by Joe Jackson
But Henry’s father did not have to go as far as the city to encounter the poor. Hampstead was an urban center in itself, paved and lit by gas, a polling place for county elections and site of “court leets and baron,” a medieval system that settled disputes and maintained common pastures and ditches. And it had its own slums. The poor lived “in alleys and courts without drainage or water supply,” said an 1848 report by the Metropolitan Association for Improving Dwellings of the Industrial Class. Overcrowding was common, and a workhouse and soup kitchen were built near Haverstock Hill. All the conditions for cholera were present; they lay in the path of many London solicitors.
Thus, it is no surprise that Henry’s father contracted the disease. The microscopic viper acted fast, with a timing that was particularly cruel. The Wickhams survived the winnowing of 1848-49; there would not be another full-blown epidemic until 1854. They must have sighed a breath of relief, for Harriette was due to give birth in the summer. They’d taken every precaution imaginable, but that was not enough. Henry’s father ingested the deadly germ in the prime of his life at age thirty-five.
The disease left victims and their loved ones little time in which to prepare. Nothing in Henry’s memoirs ever touched upon his father’s death, but it would have been one of his first memories. He was four, the age of basic impressions, and his father was dying in the bed-sitting room. The psychological shock was far-reaching. Mortality always lurked. One might seek safety in the assurance of sanitation or class, but they were never enough. Something of fundamental importance was always out of reach that would somehow make things right. Death lurked in the shadows and waited around the corner.
You were always on the run.
The death of Henry’s father changed everything. When John Joseph, the third child, was born a few months after her husband’s funeral, Harriette had three mouths to feed. What had seemed an exciting future, with husband, security, a home in the country, and bohemian friends, now looked like a future of endless worry and toil. Since she could no longer afford the pretty villa at Haverstock Hill, she soon moved. According to the 1871 census, all four listed their address as 25 Fitzroy Road in Marylebone, close to Joseph Wickham, the warhorse grandfather. Marylebone was one of the city’s five wealthiest districts, where the average annual rental rate went far beyond her newly modest means. In all likelihood, Grandfather Joseph became Harriette’s benefactor; they became the “poor relations,” an embarrassing drop in status keenly felt in class-conscious London.
Harriette returned to millinery, the only skill she knew from before her marriage and “set up a not very successful millinery business in Sackville Street,” according to Wickham’s only biographer, historian Edward Valentine Lane. Millinery was one of the only trades at the time in which a woman might be a sole proprietress and hire employees. It was the kind of work a middle-class woman down on her luck might take up, yet the hours were brutal and the pay pitifully low. As late as 1903, Jack London reported the case of a destitute, seventy-two-year-old milliner who applied for relief, since the amount she charged per straw hat—two and a quarter pence—was simply too low to survive.
Yet it was also believed that a well-dressed woman never ventured out without a hat or bonnet, so there was always trade. Small touches made the difference—a smartly-placed rose or bird-of-paradise feather could make or break a sale. But feathers from exotic birds cut into the milliner’s profits. Unless Harriette had a tropical source, she could only gaze in envy at the trendy shops that could afford to stock such finery.
As the oldest child, Henry would normally have been saddled with the most responsibility, but he seemed to evade this burden. “Henry Alexander, deprived of a father’s guidance, grew up something of a spoilt, harum-scarum boy,” Lane reported, apparently quoting family tradition. Henry was not a great scholar and showed little interest in any subject save art. He liked to wander more than anything, and a school-age portrait shows a slightly chubby boy, dressed in black school uniform, with dark, wavy hair and intense, blue-gray eyes. He has a distant look on his face and stands angled forward, as if ready to bolt out the door.
He longed to be outside. Regent Street, one block west of Harriette’s shop, was the heart of the shopping district, the spring of a new kind of leisure. Shops were a medley of brass, gas, and glass—retailing had become an art, borrowing techniques from the theater to catch and hold the eye. Shopping and window-shopping had become the Victorian woman’s entry into the routine of the city; they passed like gaudy moths, and the fine goods or art prints displayed in a window were thought to entrap them like flypaper. The material reverie was said to leave them vulnerable, a hypnotic state charged with sexuality. Predatory males stalked at the edges of sight, ambushing young women with what the press called “The Rape of the Glances.” Pickpockets worked the crowds. One side of Regent Street had become the midday haunt of well-dressed prostitutes who ogled and were ogled. New forms of the old predations were taking shape. London’s “inconvenient populousness” made living and working a daily adventure.
On July 30, 1850, as Henry struggled with the new world of his father’s death, ground was broken in Hyde Park for the wonder of the age: the Great Exhibition and its centerpiece, the Crystal Palace. Two months later, the first column was raised; the glass edifice rose up until the building covered eighteen acres and enclosed the tallest elms beneath its arches. Within seventeen weeks, nearly a million feet of glass were fastened to a lattice of 3,300 columns and 2,300 girders. It rose so fast because each prefabricated column, girder, gutter, and steel bar was identical. The voices of critics rose with it: The Exhibition would serve as a rallying point for riffraff; the Palace’s sparkling roof would be porous, allowing the droppings of fifty million sparrows to rain down. The voices were ignored. The Crystal Palace would be the showplace for the globe’s raw materials, machines, and plastic arts, a temple devoted to “the working bees of the world’s hive.” World peace would radiate from the Crystal Palace like power from a dynamo, for in this assemblage of “industry and skill, countries would find a new brotherhood.”
But beneath the steel and glass lay a deeper theme—the industrialization of the natural world. The Palace’s inspiration was a plant, the giant water lily Victoria amazonica, discovered in British Guiana in 1837, thought to be the largest flowering plant in the world. The water lily’s flower was bigger than a head of cabbage and smelled like a pineapple; its leaves measured six feet across and sported a multitude of ribs that could support impossible weights. On a lark, Joseph Paxton, the Duke of Devonshire’s head gardener, dressed his seven-year-old daughter as a fairy and posed her standing on the water lily. The photo became the national rage, and piqued Paxton’s curiosity about the strength of those ribs. He found he could load a leaf with five children, the equivalent of three hundred pounds. In 1850, Paxton modeled the Crystal Palace after Victoria amazonica, its cantilevered trussing of iron girders supporting nearly three hundred thousand glass panes.
This homage to what one botanist called “a vegetable wonder” bespoke the horticultural mania that gripped Britain. The last vestiges of Holland’s “tulipomania”—the botanical madness of the 1500s when entire fortunes were spent on forty rare tulips from Constantinople—could still be found among the English royalty. A bulb of the “Miss Fanny Kemble” sold for seventy-five pounds, more than the lifetime wage of a shopgirl. Flowers were so adored that “the language of flowers” grew to cult status; wax flower arrangement became a new art; flowers made of human hair commemorated the dead.
On May 1, 1851, the queen opened the Great Exhibition. A six hundred-voice choir burst into the “Hallelujah Chorus” after a short opening prayer. The event was “the greatest day in our history, the most beautiful and imposing and touching spectacle ever seen,” Victoria wrote in her diary. Thousands visited the Exhibition: Commentators noted in particular the pairings of the very old and young, the generation that built the empire to its present state and the one that would take it to further g
lory. Many headed for the cacophonous Machinery Court. Farmers in their smocks crowded around a giant reaping machine from the United States. The queen herself admired a medal-stamping machine that could produce in a week fifty million medals embossed with her image.
But it was the exhibition of rubber that drew the greatest crowds. Charles Goodyear spent thirty thousand dollars of his own money to create Goodyear’s Vulcanite Court, a three-room display in which everything was made of rubber: furniture, draperies, rugs, and fixtures—even the walls and a large “Elizabethan” sideboard. There were rubber inkstands, knife handles, stockings, bandages, hot water bottles, syringes, dolls, and air cushions. Goodyear spoke of air-inflated saddles, inflatable boxing jackets that could absorb a punch, and a rubber dress for ministers performing full-body baptisms. He envisioned the day that rubber life preservers would eliminate drowning as one of the evils of the world. Rubber could be prefabricated into any shape; it was a protean substance, hailing from nature but perfected by science. It was the material of the future, a true gift from God.
The high spirits of the exhibition were but a brief respite for Harriette and her family. In 1855, Grandfather Joseph stumbled as he left his club and fell, splintering his wooden leg. The old war wound caught up to him four decades late. He died from the injuries on June 30, at age seventy-four.
His death was a doubly cruel blow. For Harriette, there was no longer the financial backup upon which she depended, no champion in the savage wars of class, where “poor relations” were an embarrassment and a financial drain. For the children, and for nine-year-old Henry in particular, there was no longer a father figure on whom to depend. While his sister Harriette Jane helped as best she could in the millinery shop, Henry wandered the London streets and dreamed. His world was a narrow-laned warren of coal soot, sweatshops, and criminal gangs. His mother feared that he would be easily tempted, pushed by the slightest breeze. One slip, one stupid prank, and he’d be destined for the Borstal, another youth sentenced to the workhouse that guaranteed an education in crime.
Parents always worry about their children: after 1857, Harriette’s worries took a new form. That year, the Indian Mutiny burst upon the psychic landscape of the English, and the world that looked bright and promising in the Great Exhibition now seemed sinister. Suddenly, there were many comparisons made between London’s poor and bloodthirsty heathens in foreign lands. Both were described in phrases such as “wild tribes” and “savage races,” often invoked by reform-minded writers like Henry Mayhew and James Greenwood to portray the impoverished. Travelogues treated the city’s rookeries as a new kind of jungle. Shop windows featured a steady stream of books like Legends of the Savage Life, Wild Tribes of London, Low Life Deeps, and The Wild Man at Home. Such “savage” districts as Whitechapel and New Holborn were inhabited by “strange and neglected races”—the feral child, the screaming harridan, the murderer, the Jew. Every district was an unchristian wilderness in which “a clash of contest, man against man, and men against fate” took place daily. Every generation has its metaphor of temptation: in mid-Victorian London, that metaphor was the jungle, and the streets were the tangled paths where children were devoured.
In the space of a few short years, Henry had gone from life to death, comfort to want, open heaths to crowded slums—and now, his mother feared, from innocence to moral ruin. His future as a child had spread before him like the fields surrounding Haverstock Hill; his life as a youth now closed around him like the soot-blackened city. London was a jungle, a cliché today but a metaphor that was new, exciting, and frightening for its time. On the streets, as in the wilderness, warned one schoolmaster, “there is a bitter struggle to live.” Henry was learning about jungle life, but where a mother saw danger, a boy like Henry saw a New World.
CHAPTER 2
NATURE BELONGS TO MAN
A new hero was taking shape during Henry’s childhood: the explorer—the astronaut or rock star of his day.
Throughout the Victorian Age, the Crown funded scientific exploration linked directly to its imperial interests, which the public saw as an expression of culture. Exploration was an act of intervention that altered the fate of one nation while increasing the knowledge, resources, or power of the other. The explorer was the first agent in Western Europe’s conquest of “uncivilized” lands, where it was presumed that no law or truth existed. If a missionary, the explorer brought Christian light to the darkness; if a scientist, he spread knowledge among the ignorant. Residents of the periphery, however, did not always share that high-minded vision. They tended to see him as an agent of exploitation, the vanguard of an invasion—a spy.
By the late eighteenth century, exploration was a proven path to power and riches. The Spanish Conquest was the prime example. The Enlightenment’s appetite for new facts provided new reason for discovery, and although all Europe participated, Britain maintained the highest level of exploration throughout the nineteenth century. By midcentury, the popular image of the British explorer had begun to evolve. Already a symbol of reason’s spread, he now became a celebrity. The great explorations of 1790-1830 had been maritime coastal reconnaissances to produce the celebrated Admiralty Charts, and explorers of this period were seen as self-effacing, duty-driven civil servants whose sole motive was the collection of information for the charts to make sea travel safer. The new explorer who emerged during Henry’s childhood was a larger-than-life character whose exploits acted out personal ambitions and public fantasies.
There was no better example of this than Sir Richard Burton, after whom Henry would model his personal style. In 1853, dressed as the fictitious Sufi physician “Sheik Abdullah,” Burton joined the Egyptian hajj to Mecca; although he was not the first Christian to enter the holy city in disguise, his 1855-56 Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to al-Medina and Mecca was the most detailed. Success led him to a legendary quest—the discovery of the source of the White Nile. An initial foray in 1855 ended with his camp ambushed, one companion killed, and a second—John Hanning Speke—wounded, while Burton himself was pierced through the cheek with a javelin. In 1856, Speke and Burton set out again and by February 1858, the two reached Lake Tanganyika, one of the Central African “Great Lakes” thought to be the source of the Nile. With Burton paralyzed by malaria, Speke went on to locate Lake Victoria and proclaim it the Nile’s origin. By then the mismatched pair hated one another. They disagreed over Speke’s claim, initiating the great controversy that proved irresistible to chroniclers and which ended finally in September 1864 with Speke’s death, by accident or suicide, a day before the two were to debate the question at the Royal Geographical Society.
Suddenly the explorer was a central hero in an escape fantasy that gripped the British isles, a champion who trod the earth’s wild places and interpreted what he saw through English eyes. Newspapers and journals were filled with the adventures of Burton and Speke, as they were with David Livingstone’s expedition up the Zambezi River in 1857-63. A new theme crept in. Since the new explorer was in the vanguard of a culture whose science and technology were clearly superior to that of “unscientific races,” his very arrival seemed to prove England’s right to rule these newly explored lands. “Natural theology,” the Christian belief that nature existed for man’s improvement, was already a given; now it was one short step to the conviction that the West was destined to master nature and remake the world.
Henry came of age when explorers’ journals were bestsellers. There was something otherworldly about an explorer’s description of an unknown land, such as the passage where early explorer MacGregor Laird confessed that the stillness of Sierra Leone’s forests “chills the heart, and imparts a feeling of loneliness which can be shaken off only by a strong effort.” The quest to fill the spaces on the map became a journey deep inside the mind. Balancing this was an obsessive adherence to the grinding reality of exploration. Meticulous instructions from scientific societies called for daily readings of instruments, regular updates of maps, the careful preser
vation of specimens, a daily weather log, and observations of native customs, language, population, resources, and trade. The explorer was expected to be leader, emissary, hunter, observer, collector, scientist, mapmaker, and artist. He was told to make frequent notes and leave nothing out, a fail-safe in case he should be murdered. Events less final than homicide could also ruin an expedition: Precious equipment got destroyed, compasses were lost, instruments split from the heat, thermometers calibrated for English weather burst in the desert clime.
There was also a growing realization among Britons that the tropics were the “white man’s grave.” During Henry’s childhood, this meant West and Central Africa, but as the century progressed, it included any equatorial place loaded with “primitive tribes,” burning heat, miasmic swamps, swarms of insects, and miles of treacherous jungle. Much of the image was false: The maximum temperature in West Africa and the Amazon Basin rarely surpassed the maximum midsummer heat of the American Midwest, while jungles were often the home of sedentary agrarian people who were far from primitive and who for centuries had slashed and burned the underbrush to carve out farms. The image did have one real basis in fact, and that was disease. European newcomers to the African coast died at a rate of three hundred to seven hundred per thousand during their first year. After that, the mortality rate dropped to 80-120 per thousand, but that was still far higher than any cholera pandemic sweeping through the European capitals. West Africa alone was stocked with sleeping sickness, Guinea worm, yaws, bilharzia, dysentery. The principal culprits were spread by mosquito, and an individual’s chance of living a year without being bitten were nearly nonexistent. In some areas, the average number of infected bites per year per person was a hundred or more. There was no escape from malaria or yellow fever.