The Lost World of James Smithson
Page 11
Blagden, ever the wag, in writing to Sir Joseph Banks felt it necessary to add that other bit of intelligence he had been able to glean about this young explorer: "Mr. Massey is said to be a natural son of the Duke of Northumberlands [sic]: he is otherwise called Macey." The specter of Smithson's illegitimacy hovered over him, even as he made his debut among the scientific community he hoped to call home for the rest of his life.
FOUR
London: Science Like Fire, 1784-1788
Science like fire is put in motion by collision. Where a number of such men have frequent opportunities of meeting and conversing together, thought begets thought, and every hint is turned to advantage. A spirit of inquiry glows in every breast: each new discovery relative to the natural, moral, or intellectual world, leads to a farther investigation, and each man pants to distinguish himself in the interesting pursuit.
—Account of the Literary and Philosophical Society
of Manchester, quoted in the 1783 Oxford
chemistry syllabus
BACK IN LONDON fresh from his own successful journey to the wilds of Scotland, Smithson returned to a city abuzz with one of the biggest travel adventures of the time. The captain of the Antelope, an East India Company packet that had been wrecked off the shores of the Palau Islands (in modern-day Micronesia), had recently arrived in town. Returned with the captain was the beguiling young Prince Lee Boo, the son of the chief who had welcomed the shipwrecked sailors.
Lee Boo was about nineteen or twenty, the same age as Smithson, and with "a countenance so strongly marked with sensibility and good-humour, that it instantly prejudiced every one in his favour."1 London in 1784 was primed already for his arrival, still savoring a South Seas craze sparked by Captain Cook's journeys and the visit to the capital a decade earlier of the exotic Tahitian Omai. Lee Boo became London's own primitive, a Rousseau-esque creature set down amongst them, and through his reactions the bon ton delighted in their sophisticated society. Prints circulated, showing Lee Boo discovering himself in the mirror for the first time—arms (dressed in the latest English fashion) thrown up, eyes wide with astonishment. "In England there is a house for everything," he exclaimed, amazed at carriage transportation ("a little house, which was run away with by horses") and his four-poster curtained bed (a house for sleeping).
The English were captivated by the Prince's hunger for self-improvement, so in keeping with the spirit of the age, but it was his death that made his story an enduring one. Two days after Christmas, after five months in the capital, Lee Boo succumbed to smallpox. As befit the public's image of a noble savage, he passed without a groan, his mind clear to the end, far from his island home and tragically separated even from his beloved English father-figure, the captain of the Antelope, who could not attend Lee Boo's bedside because he had not been inoculated against the disease. Lee Boo's death became a milestone in the romantic imagination of Smithson's generation. Samuel Taylor Coleridge recalled weeping copiously at the death, a grief he memorialized later in one of his poems: "My soul amid the pensive twilight gloom, Mourn'd with the breeze, O LEE BOO! o'er thy tomb."2
The poignant story of Prince Lee Boo left its imprint on Smithson's contemporaries, even those like Coleridge who never met him, thanks to Smithson's cousin, the poet and man about town George Keate. Keate had been introduced to the young Prince within a week of his arrival in London. They became good friends and after Lee Boo's death it fell to Keate, as one acquaintance implored him, "not to let the memory of so much virtue pass unrecorded." Keate's An Account of the Pelew Islands (1787), which was based on Captain Wilson's diaries and log books and included a chapter on Lee Boo in London, became an instant best-seller. It ran through three editions within a year and was translated into French, German, and Spanish. A bowdlerized text, called The Interesting and Affecting History of Prince Lee Boo, became a standard primer for English schoolboys for much of the first half of the nineteenth century. After Cook's Voyages, Keate's An Account of the Pelew Islands was probably the most popular narrative of the Pacific in late eighteenth-century England, and it was more appealing in some ways than Cook's Voyages because of its optimistic, positive spin. Whereas Cook met his end amongst natives who were portrayed as cannibalistic savages, Keate's tract stressed the benevolence of the primitive—a reassuring message to the ever-exploring English.3
Smithson's great-uncle was something of a mini-celebrity in literary London, a wealthy, gregarious dabbler in the arts. During a sojourn in Switzerland he had become friends with Voltaire, and he had remained the philosopher's closest English correspondent. Angelica Kauffmann was another of his many artistic friends. Fanny Burney, however, found him pompous and his "powers of conversation … not of a shining cast." Keate paraded his polish in the landscapes he frequently exhibited at the Royal Academy, in his memberships to numerous clubs and societies, and in his own museum—an old-style cabinet of curiosities, with shells, coins, medals, and minerals displayed in ormolu-encrusted mahogany cases. Keate's museum was housed in a special octagonal room decorated in the latest Etruscan style, designed by Robert Adam. (Not long after the museum was built the Etruscan ceiling collapsed and Keate sued Adam, unsuccessfully—a drama he played up in a poem called "The Distress'd Poet.")4
Keate shared his enthusiasms with Smithson, grandly bestowing books and minerals on his young relative.5 The two had a number of interests in common. Like Smithson, Keate rarely neglected an opportunity to promote his illustrious Hungerford ancestry; he did not fail, for example, in the introduction to his poem "Netley Abbey, an Elegy" of 1764, to refer to his descent from Lady Jane Grey, Queen of England for nine days. On a personal level these two probably shared another profound connection. Keate, too, was haunted by the taint of illegitimacy. His father had married Rachel Kowalski, the daughter of Count Christian Kowalski, but questions swirled around Keate's parentage. One lampoon of Keate's work accused him of having been "Born of a spanking Polish Dam / Begot by God knows who—."6
And yet, despite this close family relationship, Keate in the end appears to have played no significant role in shepherding Smithson's entry into London circles. Although this lack of mentoring seems odd, there is an explanation. Smithson was not trying to become Keate. Even at the age of nineteen, he had no aspirations to a life as a gadfly or dilettante. He was not interested in pursuing knowledge solely in the tradition of the gentleman amateur.7 His expedition to Staffa had taught him much about how to carry himself as an international man of science. He had begun already to cultivate prestigious contacts; he was keeping notebooks of careful observations; and he was reporting his findings, even if it was so far only in the casual form of a letter to his well-placed friend Charles Greville. Smithson was already seriously committed to a life in science, and he was, above all, ambitious.
In early 1786, for example, in the months before Smithson's graduation from Pembroke, George Keate put Smithson's Pembroke classmate Thomas Sandford forward for membership in the Royal Society. Fellowship of the Royal Society (F.R.S.) was Smithson's primary goal upon leaving university, as it was for most of his closest friends. "I never felt so interested about the attainment of an object in the whole course of my life as I did about being a Fellow of the Royal Society," Smithson's Pembroke friend Davies Giddy confided to his diary. After a scare on a boating trip, he wrote, "the wish came strongly to my mind that if it was my Fate to be drowned, the event might be postponed till after my election at the Royal Society, so that I might die F.R.S."8
Thomas Sandford, like Smithson, also had a London address, though he stayed up at Oxford for longer, taking his MA only in 1789. He was arguably better connected than Smithson. Among those others who seconded his nomination to the Royal Society were Horace Walpole and Charles Burney, father of Fanny and author of a vaunted multi-volume history of music. These men, like Keate, were not considered of the scientific faction; they represented the group the Royal Society was obliged to court, those whose patronage and funds helped keep the organization afloat. So
Sandford was a candidate of the "non-useful" class, one of those who would most likely not be making material contributions to knowledge. Heir to the Sandford seat in Shropshire, Sandford was ordained like his father, and religion was to be his principal occupation, though he was "a Gentleman distinguished for his knowledge in many branches of Science and particularly in Natural History" according to his membership certificate. This tagline was common language on applications for the wellborn; a version of it can be found, for example, on the 1736 certificate of Smithson's father, back when he was the baronet Sir Hugh Smithson, "a Gentleman very well versed in all polite Literature, and skill'd in Natural knowledge."9 On April 6, 1786, Sandford was balloted for and rejected.10
The devastating rejection, for it was never less than that, must have made an immense impression on Smithson. The portentous presence of five black balls in the ballot box—the origin of the word blackballing—was a stain on a man's mind, and on his reputation. It happened rarely, making the event that much more shocking when it did occur. Smithson's swashbuckling Staffa companion Count Andreani described the infrequency of rejection in his diary of his 1784 visit to London, unaware that his own attempt to become F.R.S. in 1793 would end in blackballing on account of his republican sympathies.11 Sandford's path no doubt stood as an example to Smithson; it was the way not to go. Smithson was already in 1786 establishing his own route to the summit of scientific London, but if his cousin George Keate stepped forward and offered to help, perhaps it was this episode that clinched a refusal.
In the weeks leading up to Sandford's blackballing, Smithson made two very significant strides regarding his own entry into the sacrosanct heart of scientific society in London. He was proposed, and elected, for membership in the Coffee House Philosophical Society, a coveted conversation group composed of chemists, medical practitioners, instrument makers, and political radicals, spearheaded by the Irish chemist and Royal Society member Richard Kirwan. And he was invited by Henry Cavendish, esteemed as the Newton of his age, to be Cavendish's dinner guest at the Royal Society Club. Both of these accomplishments indicated that Smithson was very close to achieving that ultimate goal, membership in the Royal Society. But they also signaled his sense of himself as a serious scientist. Smithson had already distinguished himself from the gentleman amateurs who crowded his Oxford days; he had placed himself among those who were dedicating their lives to advancing the state of natural knowledge. It was the culmination of a campaign launched back in the summer of 1784, when Smithson had hitched himself onto Faujas de St. Fond's tour.
When Smithson returned from Scotland, two years remained of his education at Oxford. He had already pledged himself to the new fields of chemistry and mineralogy, though, and Oxford was not remotely a place at the cutting edge of scientific inquiry. There was little reason to stay, and as a gentleman-commoner he had few obligations to fulfill. Conveniently, his tutor—if Edward Dupré ever had any hold over his pupil to begin with—had been called away from Oxford to a living. While Smithson had been in Scotland, the Society for Promoting Natural History had elected him a member, his first entry into the scientific world of London. London was now his stage.
London in the 1780s was a vast, sprawling metropolis—the largest city in Europe. Its population was rapidly approaching one million, and one in every ten Englishmen lived in the capital. To accommodate this burgeoning society, the city was busily building. Capacious new squares were appearing ever westward, and rows of Georgian terraces marched northwards across the expanse of fields. Much of England was dedicated to supplying the hungry maw of the capital. Beyond London Bridge the Thames, the city's biggest commercial boulevard, flowed hardly visible under a thicket of masts and skiffs and coal barges carrying in the latest wares and fuel. But equally much of that consumed by Londoners was produced locally. Warehouses, factories, timber yards and wharves lined the riverbanks, and the chimneys of glass manufactories filled the sky. Brewers and distilleries blanketed the east end, churning out millions of barrels of ale and porter. Huguenot silk-weavers clustered in Spitalfields just outside the walls on the eastern end of town, their tall, narrow brick houses clattering with the sound of the looms in the clerestoried eaves. In the alleys around St. Paul's, printers, bookbinders, and engravers rubbed elbows with clockmakers and instrument makers. Two enormous shopping streets snaked across the city east to west, offering a theatre of plenty behind glass-fronted storefronts. London by the 1780s was its own revolution in living—a new urban existence, driven not by court or aristocratic tradition but rather by the marketplace.12
With its window displays, pleasure gardens, and street hawkers, London was a carnival of consumption. Across the city there was gambling and prostitution, bear-baiting, cock-fights, sideshows, and circuses. Spas like Sadler's Wells in Islington and Hockley-in-the Hole in Clerkenwell offered sybaritic respite for those unable to venture out to Bath or Tunbridge Wells. Theatres at Covent Garden and Drury Lane, with their boxes close up to the stage, featured intimate encounters with the greatest celebrity actors of the age. Exhibitions at the Royal Academy showcased the latest art in a highly social environment, in the great sky-lit room atop the new Somerset House. The print publisher John Boydell opened his Shakespeare Gallery on Pall Mall in 1789. And in exhibition rooms over the Exeter Change on the Strand, the artist Philippe de Loutherburg introduced the public to the concept of moving pictures with his Eidophusikon; spectators watched a series of scenes—dawn over London as seen from Greenwich, an Italian sunset near Naples, Niagara Falls in America, a shipwreck, Pandemonium from Milton—made more dramatic with colored lighting and a full complement of sound effects. The scientific lecturer Adam Walker built an enormous orrery, a mechanical model of the planetary system; visitors entered the darkened interior of what he called his Eidouranion to watch the circling of luminous celestial orbs and learn about the elegant workings of the universe. The Lyceum showcased Diller's Philosophical Fireworks, a monstrous apparatus of whirling circles sprouting hundreds of multi-colored flames. The quack doctor James Graham's Temple of Health and Hymen capitalized on the public's newfound curiosity for electrical experiments and their age-old interest in sex. Visitors willing to pay an exorbitant fee could allegedly cure their infertility with a night in the massive "Celestial Bed," in silk sheets perfumed "in oriental manner" atop mattresses stuffed with the "most springy hair, produced at vast expense from the tails of English stallions." The bed's domed canopy, supported by forty pillars of colored glass, contained a series of artificial lodestones or magnets, providing the participants with "the exhilarating force of electrical fire."13
Smithson was an avid consumer of these spectacles all his life. His library contained a booklet about two temples, each supported by fifteen jewel-encrusted elephants, made for the Emperor of China, which were put on display at Weeks' Mechanical Muséum on Tichborne Street, Haymarket. He also owned the catalogue of an exhibit on ancient and modern Mexico, which the impresario and explorer William Bullock held at the fantastical Egyptian Hall in 1825. And he owned "Murder Most Foul," a pamphlet about the 1799 trial of Charles and Hannah Squire for the murder of their apprentice—though whether Smithson went to join the prurient crowds at Charles Squire's execution or whether he had some other more sober interest in this case, which documented a long history of cruelty and abuse against the apprentice child, is impossible to know.14
For someone like Smithson, so hungry for information, the city was a swirl of novel ideas and new acquaintances, of knowledge shared in convivial, social environs. Coffeehouses and newspapers brought new voices to the fore, giving rise to greater discussion and challenges to the status quo. Thousands of books were being published and new magazines established; circulating libraries and book clubs spread publications even further. New societies formed weekly to cater to every political whim or diverting hobby. There were clubs for gambling and drinking, but there were also clubs for lovers of theatre, literature, politics, wine tasting, natural history, and antiquities. Members came
together to share their observations, report on recent travel, debate a philosophical question, and read the latest pamphlets. All over town men held conversazioni in their homes or their favorite coffeehouses.
Much of the discussion in the urban entrepot of the 1780s was tinged with a spirit of radicalism. Anticipating the centenary of the Glorious Revolution of 1688, the bloodless revolution that had marked the end of the Stuart reign, people began agitating for parliamentary reform. Questions of liberty and rights, brought on by the American War of Independence, reverberated as well in discussions of the new Irish legislative independence or the proposed repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts, which would have granted rights to Catholics and Dissenters. The world of nonconformism so absent from Oxford was thriving in London. Its most prominent advocates, such as Joseph Priestley and Richard Price, argued from their pulpits and in pamphlets for religious and educational freedoms unfettered by government or church interference. Dissenting academies like Newcombe's Academy in Hackney—where George Coleridge, Samuel Taylor's brother and a classmate of Smithson's from Pembroke, had just started teaching—encouraged such independent thinking. Their extensive curricula, encompassing language, history, and geography, were particularly rich in the experimental sciences. This cosmopolitan city was engaged in that great Enlightenment enterprise, the development of a public culture.