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From Dutch Student to London Schoolmaster
The Literary Work of Gerrit van de Linde
There was a time when the man who called himself ‘The Schoolmaster’ (‘De Schoolmeester’) was honoured as the colossus of Dutch popular verse. No schoolchild's induction into the muses was accounted complete without knowing an appropriate selection off by heart, while his more quotable lines were virtually common parlance. Particularly towards the end of the nineteenth century his collected poems, a single volume unambiguously entitled Poems by The Schoolmaster (Gedichten van den Schoolmeester), sold on a phenomenal scale. The tenth edition of 1886 alone, for instance, ran to 20,100 copies. In the early years of the present century, one Dutch manufacturer of confectionery was even distributing the book free in return for chocolate bar wrappers and proof of purchase. From this zenith his popularity gradually declined. Demand dwindled and dwindled until finally, after the Second World War, the complete edition dropped out of print altogether, relegating The Schoolmaster to virtual oblivion.
Then in 1975 a new edition, prefaced by an introduction revealing previously unknown information about the author, led to a renewed interest; and this was reinforced by the publication (1977) of further new material - The Schoolmaster's letters to Jacob van Lennep. These letters show The Schoolmaster to have been not only the creator of witty, bizarre poetry, but also a letter-writer of uncommon élan. Today The Schoolmaster stands acknowledged as a unique figure in Dutch nineteenth-century literature for his outspokenness, his clever and original use of language, his cavalier treatment of the canonised literary rules and genres, and his sardonic, subversive commentary on manners and mores.
So who is the man behind the pseudonymous Schoolmaster? A schoolmaster, indeed, but not one who originally aspired to that calling or ever practised it in the Netherlands. In fact, The Schoolmaster was the head-master-proprietor of a London boarding school.
Gerrit van de Linde was born in 1808 in Rotterdam, where his father was a well-to-do tradesman. From an early age young Gerrit's literary gifts were already quite apparent. Even as a schoolboy he was regularly invited to present his poetry at literary fellowships. Such fellowships, a more self-conscious drawing-room version of the French-style literary salon, were an
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institutionalised part of Dutch nineteenth-century middle-class culture. In 1825 he entered the University of Leiden as a student of theology destined for the ministry. He quickly attracted many friends, and also made his mark in university literary circles as a talent to be watched. He read his verses at student literary gatherings and contributed to student literary almanacs. He also put on very popular puppet shows for his friends and family, in which his salacious and satirical bent came to the fore. Academically, he was content to take his studies at an easy pace. Towards the end of 1833, however, this pleasant mode of existence foundered abruptly on scandal. First a young lady, a musician's daughter with whom he had been conducting an affair, bore him an illegitimate son. At the same time word got about of a liaison with the young wife of a chemistry professor who, after years of childlessness, now likewise found herself in a delicate condition. The cuckolded professor retaliated by having his young rival sent down from the university, and his wife's extra-marital pregnancy terminated. Next, the Leiden fraternity of shopkeepers and purveyors, with whom he had enjoyed credit for years, learning of his disgrace, to a man called in his debts. Since they were also aware that Van de Linde senior had lost his fortune, these creditors became so pressing that Van de Linde had no option but to make himself scarce.
Thus in late January 1834 Gerrit van de Linde, debarred from the university, the ministry and, hence, from respectable society because of his overenergetic love life, and hounded by creditors because of his insolvency, took ship for England, where, as his friends impressed upon him, he would at
Portrait of Gerrit van de Linde as a student (Collection P.A.M. van de Linde, Wildridge, Australia).
Cover of the first edition of Poems by The Schoolmaster (Gedichten van den Schoolmeester, 1859) (Collection Koninklijke Nederlandse Academie van Wetenschappen).
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Students of the Minerva Fraternity in Leiden. The student with the curly hair behind the man on the chair is Gerrit van de Linde (Collection Atlas van Stolk, Rotterdam).
least be beyond the reach of litigious Leiden shopkeepers and vengeful Leiden academics. He disembarked in London not knowing the language, owning barely a change of clothes, and with just about enough in his wallet to pay his way for a week or two. Ahead lay a dark spell of dire penury, humiliation, sickness and loneliness. Of his numerous friends the only one to remain loyal to him was the by now already well-known novelist Jacob van Lennep. To him Van de Linde immediately began to address long, entertaining missives to dispel his solitude and to preserve this single friendship and link with the past.
The first difference between the Netherlands and his new island home to strike the youthful exile, was the relative merits of the whores. As he put it to Jacob van Lennep:
When fleshly ragings hammer 'n clamour for naught but prompt alleviation
'T were better to postpone need-I-say-more till Holland's parts for satiation
For in England there's not a whore worth recommending
They lay like monuments supine upon the bedding
In truth to screw a sign of life into an Anglo-Saxon tart
Requires a second with the hiccups bouncing underneath to make her start.
When Van Lennep visited his friend in June of 1834, the two of them marvelled to behold a prostitute plying her trade on crutches in Drury Lane. Van Lennep, goes the story, is supposed to have addressed her as follows: ‘The devil my dear miss, left you fair of face, but our Lord gave you a couple of crutches’, upon which Van de Linde quickly rejoined: ‘Nay, blessed, rather, the heifer sound upon four immaculate extremities, inclining to none but her own mate's bollocks' tender mercies.’
Other aspects of the shadow-side of London life also became familiar to him. The theatres, he discovered, swarmed with pickpockets. The air of the
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Interior of Cromwell House (Highgate), with Mrs Van de Linde and her eldest child (Collection P.A.M. van de Linde, Wildridge, Australia).
metropolis was so foul that he developed a respiratory complaint and began to cough up blood. Writing to Van Lennep, he confided that he wished he were dead, even if that meant parting from the one and only fellow-being likely to notice his demise. A series of attempts to earn his living as a book dealer, a private tutor, and a schoolmaster, all ended in failure. He did, however, make the acquaintance of some notable and distinguished people, among them the Quaker doctor-philanthropist Thomas Hodgkin and Henry Philip Hope, a retired merchant banker and public benefactor. The latter in particular proved a generous patron to Van de Linde when he loaned him a considerable sum of money towards his first boarding school venture at the beginning of 1835. Van Lennep, meanwhile, canvassed his own friends and relations in the Netherlands for the remainder of the funds his banished friend required to set himself up in his new profession.
Keeping a boarding school was no sinecure, as Van de Linde soon discovered. Life was a constant struggle against shortage of money and unreliable staff. He learned to beware of bankrupts. Families on the financial way down were in the habit of boarding out their children; when the fees became due at the end of the quarter they would promptly remove them, and send them to another school for one term more of complimentary board, lodging and education.
Bit by bit he managed to surmount these obstacles. Especially after his marriage in 1837 to Caroline de Monteuuis, the pretty, young and accomplished daughter of the proprietor of a French residential school, life went more smoothly for him. By 1843 he was in a position to establish himself at Cromwell House, a grand house in Highgate, where his ‘collège français’ gained an increasing reputation as time went by.
Van de Linde's success as an educator in England must have been due in great measure to his teaching methods, which were not only new to England but happened to be in tune with the times. He was, for instance, opposed to corporal punishment, and propagated a non-traditional curriculum with an emphasis on modern languages as well as mathematics and the sciences, for which there was an insatiable demand as the Industrial Revolution gained momentum. Most likely he had himself been educated at a modern Dutch ‘Nutschool’, where the prevailing principle was an enlightened, benevolent Rousseauean belief in the natural good of the child which, if properly nurtured, made the use of physical correction superfluous. It did not take all that much, Van de Linde concluded, to make one's mark as a pedagogue in England. ‘I have already introduced numerous improvements here which I recollect from my own schooldays, as it appears to me that the system of education in Holland is a hundredfold better than in England,’ he told Van Lennep. Among these improvements was the abolition of the strap and cane, for which he substituted a scale of grades for conduct. One mother, though, he reported to his friend, complained about his disgraceful neglect of her son. Repeated examination of the young scholar's backside had revealed to her no hue other than that which nature intended, whereas formerly that selfsame back was wont to display every colour of the rainbow as a testimony to his previous headmaster's ministrations.
Once established at Highgate, a prosperous village enclave on London's outskirts, Van de Linde transformed himself into a respectable and respected member of the community, with access to the very best circles. His
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The backyard of Cromwell House (Highgate Literary and Scientific Institution).
intimates included leading critics, lawyers, antiquarians, educational reformers and abolitionists. To fit into his new environment with such seamless ease he must have thoroughly saturated himself in its rules and tenets. He also became a communicant of the Church of England, an absolute prerequisite for social acceptability. Dissenters were at that time still excluded from official appointments, and it would have been inconceivable that he should be entrusted with the tutelage of the offspring of the well-to-do middle classes had he continued to profess the Dutch Reformed Protestantism of his origins. Furthermore, this theologian manqué from Leiden always presented himself in clerical garb, and styled himself The Reverend Gérard van de Linde Monteuuis.
Switching from his native Dutch to English caused Van de Linde no difficulties. Within a matter of months he had so thoroughly absorbed his new language that he was able to recite by heart entire passages from the key works of English literature, and was even writing home in English, reporting to Van Lennep with relish on the annihilating critiques meted out by the English press to Dutch literati. Apart from Bilderdijk, he too did not hold the Dutch literary establishment in much esteem. He was dizzy with excitement on first encountering the works of Coleridge, Dickens and Lamb, declared himself ‘well-nigh crazed with joy’ by one of Wordsworth's odes, and took Shakespeare for his ‘bible’. With reference to his own work, it is difficult to assess to what extent Van de Linde may have been influenced by English literature. Certainly a particular brand of Anglo-Saxon humorous writing was then in its heyday, and it would be unnatural if this had not provided him with at least one source of inspiration in penning The Schoolmaster's verse. We know that he was familiar with Byron's Don Juan, with The Pickwick Papers, and was a reader of Punch. Certainly there is an affinity between the sardonic humour of Byron's epic Don Juan, and the humour of The Schoolmaster's longer poems such as ‘The Shipwreck’ (‘De schipbreuk’), and ‘The Sandwich and the Gold Prospector’ (‘De boterham en de goudzoeker’). Whether he was also familiar with the nonsense verse of Richard Barham and Edward Lear, with both of whom he has been compared, is not known. He must certainly have been aware of Lear, however,
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An engraving of Cromwell House (Highgate). The handwriting is Van de Linde's (Gemeentearchief, Amsterdam).
In 1848 the Book of Nonsense took England by storm, and Lear was also a contributor to Punch, of which Van de Linde was a reader. Be that as it may, Van de Linde was already writing absurdistic verse before quitting the Netherlands; long, that is, before he knew English, and long before Lear made his debut.
After his flight to England, it was many years before Van de Linde's work was seen in the Netherlands again. It is clear from the many scintillating verses and expressive utterances that animate his letters to Jacob van Lennep that he was constantly engaged in honing his skills. But he was so hurt by being banished from his own country, and so nervous of letting his name appear in print, that despite Van Lennep's repeated urging he resisted all pressure to publish his poems. In the event, the general public's introduction to The Schoolmaster dates from 1850, when Van Lennep persuaded his friend into contributing to Holland, his own new almanac; even then, he dared to publish only under a pseudonym.
The verse of The Schoolmaster is completely unlike that of his Dutch peers. He pulls the rug out from under every accepted canon of poetry, juggling and kneading the vocabulary to create a completely novel language of imagery, connotations and associations. Technically he is extremely adroit, displaying an equally masterly hand in prolonged rhyme sequences, in intricate passages of double-rhyme, and in complex internal rhyming patterns.
One feature that sets his work apart from contemporaries both in Holland and elsewhere, is a complete absence of metre. At a time when metric verse was de rigeur, The Schoolmaster disdains to cast his so-called ‘knittelvers’, or non-verse, in the prescribed mould of stressed and unstressed syllables, set to fixed schemes of alternating shorter and longer lines. Often the end result looks like a hodgepodge on paper, with some lines so sustained that they overrun, and others comprising but a few syllables. Still, especially when read aloud, the result scans impeccably, and the lines balance out perfectly. Furthermore, his skilful manipulation of assonance, dissonance and alliteration permits individual lines and phrases to be drawn out or foreshortened at will, to allow for different interpretations. Despite the lack of formal
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metre, usually an indispensable aid to memorisation, his timing is so easy on the ear that a few readings will suffice to imprint them on the mind without too much conscious effort. Other instantly identifiable Schoolmaster hallmarks are his quirky metaphors and figures of speech, outlandish personifications, non-sequiturs, confusing word associations, hyperbole and over-the-top elaborations, which he heaps one upon the other in exuberant explosions of verbal animation which seem to spill over with elation at their own daring. He'll play with cliché, proverb and dictum, dissolving the boundaries between the metaphorical, the figurative and the literal so that nothing means what it says, and vice versa. He'll interpolate a sly word or two which suddenly exposes the underlying meaning of a common expression. He'll draw bizarre analogies and comparisons in which the larger concept is viewed, as it were, through the small end of the telescope: in the upsidedown mental universe of The Schoolmaster you'll see the sun shine bright as a candle.
In keeping with his disdain for the received canons of his art, The Schoolmaster does not eschew to make short shrift of authority as represented by an ubiquitous officialdom, eternally on its dignity, eternally letting itself be waited on at its own convenience. Bourgeois society, with its predilection for cosy, domestic scenarios, equally comes in for a thorough drubbing from The Schoolmaster. He translates the grandiose Leitmotifs of Romanticism into homely tableaux: a violent shipwreck transforms itself into a mediocre print on a parlour wall, its savagery permanently becalmed. In short, it is the worthy little man, who thinks the world can be scaled down to his own perspectives, whom The Schoolmaster is out to reduce.
Whether Van de Linde ever appeared in the English press is difficult to establish, especially as authors' names were not invariably cited in the magazines and journals. That he was not a frequenter of literary circles we know, although he did number several publicists among his friends. He was particularly intimate with George Croly, a clergyman who enjoyed considerable renown as a critic and poet and was closely associated with the Literary Gazette and Blackwood's Magazine. It is therefore not inconceivable that Van de Linde too should have contributed to these or other journals, but even if he did, he could as well have published articles on education as verse. Our general impression is that his career was on the whole confined to education, although he does from time to time mention something to Jacob van Lennep about having contributed to the press, but without giving any particulars. He was, however, an active member of several societies for educational reform and may, perhaps, occasionally have represented these in writing.
The Schoolmaster had never enjoyed robust health, and in the autumn of 1857 he fell ill. Four months later, on 27 January 1858, aged not quite fifty, the Reverend G. van de Linde Monteuuis passed away at Cromwell House, Highgate, ‘deeply regretted by his sorrowing family and a numerous circle of friends’, as the announcement in The Times deaths column records. His widow was left with four young children to raise and a school to run.
From the poet's personal archive and from the material already published in Holland, Jacob van Lennep now compiled the anthology which appeared in 1859 and would very quickly make The Schoolmaster a household name. The first edition of Poems by The Schoolmaster sold out inside three months;
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second and third editions followed in 1860 and 1861. Even more successful was the sixth edition of 1872, the first to contain illustrations (by Anthony de Vries). The widow and her children, however, derived little benefit from all this; as was usual at the time, the publisher had bought the rights to the poems for the - as it turned out - paltry sum of 240 guilders.
In his introduction to Poems by The Schoolmaster, Van Lennep wrote that his friend had always remained a Hollander at heart. And indeed, as his verses testify, Gerrit van de Linde consistently cherished his roots in the field closest to his heart: his native language. Here, for all his demure exterior, he continued to permit himself the liberties he had enjoyed as a student. In his everyday life as a London schoolmaster, The Schoolmaster may have conformed exactly with what was expected of his clerical station and his profession, but in his verse and in his letters Gerrit van de Linde never ceased to be a rebel who challenged every literary canon and rule of grammar in his explorations of the Dutch language.
marita mathijsen
Translated by Sonja Prescod.
Poster advertising the first illustrated edition of Poems by The Schoolmaster (Gedichten van den Schoolmeester, 1872) (Collection Koninklijke Nederlandse Academie van Wetenschappen).
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