Arthur Rackham: His Life and Work/Chapter 1

by Derek Hudson

CHAPTER ONE

Beginnings

t would make an unusual beginning if his biographer could state with confidence that Arthur Rackham was descended, however remotely, from a pirate. There is a touch of macabre romanticism about the idea that is attractive and could be significant; one goes on to imagine a humorously ineffective pirate, who might have stepped out of Peter Pan, and who spent his time sketching on the quarterdeck when he should have been boarding the enemy with his cutlass.

John Rackham was undoubtedly a pirate. He operated from Providence Island and in 1718 commanded a brigantine. Captured by a man-o’-war in 1720, he was hanged with a number of his crew at Port Royal, Jamaica, on 17th November of that year. Can we connect dishonest John with the entirely respectable branch of the family from which Arthur Rackham sprang? Links in the chain of evidence are lacking. But the theory is supported by family tradition.

For a sound beginning, however, we had better turn to Thomas Rackham, born in the Minories, London, in or about the year 1800. The Rackham family was probably of East Anglian descent. The name Rackham has been derived from the Old-English word for a tick; it may have been a tribute, say the etymologists, to a specially large rick, or to the prominence of ricks around a homestead. Be that as it may, the latter-day Rackhams were cockneys, and Arthur Rackham was proudly conscious of the fact.

Thomas Rackham, Arthur’s grandfather, was a schoolmaster, who first taught in the school of his uncle William Capel in Vauxhall Walk and who opened a private school of his own in Baalzephon Street, Bermondsey, in 1832. His only brother Joseph also kept private schools, first in Kennington and afterwards in Kensington. In 1824 Thomas married Jane Harris, herself the daughter of a teacher, James Harris, whose private school was in Prospect Row, Walworth. James Harris was an agreeable character, fond of children, a member of the Philosophical Society of London and author of a school book on Algebra. There was a measure of artistic talent in the Harris family. James’s brother Henry was a lithographer, and Henry’s son Augustus became a drawing master at Maidstone.

Alfred Thomas Rackham, the father of Arthur Rackham, was born on 11th July 1829, in the house in Baalzephon Street, Bermondsey, and was christened at old Bermondsey Church. It was then a relatively prosperous neighbourhood, for a number of wealthy men lived in Bermondsey at their business premises. At the age of seven or eight Alfred Thomas attended lectures given by Wallis the astronomer, Dr Birkbeck and others, at the Southwark Astronomical Society. He did not go to school, but was privately taught by one Mary Sutherland, whom he later described as ‘a very able woman’. Before he was fifteen, he was accepted as a junior clerk by a proctor in Doctors’ Commons at a salary of £20 a year. After two years he proceeded, this time as a full clerk, to Messrs Tebbs and Sons, also proctors in Doctors’ Commons, at £40 a year.

Doctors’ Commons, immortalized by Dickens in David Copperfield, was the name given to the area south of St Paul’s Churchyard, surrounding the College of Advocates in Great Knightrider Street. The College consisted of two small quadrangles wherein the Advocates (Doctors of Law) resided or had chambers. They alone had

The struggle for seats: Scenes at Oxford Circus. Pall Mall Budget, 19 March 1891.

the right to act as Counsel in the Ecclesiastical and Admiralty Courts which were held in the large hall of the College. On the first day of each term the court looked very gay, when, after prayers in the adjoining dining-hall, the Judge and the Advocates, in their scarlet robes as Doctors of Law, assembled with the proctors – who corresponded to solicitors in the other courts – wearing black gowns and hoods lined with white fur.

The outbreak of the Crimean War in 1854 gave A. T. Rackham a chance of advancement. In war-time the business of the Admiralty Court was greatly increased, for it had cognizance of all naval prize matters. At twenty-four, A. T. Rackham’s experience in Messrs Tebbs’ office stood him in good stead. He entered the Civil Service in the Registry of the Admiralty Court with a salary of £200 a year, and was soon extremely busy preparing the Declaration of War and other papers. Much was expected of him, and he did not spare himself. Once, while copying a document for the Queen’s signature, he heard St Paul’s clock – the ‘heart of London’, as Dickens called it – strike three in the morning. Having failed three times to fill the large sheet of gilt-edged paper without a mistake, he had to return to the office earlier than usual, only a few hours afterwards, to accomplish the feat.

A. T. Rackham remained in the Registry until he became Chief Clerk, moving with it first to Somerset House and then to rooms in the new Law Courts. In 1896, while still retaining the Chief Clerkship, he was appointed to the ancient office of Admiralty Marshal and Serjeant at Mace of the High Court of Justice, at £800 a year. During each of the three years of his Marshalship he took part in the annual procession of judges and officials up the central hall of the Royal Courts of Justice on the first day of the sittings after the long vacation.

In September 1861, A. T. Rackham was married to Anne, second daughter of William Stevenson, a draper of Nottingham (her grandfather was Principal of the General Baptist College). They spent a fortnight of their honeymoon at Ventnor and another fortnight in

‘ “Hey! up the chimney, lass! Hey after you!” ’ The Ingoldsby Legends.
Frontispiece to 1907 edition.

Paris, returning to set up house at 210 South Lambeth Road, where Rackham’s mother and father lived with them until they died in 1873 and 1874 respectively.

In this house all their twelve children were born. The two eldest, both boys, died young. Then, in 1866, came Margaret, a clever girl, who studied at Bedford College and became an examiner in the King’s College Civil Service classes. Arthur, the subject of this biography, was born on 19th September 1867. Harris was born in 1868, and after a brilliant career at the City of London School and Christ’s College, Cambridge, was elected to a classical fellowship at Christ’s in 1894. The next two children, a girl and a boy, both died in their infancy. In 1873 Winifred was born; she became a school-teacher and married Herbert Edward Adams, who taught mathematics at Dulwich College. Another girl, who survived only a few months, was born in 1875. The tenth child, Bernard, born in 1876, was to become Keeper of the Department of Ceramics at the Victoria and Albert Museum and an outstanding authority on his subject. Two more boys completed the family – Stanley, born in 1877, who studied agriculture, and farmed in Canada; and Maurice, who was born in 1879 and in 1901 joined the Admiralty Registry.

This, then, was a typical middle-class Victorian family of the best sort. The father, himself a man of distinction, had at least three unusually distinguished sons – Arthur, Harris and Bernard. Certain characteristic strains ran through the lives of most of his children. There was a didactic, discriminating, scholarly strain; a strain of cheerful humour; an artistic strain; a conscientious strain, born perhaps of legal precision, which showed itself in strict application to business and financial matters. Arthur Rackham combined these qualities to a marked degree.

As a child in the house in South Lambeth Road, Arthur showed a precocious talent for drawing, and especially for fantastic subjects. Put to bed early, he smuggled paper and pencil with him and drew while the daylight lasted. When this was forbidden, he still managed to hide his pencil and draw on the pillows. In the nursery Arthur was healthily mischievous. He discovered a small hole under the saddle of the large dappled rocking-horse; successive nurses lost their thimbles; and, when the children rode the rocking-horse, a mysterious and increasing rattle sounded from the interior. A note to Arthur from his grandmother Stevenson when he was nine congratulated him on a letter which was ‘very nicely written’ and had obviously been freely illustrated with caricatures. ‘The sketches are from life I suppose. … Well, you have not made any of you very handsome.’ As for one of the girls ‘what a nose she has, and a cap fit for her grandmother’.

He entered the City of London School at the age of twelve, in September 1879. The school was then in Cheapside, and Arthur moved with it to the Victoria Embankment in 1883. Years later (28th June 1929) he wrote of his school days to his friend Howard Angus Kennedy, secretary of the Canadian Authors’ Association:

 

‘So we come from the same school! I went there first at the end of ’79 so we were never together. Old Joey was still in great form, & was my master before the school moved to the Embankment – and a great master he was. Then at the “New School” – as we then called it, I settled down under Rushy, whose back benches I occupied for a long time – never flying higher. But he & I were friends until his death: & he had a great collection of my drawings done in unorthodox hours & bagged by him. And even Abbott turned a blind eye to my delinquencies of that kind. …’

 

‘Old Joey’ was the Rev. Joseph Harris; ‘Rushy’ was W. G. Rushbrooke, the senior assistant classical master and a former Fellow of St John’s College, Cambridge; and ‘Abbott’ was Edwin A. Abbott, the headmaster. Arthur did not distinguish himself particularly by his

scholarship, though he won several prizes, including one for mathematics in his last year; but he endeared himself to his masters by his humour and character, and by his precocious talent for drawing, which earned him the school prize (a portrait of himself by Herbert Dicksee, the drawing master, which seems not to have survived). His caricatures of the masters were so successful that he was asked to repeat one of Rushbrooke on the blackboard for the benefit of the whole form.

With all his high spirits, Arthur Rackham was a delicate boy, and at the end of 1883 Dr (later Sir) Samuel Wilks recommended that he should leave school and accompany two family friends, Miss Liggens and Mrs Merryfield, who were emigrating to Australia. Accordingly he sailed with them from Plymouth in the S.S. Chimborazo of the

The five sketches of men in the margins are reproduced from original drawings in one of Rackham’s scrap-books, and are dated 4 December 1892.

Miss Nellie Stewart, the latest Comic Opera Debutante. Pall Mall Budget, 25 February 1892 (from a reproduction).

Sketch at the Palace Theatre: Mlle. Armand ’Ary. Westminster Budget, 24 February 1893 (from a reproduction).

Orient Line on 26th January 1884, passing through the Mediterranean and the Suez Canal, and arriving at Sydney on 15th March. He spent about three months in Australia, returning in June in the S.S. Iberia. During the outward and homeward voyages, and during his stay in Australia, he painted many creditable water-colours. Vesuvius, Capri and the Suez Canal were among his subjects, but his chef d’œuvre was a ‘Panoramic View of Sydney from Nature’, dated May 1884. He arrived back in London in July with his health entirely re-established.

The long sea voyage, with its ample opportunities for sketching, had quite decided him to be an artist, and in the autumn of 1884 he entered the Lambeth School of Art. His fellow students included Leonard Raven-Hill, Thomas Sturge Moore, and Charles Ricketts; the last-named particularly influenced Rackham. But there was no question of his art-studies occupying the whole of his time; he had to prove his ability and work his way. Thus on 11th November 1884, his old masters Rushbrooke and Abbott both took up their pens on his behalf. Rushbrooke recommended him ‘on the score of intelligence, industry and character’, while his late headmaster Edwin Abbott declared that ‘as regards ability, knowledge, character, and gentlemanly bearing Mr Arthur Rackham would be well suited for the clerkship he is now seeking in the Westminster Fire Office’.