MARCUS CLARKE
G'day folks,
Welcome to some very interesting details about a man well known in this part of the world. Marcus Andrew Hislop Clarke FRSA was an English-born Australian
novelist and poet, best known for his novel For the Term of His Natural
Life.
Marcus Andrew
Hislop Clarke (1846-1881), journalist and novelist, was born on 24 April 1846
at 11 Leonard Place, Kensington, London, the only child of William Hislop
Clarke, a Chancery lawyer, and his wife Amelia Elizabeth, née Matthews. His
grandfather, Dr Andrew Clarke, a retired military medical officer, made a
fortune in the West Indies and settled in Ireland. Several of his family
distinguished themselves in the army, the colonial service or the law. His
father had a flourishing practice in London and Marcus regarded his future as
assured. In circumstances never made quite clear the whole structure collapsed.
The father was removed to Northumberland House in 1862 after a physical and
mental, as well as financial, breakdown and died there about a year later.
The boy was
thus forced to give up the life of dilettante literary frittering which at 16
had been his expectation. He was not prepared for any career. He spoke loftily
of prospects at the Foreign Office and of living for a year or two in France to
perfect his French; but this was vague. Earlier an attempt was made to get him
into the army but he was turned down for physical disabilities. All that is
certain is that he was spoilt, conceited and aimless; clearly his view of life
was much coloured by the novels which he avidly read. Probably under persuasion
from relations who could see no solution for him in England, he chose to go to
Australia.
In his
impressionable years Clarke's home associations had been both brilliant and
drab; his father, alternately a bon viveur and a recluse, entertained
extravagantly, introduced the boy too early to a life of sophistication and for
the rest neglected him. His mother's death when he was 4 exacerbated his
loneliness. A sickly infant with an anchylosed left arm, his health improved
although the arm remained permanently shrunken; he retained through life a
slight stammer, probably a residue of childish insecurity, which, however, was
not thought unattractive. What he lacked physically he made up in charm,
fortified with wit, his one practical talent since in the end it made a
journalist of him.
In 1858-62
Clarke attended the Cholmeley Grammar School, Highgate, where he fell foul of
the headmaster for lack of application and as a senior was deprived of the
poetry prize as a discipline. Afterwards, however, he recalled Dr Dyne's
severity with a rueful respect. His contemporaries at Highgate were the two
Hopkins brothers, Gerard Manley and Cyril, and E. H. Coleridge; the grave of S.
T. Coleridge was in the school grounds, for the chapel then also served as
parish church. Nesfield, the grammarian, was a master at Highgate.
After his
father's collapse, his cousin, (Sir) Andrew Clarke, then in London,
arranged to send the youth to Melbourne where an uncle, James Langton Clarke, a
County Court judge at Ararat, could keep an eye on him. He arrived on 6 June
1863 with something like £800 scraped together from his father's mysteriously
dissipated resources.
On Andrew Clarke's recommendation employment was found
for him in a bank, but he proved totally unfitted for it. He later wrote some amusing
impressions of the experience. In his first year in Melbourne he gathered many
observations which afterwards served as literary material, the product of a
lively mind and a perceptive eye.
Presently,
however, like one of his own 'new-chums', he disappeared up-country to try out
station life. His uncle had an interest in the twin stations of Swinton and
Ledcourt with headquarters at Glenorchy where Clarke appears to have been
reasonably happy and contemplated taking up land himself. His plans came to nothing
after a disastrous expedition into western New South Wales in search of land, a
journey in time of drought which cost him heavily in money and in which a
companion lost his life. Back at Swinton he was persuaded by a visitor, Dr
Robert Lewins, an amateur scientist and Comtean philosopher who prided himself
on 'discovering' the young genius, to return to Melbourne and join the Argus.
From this point his bent was clear, although Clarke was too mercurial in
temperament to remain a staff writer.
Late in 1867
he began contributing a column of topicalities under the heading 'The
Peripatetic Philosopher', purporting to be the observations of a kind of
Melbourne Diogenes inhabiting a gas pipe on Cole's Wharf. He was at once
established. The first notable victim of his witty impertinence was the Duke of Edinburgh, then on a state visit
to the colonies. Clarke's association with the Argus lasted a number of
years, but he eventually quarrelled, transferring his allegiance to the
Melbourne Herald, the Daily Telegraph and finally the Age.
He retained a schoolboy humour: for example, in parting from the Argus
at a time when all the papers were fighting a battle of principle with the
Victoria Racing Club, he published a high-spirited 'spoof' in the 'scurrilous'
rival Herald, holding the Argus up to ridicule and pretending to
report the running of the Melbourne Cup by direct observation from a camera
obscura set up on the roof of the Herald office.
Clarke from
the first lusted after editorial power, for which he never had the necessary
steadiness. Whatever remained of his patrimony seems to have gone, along with
other funds contributed by a group of literary friends, to buy the Australian
Monthly Magazine, which he edited under the altered title of the Colonial
Monthly in 1868-69. For it he wrote his novel 'Long Odds'; two instalments
in July and August 1868 were contributed by his friend G. A. Walstab
when Clarke was seriously incapacitated by a fall from a horse. When the novel
ended, his energies flagged; the magazine passed to J. J. Shillinglaw and soon failed. Clarke put what he could recoup from it
into the comic weekly Humbug, but it also quickly collapsed; Melbourne
Punch ascribed its demise to morbus clerici.
At the
beginning of 1870 he was certainly the editor of the Australian Journal,
where his major novel, 'His Natural Life', began to appear in February; but
when it concluded two years and a half later the patience of the proprietors
had long been exhausted. He clearly did not last long as editor. Instead he
sought and obtained a position at the Public Library of Victoria, first
becoming secretary to the trustees and later sub-librarian. He appears to have
carried out these duties with reasonable efficiency, but levity pursued him and
in the end brought about his downfall. One notable example was shown in a
controversy sparked off by his article in the opening number of the Victorian
Review, November 1879, in which he argued that the advance of science had
led to the abandonment of belief in the miraculous and that Christianity was
moribund as an intellectual and moral force.
The article
provoked Bishop Moorhouse
into reply and Clarke was accused of atheism. His last word, published in the Melbourne
Review, April 1880, cleverly exposed the weaknesses in the bishop's
argument and scored a notable victory. These exchanges aroused enormous public
interest in Melbourne. Later that year Clarke had a hand surreptitiously in the
presentation of 'The Happy Land', a satirical operetta on a tinder-dry
political subject: the row between the Berry government and the
Legislative Council. This caused another furore and probably contributed to his
later downfall. Apart from this work of mischief he was very active in the
theatre both as an original author and as a translator. However, he wrote
nothing for the stage that made any lasting impression. His liveliest dramatic
writings were pantomimes, sometimes in collaboration with R. P. Whitworth.
By disposition
excitable, he worked hard, for he did not much reduce his contributions to the
papers when he entered the Public Library. It may be suspected that he drank
heavily; very early in his career he complained of dyspepsia and a disordered
liver. He lived extravagantly, somewhat after his father's style, and ran
hopelessly into debt. Anxiety and overwork led to sickness. He was forced into
insolvency in 1874 and again in 1881, so much to the disapproval of the library
trustees that on the second occasion he barely escaped dismissal. The real
position, however, was obscured since the disappointment he experienced at this
time in being refused the post of chief librarian led to a sudden collapse of
his powers and he died, officially of erysipelas, on 2 August 1881. There were
rumours of suicide but they must be discounted.
In 1869 Clarke
married the actress Marian, daughter of John Dunn, an Irish actor. Of their six
children, at least two married in Victoria and survived him.
After Clarke's
death his friend Hamilton Mackinnon assembled the Marcus Clarke Memorial
Volume (Melbourne, 1884), a selection of his most popular journalism with a
biographical introduction. The witty, often malicious, ephemeral humour which
colours the greater part of these writings contrasts strangely with the dark,
powerful imagination exhibited in His Natural Life, the revised,
shortened and best known version of which appeared in book form in 1874 and
1875. The title, For the Term of His Natural Life, was applied by
publishers to this work after Clarke's death.
Whether the
light and trivial social journalist, the literary butterfly, or the serious
author of this great, if defective, novel is the true Marcus Clarke, who is to
say? The best defence of his journalism is that, viewed in its context, it
still seems extraordinarily alive and vivid, providing a brilliant index to a
very vigorous period of colonial literary life. His Natural Life, with
all its shortcomings, in the end redeems him abundantly from the charge of
mental trifling. A novel in the grand tradition, it places him with Charles
Reade, Victor Hugo and Dostoevsky among the great nineteenth-century
visionaries who found in the problems of crime and punishment a new insight,
especially relevant in the convict-founded Australian colonies, into the
foundations of human worth. This book has outlasted all his other writings, and
is the one work of fiction produced in the whole first century of Australia's
history to justify description as monumental.
Clancy's comment: I read his most famous book as a kid and was enthralled by his descriptions.
I'm ...
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