The Trouble with Tom

by Paul Collins

  Conway was to be one of the book's very first readers. And as his steamboat made its way back across the Atlantic, he read the manuscript and realized with awe that his friend was now something much more than a humorist. 'Twain," he wrote, "had entered upon a larger literary field." But fellow passengers who spied the unfamiliar title scrawled across the sheaf s first page would hardly have any notion of what they were seeing: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.

  The ball goes back and forth, from one side of the court to the other. Pock, bounce, pock. Bounce. Pock. I can never quite get used to the sight of a tennis court in Lincoln's Inn Field: central London is an area of such density that it seems almost fanciful. But I finally turn my back on the players and face a brutal modern building that elbows aside the line of brick Georgians. Ah, now that's more like the dog's breakfast of a city that I expect.

  Is that where Conway went looking? It's hard to tell sometimes. Walking around London after Conway had returned bearing Tom Sawyer, Twain's editor Laurence Hutton would occasionally interrupt his own obsessive hunt for famous death masks—of Words- worth, Paine, Cromwell, and the like—to marvel at how utterly changeable the city's addresses were. "It is easier to-day to discover the house of a man who died two hundred years ago, before the streets were numbered at all, than to identify the houses of men who have died within a few years, and since the mania for changing the names and numbers of streets began," he complained.

  Lincoln's Inn Fields is quite the reverse: the addresses have stayed the same while the use of the place has changed over time. They used to hang people here, back before it was remade into a lush green space. And even then, as one of the largest open spaces in the neighborhood, this field became a favorite spot for staging duels. But now—pock, swish, pock—it has become rather less violent. Office workers eat their cheese-and-pickle sandwiches out here, loll on the grass, and watch the little tennis ball bouncing. A great many of them are from that monstrous newer building—the Cancer Trust—and more are from the old building next to it, the Royal College of Surgeons.

  The Reverend Ainslie's daughter, it seems, hadn't been quite right when she wrote back to Conway. The skull of Paine wasn't lost at all—it was still with Reverend Ainslie when he died. As he went through his late father's belongings, the Reverend Ainslie's son Oliver innocently took the bones back to his own house here at 48 Lincoln's Inn Fields. Given that he was next door to the Royal College of Surgeons, it seemed rather a shame not to have someone look at these curios—and so, bones in hand, that's just what Oliver did.

  They raised an uncommon interest in the building next door. Their examiner, John Marshall, was rightly regarded as one of the best surgeons and anatomists in the country. He was particularly noted for his interest in the shape of people's limbs and bodies, and had published theories on bodily proportion and the "perfect human form." When presented with the bony hand of Tom Paine, though, Marshall did not quite consider their form those of an ideal man.

  This looks like the hand of a woman.

  Closer examination of the hand and skull showed that it was indeed a man, albeit a rather delicate one. 'The head was also small for a man," Oliver reported of Marshall's findings, "and of the Celtic type I might say, and somewhat conical in shape, and with more cerebellum than frontal development." But beyond that, Marshall could not say much-her all, the rest of the body was missing.

  Where was Paine's body?

  "Haaauuuck."

  The two young schoolgirls in hijabs duck in and out of the doorway of a chip shop, engaged in the tender feminine art of hawking loogies at each other. THE CONFIDENTIAL ANTI-TERRORISM HOTLINE exhorts the header of a defaced poster behind them; nobody cares, and the spittle of ten-year-old girls screaming with comically horrified laughter at each other is flying everywhere. This goes on until the shopkeeper, noticing them—or noticing me noticing them—yells with exasperation at his girls to knock it off. Mouths frowning closed, they disappear.

  I walk onward, facing in the distance the immense gray torpedo-shaped building known universally as the Gherkin—though I have heard substantially ruder names for it. But there is no such modern flash in this neighborhood. Stepney Green has been a London home for immigrants for as long as anyone can remember, its old Jewish population now giving way to a thriving Muslim one. Victorian tenements still bear faint painted advertisements on their brick sides—DAREN BREAD, BEST FOR HEALTH, announces one—and in front of them, the bricks of Stepney Green Road sometimes shine an almost iridescent blue, the telltale sheen of a neighborhood built partly of mining slag.

  There is indeed a tiny green along this stretch of streee—not the Stepney Green, which is farther down the road—but a rather sorry block-long patch featuring a bench missing every single one of its slats. So you can't sit here: but if you stand, you can look right into 23 Stepney Green, a respectable old brick house on a charitable block of good works and good intentions. When Conway first moved to London, number 23 housed a neighborhood Shoeblack Society, which found homeless urchins a place to live and fitted them with uniforms, brushes, rags, and blacking—this was a noxious brew of vinegar, treacle, and charred ivory—and sent them swarming into streets teeming with dirtily shod Londoners. A few houses down lodged Dr. Thomas Barnardo, the best known and most controversial of London crusaders for poor children—he was not above faking dramatic photos of squalor, and his "Dr." title proved to be equally fanciful.

  But by 1879 number 23 was home to George Reynolds, a Baptist minister who was famous, as it happened, for his attacks on Barnardo's fakeries. Away from the glare of public debate, something altogether more curious had come into his life. A woman in his congregation let slip that her mother owned some rather strange relics and papers. They'd been sitting around since 1860, when an old tenant had died in their house at Bethnal Green. Intrigued, Reynolds paid a visit and examined a box filled with papers. The Life of cobbett, read one; another was titled The Poor Man's Bible, and its style of writing had a curiously familiar ring to anyone who still remembered the political newspapers of half a century earlier. With these papers was a small black lump wrapped in an oilcloth, along with some snips of hair.

  Who, he asked, had been her tenant?

  An old tailor, she explained. Fellow by the name of Tilly.

  As he read through the dead man's papers, it became obvious that there was something else that was supposed to be in this wooden box. Did you find more in here? he asked. A skeleton, perhaps?

  The bones? I threw them out. They went out with the rag and bone man.

  Reynolds paid the elderly landlady for the box and carried it back to Stepney Green. Something about her story did not sound quite right, and Reynolds was an experienced debunker. He and Conway, corresponding together, came to the conclusion that Tilly's landlords had sold the horrid skeleton left in the vacated apartment—possibly to the mysterious Alexander Gordon, who would now not tell either minister, Reynolds or Conway, any further details. Well, that was understandable: given Paine's peripatetic afterlife, perhaps Gordon wanted to insure that the much-abused revolutionary was never disturbed again.

  But why would the landlady lie about the body? Perhaps, Conway reasoned, she wanted to appear less greedy and more pious by having destroyed the last earthly remains of the infamous Tom Paine. But the intriguing thing was not her lies about where the skeleton was, but an inadvertent revelation of where it wasn't. For a curious detail came out when she recalled to Reynolds how she and her husband first peered inside the contents of Tilly's deathly silent room.

  The box, she said, was missing a skull and a limb.

  By the time I get back to Lincoln's Inn, the sun is just beginning to set and the tennis court has emptied out. It's curious, really—after so many travels, Paine's skull had returned to a place scarcely a five-minute walk from its old home in the Lancet office at Bolt Court. But it soon became quite as neglected here as it had been in Cobbett's hands. It seems Ainslie's daughter did not remember to tell her brother Oliver of Conwa
y's inquiries—either that, or she did not even know that her brother had found the bones among their father's personal effects. By the time Conway had caught word of the skull's discovery and arrived here at Lincoln's Inn, it was far too late—Oliver Ainslie had carelessly left the bones along with other items in a room that was being cleared out for a tenant. The Reverend's son vaguely remembered that the man involved in carting out the rubbish was named Mr. Penny, but did not know his first name or address.

  "He fears," Conway commented grimly, "that Penny may have disposed of the skull to one of the wastepaper dealers nearby." Conway held on to the hope that Penny might have been enterprising enough to separate the skull out from the other rubbish and sell it. "Every physician must possess a skull . . ." he reasoned hopefully. "It is probable that Paine's skull is now in some doctor's office or craniological collection."

  Indeed, all Mr. Penny had to do to find a buyer was to go next door to the Royal College's Hunterian Museum. It is the greatest collection of anatomical oddities in the world, assembled obsessively by John Hunter, the ghastly founding father of modern surgery. When not, say, sending out an assistant to unnervingly follow one famed giant around, ready to pounce for his immense skeleton the moment the fellow dropped dead, Hunter amused himself by keeping leopards and tigers in his backyard at Earl's Court, or by apparently injecting himself with venereal pus just to see what would happen. His museum was a temple of human frailty and strangeness: the feet of smallpox victims floated in jars; elephantine skulls gazed out painfully; gouty skeletons encrusted with uric deposits remained frozen in agony. Body parts of the famous were always welcomed, too: and given that it boasted the Bishop of Durham's rectum among its holdings, surely the Hunterian would have found a spot on its shelves for Tom Paine's head.

  But if Penny did the sensible thing and brought Paine's skull here, the public was never told. And if it was here . . . it is not now. You see, there is a reason that great ugly Cancer Trust building inhabits the space where Oliver Ainslie's house once stood next door. It is the same reason most ugly modern buildings in London inhabit the lots once occupied by quaint old ones: a German bomb. In May 1941 a succession of incendiary bombs rained down upon this block; ceilings and floors collapsed, pillars toppled, and fire roared through the Hunterian Museum. Giants and dwarves, fetuses and ancient skeletons, tongues and tails, entire families of native bodies collected from around the world were cremated in the searing heat; the jars of formaldehyde boiled about them and burst, and the remains were dashed to pieces as the walls collapsed upon them. Among the ruins were copious bone fragments, melted glass, and remains burned to charcoal. Some sixty thousand specimens, comprising most of the collection, were utterly lost. The museum has been closed for years now as the College finally renovates it fully back to life—or living death, rather—once again.

  But that was all still to come. Back in the 1870s, the chance of a doctor claiming the skull was still a hopeful one, and perhaps Conway was simply trying to put his best face on the situation. But all Conway had was a hope, and the silence that greeted his subsequent efforts to find any bones did not bode well. A landlady claimed she'd rubbished Paine's bones; now Oliver Ainslie feared the same. But what, exactly, would throwing them out mean? Where would Paine have then gone?

  As early as 1822, the Times mockingly advised Cobbett to dispose of Paine's skull with bone-dealers and phosphorus manufacturers in Whitechapel. Their joke might be closer to the truth than they imagined. Rag and bone men were a vital part of London's urban ecology: roaming the streets in horse-drawn carts bellowing "Rag-a Bo-oone!," they collected worn-out and unwanted goods that were too bulky or useful to simply be thrown out. Factories awaited them at the end of their scavenging routes. Cotton rags were ground up and turned into paper and thread, while entire towns of "Mungo and Shoddy" manufacturers in West Yorkshire made an industry of dissolving and grinding woolen garments with sulfuric acid, and recycling the extracted fibers ("shoddy") as wallpaper flocking, mattress stuffing, and yarn. And bones? They were most visibly reused in knife and fork handles, and also burned at high temperature into bone black, an animal charcoal which turned up everywhere from sugar refining to varnish and pigment. Others were ground up in immense quantities for fertilizer.

  There was a certain cannibalistic quality to all this. One visitor to a chemical manure manufacturer in Bristol in the 1880s noted the very large quantity of what were clearly human bones getting thrown into the steam-powered grinders. According to the proprietor, this was not at all unusual. But then, entire human bodies were liable to be reused in Victorian Britain in a most nonchalant manner. There was a roaring trade in Egyptian mummies—the cheaper sort, the masses of men and women who had simply been buried in the sand with nothing but their windings and perhaps a scarab—because, dried out for a couple of thousand years until they were as light and crumbly as bark, these mummies made a splendid powder for paint pigment. In times like these, how much notice would a single skull in the ragman's cart attract?

  The tennis players have come back again, back to play one last time today on the grounds where gallows once stood. And so I leave as Conway once left: empty-handed. There is nothing more to be found here. My feet tread across the lush grass of Lincoln's Inn Fields—fertilizer? Really?-and I guess maybe the skull of Thomas Paine really did go where he'd intended all along. It went back into the soil.

  Whhoooo-OOOOOOO-oooo.

  Tambourines rattled from out of nowhere as the spectral presence entered.

  Whoooo-00000-ooooo. (Twang twang twang.)

  Banjos tinkled; a cold hand of fear passed over the shabby London skance room, and then from the depths of the underworld a voice spoke:

  "I . . . am . . . the spirit . . . of Thomas Paine."

  Whhoooo-00000-0000.

  The music—the banjo music of the damned—Dstarted up again, and another tiny voice came out of the darkness.

  "I . . . am . . . a little Indian girl."

  Whhhoooo-0000-00 . . . Oof!

  The spiritualist went sprawling as the audience tackled him in the darkness: banjos crashed to the floor and lights were raised to reveal the con in all its fraudulent glory. It was a sting, and he was to be arrested yet again for faking seances. A hidden confederate providing the spectral music and voices was now pinned down by undercover audience members: and the spirit world, it seemed, wasn't going to pitch in to help them make bail.

  And Paine? Well, he was nowhere to be found.

  Despite the disappearance of Paine's bones, his spirit still made the rounds of fashionable seance rooms in London. The old rebel was well rested, presumably, from all those spectral memoirs that he'd been writing back in New York for several decades. Conway was not particularly impressed by the prospect of meeting his hero under such circumstances; after compiling his 1879 study Demons and Demonology, Conway was all too aware of the very earthly motives that appeals to demons and spirits relied upon. Siances struck him as almost laughably childish sleights of hand, and he humiliated medium after medium in London with the simplest tests. After listening to the usual table-rapping, voice-channeling, and ghostly banjo-playing at one meeting comprised entirely of mediums, the skeptical minister tossed his coin pouch on the table.

  "Let anyone here tell me how much money I have in my purse," Conway demanded.

  "I am surprised," one medium reproached him, "that your faith should rest on a thing like that."

  "Well, it happens to occur to me: I do not know how much there is in it."

  After much hushed muttering and imprecations to the vasty deep, one woman gave her answer. Eighteen coins. The pouch was opened, and-lo! behold!-it . . . it . . . it did not have eighteen coins.

  At another seance, the participants in a darkened room asked spirits to materialize objects for them—a sausage, a slipper, an onion, and so forth. From within the darkness, a gracious Southern voice ventured that he'd like something too large to fit under anyone's coat. A large bandbox, say. When the lights came up, the
table had its magical slipper, its phantasmal onion, an ecto-plasmic sausage . . . but no bandbox. At still another seance, Conway suspected that the medium "held hands" with participants in the dark by having them eventually hold only one of his hands—one participant unwittingly holding the pinkie, the other a thumb—thus leaving the medium's other hand free to produce music and ghostly raps from underneath the table. When the medium asked to shift his hand a moment in the dark, as it was getting tired, Conway and an associate refused to let go. The medium leaped from his seat and fled the house without even picking up his banjo.

  Still, Conway could not hold any real contempt for those involved. Had he not once been a traveling hemre minister himself, preaching the presence of devils upon the earth? He knew what it was like to believe in the unseen. Looking over one seance, Conway mused: 'The scene was not ridiculous but pathetic; its grotesque features vanished under the thought that if I should believe—meally, and without any trace of doube—that a deceased person had spoken to me, I also would be frantic, and my life revolutionized."

  But no: Thomas Paine was gone. If he lived on, it was through the rationalist crusading of followers like Conway, and not through sepulchral voices in a roomful of badly tuned banjos. Paine himself would never again give voice to his thoughts with that too-small head of his. But as for the brain that had formed those thoughts—that was another matter altogether.

  The windows are papered over from the inside with yellowing posters, rendered ever more ghastly as the sodium street lamps switch on:

  The World Famous Moscow State Circus of 2003

  The Sensational 6 Flying Akhtyamous!

  Wed 22 Oct at Wanstead Flats