The Story Of A Drunk, Diseased, Insane Hunter And Inglorious Squire

By Stephen J. Gertz

Original boards, untouched.

What do you call a 175 year old copy of a book that looks exactly as it did on the day it was published, completely untouched without any sort of restoration at all?

I call it an astonishment.

Light come, light go.

But, beyond the wild-tale,  it's the night scenes in aquatint engravings by Henry Alken and T.K. Rawlins that will make a lasting impression upon readers of Memoirs of the Life of the Late John Mytton, Esq. (1837) by Nimrod, the mighty hunter otherwise known as C.J. Apperley (1777-1843), British sportsman and sports writer.

The Oaks filly.

"This is not a work of fiction, for John Mytton, a rather inglorious character for a biography, was a hard-living, hard-drinking country squire of Halston, Shropshire, capable of the utmost physical endurance, and ready to accept any wager to walk, shoot or ride against any man. Many of his feats are recorded and graphically delineated, including the climax of his folly in setting his nightshirt on fire to cure a hiccough (Martin Hardie). Kids, don't try this at home.

John "Mad Jack" Mytton, born into comfortable circumstances, attended Westminster School. He was expelled a year later for fighting. He went to Harrow. He was expelled three days later. He had tutors. He tormented them with practical jokes; he once left a horse in one's bedroom.  Despite poor academic achievement he was accepted into Cambridge. He brought 2,000 bottles of port along to fortify him for study. He left before graduating because he was bored.

He went into the army and devoted himself to gambling and drinking. When he turned twenty-one he came into his inheritance. Then the real fun began.

He decided to stand for Parliament. His campaign platform was, apparently, Vote for me and I'll give you a £10 note. He won the election. But he found politics boring and only attended Parliament once, for thirty eternally excruciating minutes. He declined to stand for re-election.

In 1832 he thought he'd  give Parliament another shot. When the polling results began to be counted he quit the race when it was clear he was going to ignominiously lose. The fact that he had gone into exile to avoid debts may have had something to do with it.

The straight life cramped his style, which, at this point, centered upon horse racing and gambling, and, oh yes, drinking. About that wager he made and won: he rode his horse into the Bedford Hotel, up the grand staircase and on to the balcony, and jumped, still a-saddle, over diners in the restaurant below and then out the window and onto the street.

He was cuckoo for fox-hunting and did so no matter the weather. In winter, caught up in the thrill of the chase, he would strip naked to continue the pursuit. He enjoyed arising in the middle of the night and, buck naked with only his gun to keep him warm, would go out, ambush ducks, and return to bed.

Stand and deliver.

He owned 700 pairs of hunting boots, 1,000 hats, and 3,000 shirts. He loved pets; he owned 2,000 dogs, as hounds, and some attired in livery, others in costumes. He fed them steak and champagne.

He was, as must now be apparent, a marinated, extravagant thrill seeker. He was hell in the carriage driver's seat, the shortest, most inconsequential ride a feral dash to the finish line. He once invited a parson and doctor to dine at his home one evening. He dressed himself as a highwayman, and, face disguised, rode out and held them up at gun-point, calling "Stand and deliver!"

The list of his eccentric and scandalous behavior is long. We will gloss over the time he rode a bear into a dinner party, and dog-fought a mastiff.

Money ran through his fingers like water. His inheritance went down the drain. He died in debter's prison.

In its review of Memoirs...  the Literary Gazette contrasted Mytton's promise with his sad end:

". . .heir to an immense fortune, gifted by nature with a mind susceptible of noble cultivation, and a body endowed with admirable physical powers with the wretched drunkard who died in a gaol at the age of thirty-eight, a worn-out debauchee and driveling sot" (Literary Gazette, review of Memoirs).

". . . Did the late Mr Mytton really enjoy life amidst all this profusion of expenditure? No. He lacked the art of enjoyment. He was bored and unhappy. There was that about him which resembled the restlessness of the hyena. A sort of pestering spirit egged him on" (Nimrod).

Well done. Neck or Nothing.

"When Lockhart said of 'Nimrod' that he could 'hunt like Hugo Meynell and write like Walter Scott,' he was doubtless excited into exaggeration by the pleasure of having hit upon a man who could write of sport without the vulgarity of Egan. 'Nimrod,' whose name was Charles James Apperley, was a man of education, a country squire and a genuine sportsman. Loss of means turned him to literature; he contributed articles on sport to The Sporting Magazine, The Quarterly Review and other journals; but is best known by his two books, The Life of a Sportsman, and Memoirs of the Life of John Mytton, both of which were illustrated with coloured engravings by Alken...

"Memoirs of the Life of John Mytton appeared as a book in 1837, a portion of the work having been printed in The New Sporting Magazine in 1835. It shows a difficult task performed with fidelity and tact. Apperley had been Mytton’s neighbour in Shropshire, and had extended to him all the care that was possible when both were living in Calais in order to avoid their creditors. Apperley’s task was to write the life of a man who, while he was one of the most heroic sportsmen that ever lived, was also drunken, diseased and insane; and he performed the task with admirable judgment" (Cambridge History of English and American Literature, Volume XIV. The Victorian Age, Part Two, VI. Caricature and the Literature of Sport).

"A most valuable and important book for the sporting life of the period, aptly described by Newton as 'a biography of a man that reads like a work of fiction'" (Tooley).

And this is an unsophisticated copy of a book that looks like a work of restoration, an under-the-bed-in-a-box-and-forgotten-OMG example. Tally-Holy Mackerel.

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[ALKEN, Henry, artist]. NIMROD (pseud. of C.J. Apperley). Memoirs of the Life of the Late John Mytton, Esq. Formerly M.P. for Shrewsbury, High Sheriff for the Counties of Salup & Merioneth, and Major of the North Stropshire Yeomanry Cavalry. With Notices of His Hunting, Shooting, Driving, Racing, Eccentric and Extravagant Exploits By Nimrod. With Numerous Illustrations by H. Alken and T.J. Rawlins. Second Edition. Reprinted with considerable Additions from the New Sporting Magazine. London: R. Ackermann, 1837.

Second and enlarged edition, with additions to the text and six extra hand-colored plates. Tall octavo )9 7/8 x 5 3/4 in; 240 x 146 mm). ix, [3], 206, [2], [8], as publisher's catalog] pp. Extra-engraved title page. Eighteen hand-colored aquatint plates.

Publisher's original green pebbled cloth with large trophy vignette in gilt enclosing title, and gilt lettered spine with dog and rabbit gilt stamps bordering title and "1837" in gilt at foot. All edges gilt. Yellow endpapers. 

Abbey, Life, 385.  Tooley 67.  Schwerdt 1, p. 38.  Martin Hardie, pp. 185-186.  Prideaux, p. 326.         

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Images courtesy of David Brass Rare Books, with our thanks.
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Sometimes A Not So Great Notion, Or When Buffoons Horse Around (1831)

By Stephen J. Gertz

 A good rider can hear his horse speak to him, a great rider can hear his horse whisper, but a bad rider won't hear his horse even if it screams at him. 

• • •

 Right now it's only a notion. l think l can get money to make it into a concept, then turn it into an idea - Alvy Singer (Woody Allen), Annie Hall.

 

I have a NOTION that DUCROW could not excel this...his is all Art, mine Nature.

Some notions are best left just that particularly when they get into the heads of amateurs with horseback ambitions and delusions of grandeur. Slapstick ensues.

I had no NOTION of the Comforts of Hunting by Water.

1831-33. Henry Alken, sporting caricaturist, had a great notion that a series of engraved plates with wittily understated captions satirizing  men on steeds at unsafe speeds and the horse's ass on horseback would tickle the withers of those who find the pretensions of the upwardly mobile downright funny, i.e. everybody. He turned the notion into a concept, the concept into an idea, and Sporting Notions was born, twisting the not-so-great notions of nincompoops in the saddle into a great lampoon.

I have a NOTION that this Bridge will a-Bridge my Sport.

Inspired perhaps by circus performer Andrew Ducrow (1793-1842), "The Father of British Circus Equestrianism," and his popular acrobatics on horseback act at Astley's Amphitheater, Alken, who took special glee when riders landed on their glutes, imagined them as inept performers in a bent Cirque du Soliel, equestrian ninnies in a cirque du oy vey.

I have a NOTION that this may be called "Riding to the hounds at a Smashing rate."

In thirty-six soft-ground etched and aquatint plates, Alken skewers those in over their heads on horseback and drowning while on a fox hunt. Somewhere, the fox is on the sidelines texting his den mates, "ROTFLMAO."

I had a NOTION that Timber jumping was quite an easy thing.
I held him TIGHT in hand, too.

Henry Thomas Alken (1785-1841)  "was the dominant sporting artist of the early nineteenth century... he delivered a long series of designs to the leading sporting printsellers—S. and J. Fuller, Thomas McLean, and Rudolph Ackermann among others.

"He was also a prolific designer, etcher, and lithographer of scenes relating to racing, shooting, coaching, and other sports... He wrote several books on aspects of engraving, including The Art and Practice of Engraving (1849).

"In later life he drifted into ill health, consumption, and poverty... He died in the early summer of 1851" (Oxford DNB)

 I have a NOTION  that the Brute is going to make the best of his way out
and leave us to shift for ourself.

I have a NOTION this is not the HARD way the Man told us of.

Quite scarce, only four copies of Sporting Notions have come to auction within the last thirty-six years but only one, twenty-eight years ago at Christie's in 1984, was colored.

Modern litterateurs will have picked up the reference to Ken Kesey's magnum opus in today's headline, the hard-headed Stamper family's motto, "Never Give An Inch," apropos of the the stubborn pride exhibited by the soft-headed whose self-appraisal of their skills on horseback is off by a mile.

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ALKEN, Henry. Sporting Notions. London: T. McLean, 1831-33.

First edition. Oblong quarto (10 1/4 x 14 1/8 in; 261 x 358 mm). Thirty-six hand-colored soft-ground etchings and aquatints with tissue guards as issued without title page, watermarked 1831-1833.

Tooley 54. Siltzer p. 73.

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Images courtesy of David Brass Rare Books, with our thanks.
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Of related interest:

Slightly Nuts But Not Crazy: Artist Henry Alken Lampoons Art.

A Horse's Ass In The Saddle, With Henry Alken.
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The Comic (and True!) Misadventures of a Man Maladjusted to a Horse

by Stephen J. Gertz

"Shivering the timbers"

The Reins of Terror: The Count can't cantor, leaps to contusions, falls to the rear. Tally Ha! Ha! Ha!

"Larking - more dirt, the less hurt!"

Poor Count Sandor. He visits his friend, Lord Alvanley, in Leicestershire, gets on a horse, participates in a fox hunt, and spends half of his time trying to stay on his mount, the other half on his keister.

"Doing it well"

Count Sandor's Exploits in Leicestershire, published by R. Ackermann, Jr., son of the great English publisher of prints, Rudolph Ackermann, in 1833, is a color-plate book of extraordinary scarceness, with OCLC/KVK noting only one copy in library holdings worldwide (Union Catalogue Italy). The ten mounted hand-colored aquatints by Edward Duncan (1803-1882) after paintings by John Ferneley make their Internet debut here on Booktryst.

"A flying leap! - après vous monsieur"

The British Museum has no records in its online database for individual prints from this series, nor of  Ferneley's original paintings upon which these aquatint engravings were based.  This is the first copy to come to market in eighteen years of this classic, desirable, and priceless visual narrative of a woefully inept equestrian with a marvelous self-deprecating sense of humor.

"That's your sort"

 "Smooth glides the water where the brook is deep"

 "He's off! - no, he's on! - he hangs by the rein!"

"At first sight these drawings appear to be, more or less, examples of caricature, but, as a matter of fact, they are actual adventures, described first hand and in ludicrous terms to the artist by the hero, and depicted in the same spirit.

"Taking it coolly - very like a whale!"

 "Yooi - over he goes!"

"Count Sandor, the performer in this pictorial epic, was a Hungarian nobleman who spent one season at Melton Mowbray, on a visit to Lord Alvanley. His daring horsemanship, together with the ensuing mishaps, were the provocation to many a merry laugh over the Melton dinner tables, at the time and long after" (Siltzer).

"A Floorer - pick up the pieces!"

"John Ferneley (1782–1860), sporting painter, was born on 18 May 1782 in the village of Thrussington, 6 miles from Melton Mowbray, Leicestershire. In 1801 he began a three-year apprenticeship to the Leicestershire-born sporting artist Ben Marshall (1768–1835). Within ten years of starting his apprenticeship Ferneley was earning in excess of £200 a year. The centre of the sporting world, the ‘queen of the shires’ (Brownlow), was Melton Mowbray, and in 1813 Ferneley took lodgings there and in the following year he built in the town first a studio and then a substantial house.. From 1818 onwards he proudly signed his paintings ‘John Ferneley, Melton Mowbray’ and never lacked commissions. He was a prolific painter. Between 1806 and 1853 Ferneley exhibited twenty-two pictures at the Royal Academy, four at the British Institution, and thirteen at Suffolk Street. His average earnings were about £400 a year" (Oxford DNB).

I have a personal affection for British caricature and its often go-for-the-jugular satire. Booktryst recently covered one of Henry Alken's rarer color-plate books satirizing the pretensions of a Londoner inept in the saddle. What makes this volume so very special is that the object of the satire is the one telling the jokes at his own expense, and delightfully so.

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FERNELEY, J. Count Sandor's Exploits in Leicestershire. London: R. Ackermann, Jr. 1833. First edition. Folio (16 x 19 in; 408 x 494 mm). Ten mounted hand-colored aquatints by E. Duncan after J. Ferneley, captioned London, Pub.d 1st Aug.t 1833 by R. Ackermann Jun.r at his ECLIPSE Sporting Gallery, 191 Regent St., each full margined measuring 14 1/4 x 16 1/2 inches (357 x 420 mm).

Siltzer 121 (2d ed., 1841). Wilder p. 126. Bobins 775. Mellon Prints, p. 72. Not in Schwert.
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Images courtesy of David Brass Rare Books, with our thanks.
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