SOLDIER, POET, AND MINERVA PRESS NOVELIST
TUCKETT, Captain Thomas R.
Manuscript notebook used for verse (mainly his own), receipts for official payments to soldiers with their signatures, and other notes.
Portugal and Guernsey, 1801 to 1823, but mainly 1808-1813.
Oblong 12mo manuscript, 96 pages written from both ends, a few more pages cut out; bound in contemporary marbled boards with leather spine (rubbed, spine partly defective), internally in very good condition.
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Manuscript notebook used for verse (mainly his own), receipts for official payments to soldiers with their signatures, and other notes.
Captain T. R. Tuckett (‘Tom’ according to one entry here), served in the 2nd Battalion of the 3rd Regiment of Foot (The ‘Buffs’) during the Napoleonic wars. In 1805 he was stationed at the British garrison on Guernsey (stub of two accounts of money inward and expended), but the main series of military receipts places him in Portugal from October 1809 to February 1810. On 2 February he writes from Lisbon asking that no money be paid from his account ‘unless Bills are regularly drawn by myself’, suggesting that he was no longer acting as a paymaster. He may have retired because of an injury: ‘Operation performed fifth April 1810’; ‘began the Watters at St Servan the 8 of August [no year]’; ‘I have had an offer thro’ Col Blunt to go to a Portuguese gentleman’s house to live’ [no date]’. ‘An Attempt on the true Character of a certain man who I despise’ was ‘written when pain had rendered my mind morose and sickness had enfeebled it’ [no date].
The section of military receipts (20 pages and passim) range from small sums paid to individual soldiers to larger amounts for ‘pay for the Brigade’, ‘for subsistence’, ‘for men going to Aldea’, and ‘for the men going to march’, each signed by the soldier receiving the payment. There are payments to more than one regiment.
Just before the main series of receipts begins Tuckett was ordered on 22 September 1808 at Campo D’ourique [Lisbon] to ‘take charge of the Sick of the Brigade and a dreadful tiresome business it will be. I shall be worse off than Falstaff & his Corps, for before I reach my destination I do not think there will be half a shirt among them & as for the chance of stealing one I much doubt it, in the country we are to pass thro’. Garlic & salt fish in abundance I suppose ….’ He regrets not travelling alone, when he could have observed the country and kept a journal, but he does at least manage to ride out one day and describe his Portuguese driver and carriage.
Remarkably Tuckett found time to write a novel, which was duly published by the Minerva Press, as he records: ‘Sent my Novel entitled “Urbino”, or the “Vaults of Lepanto”, to Newman Minerva Press Leadenhall Street the fifteenth of February 1813 and I am to receive an answer in Six weeks from the above date.’ The novel was duly published in October, with title-page dated 1814, and received one sardonic review: ‘We believe that the rage for reading the improbables and the impossibles and the horrids and the horribles is not quite yet gone by. We therefore felicitate T. R. Tuckett, Esq. on the production of the present performance and conjecture that he has a reasonable chance of paying his printer and publisher and having something over to spare …’ (Critical Review, December 1813).
There are some eighteen pages of original poetry, each piece signed T.T., often with a note of publication (several ‘Appeared in the Guernsey Star’, one was ‘Inserted in the Anti-Gallican newspaper’). It would appear, therefore, that Tuckett was back on Guernsey now. There is some occasional verse – ‘To a little boy with a kite’, ‘A Valentine’ (satirical), ‘On a pick nick Rabbit Hunt, held at Doyle Barracks, Island of Guernesy, May 1814’ (polemic, on the cruelty of the hunt) – and some political (‘Green Erin’, ‘The Hoaxers hoaxed’, ‘The Patriot Brewer’). Two poems are of American interest: ‘On General Ross, who fell, while at the head of his men, when marching to the attack of Baltimore’ and ‘Madison’s Lamentation’ for Buonaparte, dated from Delancey [Barracks, Guernsey], 17 November 1814. When President Madison embarked on the War of 1812 he was convinced, wrongly, that his friend Napoleon would come into the war on the side of America. Now ‘To Elba’s Isle my bosom friend is gone ….’
A perplexing section, twelve pages dated at the end 21 February 1822 in a different hand, apparently that of a woman, is a gloomy, almost paranoid, series of reflections and prayers on deceit and friendship lost. It starts in Guernsey but soon ‘I am out of Guernsey and what am I the better of it a miserable being go where I wish forlorn and wretched what is a woman left to herself but for my poor children I could deem death a happiness ….’ In due course there is some relief (‘How much more happy do I feel since I live more to myself’) but then: ‘Friendship which lasted for seven years is in one fortnight totally destroyed. She is going away and I am never to see her more ….’ Has Tuckett died? Is this his widow reusing spare pages in his old notebook? Some research in the archives of The Buffs might provide an answer.
For Urbino, or the Vaults of Lepanto see Blakey, p. 289, and Garside, Raven, and Schöwerling 1814: 57. A single copy survives, at Corvey.
