Gerrit van de Linde (1808–1858)

Gerrit van de Linde was one of three jolly young men who got to know Jacob Van Lennep when he was invited to speak to a student club at Leiden in 1831. It must have been quite an evening, as they all remained close friends for the rest of their lives. But Gerrit was a little bit too jolly for a future parson, and in 1833-34 he suffered a series of calamities of the kind that normally only happens to the heroes of 19th-century novels. Within a very short time, he got a serving-girl pregnant, was ejected from the university when it emerged that he'd been having an affair with the wife of one of his professors, and had to flee the country because of gambling debts. Somewhere along the line his respectable fiancée terminated their engagement as well.

Gerrit set off for the colonies, but only got as far as London, where he had to learn English rapidly and soon found a new fiancée, Caroline de Monteuuis, whose father ran a school in Boulogne. Some generous loans from Van Lennep helped them to start a new life together running a "Collège français" in Highgate(*). Van Lennep also published many of Gerrit's poems in the annual he edited, "Almanak Holland". Since Gerrit's real name was still too hot to handle in the Netherlands, they appeared under the pen-name "De Schoolmeester".

After Gerrit's death in 1858, Caroline asked Van Lennep to put together a collection of her husband's poems, sending him all the manuscripts she could find. He seems to have done a lot of tidying up and correction, including adding a line or two where poems were obviously unfinished, and he filtered out some of the more risqué stuff — it seems modern scholars are still scratching their heads to work out what was original and what was Van Lennep. Van Lennep was also quite creative in his "biographical note", where he managed to imply that Gerrit left Leiden as a result of a failure of his father's investments, and was oddly silent about the scandals many of his readers probably remembered...

The poems were a big success, and remained in print for many years. Readers old and young loved the comic absurdity of van de Linde's leaps of logic, his unexpected juxtapositions of formal and informal language, his refusal to take anything seriously, and his sheer verbal agility. The subject-matter and light touch are obviously influenced by the Ingoldsby Legends and Punch, but the astonishingly sure-footed way that van de Linde ignores the normal rules of rhyme and meter — and always gets away with it — is all his own. Not many people in the mid-nineteenth century were doing that, in any language.

Illustrated editions started to appear from the 1870s, and many different illustrators had a go at the poems, but the ones most people seem to remember are those by Anthony de Vries, which pick up the absurdity of the poems perfectly.

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(*) Remember the Porter in Evelyn Waugh's Decline and Fall? — "I expect you'll be becoming a schoolmaster, sir. That's what most of the gentlemen does, sir, that gets sent down for indecent behaviour."… (altro)