Vincent’s Lost Letter to his Brother, Theo, October 13th, 1873

I wrote Vincent’s Lost Letter to his Brother, Theo, October 13th, 1873, during the first module at college, the Reading and Writing Seminar. The module was run by Rachel Sieffert, who was a wonderful person to learn from. For my second workshop piece, Rachel encouraged me to try my hand at historical fiction, which is a genre I hadn’t had a serious go at previously. Turns out, I love writing it.

I live in South London, and Van Gogh lived in Kennington, just a couple of miles up the road, when he worked for Goupil & Cie on Southampton Street, who were an art dealership. I knew Pissarro and Zola both lived in Upper Norwood (Crystal Palace, as everyone knows it now) in the late 19th century, and my first thought was to imagine a meeting of the three somehow. Sadly, their time in London did not overlap (though apparently Pissarro and Zola did meet here).

Van Gogh took his first known forays into art in London. His first verified piece is a sketch of his board house in Kennington. He was an anglophile, and loved the great British novelists, such as Dickens. He developed a social conscience, and considered a life in the church as a way to alleviate the poverty he saw. These were all lovely chunks of information to build a story around.

Vincent was a regular correspondent with his brother, Theo. Their remaining letters let us see who Vincent was in those days. I invented a lost letter to channel Vincent’s more anxious thoughts. (It’s a lovely co-incidence that this post is going out on the 150th anniversary of my made-up letter).

The globes of gaslight of an evening make me feel I’m walking among the heavens. To look into the water from Westminster Bridge is to see the weeds as a widow’s shawl, lank and drawn downstream to the distant darkness. So far from the coast, the tidal Thames heaves its great mass inland or disappears out to sea to leave little but a stream in a bog of mud. I see many broken things on the water’s edge: fractured clay pipes, smashed crockery, discarded bones. The mudlarks make good work on the beaches when the river is gone.

But London fog is not like Helvoirt fog. The heavy soot of the myriad manufactories falls upon the city’s back. It makes my spit dark and thick. The mist shrouds the streetlight, leans in to tell its secrets. These are the streets of Dickens, of the lost children of civilisation, finding places to live in the shadows of ramshackle buildings that seem too derelict to inhabit. It frightens me, and, I confess, at times it excites me, too. Dickens’ old house is not far from Southampton Street, and I walk there at midday as I take my repast. I had the temerity to sketch his house on Doughty Street, but hated my work and threw it away. It was junk.