Magpies, Squirrels and Thieves (32 page)

Very little is known about Peggy Harrison, or her exact relationship with Mayer. She certainly travelled abroad with him extensively, and the marble bust is a clear sign of his admiration and respect. Perhaps it was also a way of making amends. In an age with strict rules of propriety, Peggy may well have expected a proposal of marriage. A woman who travelled with a man to whom she was not married, who accompanied him to archaeological sites and along tangled streets of antique dealers, who studied sales catalogues in cold hotel rooms and who entertained, amused and comforted her companion on long journeys, risked a great deal – presumably for love. There is obvious intimacy in Mayer's evocation of ‘a delightful companion' who had travelled so far and for so long with him, and there is clear admiration in his assessment of her manners and character. For a connoisseur like Mayer, too, his judgement of Peggy's ‘cultivated taste' signals the highest praise. But perhaps she was too independent to submit to married life with a man like Mayer, or perhaps she was not quite what he was looking for. However it was, their relationship was never formalized, and eventually faltered. By the time Mayer had settled himself into Pennant House, their intimate companionship had somehow come to an end.

As Mayer's circle of friends grew, there were inevitably other women to whom he was attracted, and who understood his
devotion to collecting. Not long after moving into Pennant House, he spent some weeks working with Elizabeth Meteyard, who was writing a biography of Josiah Wedgwood. Elizabeth was bright and appealing in her middle age. She was studious and she shared Mayer's taste in ceramics and his fascination with the past. Mayer was delighted to be in such company and gave Elizabeth free access to all his papers, helped fund her research and offered her the benefit of introductions to his long list of useful acquaintances, including members of the Wedgwood family. Elizabeth also noted demurely, that he ‘permitted me to work for a fortnight under his personal guidance' and entertained her with stories.
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There is no doubt that he found her a charming and knowledgeable companion. He may, for a moment, have thought of more. But Elizabeth had a career and was as committed to her work as Mayer was to his collection. Her biography was soon to be followed by five other books on Wedgwood. Making her way as a professional writer, she contributed articles and short stories to numerous periodicals under the pen-name ‘Silverpen' and she also found success as a popular novelist. She could not spend too much time at Pennant House, no matter how pleasant it was, and she was unwilling to be distracted by Mayer. For each of her ceramics books, she drew on the resources of Mayer's collection, and over the years she became a familiar face in Bebington, attending the opening of an art exhibition there in September 1871 and visiting again to research Wedgwood books that were published in 1873 and 1875. Such visits seem to have been no more than an agreeable interlude for them both, and all too quickly she returned to London. Meteyard clearly retained a lifelong admiration for Mayer and his work, however, and at her death in 1879 her will bequeathed all her personal papers to Liverpool Museum; the wish was not respected by her executors.

In the summer of 1863, Mayer's sixtieth year, he finally became engaged. He wrote delightedly to all his closest friends, announcing
his forthcoming marriage with pride, and they wrote back in turn, expressing their surprise and sharing in his pleasure. ‘I am very happy to think that you have partially weaned yourself from things antique. . . that you have distracted your attention from coats of mail and bent it upon crinoline,' wrote Joseph Clarke, adding that he was ‘in high glee at the pleasure of paying my most ardent but humble respects' to the new Mrs Mayer.
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The wedding plans, it seems, were quickly set – there was little reason for delay. At Mayer's age, he could dispense with the reticence of youth.

We don't know who it was that Mayer was so close to marrying. All we know is that she lived in Kent, some 300 miles away. It is possible that Mayer had known her a long time and I believe he may have met her during the negotiations to buy the Faussett collection ten years earlier when he had spent time in and around Heppington. He may have been wooing her for a decade, or he may have had to shelve his advances until the way finally became clear on the death of a father or a husband. Nor do we know why the marriage never took place. There might have been last-minute nerves or a disagreement. The lady who Mayer had chosen for a wife may have faltered at the thought of uprooting herself and moving so far from familiar things. They may have been cheated, in the end, by death, leaving Mayer to mourn the woman he should have married. All we know for sure is that he was left alone.

The Victorians were inclined to think of avid collectors as life's losers. Although there was money to be made from collecting, and a certain prestige too for those who, like Mayer, managed to earn a prominent position within the community, it was difficult to resist the idea that a singular devotion to things was the mark of a man who had failed in other ways. Collecting was increasingly being seen as a means of expressing identity – or of compensating for personal shortfalls. In literature, the stereotype of the collector
was associated with the withdrawn, the anti-social and the strange, like Wilkie Collins's Mr Fairlie in
The Woman in White
, a character portrayed as living in ‘profound seclusion' and completely preoccupied with his possessions.
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In popular journals like
Punch
, the collector was drawn as weak, obsessive and comical. A cartoon from the
Punch Almanack
of 1875 shows a ‘pale enthusiast' in the grips of ‘Chronic Chinamania (incurable)' and so absorbed by his collection that he is apparently oblivious to the charms of the young women encircling him. Similalry, a set of French caricatures features M. de Menussard, an imaginary collector who lives alone, never goes out, has no friends and is ‘a little old man, dry, wrinkled, worn down, patched up'.
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Even among collectors themselves, there could be ambiguity and embarrassment about their activity:
The Connoisseur: A Collector's Journal and Monthly Review
noted defensively that its readers might well display ‘amiable weaknesses', and might even be in the grip of an ‘unwise but never despicable passion'.
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The idea that collecting was somehow ‘unwise' harked back to a more widespread discomfort with art, and how it might encourage potentially disruptive, or even immoral, pleasures. The behaviour of avant-garde artists such as the Pre-Raphaelites only reinforced this uneasiness. In 1850, John Everett Millais' work,
Christ in the House of His Parents
, was attacked as blasphemous, while the unconventional lives and loves of the painters attracted continual attention and at times caused outrage: John Millais' relationship with Effie, the wife of John Ruskin, her subsequent divorce and remarriage to Millais was the subject of a public scandal. Those of a religious turn of mind could be suspicious of art's appeal to the senses, and its portrayal of unpredictable emotional and psychological states. The emphasis on the utility of art objects – Henry Cole's commitment to proving their relevance to industry and manufacturing – was one way of divorcing them from desire or sensual pleasure, removing them
from the domain of aesthetic pleasure to the less unsettling and more pragmatic structure of commerce.

The anxieties about such unhealthy passions were particularly evident when the Victorians thought about men collecting the decorative arts or antiquarians in their cluttered studies. Science collections were typically regarded as scholarly and progressive; paintings, sculpture and classical antiquities were respectable and had long been valued by the leisured and landed classes. Robinson's fondness for historical works, especially Renaissance masterpieces, was considered properly intellectual and cultured – but a preoccupation with what became known as the ‘lesser' arts was more suspect. Modern manufactures carried the taint of the factory and warehouse; china, glass, silverware and textiles were a matter for household affairs and were associated with excess, decoration and femininity. As we have seen with the collecting of china, men who chose to collect these things risked being seen as odd, emotionally deficient or even effeminate.

For some Victorians – and for later psychoanalysts such as Sigmund Freud – there was something about collecting that suggested abnormality, sexual impotence and personal failure.
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Writers like Henry James and George Meredith peopled their novels with collectors who turned to their objects as a substitute for love. In James'
The Portrait of a Lady
, the relationships of one of the central characters, Gilbert Osmond, are described in terms of collecting: ‘We knew that he was fond of originals, of rarities, of the superior, the exquisite. . . he perceived a new attraction in the idea of taking to himself a young lady. . . in his collection of choice objects.' Osmond's emotional inadequacy and cold sexuality are directly linked to his collecting, which is seen as an impulse that disengages him from the more normal passions of those around him. During the collapse of his marriage, he turns to his objects, breaking off from an emotional scene with his wife to study some of his favourite pieces: ‘He got up, as he spoke, and
walked to the chimney, where he stood a moment bending his eye, as if he had seen them for the first time, on the delicate specimens of rare porcelain with which it was covered. He took up a small cup and held it in his hand. . .' Elsewhere in the same novel, another character, Ned Rosier, pursues love in a similarly frigid way, unable to dissociate his collecting from his emotional life: ‘She was admirably finished,' he notes, on finding the woman of his dreams. ‘She had had the last touch: she was really a consummate piece. He thought of her in amorous meditation a good deal as he might have thought of a Dresden-china shepherdess.' In
The Egoist
, Meredith explores similar ideas. The wealthy aristocrat at the heart of the novel, Sir Willoughby Patterne, is a collector. His overwhelming urge to collect people as well as things is presented not in terms of sexual desire but as a more insidious and general obsession with control. His collecting impulses become all-embracing – and dangerous – reducing him finally to ‘a stone man'.
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With such precedents all around in popular culture, it seems likely that knowing nods would have been exchanged in Liverpool drawing rooms when a man like Mayer, failing to marry, immersed himself instead in his collection.

With the knowledge that he would never now be a family man, Mayer threw himself so vigorously into collecting that, despite its size, Pennant House was soon full of objects, papers, letters and ledgers. Having already given his Egyptian Museum to the public, he now accumulated a second collection, one that was even more personal. In the quiet garden rooms that might in other circumstances have been used by his wife, he accumulated packets of autographs from famous people whom he admired. In cabinets and on tables were displayed over 200 engraved gems and rings. There were illuminated manuscripts, wood engravings, ivories, enamels and embroideries. There were calendars of plays performed at Covent Garden and the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, during the early 1740s and the seventeenth-century manuscript
of John Crowne's play
Darius
,
King of Persia
. The greatest solace was all kinds of papers and objects relating to pottery.

The house began to feel small under the pressure of the expanding collection, and so Mayer was forced to extend. First a two-storey bay was added, but it was almost immediately filled and, just a few months later, in the autumn of 1873, Mayer added a new wing on each side of the house, as well as a high tower. He set himself the monumental task of writing a history of art in England, drawing on his collection for material, and he collaborated with his nephew Frederick Boyle on two books:
Early Exhibitions of Art in Liverpool: With some Notes for a Memoir of George Stubbs R.A
., which he published in 1876, and
Memoirs of Thomas Dodd, William Upcott and George Stubbs R.A.
, three years later. The great art history was never completed and neither of Mayer's published collaborations was particularly remarkable: both were almost certainly ghosted by Boyle on his uncle's behalf. It was a much less ambitious work, a paper on the ‘History of the art of pottery in Liverpool', first contributed to the
Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire
in 1855, and revised by Mayer in 1873 during this period of learned writing, that proved that his lifelong lack of confidence in his own scholarly credentials was misplaced. It became the definitive text on the subject, and is still significant today.

As the years passed and he retired from his business, finally, at the age of seventy-one, as his friends became too old to travel, too tired to collect or too ill to spend time with him – and as loneliness proved ever harder to keep at bay – Mayer must have seemed at times like the archetypal collector, shuffling around rooms piled high with the past, obsessed with the minutiae of history. But he was not one to shut himself away. His collecting had always been a sociable activity, a way to make friends and meet colleagues, and even in old age he displayed no desire to become reclusive. His
nature was philanthropic and he spent his last years looking beyond the collection at Pennant House. When the evenings closed in, quiet and dark, he relished the hours reading his papers or writing notes, but he was proud, too, that his days were active and generous and useful. The village of Bebington was thriving, and Mayer was, by and large, responsible for its orderly growth.

With the construction of the railways and new roads, and the introduction of a ferry boat link with Liverpool, the population of Bebington more than trebled between 1841 and 1871. But whereas, in cities, the rapid mid-century rise in the number of inhabitants frequently resulted in overcrowded slums and desperate poverty, Bebington's growth saw an influx of professional people, rather than unskilled labourers, and, thanks to Mayer, there was a sustained programme of investment. ‘Without losing its rustic air, the village has gained advantages such as many a town might envy,' boasted a local paper,
The Standard
, in 1878. ‘A very few years since. . . it had neither gas nor pavements, its younger population went barefooted and women fetched water from two miles distance.' Now, however, the paper noted proudly, ‘Bebington may be held up as a model village [and] the honour is chiefly due to Mr Joseph Mayer.'
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