by Paul Collins
Over breakfast they read the letters for the day. There were always letters, and his daughters had to sort the ones from friends from the great mass sent by strangers. It still amused Darwin's family that he never quite grasped just how famous he'd become. His sister confided to Moncure that, after the Prime Minister came by to visit one day, Darwin was left astounded. "To think of such a great man coming to see me!" he'd kept exclaiming afterward. But the letters he received were often of a humbler sort: rural gardeners writing about a new variety of bean they thought they'd developed. A man writing in with what he clearly believed to be important observations on pigeons. An unlettered farmer excited over his dog, who—evolving into a more intelligent being, clearly—seemed to know exactly when his master was about to take him outside for a walk. Darwin's family laughed over the well-meaning but crude letters, but the old scientist turned thoughtful as he dispatched the remains of his breakfast.
"Let them all be pleasantly answered," he said. "It is something to have people observing the things in their gardens and backyards."
As I walk out of Darwin's backyard, nobody seems to be observing me very much: the road back down to the village bus stop has almost no verge, so that Rovers and Renaults keep whistling past just inches away, sending me diving into the hedges. Overhead, every few minutes, a plane distantly rumbles up a steep angle of ascent as it leaves London. But then—improbably—one side of the road opens up into a glorious vision of old England. A manor, a blue sky, a line of trees. A woman on horseback clops by behind me, and suddenly there are no cars visible anywhere, no planes overhead: for a moment, the past is visible not in the mute sepia of antiquity, but in the color and living silence of actual being.
Trowmer Lodge is an ancient dwelling, so much so that it has acquired at least three different spellings—Troumer, Trowmer, and Tromer. It is set behind struck-off flint walls and a drained fishpond now filled in with lush green grass and the shade of a weeping willow. An actual Troumer family lived here from at least the 1300s, and held on to their home for centuries until the reign of Henry VIII. By 1868 Darwin's daughter Elizabeth owned the house, and as Moncure Conway walked past Trowmer Lodge, he didn't notice the tenant to whom Elizabeth had rented the house. Within was a fellow man of the cloth—one that he in fact already knew.
The Reverend Robert Ainslie was a respectable fellow, as orthodox in his belief as Conway was liberal; the two men had met years before, soon after Conway arrived in England. By then Ainslie had led a series of London lectures against "Infidel Socialism," and written pamphlets bearing titles like Is There a God?(In case you were wondering, apparently the answer is: yes.) But amid his old Hebrew and Latin books, his volumes of theology and history, something rather more curious sat in Ainslie's study—and had been sitting there for twenty years when Conway walked right past his house completely unaware.
I walk onward, my gaze following the stolid house in an arc as it moves out of sight. A chance comment by Elizabeth or Charles on the tenant, and Conway would have sat up and taken note: he always stopped off to visit other clergymen. Indeed, he generally found that even the most conservative ministers gave him the politest reception of all the people he met when traveling. Yes: he could have been invited inside, had a cup of tea in that very study where . . .
Ah, but chance did not work that way.
The road comes to a T in front of an old chapel. St. Mary's is the end of the line: the bus into Bromley terminates at this end, making its turnaround in front of a churchyard that forms the very final stop indeed for town residents. The church, like everything else around here, is built of handsome chunks of flint, and surrounding it are the wind-blasted and lichen-covered stubs of old tombstones. I lean down to read one. It is for James Fontaine, a minister who died at the age of twenty soon after preaching a sermon titled "In the Midst of Life We Are in Death." Very astute of him, if rather more astute than he might have hoped. Thursday saw him cheerful and grateful for health, the stone's inscription notes. August 6th, 1825, a pale corpse.
Charles Darwin's wife Emma is buried here, as is his brother Erasmus. So are Charles's faithful house servants of thirty-six years, Joseph and Eliza Parslow. But . . . Charles is not here. This is the churchyard where Darwin himself wished to be buried, and in as modest a casket and simple a ceremony as possible. It didn't happen. The government, pleading national pride with Darwin's family, buried him in Westminster Abbey in a blazingly sumptuous coffin. And so now instead of voyaging through eternity with his wife by his side, his closest company, within whispering distance of him below the ground, is Sir Isaac Newton. Somehow it seems unsurprising by now: for once dead, we no longer belong to ourselves. It is the final loss of control.
I'm the only person to board the bus, and it roars me back toward my London-bound train, its silence punctuated only by an occasional immense sneeze from the burly driver. We pass the vast fields of nature that Darwin loved so well: shady trees, grazing cows, and the ripe smell of manure in the air. As I settle in to peruse through some old maps and directories I picked up back in Guildford, back where I was searching for Chennell's house, a notation on one catches my eye: 'The High Street was renumbered in 1959," it says, and . . . Dammit. I pore over a 1739 merchant directory and map, and—for chrissake—the numbers are all different. I trace my thumb over the old numbering of the municipal lots to a notation of 132, the location of a fruiterer. So 130, where Chennell lived? That used to be on the other side of Tunsgate.
The perfume shop.
As the cows look up with bored eyes at our passing bus, with nobody but me to hear, I laugh incredulously. It's perfect. I'd done exactly what everyone else has ever done. I walked right through a resting place of Paine's bones without realizing it at all.
Since you already know the rules of Mornington Crescent game, I won't bore you with them here. But, needless to say, I have studied them deeply: I have examined the routes of Victorian hansom drivers, read the Welsh-language texts on the Double-Reverse Stratagem, and in the Public Records Office I found the first known description of Trumpington's Gambit scrawled into the margins of a torn-out page of Beeton's Christmas Annual for 1889. The curious thing about the latter text is that . . .
Sorry? You haven't heard the rules?
"Mind the gap," the tunnel scolds.
The elevator begins the long ascent to the surface. Mornington Crescent is one of the deeper tube stations in London; you wouldn't want to install escalators here. In fact, once the elevators broke down in the early 1990s, they closed the place for five years and almost shut it down for good. For decades beforehand, many trains wouldn't even stop here: nobody ever much uses this station. True, it's got a rather lovely glazed terra-cotta building atop it, the inspiration for the 1920s comic song "The Night I Appeared As Macbeth":
The audience yelled 'You're sublime!"
They made me a present of Mornington Crescent
They threw it one brick at a time.
The bricks are all back in place, the station very nicely restored—and still nobody much uses it. I emerge into daylight and almost immediately trip up: pavers are scattered everywhere, along with sawhorses and taped-off areas, all haphazardly arranged as if a local drunk stumbling out of the Mornington Arms had been put in charge of the sidewalk repairs.
And out here is where Conway stood, wondering—where? Where is he?
Days after burying James Watson in 1874, Conway placed a notice in the National Reformer asking for any information from readers about Paine's remains. Watson had them, true, but the question of whether he'd buried Paine, and that jar ofbones sighted in Guildford in 1849 . . .well, it was all very confusing. The mystery only deepened when a minister in Manchesterwrote to Conway and not only claimed to have seen the revolutionary's skeleton, but also spoke ofburying it.
This was hardly an idle claim, for it came from Alexander Gordon, who along with Conway was one of the most prominent Unitarian ministers in the country. It's not hard to see how Paine held an interest for
him. Gordon was a well-regarded historian of religious dissent, and not long before writing Conway, he'd already come to notice for his sensational discovery of the continuing existence of the Muggletonians. A religious sect as whimsical sounding in its theology as in its name, the Muggletonians were founded by two London tailors in the 1640s, John Reeve and Lodowick Muggleton. They believed they were living in end times, but of an exceedingly curious sort: namely that they, when not busy taking up people's trousers, were endowed with God-like powers—not least because God himself no longer cared about the Earth and wouldn't interfere. Their God lived six miles above the ground, in a realm of planets and stars that were actually exceedingly small: in fact, what we perceived in the sky was their actual size.
One can only imagine Gordon's amazement when he stumbled upon a Muggletonian meeting in 1860. It was a veritable religious version of The Lost World: the sect was not even thought to exist anymore. And yet, sure enough, there they were: in fact, the members had been creating some very lovely Muggletonian celestial maps over the last few decades. Their utter obscurity makes sense when you realize that, almost alone among every religious sect ever known, the Muggletonians had no interest in proselytizing. They were the world's laziest cult, and assumed that anyone meant to join them would eventually find them somehow. Not that they'd have been easy to find. The Muggletonians did not believe in churches: they liked to hold their meetings in taverns.
After getting his head around a Muggletonian meeting, encountering a boxful of Tom Paine must have seemed downright normal to Gordon. And if it took him a few years to get around to burying them, well, he was certainly already busy with other projects as it was. Gordon was one of the most prolific contributors to that monument of Victorian historical reference, the Dictionary of National Biography, writing a staggering 699 entries for it. But the voluble minister turned very quiet when pressed for any further details about Paine, even when asked by a colleague like Conway. Perhaps, Conway theorized, Gordon had buried the remains near those of Paine's parents at Thetford. But perhaps not. It sounded like Gordon had buried Paine, but as Conway noted, "that gentleman gave no further particulars."
And with this final mystery, that should have been that: the end of Paine's travels.
But after giving a London lecture on Paine in 1876, Conway received a curious note in the mail from a London bookseller. "I remember a gentleman who had Paine's skull," it claimed. Once, in '53 or '54 and scarcely after the auction of Tilly's goods, a customer saw Paine's Works on display in his London shop and blurted out—maybe he couldn't help but gloat—"I have Paine's skull and right hand." When the shopkeeper pressed him for details, he clammed up. But clearly the customer felt safely anonymous in the first place, and figured the clerk didn't know who he was. Only—the clerk did. And years later, when the same man stopped by the store once again, the same shopkeeper recognized him again and pestered him anew for details. Where's the skull? What did you do with it? Where'sthe. . . ? . . .
And the customer ? It was none other than the Reverend Robert Ainslie.
When visiting Darwin a few years earlier Conway had walked rightpast the skull at Trowmer Lodge. It was absolutely maddening to realize, and he was determined not to miss it this time. The reverend now lived just steps from here, at 71 Mornington Road, and so Conway fired off a letter to him asking for details-but what he got back in reply was crushing. The reply was addressed in a feminine hand, and not in the writing of the reverend at all. Ainslie, it seemed, had died immediately before Conway's letter arrived. "Mr. Thomas Paine's bones were in our possession," a grieving daughter wrote back to Conway. "I remember them as a child, but I believe they were lost in various movings which my father had some years ago. I can find no trace of them . . ."
First Watson, now Ainslie: authors kept taking Paine's secret to their graves. And this latest lead made no sense at all. Why would this strictly conventional minister want the skull of the great infidel himself? Conway pondered the possibilities: was, he wondered, the Reverend Ainslie studying Paine's phrenology?
A trio of teens come up the sidewalk, bouncing a soccer ball on their way home from practice.
". . . and so it's shit then, innit?" one explains.
"S'not."
This dialectic is interrupted when the ball bounces wildly off one of the loose pavers and into the street; it's about as random a shot as any round of the Mornington Crescent game would be.
Ah—the Game. If you're an American, then I will have to explain. There is an ancient and honorable Mornington Crescent game, one which you will occasionally hear Brits speaking of: but when pressed for details of how the game is played, they not only wriggle out of an explanation, but will leave you more confused about it than when you started. Oh, they will say, surely you already know. Or: The rules are easy tofind. Iwon't troubleyou with recounting them. It is a game that seems to involve a strategic recitation of tube stops, the goal being the first to be able to utter "Mornington Crescent." The game's roots go back centuries, enthusiasts will tell you—perhaps even to the era of Roman occupation. And it has wildly proliferated over that time into innumerable stratagems and alternate rules: there's Crockford's Official Gambling Version, Lord Grosvenor's Original Metropolitan Rules, Tobermory's Stratagem, and of course Thornton's Controversial Third Amendment. There are books on Mornington Crescent, even an almanac, and yet somehow they get one no closer to understanding it. But when pressed, a veteran player did outline some of the rules once for the BBC:
* Boxing out the F, J, 0 and W placings draws the partner into an elliptical progression north to south.
* In a weak positional play, it is vital to consolidate an already strong outer square, eg Pentonville Road.
* The lateral shift decisively breaks opponents' horizontal and vertical approaches.
There. Now do you understand the game?
The glory of the Mornington Crescent game is that it is complete and utter nonsense. It's an immense put-on: the product of a radio show where contestants sit stroking their beards and oracularly muttering tube station names, all while the host gives impenetrable play-by-play analyses befitting chess grandmasters. It ends when one player, at no particular prompting, shouts out "Mornington Crescent!"—and the audience goes wild. Any rube visiting Britain who asks what it all means, or what the rules are, is then methodically flummoxed with absurdly fake histories of the game and utter evasion as to its actual workings.
Want to know where Tom Paine is? You might as well consult the Mornington Crescent Game Almanac. Tom Paine is lost: Tom Paine is found: Tom Paine is destroyed: Tom Paine is preserved: he is here: he is there. Tom Paine is everywhere and Tom Paine is nowhere. Where is Tom Paine? You didn't know? Where . . . I have buried his skeleton but can't tell you about it. Where is he? Well, we had his bones but lost them. Where is . . . Well, we won't trouble you wit6 an explanation of w6ere he is, since sure4 you already know . . .
Of course Tom Paine's bones got off at Mornington Crescent.
Ha bloody ha.
That year Conway made one of his occasional forays back to the United States, where the Centennial was now in full swing. The minister felt ambivalent about the celebrations, and the halo that martyrdom had placed upon Lincoln's head did not impress him much either. He had met Lincoln: the man was not a mythical figure to Conway, nor could he be. "Lincoln decided that the fate of the country should be determined by powder and shot," he wrote bitterly. "In the canonization of Lincoln there lurks the canonization of the sword . . . By the same method Booth placed in the presidential chair a tipsy tailor from Tennessee, who founded in the South a reign of terror over the negro race.''
But Conway rallied in the genial company of Mark Twain. The two had met in London years earlier, and now, staying in Twain's house in Hartford, Conway found the author in fine mischievous form.
"Here's a fellow"—Twain quietly stole into Conway's guest room, flourishing a letter—"who has for some time been trying to get my autograph under the pretens
e of business. I have to answer his notes, but have been playing a game. Mrs. Clemens has been writing my replies, but just for a change we want you to write one." Conway had already been writing, and so with his pen at the ready he scratched out a reply to the correspondent, signed: S. L. Clemens . . . per M.D. C.
"Mark," he wrote afterward, "went out with a triumphant smile."
The two enjoyed simple pranks and entertainments, and the billiards room got plenty of use any time Moncure visited. Once, when a friend brought Twain a mechanical hopping frog she'd found in Paris, Conway watched Twain "more amused than I had ever seen him. He got down on his hands and knees and followed the leaping automaton all about the room." On the pretext of introducing Moncure, they visited next door, where Mark's neighbor Harriet Beecher Stowe was piously writing her book Biblical Heroines; the men pretended to be surprised when their sober conversation was interrupted by an invasion of costumed neighborhood children. Twain had conspired with them to stage a "Mrs. Jarvis's Wax Works'—a living tableau of famous historical scenes and paintings that was one of the great parlor games of the time. Twain proceeded to narrate each scene illustrated to Stowe and Conway, drolly instructing, "Bring on that tin-shop!" to introduce one boy in clanking knight's armor.
But Twain and Conway were both writing prolifically that summer too—indeed, Twain trusted the minister's moral and literary judgment so implicitly that he now appointed him as his British literary agent. It was an auspicious time to do so. Twain had just composed a tale based upon his own childhood, much of it written in an octagonal study. If Twain found the Fowler brothers and their phrenology suspect—he'd once visited a Fowler office months apart, under an assumed name and then as his own famous self, and amused himself with the utterly contradictory head-readings they gave him-he certainly seemed to find their architecture productive for writing. He gave Conway a handwritten manuscript to take back to London with him, in the hope that publishing the book there first would help secure copyright for its American publication.