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.