THE MUTE
By Mrs. Gore
Death hath its vanities, and these are of them…
These sable statues are the Mutes of a funeral ceremony!— Habited from top to toe in suits of sables, their faces composed to decent sympathy with the lugubrious ceremonial of the day, they assume their post shortly after daylight, in order to preserve tranquility around the house of mourning; an aim accomplished by hanging out a banner of woe, which never fails to collect upon the pavement before the door all the errand boys and idle apprentices of the neighbourhood; the young children to gaze with wondering eyes upon those mysterious symbols of death—the elder ones to gossip over the name and nature, demise and sepulture, of the defunct; of what doctors he died, to what heirs his lands and tenements are to descend… And all this uproar, because the vaingloriousness of human nature requires that a door whence the dead are about to be borne forth to decay, should be pointed out to vulgar notice by the attendance of those twins of Erebus, a couple of undertaker’s Mutes!…
Let it not be inferred, however, that Mutes are an inevitable fringe upon the sable garment of death. On the continent of Europe, their office is performed by proxy. On the day of burial, funereal draperies (black or white, as the sex and age of the defunct may be) are suspended, at early morn, across the ground floor of the house of death; which, being level with the causeway, and undivided from it by an area, is easily attainable. This drapery is of serge or velvet, plain or garnished with silver, according to the means of the family. For the noble, it is furthermore adorned with heraldic escutcheons; by the opulent, it is even overscattered with silver tears and palms of triumph. For though “dust to dust” is the universal sentence of mortality, there is dust and dust! There is the dust of Rothschilds, and the dust of paupers; there was the dust of Dryden, which was bandied about for burial between the poverty of his family and the brutal jests of an insolent lordling; there was the dust of Frauenlob, the minne-singer, borne forth by the fairest damsels, clad in white, chanting his own sweet songs to the place of interment. There was the dust of Sheridan, snatched from the hands of the bailiff to be escorted to the immortality of the Abbey, by dukes and earls, eager to catch the reflection of the last gleam of his renown: and there is the dust of those whose coffins are made the rallying point of the seditious, who shake their clenched fists at government and spit their venom at the throne, under sanction of a hat-band and weepers.
But there is also the dust of the poor and nameless:–people, whose career on earth has been one of duty and submission;–people, over whose casual coffin the hearts that loved them have not leisure to break, lest those should starve who depend upon their labours for daily bread. These must be thrust into the grave in haste. These leave no memory to the multitude. In foreign lands, they boast no drapery of the pompes funébres above their doorway; at home, no nodding plumes. No ragged throng gathers before their threshold to see the coffin, covered with a parish pall, paraded beneath the lidless eye of heaven. The holiness of solitude is there, even amid the crowded city. Nature herself hath stationed beside their door, the unseen Mute.
It is often said that a man must be born an artist. Surely a Mute also must be a Mute by imprescriptible right. There is no accounting for tastes—there is no accounting for trades. To be a butcher, a dentist, a surgeon, a scavenger, may be “the gift of fortune;” but, to be a Mute at a funeral, must “come by nature.” What but the decree of Providence can create that rigid immobility of feature—that leadenness of eye—that stoniness of brow —that more than military uprightness of deportment; not altogether like the African, “God’s image cut in ebony,” but an abstraction of sable woe, scarcely vivified by the touch of life. A mummy has more animation in it than the accomplished Mute in the discharge of his duties; and when stationed beside some aristocratic doorway in St. James’s Square (to bespeak reverence for the ennobled clay, covered with crimson velvet glittering with cherubim of gold), the black marble figure of a knight templar, upon his tomb in some mildewed cathedral, is not more rigidly unexistent than the well-drilled Mute.
Accident, however, hath sometimes created the singular individual which one might suppose a forethought of Providence.
In a cheerful, sunshiny cottage, on the Severn side, there once rolled upon the floor a chubby child, whose skin was glossy with healthfulness, whose eyes bright with joy, whose voice a carol, whose cheek red as the apples clustering in the tree that spread its knotty, shapeless branches beside the little homestead. Jem Willett was a pledge of joy to his parents, for he was a firstborn; a ray of the sun of promise, which, in the early days of matrimony, beams alike for rich and poor ; and he was dandled by his father, and hugged by his mother, till a little Jack came to claim a share in the family endearments. Still, Jem was the favourite. He was the first He was such a merry, lightsome-hearted, little fellow. Nor was it till a whole tribe of Toms and Neds, Bets and Sals, put forth equal rights with himself to slices of the brown loaf, that poor Jem’s humble garments were suffered to go ragged, and he was allowed to crawl to bed with the rest, unblest by the caresses of a parent. But what leisure had father or mother for domestic love?—Their bread was embittered by its scantiness;–the staff of life was a slender staff in their hands.—Taxed to support the waste and wantonness of the great castle whose towers were visible from their cottage door, the loaf, which was their luxury, scarcely sufficed their wants: and how could they be expected to love the children whose cries of hunger distracted their poor hovel ?—The caress became a cuff; the tender word, a curse. The children were sent out to work. It was something that they were not sent out to beg!
Yet, in spite of these clinging cares, there was an inborn joyousness in poor Jem Willett’s nature, that would not be repressed. He seemed to whoop and halloo the louder for his rags; and even want sat so lightly on him, that “his cheek so much as paled not.” A better fortune seemed reserved for him, than for his brother and sister starvelings. While one or two were draughted into a factory-team of drag-children, while Jack became a cow-boy, Bill a climbing-boy, and Tom the drudge of a collier’s barge, Jem (who was growing up what the linen-drapers’ advertisements call “a genteel youth”) was apprenticed to a carpenter: apprenticed by the benevolence of the parish, which was now sole proprietor of Richard Willett’s lame widow and fifteen children, the husband and father having fallen a victim to small gains and a large family,–high rent, and low fever.
Jem was now the happiest of boys; that is, he had as much bread as he could eat, and a little more work than he could do. But a humane, intelligent master put him in the way of doing it in the best manner. He was an improving lad. By the time he was out of his apprenticeship, he became a good workman. Bill had been put out of his miseries by opportune suffocation in a narrow flue, belonging to the county member, at Marrowbone Hall; Tom had fallen overboard, after a severe banging from his tyrant, and was gone to feed the lampreys of the Severn; Jack was becoming almost as great a brute as the beasts he tended; and the factory brother and sisters were slaved, gassed, and drubbed into a transfiguration tripartite of the yellow dwarf. But Jem was gay and rubicund as ever; well-grown, well-fed, well-taught, a good-humoured, good-looking fellow as ever breathed.
Unluckily, the result of this even temper and comely aspect, was an early marriage. On finding that he could earn eighteen shillings a-week, one of the prettiest lasses in Gloucestershire persuaded him that it was too large a sum for his single enjoyment; and Jem Willett, like Richard Willett before him, became a father at so early an age, that there was little chance of his surviving to become a grandfather. He chose to gird on the crown of thorns, without allowing time for the previous expansion of its roses. He chose to jump from boyhood to middle age, without allotting a moment to the pleasures of youth. Nevertheless, the plane and the chisel sped prosperously. Jem was never out of employ, never sick, never sorry. Children came; ay, and on one occasion, twins, who seemed to bring a blessing with them; for Jem Willett’s household throve in proportion to its increase.
But, alas! the sin which—ere the foundations of this earth were laid—marred the harmony of primeval heaven, is still predominant below. — The Willetts were ambitious! Jem’s pretty wife had been three years in service in London, before a visit to her friends in Gloucester converted her into the wife of the handsome young carpenter. Poor Mary could not forget Cheapside; and had a natural hankering after St. Paul’s Church-yard. The High Street of Gloucester was not worthy to hold a candle to the Strand, among whose gay haberdashers’ shops her green and salad days had passed. In the clear atmosphere of her country home, she pined after the smother of the metropolis; and, like others of her sex, from Eve modernwards, contrived to win over her partner to her fault. Her faithful Jem was taught to believe that there was no promotion for him in a country town; that so good a workman might enjoy, in London, the wages of a cabinetmaker; and that two days’ journey with his family, in the Gloucester wagon, was all that was wanting to convert his eighteen shillings per week into six-and-thirty. They were before-hand with the world. They had seven-and-forty pounds to draw out of the savings’ bank, to establish them in London. It shewed a poor heart, according to Mary Willett, to sit down contented with their humble fortunes, when “happiness courted them in its best array.” In short, after some prudential misgivings on the part of Jem, the woman persuaded him, and he did go. Their goods and chattels were sold off at considerable loss, but still so as to add some pounds to their capital; and having put money in their purse, and stowed away their five children under the awning of the wagon which was to prove their chariot of fortune, away they snail’s-paced it, along that great western road, which has conveyed to Hyde Park Corner so many aspirants after metropolitan promotion.
Few are destined to reach it in such piteous plight as Jem Willett and his wife —Within eight miles of London, thanks to an insufficient lantern and inefficient wagoner, the huge vehicle was overturned into a paviour’s hole; and Jem all but crushed into nothingness, by the weight of a huge bale of merchandise.—The infant in his arms never breathed again!—The mangled father was transported upon straw, in a light cart, to St. George’s Hospital, with his family, all of whom were more or less injured by the accident, and, at the expiration of a year from their departure from the country, the Willetts were settled in a squalid, lodging of a bystreet in Chelsea, with three out of their five children remaining, and two pounds ten, out of their forty-nine. There was misery in the little household,—past, present, and in expectation. It was in vain that poor Mary cursed her restless spirit as the cause of all. Her self-accusations yielded no fuel to their empty grate; no food to their hungry mouths. A severe injury received by Jem in the right shoulder, at the time of his accident, incapacitated him for the carpenter’s bench, and all other manual labour; nor could the poor people devise any mode of gaining a living for a man who was no scholar, and had not connexions to back him in applications for employment, as light porter to some house of business.
It was a sorry time. The winter was a hard one,—their money gone: even the last half-crown in their little treasury had been changed to purchase provisions for the day. Mary was eager with her husband to make an application for parochial relief, such as might be the means of getting them passed back into Gloucestershire. She knew that they should be no better off there than in London. But it was their own place. They should hear familiar voices; their eyes would rest upon familiar spots; their hands be clasped in those of the humble friends of their childhood. There would be somebody to look upon their half-starved babes, and say “God speed them!’—
But Jem resisted. Though his early condition had familiarised him with the shame of pauperism, yet the independence his own exertions had since achieved, had taught him pride. It was pleasanter to hope, it was almost pleasanter to starve, than to confront that bitter tribunal, a Monday board. Another day came; and Mary, who had looked so wistfully upon the last half-crown ere she could make up her mind to change it, found herself looking, with exactly the same shuddering, upon their last sixpence!–In the interim, their prospects had darkened. Jem had been refused work in various quarters, where he had flattered himself his crippled powers were still available. “You don’t look strong enough,” was the universal reply; and on returning from a grocer’s, in Whitechapel, to whom he had taken a recommendation for employment in his warehouse, he found the eldest girl, a delicate slip of a thing, unable to bear up against the squalor and wretchedness with which she was surrounded, suffering under a violent attack of ague; the disease, of all others, requiring the administration of wholesome nourishment.
“She will die! She will follow her dear brother and sister!’” faltered the poor fellow, rushing from the house, determined to seek for his sick child the parochial aid he had been too proud to seek for himself; and as he went along, the temptation was almost too strong to escape from the slow agonies of life, by plunging himself headlong into the Thames, that ran, temptingly, within reach. It was December; and the dingy waters rippled on, like the waves of an unclean element, under a heavy autumnal fog that shut out all prospect of the sky. How different from the dancing waters of his own translucent Severn; the friend and companion of his merry childhood —The reminiscence brought back careful thoughts of his dead brothers;–of his old mother, the inmate of a poor-house; of toil and sorrow, hunger and cold,—till Jem Willett could not help feeling that it was a sorry world for those who, like himself, were born to work out the condemnation of the first human sin
His eyes were red with unshed tears, his nose blue with heartchill and a north-west wind, his features pinched, his looks meagre; it might almost be added, his “bones marrowless—his blood cold.” Yet a sort of fierce striving against evil fortune, caused him to maintain a firm demeanour, and to erect his head to the utmost stretch, as he was about to enter the workhouse gate.
Such was the origin of the after fortunes of Jem Willett!—Ere he could cross the fatal threshold, he found himself civilly accosted by a solemn individual, who announced himself as “Mr. Screw, the eminent Knightsbridge upholsterer;” and the long rambling conversation that ensued, ended in Jem Willett’s quitting the premises, “attached to the establishment” of his new acquaintance, at twelve shillings a-week wages, and the promise of advancement. He was about to be converted into a MUTE!
Jem was to enter upon his functions on the morrow. He was in fact as great an acquisition to Screw, as Screw to him. The Knightsbridge upholsterer and undertaker having been bereaved of one of his standard Mutes, by the great master and commander of his gloomy trade, was sadly at a loss for a fellow of sufficiently doleful countenance to match the fine funereal face of the survivor. “Poor Bill Hobbs, who was dead and gone, was a treasure; a man whom it brought tears into the eyes of the multitude to look on. He confessed he never expected to find an adequate substitute for Bill Hobbs. All he could expect of his new adherent was, to do his best,–that is, look his worst; and if he gave satisfaction to the customers, he might count upon eighteen shillings a-week, at the close of the winter. Perhaps, if the influenza was about and it proved a good burying season, something might be done sooner.”
Poor Jem was beside himself with joy! Such an unexpected stroke of good fortune,—such manna in the desert, such corn in Egypt! His wife wept for gladness when she heard of his promotion. To be sure, it was not exactly the line of employment he would have solicited; not exactly the duty that the fair, chubby, laughing Jem seemed brought into the world to perform. But misery brings down the spirits to an incalculably low level; and Jem seemed to fancy it might be satisfactory to his poor disabled frame, to array itself in a decent garb of woe, and stand sentinel at the gates of death.
During the first week, he gave unqualified satisfaction. No advance having been made to him by Screw, whose name was prophetic of his nature, Jem had to endure the torment of taking up his position of a foggy morning, without having broken his fast, after sitting up all night beside the pallet of his groaning child; and so piteous was his countenance, under sorrows and privations thus accumulated, as to excite the envy of his sable brother, as well as the admiration of his new master. Screw looked upon him as a Mute of genius. His countenance was something between that of Quixote, Reynolds’s Ugolino, and the man who “drew Priam’s curtain in the dead of night.” His stomach was empty; his heart sinking with the idea of the family affliction, of which he was the outward and visible sign; his soul sickening at the whispered allusions of his professional brother on the opposite side the door, to “stiff ‘uns and black jobs, shrouds and winding sheets, pickaxes and shovels!’” The last funeral in which Jem had borne a part, was that of one of his own beloved babes; and he could not hear a coffin made a theme for jesting! Mr. Screw and his men, when they drew up the hearse and mourning coaches to the door, were as much struck with the appropriate air and features of the new Mute, as some might be by the proportions of the Venus de Medicis. He was an honour to the profession;–tall and solemn as a cypress;–a frontispiece, foretelling the nature of a tragic volume. Screw went even so far as to advance him eight shillings, for the use of his family, on the Thursday night; an act of liberality unprecedented in the annals of his establishment. Nay, as the scarlet fever was rife in Chelsea, before the close of the month, the new Mute was raised to the promised modicum of eighteen shillings per week. –
All now went well in his little household. The young ravens were fed, and Mary’s clothes gradually returned from the pawnbroker’s; and though Jem’s vocation was still loathsome to him, though he could scarcely restrain his tears when he saw white feathers nodding over the vehicle that bore forth the little coffin of some only hope from the roof of its parents, to be cast into the wintry earth,–the sensibility which made his calling thus distasteful rendered him invaluable to his master. While the Mutes of other establishments, or former Mutes of his own, degraded their scarfs and hatbands, by being seen tossing off a glass of gin, or a well-crested pot of porter, with their insignia of office fluttering about them, thereby bringing into discredit the pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious undertakership, Jem was always dumb as death, and moulded in clay that required no wetting. He was, in fact, a model-Mute.
It is possible that the merits of the man contributed something to the prosperity of the master; for, in the course of a year or two, Screw removed from his suburban abode to one of the handsomest streets at the west end; set up a shop, with a gothic front, on whose door, in lieu of panes, there figured two funeral escutcheons; with death’s head, cross-bones, and “Resurgam,” painted, achievement-wise, on one; and a street-door, guarded by two Mutes, holding handkerchiefs to their eyes, on the other;–for the off-Mute of which pictorial representation, Jem Willett was supposed to have sat to the artist. Above the escutcheons, was inscribed, in letters of gold, “Funerals Performed.”—PERFORMED ! ay, just as Macbeth is “performed” by Macready, or Nicholas Flam by Farren. On the other windows were pasted announcements of “Houses to Let; furnished or unfurnished; ” Mr. Screw having taken upon himself the trade of providing mansions for the quick, as well as for the dead.
Upon his removal to this aristocratic warehouse, Screw felt in conscience bound to raise the wages of his Mutes to the level of those bestowed upon their black gentlemen by Gillow, Banting, and other fashionable purveyors to the last wants of humanity; and Jem, in the enjoyment of thirty shillings per week, lost all recollection of his former woes. “Who was it persuaded you to come to Lon’on, I should like to know?”—was now the favourite query of his wife. “How would a workman, with his bread-winner disabled, have found means of earning thirty shillings a-week, in Gloucester?”—And if Jem refrained from replying that, had he never come to Lon’on, his shoulder would never have been broken in the socket, when he might have enjoyed the same wages, with a less noisome occupation, it was because he was too good-natured to cause vexation to his wife. The Willets had now their share of the good things of this world. They ate, drank, and were merry. After burial-hours, Jem might be seen taking his pipe and glass, in winter at “The Undertakers’ Arms,” in summer at “The Adam and Eve” tea-gardens. Care came no longer near him. He said to himself, “Soul, take thine ease !”—and his soul did as it was bid!
But, alas! ruin was laying a train under his feet! Amid all this jollification, his features lost their sharpness; his complexion, its pallor; his limbs, their dignified gauntness. The ruddy tints of his Severn days came back in undiminished brilliancy; nay, his very nose became “celestial rosy red.” An incipient paunch was springing.—Othello’s occupation was gone! In the overflowing of his heart, he could not forbear, now and then, a jovial word with his brother Mute; and, in the awful discharge of their duties at the doors of defunct peers of the realm or ministers of state, he had even been betrayed, by absence of mind, into humming snatches of a tune, haunting his imagination after the carouse of the preceding night. The starveling Mute was become a jolly dog! It was no longer “Willow, willow,” with him, but “Wine, mighty wine!”
Under such circumstances, it was scarcely wonderful that Screw and Co. should require his resignation to be sent in. One Saturday night, in Midsummer time (when the morning sun shines with telltale brightness on the minutiae of the rites of sepulture), Willett was requested to give his receipt in full, on receiving his final one pound ten. The “establishment” required his services no longer. He was superseded;—not superannuated, but super-gladdened. The foreman said to him, like Apollo, in the song, to “Voice, fiddle, and flute,
No longer be Mute!”
His jolly face reflected discredit on the house. At a funeral, he was the impersonation of a practical joke;—a figure of fun; a parody upon the tragedy; a jest upon a grave subject. He was like Aesop’s weasel in the meal-tub; the only difference, that Jem was turned out of his luxurious berth, while the weasel was forced to remain in. Though twice the man he was when taken into Screw’s establishment, he was not half so good for the undertaker’s purpose. He was as much out of place as a fat harlequin, or gouty rope-dancer. He was a merry Mute!
Poor Jem is, at this moment, looking out for a new place. He is too tender-hearted for a beadle, though the gold-laced hat would mightily become him. But our friend is unconsciously dwindling into such a condition, as may entitle him, a second time, to the honours of Muteship. As Napoleon became a second time Emperor, it is by no means impossible, that the now sorrowing father of four needy children may shortly return to the establishment of Messrs. Screw and Company, well-qualified to become anew—a MUTE!
Selections from the Heads of the People: Or, Portraits of the English, drawn by Kenny Meadows, 1845: pp. 38-48
Chris Woodyard is the author of A is For Arsenic: An ABC of Victorian Death, The Victorian Book of the Dead, The Ghost Wore Black, The Headless Horror, The Face in the Window, and the 7-volume Haunted Ohio series. She is also the chronicler of the adventures of that amiable murderess Mrs Daffodil in A Spot of Bother: Four Macabre Tales. The books are available in paperback and for Kindle. Indexes and fact sheets for all of these books may be found by searching hauntedohiobooks.com. Join her on FB at Haunted Ohio by Chris Woodyard or The Victorian Book of the Dead and on Twitter @hauntedohiobook. And visit her newest blog The Victorian Book of the Dead.
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