The Edge of the Crowd. Ross Gilfillan
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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