The Pattern in the Carpet: A Personal History With Jigsaws (28 page)

On the other hand, I very much like two homophones I came across recently in Gregory Benford's introduction to a translation of Jules Verne's
From the Earth to the Moon,
and I think Verne's admirer Perec would have liked them too. Benford, describingVerne's influence on other science-fiction writers, writes:

Verne even influenced those who didn't quite know who he was. Isaac Asimov once told me that when he was still a young science fiction fan he found himself listening to a lecture about a great foreign writer, a master of fantastic literature. But Asimov couldn't recognise the name. Giving the French pronunciation, the lecturer said 'Surely you must know Zuell Pfern', and described
From the Earth to the Moon.
Asimov replied in his Brooklyn accent, 'Oh, you mean Jewels Voine!

That's a Perec kind of anecdote. 'Jewels Voine' is beautiful. Hyman Kaplan couldn't have put it better.

Wilful experiment used to annoy me. I was a
Mimesis
woman, brought up on the great Eric Auerbach and his magisterial version of what he calls 'The Representation of Reality in Western Literature', which he wrote in exile during the Second World War in Istanbul. (His concluding chapter, titled 'The Brown Stocking', discusses
To the Lighthouse
and James Ramsay cutting out his refrigerator.) I gained much and I missed much through this bias. I am catching up now.

I have even come to like the visual artists connected with Oulipo (they sometimes call themselves Oupeinpo) who have invented ingenious games with well-known images, fracturing them, swivelling them, slicing them, restructuring them and turning them inside out. I used to think this kind of experiment akin to a schoolboy's painting a moustache on the
Mona Lisa
or adding arms to the
Venus of Milo
and thinking it funny, but, again, I've changed my mind. Their efforts include reversing the image of Ingres's
Grande Odalisque
by turning her around on her couch in sixty-four slices so that she faces in the opposite direction, and creating new paintings from composite Old Master sources in elaborate collages. Some of the results are surprisingly attractive. (They claim to distance themselves from the collages of Surrealism by introducing technical constraints, but in my view this distancing is in itself something of a technicality.)

One of their proposals, the
Module Oupeinpien Universel (MOU),
devised at a meeting of Oulipo on 11 January 1997, is for a jigsaw described as a 'puzzlomorphic trammel-net, all of whose pieces have an identical shape', which can be permuted indefinitely. 'Every painting in the world (and all its reproductions), every printed page and poster, the entirety of existing images could thus be cut up using the
MOU,
and reassembled in a near-infinity of combinations.' Tristan Bastit (who is a real painter, not a fantasy figure) suggested creating 'a Potential History of Art (text and illustrations) on the
MOU
principle by cutting up the 4,008 pages of the
Universal History of Art
(in 10 volumes)'. This could be achieved, he said calmly, with the help of a jigsaw punch.

Johann Siegmund Stoy, inventor of the boxed picture academy, appears to have been an isolated and eccentric figure, whereas the Oulipeans thrived (and still thrive) on interchange. Perec, who has written so powerfully of the experience of half-crazed loneliness, was, paradoxically, for much of his life a gregarious and clubbable man, with many close friendships. Most of the early children's publishers were similarly interconnected, though by patterns of kinship rather than friendship; they came from closely knit family businesses, which intermarried and created long-lived dynasties. F. J. Harvey Darton, who chronicled the rise of these family groups, came from one of the most powerful; he was the great-great-grandson of William Darton, the founder of a durable publishing venture. The Dartons were Quakers, whereas the Spilsburys ( John, the puzzle maker, and his older brother Jonathan) had leanings towards the Moravian Church, of which Jonathan became a member. An educational purpose informed both families, although John, with his dissected puzzles and printed kerchiefs, clearly had a commercial instinct as sound as John Newbery's.

The talented Spilsburys, unlike the Dartons, did not found a
dynasty, although as we have seen John Spilsbury's name is now firmly recorded in history (or at least in the
ODNB
and the records of
University Challenge
) and the intricacies of the Spilsbury family tree have been disentangled. The name of Darton, however, is threaded through the long history of children's literature, and is still current. William Darton (1755–1819), writer, printer, bookseller, stationer and engraver, was the son of the landlord of the Coach and Six Horses in Tottenham, Middlesex, and was apprenticed to an engraver before setting up his own business. He became a Quaker, joining the Society of Friends in 1777, and ten years later began to trade in 1787 in White Lion Alley, Birchin Lane. It was from this address that he published
Engravings for teaching the elements of English history and chronology after the manner of dissected maps for teaching geography,
which has a claim to be the earliest historical jigsaw puzzle. He soon moved two streets to the east to 55 Gracechurch Street, where he formed a long-lasting partnership with printer Joseph Harvey (1764–1841). Darton's son, another William Darton (1781–1854), was to pursue the same line of business in the same neighbourhood, from an address in Holborn Hill.

Joseph Harvey, like the Dartons, was a Quaker, and the firm of Darton and Harvey, which flourished for well over a hundred years, had a strong ethical policy. It published anti-slavery literature for adults, and its many publications for children included works by two immensely successful sisters, Jane and Anne Taylor, who came from another prolific and thriving family business of writers and engravers. Anne wrote 'My Mother'
(Original Poems for Infant Minds,
1804), and Jane wrote 'Twinkle, twinkle, little star'
(Rhymes for the Nursery,
1806), which inspired many commercial spin-offs. Darton and Harvey also published the formidable Mrs Sherwood, whose memoirs were edited by F. J. Harvey Darton. It was William Darton Junior of Holborn Hill who invested heavily in table
games and puzzles; his surviving products include an illustrated version of Anne Taylor's 'My Mother' in puzzle form, which was followed by 'My Bible', 'My Son', and 'My Grandmother'.

The firm of Darton and Harvey also published an author whose name was very well known to me as a schoolgirl in York, though I did not know much about him. In the school garden of the Mount there was a charming, eighteenth-century, octagonal summer house with an ogee roof, which was known to us as 'the Lindley Murray', after the Pennsylvanian-born Quaker grammarian (1745–1826) who eventually settled in York, and whose best-selling
English Grammar
was published by Darton and Harvey in 1795. Murray had been asked to write his famous
Grammar
in a 'humble petition' from three friends who were teachers at the Quaker school for girls in York, then located in Trinity Lane, and now known as the Mount School. His work was immensely successful in its day, and the school continues to prosper. It continues to be, as it was then, both Quaker and single sex, and the summer house named after him stands in its garden just as it always has. A history of the school written in 1931 tells us that it was then 'the haunt of schoolgirls, who would still talk of "the Lindley Murray", meaning a summer-house and not a book', and this was true when I was there in the 1950s.

My sisters and I were not sent to the Mount School because my parents were Quakers. They became Quakers as a result of sending us to the Mount. My mother had taught there, briefly, before her marriage, and had retained happy memories of its friendly and egalitarian spirit, so when my parents were looking for a suitable boarding school its name came up. My father thought we would have a less 'snobbish' education there than at some other well-known schools for girls, and he was right. I cannot remember precisely when he joined the Society of Friends, but it must have been at some point during the 1950s. (My mother, once a vocal,
Shavian, anti-chapel atheist, took some years to follow him.) My father, unlike my mother and my aunt, had a religious temperament, and intermittently attended the local Anglican church in Sheffield (now, I believe, demolished), but he found the service unsatisfactory. He could never say the Creed, because he did not believe in most of it, and he hated some of the Old Testament and the psalms, which were intoned from the pulpit or chanted by the congregation. Passages about dashing out the brains of children caused him particular distress: I recall his response to a reading of Psalm 137, which ends: 'O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed: happy shall he be, that rewardeth thee as thou hast served us. Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.' No, he said, as we walked home down the tree-lined suburban avenue; that was not the way to behave, or the way to talk.

I didn't mind those bits then (I do now) but in St Andrew's I developed a lasting dislike of organ music. To this day the sound of the organ sets my teeth on edge. Just as the cant of Methodist chapels and Sunday schools annoyed my mother and Arnold Bennett, so the windy, droning screech of the organ annoys me. And I didn't like the collection, either. My father would give me a threepenny bit to drop into the nasty, dusty, velvety pouch, which made me feel a hypocrite. It hadn't been mine to give, nor had it been given willingly.

My father escaped from what he saw as the hypocrisies of the Church of England by becoming a Quaker. He was not a Pacifist, as he maintained that the Second World War was a just war and he was right to have served in it, but by and large the enlightened and rational Quaker faith suited him. It did not compel him to say he believed in the impossible, and he liked the emphasis on social service and internationalism. He became involved, as lawyer then as judge, with the Quaker prison reform agenda, about which
he felt strongly. He thought it important to try to belong to a community of believers, although he was in many ways a solitary man. I don't know whether or not he believed in God, but he would certainly have liked to have been able to do so, and he behaved as though he did. I have often wished I could have asked him what he made of Hugh Kingsmill's words about the Kingdom of Heaven, which 'cannot be created by charters and constitutions nor established by arms. Those who set out for it alone will reach it together, and those who seek it in company will perish by themselves.' But I didn't discover these moving words until after his death. I was introduced to them by Michael, Kingsmill's biographer, who found them for himself in Maidenhead Public Library, and by the time Michael met my father in Amsterdam in 1982, my father was on his deathbed.

Attending a Quaker school and being exposed to Quaker morality and literature (George Fox, William Penn, John Woolman, John Greenleaf Whittier) had an effect on me, and I have never reacted against the Quaker spirit as I did against the church organ. On the whole, I value it, and I was not surprised to discover that Quaker publishing families had been involved with the early days of juvenile literature and educational toys and puzzles, as well as with anti-slavery tracts. This was all of a piece. The vast output of the Darton family has generated a great deal of bibliographical research; descendant Lawrence Darton devoted many years to producing
The Dartons: An Annotated Check-List of Children's Books Published by Two Publishing Houses 1787–1876
(2004), a volume of 729 pages, and Jill Shefrin has been working on a descriptive bibliography of everything published for children by the Dartons other than books. This is a task that could have been pursued for many decades or, indeed, in perpetuity. The objects are ephemeral, and their survival chancy, and you can never know when you have reached the end of the list. They seem designed for the
employment of those who, like Georges Perec, are addicted to the endless pursuit of classification.

Lawrence Darton was the first winner of the Harvey Darton Prize, which is awarded by the Children's Books History Society for a work 'which extends our knowledge of some aspect of British children's literature of the past'. This prize was named after his cousin F. J. Harvey Darton, a man whose career began to intrigue me more and more as I looked into this subject. F. J., or 'Fred', is an interesting character, whose modest, authoritative and kindly authorial tone gives little indication of his troubled life. While dipping into his great work
Children's Books in England,
I had endowed him with a Teas-with-Hovis personality; I assumed he was a kind father, an attentive grandfather, a benevolent Quaker patriarch. My father, the kindest of men, was known as 'Fred' to his family in his youth, and I saw Fred Harvey Darton as a man cast in the same mould, but perhaps a little more austere than my father, who was known to startle the teetotal members of his Quaker Meeting by offering them a gin and tonic on a Sunday morning in his later years when Meeting was held in his Suffolk home.

I could not have been more wrong. Harvey Darton's life surprised me as much as the life of Alison Uttley surprised Auntie Phyl.

I suppose I should have been alerted to Harvey Darton's true character and circumstances by a faint whiff of Grub Street desperation manifested in the length of the catalogue of his published works. He turned his hand to anything – magazine editing, museum guides, monographs, reviews, topographical works – and he also, more revealingly, published two pseudonymous novels, which give a startlingly different picture of the book trade from that portrayed in his enduring magnum opus.

The first of these novels was titled
My Father's Son: A Faithful Record
by 'W. W. Penn', a novel that claims to have been 'prepared for the press by John Harvey' – both Penn and Harvey being
deliberately giveaway Quaker names. Published in 1913 by Hodder & Stoughton, it has an attractive, two-tone, blue-canvas jacket with gilt lettering, and a skyline of the towers and spires of the City and the dome of St Paul's – a silhouette of the old publishing world of the Bible and the Book. It is the story of William, the spendthrift offspring of a bankrupt grandfather and a respectable, lower-middle-class, book-trade father. The family business deals in 'moral pamphlets and goody-goody children's tracts', and Will hates and despises it, but makes such a mess of his university career at Oxford and his Civil Service examinations that he is obliged to enter it.