Introduction

There is a particular kind of English book that resists easy classification — not quite biography, not quite social history, not quite comedy, yet somehow all three at once, and more besides. It belongs to a tradition of curious, capacious, affectionately skeptical writing about human nature that flourished in the nineteenth century, when the reading public had both the leisure to be entertained and the confidence to be amused by their own countrymen without feeling obliged to draw improving conclusions from every anecdote. John Timbs understood this tradition intimately, and the volume you are about to read is one of its finest and most generous expressions. It is a book about people who refused, whether by temperament, obsession, vanity, genius, or simple magnificent stubbornness, to behave as the world expected them to behave. It is also, quietly and persistently, a book about what it means to be human in a society that has very firm ideas about what that ought to look like.

Timbs published the first edition in 1866, and the work went through several printings, the most widely circulated of which appeared under the Chatto and Windus imprint in 1898, illustrated with forty-eight engravings that range from the stately to the gleefully undignified. That longevity is itself a kind of testimony. Victorian readers were not sentimental about books that failed to deliver, and a collection of this kind — essentially a gallery of portraits, anecdotes, and digressions arranged under broad thematic headings — could easily have felt exhausting or repetitive. Instead it accumulated admirers across decades, because Timbs had a gift that is rarer than it sounds: he genuinely liked the people he wrote about, even when, perhaps especially when, they were making spectacular fools of themselves.

Who Was John Timbs, and Why Should We Trust Him

John Timbs was born in 1801 and spent the greater part of his working life as a journalist, editor, and compiler of popular reference works on English history, manners, and curiosities. He edited the Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction for many years, and his output was prodigious — somewhere in the region of a hundred and fifty volumes, covering subjects from club life in London to the curiosities of science, from the history of doctors and medicine to the folklore of the English countryside. He was, in the best sense of the phrase, a man of miscellaneous learning: someone who read everything, remembered most of it, and had the journalist’s instinct for knowing which detail would make a reader sit up and pay attention.

This background matters for understanding what kind of book you are holding. Timbs was not an academic, and he did not write like one. He was a professional entertainer of the intelligent reading public, and he took that responsibility seriously. In his preface — which is worth reading carefully before you proceed, because it sets out his intentions with a candor that is itself rather charming — he explains that he has drawn his material primarily from his own time, meaning the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and that he has in many cases preferred to give his sources in their own words rather than rewrite them, on the sensible grounds that rewriting rarely improves the truth of a story and often distorts it. This is an important admission. It means that the voice of the book is not always uniformly Timbs’s own; it shifts and modulates as he draws on memoirs, newspaper accounts, legal records, and the recollections of contemporaries. What holds it together is his editorial intelligence — his sense of what to include, what to emphasize, and when to stand back and let the subject speak for themselves.

There is a question, worth acknowledging briefly, about the precise authorship of certain passages in a work of this kind. Timbs was a compiler as much as an original writer, and some of the material he incorporated had appeared in earlier forms in periodicals and collections, some of it his own previous work and some of it drawn from sources he acknowledged with varying degrees of specificity. This was entirely normal practice in Victorian popular publishing, and it does not diminish the achievement of the book as a whole. What Timbs created was not simply an anthology but a shaped and purposeful collection with a consistent sensibility running through it, and that sensibility is his own. Readers who want to trace individual passages to their original sources will find the scholarly apparatus of later bibliographical work helpful, but for the purposes of reading and enjoying this edition, the question of precise sourcing is less important than the quality of the whole.

The quality of the whole is very high indeed.

The England that populates these pages is recognizable and yet strange, which is precisely the effect Timbs intended. It is the England of the Regency and the early Victorian period, a society in the process of rapid and sometimes bewildering transformation — industrializing, urbanizing, growing richer in aggregate while remaining brutally unequal in distribution, and simultaneously becoming more self-conscious about its own manners and more anxious about the boundaries between respectability and its opposite. Into this world Timbs releases his eccentrics, and the effect is both comic and illuminating, because eccentricity, as he understands it, is not simply oddness for its own sake. It is what happens when an individual’s inner life is too large, too strange, too insistent, or too indifferent to social convention to be contained within the forms that society has prepared for it.

The range of characters is extraordinary. There are the fabulously wealthy, like William Beckford the younger — the builder of Fonthill Abbey, the author of the Gothic novel Vathek, a man whose fortune was so immense that he could indulge fantasies of architectural grandeur that would have bankrupted a lesser eccentric several times over. There is Beau Brummell, whose eccentricity was of the most refined and paradoxical kind: a man of no particular birth who remade the social world of Regency London through the sheer force of his aesthetic convictions about how a gentleman ought to dress, and who ended his days in provincial French obscurity, his mind gone, his debts unpayable, his legend already forming. There is John Mytton, the squire of Halston, whose appetite for physical danger was so extreme that it reads less like high spirits than like a sustained and almost philosophical argument against self-preservation. There are misers of spectacular dedication, hermits of genuine conviction, alchemists who believed with perfect sincerity that they were on the verge of transmuting base metals into gold, preachers who gathered thousands of followers on the strength of visions that their contemporaries found either divine or delusional depending on their own inclinations.

There are also artists and writers, and these chapters are among the most rewarding in the book. The portrait of William Blake — painter, poet, visionary, and by any conventional measure one of the most eccentric figures in the history of English literature — is handled with a delicacy that reflects Timbs’s genuine respect for creative genius even when it manifests in ways that his contemporaries found incomprehensible. The account of James Gillray, the caricaturist, is vivid and sympathetic, capturing both the savage brilliance of his work and the melancholy of his later years. The sculptor Nollekens appears in all his magnificent miserliness, a man whose art was generous and whose personal habits were the opposite. And scattered throughout the theatrical section are figures from the Georgian and Regency stage — Grimaldi the clown, Edmund Kean, the Young Roscius, Mrs. Garrick in her long widowhood — who remind us that the theatre was then, as it has always been, a natural habitat for those whose relationship with ordinary social reality is somewhat provisional.

What unites all these figures, and what Timbs is at pains to establish from the very first pages, is that eccentricity is not the same as wickedness, and not the same as madness, though it can shade into either. His eccentrics are, for the most part, people of good understanding, as he puts it, whose oddity coexists with genuine qualities of heart and mind. The miser may be absurd in his parsimony, but he is often also shrewd, loyal to his own peculiar code, and capable of surprising generosity in unexpected directions. The religious fanatic may be deluded, but the delusion frequently springs from an intensity of moral feeling that puts the conventionally respectable to shame. The spendthrift may be ruining himself with magnificent recklessness, but there is something in his refusal to be prudent that Timbs finds genuinely admirable, or at least genuinely interesting, which for a writer of his temperament amounts to much the same thing.

The structure of the volume is worth understanding before you begin, because it will help you navigate what is, by design, a deliberately non-linear experience. Timbs has organized his material into broad thematic sections — Wealth and Fashion, Delusions and Impostures and Fanatic Missions, Strange Sights and Sporting Scenes, Eccentric Artists, Theatrical Folks, Men of Letters, Convivial Eccentricities, and a final catch-all Miscellanea — but these categories are more suggestive than definitive. Characters bleed across boundaries. A figure who appears in the section on wealth and fashion may turn out to have religious obsessions that would fit equally well in the section on fanatics; a theatrical eccentric may also be a literary one; a sporting eccentric may also be a miser. The categories are Timbs’s way of giving the reader handholds on a very large and varied collection, not a rigid taxonomy of human oddity.

The best way to read the book, for most readers, is not straight through from beginning to end, though that is certainly possible and has its own pleasures. It is more rewarding to treat it as you might treat a well-stocked cabinet of curiosities — to open it at a point that catches your eye, to follow a thread for as long as it holds your interest, and then to let yourself be distracted by something adjacent. The table of contents is an invitation to browse, and browsing is entirely in the spirit of what Timbs intended. He was, after all, a journalist, and he understood that the reader’s attention is a gift that must be earned on every page, not assumed because the previous page was interesting.

That said, there are certain sequences within the sections that reward reading in order, because Timbs has arranged them with a quiet compositional intelligence that is easy to miss if you are jumping around too freely. The opening section on wealth and fashion, for instance, moves from the grand and the tragic — the Beckfords, with their ruined abbey and their squandered millions — through the merely fashionable and the merely absurd, and then gradually downward through the social scale to misers, dust-sifters, and the eccentric poor, so that by the end of the section you have a panoramic view of English society in which money is revealed as a force that distorts character at every level, not just at the top. This is not an argument Timbs makes explicitly — he is too good a journalist to lecture — but it is there in the arrangement, and noticing it adds considerably to the pleasure of the reading.

Similarly, the section on delusions and impostures and fanatic missions is more carefully organized than it first appears. It moves from the relatively harmless — astrologers, alchemists, hermits — through figures of increasing social influence and potential danger, culminating in extended accounts of Joanna Southcott and the founder of Mormonism that are among the most sustained pieces of writing in the book. These are not comic figures in the way that a miser or a dandy is comic. They are people who gathered genuine followings, who changed lives, who in some cases caused real suffering, and Timbs treats them with a seriousness that is all the more effective for being surrounded by lighter material. The contrast is deliberate, and it is one of the ways in which the book earns its claim to be not merely entertaining but truthful.