One Hot Summer

by Rosemary Ashton

  We meet at a Club where, before you were born I believe, I and other gentlemen have been in the habit of talking, without any idea that our conversation would supply paragraphs for professional vendors of ‘Literary Talk’, and I don’t remember that out of that Club I ever exchanged 6 words with you. Allow me to inform you that the talk wh[ich] you may have heard there is not intended for newspaper remark; & to beg, as I have a right to do, that you will refrain from printing comments upon my private conversation; that you will forgo discussions however blundering, on my private affairs; & that you will henceforth please to consider any question of my personal truth & sincerity as quite out of the province of your criticism.106

  That Thackeray spent some time wondering how best to respond is shown by the fact that he wrote at least three drafts of this letter, in one case referring to Yates’s comments about some of his works being failures.107 He clearly decided, sensibly, to concentrate on the attacks on his personal morality rather than those on his books. However, his tone is haughty; he mentions Yates’s youth (and therefore junior position in relation to himself), and makes rather a meal out of the breach of club rules, of gentlemanly behaviour, which he thinks Yates has committed. He also overreacts by calling Yates’s remarks slanderous. Though Yates does refer to Thackeray’s conversation in his article, he gives no examples of it, so cannot really be said to have broken the unspoken rule about not quoting from someone’s club conversation.

  While Thackeray received, or took, no calming advice, Yates approached his mentor Dickens for help in responding in his turn. In a self-excusing passage in his Recollections and Experiences, published in 1884, he recalls drafting an inflammatory reply before sending a note to Dickens on Tuesday, 15 June asking if he could visit him later that day for advice.108 Dickens, godfather since 1855 to one of Yates’s twin sons, and admirer of his young friend’s actress mother, was close to Yates at this time, addressing him as ‘my dear Edmund’ in some of his letters. He replied immediately on 15 June, telling Yates to come before 6 p.m.; ‘I needn’t tell you that you may in all things count upon / Yours Ever / CD.’109 Dickens persuaded Yates to tone down his intended reply, though not enough to put an end to the silly spat. It is hard not to suppose that Dickens, in his current state of mind, was inclined to find Thackeray particularly irritating, no doubt because he could imagine Thackeray making jokes about his alleged relationship with an actress, and because he knew that Thackeray believed himself Dickens’s social superior. Here he was, yet again harping on about what was, or was not, ‘gentlemanly’ or permitted in a club frequented by ‘gentlemen’.

  After the consultation with Dickens, the reply Yates sent that very evening was far from humble or appeasing. It matches Thackeray’s outrage, pointing out that ‘it is absurd to suppose me bound to accept your angry “understanding” of my “phrases”; I do not accept it in the least; I altogether reject it.’ He goes so far as to fling Thackeray’s adjectives ‘slanderous and untrue’ back at him, saying the words describe Thackeray’s angry letter to Yates as much as they do Yates’s article in Town Talk. He finishes his short reply: ‘Your letter being what it is, I have nothing to add to my present reply.’110 All in all, the letter is not particularly offensive, though it is defiant. The first draft, as described by Yates after all the people involved were long dead, would certainly have raised the stakes much higher, yet oddly it might have stopped Thackeray in his tracks, since it pointed out some undeniable and provable truths about Thackeray’s own practice of insulting others in his journalism, and using his club membership in the process. Yates remembered how he ‘sat down at once’ on receiving Thackeray’s complaint and ‘took the liberty of reminding him of some past errors of his own – rather strong errors of a similar kind as to taste’:

  I reminded him how, in his Yellowplush Correspondence [in Fraser’s Magazine, 1837–8], he had described [Bulwer Lytton as] ‘Mistaw Edwad Lytton Bulwig’ [sic] …

  In regard to the Garrick Club, I called Mr Thackeray’s attention to the fact that he had not merely, in his Book of Snobs, and under the pseudonym of Captain Shandy, given an exact sketch of a former member, Mr Stephen Price, reproducing Mr Price’s frequent and well-known phrases … he had not merely, in Pendennis, made a sketch of a former member, Captain Granby Calcraft, under the name of Captain Granby Tiptoff, but in the same book, under the name of Foker, he had most offensively, though amusingly, reproduced every characteristic, in language, manner, and gesture, of our fellow-member, Mr Andrew Arcedeckne, and had gone so far as to give an exact woodcut portrait of him, to Mr Arcedeckne’s intense annoyance.

  With hindsight, Yates thinks, he should probably have sent this, for if he had, he ‘might have heard no more of Mr Thackeray or his outraged sensitiveness’.111 Certainly, Thackeray could not have denied the charge. Indeed, he had written to Bulwer Lytton in 1853 apologising for the Yellowplush satire and saying that he now wondered ‘at the recklessness of the young man who could fancy such satire was harmless jocularity, and never calculate that it might give pain’.112 The wording could not have been more appropriate to Yates’s silly article about him.

  Thackeray made the further mistake of referring the matter to the committee of the Garrick Club, writing on 19 June to express his hope that the committee would agree with him that ‘the practice of publishing such articles as that which I enclose will … be fatal to the comfort of the Club, and is … intolerable in a Society of Gentlemen’.113 This ensured that the business rolled on for many more months and, as collateral damage, put an unbridgeable distance between himself and Dickens. Another action of his at this time would have exacerbated the rift, if Dickens had heard of it; on 15 June Thackeray wrote to Charley Dickens, now living with his mother in Regent’s Park, inviting him to a dinner the following Sunday, 20 June. Several others were coming, he wrote, adding: ‘Is your mother in town, and would she care to come and meet old friends, who will be very happy indeed to see her?’ ‘The girls’, he said (his daughters Anny and Minny, now aged twenty-one and eighteen), ‘send their very best regards to her.’114

  Saturday, 12 June was a busy day for newspapers reporting scandal. In addition to Household Words and Dickens, Town Talk and Thackeray, and the universal coverage of the Meux lunacy case, Punch drew attention to the Poisons Bill, introduced by Lord Derby on 4 June, which was intended to tighten up regulations for the sale of poisons. Though the bill was timely following the main scandal of the previous hot summer, the trial during June and July 1857 of Madeleine Smith for poisoning her lover with arsenic,115 Punch was not particularly impressed with the proposed legislation, preferring to turn the conversation towards this year’s main scandal:

  It may have a limited beneficial effect, but while Two Millions of people in London are living over a far worse poison than an Apothecary can sell, and are inhaling it day by day until they are killed … these tiny measures are child’s play. Cleanse the Thames, the stench whereof, this last beautiful week, has been perfectly loathsome, and carry out a system of sewage, and then attack the chemists’ shops.116

  Complaints about the state of the Thames filled the papers for the next few weeks, until it was clear that something was at last going to be done, at which point the papers turned to discussing and criticising the committees empowered to decide what to do.

  Meanwhile The Times of 12 June became excited by a scandal in a London church. Its editorial declared:

  An extraordinary meeting at St James’s-hall yesterday will introduce to our readers for the first time certain ecclesiastical abominations discovered in this metropolis. We have heard a great deal about the Confessional, about priests and prying questions [i.e. in the Roman Catholic Church] … Few, however, have suspected that the system so often exposed had charms for any of our own Church … It appears that at least one clergyman, connected with the Church of St Barnabas, has been for some time in the habit of inviting and even compelling women of all ages to make confession of their mental habits as well as their actual word
s and deeds, not merely for some recent period, but for the whole of their lives, as one condition of receiving the Sacrament of Communion … There has been an exposure in St James’s-hall.117

  A second article in The Times on the subject that same day, ‘The Confessional in Belgravia’, gave a detailed account of the meeting at 11.30 a.m. on Friday, 11 June in St James’s Hall in Piccadilly, which was ‘crowded to excess’, according to the paper. Lord Shaftesbury, a defender of Anglican evangelical orthodoxy against Anglo-Catholicism, was on the platform alongside ‘many other noblemen and gentlemen’. In the body of the hall ‘upwards of 50 peers and 200 members of Parliament’ were in attendance. The purpose of the meeting was ‘to hear certain disclosures respecting the use of the confessional by the Rev. Alfred Poole, late curate of St Barnabas, and others connected with that church’. The bishop of London, Archibald Tait, had suspended Poole pending an explanation of his conduct, and in the absence of such an explanation, had revoked Poole’s licence to preach. Queen Victoria read about this in The Times and told her daughter Vicky, recently married to Prince Frederick William of Prussia and living in Berlin, to ‘be sure and read’ the account of the meeting about St Barnabas. ‘It will shock you.’118 Punch joked its way through the rest of the year with illustrations and slogans about the confessional, clergymen wearing large crosses, and churches displaying punningly named ‘Roman’ candles. On 24 July the ‘Big Cut’ – the main full-page illustration – featured a lady being handed into a carriage by a servant who asks her ‘Confession or Cremorne, my lady?’ (Cremorne being the famous pleasure garden in Chelsea).119

  St Barnabas church had been built in 1850 in Pimlico, near Westminster, as a daughter church of the wealthy parish of St Paul’s in Knightsbridge, which, according to a book on London’s churches published in 1858, had recently become notorious for its ‘Catholic’ furniture – a screen with a cross, ‘costly flowers’ wrapped round its pillars, ‘painted glass’, and a preacher who expatiated on the ‘sanctity of the priestly office’.120 St Barnabas, too, had its screen with a cross and its silver candlesticks. Both churches were suspected of ‘Roman’ sympathies just at the time of the so-called ‘Catholic revival’ in England under John Henry Newman and Nicholas Wiseman, the latter having been appointed cardinal-archbishop of Westminster by Pope Pius IX in 1850 to mark the restoration after nearly four centuries of the Catholic hierarchy in England. Lord Shaftesbury spoke warningly of the ‘surpliced priests’ in ‘the gorgeous temple of St Barnabas’.121 As the prolific Yates wrote in the Illustrated Times on 19 June, it was remarkable that so many politicians should have turned up to discuss religious matters in St James’s Hall:

  The sayings and doings of the Rev. Alfred Poole and his comrades at St Barnabas’s have been the theme of constant gossip during the week, and came as a boon to the ever-novelty-hunting quidnuncs [gossips who are always asking ‘what now?’, like the Lounger himself], whom the hot weather and the lack of excitement were generally exhausting.122

  There was, as we have seen, plenty of excitement in the press at this time. For good measure, on Monday, 14 June the Divorce Court began hearing the most interesting case of its short existence thus far, that of Robinson v. Robinson and Lane. Sir Cresswell Cresswell, Lord Cockburn, and Mr Justice Wightman presided. There were three sets of counsel, one for each of the parties. The case raised legal questions which required amendments to the law to resolve them, and the bulk of the ‘evidence’ of adultery came from the journals of the accused woman, Isabella Robinson. As the mercury rose, reaching its height two days after the beginning of the case, the story gripped the country, providing the same kind of interest which had been generated by the Madeleine Smith case the year before. At the same time the Garrick Club affair became common knowledge and filled the columns over the summer; Dickens’s separation fell out of the news briefly, only to return to the headlines in August; the Lytton fracas continued. And as Darwin received the letter from Alfred Russel Wallace which jolted him out of his quiet routine, Disraeli worked day and night to get his various bills through parliament before the summer recess.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  June 1858, Part II

  The silver Thames

  MID-JUNE BROUGHT THE hottest day of this or any previous summer, and with it came letters to The Times reporting local temperatures and records. G.J. Symons from Camden, north London, wrote on Tuesday, 15 June:

  Sir,

  Thinking it probable that many of your readers will be glad to know the exact heat of this ‘very hot’ day, I beg to forward the annexed observations from instruments tested by the Meteorological Society:

  Temperature in the Shade

  Deg.

  Deg.

  Deg.

  9 a.m.

  80.3

  2 p.m.

  87.2

  Greatest

  89.9 or 90.0

  heat

  [32.5°C]

  11 a.m.

  84.4

  3 p.m.

  88.7

  Least heat

  61.4 [16.4 °C]

  1 p.m.

  88.4

  5 p.m.

  82.5

  The mean temperature has, therefore, notwithstanding a gentle breeze, been nearly 15 degrees above the average.1

  On the same page the newspaper reported that the two official London measurements for Monday, 14 June, taken at noon in Hyde Park and at the entrance to Brunel’s Thames Tunnel in Rotherhithe, on the south bank of the Thames, were 86 and 87 °F respectively (30 and 31 °C). By Wednesday, 16 June the top temperature of 94.5 °F in the shade (35 °C) was reached, and soon people were sending in their observations from all over the southeast of England.2 Darwin’s local journal, the Bromley Record, noted on 1 July that the month of June had been ‘unusually fine’ in that neighbourhood too, with no rain since 5 June; the ‘intense heat’ had ‘reached its height on Wednesday, the 16th, when it was 93 degs. [34 °C] in the shade’.3 The Rev. W. Adams, who kept ‘Charts of Daily Maximum and Minimum Temperature’ in nearby Beckenham and sent them to the Royal Meteorological Society in London, recorded 91 °F on the hottest day.4

  The House of Commons sat until just before 6 p.m. on 16 June debating two bills relating to Scotland, one concerning a church tax imposed on the country in 1634 during the reign of Charles I which a number of Scottish members wished to repeal. At the end of a heroically long discussion it was decided that the bill should be ‘put off for six months’.5 Disraeli wrote to his friend Sarah Brydges Willyams on the same day, telling her that his life ‘has been passed in constant combat, but I am glad to add, with respect to all important matters, constant victory’. Waxing dramatic about the weather, he connects it to the ongoing discussion of the India Bill and the last actual skirmishes in India between rebels and Sir Colin Campbell: ‘The enemy, however, like the Sepoy, still keep the field, & like Sir Colin, I really have to carry on the campaign under a scorching sky.’ He explains that parliament has been holding morning sittings as well as the usual afternoon ones, in order to get through the business before the end of the session. His life is ‘engrossed & absorbed’ from waking in the morning till ‘generally three hours after midnight’, the more so as his boss Lord Derby is away with a severe attack of gout.6

  A notice in The Times a few days later recorded the death on 16 June, ‘at his residence, 18 Sackville-street, Piccadilly’, of ‘John Snow, M.D., of apoplexy, aged 45’.7 On Tuesday, 8 June Snow had attended a meeting of the Royal Medical and Chirurgical Society; on the evening of 9 June he was at a private meeting of fellow doctors discussing chest diseases. On 10 June he collapsed at home, and died of a stroke the following Wednesday.8 His friend and colleague Benjamin Richardson completed Snow’s unfinished work, On Chloroform and Other Anaesthetics, later in 1858, writing in his preface of his friend’s achievements in the field, and also claiming for him ‘the entire originality of the discovery of a connection between impure water supply and choleraic disease’. Snow, he said, had published a
work on the subject in 1855 which cost him more than £200 to print and ‘realized in return scarcely so many shillings’.9 Despite Richardson’s efforts, Snow’s discoveries in the field of public health were largely ignored, both in Britain and abroad.10 Notices and obituaries for Snow were few. Only the Builder gave him credit in its short piece on 26 June for his investigation of cholera and its causes and his pointing out ‘the fact that drinking impure water had much to do with it’.11

  Snow was therefore unable to take any part in the discussions, which now became loud and frequent, about the state of the Thames. Parliament debated it, among other topics, for four hours on 18 June, and a Commission of Sewers also met, but with so many agencies – vestries, City of London companies, water companies – putting their own financial interests first, and the Metropolitan Board of Works paralysed by disagreements about how to proceed, nothing was being decided. The Times’s editorial on 18 June was scathing:

  As long as the nuisance did not directly affect themselves noble Lords and hon. Gentlemen could afford to disregard the safety and comfort of London; but now that they are fairly driven from their Libraries and committee-rooms – or, better still, forced to remain in them, with a putrid atmosphere around them – they may, perhaps, spare a thought for the Londoners … How many years has the subject been under consideration, while the Board of Works has been ‘referring’ plans and squabbling with the Commissioner for the time being! … Shall the sewage be utilised or not? Shall the outfall be at this point or at that? Surely, questions such as these … are not impossible of solution. They must be solved at last, and why not now, as well as three years hence? … It would not be amiss to deal with the Board of Works as we do with a jury which cannot be brought to hand in a decisive verdict. Let them be confined in a river steamer and compelled to ply, without intermission, between London and Vauxhall bridges until they have agreed upon a plan, or the last man of their number has been summoned away to regions where the stench which they have protected can trouble them no more.12