The Lost World of James Smithson

by Heather Ewing

  It was only the death of Smithson's nephew Henry James Dickenson a few years later in 1835, in a hotel on the banks of the Arno at Pisa, that set the Smithson bequest in motion. If this young man had not passed away at such an early age, if he had instead gone on to have children, the name of smithsonite would stand today as the only notice of James Smithson's life and work. It was this single death that brought Smithson's name to the shores of the New World and out of obscurity.

  In 1832 Smithson's twenty-four-year-old nephew was roaming the Continent with all the world in front of him, buoyed by a bank account swollen by his uncle's largesse. He felt no compunction to expand the store of the world's knowledge, that lofty aim of his uncle's; it seems he was a disciple more of that other part of his uncle's character, the witty and dissipated casino haunter, the gambler, the coxcomb. Hungerford may also have been something of an amateur artist; he left behind several sketchbooks.2 His debt to his uncle and benefactor he had paid with the commissioning of an elaborate neoclassical monument in the English Protestant Cemetery at Genoa, on which he had ordered the inscriptions:

  Sacred to the Memory of James Smithson, Esq.re Fellow of the Royal Society London, who died at Genoa the 26. June 1829. aged 75 years.3

  This monument is erected, and the ground on which it stands purchased in perpetuity, by Henry Hungerford, esq., the deceased's nephew, in token of gratitude to a generous benefactor and as a tribute to departed worth.

  Smithson's tomb in Genoa.

  More than half a century later, the astrophysicist and head of the Smithsonian Samuel Pierpont Langley, standing in front of that marble sarcophagus on the cypress-topped cliffs of San Benigno, would be shocked to find no mention of the Smithsonian in the dedication. How could the founder of such an important American institution lie so utterly neglected and unacknowledged?4

  In 1832, however, when the nephew was still alive and the sarcophagus newly erected, Smithson's "establishment for the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men" survived merely in the realm of dreams. It was a sentence in a will buried in the offices of a dead man's solicitors, or a paper filed at Chancery Court during the proceedings to entail the nephew. Fleetingly perhaps, when the will was published in The Times six months after Smithson's death, the idea might have circulated as a curiosity in the salons of fashionable London. How extraordinary, they might have said—as we still do today—how bizarre, to leave your fortune to a country you had never seen. The potential windfall for the burgeoning United States of America piqued the curiosity of a sharp-eyed editor in New York, who published a notice of Smithson's will in his New-York American in January 1830.5 But three years later the chatter had, if it ever existed, without question disappeared. Consigned to history, the Smithson bequest existed only as a curious artifact of one man's fantastical imagination.

  Yet it was also a brilliant example of the collective will of the "citizens of the world," a remarkable extension of the ideals embraced by one who came of age in the exploding culture of knowledge and revolution in the late eighteenth century. Smithson's bequest exemplified the faith that he and his circle shared in science as a vehicle for progress and enlightenment—and the place that America occupied in their imagination. The future they imagined was one in which talent and industry would be rewarded above all else, where the increase and diffusion of knowledge would bring society to a state of happiness and prosperity.

  Smithson seems never to have abandoned those beliefs. In his last papers he argued still that "no researches can be undertaken without producing some facts, leading to some consequences," and he extolled the virtues of spreading "comforts and happiness" to the widest possible community. In the scathing marginalia he added sometime in the late 1810s or 1820s to Col. Pinkney's Travels through the South of France, Smithson wrote, "noble things!" next to a description of "ancient chateaux," and a sarcastic "Oh! No!" next to Pinkney's lament that many of the ancient châteaux "were indeed in ruin from the effects of the Revolution."6

  But Smithson had been powerfully imprinted by his mother's world, a society that took for granted a belief in the nobility of blood. His embrace of democracy seems to have been at least partly grounded in what for him was the retribution of equality, in an awareness of how it might have rewritten the story of his life. For all his scientific promise, for all the acclaim he garnered from such a young age, he never stopped hungering for the validation of his family history. Even in his last years he was still writing letters to the solicitors of his cousins trying to establish claims. He styled himself as "Monsieur de Smithson," and he made a series of efforts to ensure the Hungerford name was carried on into the future, funding the establishment of the Hungerford Hotel in Paris and making his nephew and heir change his name from Dickenson to Hungerford.

  He seems to have straddled these two worlds, never able fully to inhabit either. In the world of science he was defined in part by his fortune, and he constantly took himself out of circulation, through travel and gambling and his quest for the aristocratic sheen he felt was his birthright. These ellipses of engagement were compounded by times that he was removed from the scientific arena against his will, caught up in the geo-political maelstrom of his war-torn era. Unlike so many of his Oxford scientific peers, he did not explore the roles opening up to his generation, the possibilities for teaching, for founding manufactories or charitable institutions, for becoming scientific leaders in diverse ways. These friends, for the most part, unlike Smithson, seem to have been less preoccupied with questions of their status in society; many of them did not have extensive personal incomes like Smithson's. Perhaps, had he not so desperately needed to fill a void, to find the respect and credibility that he felt came for him in the guise of seigneur first of all, he might have lived a less restless life. Perhaps he might have chanced on a scientific discovery that could have made his name.

  Smithson grappled all his life with the extraordinary facts of his own life story. He had enjoyed a jeunesse dorée, a youth that coincided with Europe's own time, as Wordsworth said, "at the top of golden hours." And yet he was a man haunted by the specter of what could have been, had just a few things been different, or one thing changed. "It is the character of human nature, even when no extraordinary motives to it have occurred," Smithson once told a friend, "to cherish the past above the present, both because youth is in the past, & because fr.m something unaccountable in man what is irretrievably lost is ever most valued."7 He wrote this when he was only forty years old. He was looking back already, even before the disappointments and setbacks that marred his later years: the brutal incarceration during the wars, the break with Hoare's, his long-time bankers, the even more profound rupture with the Royal Society. Of course, the most significant and irretrievable loss Smithson suffered occurred before he ever clutched it in his hands. Acknowledgment from his father, an identity of legitimacy, and a secure and admired position in society were all taken from him before he had even arrived.

  For a story lined with sadness and unfulfillment, the ending is purely American. It is a very sweet twist of fate that Smithson's last grasp for posterity—the leaving of his fortune to the government of the United States in a secondary clause of his will—gave birth to a legacy greater than he could have ever imagined. The bequest has made him the founder of one of the world's great museums, a place that serves as curator of America's dreams and memory, a much beloved "nation's attic." Smithson's gift in the end was a spark from the last embers of the English Enlightenment, one that managed—against unimaginable odds—to land across an ocean in the dry brushfield of a nation hungry for identity, prestige, and progress.

  SMITHSON'S FAMILY TREE

  "The best blood of England runs through my veins. On my father's side, I am a Northumberland, on my mother's I am related to kings …"

  Notes

  Citations here are given in full at the first mention in each chapter. Translations of foreign language texts are my own unless otherwise specified. Some abbreviations used throughout are:<
br />
  Smithsonian Institution Archives, Record Unit (SIA, RU)

  The National Archives, Public Record Office (TNA: PRO)

  British Library, Additional Manuscripts (BL Add MS)

  American Philosophical Society, Fabbroni Papers (APS B Fl 13)

  Cornwall Record Office (CRO)

  Edinburgh University Library, Manuscripts Collection (EUL)

  Dawson Turner Collection, Natural History Museum, London (DTC)

  Rush Family Papers, Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library. Published with permission of the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections. Abbreviated as Rush Family Papers, Princeton.

  The documents related to Richard Rush's term as agent for the Smithson bequest and the legislative history of the establishment of the Smithsonian are contained in William J. Rhees, ed., The Smithsonian Institution: Documents Relative to its History, 1835-1899 (Washington, 1901). Abbreviated as Rhees, Documents.

  Smithson's scientific papers have been collected together and published as "The Scientific Writings of James Smithson," together with William J. Rhees' 1880 biography "James Smithson and His Bequest," and Walter R. Johnson's 1844 "Memoir on the Scientific

  Character and Researches of James Smithson," in Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections 21 (Washington, 1881). I have referred below to the individual publications by journal title and year, without reference to this volume.

  Smithson's book collection is housed in the Joseph F. Cullman 3rd Library of National History, Special Collections Department, Smithsonian Institution Libraries. Abbreviated as Smithson Library, SIL.

  Another resource are the volumes produced by the Joseph Henry Papers editorial project, especially: Volume 6, The Princeton Years: January 1844–December 1846 (Washington, 1992); Volume 7, The Smithsonian Years: January 1847-December 1849 (Washington, 1996); Volume 8, The Smithsonian Years: January 1850— December 1853 (Washington, 1998), and Volume 9, The Smithsonian Years: January 1854-December 1851 (Science History Publications/USA, 2002). Abbreviated as The Papers of Joseph Henry.

  Prologue 1865

  1 Evening Star, January 23, 1865, p. 1.

  2 Smithsonian Annual Report of 1854, p. 9.

  3 Marcus Benjamin, "Meteorology," in G. Brown Goode, ed., The Smithsonian Institution, 1846–1896: the history of its first half century (Washington, 1897), pp. 659–61.

  4 Cynthia R. Field, Richard E. Stamm, and Heather P. Ewing, The Castle: An Illustrated History of the Smithsonian Building (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993), p. 77. In 1858 Joseph Henry wrote, "it is hoped that Congress will in due time purchase the portraits belonging to Mr. Stanley, which will become more and more valuable in the progress of the gradual extinction of the race of which they are such faithful representations." Smithsonian Annual Report of 1858, p. 42. See also Michael Kraus, "America and the Utopian Ideal in the Eighteenth Century," Mississippi Valley Historical Review, vol. 22, no. 4 (March 1936), p. 490, fn. 12.

  5 The account of the fire is taken from three sources: Report of the Special Committee of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution relative to the fire (February 1865), Senate Rep. Com. No. 129, 38th Congress, 2nd Session; newspaper accounts of January 24 and 25, 1865, in the Daily National Intelligencer and the Evening Star, and the diary of Mary Henry, SIA, RU 7001, Box 51.

  6 Mary Henry diary, entry for January 26, 1865.

  7 Mary Henry diary, entry for January 25, 1865.

  8 Testimonials of the fire, January 1865; SIA, RU 7081, Box 14.

  9 There remains some confusion as to what exactly survived from the regents' room in the south tower. The report investigating the fire states vaguely that among the losses is "a part of the contents of the regents' room, including the personal effects of Smithson, with the exception of his portrait and library." Smithson's library and portrait survived because they were kept in the west wing of the building (which was unharmed in the fire), where the institution's library was housed. Some scraps of Smithson's mineralogical notes were salvaged, which John McD. Irby in 1878 compiled and bound with transcriptions in a red leather book now kept in the Smithsonian Archives; SIA, RU 7000, Box 2. And one other piece of Smithson ephemera survived the fire, though no mention is made of it in the 1865 report: a painting of a landscape by Nicolaes Berchem. Henry arranged for Smithson's books to be displayed to the public in the library in 1858; it is likely that at this time he also moved the portrait of Smithson as a student, the Nicolaes Berchem landscape, and the scraps of mineralogical notes—all those things of Smithson's that survived the fire—down for display in the west wing as well. Henry Desk Diary, March 4, 1858; SIA, RU 7001.

  10 This phrase was first published before the Smithsonian fire, in the U.S. Magazine, vol. IV, no. 1 (January 1857). "He [James Smithson] declared, in writing, that though the best blood of England flowed in his veins, this availed him not, for his name would live in the memory of men when the titles of Northumberlands and Percies were extinct or forgotten." It is probable that Rhees or someone else who perused the diaries for some elaboration of Smithson's intentions for a Smithsonian Institution landed on this sentiment as the closest expression of a motivation. Having paraphrased it using the third person for the 1857 article, Rhees seems after the fire to have taken this phrase and transformed it into a direct quote.

  11 William St. Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge, 2004); personal communication with the author, March 2006.

  12 Walter R. Johnson, "A Memoir on the Scientific Character and Researches of James Smithson, Esq., F.R.S." (Philadelphia, 1844).

  13 Spencer Baird, prefatory advertisement to William J. Rhees, "James Smithson and His Bequest" (Washington, 1880).

  14 James M. Goode, "Exhumation and Reinterment of the Remains of james Smithson," memorandum for the record, October 5, 1973; SIA, Smithson reference file.

  15 John Sherwood, "Smithson Skeleton Unearthed," Washington Star-News, October 5, 1973; J. Lawrence Angel, "The Skeleton of james Smithson (1765–1829)," October 15, 1973; SIA, Smithson reference file. I'm very grateful to Dr. David Hunt for spending time discussing this report with me. The graphologist JoNeal Scully has suggested that the deformation of the right metacarpal may have been the result of a thyroid irregularity; personal communication with the author, June 2005.

  16 Richard Kirwan to Sir Joseph Banks, April 9, 1797; DTC, vol. 10, ff. 119–121. Many thanks to Neil Chambers and the Joseph Banks Archive Project for their assistance. Dr. William Drew to Lady Webster, n.d. [June to July 5, 1797], BL Add MSS 51814, ff. 37–38.

  17 See Macie v. Hungerford, 1766; TNA: PRO C 12/1019/4. Macie v. Blaake, 1767; PRO C 12/1250/27. Macie v. Dickinson, 1770; PRO C 12/1028/19 and C 12/56/39. Macie v. Cowdrey, 1771–2; C 12/1038/11. Macie v. Cocks, 1772–3; C 12/1035/12. Macie v. Walker, 1782–4; PRO C 12/1261/38. Leir v. Macie, 1773; PRO C12/1626/19. Macie v. Baldwin, 1792; PRO C 12/471/70. Leir v. Macie, 1796; PRO C 12/2181/16. Rhees, "James Smithson and His Bequest," p. 1.

  18 Smithson, "A Chemical Analysis of Some Calamines," Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (1802).

  19 William Drew to Lady Holland, October 27, 1798; BL Add MS 51814, ff. 62–63.

  1. Descended from Kings

  1 Elizabeth Macie died in Brighton on May 22, 1800. A death notice was published in The Sussex Weekly Advertiser or Lewes Journal, Monday June 2, 1800, vol. 52, no. 2805. I am grateful to Hugh Torrens for sharing this find with me. Her burial is recorded in the burial register of St. Nicholas', Brighton [ref. PAR 255/1/1/7]. Her bank records are at Hoare's, London. In her will she bequeathed Smithson "all the Manors Messuages Lands Tenements and Hereditaments both Household Copyhold Customary and Leasehold and also all my ready money Securities for money money in the public funds and all my Goods Chattels Personal Estate whatsoever and wheresoever …"; TNA: PRO, PROB 11/1343. The multiple lawsuits Elizabeth Macie filed and those lodged against her are at TNA: PRO; in the 1790s, she was suing the celebrated Bath architec
t Thomas Baldwin, who had renovated her house in Weston, near Bath, for money he owed her (TNA: PRO C 12/471/70), and she was being sued by the Leirs, the cousins of her first husband who were due to inherit Weston after her death, who accused her of squandering the estate (TNA: PRO C 12/2181/16). The record of the 1791 sale of Great Durnford is located in the Hampshire Record Office (Hants RO), 7M54/20.

  2 Smithson to Lady Holland, May 1, n.y. [1801]. BL Add MS 51846, ff. 104–5.

  3 The name change was noted on June 18, 1800; Hoare's Bank Archives, vol. 68 (1800–1801), ff. 67–68. W.P.W. Phillimore and E. A. Fry, An Index to Changes of Name under authority of Act of Parliament or Royal Licence 1760–1901 (London, 1905), p. 296. It was also announced in the London Gazette, February 16, 1801, p. 202.

  4 The description of Smithson's appearance is based on a painting by Louis Gauffier, Portrait of a Young Gentleman in Florence, 1796 (whereabouts unknown), that might possibly be of Smithson. The wax seal is on one of his letters to Fabbroni in Florence, located in the SIA, RU 7000, Box 1; I am grateful to my friend Massimo Pelligrini for his research into the iconography of the seal, which appears to be based on the sculpture of Eros and Psyche in the Capitoline Muséum in Rome; personal communication with the author, September 2001.

  5 Smithson, beginning sometime in early 1799, nearly two years after his return from the Continent, took lodgings at No. 19 Clarges Street, a house he maintained until he left for France in 1803; Boyle's Court Guide, 1799–1803. I do not know for certain that he established a library and laboratory at this address, but it seems likely; Sir Charles Blagden reported in 1790, soon after Smithson moved into new quarters on Orchard Street, that Smithson was busy "setting up his library and laboratory." Blagden to Richard Kirwan, March 20, 1790; Royal Society (RS) Archives, Blagden Papers 7.322. In May 1797 Smithson paid out £70 to Christie and Co.; he was probably the "Mr. M" who bought a large number of items at a Christie's house sale at that time; see May 1, 1797, sale in Christie's Archives.