The Lost World of James Smithson

by Heather Ewing

  Following a tradition that had been in place since the sixteenth century, each newly arrived student was presented by his tutor to the Vice Chancellor to be matriculated. Smithson's tutor was Edward Dupré, a Fellow at Pembroke who went on to become Dean of the Isle of Jersey (and was so loathed for his reactionary politics during the Napoleonic Wars that his parishioners tried to leave and set up a new church).3 While Dupré and perhaps his mother looked on, Smithson—like all students sixteen and over—took the oath of supremacy and subscribed to the Thirty-Nine Articles, testifying his adherence to the Church of England. He then joined his name to the ancient rolls of the university.

  Smithson's entry, in the requisite Latin, encapsulates the problems of legacy and legitimacy that so dogged him. He signed his name "Jacobus Ludovicus Macie," and his college, "Col. Pern. [Pembroke College]," and provided the details of his age and where he had come from—"17, de Civit. Londin."—before supplying his status: "Arm. Fil." Arm. Fil. was short for Armigeri filius, son of an esquire. It was a label indicating gentle birth, signaling that the person so called was probably entitled to bear heraldic arms. Smithson, however, despite being the son of a duke was not entitled to a coat of arms, and it was extraordinarily audacious of him to register himself this way. No illegitimate son could make such a claim, and because arms could only be conveyed through the paternal line he could not gain any rights to heraldry through his mother, no matter how aristocratic his Hungerford ancestry.4

  It was expected, too, that each student would provide his father's name; the ledger entry before Smithson's, for example, read "Coll: Di. Jo. Bap. 4. Thomas Keck 17 Samuelis de Civitate London:—Gen: Fil:" [St. John's College, May 4, Thomas Keck, 17, son of Samuel, of London, Gentleman]. But Smithson may simply not have known how to address this particular question. What he did with this space was something that had not been done in nearly two decades. He left it empty. The blank next to Smithson's name was the only such void in the register during Smithson's entire tenure at Pembroke. One would have to go back all the way to 1764, close to the time of Smithson's birth, to find another student from his college missing a father. It was a glaring omission, and one that seems to have been known to Smithson's peers. Davies Giddy, who entered Pembroke nearly three years after Smithson—and whose position could not have been more opposite to Smithson's, as Giddy's father matriculated with him and moved into Giddy's rooms at Pembroke to finish his own degree at the same time as his son— recalled the blank in Smithson's entry vividly in his diary: "What is very curious his Father's name is omitted and he is merely stated to be a son of an Esquire."5 The blank never ceased to be a subject of fascination in regard to Smithson's biography. Sometime around 1837, well after Smithson's death and probably inspired by the initiation in Chancery Court of the United States' suit over the Smithson bequest, Giddy even made an extract of Smithson's college register entry at the behest of Lord Egremont, who was related to Smithson through their shared Seymour ancestry.6

  Life at Oxford served up a constant reinforcement of social hierarchy, a rigid stratification that mirrored society at large. It was an order predicated on wealth and intimately tied to ancestry. Two things underscored this state of affairs on a daily basis: costume and privileges. Oxford's inescapable ladder of sartorial prestige dictated a particular gown to each rank of student, and the top rung far outshone the ones below. From far down the cobbled length of Broad Street one could see the noblemen shimmering in their bright silk robes—in whatever color the student and his tutor selected: celestial blue, emerald green, a rich burgundy or claret. The gold tufts or tassels on their black velvet caps were just as easily spotted, giving rise to the term "tuft-hunters" to denote those toadies who sought to befriend the wealthiest students.7

  Smithson probably suffered acutely the knowledge that he was not destined to wear the sparkling colored silk gown and gold-tasseled cap that the other sons of dukes wore. Nor was he bound for Christ Church, Oxford's most aristocratic college, and where his father had attended. Instead, Smithson's home lay across the street from Christ Church's bravura Tom Tower, at Pembroke College. Tucked in the shadow of St. Aldate's Church, Pembroke was not a rich college. It nestled quietly into its narrow site abutting the old city wall. The neoclassical chapel, the college's newest addition, was fifty years old when Smithson arrived. The library was tucked under the eaves above the Hall, an improvement at least on its original location in a cramped tower room over the south aisle of St. Aldate's. Pembroke projected no bold statement, it laid no claim to prominence, and it suffered still from this lowly status in the 1830s, when John Keble referred to it as "the cellar and dusthole of the university."8

  Nevertheless, Smithson's gown, the elegant black silk gown and black-tufted velvet cap of the gentleman-commoner, marked him as a member of the elite just the same—on the rung below the nobles and enjoying many of the same privileges. Only the uppermost ranks enjoyed privileges such as special seats at Chapel and Table, and the liberty of free time and few responsibilities. At Pembroke in the 1780s there were no noblemen; Smithson as a gentleman-commoner, one of less than a dozen at Pembroke, sat freewheeling at the top of the pile, above commoners, scholars, and exhibitioners, battelers and servitors. Their easy access to large allowances enabled them to devote their days to parties, drinking, and games, and they whiled away their hours in the little pagoda-like summerhouse in the college's walled gardens. Gambling was common, a habit Smithson seems to have picked up early and pursued with gusto his entire life. Outside Oxford's walls these wealthy young men enjoyed the manly pursuits of hunting, shooting, and fishing. They were a famously bad influence on the many commoners, away from home for first time, whose desire to follow suit led to duns entrapping them for debt and to severe punishments from tutors and masters. Gentlemen-commoners were given lavish suites of rooms, often three or four rooms in total. In Pembroke certainly, Smithson would have had the finest the college had to offer. And the records of Smithson's expenditures, lodged in Pembroke's unwieldy buttery or battels books, vault him consistently during his time in residence up among the top two or three spenders in the college—making it likely that his rooms were the locus of many gatherings and parties.9

  In May 1782 Smithson was Pembroke's only new student that month, and the third since January. Admissions were in decline across Oxford. A culture of decadence had settled on the university, and little was expected or required of these largely unsupervised, privileged students. Some professors had not taught a course in years, and many nobles and gentlemen-commoners scarcely attended lectures. "In no places of education are men more extravagant," declaimed Vicesimus Knox in 1781. "In none do they learn to drink sooner; in none do they more effectively shake off the firm sensibilities of shame and learn to glory in debauchery; in none do they learn more extravagantly to dissipate their fortunes."10 For those of wealth, life in eighteenth-century Oxford was one long, lazy stumble towards the role of gentleman in society.

  Doctor Johnson at Pembroke College, Oxford, 1784. A pencil sketch done for the Master's daughter by John Roberts, the artist who painted Smithson's Oxford portrait.

  Pembroke, though home to few elites and even fewer famous alumni, could however boast of one colossus. Samuel Johnson, who left Pembroke after only thirteen months, without settling his debts and without graduating, was now the glory of the entire university. The friendship he enjoyed with Pembroke's Master, William Adams, brought the celebrated doctor over the Pembroke threshold several times in those last years of his life, the very years that Smithson was most enmeshed in life at Oxford. At the Master's "blue-stocking Parties" for Johnson, the conversation bounded through a staggering litany of subjects, from Milton's sonnets to marriage to an argument over what happens to wine or cider when it is frozen. Much of the tenor of the exchange was due to the setting provided by Master William Adams.11

  Pembroke's Master Adams was an exception to the status quo at the university: a well-respected divine who was nevertheless immersed in nontraditional a
lliances. He was a frequent correspondent with the likes of the radical Dissenting minister Richard Price, whose prominent defense of the American rebels was attracting widespread notoriety in England. In Price's eyes the American "revolution in favour of universal liberty" opened up "a new aera in the history of mankind," and he told Adams, "No people ever enjoy'd a better opportunity for establishing a plan favourable to an amendment in human affairs."12 Pembroke under Master Adams was a place of intense philosophical debate, and students must have closely followed events across the Adantic. Had Adams lived into the fraught years of the French Revolution, he would probably have come to grief in Tory Oxford. Instead, in the early 1780s, it appeared only that he had finally breathed some life into Pembroke after the interminable rule of his predecessor John Ratcliffe.

  Significantly, Adams was known to be "considerably deep" in that most avant-garde of fields, chemistry.13 Pembroke under Adams gathered beneath its roofs a remarkable stable of young men who, quite exceptional to the general rule in eighteenth-century Oxford, went on to dedicate their lives to an Enlightenment ideal of public science. Smithson, masquerading confidently through an elite social world that he felt remained just beyond his grasp, had found an unlikely home, the closest thing the eighteenth century had to a meritocracy—the flourishing under ground realm of chemistry.

  In the matter of the sciences, as in so much else, the university in the eighteenth century had sunk into a gouty complacency. Oxford's era as a midwife of the scientific revolution was long since past. Well over a century had elapsed since members of the "Invisible Club," the precursor to the Royal Society, had congregated at the coffeehouses of Oxford, or since Robert Boyle haunted rooms over the city's apothecary shops, assisted in his experimental work at the air pump by the brilliant Robert Hooke. In the intervening decades the Museum's chemical laboratory, the first purpose-built laboratory in all of England and hailed at its inception in 1684 as "perchance one of the most beautiful and useful in the world," had fallen into disrepair. Outdated and filthy, it sat ignored, its rear yard overflowing with bones, broken crucibles, retorts and other detritus.14 Medical studentships at Christ Church, the preeminent college for such study—and lone among the Oxford colleges in not losing numbers during the late eighteenth century—were vacant for much of the second half of the 1700s, and if not vacant then filled by a lawyer rather than a physician. The Church's stranglehold on matriculation kept the university in this stolid state. Oxford was impervious to the winds of change blowing from places on the Continent like Leiden, where experimental physics had been introduced to the curriculum as early as 1675—breezes that were welcomed up in Edinburgh and down in London. Edinburgh was hailed as "the Lyceum of Brittain," and its medical students came from all over Europe and America. Physicians who chose to train in London found a world of professional opportunities that Oxford simply could not offer. Cambridge, too, while suffering as well from the strictures of a Church-dominated curriculum, offered a much better education in medicine and mathematics than could be found at Oxford.15

  When Smithson arrived in the spring of 1782, however, there were distinct signs that the torpor was beginning to lift. The Radcliffe Observatory, under construction since 1772, brought a replica of the classical Tower of the Winds from ancient Greece to the skyline of Oxford. Equipped with the finest scientific instruments available, including two eight-foot mural quadrants, a transit telescope, and a twelve-foot zenith sector, it formed an important center for astronomical and meteorological observations. The astronomer Thomas Hornsby oversaw it, while also teaching experimental philosophy at the Muséum (the Old Ashmolean, today the Muséum of the History of Science). And a new Anatomy School had been endowed at Christ Church in the 1760s, where courses were offered in anatomy, physic or botany. Housed in a stately stone building in a back courtyard behind the college kitchens, the place was known informally as Skeleton's Corner, on account of the bodies that were quietly brought to the college's back entrance, used in dissection lectures, and then interred in a deep hole in the basement of the school.16

  In the matter of chemistry in particular, great stirrings were afoot. In 1781, the year before Smithson's arrival, Dr. Martin Wall, Oxford's first Reader in Chemistry and fresh from study in Edinburgh, had given his first course.17 In conjunction with his appointment the old chemical laboratory in the cool, vaulted basement of the Muséum was completely refurbished (its thick stone walls furnished budding chemists with "fresh crops of nitre every three or four months," according to one of Smithson's contemporaries).18 Oxford seemed cognizant that it was falling behind, especially as regarded its historic competition with Cambridge. The creation of a chemical professorship and the fixing up of the laboratory to accommodate it "to the purposes of a chemical school" went a long way in trying to redress the imbalance between the two rivals."19 It was another small step for scientific education in the wave that had been building since the creation of the Radcliffe Infirmary in 1770. It also coincided with the beginning of a general elevation in the status of chemistry as a discipline.

  For most of the century, chemistry had not been adjudged a subject of much standing. It was seen instead, along with anatomy, as a useful—but lowly—element in the preparation for the practice of medicine. It existed as a supporting or practical subject, buttressing the more theoretical discipline of natural philosophy, which typically encompassed the mathematical sciences of astronomy, mechanics, and optics. In an age before the term "scientist" was coined, the pursuit of knowledge of the natural world was called natural philosophy, and scientists termed natural philosophers. The scientific revolution of the seventeenth century had banished a medieval conception of the universe, ejecting man from his comfortable place at the center of it all. Newton, in his Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica and Opticks, had articulated a series of laws that made sense of this new world view and explained the forces and phenomena of nature both on earth and in the heavens. His work had given man a picture of the universe as a gigantic timepiece, a vast but rational mechanical world subject to universal laws. It also ushered in an entirely new way of thinking and established a practice of discovery rooted in experiment and empiricism. By the time of Isaac Newton's death in 1727, natural philosophy was viewed as the "handmaiden" of theology and had become an appropriate, and almost essential, gentlemanly pursuit.20

  Chemistry, on the other hand, was still shaking itself loose from its occult roots in alchemy and the search for the philosopher's stone, the elixir of eternal life. It was a science that required dirtying the hands—which hardly made it a subject for polite education. In these last decades of the eighteenth century, even as chemistry made tremendous advances, the general public continued in some ways to perceive the science as the work of wizards and diviners, men who worked furtively behind heavy stone walls making rank-smelling concoctions and risking dangerous explosions. As late as 1798 one of Smithson's society friends jokingly referred to him as "Rosicrucian Macie," and boasted that he wouldn't be surprised if Smithson "discovered a method to prepare the universal medicine to prolong Life & also the long wished for Art of making Gold, that summum bonum of all human desires & concerns."21

  There was in fact a major alchemical scandal in 1782, during Smithson's first year at Oxford, one that reverberated alarmingly in the university's tiny chemistry community. James Higginbotham Price, a respected and well-liked twenty-seven-year-old alumnus, announced that he had successfully converted mercury into gold and silver. His claim was confirmed by the King's assayer, and Price began to receive serious popular attention. He dedicated the paper publishing this discovery to Oxford's chemistry professor Martin Wall. Oxford some months earlier had awarded Price an honorary degree in physic, which gave the mistaken appearance that the university supported his work; the Royal Society, likewise, had recently elected him a Fellow. When the scientific establishment started clamoring for proof, however, the hoax began to unravel. Price finally welcomed a panel of Royal Society examiners to his house for a d
emonstration, where in front of them all he committed suicide, downing a glass of distilled laurel water. Back at Oxford Martin Wall and others scrambled to distance themselves from the sordid event, fearful of endangering their own reputations and the credibility of the science they were trying so valiantly to bring into prominence.22

  From the vantage point of the early twenty-first century, Smithson inhabited a remote and murky chemical universe, a world in which oxygen was understood as dephlogisticated air and heat was perceived as an "imponderable" or weightless fluid. Chemical processes were evident all around them—a nail rusting, copper flashing turning green, grapes fermenting—but the principles underlying these changes were still unknown. Scientists were only just beginning to relinquish an understanding of matter based on the ancient Aristotelian elements of earth, air, fire, and water. They organized the knowledge they had of chemical reactions in affinity tables; each column charted in descending order a substance's attraction for another. In these diagrams minerals, metals and other substances were represented by their old alchemical signs—a crescent moon for silver, the female sign for copper, an inverted triangle for water. Chemistry, as Joseph Black told his students in Edinburgh, was not yet a science. "We are very far from the knowledge of first principles."23