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Nothing is more remarkable in reading the life of Crabbe than his passion for weeds. After his wife’s death—she was mad for the last years of her life, alternately melancholic and exalted—he gave up weed collecting and took to fossils. But he always went fossilizing alone; though if children insisted upon coming he suffered them. “Playing with fossils,” he called it. When he went to stay with his son George he went off, always alone, to grout for fossils in the blue lias quarries; “stopping to cut up any herb not quite common that grew in his path”; and he would return loaded with them. “The dirty fossils were placed in our best bedroom, to the great diversion of the female part of my family, the herbs stuck in the borders, among my choice flowers, that he might see them when he came again. I never displaced one of them.” This gnarled and sea-salted man was no smug clergyman underneath. He had a passion for the rejected and injured, the stunted, the hardy, the wild self-grown, self-supported unsightly weed. He was himself a weed. His birth and breeding had been the weeds—at Aldeburgh, where he was born on Christmas Eve, 1754. His father was a warehouse keeper, and rose to be collector of Salt Duties, or Salt Master, in that miserable dull sea village, the sound of whose waves never went out of George’s ears, even at Belvoir or Troubridge. His mother had kept a public house, and his father, a short powerful man, who used sometimes to read poetry—Milton or Young—to his children but was fondest of mathematics, became, owing to the death of his only daughter, violent sometimes; her “untimely death drew from him those gloomy and savage tokens of misery, which haunted, fifty years after, the memory of his gentler son”. His mother was pious, resigned, and dropsical.
Such, then, was his original weedlike life, on the quays rolling casks, waiting for a signal from the offing. And nothing is more remarkable than that this pale boy should have raised himself once and for all, by the force of one letter to Burke, into a luxurious, educated, cushioned career for life. Nothing of the kind would now be possible. Burke has been supplanted by the elementary school and scholarships.
Then there were his amorous propensities. This has to be referred to by the most respectful of sons—did he not let his father’s weeds grow among his own choice flowers?—because “These things were so well-known among the circle of which at this period he formed the delight and ornament that I have thought it absurd not to dwell on them.” He suffered at the age of sixty-four more acutely from love and jealousy than most young men of twenty. Crabbe’s nature, indeed, included more than one full-grown human being. He could shine—witness his diary, brief, pointed—in the very highest society. He had admirable manners, but, though he always gave way, yet always expected to be given way to. Moreover he was untidy in the extreme. His study table was notorious. And he was genial; called his sons “old fellows” and liked to offer his friends good claret. He tipped servants, gave presents, was loved and plundered by the poor, who pestered him for shillings so that his birthday was a kind of levée for the whole neighbourhood. As a preacher too he was unconventional, and would stand in a seat near the window to finish reading his sermon in the dark. And he took opium, with very good results, in a constant and slightly increasing dose. He would wander with his children in the fields at Glemham till the moon rose, reading aloud from some novel as he walked, while the boys chased moths, filled their caps with glow worms, and the nightingales sang. He wrote innumerable books which he afterwards burnt in his garden, the children stirring up the fire and flinging on it fresh manuscripts. Thus was burnt his Essay on Botany because it was in English and his friend, Mr. Davies of Trinity College, Cambridge, “could not stomach the notion of degrading such a science by treating of it in a modern language”. For this reason he missed the honour of being known as the discoverer of the humble trefoil now known as Trofolium Suffocatum. And in 1787 he was seized one fine summer’s day with so intense a longing for the sea that he mounted his horse, rode alone to the coast of Lincolnshire sixty miles from his home, dipped in the waves that washed the beach of Aldeburgh, and returned home to sit in his untidy study, arranging minerals, shells, and insects.
[written ca. 1933]
Selina Trimmer.
The gardens at Chatsworth which contained so many strange exotic plants brought by the great gardener Paxton from foreign lands, could boast, too, of one modest daisy whose surname was Trimmer and whose Christian name was Selina. She was a governess of course, and when we think what it meant to Charlotte Brontë and to Miss Weeton to be a governess in a middle-class family, the life of Selina Trimmer redounds more to the credit of the Cavendishes than all the splendours of Chatsworth, Devonshire House and Hardwick Hall. She was a governess; yet her pupil Lady Harriet wrote to her when she became engaged, “I send you the enclosed bracelet. … I often think of all your past conduct to me with affection and gratitude not to be expressed. God bless you, my dearest friend.”
Selina sheds light upon the Cavendishes, but outside that radiance little is known of her. Her life must begin with a negative—she was not her sister-in-law, the famous Mrs. Trimmer of the Tales. She had a brother who lived at Brentford. From Brentford then, about 1790, came Selina, up the great marble stairs, following a footman, to be governess to the little Cavendishes in the nursery at Devonshire House. But were they all Cavendishes—the six romping, high-spirited children she found there? Three it appeared had no right to any surname at all. And who was the Lady Elizabeth Foster who lived on such intimate terms with the disagreeable Duke, and on such friendly terms with the lovely Duchess? Soon it must have dawned upon Trimmer as she sat over her Quaker discourse when her pupils were in bed that she had taken up her lodging in the abode of vice. Downstairs there was drinking and gambling; upstairs there were bastards and mistresses. According to Brentford standards she should have drawn her skirts about her and flounced out of the polluted place at once. Yet she stayed on. Far from being vicious, the Devonshire House family was healthy and in its own way virtuous. No more devoted family existed. The children adored their mother. They were on the best of terms with one another. If the Duke was an indifferent father, his daughters were as dutiful as the daughters of any country parson. One person, it is true, all the children hated, and that was Lady Liz. But they hated her not because she was their father’s mistress, but because she was corrupt; whining and cooing, false and spiteful. Could it be possible, then, that an absence of conventional morality brings into being a real morality? Were not the little girls, Georgiana and Hary-o, who knew from childhood all the facts that are concealed from female Trimmers till they were married women, far less sentimental, less prudish and silly, infinitely more honest, sensible and downright than the middle-class girls whose virtue was so carefully shielded at Brentford?
These were questions that Trimmer must have pondered as she walked with her dubious brood in Hyde Park or escorted them to parties. They were asked everywhere. The courtyard at Devonshire House was full of coaches by day and by night. Nobody looked askance at them. So, while she taught the little Cavendishes their sums and their pothooks, they taught her; they enlarged her mind. They laughed at her and teased her and vowed that she was carrying on a love affair with Bob Adair. But for all that they treated her as if she were a woman of flesh and blood. There was only one class for the Cavendish children, and that was their own. Whatever their faults, and Hary-o always overslept, and could never read only one book at a time, the Cavendishes were the least snobbish of people. They treated her as an equal; they accepted her as part of their pagan and classless society. When the girls began to go out into the world they wrote as frankly and freely to their “dearest Selina” about their parties and their partners as they wrote to each other.
By the time they were going out into the great world, Trimmer was well aware of its dangers. She could take comfort in the fact that Georgiana and Hary-o were spared at least one temptation—they had not their mother’s beauty. “I am delighted to be reckoned like mama,” Hary-o wrote. “ ‘A very bad edition though,’ as an honest man said of me at Mrs. Somebody’s party.” They were short, fat, and rather heavy featured. But by way of compensation they had excellent brains. Their little eyes were extremely shrewd; in mind they were precocious and caustic. Hary-o could dash off a description of her fox-hunting cousin Althorp with a vivacity that any novelist might have envied,