But first of all he tended promptly to the resolution of his public identity. Immediately following his mother's burial he instituted efforts to change his name from Macie to Smithson. No longer was there to be any secrecy surrounding his paternal lineage. He appealed to the Crown for a formal change of name, which was ultimately accepted in February 1801 and printed in the London Gazette. The first place the change was registered was in his banking records at Hoare's, in June 1800—about a month after his mother's burial.35 Clearly, it was a move he had been contemplating for some time.
There are few examples of how his friends reacted to the name change. The bald striving for acknowledgment that lay behind the decision seems to have been evident to most—and was even on occasion a source of amusement or ridicule. The catty Sir Charles Blagden, seeing Smithson in Paris in 1814, well over a decade after the name change, wrote in his diary: "Teased to B[ertholle]t that he [Smithson] was the same man as Macie."36
Despite the fact that Smithson was not socializing much during these days, one person he did see with regularity was his cousin Georgiana Henderson, the only child of his cousin George Keate. On the last day of the auction of Keate's immense museum collections, Smithson went to dinner at Georgiana's town house on Devonshire Street, near Portland Place. He played with her children and supped with her husband, the collector and amateur artist John Henderson. At half past eight Henderson and Smithson climbed the stairs to take tea with Georgiana in her room. For the rest of the evening the three of them, just as they had three nights earlier, pored endlessly over the Hungerford family papers. Smithson, Georgiana reported in her diary, "did not go away till Twelve o'clock."37
These two cousins, now orphaned adults, shared a deep bond. Both lived unacknowledged, deprived of any public claim to their family. George Keate had mysteriously and vitriolically turned against his daughter at the time of her marriage, despite having been supportive of John Henderson for several years prior. Keate cut Georgiana out of her inheritance and shunned any of his friends who carried on their friendship with his daughter. Georgiana's invitation to her father to bestow a name upon her firstborn child, who arrived at the end of that first year of her marriage, was met with silence. She lived now, like Smithson, in a state of dispossession.38 As Smithson battled with Lord Malmesbury over Great Durnford Manor and Georgiana watched her father's collections go under the gavel, Smithson and Georgiana wrote letters and saw each other constantly. In the lamplight of Georgiana's study they consoled themselves with the litany of their family history, tracing its ancestry, reviewing its deeds and titles. Both believed in the chimera of its potency.
Following his mother's death, Smithson focused ever more intently on his wealth and how best to put it to use. In July he sold £13,350 of the 5 percents and reinvested the enormous sum— £5,350 of which may have been his mother's shares—in exchequer bills. He had long been a shrewd investor in relatively safe, blue-chip Bank of England investments—the 5 percents, the 3 percents, India bonds and others—but he now also turned his attention to bankrolling technological innovations that promised a better economic future for England. Many of the projects Smithson might have been involved in will probably remain unknown, as it is possible they were funded from other caches of money or paid out to intermediaries.39 His bank accounts seem far from presenting a complete picture of his finances.
First, and most successful, among these investments was the Grand Junction Canal. Designed to provide a direct waterway for industrial goods from Birmingham to London, the Grand Junction was part of the canal mania that had swept the country in the preceding decades. Originally, the contribution of Londoners to this growth was minor. The Grand Junction Canal was unusual in that it sought its investors in London, and Smithson when he joined found himself in the company of some of the richest and most prominent men of England. Its chairman was the well-connected banker William Praed, and the Duke of Grafton, the Earl of Clarendon, the Earl of Essex, and the Earl Spencer were all on the board. The financial troubles of 1797-8 complicated the completion of the canal and caused construction estimates to spiral well beyond their original projections. Simultaneously, however, the threat of invasion and the urgent need to move troops and stores securely around the country underscored the strategic importance of the canal project. In 1801 the Grand Junction Canal finally opened onto the Paddington Basin, and a few years later the Blisworth Tunnel, the last part of the route, was completed.40 It immediately showed a return, and Smithson continued to receive dividends from it all his life. He was even carrying with him at the time of his death in Genoa a large packet of papers concerning the canal company.41
Smithson's enthusiasm for industrial progress seems to have stayed close to home, focused primarily on the London area and on projects aimed at improving transport and communication. The efficient movement of people and goods was essential to bringing about a modern and materially successful society. Smithson invested in the New Croydon Canal, though it did not in the end yield much in the way of dividends. And he joined a number of local industrialists to serve as a financial backer to one of the Croydon Canal's biggest competitors, the Surrey Iron Railway, which carried goods from the Thames at Wandsworth south through Colliers Wood to Croydon. Canal companies often owned the tramways or other byways that linked various canals and endpoints; the Surrey Iron Railway, however, established by an Act of Parliament in 1801, was the first railway independent of a canal.42 Smithson also backed the construction of an abortive tunnel under the Thames. The sprawl of London made the need for a better method of traffic between the two banks an absolute imperative—but bridges, which impeded the passage of large ships, were considered less than ideal solutions. The impresario-engineer who proposed the tunnel emphasized its usefulness in moving troops, and Parliament passed the Act to make the tunnel in 1799. Smithson bought up several hundred pounds' worth of shares to fund the project—but it never actually came to fruition (Brunei's tunnel, the one that was finally built, did not start construction until 1825).43 All of these investments reflected Smithson's enduring belief in the social benefits of scientific progress. They also evince a strong interest in promoting the economic strength of his homeland, England.
Despite the emotional drain of these first years of the new century, Smithson continued his scientific work. Mention in his catalogue, in 1799, of some new examples of what Smithson suspected to be fluorspar, from Matlock in Derbyshire, suggests that perhaps he made a mineralogical tour or two around England in the years following his return from the Continent, in pursuit of representative specimens for his cabinet.44 Of the laboratory experiments he was conducting during this period, he brought one to the level of presentation, a paper that turned out to be the most significant of his career. With some calamines he had purchased from a dealer in Germany, he began a series of experiments that led to the paper he presented to the Royal Society at the start of the new season in November 1802. This work, the first official public outing of his new name Smithson, eventually led, appropriately enough, to the naming of the mineral smithsonite.45
When Smithson began his investigations of calamine, there were many confusing accounts of it circulating among mineralogists. Miners and artisan metalworkers had long known that some calamine produced zinc that was useful in the making of brass, while other specimens—which appeared identical—produced only slag. Although the eighteenth century had seen the development of zinc smelting techniques, it remained economically viable to mine calamine. There was a decided value to finding a reliable means of distinguishing between these different kinds of calamine. Smithson collected numerous samples for his study. He had specimens from the Mendip hills in Somersetshire, from Derbyshire, from Regbania in Hungary, and from "Bleyberg in Carinthia [Bleiberg, Austria]." His analyses revealed that what was called "calamine" was not in fact a single substance but multiple distinct minerals—zinc carbonate (that which became smithsonite); zinc silicate (now hemimorphite), which was also called electric calamine on account of its
pyroelectric qualities, the ends of the crystals becoming electrically charged when heated; and that which was eventually named hydrozincite.
Smithson's calamine paper exuded a confidence that had not been in evidence in his tabasheer paper of a decade earlier. The species had already been studied by two of the most prominent mineralogists of the eighteenth century—the Swede Torbern Bergman, champion of chemical analysis in mineralogy, and the French founder of crystallography René-Just Haüy. Smithson, at the opening of his paper, unabashedly announced that his experiments had shown "how wide from the truth have been the opinions adopted concerning them [these ores of zinc]." Haüy had not even been convinced that zinc silicate existed, but in light of Smithson's work he quickly revised his position.
In addition to putting forward these new identifications, Smithson also ventured some theoretical speculations based on his findings. He had observed the constituents of calamine to be combining in regular proportions. He cautiously suggested that the application of mathematical calculations to check laboratory results might "introduce a degree of rigorous accuracy and certainty into chemistry, of which this science was thought to be ever incapable." He probed further, stating, "A certain knowledge of the exact proportions of the constituent principles of bodies, may likewise open to our view harmonious analogies between the constitutions of related objects, general laws, & c, which at present totally escape us."46 In the coming years Smithson argued more forcefully for the "importance of a knowledge of the true quantity in which matters combine."47 John Dalton soon thereafter formulated his atomic theory, explaining how the weights of an element's atoms combined in fixed ratios, coining the laws of definite proportions and of multiple proportions. Smithson, on account of these musings, which he mentioned in other papers as well, was credited in the first decades of the nineteenth century as one of those instigators who had been crucial to discovering an underlying chemical theory.48
At the end of 1801 Smithson stood atop the cliffs of Dover, staring across to France. Gone were the crowds that had massed there a few months earlier seeking the pyrotechnics of a confrontation between their own sails and those that menaced from across the Channel. a lone on the windswept chalky bluffs, Smithson drolly painted the scene for Lady Holland back in London. "Vapid flags of truce tamely" waved from every direction, and there were a few "old and crazy edifices, shaken in the passed storm, tottering on their foundations and forewarning of the approaching moment of their fall." He lamented his inability "to enrich my letter with interesting details of the destruction of fleets and the conflagration of cities, but helas, before I came hither exhaustion had already forced a pause in the noble scene, and satiety has since quenched, for a time, the thirst of human blood."49
During the war the Continent lay off bounds for wealthy Grand Tourists, and the bon ton had to content themselves instead with holidays at the English coastal resorts. Smithson's cousin Georgiana Henderson typically spent several months over the late autumn and winter at Dover and the Isle of Wight in the years leading up to the Peace of Amiens. His mother likewise had passed her last seasons in Brighton. Smithson over the winter of 1801-2 spent more than three months in the Dover area. He probably dabbled in the pleasures of society there, partaking of gambling and dinners and dances. He also explored the windswept countryside, ranging from Kent into Sussex, with hammer and chisel in hand and a collecting sack over his shoulder, looking for specimens. Mindful of currying favor with well-placed friends, he sent off "a small box, containing some of the productions of this neighbourhood" to Lady Holland. "All the specimens are perfectly fresh." he told her, "having been dug out from the strata where they were formed. It being proper that they should travel a grave and philosophical pall, they will not pay their respects to you for some days."50
A few weeks of observing life on the coast instilled Smithson with tremendous optimism. He abandoned the wry and cynical tone with which he'd described the scene at Dover in his letter to Lady Holland. The elation of peace after such wrenching bloodshed and upheaval, like the release of a long pent-up breath, had infused him with hope for the future. Writing now to her husband, he sounded both amazed and joyful. "Only the being contemporary to the wonderful event, and an eyewitness to the truth of it," Smithson told Lord Holland, "could render credible the change which, in the space of a few short years, has taken place, thro'out all Europe, in the minds of men." Smithson felt the surge of communal sympathy and acceptance that follows the survival of a harrowing ordeal. People from warring nations now suddenly conceived of themselves as part of one universal society. Smithson could hardly believe the transformation:
Indeed I scarcely meet with an individual who is not in fact become a citizen of the world, who does not already consider the Globe as his country; and express a determination to take up his residence in that part of it where he can live most secure, most free, most happy, whatever may be the meridian in which this may be.
His letter to Holland was steeped in the language of Enlightenment, equating freedom of movement with liberty and light, and the privations of war and oppression with darkness and ignorance. Smithson told his friend that when peace finally arrived the opening of the ports would be "like the destruction of a dike—like the bursting of a mine—the people will issue as a huge wave; will rush out as by explosion from this damp dungeon, the dark den of want and melancholy—the lurid cell of maniac puritanism."51
The declaration of amnesties on October 1, signaling the coming peace, enabled countless émigrés and royalists hiding in England to return to their homeland. And even before the official Peace of Amiens was signed in March 1802, the stream of curious English across the Channel turned to a flood. The French likewise made their way to England. "The number of French people daily landing here is quite astonishing. 20, 30, 50 come over in a vessel I am told," Smithson informed Holland. "The two countries seem going completely to exchange their inhabitants." Many of the French visitors were hailed as celebrities. Madame é was mobbed in Kensington Gardens, and the French aeronaut A. J. Garnerin, the first ever to parachute out of a balloon, was received with wild applause when he arrived with his wife to make some theatrical ascents. Smithson no doubt wished to be among those rushing off to France, but 1802 passed in its entirety, and several months of 1803 as well, before he finally crossed the Channel.
He was probably waiting for his brother, Henry Louis Dickenson, to return. The two of them had not seen each other in more than ten years, and now, with their mother dead, they had only each other. Dickenson, the second son, had not gone on to university. After flirting briefly with an apprenticeship at the family solicitors, he had bought a commission in the Army. His subsequent, not especially illustrious career had taken him to Holland, Cape Town, and India.
Now on leave, he drew out his trip home, taking nearly six months to travel from the Red Sea back to London. It was a journey filled with sightseeing, Dickenson's own version of the Grand Tour. In Egypt he picked up a little figure of Isis to bring back to his brother Smithson, who later analyzed the pigments that had been used to color it. The view from the top of the pyramids marked, he said, "the first time in my life that my imagination had fallen short of the reality." After crossing from Alexandria to Malta, he carried on to Naples, saw Pompeii and Herculaneum and climbed Vesuvius. In Rome he was presented to the Pope, whom he found "totally deficient in dignity." Traversing the Alps at Mont Cenis, he delighted to see ice again for the first time in so many years. At the end of November 1802 he arrived in Paris and stayed a month, visiting "everything worthy of curiosity." When he finally reached London, Smithson, who had inherited almost everything from his mother, including money in trust for his younger brother, quickly began to pick up Dickenson's bills. Their overlap, however, was brief. Although they had much to catch up on, Smithson was eager to taste the delights of Paris for himself. He probably intended to be gone only a few months at most.52
The frontispiece from one of Smithson's books, showing Garnerin's balloon launch and
his parachute jump.
In late February 1803 Smithson made the requisite trips to get his passport documents—first to Lord Hawkesbury at Whitehall and then to the French ambassador. He was ready finally to leave for the Continent by the end of the month. Once again, however, a death in the family intervened. On March 10 his aunt Henrietta Maria Keate Walker Hungerford, the last of the "heiresses of Studley," as she and Smithson's mother had called themselves, died at her house near Cavendish Square after a long illness. The burial did not take place until the end of the month. It was held at Salisbury Cathedral, where the Hungerford family had long ago dominated in medieval splendor. There amongst her ancestors, adjacent to the seventeenth-century brass plates commemorating Sir Giles Hungerford and his wife Dame Margarite, and near the worn and displaced fifteenth-century stone tombs of Walter Lord Hungerford and Catherine his first wife, Henrietta Maria Hungerford found her resting place. She was the last of the Hungerfords to be buried at Salisbury.
The Lost World of James Smithson Page 22
