This early Victorian portrait by John Robert Wildman (1788-1843) has long intrigued us... Not only for its technical assurance but for the weary character held within the sitter’s gaze. We do not know the gentleman’s true name, nor the exact details of his story, but his expression conveys such eloquence that it sparks one's imagination.
For the Victorians, fiction was a cultural force and helped to shape how people understood themselves and the world around them. Readers devoured stories with a kind of moral hunger, and writers crafted characters who felt so plausible that they seemed to step out of the page. It's in this spirit of playful invention that we offer the following vignette.
The gentleman you are about to meet, Mr Peregrine Latchford, Esq. is entirely fictional. He is a creation inspired by the character we sense in the portrait: a man of intellect, eccentricity, and contemplation. His name, his biography, and his peculiar habits are inventions designed to contextualise the portrait, much as a Victorian novelist might have done when encountering an expressive face in a crowd.
What follows is an homage: a Dickensian sketch that seeks to honour the richness of the era.
The Extraordinary Mr Peregrine Latchford, Esq.
A Dickensian character study inspired by the portrait by John Robert Wildman.
It was widely remarked, in those polite, half-whispered tones peculiar to drawing rooms of moderate refinement, that Mr Peregrine Latchford possessed a mind of such unusual construction that no two persons could agree upon the precise nature of its peculiarities. Some declared him a genius, others a harmless madman, and one particularly sour-tempered cousin maintained, with stubborn regularity, that he was “simply odd, and shouldn't be encouraged.”
But encourage him the world did, or, more truthfully, the world could not prevent him, for Mr Latchford’s intellect, once galloping, had the momentum of a well-fed dray horse at full tilt, and was seldom halted by anything so trivial as societal expectation.
In appearance, he cut a figure both solemn and electrical. His hair, which sprang from his head in pale, spirited tufts, gave him the perpetual look of a man recently struck by revelation (or possibly lightning).
His eyes were keen, astonishingly so, and carried that penetrating glaze one associates with gentlemen who observe everything and reveal nothing. They were the sort of eyes that might notice the tilt of a picture frame in a stranger’s house, or deduce the political persuasion of a man from the manner in which he buttered his toast.
Yet for all this intensity, his face bore a softness too: the introspective melancholy of one who gazes so frequently into the great machinery of the universe that ordinary earthly concerns, such as household accounts, neighbourly gossip, and the correct social temperature at which to inquire after someone’s rheumatism, strike him as decidedly trivial.
It was whispered among a certain circle of amateur philosophers that Mr Latchford had once attempted to calculate the precise weight of a sunbeam. Not the metaphorical weight, for metaphor was a thing he held in deep suspicion, but the literal, gravitational burden of light itself. The experiment required so many mirrors, lenses, and glass contraptions that his housekeeper refused to dust the study for a fortnight, declaring it “an arrangement best left untouched, lest the Almighty smite it.”
There was also the incident of the “Nocturnal Air-Weighing Apparatus,” which he assembled on his rooftop in the optimistic belief that night-time air possessed a different density from daytime air - a theory he claimed to have proven on the basis of standing in it. When a neighbour complained about the clattering machinery disturbing his sleep, Mr Latchford responded by calculating the neighbour’s likely hours of wakefulness using the man’s average footfall pattern on the pavement below.
His eccentricities were matched only by his curiosities. He collected curious rocks from quarries, intriguing insects from fields, and unlikely rumours from gentlemen’s clubs. He maintained a ledger of “Unusual Occurrences Observed Between Breakfast and Luncheon,” including such entries as:
- A sparrow flew in a perfect semicircle.
- A pot-boy whistled in F-sharp, remarkable dexterity!
- Cloud resembled an elderly aunt.
- Observed neighbour’s cat staring into the middle distance with suspicion - will investigate further.
And yet, despite this catalogue of odd preoccupations, there was nothing foolish about him. Indeed, his manner contained a quiet gravity - the kind that gathers in thoughtful men who spend their lives attempting to stitch patterns into the fabric of the cosmos. When he listened, he absorbed; when he spoke, he reasoned; when he walked, he strode as though marching toward an idea just beyond the horizon.
Wildman, when painting him, is said (in this entirely fictional account) to have struggled mightily. For whenever the artist requested stillness, Mr Latchford would erupt with a new hypothesis:
“The viscosity of air in warm climates!”
“The moral qualities of soot!”
“The possibility that time itself expands in the presence of boiled eggs!”
To which Wildman, whose patience was widely admired, responded with gentle exhalations, mild encouragement, and the inevitable request:
“Sir, if I might entreat you to lower your chin a fraction?”
But much as Wildman painted with oils, Mr Latchford painted with thoughts - great, swarming murals of ideas that no wall, nor page, nor ear could contain. And the portrait, with its solemn brow and inward-turning gaze, captures precisely that moment when a man, caught mid-contemplation, is wrestling with the universe.
So here he sits: Mr Peregrine Latchford, Esq. Gentleman. Philosopher. Observer of Oddities. A man who could calculate the weight of silence, argue with the moon, and spend an entire afternoon attempting to determine whether melancholy has a shape.
And though the world may never fully understand him, the portrait, seen through these eyes, becomes a quiet tribute to the peculiar majesty of a relentless wandering mind.