One Hot Summer

by Rosemary Ashton

  12.For Huxley’s life and career, see Leonard Huxley, Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley, 2 vols (London, 1900), Cyril Bibby, Scientist Extraordinary: The Life and Scientific Work of Thomas Henry Huxley 1825–1895 (London, 1972), and Paul White, Thomas Huxley: Making the ‘Man of Science’ (Cambridge, 2003).

  13.Darwin, Autobiography, p. 106.

  14.Ibid., p. 101.

  15.Sir Charles Lyell to Darwin, 15 March 1863, Life, Letters and Journals of Sir Charles Lyell, Bart., ed. by his sister-in-law Mrs Lyell, 2 vols (London, 1881), vol. 2, p. 366.

  16.Freeman, Charles Darwin, pp. 169–70; ODNB entry for Huxley.

  17.Leonard Huxley, Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley, vol. 1, pp. 91, 96.

  18.Alfred Russel Wallace, My Life: A Record of Events and Opinions (London, 1908), p. 45.

  19.Ibid., pp. 143–4, 146.

  20.Ibid., p. 168.

  21.Ibid., pp. 175, 177, 194–5; Alfred Russel Wallace to his mother, 30 September 1854, Alfred Russel Wallace: Letters from the Malay Archipelago, ed. John van Wyhe and Kees Rookmaaker (Oxford, 2013), pp. 21–2.

  22.Letters from the Malay Archipelago, p. 125 and n. For Wallace’s career see also Peter Raby, Alfred Russel Wallace: A Life (London, 2001), Ross A. Slotten, The Heretic in Darwin’s Court: The Life of Alfred Russel Wallace (New York, 2004), and Michael A. Flannery, Alfred Russel Wallace: A Rediscovered Life (Seattle, Washington State, 2011).

  23.Wallace to Henry Walter Bates, 4 January 1858, Letters from the Malay Archipelago, p. 146.

  24.Wallace to Bates, 25 January 1858, ibid., p. 148.

  25.Wallace to Samuel Stevens, 15 May 1857, ibid., pp. 127, 128.

  26.Wallace, My Life, p. 183.

  27.Darwin, memorandum, December 1855, Correspondence, vol. 5, pp. 510–11, 521–2n.

  28.Darwin to Wallace, 1 May 1857, ibid., vol. 6, p. 387.

  29.Ibid.

  30.Wallace to Darwin, 27 September 1857, Letters from the Malay Archipelago, p. 132.

  31.Darwin to Wallace, 22 December 1857, Correspondence, vol. 6, pp. 514–15.

  32.Darwin to Syms Covington, 18 May 1858, ibid., vol. 7, p. 95. For a fictionalised account of Covington’s life in Australia, see Roger McDonald, Mr Darwin’s Shooter (London, 1998).

  33.See Darwin, Autobiography, p. 124.

  34.See Darwin to William Darwin Fox, 8 May 1858, Correspondence, vol. 7, p. 90.

  35.Darwin to Hooker, 8 June 1858, ibid., vol. 7, p. 102.

  36.Dickens to Daniel Maclise, [11 June 1858], Letters, vol. 8, p. 584.

  37.‘Mr Charles Dickens Reading “Little Dombey” at St Martin’s Hall’, Illustrated London News, vol. 33 (31 July 1858), p. 100.

  38.See Slater, Charles Dickens, p. 463.

  39.Dickens, Dombey and Son (1846–8), chap. 16.

  40.See Martin Hewitt, The Dawn of the Cheap Press in Victorian Britain: The End of the ‘Taxes on Knowledge’ 1849–1869 (London, 2014).

  41.Dickens’s statement, The Times, 7 June 1858; Household Words, 12 June 1858.

  42.See Dickens to Frederic Ouvry, 2 June 1858, and to William Macready, 7 June 1858, Letters, vol. 8, pp. 577 and n., 579–80 and n.

  43.Dickens to William Holman Hunt, 13 and 20 April 1858, ibid., vol. 8, pp. 543 and n., 548 and n.

  44.St James’s Chronicle, 8 June 1858.

  45.Era, 13 June 1858.

  46.Court Circular, 12 June 1858, and Reynolds’s Newspaper, 13 June 1858; both articles are quoted in part in Fielding, ‘Dickens and the Hogarth Scandal’, pp. 71–2.

  47.William Henry Wills to Frederic Ouvry, 14 June 1858, ibid., p. 71.

  48.See Shannon, Dickens, Reynolds, and Mayhew on Wellington Street, p. 28.

  49.Carlyle to Ralph Waldo Emerson, 2 June 1858, Collected Letters, vol. 33, p. 233.

  50.The Life and Reminiscences of E.L. Blanchard, with Notes from the Diary of Wm. Blanchard, ed. Clement Scott and Cecil Howard, 2 vols (London, 1891), vol. 1, p. 198.

  51.Thackeray to his mother, early June, Letters and Private Papers, vol. 4, p. 87.

  52.G.H. Lewes, journal, 14 June 1858, MS George Eliot / George Henry Lewes Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

  53.For Dickens’s itinerary, see Letters, vol. 8, pp. 752–3.

  54.Queen Victoria, journal, 4, 5, and 8 June 1858, online at http://www.queenvictoriasjournals.org, vol. 45, pp. 228, 234.

  55.The Times, 7 June 1858.

  56.See Edmund Yates, Recollections and Experiences, 2 vols (London, 1884), vol. 1, p. 227; Altick, The Shows of London, pp. 475–7.

  57.Disraeli to his wife, Letters, vol. 7, p. 200; for the temperature report see The Times, 10 June 1858.

  58.The Times, 11 June 1858.

  59.See ibid., 8 June 1858.

  60.Disraeli to Bulwer Lytton, [8 June 1858], Letters, vol. 7, p. 201.

  61.Rosina Bulwer Lytton, A Blighted Life: A True Story (London, 1880); see also David Lytton Cobbold, A Blighted Marriage: The Life of Rosina Bulwer Lytton, Irish Beauty, Satirist and Tormented Wife, 1802–1882 (Knebworth, 1999).

  62.For a detailed summary of election day in Hertford, see Sarah Wise, Inconvenient People: Lunacy, Liberty and the Mad Doctors in Victorian England (London, 2012), pp. 223–6.

  63.Carlyle to Jane Carlyle, 11 July 1858, Collected Letters, vol. 34, p. 30.

  64.Rosina Bulwer Lytton to Rebecca Ryves, 11 June 1858, Collected Letters, vol. 3, p. 70; The Times, 9 June 1858.

  65.Earl of Lytton, The Life of Edward Bulwer Lytton, first Lord Lytton, 2 vols (London, 1913), vol. 2, p. 269.

  66.See James A. Davies, John Forster: A Literary Life (Leicester, 1983), pp. 40, 41. The journalist Thornton Hunt called Forster ‘the beadle of the universe’, see Alethea Hayter, A Sultry Month: Scenes of London Literary Life in 1846 (London, 1966, reprinted 1992), p. 163.

  67.Mitchell, Bulwer Lytton, p. 63.

  68.Rosina Bulwer Lytton to Rebecca Ryves, 12 June 1858, Collected Letters, vol. 3, p. 72.

  69.Rosina Bulwer Lytton to Frederick Hale Thomson, 15 June 1858, ibid., vol. 3, p. 76.

  70.For a number of cases dating from 1858, see Wise, Inconvenient People, pp. 252–81.

  71.‘Commission of Lunacy’, The Times, 18 June 1858.

  72.See The Times account in the article ‘Commission of Lunacy’, 11 June 1858.

  73.For monetary values then and now, see Slater, Charles Dickens, p. xviii, and http://www.measuringworth.com.

  74.See ODNB entry for Sir Henry Meux and reports in The Times on 9, 10, 11, 18, and 21 June 1858.

  75.People’s Paper, 19 June 1858. For Edwin James’s career, see ODNB. See also Wise, Inconvenient People, p. 274.

  76.Rosina Bulwer Lytton to Rebecca Ryves, 11 June 1858, Collected Letters, vol. 3, p. 70.

  77.Carlyle to his brother John, 12 June 1858, Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle, vol. 33, p. 240.

  78.Carlyle to Forster, 17 June 1858, ibid., vol. 33, pp. 242–3.

  79.Queen Victoria, journal, 13 June 1858, online at http://www.queenvictoriasjournals.org, vol. 45, p. 238.

  80.Disraeli to Sarah Brydges Willyams, 16 June 1858, Letters, vol. 7, p. 205.

  81.See Morning Chronicle, 1 June 1858.

  82.See Ritchie, Here and There in London, p. 11; ODNB entry for Lord Chelmsford (previously Sir Frederick Thesiger); Disraeli, Letters, vol. 7, pp. 205–6n.

  83.Liverpool Mercury, 2 June 1858.

  84.Lord Derby to Lord Carnarvon, Carnarvon Papers, vol. 9, Add MS 60,765, British Library.

  85.Weekly Chronicle, 19 June 1858.

  86.See ‘Pestilential State of the Thames’, Era, 20 June 1858.

  87.‘The State of the Thames’, People’s Paper, 3 July 1858.

  88.Theatrical Journal, 23 June 1858.

  89.‘The Weather and the Wigs’, Weekly Chronicle, 19 June 1858.

  90.See P.D. Edwards, Dickens’s ‘Young Men’: George Augustus Sala, Edmund Yates, and the World of Victorian Journalism (Aldershot, 1997).

  91.For Sala’s life and career see
his ODNB entry, and Ralph Straus, Sala: The Portrait of an Eminent Victorian (London, 1942). For details of the circulation of cheap newspapers in 1855–8 see Richard Altick, The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800–1900 (Columbus, Ohio, 1957, reprinted 1988), pp. 394–5.

  92.Sala, Twice Round the Clock, pp. 95, 98, 100–101, 193.

  93.G.A. Sala to Edmund Yates, [December 1858], Letters of George Augustus Sala to Edmund Yates, ed. Judy McKenzie (University of Queensland Victorian Fiction Research Guide, 1993), p. 53.

  94.Ibid., pp. 25, 32–3, 143, 148, 327, 333.

  95.G.A. Sala, The Life and Adventures of George Augustus Sala, Written by Himself, 2 vols (London, 1895), vol. 1, p. 381.

  96.‘Gossip of the Week’, Reynolds’s Newspaper, 20 June 1858; Sala to Yates, [31 January 1859], Letters of Sala to Yates, p. 59.

  97.‘The Lounger at the Clubs’, Illustrated Times, vol. 6 (12 June 1858), p. 415.

  98.Yates, Recollections and Experiences, vol. 2, p. 2.

  99.See Guy Boas, The Garrick Club 1831–1947 (London, 1948), p. 41.

  100.Yates, Recollections and Experiences, vol. 1, pp. 218–19.

  101.Yates, ‘Literary Talk’, Town Talk, 12 June 1858.

  102.Thackeray to Mrs Baxter, 23 April 1858, Letters and Private Papers, vol. 4, p. 80.

  103.Yates, Town Talk, 12 June 1858.

  104.Yates, Recollections and Experiences, vol. 2, pp. 9–10.

  105.See Thackeray’s diary, 3 January–23 September 1858, Letters and Private Papers, vol. 4, pp. 390–4.

  106.Thackeray to Yates, 13 June 1858, Letters and Private Papers, vol. 4, pp. 89–90.

  107.Ibid., vol. 4, pp. 90–1n.

  108.Yates, Recollections and Experiences, vol. 2, p. 18.

  109.Dickens to Yates, 15 June 1858, Letters, vol. 8, p. 588; for ‘My dear Edmund’, see the letter of 8 June 1858, ibid., vol. 8, p. 581.

  110.Yates to Thackeray, 15 June 1858, Letters and Private Papers of William Makepeace Thackeray, vol. 4, pp. 91–2.

  111.Yates, Recollections and Experiences, vol. 2, pp. 15–16.

  112.Thackeray to Bulwer Lytton, 21 June 1853, Letters and Private Papers, vol. 3, p. 278.

  113.Thackeray to the committee of the Garrick Club, 19 June 1858, Letters and Private Papers, vol. 4, pp. 93–4.

  114.Thackeray to Charles Dickens Jr, 15 June 1858, Gordon N. Ray, Thackeray: The Age of Wisdom (1847–1863) (London, 1958), p. 477, n. 20.

  115.See James C. Whorton, The Arsenic Century: How Victorian Britain was Poisoned at Home, Work and Play (Oxford, 2010), pp. 262–70.

  116.Punch, vol. 34 (12 June 1858), p. 233.

  117.The Times, Editorial, ‘An Extraordinary Meeting at St James’s-hall’, 12 June 1858.

  118.Queen Victoria to her daughter Vicky, 14 June 1858, Dearest Child: Letters between Queen Victoria and the Princess Royal, ed. Roger Fulford (London, 1964), p. 113. Vicky had got married, aged seventeen, on 25 January 1858.

  119.Punch, vol. 35 (24 July 1858), p. 35; see also ibid., vol. 35 (9 October and 27 November 1858), pp. 147, 217.

  120.J. Ewing Ritchie, The London Pulpit (London, 1858), pp. 47–8.

  121.Basil F. Clarke, Parish Churches of London (London, 1966), pp. 185–6.

  122.‘The Lounger at the Club’, Illustrated Times, vol. 6 (19 June 1858), p. 431.

  Chapter Four: June 1858, part II

  1.‘To the Editor’, The Times, 16 June 1858.

  2.See, for example, a report from Berkhamsted in Hertfordshire, ibid., 18 June 1858.

  3.Bromley Record, vol. 1 (1 July 1858), p. 8.

  4.National Meteorological Library and Archive, https://library.metoffice.gov.uk/M10326UK/OPAC/Details/Record.aspx?BibCode=56602443.

  5.Hansard, vol. 150, cols 2157–89, 16 June 1858.

  6.Disraeli to Sarah Brydges Willyams, 16 June 1858, Letters, vol. 7, p. 204 and n.

  7.The Times, 19 June 1858.

  8.B.W. Richardson, memoir of John Snow in Snow, On Chloroform and Other Anaesthetics: Their Action and Administration (London, 1858), pp. xlii–xliv.

  9.Ibid., p. xxii.

  10.The authorities in Paris continued to subscribe to the miasma theory until well into the 1880s: see Barnes, The Great Stink of Paris, and Colin Jones, Paris: Biography of a City (London, 2004), pp. 338–9.

  11.Builder, vol. 16 (26 June 1858), p. 445.

  12.The Times, 18 June 1858.

  13.‘Pestilential State of the Thames’, Era, 20 June 1858.

  14.‘To the Editor’, The Times, 18 June 1858.

  15.Illustrated London News, vol. 32 (26 June 1858), p. 626; Times editorial, 29 June 1858; Luckin, Pollution and Control, p. 17; Allen, Cleansing the City, p. 57.

  16.See Halliday, The Great Filth, pp. 75–6; Allen, Cleansing the City, pp. 57–8.

  17.Annual Register (1858), p. 111.

  18.Carlyle to Joseph Neuberg, 21 June 1858, Collected Letters, vol. 33, p. 246.

  19.E.L. Blanchard, diary, 23 June 1858, Life and Reminiscences, vol. 1, p. 199.

  20.John Ruskin to his father, 25 June 1858, John Ruskin: Letters from the Continent 1858, ed. John Hayman (Toronto, 1982), p. 58.

  21.Motley to his wife, 20 June 1858, Correspondence, vol. 1, pp. 271, 269.

  22.Letter to the editor of The Times, 21 June 1858. For the arguments between the crown and the City of London over ownership of the Thames foreshore, see Luckin, Pollution and Control, pp. 143–4.

  23.John Simon and Edward Headlam Greenhow, Papers Relating to the Sanitary State of the People of England, June 1858, House of Commons Parliamentary Papers Online, pp. iii–iv.

  24.See Royston Lambert, Sir John Simon (1816–1904) and English Social Administration (London, 1963), pp. 50–51.

  25.See ‘Return of the Number of Select Committees appointed in the Session of 1857–8’, House of Commons Parliamentary Papers Online, p. 749.

  26.See Disraeli, Letters, vol. 7, p. 214n.

  27.Queen Victoria, journal, 23 June 1858, online at http://www.queenvictoriasjournals.org, vol. 45, p. 254.

  28.Disraeli to Queen Victoria, 24 June 1858, Letters, vol. 7, p. 215.

  29.Ibid., vol. 7, p. 216n.

  30.The Times, 26 June 1858.

  31.Report from the select committee on the River Thames, 17 July 1858, House of Commons Parliamentary Papers Online, pp. 252–85.

  32.The Times, 26 June 1858.

  33.See ODNB entry for Thwaites.

  34.See Halliday, The Great Filth, p. 205.

  35.People’s Paper, 5 June 1858.

  36.‘No Coat, No Justice’, ibid., 26 June 1858.

  37.Alfred Smee, letter to the editor of The Times, 26 June 1858; Illustrated London News, vol. 32 (26 June 1858), p. 631; Era, 27 June 1858.

  38.‘Londoners, Look to Your River!’, Era, 27 June 1858.

  39.Darwin to Lyell, 26 June 1858, Correspondence, vol. 7, p. 119.

  40.Darwin to Hooker, 23 June, to W.D. Fox, 24 and 27 June, and to Lyell, 25 June 1858, ibid., vol. 7, pp. 115–19.

  41.See Queen Victoria, journal, 19, 21, 22, 23, 24 June 1858, online at http://www.queenvictoriasjournals.org, vol. 45, pp. 251–9.

  42.Queen Victoria, journal, 26 June 1858, ibid., vol. 45, p. 258.

  43.See the list of subscribers to Rarey’s book, The Times, 19 April 1858.

  44.Punch, preface to vol. 34 (January–June 1858), p. iii; How I Tamed Mrs Cruiser, by Benedict Cruiser, M.M. (Married Man), and now H.H. (Happy Husband), ed. George Augustus Sala, with Illustrations by Phiz [Hablot Knight Browne] (London, 1858).

  45.Queen Victoria to Vicky, 29 June 1858, Dearest Child, p. 118.

  46.Queen Victoria, journal, 28 June 1858, online at http://www.queenvictoriasjournals.org, vol. 45, p. 260.

  47.‘Queen of the River’, Punch, vol. 35 (10 July 1858), p. 20.

  48.Weekly Chronicle, 19 June 1858, p. 5.

  49.See Buchanan, The Life and Times of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, p. 123.

  50.Thomas Wright, Some Habits and Customs of the Working Classes,
by a Journeyman Engineer (London, 1867), pp. 251–60.

  51.Isambard Kingdom Brunel to John Scott Russell, 2 October 1855, Buchanan, Life and Times, p. 121.

  52.The Times, 18 and 20 April 1858; see also Vaughan, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, p. 257.

  53.Buchanan, Life and Times, p. 123.

  54.See The Times, 2, 4, 5, 7, 11, 16, and 17 December 1857; Carlyle to John Carlyle, 7 December 1857, Collected Letters, vol. 33, p. 128.

  55.Vaughan, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, p. 258; ODNB entry for Henry Thomas Hope.

  56.Buchanan, Life and Times, p. 128.

  57.Ibid., pp. 127–32; Vaughan, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, pp. 260–69.

  58.See ODNB entry for Robert Howlett.

  59.Irving, Annals of Our Time, p. 524.

  60.See The Times, 3 July 1858.

  61.Athenaeum, 3 July 1858, p. 24.

  62.‘Advice in Hot Weather’, Punch, vol. 35 (3 July 1858), p. 9.

  63.Princess Royal to Queen Victoria, 24 July 1858, Dearest Child, p. 124.

  64.Gwen Raverat, Period Piece: A Cambridge Childhood (London, 1952), p. 260.

  65.See Lucy Johnston with Marion Kite and Helen Persson, Nineteenth-Century Fashion in Detail, V&A Publications (London, 2005), p. 128.

  66.See Norah Waugh, Corsets and Crinolines (New York, 1954, reprinted 2004), pp. 79, 93.

  67.‘Philosophy and Fashion’, Punch, vol. 48 (6 May 1865), p. 181.

  68.Mary Anne Disraeli to Sarah Brydges Willyams, 24 April 1856, Hay, Mr and Mrs Disraeli, p. 181.

  69.Elizabeth Gaskell, ‘The Cage at Cranford’, All the Year Round, vol. 10 (28 November 1863), pp. 332–6.

  70.‘Every Lady her own Perambulator’, Punch, vol. 31 (23 August 1856), p. 77.

  71.‘Crinolineomania. Treated pathologically by Dr Punch’, ibid., vol. 31 (27 December 1856), p. 253.

  72.‘Effect of Crinoline on Parties’ and ‘Crinoline in the Studio’, ibid., vol. 32 (7 February and 2 May 1857), pp. 57, 177.

  73.‘A Wholesome Conclusion’, ibid., vol. 34 (6 February 1858), p. 54; ‘Crinoline in the Slums’, ibid., vol. 35 (10 July 1858), p. 17; ‘New Omnibus Regulation’, ibid., vol. 35 (2 October 1858), p. 133.

  74.‘The Theatre of Crinoline’, ibid., vol. 34 (29 May 1858), p. 221.

  75.‘The Opening of the New Opera House, Covent-garden’, Builder, vol. 16 (22 May 1858), pp. 345–7.