The Edge of the Crowd

1 Wet Collodion

Hyde Park Corner, late in the morning of July 14th, 1851, would try the patience of angels. That, anyway, is the unshakeable opinion of Cornelius Touchfarthing, as he sharply detaches sweat-fastened buttocks from the wagon’s dampened leather seat and climbs up on the chest of chemicals that has been stored behind him. Once aloft, he sways dangerously like a mast-top sailor as he searches ahead for the latest impediment to his progress and attracts the disdainful glance of a liveried footman upon a carriage and the interested attention of two sporting gentlemen in a fly. ‘What the deuce is it this time?’ asks one of them.

Touchfarthing shades his brow and squints into the middle-distance. ‘They’re letting traffic across the street,’ he reports. ‘Carriages. Lords and ladies, it looks like. And a squadron of dragoons. Well, it makes a fine picture!’

‘Picture be damned!’ says one of the passengers in the fly and takes up his newspaper while Touchfarthing, looming above, uses his hands to shape a scene beyond the crush of carriages and broughams, laden wagons and packed omnibuses. Fleshy thumbs crop pavements closely-cobbled with hats and bare heads, making them a variegated living border for a square of scarlet coats, sleekly-groomed horses and glittering carriages. ‘A very fine picture indeed!’ repeats Touchfarthing to himself.

Shaded by Touchfarthing’s corpulence is the slighter figure of John Rankin, who flicks limp reins against his knee as he chats to a lava-haired street-sweeper who has been performing ‘cat’un-wheels, ha-penny a tumble!’ between the wagon and the stationary carriage alongside. The boy doffs his cap and thanks Rankin for his penny. ‘Oh, that an’t nothing at all,’ Rankin says, jerking his thumb upwards. ‘Least, not for a cove what’s in the employ of Admiral bloody Nelson!’

‘What was that?’ Touchfarthing demands and sits down so heavily that the springs bounce and the bottles of chemicals chink loudly in the box.

‘Admiral Nelson,’ says Rankin. ‘I was just saying that Admiral Nelson lived in that there house.’

The bigger man sighs loudly as he swabs his thick neck with a damp and discoloured handkerchief. ‘Apsley House is the residence of the Duke of Wellington.’

‘That’s the fellow,’ says Rankin, and turns to wink at the boy who is already ducking under the horse’s head and causing Touchfarthing to catch his breath as he slips between the enormous wheels of a great wagon loaded with slate. The driver takes up his whip and for a dreadful moment Touchfarthing fears that the vehicle will move off and that the child will be crushed but the boy reappears among the shuffling crowds on the far pavement, biting his coin before a company of unshod ragamuffins.

Touchfarthing stares in awe at the multitude of street hawkers: the sellers of oranges and thinly cut ham sandwiches, baked potatoes and bottles of ginger beer. Then his attention is drawn towards the long lines of costermongers with their barrows and to the many hawkers of shiny commemorative medals. He considers the fact that this small army is there only to service a much greater force, whose ranks stand four and five deep by the Park rails.

Touchfarthing watches the world go by: young men with beribboned sweethearts; gangs of loudly-singing apprentices; immaculately turned-out recruiting sergeants; a sprinkling of shabby-genteel half-pay officers; two elderly widows in bombazine complaining of the heat; the many-hued faces of foreign visitors; and the walking advertisements whose signboards offer ‘cheap beds tonight’. A fascination of individuals now intrudes itself upon his attention: a small portly gentleman with glinting glasses and apoplectic colour prattling with a gaunt cleric whose frock-coat is out at the elbows; a plump and rubescent matron swiping at unruly children with a furled umbrella; and a lean man in black with green-tinted spectacles who stands against a lamppost unmoving, like a rock in a flowing stream.

‘I never saw so many people here in my life,’ Touchfarthing mutters to himself. ‘Just look at that mob,’ he says, louder this time, indicating this swell to his assistant. ‘And it’s not even a cheap shilling day …’

‘That mob’s our bread and butter,’ Rankin says. ‘It’s their sixpunny portraits what puts meat on our table.’

‘For the moment, yes,’ Touchfarthing sighs, noting the strange admixture of the crowds, the well-turned-out families lining up with dusty travellers, the quality coalescing in the crush with shopkeepers and tradesmen. ‘Perhaps, unlike myself, you don’t find it distasteful, all that … mingling?’ He is overwhelmed, perhaps appalled, by this unnatural colliding of the classes.

Rankin rolls his eyes. ‘You know what you’ve become, Mr Touchfarthing?’ he says. ‘A stunning snob, that’s what.’

Touchfarthing is too hot and too tired to rise to Rankin’s bait. They have been stopped outside Apsley House a full half hour but no one has made better headway today: crested carriage has had no more advantage over laden wagon than hansom cab over four-wheeled growler. All have been stilled under the grilling sun as drivers curse and passengers fan away flies drawn by mounting piles of horse dung.

The petrifying spell is broken by a passenger in a hansom. ‘Devil take it, I shall walk!’ he says and pays off his driver. As if this is the signal that all have awaited, the traffic begins to move again. Rankin shakes the reins and the wagon trundles forward.

Progress is slow. A piece of orange peel crushed on a front wheel takes almost a whole minute to come again to the top. But no matter how slowly they are moving, at last and up ahead vehicles can be seen turning into Hyde Park through the Prince of Wales’ Gate, where they are illuminated by sunbeams glancing off the thousands of glass panes housing the Great Exhibition.

II

Rankin does all the work. It is Rankin who unhitches and tethers the horse and Rankin who brings their operation to such a state of readiness that a crowd has already gathered and has begun to hinder preparations with numerous enquiries about the pricing of premium-quality souvenir photographs. A handful of mismatched dining chairs are taken from the wagon and arranged upon the grass where the subjects will sit. The camera nestles upon its tripod sufficiently distant from the Exhibition that a portion of the building may serve as a recognisable background and the angle of view has been adjusted so that the lines of abandoned carriages and other conveyances will be excluded. Even so, Rankin frowns as he emerges from under the black cloth, dissatisfied with the picture on the ground-glass screen.

For once, backgrounding is important. His customers will pay today’s high rate only if the photograph associates them with the fabulous edifice. But between the lens and the all-important background are desultory strollers, boys with hoops and vendors of various comestibles. He wishes them vanished. Rankin would also prefer that the visitors examining the exhibits outside the building – a monolithic slab of coal, an assortment of heaped raw materials for use in industry and the biggest ship’s anchor Rankin has seen – would take themselves inside. But humankind is not to be avoided today: all about are people of every station and exotic tint. It is hard to remember, and at this moment even more difficult to believe, that a two-minute exposure will entirely eliminate from the scene everything that is in motion.

Rankin pitches the dark-tent under an elm tree and into this he installs a brass-cornered and felt-lined box of lenses. Beside the box he places his dishes, scales, weights, funnels, glass measures and a large supply of glass plates. He sends a boy to fill a pail from the Serpentine and now needs only the heavy chest, in which are contained bottles of chemicals for coating, sensitising, developing and fixing of the glass negatives. He exits the tent and begins to drag the trunk towards the tailboard of the wagon. ‘I ain’t shifting the chemicals by myself,’ he calls to Touchfarthing, who stands shaded by the great elm. ‘I shan’t answer if the box gets dropped.’

Touchfarthing, sipping from a bottle of ginger beer and watching riders upon Rotten Row, makes no reply.

‘What you’ll have is a box of broken glass and spilt chemicals,’ says Rankin, louder. ‘And it won’t be my fault.’

But Touchfarthing only indicates a pair of riders who have broken into a dangerous canter, sending a small boy and girl fleeing from their path. ‘Look there,’ he says. ‘That’s Lord Montague mounted on the roan. With Arthur Vavasour. Well, well! Do you know that when last I saw them they were hardly speaking?’

‘No, I didn’t know that,’ says Rankin, shortly. He purses his lips and drums his fingers on the chest containing chemicals.

‘I had their acquaintance at Sibthorpe, you know,’ Touchfarthing says, complacently.

Rankin whistles through his teeth and rolls his blue eyes. ‘When you’re ready, guv’nor,’ he says, managing with some difficulty to move the box unaided by the other man.

Touchfarthing approaches the camera as a maestro his piano forte. By separating himself from Rankin and the labours of preparation, it has been made clear to onlookers that it is Touchfarthing who is the artist; and Rankin who is very much ‘school of’.

Touchfarthing signals with a ringed finger and Rankin invites the first subject, a well-fed gentleman with a single bushy eyebrow and luxuriant red whiskers, to sit upon a chair. As discreetly as possible, he quietly points out the advantages of a larger photograph frame, of additional prints or of a special patent backing which is guaranteed to prevent fading, before he solicits a shilling and retires to the rope, beyond which interested onlookers have now formed themselves into an orderly queue. Touchfarthing, shrouded by the great black cloth, removes the lens cover and raises his right arm. Eyebrow and whiskers are still as death and eternity seems to pass before the photographer drops his hand and re-covers the lens. The business of the day has commenced.

Rankin must now confine himself to the dark-tent, the conjuror’s cloak under which some magic must be performed before the sorcerer’s apprentice can re-emerge with his subjects’ captured and framed likenesses on the day they visited the Great Exhibition. And it might as well be alchemy to Touchfarthing too. This collodion process is so new that Rankin alone has attempted its mastery and even he has doubts concerning its use on such an important occasion. But Touchfarthing has proved intransigent, insisting that only the very latest method is appropriate for use at the Great Exhibition of All Nations.

With Rankin engaged, Touchfarthing is obliged to attend to the subjects. Before he carefully constrains them in their chairs he will compliment and flatter them or bamboozle them with the science of photography. This, he hopes, will divert attention from the transaction itself, the part of the business Touchfarthing loathes. It is, after all, the transfer of cash that distinguishes the grubbing tradesman from the pioneering amateur.

The ordeal over, he again addresses the camera into which Rankin has inserted a new wet plate and under whose black cloth he buries his head from view. Flattened into two dimensions is how Touchfarthing prefers to view his run-of-the-mill clients. On the ground-glass screen their hats and their ‘physogs’, their arms and their torsos become mere compositional elements to be arranged in the most pleasing and aesthetic manner. By correcting poor posture, rearranging slack attire and encouraging a sober expression, Touchfarthing considers that he improves on life.

The afternoon passes away. Never has either man worked so hard at the business of photography nor encompassed such a bewildering variety of subjects from every place and of every station: couples from Clapham; families up from Kent; Midlands industrialists; richly-attired visitors from the sub-continent; a fidgeting band of Neapolitan musicians; mechanics and farmers; curates and choristers; sailors on shore leave; the recruiting sergeants, now merrily drunk; Etonians and Harrovians and a class of National school children, the eyes of whose teacher pierce the lens so fiercely that Touchfarthing almost trembles.

The photographer finds this multiplicity repellent: skilled physician follows lowly apothecary as if there were no order in the world. And perhaps this is a singular occasion but no one seems to take offence at such an unnatural commingling of society. Touchfarthing whispers to the busy Rankin, ‘Dear me, where is the quality here?’

Touchfarthing would rather maintain distance from the common man and upstart alike. This last taxonomy he most detests. Rankin has tired long ago of Touchfarthing’s declamations on these ‘self-made counter-jumpers’ who ‘dress like kings and talk like coal-heavers’, but the process is slow and while Rankin is in and out of the dark-tent changing and processing plates, there is little that Touchfarthing can do to avoid unwanted intimacy with hoi polloi and he is further dismayed to discover among his sitters a tendency towards self-publicity.

Mr Hector Trundle, as he tolerates Touchfarthing fussing about his disarrayed neck-wear, announces that he might buy up any of the exotic exhibits he has seen displayed within ‘they great glass walls’. He might load up a caravan with power looms and steam hammers and such practical improvements; he might choose the finest satins and silks for his wife (for whom he had a handkerchief passed through the fountain of Eau de Cologne); and should he so desire, it would be within his power to buy up a whole array of novelties: the eighty-bladed pen-knife, the stiletto umbrella, the tableaux of small and expertly stuffed animals. With the possible exception of that Koh-i-Noor diamond, he might slap cash on the table and haul the whole lot back to Salford, Lancashire. In fact, he might do anything he likes except that which this minute he desires most in all the world and that is to scratch his nose.

Jasper Munro considers the Great Exhibition ‘a damnable mess’. He sits erect, his hands folded over a silver-topped cane that he has pegged into the earth while Touchfarthing fastens a collar stud and brushes dust from his shoulders. ‘Poor classifying, that’s what it is,’ he is saying. ‘No idea of proper categorisation. I saw how it would be from the start, when the Prince announced his intentions. How can you “wed high art with mechanical skill” and avoid an unholy mess? Crystal and fine porcelain here, greasy, thumping steam engines there. It’s a fiasco.’

But by no means all those who share their views with Touchfarthing are dissenters. Most, in fact, are evidently impressed by the varied marvels of the Exhibition or simply by the novel experience of entering a structure so vast that it can and does contain fully grown trees. The glass and steel edifice itself is the source of infinite wonder to many more. Mr Colin Caldicott, an engineer ‘from Brummagem’, informs Touchfarthing that the Crystal Palace is ‘a modern marvel’. Touchfarthing nods and prepares to duck under his cloth, but Caldicott holds his arm. ‘It’s one thousand, eight hundred and forty-eight feet in length. Four hundred and eight feet in height. An area six times that of St Paul’s Cathedral!’

‘I can well believe it,’ says Touchfarthing.

Caldicott shakes his head as he reads in a flat tone from a catalogue on his lap. ‘Five hundred and fifty tons of wrought iron. Three thousand, five hundred tons of cast iron. Nine hundred thousand feet of glass. Six hundred thousand feet of wooden planking. Two hundred and two miles of sash bars. Thirty miles of guttering.’

Touchfarthing makes a show of producing and checking the face of his silver pocket-watch but another long minute passes before the sitter folds his catalogue and allows Touchfarthing to execute his shilling commission. For the next three hours the performance is the same – a cast of changing faces, a succession of to-ings and fro-ings between the front-of-house chairs and the backstage dark-tent – and it is late afternoon before the last customer, an impatient young hussar, pockets a dried, framed and wrapped photograph and strides quickly across the Park in the direction of Gore House.

The sun has begun to dip towards the western roofscapes; visitors on foot and on wheels are leaving the Park by every exit. Rankin is squatting by his box, funnelling chemicals into bottles. Touchfarthing is uncomfortably close. ‘I feel filthy,’ he says. ‘Like a wretched tradesman.’

‘That was good business we done there,’ says Rankin, jingling the purse. ‘And I’ve the one plate left, if you can find a customer.’

‘No, that’s enough of the mob for one day,’ says Touchfarthing. ‘That plate is saved for Art. The Exhibition by itself will make a very fine picture, I think.’

‘And sell like hot plum-dough,’ Rankin agrees. ‘But I suppose we’ll have to shift everything back to the Gate.’

‘You’ll do that, will you?’ says Touchfarthing. ‘While I calculate the longer exposure. Just take the essentials – it’s only one picture.’

‘And have some vagabond lift everything else? You’d best help out, that’s my belief, guv’nor,’ says Rankin and prepares to lift the camera from its tripod. He hesitates and nudges the other man. ‘Do you suppose that cove got up like an undertaker is waiting his turn?’ To Touchfarthing’s questioning glance, Rankin indicates a lean, pale-faced man dressed wholly in black. The dark and curling locks which depend from the brim of his hat are longer than fashion allows and he wears a pair of green-tinted spectacles. ‘I’ve caught him watching our goings on earlier,’ says Rankin. ‘What’s ’is lay, do you think?’

‘I’m sure he only wants his photograph taken, as do the world and his wife today.’

Touchfarthing’s eyebrows interrogate the man, but he makes no move towards the chairs, only looks a little longer upon the scene before straightening a louche pose and strolling towards the trees, where he becomes a part of a crowd that surrounds the fire-eater whose loud patter and sooty explosions have drawn away the last of Touchfarthing’s trade. ‘Rum fellow,’ Touchfarthing says, frowning as he takes hold of a rope handle. There is a tinkling of glass as the two men swing the great box aboard the wagon.

III

By the Park gates, Rankin fits a new lens upon the camera, into which is inserted the last of the wet collodion plates. They have been ready for the past quarter hour and Rankin is impatient to quit the Park and fill his belly at Simpson’s chop-house. He observes that ‘Simpson’s is very good for their cutlets’ and that ‘their pies is full of meat with no rubbish’, hoping that Touchfarthing will perceive the wisdom of patronising a place of ‘unbeatable value’ and not squander the day’s takings at Alexis Soyer’s grand new establishment at Gore House, the wonders of which the hussar has left ringing in their ears. ‘Now that’s the sort of place we might make useful connections,’ Touchfarthing had said. ‘It’s the sort of place we might waste a lot of money,’ Rankin had replied.

A vendor is crying his wares by the Park gates: ‘Potatoes, all ’ot!!’ and Rankin is debating with himself whether a further economy might be made by expending a couple of pennies there rather than at Simpson’s, when Touchfarthing claps his hands and exclaims, ‘There, we have it now!’ and points towards his magnificent subject. Even Rankin is forced to admit the beauty of the scene before them. Oblique sunlight lends fleeting solidity and sharply defines a thousand sash bars and gracefully curving flights of iron. The roof-lined flags of all nations which fluttered gaily in the morning breeze now hang heavy in the still evening air and nothing distracts from the audacious simplicity of Paxton’s ingenious design.

‘A pity about all those folk cluttering the middle ground,’ Rankin says. ‘Ain’t they got no homes?’

‘They won’t register on the photograph,’ says Touchfarthing. ‘Not so long as they keep moving. Now then, I shall have to lengthen the exposure in this light.’

Touchfarthing removes the lens cover and hold up his pocket-watch, timing the exposure while impressively signalling to all about that here is a photographist going about his work. And indeed, in the ground between lens and Exhibition are many careless strollers who appear to take notice and who, perhaps in their ignorance, believe that their presence at the Great Exhibition is being recorded on a photograph.

‘I think that will suffice,’ Touchfarthing says as he re-covers the lens. ‘Take care with your process, Rankin. I think I shall be pleased with this picture.’

‘Well, let’s ’ave that plate quickly, then,’ says Rankin, ‘while there’s still enough light to make a print.’ Rankin disappears inside his dark-tent while Touchfarthing, succumbing to the fatigue of a long and busy day, climbs upon the wagon and settles himself in the largest of the assortment of chairs. He begins to doze, his heavy jowl supported by a hefty hand, and would at any moment have given himself up to a deep and languorous sleep, had not Rankin shaken his knee. ‘Guv’nor, you an’t going to like this!’ he says, pulling the torpid Touchfarthing from his seat. He follows Rankin to his bottles and dishes and from one of these Rankin extracts a square of paper which drips a new pattern of stains upon his already particoloured unmentionables.

‘Well, what is it?’ asks Touchfarthing irritably. His sleep-bleared eyes descry the unmistakeable shape of the great glasshouse before them. ‘It looks all right?’

‘It ain’t quite there yet. But watch here, by the tree.’ Rankin holds the developing photograph towards the sunlight and before their eyes the gauzy facsimile darkens and sharpens and detail begins to show: the crazing of the bark on an elm bough, individual panes of glinting glass, the folds of a Union flag.

‘What’s that?’ Touchfarthing explodes. He takes himself and the photograph from the dark-tent, the better to examine it by the last rays of the sun. ‘Ruined!’ he says, his focus fixed upon an unexpected element in his composition. In the bottom corner, separating and becoming distinct from the trunk of a great tree, stands the man in the green-tinted spectacles and funereal clothing. Long exposure has, as the photographer predicted, erased every other idler and stroller from the scene. But this one remains. The subject of the photograph now seems not to be the Great Exhibition but rather a wealthy country gentleman showing off his estate.