It is highly unlikely that Benjamin ever had the slightest intention of
catching the boat to Holland on Sunday 22 July 1787. In fact by then,
having secured the money he needed from Rivier, he was 40 miles to the
north of London, on the Cambridgeshire-Suffolk border and heading, by a
very circuitous route, for Edinburgh.
Constant’s stay in London had been a curious affair. He went to the theatre from time
to time it seems, lived reasonably well, and made a tentative approach to John Adams
(1739–1826), the United States Ambassador and future President about the possibility of
emigrating to America. But he was lonely, and bought various pets—a monkey and two
dogs—for company (Constant was always inordinately fond of animals). And when the
initial excitement of his fugue had worn off, he became fearful of his father’s anger. He
sought out a young English aristocrat, probably Henry Lascelles (1767–1841), known as
‘Beau Lascelles’, whom he had met in Lausanne but who did not remember him and
refused to lend him money to help him on his tour of the island. He also met quite by
chance John Mackay (1761–1841), one of his companions at the Speculative Society,
who was working in London and due shortly to leave for India. They talked together of
John Wilde, to whom Constant thereupon wrote, and from whom he received such a
warm reply that he decided to go and stay with him in Edinburgh. Then, also by chance it
would seem, he met Dr Richard Kentish (1761–1848), another Edinburgh acquaintance,
not a member of the Speculative Society but a former drinking companion, who now had
a successful practice in London and a house in Gower Street. An ambitious and rather
turbulent Yorkshireman, Kentish was on the point of leaving for Brighton with his wife
where he intended to pay court to members of fashionable society who were there for the
season. He invited Constant to accompany them. Constant declined, but two days later
thought better of it and joined Kentish and his wife in Brighton, expecting ‘all sorts of
pleasures’. But Kentish had misled him: he knew hardly anyone and spent most of his
time at a hospital or earning fees by looking after sick patients. After a week of boredom,
Constant returned to London, and a few days later, after deceiving his father’s banker, set
off on his journey north.
Writing to Isabelle de Charrière from ‘Chesterford’, that is Great Chesterford near
Cambridge, on 22 July 1787 Constant makes a very significant revelation: ‘I’m working
on a novel which I shall show you. I’ve written and corrected fifty octavo pages of it. I
shall dedicate it to you if I publish it.’^19 Clearly a novel of such length must have been
begun before Constant set out on his journey, in all probability in London or Brighton.
And he was obviously toying with the idea of publishing it, no doubt after Madame de
Charrière had first cast a critical eye over it. As he travelled he continued to work on the
book. And those solitary travels on horseback took him through Newmarket, King’s Lynn
and Wisbech to Wadenhoe in Northamptonshire, where he hoped to borrow money from
his father’s old friend, the Reverend Nathaniel Bridges (1750–1834), the deeply pious
Evangelical rector of Wadenhoe; then away to the north again, having found Bridges was
away, via Stamford, Kettering, Leicester, Derby, Buxton, Chorley, Kendal and Carlisle,
to arrive in Edinburgh at 6 o’clock on a Sunday evening, 12 August 1787, with only 9 or
10 shillings left in his pocket; back again, after a fortnight of carousing with his old
student friends and with 10 guineas borrowed from John Wilde, via Carlisle and the Lake
District, Lancaster, Bolton and Market Harborough, to Wadenhoe, where he enlisted the
Benjamin constant 98