ROBERT WILLIAMS BUCHANAN (1841 - 1901)

The Sentinel Article - unused.

THE RETURN OF ROBERT BUCHANAN

by Patrick Regan

On Tuesday, March 15th a bronze bust of Robert Buchanan was unveiled on his grave in the churchyard of St. John the Baptist, Southend-on-Sea. Which may not seem especially relevant to the readers of the Sentinel, but as this paper pointed out in their obituary of June 13th 1901, “Mr. Robert Buchanan, the author, who died on Monday, was, of course, a local man.”

He was born in Caverswall on August 18th 1841, the only child of Robert Buchanan, a Scottish journalist and prominent missionary for the Socialist cause of Robert Owen, and Margaret Williams, the daughter of a Stoke lawyer. He left the area when still a child and as far as I know, never returned. This could explain his lack of a local reputation, which has also not been helped by the widespread assumption that he was Scottish and the fact that the only biography of Buchanan (written by his sister-in-law, Harriett Jay) places Caverswall in Lancashire.

Although some of Buchanan’s works were extremely popular, he himself was not. He had few friends, but made a lot of enemies, particularly among the literary class. He was one of the most controversial writers of the Victorian age. When Britain was ruling the world, Buchanan was anti-Empire and anti-war, anti-capital punishment, pro-women’s rights (and animal rights for that matter) and his views on religion were unorthodox, to say the least. In 1893, his poem, The Wandering Jew, wherein Christ is made to wander the earth in atonement for the sins committed in his name by the Christian Church, caused a month-long debate in the letters section of The Daily Chronicle, and in pulpits up and down the land. When Herman Vizetelly, the publisher of English translations of Zola’s novels, was imprisoned on obscenity charges, Buchanan, despite his own dislike of Zola’s work, published a thirty-eight page letter addressed to the Home Secretary demanding his release. When Oscar Wilde was arrested, Buchanan was the only writer, outside Wilde’s immediate circle, to stand up in his defence. And on several occasions he used his pen to support those he felt had been wrongly convicted and were facing the death penalty.

There is a quotation incised on the base of the new bust of Buchanan, selected by the sculptor, Lisa Hawker: “Truth first; afterwards, if possible, Beauty.” It occurs in a letter Buchanan wrote to Robert Browning in 1870 and it’s a clue to Buchanan’s failure to secure a place among the favoured authors of English Literature. People don’t like the truth, especially in their poetry. For example, Buchanan’s ode to Queen Victoria on the occasion of her Golden Jubilee in 1887, begins, quite conventionally, with a hymn of praise, before embarking on a catalogue of all the things that are wrong with the British Empire, at home and abroad. As for the second part of the quotation, Buchanan did occasionally manage it, for example in these lines from the ‘Carmen Deific’:

If I were a God like you, and you were a man like me,
And in the dark you prayed and wept and I could hear and see,
The sorrow of your broken heart would darken all my day,
And never peace or pride were mine, till it was smiled away,
I’d clear my Heaven above your head till all was bright and blue,
If you were a man like me, and I were a God like you!

Buchanan was also a critic, and after writing a particularly harsh criticism of the poems of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (which unfortunately caused Rossetti to attempt suicide) Buchanan found that he could no longer make an honest living as a  poet. For a while he tried to make a dishonest living by publishing several poems anonymously on American themes, which were praised by all the London reviewers, but when Buchanan revealed himself to be the author, rather than welcome him back into the fold, he was disliked even more for the deception. So, in order to make money he turned to novels and plays.

Money was a constant problem for Buchanan. When his father went bankrupt in 1860, young Robert set off for London with half-a-crown in his pocket to make his fortune. Which eventually he did, but along the way he starved in a garret, as poets are meant to do, alongside his friend David Gray, who was not so lucky and died of consumption at the age of 22. Of the few letters of Buchanan’s that remain, there are a couple to Browning where he asks for loans of £20, and one to Tennyson, where he asks him for £200 (about £9,000 in today’s money). In 1869 Buchanan tried to raise some cash by giving public readings of his own work, in imitation of Dickens. The first two events went well in Scotland, but when he came down to London there were so many creditors waiting to pounce on him that he had to sneak into his own poetry reading in disguise. That scheme was swiftly abandoned.

In Buchanan’s defence, it should be said that he had a family to support. He had married Mary Jay in 1861 and although they had no children, Mary’s younger sister Harriett, lived with them as an adopted daughter. After the death of Buchanan’s father in 1866, his mother (and her mother) also joined the household. So, on the whole, Buchanan wrote his poems for pleasure and his novels and plays for profit. And he would have made a reasonable living if he had any notion of how to manage his money. Buchanan wrote 27 novels and over 50 plays, so he wasn’t short of ideas, but when he did have a success on the stage he tended to sell the rights as soon as possible and move on to the next project. In the case of Alone in London, after losing money on the London production (although it had been a great success in America), Buchanan sold the provincial rights for a pittance and it went on to tour the provinces for years (the twelfth annual tour actually started out at the Theatre Royal in Hanley) making a fortune for the managers of the touring  company. Our view of the Victorian theatre has been skewed somewhat by what has been allowed to survive and we have lost the world of the Victorian melodrama with its incredible use of stage effects to create sensational scenes. At one point in The English Rose, a melodrama by Buchanan and G. R. Sims, set in Ireland, the English landlord drives onto the stage in his car, is attacked by a band of rebels, and then the hero gallops to the rescue on his horse, guns blazing. It’s not Ibsen.

In 1894, at the apparent height of his success, living next door to the future Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith (renting of course, since Buchanan never thought of investing in property), the shaky edifice of Buchanan’s finances finally crumbled. It was all Lillie Langtry’s fault. Buchanan’s friend, Henry Murray, reckoned that people would pay good money to see Mrs. Langtry dance on the stage. So Buchanan dusted off an old play, A Society Butterfly, hired a theatre and signed up Mrs. Langtry. She offered to buy her own costumes, but Buchanan and Murray insisted on providing the one she was to do the dance in. She took one look at it and refused to play the scene. Buchanan and Murray then came up with another idea, instead of the dance Mrs. Langtry would appear in a tableau as Lady Godiva. The play was not a success and Mrs. Langtry in her Godiva costume was described by one reviewer as “suggestive of Lady Macbeth in a blanket”. Buchanan and Murray tried to rescue the play, reinstating the dance performed by a Lillie Langtry lookalike. Then, down to their last £100, they got a tip on a horse, went to the racetrack, but got so involved in conversation that they forgot to place the bet. The horse won - at 20 to 1. Buchanan was declared bankrupt.

Later that year he suffered a worse blow when his mother died. She was buried in Southend alongside his wife Mary, who had died in 1881 from cancer, at the age of just 36. There was now only one woman in Buchanan’s household, his sister-in-law, Harriett Jay. A novelist, playwright and actress, a fascinating figure in her own right, she now took her brother-in-law in hand and they wrote a series of plays together. In May 1895 Harriett Jay was also declared bankrupt, which probably explains why she adopted the pseudonym of ‘Charles Marlowe’ for the play which was opening the following month. It was a variation on Charley’s Aunt called The Strange Adventures of Miss Brown and surprisingly it was a great hit. Rather than consolidate his financial position and pay off some of his debts, Buchanan decided to set himself up as his own publisher in order to revitalise his career as a poet, but he refused to send out review copies to critics and he had no money to advertise, so the scheme failed. He continued to write novels and his final book of poems, The New Rome, was published in 1898. The title of the last poem in the collection is ‘I End As I Began’ and it contains these lines:

Never to bow and kneel
To any brazen Lie,
To love the worst, to feel
The least is ev’n as I,
To hold all fame unblest
That helps no struggling man,
In this, as in the rest,
I end as I began.

Buchanan’s health began to fail, he suffered angina attacks, and he and Harriett Jay moved out of London and lived in various seaside resorts for a time. They also took up the latest craze of bicycle riding. They returned to London in October 1900 and in Jay’s biography of Buchanan she writes the following:

     “The next morning, Friday, October 19th, his high spirits had not deserted him, for I heard him whistling merrily before he came in to breakfast. I asked him if the muddled vision had troubled him again, and he replied in the negative, assuring me that he felt particularly well in every way. Breakfast over and the morning papers read, we set off on our bicycles together.
     After a ride in Regent’s Park, which lasted close upon two hours, we returned home. He partook of a hearty lunch, and then fell asleep in an easy chair beside the fire. He awoke refreshed, and after he had drunk a cup of tea and had written some half-dozen letters, proposed that we should cycle again. ‘I should like to have a good spin down Regent Street,’ he said. Those were the last words he ever spoke, for five minutes later the cruel stroke had descended upon him which rendered him helpless as a little child.”

At first the newspapers carried daily bulletins on Buchanan’s health but he lingered on in his paralysed, speechless state for another eight months. He died on 10th June 1901, at the age of 59, and was buried in the Southend churchyard. A public collection was organised to erect a monument to the poet above his grave, and the original bust of Buchanan was unveiled on 25th July 1903. Over the intervening years the grave fell into disrepair and Buchanan’s head was lost. Now, thanks to Southend Council and the incredible work of Lisa Hawker, Buchanan’s memorial is once again complete.

But, there’s one last irony. Buchanan died in poverty and the papers which carried his obituary also noted that a receiving order had been made against his estate. Perhaps that was the reason Harriett Jay removed Buchanan’s name from an old, unperformed play of theirs, when she sold an option on it to one of the leading comic actors of the day, James Welch. He eventually tried it out in Nottingham in 1906 and When Knights Were Bold, by ‘Charles Marlowe’, was an immediate hit. In London it ran for 579 performances. It was played all round the world and there were three silent film versions, and one ‘talkie’ starring Jack Buchanan and Fay Wray. And every Christmas, until 1937, the play was revived in London and ran alongside the usual pantomimes. And there was never any credit for poor old Robert Buchanan of Caverswall.

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