The Lost World of James Smithson

by Heather Ewing

  This book has come about through another kind of exhumation—an attempt to uncover Smithson's story, buried in the libraries and archives of Europe, Britain, and the United States. Biography aims to capture the essence of a life, painting a portrait with selective details, the turns of phrases, memorable routines, and vivid incidents. Smithson's forensic report conjured up a compelling physical picture: a relatively vigorous man in his sixties, about five foot seven inches in height, with a wide brow, wiry, strong hands, and a long torso, a man who smoked a pipe and was suffering from five abscessed teeth at the time of his death. But his humanity, his voice and his thoughts remained as inaccessible as if the tomb had never been opened. The lack of love letters and minimal evidence of friendships have led to conclusions that such intimacies must not have existed. In the absence of proof to the contrary, Smithson has been labeled an eccentric recluse; his science has been dismissed as dabbling and dilettantish, and the motivation behind his extraordinary bequest deemed ultimately unknowable. He lies now virtually forgotten, while his name, in the form of the Smithsonian, has become one of the most famous in the world. It seems a very long distance from the eighteenth-century English gentleman-scientist to the place known affectionately as the Nation's Attic, where America's iconic heritage is kept: the Star-Spangled Banner, the Spirit of St. Louis, Abraham Lincoln's top hat, and Dorothy's ruby slippers. I wondered if it might be possible to recover something of that lost world.

  I set out to try to map Smithson's social and scientific networks, his web of cousins and colleagues, hoping to flesh out his life through the papers and diaries of others. I combed the registers of students at Oxford and the lists of guests at the Royal Society, and hunted through probate records and passport controls, amassing a cast of characters. I mined the faint, penciled marginalia in Smithson's books for indications of his taste and temperament, and tried to chart some of his travels through the people and places mentioned in his mineral catalogue notes. His bank records, still at Hoare's on Fleet Street—where the bayonets and muskets used to defend the bank during the Gordon Riots of 1780 line the entrance hall—offered a wealth of data and aided in constructing a chronology of his life. I was helped from the outset by Hugh Torrens, author of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography entry on Smithson, who from his perch in the Potteries in Staffordshire—the heart of England's eighteenth-century industrial economy—has done remarkable work unearthing the forgotten figures of geology's early days, including Smithson and many of his friends.

  The project was further complicated by the fact that Smithson had been known as James Louis Macie until he was thirty-five. Macie, his mother's name, is unusual, and in the haphazard world of eighteenth-century spelling it had near endless permutations, often becoming Massey, Massie, Macey, or even, in the hands of one French geologist-associate of Smithson's, the aristocratic de Mecies. (I have for the most part referred to Smithson in the book as Smithson not Macie.)

  I followed hundreds of leads, from the astronomical observatory in Krakow to the University of Abo in Finland; I queried all the regional academies of science in France and blanketed the Isle of Jersey in search of the family papers of Smithson's Oxford tutor. Most of these letters yielded nothing. For a long time it seemed likely that Smithson would remain as inscrutable as ever, that my efforts would join those in the Smithsonian Archives, a catalogue of one more fruitless search. Slowly, however, letters from Smithson did appear, and as my knowledge of his network grew, mentions of Smithson emerged in the letters and diaries of his friends and acquaintances. I began to be able to target where he had been, and to guess whom he might have called on. I found him acting as a kind of scientific cicerone for Lord Bristol, the profligate Earl-Bishop, in Italy around the time of the great Siena meteorite fall of 1794, and complaining of his health at a party in Paris with the German explorer Alexander von Humboldt after the restoration of the Bourbons in 1814. In the royal archives of Copenhagen I pored through boxes of antique gothic script to find the records relating to Smithson's arrest as a prisoner of war in 1807. And, in Paris during the hallucinatory heatwave of August 2003, I found my doppelganger of two hundred years ago, someone who trailed Smithson through the inns of the Rhine in 1805—a hapless French policeman, as it turned out, convinced Smithson was a "vagabonde d'intrigues." His dossier was filled with wild theories about Smithson's nefarious exploits, and included Smithson's passport, which the policeman had pinched from his hotel room.

  As these finds piled up in my files and notebooks, a new portrait began to emerge. The protean blur of Smithson came into better focus, and a man of infectious exuberance and ambition replaced the retiring loner. "How can a man of his ardour ever be idle?" one friend wondered. "Macie is my delight!" crowed another. "His brain like my own is fruitful in whimsies."16 His intensity brought with it new questions, and thoughts of the lacunae and silences that must be negotiated in the telling of lives. Smithson never married, and he had no children. Keepsake lockets of hair were found among his belongings after his death, and he gave two portraits of himself to one woman, but details of his intimate life remained elusive.

  The discovery of a series of extraordinary lawsuits at the Public Record Office in Kew concerning Smithson's mother, Elizabeth Macie, shed light on the emotional forces that shaped his outlook, while giving some vivid, alarming color to the once blank expanse of his childhood. The documents were nearly the size of billboards, blackened by age and embossed with crumbling red wax seals; unfurled, they revealed yards of florid legal language recounting Elizabeth Macie's dogged pursuit of ancestral properties as well as the lurid saga of her rash second marriage to a lothario and fortune hunter named John Marshe Dickinson. She sued an extraordinary number of people in addition to this husband: her sister, her architect, multiple cousins, and even an illiterate farm tenant. Smithson's mother had long been completely obscure. "Nothing has been learned of her history," the Smithsonian's nineteenth-century biography of Smithson read. From the details in these suits she emerged all of a sudden as haughty and tempestuous, a domineering, emotionally erratic presence for her fatherless son.17

  This vantage on the larger-than-life personality of Smithson's mother illuminated another facet of Smithson's story, too. It has often been argued that Smithson's fortune came from his mother. But these lawsuits exposed Elizabeth Macie's manic profligacy and made clear that she left her son much less than she might have. Her estate at probate was valued at less than £10,000; the gift that established the Smithsonian totaled more than ten times that. It is not possible to gain a complete picture of Smithson's finances from the official bank records that remain. In the volatile financial climate of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when Britain was almost constantly at war, gentlemen did not confine their holdings to one place. Smithson's records at Hoare's Bank, and his subsequent account at Drummonds, reflect probably only a small portion of his dealings, but they do show a man with an avid interest in his portfolio. Smithson, it seems, made his own fortune; he took a small inheritance from his mother and, through a lifetime of shrewd management and investment, turned it into the largesse that was bequeathed to the United States.

  I studied old maps and paintings as I traveled in Smithson's footsteps, walking the streets, visiting the museums and the mineral collections, looking as I might through his eyes. The hotel where he stayed in Paris during the Revolution was there in the shadow of the Abbey of St. Germain, its tall shuttered windows overlooking the same cobbled streets, his friend Bertrand Pelletier's pharmacy still open a few doors down. The marshy fenlands of Schleswig-Holstein in a cold late September still carried the damp salty chill that so haunted him when he was a prisoner of war. At the British Library I called up one of Smithson's publications, only to discover it had been inscribed by him to Sir Joseph Banks. The Muséum d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris contained four of his donations, single crystals mounted like obelisks on small ebonized slabs of wood, each enclosed in a miniature gilt-edged bell jar. In the sunlit
studio of a chemist in western Massachusetts I took an antique blowpipe to my lips and discovered the thrill of transforming a simple candle flame into a blue jet worthy of a blowtorch, fierce enough to melt copper (at 2000 degrees F). These experiences brought Smithson's world a little closer, made it seem not so irretrievably mysterious.

  In many ways it is Smithson's science that has contributed to the remoteness. His twenty-seven published papers, had he been a poet or a novelist, might have represented a means to interpret his story after the loss of his diaries and correspondence. But Smithson's writings on the subject to which he dedicated his life were for the most part written in an antique language now indecipherable but to a few specialists. In describing his calamine experiments, for example, he talked of a specimen which when "urged with the blue flame … became extremely friable … and entirely exhaled," and of others "being digested over a spirit-lamp with diluted vitriolic acid," and of observing at another moment "the apparent sublimation of the common flowers of zinc at the instant of their production."18 His papers hardly convey the excitement that drove his investigations. His science nevertheless proved the crucial key to his story.

  Chemistry was the cutting-edge field of Smithson's era, one that lay at the heart of the making of modern commercial society. Smithson's formative years unfolded in the midst of unprecedented discovery, much of it directly connected to chemical advances. He was eighteen when man broke the bounds of gravity and the Montgolfier brothers' balloon floated up over the heads of royalty, amazing thousands of spectators in the gardens of the Tuileries. Within the year Smithson was in a coach in the company of two aeronaut experts—Paolo Andreani, the first Italian balloonist, and the Frenchman Faujas de St. Fond, who penned the first book about the Montgolfiers—rumbling up to Scotland, on an expedition of geological discovery. In Edinburgh, he met and impressed James Hutton, who was on the verge of debuting his pioneering "theory of the earth," which would upend the biblical timeline. William Herschel was off discovering Uranus and distant galaxies with a telescope he built himself; Henry Cavendish, having identified myriad new gases within what was once known as the Aristotelian element of Air, was now leading the way to the discovery that Water was not an element either; and soon Humphry Davy's work exploring galvanism was to raise the idea that even the inanimate might be brought back to life. Smithson's contemporaries were extending the boundaries of the known world, plumbing the earth, reaching for the heavens, expanding time, even entering the realm of the invisible.

  These developments brought with them an unshakeable optimism for modernity. "The present, beyond all former times," as one of Smithson's friends said, "teem[s] with wonders."19 They also brought a belief that it was scientists who would dominate the hierarchy of the future. Many of the men leading the charge for modernity stood on the margins of society; in England they were the chemists and industrialists of the provinces, Protestant Dissenters for the most part, excluded from the Anglican and aristocratic Establishments. Science for them became the means of overthrowing the system as it existed, of replacing a corrupt order based on superstition and inherited privilege with one that rewarded talent and merit—a society that would bring prosperity and happiness to the many rather than the few. Smithson's friends formed a virtual who's who of European science between the 1780s and the 1820s. Even as the world they inhabited was convulsed by war, they proclaimed themselves citizens of the globe and pledged allegiance first of all to truth and reason. Their highest aspiration was to be a benefactor of all mankind.

  Where a majority of the English reacted with fear and repression to the political and social upheavals of the late eighteenth century, Smithson was part of a small elite who looked at the factories sprouting up across England's green hills and saw not dark satanic mills, but rather the glow of industry and improvement. In the French Revolution, they found not a threat to Britain's security, but triumphant confirmation that even the most hierarchical of societies could be transformed. And in America's unprecedented system of government, founded upon the rights of man, where each person was to be valued for his contribution rather than his pedigree, they saw the future—the most promising foundation for the pursuit of knowledge and the advancement of society. America's cause, as Tom Paine had famously said, was "the cause of all mankind." In this light, Smithson's bequest of an "establishment for the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men," entrusted to the United States for its execution, shines from a new perspective.

  The mapping of Smithson's world reveals the crucible that he passed through, and how profoundly affected he was by the culture of improvement in the late eighteenth century. Although it was 1846 before Congress passed the Act establishing the Smithsonian Institution, the ideals that gave rise to Smithson's gift were fashioned more than half a century earlier. It begins to seem as if inside Smithson the Smithsonian existed all along—a seed, germinating.

  ONE

  Descended from Kings

  Families, like Empires, have their origin, decline, and fall, and such has been the fate of the Hungerfords.

  —Sir Richard Colt Hoare, Hungerfordiana, 1823

  IN MAY 1800, when his mother died, James Louis Macie was about thirty-five years old, a rising young scientist living the life of a fashionable London bachelor. Elizabeth Hungerford Keate Macie had been a dominating presence in her son's life, an intoxicatingly fiery woman—twice married, twice widowed, twice a single mother, and mistress to a duke. She had spent much of her turbulent life fighting for her right to ancestral landed estates in the west of England—lands with a feudal pedigree, fit to provide status and income for her brilliant firstborn. And yet he did not now inherit them from her. She had passed the last decade of her life practically hemorrhaging money. Battling various lawsuits, she had sold the family estate and poured money instead into elaborate building works at her house outside Bath, which was destined to pass out of the family at the time of her death.1

  James Louis Macie was left prostrate by her death, overwhelmed by the chaos of her affairs and the parlous state of his inheritance. Even a year later he was still declining dinner invitations, telling a friend he was "considerably unwell, unsettled, and harried with business."2 In the midst of this turmoil, however, there was one matter he tended to very promptly. Within a month of his mother's burial, he adopted a new name. The change was noted first in the ledgers of his account at Hoare's Bank, in London, in June 1800, and it was made official by Act of Parliament in February 1801.3 For thirty-five years, more than half his life as it turned out, he had been known as Macie, the name of his mother's first husband. Now he wanted to be known as James Smithson, the name of his real father. He wanted the world to know that he was a son, albeit the illegitimate son, of Hugh Smithson, the late first Duke of Northumberland, one of the most powerful and charismatic figures of Georgian England.

  It is a testament to how desperately Smithson hungered for this public identification with his father that he so readily abandoned the name Macie. As Macie he had already made a name for himself. In 1787 he had become the youngest member of the Royal Society, England's oldest and most prestigious scientific society. A few years later the society's journal had published his first paper, which had been extremely well received. He had been part of a pioneering expedition to explore the volcanic origins of Scotland when still in his teens; he had been to Paris to meet the famous Antoine Lavoisier in the months after the publication of Lavoisier's revolutionary chemical theory; and he had gained the friendship and admiration of many of the age's most prominent scientists, including even the reclusive Henry Cavendish.

  In 1800 he had only recently returned to London after a long tour on the Continent. He bore all the airs of a Romantic, his handsome youthful face framed by a cascade of brown curls, his letters sealed with an image of Eros and Psyche embracing.4 His Grand Tour, though, had been unlike most young English gentlemen's coming-of-age travels, focused as it was on meeting the great men of science in the capitals of Europe, and it had become excepti
onal for other reasons as well. He had enjoyed a front-row seat to the revolution that brought down the French monarchy and catapulted the Continent into war. He had dodged the French army in Switzerland, Italy, and Germany and was returning with tales of adventure at a time when few English had set foot on the Continent since Britain's entry into the war in 1793. He set up house on Clarges Street off Piccadilly, with laboratory and library, purchasing elegant mahogany furniture and extensive china services for entertaining.5 Eager as he was to resume his life among the scientific elite of London—and he had just become a founding proprietor of the new Royal Institution—the tangled web of his mother's affairs consumed him entirely.