In 1841, Charles Dickens was operated on without anesthesia. “I suffered agonies, as they related all to me, and did violence to myself in keeping to my seat,” Dickens wrote in a letter to a friend. “I could scarcely bear it.” Surgery on the penis must have been more painful than any rectal or anal procedure, especially when a patient was a five-year-old foreigner who could not have possessed the coping skills, the insight, or perhaps fluency enough in English to understand what was happening to him when Mrs. Wilson changed his dressings, administered his medicines, or appeared at his bedside with a supply of leeches if he had an inflammation believed to be due to an excess of blood.
Mrs. Wilson may have had a sweet bedside manner. Or she may have been strict and humorless. A typical requirement of a nurse in those days was that she be single or widowed so that all her time could be devoted to the hospital. Nurses were underpaid, worked long, grueling hours, and were exposed to extraordinarily unpleasant conditions and risks. It was not uncommon for nurses to “get into drink” a bit too much, to run home for a nip, to show up at work a bit mellow. I don’t know about Mrs. Wilson. She could have been a teetotaler.
Walter’s hospital stay must have seemed to him an endless stretch of bleak, scary days, with breakfast at eight, followed by milk and soup at 11:30, then a late-afternoon meal and lights out at 9:30 P.M. There he lay, day in and day out, in pain, no one on duty at night to hear him cry or comfort him in his native tongue or hold his hand. Had he secretly hated Nurse Wilson, no one could really blame him. Had he imagined she was the one who destroyed his penis and caused him so much anguish, that would be understandable. Had he hated his mother, who was far away from him during his ordeal, that would come as no surprise.
In the nineteenth century, to be born illegitimate or to be the child of an illegitimate parent was a terrible stigma. When Sickert’s maternal grandmother had sex out of wedlock, according to Victorian standards, she enjoyed it, which implied that she suffered from the same genetic disorder that prostitutes did. The common belief was that this congenital defect was passed down the bloodline and was a “contagious blood poison” routinely described in the newspapers as a “disease that has been the curse of mankind from an early period in the history of the race, leaving its baneful effects on posterity to the third and fourth generations.”
Sickert might have blamed his boyhood agonies, his humiliations, and his maimed masculinity on a genetic defect or “blood poison” that he inherited from his immoral dance-hall grandmother and his illegitimate mother. The psychological overlays to young Walter’s physical curse are tragic to contemplate. He was damaged, and his language as an adult reveals a significant preoccupation with “things medical” when he was writing about things that were not.
Throughout his letters and art reviews there are metaphors such as operating table, operation, diagnosis, dissection, laying bare, surgeon, doctors, fateful theater, castrated, eviscerated, all your organs taken out, anesthetized, anatomy, ossify, deformation, inoculated, vaccinating. Some of these images are quite shocking, even revolting, when they suddenly uncoil and strike in the middle of a paragraph about art or daily life, just as Sickert’s use of violent metaphors strikes unexpectedly, too. When he is discussing art, one doesn’t expect to run into morbid horror, horrors, deadly, dead, death, dead ladies’ hearts, hacking himself to pieces, terrify, fear, violent, violence, prey, cannibalism, nightmare, stillborn, dead work, dead drawings, blood, putting a razor to his throat, nailing up coffins, putrefied, razor, knife, cutting.
In a 1912 article for the English Review he wrote, “Enlarged photographs of the naked corpse should be in every art school as a standard of drawing from the nude.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
THE GENTLEMAN SLUMMER
The heaviest rain of the year fell during the last week of August 1888. On average, the sun burned through the mist no more than an hour each day.
Temperatures remained unseasonably cool, and coal fires burned inside dwellings, gushing black smoke into the air and adding to the worst pollution in the great city’s history. In the Victorian era, there was no such thing as pollution monitoring and the word “smog” had not been coined. But the problems created by coal were nothing new.