussed, the provision of dissected maps is a sure marker of progressive teaching methods. And they were found in the highest of social circles. Lady Charlotte Finch (1725–1813), an aristocrat with connections as grand as those of the Spencers, used maps to instruct her charges, who included two future kings, George IV and William IV She was governess to the fifteen children of George III, and is credited with supervising what has been described a progressive nursery, which encouraged child-centred learning. Queen Charlotte herself took an exceptionally close interest in her children's education, read Rousseau and Fénelon, and is said to have kept a volume by Locke on her bedside table.

Zoffany's sumptuous family portrait of
Queen Charlotte with her Two Eldest Sons
(c.1764–5) is a speaking tableau of childhood, with multiple messages: it shows the elegantly robed and jewelled young queen in her dressing room, with the two-year-old Prince of Wales and his one-year-old brother Frederick grouped around her in colourful fancy dress, both somewhat dwarfed by an enormous but docile boar-hound. The Prince of Wales is dressed, warrior-like, as Telemachus, son of Ulysses and Penelope, and Frederick as a tiny
Turk with a pretty, silvery turban and a diminutive gown of blue and gold. The mood is playful but imperious, for the room is full of the rich spoils of trade and Empire: a richly patterned Turkish carpet, a French clock, a lavish display of Flanders lace, and life-size lacquered Chinese mandarin figures standing on either side of a tall gilt-framed mirror. On the far left of the painting, we may see on the palace lawn, through the gorgeously draped window, a solitary flamingo, representing far-flung lands and voyages, and on the far right, reflected in a mirror, discreetly attentive, the profile of a woman who is taken by some to be Lady Charlotte Finch, representing the world of learning.

It was Lady Charlotte who ordered the fancy-dress outfits for the little princes, as she recorded on 6 September 1764. Dressing children in historical costume was popular at this period, as Reynolds' child portraits bear witness; little boys were immortalized in the garb of Jupiter, Hannibal, Bacchus and Henry VIII, images that curiously combine playfulness with pathos and an ominous sense of destiny. Zoffany's little princes and Reynolds' heroic children provide a striking contrast with Hoare's painting of the Quicke brothers, who are shown fair and square, without parody, as themselves, engaged in a proper children's activity, not aping the aspirations of adults or providing a sly moral for the superior viewer. The Quicke portrait, like Chardin's portraits of children playing the goose game or solemnly absorbed with knucklebones, or shuttlecocks, or toy drums, or windmills, shows respect.

The geographical allusions of Zoffany's work remind us that geography and dissected maps were of more than academic interest to kings and princes. George III was to see the maps of the Americas redrawn, and his lavish embassy to China under Lord Macartney in 1792–4 was rebuffed. It was important for heirs to the throne to be able to locate their plantations, their colonies and the empires of their rivals.

Lady Charlotte's equipment for teaching geography included, as well as the more usual globes, two elegant mahogany cabinets, one with thirteen shallow drawers, the other with three deeper drawers, furnished with brass locks and handles, perhaps designed for travelling between the royal residences in and around London. They contained several maps, two by Spilsbury, and one of North America from a printed plate from the
Atlas méthodique
of Jean Palairet. Across a vast tract of the north-west of the map of America are inscribed the words 'Partie Inconnue'. Jill Shefrin has written a monograph on these cabinets, their contents and Lady Charlotte's teaching methods, engagingly titled
Such Constant Affectionate Care,
which gives due prominence to Spilsbury's invention. These cabinets are the first though not the last example of royal patronage of the puzzle, but it is not known (or not yet known) whether they were commissioned directly from Spilsbury by Lady Charlotte. In 2000 they were offered for sale by a private owner and spent some years in limbo with a dealer awaiting an export licence before a successful appeal was made through the Department of Culture, Media and Sport to save them for the nation. This appeal, as reported by the press, slightly overstated Lady Charlotte's accomplishments, for it claimed that she herself was the inventor of dissected maps, an attribution that has long been dismissed as false. But the value of the cabinets (they sold for £120,000) certainly bears witness to a growing interest in Spilsbury and other early jigsaws both from scholars and from collectors. In 2007 they were put on display at Kew Palace, and I am told they will travel between Kew and the Museum of Childhood at Bethnal Green.

Kew Palace is an appropriate home for the puzzles, for the royal family used Kew as a retreat for many years, and here in various houses, palaces, lodgings and gardens the princes and princesses enjoyed fresh air, picnics, games and botanizing. Flora Fraser, in her tragicomic royal saga
Princesses
(2004), described Kew as 'a
full-blown royal campus, which the royal children rarely left during the summer months, where servants intrigued against each other, and where tradesmen in the village that had grown up around the church on the Green vied for preferment'. Queen Charlotte's
cottage ornée
survives today as a tourist attraction, and Kew Palace (originally built as a merchant's residence in 1631) has been renovated to give a sense of the family life of George III, the queen and their many children. Other items on display include a 'baby house' complete with furnishings embroidered by the princesses, cut-paper silhouettes, a silver rattle and a silver inkstand, globes, musical and scientific instruments, and examples of George III's accomplished architectural drawings. The message of Kew Palace is mixed; it was a place of domesticity and safety, but it was also a place of suffering and frustration, eventually contaminated for the king by memories of bouts of illness, confusion and constraint.

The baby house has an unusual wallpaper. Its colour is what I call turquoise, and what the experts call verditer green, and it shows a pattern of irregular amoeba-like blobs outlined in white floating against a turquoise background dotted with tiny spots in a darker shade of green. (I was complimented by the Deputy House Manager on my visit to Kew for wearing a colour-coded turquoise T-shirt, which we took to be a happy omen.) The baby house colour scheme has been picked up in the house itself. In the queen's boudoir, on the first floor, the walls are a strong clear verditer, with a Greek-key border of black and green, re-created from an early nineteenth-century fragment uncovered during restoration. The curtains are black and yellow chintz, and there are two little tables, one a green-baize card table, the other a sewing table with a work-basket, at which the queen and the princesses would spend hours on their knotting and netting. It is not a room of excessive grandeur.

Today, the ghosts of frustration and illness have been banished to the unrestored attics, and a more positive spirit of years of domesticity, artistic endeavour and earnest education prevails. Flora Fraser's account of the childhood of the princesses gives a vivid portrait of the texture of their lives – the music, dancing and drawing lessons with a succession of governesses, the elaborately dressed theatrical tableaux, the promenades, picnics and birthdays, the conscientious acquiring of foreign languages. In the evenings they sewed, while listening to renderings of the works of Walter Scott; sewing was euphemistically known as 'working', although the objects made were mainly ornamental gifts. (Auntie Phyl and I used to say that we 'worked' at a jigsaw, and women of her generation kept their sewing things, as did the queen, in a 'work-basket'.) The poor Princess Royal, unlike the rest of her family, was not at all musical, hated the endless evenings of Handel ('I think that my dislike for music rather increases') and was keenly conscious of her poor ear, which restricted her skill in dancing. (My sister Helen said to me the other day that we would not have done well as princesses, as none of us had a good ear. She is right.)

The claim that Lady Charlotte invented dissected maps and puzzles rests largely on a misleading note to this effect, of a later date, which was found with the cabinets. Nor, as it now appears, was John Spilsbury himself necessarily the inventor. He was probably the first commercial bookseller to market them, but Jill Shefrin has put forward the name of an earlier originator, Madame Jeanne-Marie Le Prince de Beaumont (1711–1780), a writer, teacher and well-known reteller of fairy stories, who entered 'cartes de géographie en bois' in the prospectus for her exclusive and expensive school in Henrietta Street, Cavendish Square, London, in an advertisement of c.1755–60. (This, alas for patriotism, would make the jigsaw in part a French invention.)

There are several references of the period to Madame de
Beaumont's 'wooden maps', including one by the well-connected court favourite Mary Delany (1700–1788), who refers to them specifically, and as early as December 1759, in a letter to her sister Anne Dewes. Mary Delany spent many evenings with the royal family and children, and was well acquainted with Lady Charlotte; the paths of Lady Charlotte and Madame de Beaumont also, according to Shefrin, 'crossed over a period of years', the former putting into practice the educational theories of the latter. Caroline Lennox, Lady Holland, also referred to these maps; writing in 1762 to her sister Emily about her son Harry, who was being educated
à la Rousseau,
she notes that 'he works very hard all day out of doors, which is very wholesome ... He eats quantities of fish and is so happy and pleased all day. At night we depart a little from Monsr. Rousseau's plan, for he reads fairy-tales, and learns geography on the Beaumont wooden maps; he is vastly quick at learning that or anything else.' This sounds a very pleasant regime.

So who is to know who first thought up the notion of the dissected puzzle? Maybe Spilsbury was no more than the clever exploiter of another's idea. Maybe a private commission from Lady Charlotte for the royal nursery set him on his path to brief prosperity and a small, posthumous fame. Maybe Mary Delany was the go-between.

Mary Delany, born Mary Granville, was an inventive woman. Through ingenuity and resourcefulness she made the best of a poor start in life and a dismal, semi-forced first marriage to an elderly husband, Alexander Pendarves, who died leaving her less well off than her relatives had expected. She and her friend Lady Charlotte Finch were both acquainted with marital distress. Finch's marriage to the Honourable William Finch produced four children and had at first been companionable, but shortly after her appointment as royal governess in 1762 he became mentally unstable (he died in 1766) and is said to have been violent towards her. So she left him for a life shared between Kew and an apartment at St James's, and a career caring for two families of growing children, her own and the queen's. A historian might hesitate before connecting her husband's illness with her demanding employment at court, but a novelist need not be so circumspect.

Mary Delany, who remained childless, remarried happily some twenty years after her first husband's death, but by this time she had developed her own skills and interests, as well as a distinctively independent attitude to the social whirl. She had a keen (and often satiric) eye for fashion and display, which she loved to describe in
vivid detail; fabrics, trimmings, patterns and colours ('scarlet damask, gold tabby, pale lemon lutestring, silver frosted tissue, mouse-colour velvet') glow and sparkle and flutter under her pen, and she was full of advice to country cousins about ribbons and gloves. (She would certainly have advised Alison Uttley and Auntie Phyl that ribbons for the elderly were not a good idea. She had strong opinions about ribbons.)