Microhistory, the study in depth and detail of historical phenomena, can uncover hitherto hidden connections, patterns, and structures. Some events and incidents are revealed over time to have been life changing or nation building. Examples from 1858 are the tackling of London’s sewage and the resultant improvement of public health, Brunel’s engineering feats, the initial laying of the Atlantic telegraph cable, the beginnings of a long process of attaining justice and equality in the matter of marriage and divorce, and the transformation of a miscellaneous medical practice into a proper profession. Other phenomena prove to have been less momentous, though they formed a living part of the culture of the time. Fashion fads like the mania for the crinoline beloved of the satirical magazine Punch; sports events like the Derby horse race; the annual exhibition of painting at the Royal Academy; plays and pantomimes performed in the ever-growing number of theatres, both in the West End and in small venues next to pubs in poorer districts of London; sensational attractions such as the Christy Minstrels or James Rarey, the ‘Great American Horse Tamer’: all belong to the rich medium of life in Britain, and particularly in London, in summer 1858.
Hitherto unnoticed or undervalued connections can be unearthed between individuals: Darwin and Dr Lane of the famous divorce case; Dickens and the ambitious lawyer Edwin James; Disraeli and Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton, who invited notoriety and provided newspapers with sensational headlines in June–July 1858 by putting his estranged wife Rosina in a lunatic asylum. Paths meet, cross, and converge, and patterns emerge – some intended, others accidental – when a limited period of time is taken and observed in depth. The summer of 1858 offers riches galore for those interested in the life and achievements of Darwin, Dickens, Disraeli, and a wide range of friends, family, observers, critics, and rivals, as well as ordinary people managing their lives as best they could, such as the man sent home on an extremely hot day to get a coat by a magistrate who would not deal with his case if he did not dress ‘appropriately’.
A deep delving into lives as they were lived, in the thick of it, in those hot summer days offers insights which full-length biographies and wider-ranging histories are naturally unable to provide, given the requirement to cover whole lives and whole historical periods. Small-scale studies may do for history what Virginia Woolf, in her essay ‘Modern Fiction’, suggested the novel should attempt, namely as far as possible to ‘record the atoms as they fall’, and to ‘trace the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness’. In this way a comparatively neglected time in Disraeli’s career can be shown to have been remarkably important in bringing him to prominence. The attention of historians and biographers has focused hitherto on his reckless youth, his racy novels, his controversial journalism, and his late-won success from 1868, when he finally became prime minister. His hard work in the parliamentary session of 1858, particularly in the hectic weeks before the summer break beginning on 2 August, and his success in turning round a hostile press and distrustful colleagues by his efforts, deserve to be acknowledged. In Dickens’s case his painful and self-exposing actions in connection with his failed marriage have been fully discussed, but no detailed account exists of the day-to-day struggles he faced in the long summer which followed his catastrophic error of judgment in advertising his separation from his wife in the early days of June. As for Darwin, though much has been written about his abrupt shock and change of plans on receiving in mid-June Wallace’s letter outlining natural selection, little attention has been paid to the interaction between his family life and his scientific work in summer 1858. Intense scrutiny of the lives of these men over a short period of a few months allows us to make fresh threads of connection between each of them and the larger society in which they lived, all at a time of public events which proved to be of lasting national importance.
In addition to having access to online databases of newspapers, parliamentary papers, and law courts, I have made use of various archives of unpublished material. My thanks go to librarians, curators, and trustees of manuscripts at the following institutions: the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University; the British Library; Bromley Local Studies Library; the Garrick Club; Lambeth Palace Library; National Meteorological Library and Archive; National Library of Scotland; V&A Theatre and Performance Archive. Individuals who have helped me with information and encouragement, and to whom I express my gratitude, are: Berry Chevasco, Gregory Dart, Mike Dilke, Lindsay Duguid, Nicholas Jacobs, Bill Long, Fred Schwarzbach, Michael Slater, John Sutherland, Jean Sykes, Lorna Unwin, Enrica Villari, René Weis. My thanks also go to my literary agent Victoria Hobbs and my editors at Yale University Press, Heather McCallum and Rachael Lonsdale.
CHAPTER ONE
1858 in History
Moments of consequence
The thermometer had been at 90° all day, and you may imagine what the effect of wax candles, steaming dishes, and a parboiled dozen or two of human creatures must have been. For my own feelings I can only say that St Lawrence on his gridiron was an emblem of cool comfort in comparison.1
SO WROTE THE AMERICAN historian John Lothrop Motley after attending a London dinner party on 16 June 1858, the hottest day of what was proving to be one of the hottest summers thus far recorded. The year 1858, not generally known as a particularly significant year in history, with the exception of its broiling summer, the intolerable stink on and around the Thames, and the decision of parliament to cleanse the river by taking sewage out of London in tunnels under new embankments, was in fact a year of turning points leading to often unforeseen consequences, both for individuals and for the nation as a whole. For ordinary people, and for the rich, the famous, and the powerful, the summer of 1858 was in one way or another a summer of consequence.
When thinking about the past, we often use the shorthand of a single year to represent moments or longer passages of time when events occurred which have subsequently come to be seen as significant in public life, in private life, or in both. In looking for a landmark date for public phenomena we generally refer to the most dramatic discernible moment of some great upheaval or major change, whether social, political, cultural, or ideological. We use 1789 for the event known as ‘the French Revolution’, and we concentrate our sense of that complicated set of circumstances on the day of the fall of the Bastille. 1914 is forever associated with the declaration and first military actions of the First World War. And 1859, the year of publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species, does duty as the moment when an irreversible change occurred in humanity’s outlook on the natural world and its history. All the while we know that the true beginnings of an event lie half hidden in earlier movements, so that the visible starting point is in fact a culmination of forces which pre-dated its appearance.
Historians spend their time looking back, unearthing and interpreting elements leading up to the iconic moment or year itself. The first great Reform Act of 1832, which gives that year its importance in British history, was a long time coming from the point of view of those agitators, inside and perforce outside parliament, who fought for many years to remove corruption from the election process and to widen representation beyond the tiny minority of the privileged who hitherto held all the political power. 1848 lives in the memory as the ‘year of revolutions’ in Europe, and indeed armed rebellions occurred in many capital cities, beginning, naturally, with Paris. The year was significant for the domino effect from one country to another, and its events certainly paved the way for progress towards European democracy, but strictly speaking it should be remembered as a year of failed revolutions, since autocratic governments were restored throughout the continent within the year and universal representation of peoples had to wait for many more decades. As the historian G.M. Trevelyan put it, ‘The year 1848 was the turning-point at which modern history failed to turn.’2 1848 was also the year in which Karl Marx published his internationally influential pamphlet, The Communist Manifesto, but the wo
rk spawned no immediate intellectual or practical revolution; its significance was not recognised anywhere for many years to come.
Often, therefore, a particular year, month, or day which becomes celebrated as significant has been long prepared for. 1859 is a prime example. In November of that year Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life, to give the book its full, and important, title, was published. It is a work which finally expressed the result of over twenty years of research since Darwin returned from his voyage on the Beagle. A hint that the work was truly revolutionary is contained in the unwieldy subtitle, which finds in ‘natural selection’ the all-important, hitherto elusive, but eventually widely accepted mechanism of evolution. The concept of evolution itself was far from new, as Darwin acknowledged in ‘An Historical Sketch of the Progress of Opinion on the Origin of Species’, which he added for the third edition of his book, published in April 1861. Here he surveyed the subject from Aristotle via Buffon, his own grandfather Erasmus Darwin, Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, the anonymous author of the publishing sensation of 1844, Vestiges of Creation (known to the initiated to be the work of the Edinburgh publisher Robert Chambers), and Darwin’s rival-cum-enemy Professor Richard Owen, to Alfred Russel Wallace’s and his own discovery of natural selection as the explanation for the variation and preservation of species.3 On the Origin of Species was the result of many forces and circumstances in the world of science and in Darwin’s own life; it was at one and the same time a culmination and a beginning, since outside the circle of scientific experimenters with whom Darwin corresponded and exchanged papers, the wider non-scientific community was shocked and in some cases repelled by the inferences which now had to be drawn, particularly in the sphere of religious belief. Though 1859 was the year in which Darwin’s work met its public, the previous year was for him in a sense more momentous, since it was in the steamy June of 1858 that he received the greatest shock of his life – and the stimulus to complete his great work – in the form of a communication from his fellow naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, deep in his fieldwork in the Malay Archipelago.
In the autobiography which Darwin wrote late in life for his children he looked back at his career, making the point that ‘small circumstances’ and hidden causes can lead to great things. He noted that the voyage of the Beagle from 1831 to 1836 was ‘by far the most important event in my life and has determined my whole career, yet it depended on so small a circumstance as my uncle offering to drive me 30 miles to Shrewsbury, which few uncles would have done, and on such a trifle as the shape of my nose’.4 This droll observation refers to the fact that young Charles Darwin’s father objected to his leaving Cambridge, where he was supposed to be studying to become a clergyman after having given up his medical studies at Edinburgh, in order to travel as unpaid naturalist on the voyage of the Beagle to chart the seas of South America. Charles’s uncle Josiah Wedgwood interceded with his brother-in-law. The second ‘circumstance’ was the irascible and unstable nature of the captain of the ship, Robert FitzRoy, later the first official meteorologist when the precursor of the modern Meteorological Society was founded in 1854. FitzRoy agreed to take Darwin on, despite apparently distrusting the shape of his nose. ‘He was an ardent disciple of Lavater’, wrote Darwin, ‘and was convinced that he could judge a man’s character by the outline of his features; and he doubted whether anyone with my nose could possess sufficient energy and determination for the voyage.’ With a characteristic combination of confidence and modesty, Darwin concludes, ‘But I think he was afterwards well-satisfied that my nose had spoken falsely!’5
Though Darwin did not achieve wide fame until late in 1859 with the publication of his book, the hot summer of 1858 was the time of crisis for him, as it was, for different reasons, for his close contemporaries Dickens and Disraeli. Other Victorians of lasting fame, and some whose notoriety did not outlast the stifling summer heat, found themselves intricately involved in political, social, or cultural events of national importance during the short four-month period from May to August 1858. Several far-reaching acts of parliament were debated and passed: on the governance of India, Jewish representation in parliament, the medical profession, marriage and divorce, and – most visibly and nauseatingly – the ‘Great Stink’ for which 1858 is best known. That record-breaking summer the pollution of the Thames by untreated sewage reached the point where a reluctant parliament and a recalcitrant set of local councils, vestries, and water companies finally had to agree with what The Times and other newspapers had been arguing for years, namely that ‘something must be done’. An act of parliament was swiftly passed for the cleansing and embanking of the Thames, with Joseph Bazalgette put in charge of the efforts.
1858 was thus the year in which Bazalgette began his task of innovative engineering, described by the Observer in April 1861 as ‘the most extensive and wonderful work of modern times’. The great Thames embankments were the result. The sewage was conducted in intercepting sewers to outfalls east of London at Barking on the north side of the river and Crossness in the south, road congestion on the Strand running parallel to the river was relieved, part of the first underground railway network in London and the world was conveyed through the tunnel in 1864, and London was provided with a grand river promenade such as already enhanced many other European capitals.6
Several important inventions and innovations came into being, or prominence, in the summer of 1858. Brunel’s Great Eastern was a visitor attraction, despite the stink, at its mooring on the Thames at Deptford, prior to beginning its first long voyage. Even Queen Victoria braved the heat and stench to go on board at the end of June as the ship, double-skinned, with two sets of steam engines and capable of travelling to Australia without refuelling, awaited further financial support to complete its fitting-out.7 As it transpired, the Great Eastern was too advanced to be a complete success; very few harbours in the world were big enough or deep enough to allow it to dock. It achieved usefulness only in 1866, when it served to complete successfully that other feat of technical ingenuity which first came to public attention in the summer of 1858, namely the laying of the Atlantic Cable, the two parts of which came together for long enough on 16 August to enable Queen Victoria and President James Buchanan to exchange brief messages before the signals became faint and disappeared. Efforts were postponed until more money and greater technical expertise were acquired; a new company was formed to lay a new cable, and the Great Eastern, in laying it in 1866, finally achieved deserved, if unexpected, success.8
Significant advances were made in 1858 in the science of photography, so much so that in the early autumn of the year the very first photograph of a comet was taken. Donati’s Comet, first seen telescopically in Florence in June by Giovanni Battista Donati, was sighted in the south of England in September, and photographed on the 27th of the month by William Usherwood in Reigate, Surrey.9 The trade pages of Kelly’s Post Office London Directory first listed ‘Photographic Artists’ and ‘Photographic Apparatus Manufacturers’ in its 1858 edition, and G.A. Sala, in his topical newspaper column ‘Twice Round the Clock’, noted in July 1858 that ‘of late days, photographers have hung out their signs and set up their lenses in New Street’ (in London’s Covent Garden). According to Sala’s colourful account, if you passed ‘through the street’ in the afternoon, ‘you [ran] great risks of being forcibly dragged into the hole tenanted by a photographic “artist”, and “focussed”, willy-nilly’.10
Two plays put on in the spring of 1858 incorporated the newly popular art of photography. The Royal Lyceum Theatre presented John Hollingshead’s ‘domestic sketch’, The Birthplace of Podgers, in March. Its cast included two ‘photographic artists’ who are intent on immortalising the house where the ‘great literary man’ Podgers was said to have been born. In April a comic sketch in one act by two young members of the Dramatic Authors’ Society, N.H. Harrington and Edmund Yates, was presented at the nearby Strand Thea
tre. Entitled Your Likeness – One Shilling!, it took place entirely in a photographer’s studio at the top of a house with a glass roof.11 That photography had by now, since its introduction in 1839, advanced sufficiently for the lay person to choose it as a hobby is made clear by a sixpenny tract published in June 1858 by Edward Copland. Part of a series called Manuals for the Many, this illustrated work of thirty-two pages had the cumbersome but informative title:
Photography for the Many: containing Practical Directions for the Production of Photographic Pictures on Glass and Paper, with details of the most approved Processes, including Negative and Positive Collodion; the Dry Collodion for Tourists; Stereoscopics with One Camera; and the Whole Art of Printing from Negatives on Glass or Paper; with Particulars of the Cost of the Apparatus and Chemicals for each Process. With Twenty Illustrations by Edward A. Copland, Author of ‘The Aquarium and its Lessons’.
Copland recognised that some enthusiasts would wish to develop their photographs on the move; he explained how to do it by the dry negative collodion process. He also pointed out the usefulness of the new technique to ‘architects, engineers, &c., whose time is precious’.12
That year’s president of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Richard Owen, when summing up in September 1858 the year’s achievements in every branch of science, took the opportunity to praise recent advances in photographic technology, and to assess its importance in relation to other sciences and to ordinary lives. He saw that photography would make far-reaching and permanent changes to the way lives were lived and knowledge gained. ‘Photography’, he said, was ‘now a constant and indispensable servant in certain important meteorological records.’ It supplied the botanist and the zoologist with data for judging the rate of growth of plants and animals. Moreover, the ‘engineer at home’ could ascertain ‘by photographs transmitted by successive mails the weekly progress, brick by brick, board by board, nail by nail, of the most complex works on the Indian or other remote rail-roads’, and the ‘humblest emigrant’ could take with him images of ‘scenes and persons’ from the home he had left.13
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