commonplace book

If I live to be 100, I vow to spend at least one of my remaining years compiling a “Best Of” compilation from the God-knows-how-many compilations assembled by John Timbs, perhaps the greatest of all compilers. We’ve all heard of Dickens and the many lesser ranks of Victorian writers who industriously cranked out three-volume novels at rates that competed with the fearsome cotton mills of the North, but poor John Timbs was forgotten not long after his body was placed in a pauper’s grave.

John Timbs was not really a writer. He was more of an assembler. He took things he found and assembled them into books with titles like Anecdote Lives Of Wits And Humourists, Curiosities of Science, Past and Present, a book for the Old and Young, Mysteries of Life, Death, and Futurity: Illustrated from the Best and Latest Authorities, and Things Not Generally Known: Popular Errors Explained and Illustrated. These were all published cheaply, in low-priced editions with weak bindings and poor, thin paper, for the purpose of informing as many people as possible.

Timbs worked to improve people like himself. His father was a warehouseman who managed to pull together enough money to send his son to New Marlows, a school run by Rev. Joseph Hamilton and his brother Jeremiah Hamilton. There, he discovered his talent and put it to quick use, writing by hand a school newspaper that was passed among his classmates. He was then apprenticed to a chemist and printer in Dorking, where he met Sir Richard Phillips. Phillips had just published his little travel guide Morning’s Walk from London to Kew.

In the preface to that book, Phillips apologized for writing a guide to such a mundane journey, “which thousands can daily examine after him,” and for relying solely on the evidence of his own senses and deductions of reason.” Because of this, he wrote, “He therefore entertains very serious doubts whether his work will be acceptable to those LEARNED PROFESSORS in Universities” or “STATESMEN who consider the will of princes as standards of wisdom” or “ECONOMISTS who do not consider individual happiness to be the primary object of their calculations” or a dozen other types such as TOPOGRAPHERS, BIBLIOMANIACS, and LEARNED PHILOLOGISTS. Instead, he wrote for “AMATEURS of general Literature,” those “free and honest searchers after MORAL, POLITICAL, and NATURAL TRUTH.”

This was a man after Timbs’s heart and mind. Phillips encouraged the young man to contribute to his Monthly Magazine. Perhaps inspired by Phillips’ book, Timbs soon wrote his first book, A Picturesque Promenade round Dorking, in Surrey in 1823. Timbs then moved to London to work for Phillips and started reading voraciously. He quickly produced Laconics, the first of what would become a lifetime’s production of books in which he compiled, accumulated, integrated, and occasionally distilled what he’d read.

He moved on to become editor of The Mirror in 1827, then on to John Limbird’s The Mirror of Literature. There, he mastered his technique. Henry Vizetelly, who later worked with Timbs at the Illustrated London News, described it in his crotchety memoir, Glances Back Through Seventy Years:

Timbs spent the best part of a busy life, scissors in hand, making ‘snippets.’ Such of these as could not be used up in The Mirror were carefully stores, and when later on he became sub-editor of the Illustrated London News and editor of the Year-Book of Facts, he profited by his opportunities to add largely to his collection. By-and-bay he classified his materials, and discovered that, by aid of a paste brush and a few strokes of the pen, he could instruct a lazy public respecting Things not generally known, explain Popular Errors, and provide Something for Everybody, and that he had, moreover, amassed a perfect store of Curiosities of science, history, and other subjects of general interest, wherein people partial to snippets might positively revel.

There was no love lost between Vizetelly and Timbs, whom he called “quintessentially a scissors and paste man” — which was at least better than his assessment of Timbs’ predecessor, Thomas Byerley: “a crapulent hack.” Vizetelly wrote that “the tinted tip of Timbs’s nose suggested that The Mirror editor was not averse to what is called the cheerful glass, and yet he developed into a singularly sour and cantankerous individual” and accused him of being a vicious gossip who “seemed to take especial delight in repeating all the spiteful tales he could pick up” — to which the reader is tempted to mutter, “Et tu, Brute?”

One wonders where Timbs found the time to indulge in gossip. He never married, socialized little, and seems to have spent most of his hours bent over his desk with stacks of books at his elbows. In a study of early Victorian editors that F. David Roberts published in the Victorian Periodicals Newsletter in 1971, he wrote that these men were marked by certain common characteristics: “One obvious one was that they could write. Most not only could write but had a passion to publish.” Of the 165 men covered in Roberts’s study, they averaged 9 books each (“considerably about the going average for academics today). Yet for Roberts, these men “were pikers compared to Mr. John Timbs,” whom he credited with 150 volumes.

His Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry (originally written by future Prime Minister Ramsay Macdonald) gives a flavor of the range of Timbs’s production:

They include, on subjects of domestic interest, Family Manual (1831), Domestic Life in England (1835), and Pleasant Half-Hours for the Family Circle (1872), and, on scientific subjects, Popular Zoology (1834), Stories of Inventors and Discoverers (1859), Curiosities of Science (1860), and Wonderful Inventions: from the Mariner’s Compass to the Electric Telegraph Cable (1867). He also wrote on artistic and cultural matters works such as Painting Popularly Explained (jointly with Thomas John Gulick) (1859) and Manual for Art Students and Visitors to the Exhibitions (1862). Through his connection with The Harlequin he has been identified as the likely compiler (under the pseudonym Horace Foote) of the Companion to the Theatre and Manual of British Drama (1829), which contains much valuable information on London theatres of the period. On contemporary city life his works included Curiosities of London (1855), Club Life of London with Anecdotes (1865), Romance of London: Strange Stories, Scenes, and Persons (1865), and London and Westminster, City and Suburb (1867). He also published on subjects of biographical and historical interest, including Schooldays of Eminent Men (1858), Columbus (1863), Curiosities of History (1859), Anecdote Biography (1859–60), Anecdote Lives of Wits and Humourists (1862), Ancestral Stories and Traditions of Great Families (1869), and Abbeys, Castles and Ancient Halls of England and Wales (1869). He also edited Manuals of Utility (1847), the Percy Anecdotes (1869–70), and Pepys’s Memoirs (1871).

Not surprisingly, with such an output, quality often suffered. “Mr. Timbs has an inexhaustible supply of quaint stories,” one reviewer wrote, “but his critical judgment is not quite as good as his industry is formidable.” John Bull’s reviewer was critical of Timbs’ multi-volume Anecdote Biography, observing that “Biography is something more than a collection of anecdotes.” Timbs’s portraits, he found were “lifeless; they are models, not men”: “He has dressed up a variety of figures which would make the fortune of Madame Tussaud in a week.” A Spectator reviewer, a little more charitably, acknowledged that “His books are of a kind to which it is easier for a reader than a reviewer to do justice.” Many of his books were reprinted in America, where reviewers focused on the positives. A North American Review assessment of School Days of Eminent Men is typical, saying the book could be “commended as a handy manual, containing a great deal of curious information, told in a playful, conversational style.”

Indiscriminate accumulations of anecdotes and trivia can often contain gems among all the junk, and the chief reason to remember the work of John Timbs today are the nuggets you can usually find within a dozen or so pages of any of his books. Long before anyone came up with the idea of bathroom books, a Spectator reviewer identified the peculiar merit of Timbs’s books: “His readers, if they do not gain instruction, will be amused, provided that they are satisfied with a few pages at a time. Such a collection of wit and humour can only be digested at intervals.” Here is a tiny sample of the things you can learn from a few minutes spent — wherever you happen to choose — with John Timbs:

The Fitzwalters had, however, a stranger privilege than even this: they had the privilege of drowning traitors in the Thames. The “patient” was made fast to a pillar at Wood Wharf, and left there for the tide to flow twice over, and ebb twice from him, while the crowd looked on, and enjoyed the barbarous spectacle.

From Abbeys, castles, and ancient halls of England and Wales

Peter the Great was a gourmand of the first magnitude. While in England, on his return from a visit to Portsmouth, the Czar and his party, twenty-one in number, stopped at Godalming, where they ate: at breakfast, half a sheep, a quarter of lamb, ten pullets, twelve chickens, seven dozen of eggs, and salad in proportion, and drank three quarts of brandy, and six quarts of mulled wine; at dinner, live ribs of beef, weight three stone; one sheep, fifty-six pounds; three quarters of lamb, a shoulder and loin of veal boiled, eight pullets, eight rabbits, two dozen and a half of sack, and one dozen of claret. This bill of fare is preserved in Ballard’s Collection, in the Bodleian Library, at Oxford.

From Hints for the table: or, The economy of good living. With a few words on wines

The bone of the Lion’s fore-leg is of remarkable hardness, from its containing a greater quantity of phosphate of lime that is found in ordinary bones, so that it may resist the powerful contraction of the muscles. The texture of this bone is so compact that the substance will strike fire with steel. He has little sense of taste, his lingual or tongue-nerve not being larger than that of a middle-sized dog.

From Eccentricities of the animal creation

In the winter of 1835, Mr. W. H. White ascertained the temperature in the City to be 3 degrees higher than three miles south of London Bridge; and after the gas had been lighted in the City four or five hours the temperature increased full 3 degrees, thus making 6 degrees difference in the three miles.

From Curiosities of Science, Past and Present, a book for the Old and Young

When the Archduke of Spain was obliged to land at Weymouth, he was brought to the Sheriff of Dorset, and lived at Woolverton House. The Sheriff, not being able to speak in any language but “Dorset,” found it difficult to converse with the Archduke, and bethought him of a young kinsman, named Russell, who had been a factor in Spain, and sent for him. The young man made himself so agreeable to the Archduke that ho brought him to London, where the King took a fancy to him, and in time he became Duke of Bedford, and was the founder of the House of Russell.

From Nooks and Corners of English Life, Past and Present

In 1865, there died in Paris the dwarf Richebourg, who was an historical personage. Richebourg, who was only 60 centimètres high, was in his sixteenth year placed in the household of the Duchess of Orleans (the mother of King Louis-Philippe). He was often made useful for the transmission of dispatches. He was dressed up as a baby, and important State papers placed in his clothes, and thus he was able to effect a communication between Paris and the émigrés, which could hardly have taken place by any other means. The most suspicious of sans culottes never took it into his head to stop a nurse with a baby in her arms.

From English Eccentrics and Eccentricities

Timbs was given a pension as one of the “Poor Brethren” of the Charterhouse in 1871, but for some reason he resigned his place and died in poverty at 28 Canonbury Place, London, on 4 March 1875. “He died in harness,” reported The Times, “almost with his pen in his hand, after a life of more than 70 years, and a literary career extended over more than half a century.” The Times faintly praised his special talent: “Though not gifted with any great original powers he was one of the most industrious of men, and there was scarcely a magazine of the last quarter of a centure to which he was not at least an occasional contributor.” In reviewing Timbs’s English Eccentrics not long after his death, the Spectator noted somewhat wistfully, “This is, we suppose, the last work of an indefatigable compiler, who had a talent for finding odd things hidden away in odd corners, and presenting them for the amusement of readers.”