House Dickensian ravens croaking in fatal battlements
Ihave a secret desire to own a raven. Perhaps 'own' is the wrong word. A raven has a habit of owning you. They will never be pets, though they accept a form of domestication and can be taught many words. 'Tame' is not the word for them either. When I first saw ravens at the Tower before the war, in twos, dancing or rather marching in step, they seemed to me part of the garrison, much fiercer than the Beefeaters, more at home in that grim place than the Royal Fusiliers, whose HO it then was. They made me laugh with their antics, but it was gallows humour, like Stalin's jokes. The raven's propensity to live off carrion in winter, and so to hover about fields of slaughter and plague towns, have made it a bird of ill omen in simple minds. But it is worth remembering that their first appearance in history, in I Kings wii 4-6, shows them at Jehovah's command keeping alive the valuable carcass of Elijah the Tishbite by bringing him 'bread and flesh' every morning and evening.
It is true that the raven's call is unpleasing: a loud, sharp but echoing croak-croak-croak or pruuk-pmuk, varied by a brutal tank, like a crash of metal. But Dorothy Wordsworth. listening to a raven speak to an amphitheatre of hills at Grasmere on 27 July 1800, noted in her Journal how well the raven's call was adapted to mountain orchestration: The whole dome of the sky seemed to echo the sound . . . a musical bell-like answer to the bird's hoarse voice.' Shakespeare was a raven-fancier for this reason. It would not surprise me to learn that he kept one. Ravens play a major role in Macbeth, and a minor one in Othello. In the scale of greatness, ravens are just the right size: smaller than an eagle and so capable of comic turns, which an eagle can never manage; yet big enough to be formidable. A raven can measure well over two feet from tip to tail, with a weight of nearly two stone and a wingspan of five feet. The beak is horribly powerful; to frighten its enemies it can raise its feathers to double the size of its head, and its talons can carry huge weights with surprising tenacity.
Hence the name Grip, which Dickens gave not only to the raven in Bamaby Rudge but also to the three ravens he successively kept in order to study their habits. Bamaby's Grip was a dark spirit: 'Balancing himself on tiptoe, as it were, and moving his body up and down in a sort of grave dance, he rejoined, "I'm a devil! I'm a devil! I'm a devil!" 'Real ravens, Dickens found, were quite different, and none alike. 'Be careful in your choice of a raven,' he wrote. 'You must get a character with him from his last place,' (like a servant). The first Grip, 'presented by a friend', was a young but sagacious bird. He lived in the stables behind Dickens's house at l Devonshire Terrace, was looked after by the groom Topping, and carried out acts of piracy against tradesmen in the mews. The illustrator Hablot Browne drew his portrait shortly after he waylaid and attacked the local butcher, raiding his tray and tearing a huge piece out of his pantaloons. The butcher vowed vengeance and threatened to throw poison over the wall, but Topping said, 'The raven wouldn't have it at no price. He knows better than that.' Grip also stole 'a very large hammer from a carpenter of vindictive disposition', who also frequented the mews. It was buried, along with countless halfpennies and vintage pieces of cheese, in Grip's personal treasure-tip.
These outrages made Topping laugh, but he was less pleased when Grip set about the carriage, tearing out the lining and eating the paint off the wheels. Topping 'thought he might eat the entire carriage', and vowed to teach him a lesson. But Herring, the local birdfancier and empiric vet, ridiculed the idea of the groom getting the better of Grip. He had 'never seen such a thorough-goin', long-headed, deep, owdacious file in the whole course of my practice'. Dickens recorded him saying, Vot was Topping agin that bird? That 'ere little man could no more stand agin him in pint of sense and reason than I could agin the ghost of Cobbett.' (He meant, added Dickens, 'in slaughtering invective'.) However, in March 1841, Grip became ill. Like other ravens, he talked in an undertone, on this occasion, about Dickens's horse and Toppings' family. Called in, Herring dosed the bird with castor oil. When the clock struck noon, he staggered and called out, `Halloa, Old Girl!' This was a favourite expression of his, but Dickens thought it might have been a raven's version of famous last words and a salutation to death (female in the Latin), rather on the lines of Henry James's later greeting, 'So here it is at last, the distinguished thing!' At any rate, Grip died on the spot. A post-mortem established that he was the victim neither of the butcher nor of the carpenter. He had, said Dickens, observed the care with which some painters, working in the stables, looked after their white lead paint, and deduced it was valuable and thus (to his mind) deliciously edible. So he ate between one and two pounds of it: he was killed by greed. Dickens had him stuffed and placed under a glass case, an item which fetched £126 at Christie's 1870 sale of the novelist's effects. This historic object was last heard of in the possession of Colonel Richard Gimbel. Grip also survives in the form of a funeral card drawn by Daniel IVlaclise, RA, showing him being raised up to heaven by three angelic ravens dressed in white.
Grip's successor, Grip II, was a nonentity 'with intelligence scarcely beyond a fowl's', as Dickens put it. Grip III was older, and full of guile, knowledge and wickedness. He had been brought up in a country pub and had a wide, profane vocabulary. Dickens wrote, 'He has a power of swallowing door-keys and reproducing them at pleasure which fills all beholders with mingled sensations of horror and satisfaction.' He 'new pointed the greater part of the garden wall by digging out the mortar; and swallowing the putty in the frames. If you could only hear him break the windows!' wrote Dickens to one correspondent. His pub duties, he added, gave him a delight in the effects of intoxication. 'The sight of a drunken man calls forth all his powers,' so much so, Dickens joked, that he was thinking of changing the teetotal Topping for a groom 'with a dissolute character'. Dickens reasoned that the raven 'loves to see human nature in a state of degradation and to have the superiority of ravens thus asserted. At such times he is fearful in his Mephistophelean humour.' He not only terrorised the neighbourhood, provoking the much-tried butcher to the boast, 'I will not be molested in taking orders down the mews by any bird that has a tail,' hut also disrupted church services and led the Beadle to utter sentence of death. This was not carried out: Grip III did for himself when he 'tore up and swallowed splinters of a wooden staircase of six steps and a landing'.
That was in 1845. the year in which Edgar Allan Poe published and frequently recited his famous or notorious poem, with its mesmeric refrain, `Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore": Easy to memorise and a hit at poetry readings on both sides of the Atlantic, Poe's 'Raven' became instantly celebrated — indeed it was perhaps the most often performed poem of the entire 19th century. More established poets like Longfellow, and gurus like Emerson, thought it cheap and vulgar. It was thought to have brought the raven, hitherto a valuable poetic bird, into disrepute. At all events, after the death of Grip III, Dickens wrote, 'I have been ravenless.' But that does not mean I have lost my hankering for one.
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