The Lost World of James Smithson

by Heather Ewing

  In September 1809 Hoare's Bank made the first payment out to Henri Honoré Sailly, a servant to whom Smithson remained connected for the rest of his life, one he remembered in his will. After the demeaning treatment Smithson endured in Hamburg he told Sir Joseph Banks that he had "totally lost all inclination to stay among the French." And yet at some point during this time Smithson took on Sailly for the intimate role of manservant or valet de chambre. Perhaps Smithson brought this Frenchman back with him to London as a kind of trophy. The eccentric household at Holland House boasted a number of continental servants, and William Beckford kept as one of his favored inner circle a malodorous dwarf from the Savoy named Pierre de Grailly. Henri Honoré Sailly could have been Smithson's own exotic appendage, evidence of his triumphant survival at the hands of the enemy—an acquisition to be prized perhaps much as black servants were a generation earlier; Smithson's half-brother Lord Percy, later the second Duke of Northumberland, had brought back the former slave Bill Richmond from Revolutionary America, who went on to a career as the famous pugilist, "the Black Terror."39

  On November 30, 1809, at the Royal Society's annual anniversary meeting, Smithson was elected to the governing council. This vote was a reassuring affirmation of his colleagues' regard for him and evidence of his respected place amongst the contributing members of the society; it was probably also hearty congratulations for having survived such a long period of suffering. But Smithson was not sworn in to his place of honor with the other newly elected members in the meetings that followed the election. His own induction to the council did not take place until June 1810. He missed every single monthly meeting of the governing body for the first half of the year.

  There remains no proof then that he was back in the public eye, heralded and among company. It is possible that Smithson's election to the council followed on the news that he had been released as a prisoner and was on his way home, and perhaps the fact that he was not sworn in immediately should be taken as an indication that he had not yet arrived in London. Or, more likely, he could have returned and been sequestered at home, in feeble health. Beginning in the late autumn of 1809 there are small indications of his presence in London, mostly showing that he was deeply engrossed in his laboratory work. On New Year's Day 1810 Hoare's ledgers recorded a payment to Allen & Co., which was probably the establishment of the Quaker chemist William Allen at Plough Court, a place at the heart of supplying London's burgeoning industrial community and active in a number of chemistry and mineralogy philosophical societies.40 In February 1810 Smithson conducted some experiments on the "Fossile wood" he had picked up at Meissner. "I could not saw it. The saw was however not a good one" was his first observation; "A bit put into the flame of a candle burned with a large vivid flame & fell to a white ash. It had an odd smell" was his second.41

  The first real indication of Smithson's re-entry into London society is the payment, on April 21, 1810, into his account of £100 by Lord Holland. The baron, who had become an important MP and opposition leader, finally ponied up the £100 he owed Smithson on their one-guinea wager over whether a king would once more sit upon the throne in France. Napoleon, having crowned himself emperor, could no longer be seen as quite the revolutionary hero that Lady Holland would have liked to have painted him. One wager still remained outstanding between them—the question of whether the Bourbons would sit once more upon the throne. Smithson had bet yes, and he surely intended to wait and see if he would collect.

  On June 22, 1810, less than a week before his swearing in at the Royal Society council meeting, Smithson paid out twenty-one pounds from his Hoare's bank account to the Royal Society, in trust for the family of the late George Gilpin.42 It was not an extravagant sum of money, but to a family which had recently lost its principal means of support it was enough to live on for several months. Gilpin's widow, the society had discovered, had been left "wholly unprovided for." She had two sons, only one of whom was employed, and five daughters. The Royal Society came together to raise support for the family.43

  George Gilpin had been the clerk of the Royal Society for twenty-five years, and before that had served as an assistant to Neville Maskelyne at the Royal Observatory. It was Gilpin who had conducted the trials of Cavendish's experiments that Smithson had been invited to witness back in late 1787. Gilpin was never made a Fellow, though he did contribute two papers to the society deemed worthy of publication in the Philosophical Transactions. Gilpin had simply, quietly, for a quarter of a century, administered the business of the society. He wrote and transcribed correspondence, carried out the dogsbody work of many large-scale experiments, and calmly took care of the details when Sir Joseph Banks was out at his rural retreat of Revesby Abbey. All ran so smoothly that he faded into the background. In the end George Gilpin was so unremarkable that the Royal Society today has no biographical information on him whatsoever.44

  With this gesture, the compassionate act of a man who had just been through his own grueling ordeal—and who no doubt felt deep gratitude to the Royal Society's president for his efforts in securing his freedom—it is safe to assume that James Smithson, Esquire, was back in the thick of things in London.

  TEN

  London: A New Race of Chemists, 1810-1814

  "The ancient teachers of this science," said he, "promised impossibilities, and performed nothing. The modern masters promise very little; they know that metals cannot be transmuted, and that the elixir of life is a chimera. But these philosophers, whose hands seem only made to dabble in dirt, and their eyes to pore over the microscope or crucible, have indeed performed miracles. They penetrate into the recesses of nature, and show how she works in her hiding places. They ascend into the heavens: they have discovered how the blood circulates, and the nature of the air we breathe. They have acquired new and almost unlimited powers; they can command the thunders of heaven, mimic the earthquake, and even mock the invisible world with its own shadows."

  —Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818)

  FROM HIS NEW rented apartments on St. James's Place, fast by the gambling dens and smoking rooms of the gentlemen's clubs of Brooks's, White's, and Boodle's, Smithson returned to the rhythms of his London life.1 He was soon reunited with his brother Henry Louis Dickenson, and he discovered that during his long incarceration abroad he had become an uncle. Dickenson had sold his commission and retired from military life; on his last tour in India his common-law wife Mary Ann had given birth in Pondicherry to a son. The child was fair-haired and blue-eyed, with the tell-tale broad, high expanse of forehead and long, aquiline nose both his father and uncle shared. He had been christened Henry James Dickenson—the middle name a tribute, in all likelihood, to his talented, charismatic uncle James Smithson.2

  Everywhere Smithson turned there were indications of his warm welcome back into the inner circle of high science in London. He went as Humphry Davy's guest to the Royal Society Club dinner.3 He was elected to the Royal Society Council, a post to which he was returned the following year; he was also elected to the new Committee of Chemistry, Geology and Mineralogy at the Royal Institution, an appointment that was renewed virtually every year until the disbandment of the Committee. And his library began to fill once more with the latest scientific publications of his friends, many cordially inscribed from the authors.4

  In print, too, Smithson received some notice from his peers. Tilloch's Philosophical Magazine referred to him as "this ingenious mineralogist," and a new book included him as one of the "new race of chemists' keeping Britain at the forefront of science. Smithson still believed that the work of science transcended national interests, and that scientists should be considered "citizens of the world" and benefactors of mankind. But as the war with France trundled on towards the tenth anniversary of the resumption of hostilities, this viewpoint was one increasingly in the minority. Discussion of scientific accomplishment took on a nationalistic tinge, and Smithson became one more drafted into the fray. Thomas Thomson's history of the Royal Society, published in 1812, expla
ined how the victory of the French chemists over the doctrine of phlogiston "drove all the British chemists out of the field." It described the creation of a new nomenclature and a new theoretical system for chemistry as a humiliating setback in the history of British science and ingenuity. "By degrees, however," Thomson continued, "a new race of chemists arose … [T]he reverence, almost approaching to absurdity, which was paid to the French School, wore off, and the natural genius and invention of British philosophers began to appear." Thomson singled out about ten men from the Royal Society, all alive and active, whose work had "restored Great Britain to the first rank among the improvers of chemistry." Smithson was among them.5

  Chemistry enjoyed a privileged position now, credited with a primary role in the advent of modern living. And the chemist himself had become a figure of admiration and allure, a transformation due in large part to Humphry Davy. In the years of Smithson's absence, Davy had become the most famous and celebrated chemist in England. Since his 1801 arrival in the capital as a young man of twenty-three, dreaming of "greatness and utility," Davy had risen to the heights of cosmopolitan society. His lectures at the Royal Institution were a magnet for the fashionable. Thomas Carlyle teasingly suggested that Davy had transformed the Royal Institution into "a kind of sublime Mechanics' Institute for the upper classes."6 They "come in their carriages for their weekly luncheon of philosophy," one observer commented wryly, "just with the same intention, & with as much advantage, as they go in the evening, to hear Madame A. or Signora B. squall at the opera." Women were a large part of this constituency, and a slew of new books aimed at this audience, such as Jane Marcet's hugely popular Conversations on Chemistry, underscored the acceptability of such study. Davy praised women's interest, proclaiming that the study of science "refined and exalted" the imagination. Everyone could benefit from an understanding of nature's secrets.7

  Davy's lectures ushered in a sense of wonder and awe for the quest for knowledge. "The philosopher who has made a discovery in natural science, or the author of a work of genius in art or in literature, is a benefactor," he explained, "not only to the present generation, but likewise to future ages." He cast himself, and by extension his fellow chemists, as a channeler of nature's powers, submitting to dangers and toiling endlessly in his effort to comprehend the processes of life. The scientist, he said, was a "mariner voyaging for discovery," out on the gusting ocean, and the new facts and truths he was accumulating were like the green branches that were "the omens of the land." Davy invited his audiences to marvel both at the extraordinary progress that had been made to date, but also at that which was to come. He blazed a heroic path for the scientist in society creating the romantic identity of genius that has stayed with us ever since.8

  Smithson would have seen that the Royal Institution, with Davy as impresario, boosting the profile of people like himself who had dedicated themselves to chemistry, was now established on a firm footing. In 1810 Parliament had passed an Act establishing a single class of membership for the institution, abolishing the Proprietors, the landowning elites who had frequently bailed out the institution in moments of financial hardship. It had become a publicly owned entity dedicated to the improvement and prosperity of the nation as a whole. Davy, explaining the changes, announced that the Proprietors were "giving up their private interests for the purpose of founding what may be called a National Establishment." He told the country, "Our doors are open to all who wish to profit by knowledge."9

  Under Davy's dynamic public leadership, the Royal Institution probably appeared to Smithson as a powerful vehicle for the promotion of science in society. The reactionary 1790s had severely compromised the movement for Enlightenment science, and many of its strongest proponents—like Joseph Priestley, or Smithson's old Pembroke associate Thomas Beddoes—had been tarred by their enthusiasms for revolution and change. Davy himself had struggled to shake off his reputation as one of those anarchic experimenters from his early successes exploring the hallucinatory effects of nitrous oxide at Beddoes' Pneumatic Institution in Bristol. But now the Royal Institution under Davy generated tremendous energy, bringing a much greater audience than before for science.10

  Organizations modeled on the Royal Institution began to spring up across the British Isles. In Ireland the Cork Institution for the Application of Science to the Common Purposes of Life was founded by a follower of Joseph Priestley. Cornwall, Liverpool, and Manchester all gained their own versions of a Royal Institution—the Royal Institution of Cornwall, the Liverpool Royal Institution, and the Royal Manchester Institution.11 Closer to home the London Institution for the Advancement of Literature and the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge was founded in 1805, and the Surrey Institution, dedicated to promoting scientific and literary knowledge, followed a few years later.

  Smithson's naming of the Smithsonian Institution suggests that the model might have been rooted in the establishments that proliferated in these years.12 They catered to large popular audiences, offering well-stocked libraries and dozens of lecture courses. Although lectures covered a wide range of topics—in the Surrey Institution's domed "Rotunda," for example, Samuel Taylor Coleridge talked of belles-lettres and Shakespeare, and William Hazlitt covered the English poets—they focused especially on the natural sciences.13 These institutions provided at the same time sophisticated facilities for a corps of professional scientific researchers. In the basement of the Royal Institution, the members of the Committee of Chemistry, Geology and Mineralogy—a group which included Smithson—gathered regularly to witness Davy's work.14 Although Smithson did not specify in his will the functions of a Smithsonian beyond "the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men," his life in London was immersed in a world where forums for the cultivation of science were flourishing—providing places both for cutting-edge investigations and for enthusiastic, growing audiences for science.

  Upon his return, Smithson seems to have flung himself into the business of catching up—renewing his correspondence, updating the catalogue of his cabinet, and reading the latest literature. The scientific advances that had been made while he had been away on the Continent were dramatic. John Dalton had unveiled his atomic theory, the idea that the atoms of each element had a unique "atomic weight" and that they formed compounds by combining in small, regular numbers. His theory introduced the first mathematical theoretical underpinnings for chemistry, and Thomas Thomson promptly hailed it as "the greatest step which chemistry has yet made as a science."15

  But perhaps the most exciting development during Smithson's absence was Davy's command of the voltaic battery. Control of this animating force had given him powers previously unimaginable. Substances that were thought elemental a few years earlier he was now able to identify as compounds—and then proceed to break them down into their constituent parts. Myriad new elements were discovered in these early years of the century. His first successes came in 1807 with the isolation of potassium and sodium. These soft metals generated dramatic reactions; when Davy threw the particles of potassium into water, they "skimmed about excitedly with a hissing sound, and soon burned with a lovely lavender light." Davy's brother described him "delirious with joy," dancing around the room, when he realized the significance of his finds.16 He had harnessed a new tool for chemistry and cut a path forward for his fellow scientists. Priestley saw it as the way "the glory of the great Sir Isaac Newton … [could] be eclipsed."17 And in France the chemist Louis Jacques Thenard when he heard of it also took to running around the room, shouting, "How beautiful! I would give my right arm to have made this discovery!"18 In the years that followed Davy announced the discovery of calcium, magnesium, strontium, barium, and other elements. Though the periodic table would not be established properly until the 1860s, many of the pieces came together now in these first decades of the new century.

  These developments led many to believe that the science was already undergoing another rebirth, just a decade or so after Lavoisier's groundbreaking discoveries.19 New publications appeared, such a
s Nicholson's Journal of Natural Philosophy, wholly dedicated to scientific matters. New instruments were invented, new technologies mastered, and entirely new fields of study introduced. Geology, which had not even been mentioned in the 1797 Encyclopedia Britannica, had become its own discipline; it was given a long write-up in the next edition, in 1810. Humphry Davy delivered a highly successful series of geology lectures at the Royal Institution, exclaiming that one day the field would have its own Newton. In 1807 the Geological Society of London had been founded, one of a number of specialist societies that cropped up in the early years of the nineteenth century, but the first one to have its own journal and the first really to challenge the hegemony of the Royal Society.20

  Smithson published three papers during these years in London, 1810 to 1814. They stand now as practically the only remaining clues to his activities and thoughts at this stage in his life. They show a man avidly reconnecting with the state of scientific knowledge. But they also reflect the interests of a man in poor health, and one who had been separated for a long time from his collections, his community, and the trajectory of his own life. His health had probably deteriorated greatly while abroad, and he appears to have kept pretty close to home. The trials of his years as a prisoner seem to have left their mark.

  All three papers focused on specimens that Smithson had analyzed or collected years earlier, in his teens and twenties. "An analysis of zeolite," published in the Philosophical Transactions in early 1811, gave him an opportunity to recall his very first triumph, the trip to Staffa so many years earlier, at a time when that island had only just come under the scrutiny of naturalists. His analysis of ulmin and his account of a "saline substance" from Vesuvius were both based on specimens that his old friend William Thomson had sent him years earlier. The ulmin, a black gum-like substance, had been sent him "adhering to the bark from Palermo in Sicily by Dr Thomson with the following label 'Saline gum from an old elm tree under my window. Palermo June 1800.'" There would be no more packets from Dr. Thomson, however; he had died in Palermo in 1806, aged only forty-six.21