One Hot Summer

by Rosemary Ashton

  Nonetheless, Dickens was in such a state of anger and anxiety, writing to correspondents near and far about the ‘smashing slanders’ of his wicked female in-laws (Catherine’s father, George Hogarth, seems to have kept as far out of the controversy as he could), that he believed them capable of fouling their own nest in this way.115 He indicated as much to his friend Macready, telling him that the Hogarth women’s ‘wickedness’ had led them to the idea of going to court, ‘though I warned them in the strongest manner’. Catherine’s aunt Helen Thomson later suggested that the family had indeed raised the possibility of taking legal action.116 Certainly Forster, who like Dickens was inclined to melodrama, wrote urgently to Ouvry on 21 May about the need to get the Hogarths’ agreement to the terms of the separation deed Dickens had drawn up ‘by 3 o’clock today’. He refers to the Divorce Act as a threat to the agreement, and asks Ouvry to meet him before 3 p.m., and again between 4.30 and 5 p.m. ‘with Dickens’.117

  However real the threat was, the danger was averted and things went relatively smoothly from then on. Catherine’s father signed a legal document denying, on behalf of his family, that any of them had ‘stated or insinuated that any impropriety of conduct had taken place between my daughter Georgiana [sic] and her Brother in Law Mr Charles Dickens’.118 After a few more skirmishes, with Dickens insisting on his wife’s family signing the statement he had drafted for them, the settlement was finalised – Catherine was to have £600 a year and unlimited access to her children – though not before Dickens had written down a particularly unkind account of Catherine’s character and entrusted it to Arthur Smith, the friend who managed his public readings and who would go on his reading tour with him during the summer. Dickens sent it to Smith on 25 May, permitting him to show it to ‘any one who wishes to do me right, or to any one who may have been misled into doing me wrong’.119 Smith obviously did show the letter in certain circles, for it made a very public appearance a few months later, when the great Dickens scandal, which its subject had taken such pains to squash, reared up afresh.

  While Dickens was involved in this flurry of manic activity, he was continuing his public readings at St Martin’s Hall every Thursday evening, corresponding with friends, and engaging the well-known London photographer Herbert Watkins to take a photograph of him that he could send to a friend in Italy.120 By this time the great heat of the summer had begun; The Times recorded 84 °F (29 °C) in the shade for Monday, 31 May.121 Queen Victoria, who had turned thirty-nine the previous Monday, noted the change to ‘beautiful weather’ in her journal that week. ‘Another wonderfully fine & hot day’, she wrote on 31 May, adding, ‘Rather vexed to hear that Sir E. Lytton has accepted Office!!’122 Bulwer Lytton had that day finally taken up Derby’s offer, after angling once more unsuccessfully for the desired peerage.123 The heat was becoming a familiar topic; the Era, in its review on Sunday, 30 May of the Royal Academy exhibition, complained of the vast number of exhibits – between 1,100 and 1,200 paintings and nearly 260 sculptures – and of the difficulty of assessing them ‘in the midst of heat and dust, and a crush of crinolines’.124 Crinoline mania had been developing for a few years; it hit new heights – or reached new widths – in this hot summer, as Punch and other commentators pointed out incessantly.

  Among the news at the end of the month was that Brunel and Russell’s great ship, the Great Eastern, sometimes called the Leviathan, was now open to the public to visit. This ‘wonder of the engineering world’, as the Era called it, broke all records for size and capacity, but was in need of at least £200,000 to complete her fitting-out and get her ready to go to sea. Optimistically, the paper predicted commercial success for the vessel.125 Hopes were high on several fronts. The other promising engineering feat of the year, the Atlantic Cable, underwent a rehearsal on 29 May, when a squadron left Portsmouth on an experimental trip to test the machinery in preparation for the summer’s attempt at laying it and joining it in the middle of the Atlantic.126 Derby’s government had survived its crisis and looked likely to achieve some important legislation before the session ended. Disraeli was riding high in spite of his troublesome friend Bulwer Lytton, Dickens was surviving – just – the greatest crisis of his life.

  Meanwhile, 20 miles away at his home in Kent, Darwin was working quietly away, writing to correspondents all over the world to compare notes on various species, studying bees’ cells in his garden, and noting down the habits of rare slave-making ants. These last he spotted while on a visit to Dr Edward Lane’s hydropathic establishment at Moor Park in late April and early May, and he deemed them interesting enough to include in On the Origin of Species.127 The next few weeks would bring unexpected urgency to his plans for publication.

  June was to be a busy month for Darwin, Dickens, and Disraeli, as the summer heat mounted, records were broken, and important decisions had to be made both on the national stage and in private studies and drawing rooms.

  CHAPTER THREE

  June 1858, Part I

  Darwin and the pursuit of science

  ON 3 JUNE 1858 Darwin wrote to his best friend, the botanist Joseph Hooker, at that time assistant director of Kew Gardens, asking his advice. He had been elected a few months earlier to the German Academy of Naturalists and was now being asked to pay for the printing of his diploma. ‘I am utterly perplexed what to send’, he wrote. ‘Do for Heaven-sake aid me with one line soon. I do not want to give more than proper, but I am far from wanting to be shabby.’1 Living in domestic bliss and relative seclusion in his village in Kent, steadily going on with his study of species – from books, from his own notes dating back to the Beagle voyage, from correspondence with other scientists – and patiently observing animal life in his own garden, he relied on his London friends for advice and support. Chief among them were Hooker and Sir Charles Lyell, Britain’s leading geologist. Darwin’s current study being of bees’ cells, he corresponded with a number of friends and fellow scientists to compare notes and ask for help on that subject. His older brother Erasmus Alvey Darwin responded to a question about the cells’ construction by sending him diagrams, and William Tegetmeier, a London teacher who shared both Darwin’s interest in bees and his passion for breeding pigeons, was quizzed for advice on 5 June.2

  Though Darwin was known and appreciated among his fellow scientists at this time, he was hardly known at all to the public at large.3 Between 1839 and 1854 he had written or edited various volumes reporting the zoological and geological findings of the Beagle voyage, with particular emphasis on coral reefs, fossils, and barnacles, but these reached only a specialist readership. The secret of his achieving eventual recognition as a scientific author of originality and international significance was, in the first place, his extraordinary thoroughness, determination, and patience in carrying out his observations and studies, and, secondly, his way of attaching people to him, which was vital for a scientist who was not in daily face-to-face contact with fellow researchers. His letters give abundant evidence of his charm as a friend and colleague. He had a natural gift for flattering his correspondents while assiduously extracting information from them, and it is clear from the number of scientific men who called him their friend that he was as generous towards them as he expected them to be towards him in the matter of sharing information and insights. He took enormous time and trouble over his chosen life’s work, and was a fine communicator of his curiosity, his excitement, his disappointments, his puzzlement, and sometimes his amusement at the results he arrived at and the route taken to get there. A light-hearted example comes in a letter written from the Isle of Wight in August 1858 to Hooker, advising his friend to take his holiday somewhere on the coast:

  If you go to Broadstairs, when there is a strong wind from [the] coast of France & fine dry warm weather, look out & you will probably (!) see thistleseeds blown across the channel. The other day, I saw one blown right inland, & then in a few minutes a second & then a third; so I said to myself God bless me how many thistles there must be in France; & I wrote a lette
r in imagination to you. But I then looked at low clouds & noticed that they were not coming inland, so I feared a screw was loose, I then walked beyond a headland & found the wind parallel to coast, & on this very headland a noble bed of thistles, which by very wide eddy were blown far out to sea & then came right in at right angle to shore! One day such a number of insects were washed up by tide, & I brought to life 13 species of Coleoptera [beetles]; not that I suppose these came from France. But do you watch for thistle seed, as you saunter along the coast.4

  Hooker and Darwin had met as young men in 1839 and had become friends; it was to Hooker that Darwin first divulged in 1844 his conviction, in defiance of scientific and religious orthodoxy, that species were not immutable, and created so by God. ‘At last gleams of light have come’, he wrote, ‘and I am almost convinced (quite contrary to [the] opinion I started with) that species are not (it is like committing a murder) immutable.’5 The work he was still pursuing in 1858 as he toiled towards eventual publication was the painstaking checking and working out of his theory that species changed through time, and that they did so by means of natural selection. Asa Gray, professor of botany at Harvard University, was the recipient of a paper he wrote in September 1857 entitled ‘Natural Selection’.6 This was to be Darwin’s distinctive contribution to species theory, as he knew, but he was not yet ready to divulge it to the public at large.

  Darwin’s correspondents lived and worked all over the world. In the first couple of months of 1858 alone, Darwin begged for information about bees, ants, and various plant species from correspondents in Ceylon (George Thwaites, curator of the Botanic Garden of Ceylon), Central Africa (William Baikie, a naval surgeon exploring the River Niger), America (Asa Gray), as well as experts in the natural history departments of the British Museum.7 His poor health, an innate diffidence, his hatred of living in London and dislike of socialising combined to keep him in Down, where he relied on friends to send him the information he would otherwise have to seek by undertaking more exploratory voyages to distant places or working in a laboratory. Hooker regularly sent parcels of books from the Linnaean Society library and botanic samples from Kew to his friend in Kent. According to Hooker’s early biographer, Leonard Huxley (son of Thomas Henry Huxley), parcels from Kew generally went ‘to the Nag’s Head in Borough [near London Bridge railway station], the headquarters of the Down carrier’, though ‘in the case of a rare orchid in flower, Parslow, the immemorial butler, would travel to Kew and carry it back in his own safe hands’.8 Items might also travel by train, as Down was close to the town of Bromley, which was soon served by two railway companies from London; one of them, the Crystal Palace and West End Railway, opened on 3 May 1858, and the other, the Mid-Kent Railway, operated to and from London Bridge from 5 July.9 As for Darwin’s correspondence, it was dispatched with impressive frequency. According to the local monthly newspaper, the Bromley Record, which was launched on 1 June 1858, mail went in both directions between Bromley and London four times every weekday and once on Sundays.10

  Darwin’s life of study was smoothed by the presence of his loving wife Emma and eight children, and by his servants, including Parslow the butler, who lived with the family from 1839 to 1876. Also in the household were Mrs Davies the cook, successive governesses, footmen, coachmen, and various maids and boys who helped with the large house and surrounding land, where cows and chickens were reared. Since much of Darwin’s work consisted of experimenting on seeds and worms in his garden, and on exotic plants in his greenhouse, he employed two gardeners, William Brooks and Henry Lettington, who spent their whole working lives at Down House.11

  With all this support and, thanks to inherited family money, no need to earn a living, Darwin knew he was lucky in comparison with some of his younger colleagues. Thomas Henry Huxley, by contrast, had to write scientific columns in the press and give lectures in various institutions across London while he fought for one of the few permanent scientific posts available, and was obliged to wait eight years before he could afford in 1855 to bring his fiancée over from Australia, where he had met her on his own youthful voyage, in his case on the Rattlesnake, which set out on a four-year trip in December 1846 to study the Great Barrier Reef.12 Huxley was thirty-three to Darwin’s forty-nine in the summer of 1858; though he, too, became famous, he continued to teach and examine at various institutions as well as writing scientific papers and journalism, and never became financially secure. Darwin, in his autobiography, praised Huxley’s mind – ‘as quick as a flash of lightning and as sharp as a razor’ – and regretted that his friend had not enjoyed the leisure to write more: ‘Much splendid work he has done in Zoology’, he wrote, but he would have done much more if his time had not been ‘so largely consumed by official and literary work’, by which Darwin meant editing and writing for periodicals.13

  The geologist Sir Charles Lyell, now aged sixty and living a celebrated and comfortable life, mixing with aristocracy and royalty (he was ‘very fond of society, especially of eminent men, and of persons high in rank’, Darwin noted in his autobiography14), also observed with regret Huxley’s prodigious work rate. He wrote to Darwin in 1863:

  If he had leisure like you and me; – and the vigour and logic of the lectures, and his address to the Geological Society, and half a dozen other recent works (letters to the ‘Times’ on Darwin, &c.), been all in one book, what a position he would occupy! I entreated him not to undertake the ‘Natural History Review’ before it began. The responsibility all falls on the man of chief energy and talent; it is a quarterly mischief, and will end in knocking him up.15

  Lyell’s prediction came true in 1873, when Huxley suffered a breakdown from overwork. The Darwins helped by raising money to allow him to take some time off and by looking after the Huxley children at Down while he recuperated in the Auvergne.16

  The precariousness of a life in science is illustrated not only by Huxley’s example, but also by that of another young scientist working in the field of evolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, aged thirty-five in 1858. Though both Huxley and Wallace were born to middle-class parents, Huxley’s father being a maths teacher and Wallace’s a solicitor, neither family had enough money to support their son through university. Huxley got his education in science and medicine by taking classes here and there, while earning money as he could; he won scholarships and medals at the University of London, but after spending four years as an assistant surgeon on the Rattlesnake as it surveyed the Great Barrier Reef and New Guinea, he sailed home in 1850, engaged but unable to marry, owing £100, and not knowing what to do next. Despite being elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1851 – the youngest candidate in his year – he could not obtain either a university post or a government grant for more research.17

  Wallace’s father lost money through imprudent investments, and Alfred had to leave school at thirteen to join his older brother in learning the surveying trade in London. He educated himself by reading books and attending evening lectures for working men, some of them politically and religiously radical, at the Hall of Science near Tottenham Court Road.18 In 1848, having read Darwin’s Journal of his researches on the Beagle and Robert Chambers’s Vestiges of Creation, he was encouraged to set off with an entomologist friend, Henry Bates, to sail down the Amazon, returning four years later with a huge collection of insects and butterflies. (Wallace’s younger brother Herbert had joined them in 1849, only to die of yellow fever in Brazil.19) He earned a modest living by sending and bringing home specimens to one of London’s specialist scientific agents, Samuel Stevens, who sold them to museums and wealthy private collectors. Wallace met and admired Huxley at evening meetings of the Zoological Society, where he was struck by the fact that Huxley was two years his junior and yet already had a ‘wonderful power of making a difficult and rather complex subject perfectly intelligible and extremely interesting to persons who, like myself, were absolutely ignorant’ of the subject under discussion, in this case the liver of a zebra which had died in London Zoo.20

 
; In 1854, having published an account of his and Bates’s travels on the Amazon, he was given a grant by the Royal Geographical Society to sail to Singapore and on to the Malay Archipelago, where he spent the next eight years travelling between the numerous islands, observing and collecting specimens to send back to Stevens, who sold them and posted funds back to Wallace to allow him to extend his stay. As Darwin did with reference to his experience on the Beagle, so Wallace described his eight years of ‘wandering’ in Malaysia as ‘the central and controlling incident of my life’. Though he took Charles Allen, a 16-year-old boy from London, with him, after eighteen months he was alone, studying and describing in his journals, letters, and scientific papers, often for the first time, hundreds of species of beetles, insects and birds, orang-utan skins and skeletons, and – most exotic and prized of all – ‘the rare red bird of paradise’. He traversed the sea between islands, covering 14,000 miles in locally built boats, often seasick; he was sometimes seriously short of food; he caught fevers and sweated them out in solitary home-made huts, dosing himself with quinine got from government doctors in Singapore and elsewhere.21 During his time in Malaysia he collected over 100,000 specimens of plants and animals, and with his discovery that animal species differed on either side of an invisible oceanic line within the Malay Archipelago, he made an early contribution to zoogeography. This boundary was named the Wallace Line by Huxley in 1868.22

  Wallace met some European travellers and local government officials from time to time. He told his friend Bates in a letter of 4 January 1858 that he had spent twenty days collecting in Amboyna, where he talked to entomologists and doctors, a German collector, and a Hungarian ‘who studied a year in the Vienna Museum’.23 Three weeks later he wrote to Bates from Ternate, cheerfully saying that he planned ‘to stay in this place 2 or 3 years, as it is the centre of a most interesting & unknown region’. He added that a Dutch steamer arrived once a month bringing ‘letters from England in about 10 weeks which makes the place convenient & there are plenty of small schooners & native Prows by which the surrounding islands can be visited’.24 To his agent Stevens he had written in May 1857 in high spirits from the Arru Islands. He had found some glorious birds of paradise, which he intended to mount properly, unlike the specimens mounted by the locals, which were ‘miserable’ and not indicative of the birds’ ‘true attitude when displaying their plumes’. In a rare moment of boasting, he added: