The Lost World of James Smithson

by Heather Ewing

  Smithson made no mention of the disturbances. He was interested more in Livorno's position near the mineralogical paradise of Elba. The spectacular specimens particular to the island of Elba represented an essential component of the cabinet Smithson was building of the crystallized produce of the earth. His trip to the Livornese lapidary was a wash, however; the man had nothing of worth. As Smithson explained to his friends in Florence, "I did not doubt that I should be able to furnish myself with specimens of all the bodies, of at least that part of Italy, which were interesting to me, but I found myself entirely disappointed in my expectations, for he had not any thing I wanted, or indeed any thing at all besides a few common shells."37

  Smithson's disappointment in Livorno reinforced his sense that his best hope for building a comprehensive cabinet lay not in seeking out dealers but rather in working closely with his peers, those fellow savants who were also keeping cabinets. He asked his friends to hold onto any duplicates that they might have of his desiderata, and offered to reciprocate by filling the blanks in their collections of English productions. "It is only by exchange and mutual assistance," he believed, "that naturallists [sic] can possibly ever succeed in assembling together a collection of subjects of their study, which nature has made so numerous, and disseminated in such various and distant parts of the world."38

  As he traveled along the edge of the Maremma towards Rome, on the main road south from Siena, Smithson passed through the Lagoni, a land of eerie and putrid vaporous hot springs much feared by the locals. He became friends with Paolo Mascagni, a Siena-based physician best known for his research into the lymphatic system, who was busily championing the Lagoni as an engine of economic advantage for the region. Mascagni had discovered a mineral there he called sassolino, which he determined to be boric acid in its solid state, a substance highly valued for use in manufacturing enamel, glass, pottery, and other wares.39 The Lagoni were but one part of Smithson's scientific tour southwards. Fabbroni had plotted out the route for him, which was focused on "extinct volcanoes." It took him to the pyramid of Monte Amiata, terraced with vineyards; the medieval fortress town of Radicofani, perched high on a vertiginous pile of basalt; and the serene waters of Lake Bolsena, which, he told Fabbroni, "furnished me some bodies acceptable to my cabinet."40

  In the last weeks of 1793 Smithson entered the gates of Rome, the omphalos of the English gentleman's Grand Tour. Piazzas, full of the music of conversation and splashing fountains, were crowded with outdoor cafes and people promenading. The English clustered around the Piazza di Spagna; the popular Cafe Anglais there, bedecked with murals by Piranesi, was a place where many collected their mail, their news, and their latest acquaintances. Artists congregated in this area as well, looking to capitalize on a captive clientele. The acclaimed painter of English aristocrats Pompeo Batoni was now dead, but others were taking his place. The sculptor Richard Westmacott was installed at the Palazzo Zuccari on the Strada Gregoriana, and the flirtatious painter Angelica Kauffmann was in residence at her studio near the top of the Spanish Steps; as a close friend of Smithson's cousin George Keate, Kauffmann might well have been someone for whom Smithson carried a letter of introduction. The Danish archeologist Georg Zoega, engrossed in investigating the hieroglyphic inscriptions on Egyptian obelisks, was a good friend of William Thomson's and another whom Smithson would probably have sought out.41

  Smithson, however, was not enthralled by Rome. Despite finding the city "so celebrated a Capital," he concluded it was "far removed from the mineral, the comm[er]cial and I had almost said, the scientific, world."42 His friend Lord Wycombe, the son of Smithson's family friend Lord Lansdowne (as Lord Shelburne was now known), shared this disappointment. He too was in Italy at this time and wrote home: "Inhabiting Rome is like conversing with the dead, it exhibits a people as well as a city in ruins, it has no Society, no Spectacle; no commerce, no industry, and consequently no animation."43

  These forward-looking Grand Tourists did not come to Italy simply to see the monuments of antiquity and to commune with the landscape that animated the classical texts that had been their school primers. The ruins did need to be examined, the paintings admired, and the churches visited; as Lord Wycombe went on to tell his father, "The objects of antiquity however, and those which the fine arts afford make ample amends to the stranger whose views do not extend to residence." But how could they leave behind all their ruminations on progress? How could they lay aside all the energies they were devoting to change and industrialization back home? They were living in times that seemed, finally, as brilliant as those of the ancients. Agricultural improvements, manufacturing inventions, medicinal advances, revolutions in living—all these things continued to possess men like Smithson. On their travels they cast an eye to see how these same challenges were being handled in other countries. They discussed them with each other at the table d'hote in their pensions and with their newfound companions at the salons into which they were welcomed.

  Even the few letters of Smithson's that survive are littered with such observations. He brought to Fabbroni's attention news of an exorbitant sale price for cattle in England, an apparent continuation of a discussion they had been having on the current state of agriculture. "You see what a footing agriculture is upon at present in England," Smithson concluded, "and you will not wonder that kings have farms, indeed at this rate, it will soon only be kings that will be able to have them."44 In another letter he informed Fabbroni of "the new Telegraph," installed along the southern coast of England all the way to Land's End, with a signal system consisting of "balls, flags, and lanthorns [sic] by night."45 Smithson's interest in this invention—yet another example of science in the service of society—was typical. Back in a Britain roiled by the French Revolution, however, reactionary factions viewed this development, along with many other technological advances, as the work of pro-French subversives. The caricaturist James Gillray depicted the opposition leader Charles James Fox as a gigantic, bulbous, hairy telegraph pole making signals in the dark. He stands as a beacon shining out across the black expanse of the Channel, a guiding light for the great wave of ships coming from France. With his other arm, a plank-like crossbar culminating in a finger-pointing hand, he directs the invading force's attention to the dome of St. Paul's, the figurative heart of the kingdom.

  Gillray's caricature of Charles James Fox, 1795.

  For Smithson Rome held one redeeming contemporary attraction. The elderly, self-effacing Father Petrini at the Collegio Nazareno provided a worthy scientific diversion in an otherwise mineralogically vacant city. "I have derived here no small pleasure and advantage from the acquaintance of Father Petrini, who is a pleasing and informed man, and really possesses of a cabinet much more extensive and complete than I should have expected," Smithson wrote, thanking Fabbroni for the introduction. Gian-Vicenzo Petrini's mineral collection, which he had started while teaching philosophy and mathematics at the college, had become somewhat famous; even the Emperor Joseph II had paid a visit, and he had subsequently sent an outstanding collection of rare metallic rocks from Hungary in thanks.46 Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, and many other fashionable English stopped in to meet Petrini while in Rome; Lady Webster visited too, though she found Petrini unutterably dull—"a more stupid personage I never knew in my life," she told Fabbroni.47

  Smithson's visit was clearly the most exciting event of the year for Petrini. Smithson, in Petrini's eyes, was that rare landed gentleman, polished, humane and highly knowledgeable: "a Cavaliere in whom a vast and profound knowledge of chemistry, mineralogy, and physics is united in a character of sweetness, affability and grace." Petrini immediately wrote an ecstatic letter to Fabbroni, thanking him for the introduction to Smithson. "The obligations I owed you were already many and great," Petrini commenced. "But in presenting me with Mr. Macie they have grown almost to infinity."48 In incantatory prose Petrini carried on writing about Smithson's visit to multiple correspondents; Smithson, in this world incumbent on giving and attending to
favors, became a type of currency. Petrini even wrote to the Duchess of Devonshire, someone who had never heard of Smithson. His description of the young man was so incandescent that she felt compelled to ferret out some information about this Mr. Macie, and she turned to Sir Charles Blagden, secretary of the Royal Society, as her reliable source.

  Blagden's response provides a fascinating window into how information was exchanged and relationships built in an era reliant on personal introductions. It is also a telling example of the curious fault line on which Smithson teetered, between the aristocracy and the world of science. Prickly old Blagden was hardly the advocate Smithson might have wished to be promoting his cause with the Duchess of Devonshire. Blagden had reason to be jealous of Smithson, a young man who had been steadily gaining a foothold with Blagden's patron Henry Cavendish. William Thomson "detested" Blagden, as he told Fabbroni, 49 and Smithson might well have shared some of this sentiment. Blagden was a character easily wounded; after some minor affront, for example, he insisted on corresponding with Sir Joseph Banks in a diffident third-person voice, despite Banks' repeated entreaties for him to desist. Blagden hadn't managed to make a good match, either. He never married, in fact, but unlike Smithson he suffered several public humiliations in his attempts to do so: he was rebuffed first by the widowed Madame Lavoisier and still later laughed out of town by the daughter of La Lavoisier's successful suitor, Count Rumford.50

  And so, for Smithson, Blagden was able to muster only tempered praise. There was the reluctant acknowledgment that the young man was blindingly bright company. "The Mr. Macie of whom Father Petrini writes so favorably is indeed an excellent Chemist, with much information in many other parts of Science & great precision of ideas," he told the duchess. Blagden, however, was not willing to concur with Petrini's praise of Smithson's character, explaining that Petrini's description was "not exactly as I should have stated it." He refused to second Petrini's lyrical tribute, choosing instead to make some small put-down. He referred to Smithson in the past tense, and wrote that he had concluded his chemical career, before it had hardly begun:

  Our friend Mr Cavendish liked him very much, & seemed to take great pleasure in his company. I was also frequently with him, and scarcely ever without acquiring some new ideas. He left England for his health, and, I was told, has, on the same account, entirely abandoned his chemical studies. The only thing of consequence that I know he has published is a paper in the Philosophical Transactions, giving the analysis of a remarkable concretion found not infrequently in the bamboo cane, & called in the Levant Tabasheer. This he discovered to be an almost pure siliceous earth, though generated in the middle of a vegetable; and further experiments showed him, that the substance of the bamboo itself contains some portion of the same earth; a fact which no doubt will be applied by those naturalists who conceive all the solid matter of our planet to be the produce of vegetables or animals, accumulated in a very long succession of ages.51 It is especially interesting to note that Blagden made no mention of Smithson's parentage. He had not been reluctant in the past to gossip about Smithson's supposed pedigree—back in 1784 he had reported to Sir Joseph Banks that Smithson "is said to be a natural son of the Duke of Northumberlands." The omission of Smithson's connection to the duke in this instance seems very deliberate. Blagden knew that such information would probably only raise Smithson in the duchess' estimation. It would have brought him into her circle in a way that Blagden could never have entered. In fact the duchess would probably have been more sympathetic to Smithson than Blagden could ever have imagined, as she had given birth to the child of her lover Charles Grey just the year before, in secret while on the Continent. The little girl had been taken away from her almost immediately, and she had been forbidden ever to acknowledge her connection to the child.52

  It is important, too, not to overlook the speed of the gossip. Petrini, awed by the arrival of this young meteor, wrote immediately to the popular duchess. His letter traveled all the way from the frescoed vaults of the Collegio Nazareno in Rome to the shores of England, and from there into the countryside, to the pleasure town of Bath, where Georgiana and her family were taking the waters. She in turn, from her perch in the spa town, sent her query to Blagden. Her letter traveled out in the coach back to London, where it found the doctor in his rented lodgings near Hanover Square. Blagden, zealous to set the record straight, responded immediately. Hardly any time elapsed. The duchess was reading Blagden's letter, still in the first days of January. Smithson was whiling the time away in Rome, oblivious to the chatter. He had hardly even gotten around to thanking Fabbroni for the introduction to Petrini.53

  Was there in the end a short visit in Naples? A month or six weeks, maybe? The archives yield nothing. The passports of foreign tourists are filed still in the cool courtyarded palazzo that houses the Archivio di Stato di Napoli, but there is a gap in the records for exactly the critical years of 1790 to 1795.54 Neither is there any evidence of James Louis Macie in the trail of gossip amongst the traveling English. Lady Palmerston was present, and Dr. William Drew, who was falling for her. Bishop Winchester was there with his ailing wife Lady North, and Count Rumford, too, himself on the verge of an intrigue with Lady Palmerston. The English circle around Sir William Hamilton swelled with visitors as the winter months approached. "The Society here this Winter is very pleasing," Drew wrote to the vivacious Lady Webster in Florence, trying to entice her down. "I will not tell you who are, and who are not here; come & see."55 Even among the scientists there is no trace of Smithson. William Thomson's letters to his Florentine friends in this period are curiously silent. One expects the ringing of bells, great clarion trumpets of publicity that the two old Oxford friends are reunited, that the young Smithson who charmed everyone in the north has come now to the sweet, indolent south and done the same.

  At the same time, it seems impossible that someone so keen to see Vesuvius would not have made his way just that much further south than Rome. The mountain continued to signal that it might bestow some theatrical fireworks on its eager audience. "Vesuvius holds his breath as long as he can in tremulous expectation of you," another of Lady Webster's admirers coyly carried on to her, "but an ardent sigh not unfrequently escapes from his lips & now & then he utters a groan."56 Smithson could have been sure of a redcarpet welcome, as he was almost certainly equipped with a letter of introduction to Hamilton, the central figure in British Naples, from Hamilton's beloved nephew Greville.57 Hamilton had wed Emma, his living sculpture, just a few years earlier. Now she had been brought to the Neapolitan court, befriended the Queen, and was stopping the hearts of Goethe and all the lovers of virtù—though perhaps not their wives, who were still unsure of her respectability. She was Smithson's exact contemporary, and he probably knew her well, having been exposed perhaps to much of her rise and transformation after her arrival in Charles Greville's London apartments from her life as an attending nymph in the quack doctor Graham's Temple of Hymen.58

  The clearest sign of Smithson's presence in Naples can be found in his handwritten list of mineral specimens collected abroad. Smithson's "Catalogue of Some Minerals 1798" is littered with examples from the Neapolitan region. Many of these, along with those from Calabria and Sicily, were probably sent to Smithson by William Thomson. When Smithson returned to Florence in the spring of 1794, for example, he received a sample of a saline substance that had flowed out of a hole in the cone of Vesuvius, "with a request to ascertain its nature."59 Nevertheless, it is quite likely that some of these specimens in his catalogue—"Phosphoric Marble, Vesuvius . … Group of Hornblend crystals [from] Naples . … Garnets from Naples for Exp[erimen]ts. … Porphyry lava cont[ainin]g iron crystals, Vesuvius"—do indicate a trip to Naples.60 And there was so much to see beyond the mountain. Smithson's fellow scientific laborers were doing much to turn the region's resources to advantage; William Thomson's friend Scipione Breislak, who reconstructed the history of Vesuvius' evolution, was one such, guiding visitors around the alum works he operated at nea
rby Solfatara, a volcanic crater in the Phlegraean Fields (Campi Phlegraei). And the buried cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum, discovered only in the 1750s, offered up for scrutiny an ancient humanity caught in mid-breath. Tourists lunched on tables studded with the ring marks of round-bottomed cups from two thousand years earlier. In the museum at Portici, they gaped at the furniture and the trinkets and "some remains even of various kinds of victuals such as Eggs, Raisins, Bread, a Tart found in an Oven."61 For Smithson the most indelible image of Pompeii seems to have been "the cast of a woman's breasts" captured in the hardened ashes, which he evoked decades later in one of the papers he wrote for the Annals of Philosophy. 62

  By the spring of 1794 Smithson had returned to Florence, where he apparently based himself for more than a year. He continued to socialize regularly with his scientific friends Fabbroni and Targioni-Tozzetti, availing himself of the museum's excellent chemical laboratory and extensive mineral cabinet. He also fell in with the fashionable Whig aristocrats who clustered around the English envoy to the Tuscan court. This was initially Lord Hervey, but after an outburst in which he called the Grand Duke a fool and a knave he was replaced by William Wyndham.63 Most of this circle was younger even than Smithson, who, though still very youthful in appearance, was now nearly thirty. Although Florence's identity had long been stamped with homosexuality—even as early as the 1400s a German verb meaning to sodomize was "florenzen" and a sodomite a "florenzer"—the bed-swapping among the English resident in the republic in the 1790s was primarily heterosexual. Liaisons in this circle were complicated, ecstatic, and youthful, energized by the freedom these young men and women had discovered in travel and a life abroad.64