Mysterious Wisdom by Rachel Campbell-Johnston

Author:Rachel Campbell-Johnston
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2011-06-07T04:00:00+00:00

The letters written by Palmer and Hannah from Italy are irregular. They reached the Linnells haphazardly, sometimes in the wrong order, sometimes two at once; long and (as far as Hannah’s parents were concerned) nerve-wracking interludes often fell between them, provoking terrible anxieties and leading to angry recriminations. Read all together, however, they give a vivacious account of foreign adventures. Palmer, who would pull out his pen as soon as the tea was drawing, had rather less time than his wife for writing; but their missives – his often poured onto the page without revisions or erasures, hers full of apologies for not writing sooner, for having bad handwriting, broken pens or for being too brief – bring their experiences to vivid life. ‘An account of all the novelties which I have seen, if hung from the top of the Monument, would trail upon London Bridge,’19 Palmer said.

He and his new wife observed everything wide-eyed, from the extravagant masquerades of the Rome carnival to a papal procession in which a white satin pontiff was borne aloft like ‘something the English boys carry about on the fifth of November’.20 They remarked on the ‘dear precious shining heavenly faces’ of the ‘poor barefooted pilgrims’21 arriving at churches to pray. They witnessed a monk securing his dinner by offering fish-market traders a coloured print of the Virgin to kiss in exchange for a small gift from each of their stalls: ‘I think in Billingsgate he would find himself as much out of his element as the fish themselves,’22 Palmer observed dryly. They met a curly-headed urchin who had been christened after Christ’s prophetic cousin: ‘I saw John the Baptist this morning eat a very large raw Cucumber for breakfast,’23 Hannah said. And they watched a funeral in which boys dressed as angels carried the bier, their large pasteboard wings knocking against everything, and making, Hannah noted, the most uncelestial noise. They listened to nightingales, saw the oxen of Theocritus and the frescos of the Florentines, ate pomegranates and oranges and sketched cypress trees planted in the days of Ariosto. They crammed their letters full of detailed observations of everything: from the way that bedsheets, shaken out of windows, scattered passers-by with bugs, through how swaddled babies were hung up on hooks to keep them out of the way, to the heat of the door handles which could not even be touched. Nothing was too small to mention – from a screaming match with a curricle driver to the loss of a parasol.

The weather proved a matter of constant discussion. One moment Palmer was shivering in Rome ‘wearing always two shirts and two waistcoats lined with flannel – and sometimes an India rubber cloak’,24 a few months later he was sweltering through the high summer of Pompeii. ‘It is a labour here to lift my hand for a dip of ink,’ he moaned, though at least he was being baked in a ‘pleasantly ventilated oven’.25 In Florence a stifling heatwave reduced him to the consistency ‘of the jelly fish which we find on the sands’.

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