The Square Pegs (37 page)

The book opened with a flat declaration by its author of his own importance and his right to be heard. “line the first Lord in the younited States of A mercary Now of Newburyport it is the voise of the peopel and I cant Help it and so Let it goue Now as I must be Lord there will foller many more Lords pretty soune for it dont hurt A Cat Nor the mouse Nor the son Nor the water Nor the Eare …”

Before the befuddled reader could recover, the author hurriedly outlined his plan for a great “Dexters mouseum.” The museum, already begun, would feature wooden replicas of the most famous figures in history not only the author himself, but “mister pitt” and “the king of grat britton” and even “Loues the 16” of France. It would, Dexter promised, be one of the “grate Wonders of the world.”

Now the book became more autobiographical. “How Did Dexter make his money ye says …” He told how he made it by shipping warming pans to the West Indies, among other speculative follies. He told how much money he made. He gloated over the percentages of his profits. Next he discussed improvements that he contemplated on his house. Then he digressed on one “Bonne partey the grat,” who turned out to be Bonaparte the Great. There followed a discussion of the tomb the author had built for himself, with a list of its peculiar furnishings, some invective against politicians, priests, the devil, and college men, and an indignant recital of how a lawyer once tried to beat him up. After that, there was a learned discourse on the three bridges spanning the Merrimack, some angry words on why the author had separated from his wife and come to regard her as a ghost “I have bin in hell 35 years in this world with the gost” and an announcement that his house would soon be for sale. There was a modest hint that the author might make a good Emperor of the United States, a reminiscence of his youth, a suggestion for the names of his pallbearers, and, for a change of pace, the inclusion of two funny stories.

What did contemporary critics, and those who followed, think of all this?

Samuel Lorenzo Knapp, who knew Dexter and became his Boswell, thought that
A Pickle for the Knowing Ones
preserved “all the
saws, shreds and patches
that ever entered the head of a ‘motley fool.’” An anonymous critic for the National Aegis was even less kind. “For what purpose are riches given to some men,” he wondered, “unless to display in more glowing colours the disgusting deformities of their Characters? … In his
Pickle
for the knowing ones’ he had effectually
preserved the full grown fruits
of his nonsense.” After the author’s death the
Newburyport Impartial Herald
, which had once praised the book, did an about-face. Dexter’s “ruling passion appeared to be popularity, and one would suppose he rather chose to render his name ‘infamously famous than not famous at all.’ His writings stand as a monument of the truth of this remark; for those who have read his ‘Pickle for the Knowing Ones’, a jumble of letters promiscuously gathered together, find it difficult to determine whether most to laugh at the consummate folly, or despise the vulgarity and profanity of the writer.” Mrs. E. Vale Smith, preparing her
History of Newburyport
for publication in 1854, discussed Dexter and his book with many persons who had met him. Of the book she could only think that it was “a final effort for posthumous fame,” and of the author she could only remark that his “vices were profanity, a want of veracity, and irreverence, while his execrable taste led him into such vicious displays as were calculated to have an injurious effect, especially upon the young.”

But reaction was not all one-sided. In 1802 the
Newburyport Impartial Herald
had thought that Dexter’s book would “be a valuable acquisition to the lovers of knowledge and polite literature.” The passage of years brought others into the fold. Oliver Wendell Holmes was charmed by the “famous little book.” He wrote of Dexter: “As an inventor of a new American style, he goes far beyond Mr. Whitman, who, to be sure, cares little for the dictionary … I am afraid that Mr. Emerson and Mr. Whitman must yield the claim of declaring American literary independence to Lord Timothy Dexter, who not only taught his countrymen that they need not go to the Herald’s College to authenticate their titles of nobility, but also that they were at perfect liberty to spell just as they liked, and to write without troubling themselves about stops of any kind.” In 1925 J. P. Marquand became a proselyte. “In all seriousness,” he said, “this bold Dexterian effort actually possesses a style of its own, which all its faults combine to give it, a strength and characteristic vivacity that many more accomplished penmen and spellers have tried in vain to achieve. Every page, every line has an utter naturalness that is refreshing to a jaded taste.”

Unfortunately,
A Pickle for the Knowing Ones
outlived its author. Few encyclopedias and biographical dictionaries remembered him. One that did called him that “Machiavellian parvenu and avowed toper” who became “an incomparable literary figure.” Parvenu he was, and toper and literary figure, too. But he was considerably more. He dwelt in an age of much eccentricity among the great, but few great eccentrics. The earliest days of the republic were serious days. Men were strait-laced and dedicated and often humorless. There was little time or patience for the nonconformist. It surprised no one that Thomas Paine called his second book Common Sense. Men like John Randolph, Israel Putnam, and William Franklin were individuals in their ideas and in their habits, but they were not eccentrics. They conformed to the ways of colonial society. They went along. Timothy Dexter did not go along. He was his own planet and his own civilization. Or, more accurately, when a new nation was formed, he did not join it. If the flag of the infant republic had thirteen stars, one had surely been omitted. For Timothy Dexter was the fourteenth.

In the
New England Historical and Genealogical Register
it is recorded that “Nathan Dexter of Maiden & Esther Brintnall of Chelsea” were married in the latter part of June 1744. There had been Dexters in Maiden, Massachusetts, since the first Dexter had emigrated from Ireland almost a century before. With the marriage of Nathan and Esther Dexter, the family line would remain unbroken. Nine months and two weeks after their wedding, they produced a son, Nathan, followed two years later by a second son, Timothy, and two years after that by a daughter named Esther.

Timothy Dexter’s birth was auspicious or so he always insisted. He was born on the morning of January 22, 1747, while a snowstorm raged outdoors. The constellations were so situated in the heavens on that day that young Dexter later became convinced he was “to be one grat man.” Nothing is known of his father’s occupation except that it brought little income. It is thought that young Dexter was exposed to a limited amount of schooling.

In May 1755, when he was eight years old, Timothy Dexter was sent to work on a farm in Maiden. This move not only lightened the burden on the impoverished Dexter family, but also gave the second-born adequate board and keep as well as instruction in a means of livelihood. Timothy Dexter remained a farm laborer for six and a half years. Then, aged fourteen, eager to acquire a trade that held more promise of profit, he left the farm forever and traveled to Charleston, South Carolina, to become an apprentice leather-dresser. In “Chalston,” he recalled, “I stayed Leven months at Dressin of skins for briches & glovs—then went to boston there stayed till I was free …”

In Boston, a bustling metropolis of 17,000 persons, Dexter resumed his apprenticeship. leather-dressing was a popular craft in those times, and much in demand, but the work was harsh and exhausting. For seven years Dexter toiled amid the stench of hides and tannin, sleeping and living in a cramped hovel and eating his employer’s leftover food, until at last his servitude was ended. His employer bestowed the traditional freedom-suit upon him, as a mark of his graduation and his maturity. The garment was, apparently, a splendid one, for Dexter always remembered it as made of “guinea Cloth” worth five shillings sterling a yard.

The moment Dexter was on his own, he disposed of the suit. He was ambitious, and he needed ready cash. He offered the suit to a Boston vendor, who disagreed with him sharply about its value. “I was angry,” admitted Dexter, but in the end he sold the suit for “Eight Dolors & 20 sents.” This modest sum, he was confident, would lay the foundation for his fortune.

His goal was the thriving community of Newburyport, Massachusetts. Only six years earlier Newburyport had become an incorporated town after 206 of its “water-side people” petitioned to be “set off from Newbury.” By 1769 its population was upwards of 2,300. The extensive shipbuilding activity in the one-square-mile seaport, encouraged by the British, provided employment for carpenters, blacksmiths, painters, and rope-makers. Warehouses were stuffed with local farm produce, cheaply made gold-plated beads, and rum, which would be exchanged for English calico, cutlery, and sugar. The general prosperity made retail shops in the community flourish. Individual fortunes were being amassed quickly, and the Yankee inhabitants were beginning to dwell in the splendor which they had so long admired in their English betters. Here, if any, was the place for a strong young enterprising leather-dresser. In the two weeks that elapsed between the time Dexter left his apprenticeship and the time he arrived in Newburyport, his confidence grew. “I had faith by reading A book,” he said. “I was to have this world’s goods and be Come grate and be Amonkest grat men in the East …”

The forty miles from Boston to Newburyport by way of Salem and Rowley took Dexter a day or two, on foot, “with A bondel in my hand” and what remained of eight dollars and twenty cents in his pocket.

Within a year after setting foot in Newburyport he had acquired property, a wife, a family, and a business, in the order named. Land records of the period indicate that by early 1770 he was dealing in Salem real estate, and, with a partner named Mulliken, had acquired mortgaged property in Chester. Where he obtained the capital for these transactions in so short a time, we do not know. He had little means. In referring to Dexter’s first Newburyport year, when he was but twenty-three, William C. Todd wrote: “I remember a few years ago an old gentleman told me that his father was associated with Dexter, and related anecdotes of him when poor, and living in an humble way as a leather dresser in one of the poor sections of town.”

Though Dexter possessed few assets beyond a trade and some mortgaged property, and though he yet displayed little business acumen, one person in the town saw a good prospect in him. This was the widow Frothingham. She had been the daughter of Deacon John Lord, of Exeter, New Hampshire, when she married a Newbury glazier named Benjamin Frothingham. In June 1769 the glazier, aged fifty-two, died. His departure, it might be noted, coincided closely with Dexter’s arrival in the community. Elizabeth Frothingham, aged thirty-one, was left in “good circumstances” with her house on the Merrimack River and her four children. In May 1770, after eleven months of widowhood, Mrs. Frothingham was wedded to Timothy Dexter, nine years her junior.

In acquiring a bride, Dexter also acquired a residence. He had a place for business at last. Immediately, he decorated the entrance to the house with a glove carved of wood and opened his leather-dressing shop in the basement. He produced gloves, breeches, and morocco leather, and he sold hides. Upstairs, the thrifty and industrious Mrs. Dexter took in mending and conducted a huckster’s store. However, all activity in the residence was not of a commercial nature. In 1772 the Dexters had a son named Samuel, and in 1776 a daughter named Nancy.

The shot fired at Lexington in April 1775 and heard round the world was heard by all but Timothy Dexter. When, through 1776, the Revolutionary War sparked and sputtered near and about him, Timothy Dexter was above the battle. Though the great homes of Newburyport were soon overfurnished with the loot won by hastily commissioned privateers who preyed upon British shipping, Timothy Dexter confined his ambitions and his labors to his basement shop. In April 1776 he was calmly advertising “Good Deer Sheep and Moose skins. Likewise Deer Sheep and Moose Skin Breeches, and a quantity of good Blubber.”

In that same year Dexter was elected to his first and last municipal post by popular plebiscite. He was made Informer of Deer. Though still a nonentity, he may have been elevated to the august seat because of the shortage of manpower. Possibly, too, the office may have been an expression of gratefulness by fellow patriots for modest donations he had made to the town’s welfare. Or, it could have been a joke perpetrated by many who already suspected that their leather-dresser had comic qualities. Certainly, there was an element of irony in electing a leather-dresser, whose livelihood was won by preserving deerskins, to the task of seeing that deers kept their skins.

The elective post that Dexter held for years made few demands on his energies and fortunately so. By the time Cornwallis had surrendered his sword to Washington at Yorktown, Dexter had saved “several thousand dollars” and was busily casting about for a speculation that might make him his fortune. He found it soon enough.