The Inventor and the Tycoon

by Edward Ball

  The telegraph came at the same time. When the Great Western Railway went in, its developers strung telegraph wires along the track route, and on them the first telegraph service to go into commercial operation in England went live, extending from London to towns in the west. The coming all at once of these two life-changing machines, the locomotive and the telegraph, would have shaken perceptions. They would have made Ted’s hometown feel weaker, more provincial. They would have tied it to a network that originated in the city and made every place it touched into a dependent node on the line. The railroad changed the land, cutting through centuries of settlement and across property lines; the telegraph seemed to destroy time, reducing distance and the difficulty of getting out a message to nothing. Prior to the railroad, Kingston was one of England’s antiques. After it, the town became a destination on the branch from the capital, a stopping place for dots and dashes sent on the wire.

  As a boy Ted saw firsthand that traditions like his family’s barge business, which stood in the path of the machine, turned obsolete and went into decline. Eventually he began building little machines of his own. The cousin who wrote about him, Maybanke Anderson, said that Ted, during his childhood, was something of a tinkerer—she described his appetite for making little gadgets and toys to impress other kids. Later in life Ted would patent his own equipment and place it on show in industrial exhibitions. And forty years after the rail came to his hometown, Edward Muybridge would photograph the horses of Leland Stanford, the train monopolist, closing a circle of some kind.

  Ted Muggeridge was “an eccentric boy, rather mischievous, always doing something or saying something unusual or inventing a new toy or a fresh trick,” his cousin said. He sounds like the kid known in the family for entertaining the others, and for getting up stunts to attract attention. He seemed to like persuading younger children to fetch things for him and do him favors. Anderson wrote down her memories after Edward Muybridge had become famous—in fact, after he had died. But if you adjust for the dressing-up that’s done by old memory, you come away with Ted Muggeridge as a boy who had the mind of a prankwise child, a boy perhaps skeptical if not devious. Some of this remained in the personality of the grown-up, at any rate, the artist and shape shifter of photo-technology.

  His parents could not send him to an exclusive school, so according to most sources they sent Ted to the next best, a place called Queen Elizabeth’s Grammar. An upright institute, no dithering allowed, this place for the better boys in town was housed in a four-hundred-year-old church, known as Lovekyn Chapel, remade into a school. With decent teachers and a steady family life, Ted was on the way to mapping a life, maybe a role in the barge business, or something in trade. But soon after he had enrolled, just when his voice was breaking, all this changed.

  Ted Muggeridge’s school, Queen Elizabeth’s Grammar, operated out of a fifteenth-century church known as Lovekyn Chapel. (Illustration Credit c11.4)

  Ted’s uncle Charles Muggeridge, the malt maker, age thirty, was the first to die. There is no record of the cause, but the year Charles died, 1842, an epidemic of typhus killed some sixteen thousand people in England and Wales.4 Ted would have gone to his uncle’s funeral and seen his four young cousins, Charles’s children, in the front pew. A year later Charles’s widow, Ted’s aunt Ann Muggeridge, possibly short of money, moved away with her children—she disappears from Kingston records.

  The second to die, in March 1843, was Ted’s father, John Muggeridge. Again there is no record, but medical histories cite that month as one when an epidemic of influenza broke out in England, killing many thousands before it crossed the Atlantic and killed many more in America. John Muggeridge probably died in the sweep of this virus, age thirty-seven.

  Ted was twelve years old. The cull that took away his father and uncle in a period of a little more than a year would have been, at that time, a common experience, when waves of disease flooded the population, and children lost adults to sudden death. But there is nothing routine about the mental injury Ted would have experienced. His father’s people were gone from town, and three of his four grandparents were dead. When Ted’s father died, he took away from his son some kind of an ideal. It may have burned Ted in a way that caused him to withdraw, might have made him even more irregular, or “mischievous,” as his cousin put it.

  The death of Ted’s father erased most of the family’s income and left his mother with four young sons. Susannah Muggeridge had to worry about money, but less than other women in the same place because her own mother had extra. The widow was thirty-five. Her circumstances would have been familiar to her mother, the matriarch, who was also once a young widow with a house full of children. It seems the grand Susanna Smith stepped in, paid the bills, and padded things for Ted, softening his fatherless world.

  Ted was the second of the four boys. The oldest by two years was the father’s namesake, John Muggeridge. Ted may have looked up to him, the more so when the older boy found his way into a venerable boarding school in London. It was 1846. The academy known as Christ’s Hospital was a three-hundred-year-old school at Newgate, in the old city center, which subsidized tuition for the sons of workers and so gave plainer boys a chance at university. The school took the sons of certain tradesmen as scholarship students, and among the favored guilds, a union of riverboat hands called the Company of Watermen had the right to send a few boys. John Muggeridge Jr. seems to have gotten into the school thanks to his grandmother’s barges. At a time when one in a hundred boys went beyond high school, a place at Christ’s Hospital meant university might lie over the horizon, and Ted’s brother could end up with a profession and a great leap in class.

  John Jr. left Kingston for school, spent a year there, came home. He returned for his second year and started studying, but in October 1847, he fell sick and died. He was nineteen. As usual, the record gives no cause, but 1847 was yet another year of pandemic. This one was known as the “Irish fever,” an eruption of typhus that killed thirty thousand around the country.5

  The spasms of natural selection arranged Ted’s childhood. First his uncle’s funeral, then his father’s, now his brother’s. Ted was sixteen when his brother died. Historians say this kind of loss happened all the time, but Ted Muggeridge could count more than the average number of family members gone missing, all of them men. What is it like, behind the eyes, as your closest ones disappear into the churchyard? What kind of self remains? Is it the personality of a survivor? Ted’s childhood does not have ample documentation, but if you look at what evidence does exist, you might conclude that the shocks he experienced with death correspond with later patterns of alienation (if that is the right word). As an adult, Edward Muybridge, the photographer, relied on few people. He changed his relationships often and made not many friends, and he seemed most content alone. Solitary, peripatetic, Muybridge lived like a castaway, deracinated and drifting. Are the sources of his isolation to be found in the time when the men in his family vanished?

  The boy Ted Muggeridge also felt the plain fragility of status. When his father died, he saw success and social standing collapse between one year and the next; when his brother died, the same. I imagine that from these things the understanding might have entered his mind how nothing really remains, how you remake yourself as you go. If Ted took a message from all these deaths, it might have been to make his life more available to self-styling, to improvisation, a tactic of getting by that he eventually put into action in America.

  As a child he lived in a rooted place, but the storm of industrialization was all around. Britain embraced the machine—factories and mass production, coal and urbanization—and its center was London. A list of the city’s industries, all of them adult but still growing, would include engineering, shipbuilding, papermaking, and leather. (The textile mills, the biggest industrial drivers, were in Manchester.) The experience of England during Muggeridge’s youth was not unlike that of China during its industrialization in the late twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries: ma
sses of people moved from farmland to cities to shoehorn themselves into crowded rooms and neighborhoods. As they did, the rural experience of time itself disappeared, replaced by the inflexible clock, the measured hour. With it came new forms of degradation—child labor and the twelve-hour day, slums and epidemic disease, the exhaustion of being tethered to machines.

  Muggeridge as a boy saw these things from the relative calm of his river town. Looking at his later life, it is obvious that technology interested him, how to build a better machine. As a boy he seems to have admired the iron bridges, the machines that sped up life and made it more standard. He seems to have admired the steam engine that made possible the great “overland ship” of the railroad. Muggeridge was a practical boy from an impractically old place. His mother’s family, the comfortable ones, may not have seen that their prosperity would be wiped away by the railroad, but maybe Ted Muggeridge did.

  The patronymic “Muggeridge” had been around for centuries. For some reason, around the middle of the 1800s, it presented a problem to many of the family’s men. Ted would not be the only one who changed his name. He had two brothers who survived into adulthood, and it turns out that they, too, would change their last name. And the brothers also had a male cousin who did the same. All this relabeling adds up.

  You can speculate about what prompted it. The name Muggeridge happens to rhyme with “bugger.” The Oxford English Dictionary, so thorough with a million other etymologies, defines buggery pretty obscurely as “a technical term in criminal law” and cites an 1861 statute that criminalized “the abominable crime of buggery, committed either with mankind or with any animal.” The apparently wild and indefensible act of anal sex was criminalized. It may have been that the act of buggery, during the famously anti-sexual Victorian decades, grew from merely furtive behavior into a crime. It may have been that the word buggery (and jokes at the family’s expense) got pretty hot around this time. In the end, many Muggeridge men took steps to ditch their surname, as though they wanted to get away from something. Was it this sort of adolescent boy trouble that made Ted begin to tinker with his name, a habit he kept up throughout his life? It seemed easier to change the family handle than to carry it.

  As for his first name, the metamorphosis into Eadweard links up with local history. According to a legend (few papers exist to back it up), during the tenth century, Kingston became the coronation place for seven Saxon kings. The kings demonstrably lived, but whether they came to this place to be crowned is another matter. The first of them, in the year 900, was King Eadweard. A bit later you find a sovereign called Eadwig, coronation date 955, and then another like the first, Eadweard the Martyr, crowned 975. When Ted Muggeridge was a teenager, the burghers of Kingston, in a show of civic pride, dusted off the legend of the Saxon rulers. A great stumplike boulder was produced from the yard of All Saints Church, where Ted had been baptized, and designated the Coronation Stone—the flat, round rock was said to have been the place on which the rulers sat to be crowned. Not wishing truth to stand in the way of a story, the town placed the stone in the market square and chiseled the names of the kings on a large plinth. It was 1850. That year, gossip and storytelling about the stone preoccupied Kingston, and suitable ceremony accompanied the placement of the flat rock—a dais with bunting, music, and speeches.

  In hindsight, it seems more than a coincidence that local excitement about the town’s ancient royal roots grew just after the appearance of the rail line and the telegraph. When Kingston became a London afterthought, with the hint of irrelevance, it suddenly discovered its fancy history. The stone and its plinth remain, since moved next to the guildhall, and if you have a look, you will see prominently on the base the medieval spelling of the name: EADWEARD.

  Ted Muggeridge, who was nineteen when Kingston reclaimed the story of its Saxon king, took the name “Eadweard” from his hometown’s tale about itself. But this part is curious: he was fifty-two years old, and living abroad, when he finally did so. He knew the story, but waited a long time before dressing himself in the unpronounceable name, Eadweard.

  Coronation Stone, Kingston (Illustration Credit c11.5)

  He might have been aware of another thing, namely, the association of King Eadweard with murder. As it happened, two kings called Eadweard reigned, and the second of them, Eadweard the Martyr, ruled for just three years before he was murdered, in the year 975, by his stepmother and stepbrother—leading posterity to give him the cheery epithet “the Martyr.” No evidence exists, though, that these facts played a role when Edward Muybridge, lately a murderer himself, took up the king’s name.

  He was about five foot ten, age sixteen. He came from deep tradition and tight family, but at some point during his teens these things ceased to give him what he wanted. His brother John Jr. had gone to the fancy boarding school, Christ’s Hospital, and there was not another place for the Muggeridges, not another chance at Oxford or Cambridge. The barge business would go into the hands of his cousins, boys named Smith, grandsons of the matriarch, Susanna Smith. (He was also a grandson, but through his mother, a different matter.) The English pattern caused most boys who had run out of other prospects to leave the classroom before age sixteen and apprentice to a company or trade. Despite having a bit of cash, the Muggeridges and Smiths kept to this line. A record shows that Ted’s brother Thomas left school at sixteen to apprentice to a shipper in Carmarthen, Wales, a step he took before joining the merchant marine, and although there is no direct evidence for Ted, an apprenticeship someplace would have been the only path open.6

  It seems that in the year 1846, Ted Muggeridge was taken from his books and made to support himself. When it happened, circumstances suggest that he would have looked to his father’s people. There were no Muggeridges left in Kingston, but a lot of them elsewhere. Ten miles away, in the village of Banstead, were the Muggeridges who farmed (but there was not much to offer there). More Muggeridges lived in London itself, on the south side of the Thames, and these were better off. This big-city branch kept up with Ted’s mother, and in later years she would move to London and live with some of them in the neighborhood of Camberwell.

  At least two Muggeridge families in London ran businesses in publishing. A stationer called Muggeridge & Sprague had two offices, a showplace in the center city, and a printing operation in Camberwell. Another stationer named Muggeridge did business two miles from Camberwell in Southwark. Stationers did not merely sell paper (although they did that, too). By long tradition, stationers published books and pamphlets, and they printed art. Muggeridge & Sprague had been in business for fifty years at 61 Queen Street, near St. Paul’s Cathedral, in the center of the legal and money nexus, the City. An established stationer like Muggeridge & Sprague operated as a publisher of literature as well as a dealer in engravings and full-color prints you could frame. It employed salesmen to drum up subscribers, people who might put down money for books before publication date, and it ran an art printing operation. From its substantial office in central London, Muggeridge & Sprague published encyclopedias and other reference books, and folios of art, and sold all of them on site.7

  It may have been that either Muggeridge & Sprague or the stationer in Southwark, Nathaniel & John Muggeridge, belonged to cousins of Ted’s dead father. What Ted Muggeridge did later in America—selling reference books, publishing art—implies that he apprenticed to one of these two. Both would have used young men who signed up to the trade and suffered what abuse and long hours and bad pay were necessary in order to leave in three or four years, having learned how things were done. Books and pamphlets were old trades, so this would have been regarded as a conservative path for Ted. But machines, as everywhere, were changing things. Chromolithography, or mass-produced color printing, came in around 1840, and the rotary press about 1850, both of them boosting print runs and pushing the public to read and to look, more and faster. The technology made stationers grow and brought more young men like Ted to the training bench.

  His letters contain
another bit of circumstantial evidence. The business mail Ted wrote, years later, displays the style that Victorian gentlemen used with one another—polite and high, full of mannerisms like “your obedient servant,” a writing voice that flourished in an office staffed with scriveners, like a stationer’s.

  Ted Muggeridge might have lived at the publishing house, might have taken the train back and forth from Kingston. He would have gotten the feel of books and their varieties, learned about quartos and engraving plates and thirty-six-page duodecimos. He would have learned announcements and tombstone ads and layout, cardstock and engravings and pamphlets. He would also have been hitting the streets of stinking and euphoric London and picking up a taste for the metropolis.

  One firm in downtown London stood a notch in status above the stationers—the London Printing & Publishing Company. It had offices on St. John’s Street, a mile from Muggeridge & Sprague, and Ted Muggeridge, when he came to the city, would have walked past it. London Printing & Publishing produced thick, ponderous books—encyclopedias, multivolume histories, science monographs—titles aimed at the deep libraries of rich people and institutions. The company also put out travel books, art reproductions, etchings, and engravings. It happened that London Printing & Publishing had designs on America. The company wanted to increase its sales in the United States and was opening an office in New York. For this overseas operation, the book publisher needed a salesman—a “merchant,” as Ted would put it on his travel papers.