Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Miscellaneous Frontmatter
- Another Look
- A Great-Grandfather
- A Great-Grandmother
- Grandfathers
- Grandmothers
- Birthplace
- My Mother and her Two Brothers
- Their Wedding Photograph
- Sticks and Stones
- Hickory Dickory
- Jolson Sings
- First Day at the Grammar School
- Catching an Old Film on Television
- Days of TEFL
- Snap
- May 1997
- Emma at Seven Months
- Somewhere Down the Line
- No Joke
- For the Man I Used to Go Fishing With
- Fishing in the Grounds of a Therapeutic Community
- Not at his Best
- Dead of Winter
- ‘Committal’
- The Dovecote
- The Idea of Order at Hunts Cross
- Jupiter Optimus Maximus
- Squeezing a Poem out of Me
- Fragment
- Something for Gael Turnbull on his Seventieth Birthday
- Making an Arrangement
- An Invitation to Breakfast from Sydney Smith
- Hiroshima
- Sez I Sez I in Stephen's Green
- Seventh Heaven
- At Drumcliff in 1997
- Getting There
- Mnemósynon
- Moonlight on Leros
- Olives
- The Quality of Greek Light
- Scottish Waiter Bringing Squid
- Funerary Monuments, Aegina
- Taking the Hexameter a Walk
- Moonlight on Aegina
- Whalewatching – Vancouver Island
- Seventh-Storey Heaven
- Sarah Biffin
- Ancestors
- In the Dock Canteen
- On Tape at the Old People's Home
- Winter Solstice 2001
- A Long Way from Home
- Publisher's note
Sarah Biffin
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Miscellaneous Frontmatter
- Another Look
- A Great-Grandfather
- A Great-Grandmother
- Grandfathers
- Grandmothers
- Birthplace
- My Mother and her Two Brothers
- Their Wedding Photograph
- Sticks and Stones
- Hickory Dickory
- Jolson Sings
- First Day at the Grammar School
- Catching an Old Film on Television
- Days of TEFL
- Snap
- May 1997
- Emma at Seven Months
- Somewhere Down the Line
- No Joke
- For the Man I Used to Go Fishing With
- Fishing in the Grounds of a Therapeutic Community
- Not at his Best
- Dead of Winter
- ‘Committal’
- The Dovecote
- The Idea of Order at Hunts Cross
- Jupiter Optimus Maximus
- Squeezing a Poem out of Me
- Fragment
- Something for Gael Turnbull on his Seventieth Birthday
- Making an Arrangement
- An Invitation to Breakfast from Sydney Smith
- Hiroshima
- Sez I Sez I in Stephen's Green
- Seventh Heaven
- At Drumcliff in 1997
- Getting There
- Mnemósynon
- Moonlight on Leros
- Olives
- The Quality of Greek Light
- Scottish Waiter Bringing Squid
- Funerary Monuments, Aegina
- Taking the Hexameter a Walk
- Moonlight on Aegina
- Whalewatching – Vancouver Island
- Seventh-Storey Heaven
- Sarah Biffin
- Ancestors
- In the Dock Canteen
- On Tape at the Old People's Home
- Winter Solstice 2001
- A Long Way from Home
- Publisher's note
Summary
There's a lot of feet in Shakespeare's verse, but there ain't
any legs worth mentioning in Shakespeare's plays, are
there, Pip? Juliet, Desdemona, Lady Macbeth, and all the
rest of 'em, whatever their names are, might as well have
no legs at all, for anything the audience know about it,
Pip. Why, in that respect they are all Miss Biffins to the
audience.
Martin Chuzzlewit
She was real, historical enough; so were the legs. Roll up, roll up!
No hands, no arms; a woman three-feet tall, who died – the irony! –
in Duke Street in the bustling port of Liverpool. Ladies and gentlemen,
the great Mr Dickens had it wrong, not once but twice –
in Chuzzlewit and Nickleby : Mr Scott Surtees with his own eyes
had seen the Biffin toes! reported it in Notes and Queries 1888.
The painter, Dukes, (and so the irony) exchanged painting lessons
for a contract: her for sixteen years to appear at rural fairs, a freak,
beneath striped canvases, with the Fat Woman, the Smallest
Man on Earth, the Lady with the pig-snout nose.
Used her mouth and shoulders, picked up the paintbrush
with her tongue, could tie a knot in a single hair; sew, cut patterns
with her toes. A Little Marvel then, my friends! A child (I quote)
of hapless fortune … and yet possessor of endowments of no ordinary
kind. Our armless midget painted kings! Not one but two
King Georges, a William, old Queen Vic herself, all of them
patronising. The King of Holland appointed her his miniaturist.
Dickens puts her in his painted toyshop, his Tussauds, when she
is all the rage – with exhibitions, medals, readies coming in.
Believe it or not, gentlemen, she married a Mr Wright
who turned out wrong. Alas, it all went pear-shaped. She died
almost in penury. Where's that? I hear the children ask. Just round
the corner there from jeopardy! Civil List Pension, an annuity secured
by Richard Rathbone, a chiselled headstone in St James's Cemetery
talking of gratifications. Not far from Kitty Wilkinson.
Ah, there now is another! Saint if ever there was one!
Mind how you go!
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- Information
- Getting There , pp. 64 - 65Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2001