Footprints in Paris

by Gillian Tindall

  By March the following year the Russians, and other of Britain’s intermittent allies in the Napoleonic Wars, were forming up to attack Paris. As Napoleon’s minister, the arch-survivor Talleyrand, remarked with his habitual cynicism: ‘This is the beginning of the end.’ Napoleon’s support was haemorrhaging from him. Paris, ill-prepared for any assault, fell on the last day of the month. Six days later Napoleon abdicated, theoretically in favour of his infant son who was already in safety elsewhere, and departed to ‘rule’ Elba. This insignificant realm the size of the Isle of Wight, between Italy and Corsica, was ostensibly a Ruritanian imperial seat in which he could salvage his pride, but in practice it was an island prison which he soon began scheming to leave. The restored Bourbon king, arbitrarily known as Louis XVIII since his unhappy nephew, the little Dauphin, had disappeared in the Revolution, was in Paris by early May. The Parisians, punch-drunk with successive regime changes over the preceding twenty-five years, obediently stuck white cockades in their hats. Continuing loyalty to Napoleon was muttered in the old streets, but in the wealthier quarters the royal lilies and bees were quickly sewn back onto curtains.

  The hostile armies had all vacated the city by the end of that month, just about the time that Arthur Jacob in Edinburgh was being awarded his MD. For this he wrote a dissertation in Latin on one of the arteries from the heart. Diplomatically – or perhaps, who knows, with sincere gratitude? – he dedicated this opus to his parent – ‘quo rudimenta non solum attigit, sed omnibus postes nummis adeptu professionis in cultu fructus est filius’. (‘From whom did he attain not only the rudiments but all subsequent provision for the professional art: the son is the fruit.’)

  Since Arthur did not return to Ireland before his momentous journey, any dispute with his father over the plan must have taken place by mail. One can imagine the nature of it in an era when letters were composed with a certain formality, even between close relatives.

  ‘… I have spent money on you, my son, money that I have laid out gladly but, as you are aware, Samuel is now studying for the Church in Dublin and so costing us money also for his fees and keep. I don’t speak of the Michael business, but his debts are now paid. Four of your sisters are now off my hands, but each had to have her portion, there will still be Susan and Mary to marry not to mention William, Thomas and little John to launch into life. I shall be sixty this year and have pinned many hopes on you. I know you have been a devoted scholar, but it is now your duty to return to Ireland and take up your place here as a grown man.’

  ‘Sir, the chance of a lifetime is before me. Paris can now be visited again, and my professor here, John Bell, is willing to give me introductions to Dupuytren, who is soon to become chief surgeon of the Hôtel Dieu, and to Dubois who has been physician to the Empress. Professor Colles will help me too: with such recommendations I believe I can readily find some work in Paris as a dresser or even as an assistant. Do you not see, Father, that I cannot possibly ignore these offers?’

  ‘… did not send you to Edinburgh for you to work as a dresser. You know of my plans for a building more fit for the Infirmary, and that Eyre Coote and Sir James Grattan have pledged their support. I have devoted my life to this. I shall need you, Arthur.’

  ‘… I too am devoting my life to medicine but – forgive me, Father – medicine today is becoming much more than …’

  ‘… these French ideas! Jacobins. Many of our best medical men distrust them, you know … Well, you must act as you think fit. No doubt in any case you will. But please understand that not a penny more …’

  Old Squaretoes. But no, perhaps I have got it wrong. Perhaps, at that stage, Arthur did have the family business in his own sights, and initially the main purpose of the walk to Paris was the chance to survey comparable institutions, both in England and in France.

  ‘… So, Father, making the journey on foot, I shall have the opportunity to vary my route to visit many hospitals and infirmaries on my way south and form an opinion of their methods. This will be of the greatest use in the future, to you as well as to me …’

  Maybe, indeed, it was not till Paris was attained, and further experience had there, that Arthur’s ambition evolved definitively away from the life of a country surgeon towards a more specialised career.

  Chapter III

  ARTHUR’S JOURNEY

  A better-off young man than Arthur Jacob would have climbed onto one of the coaches that then plied between Edinburgh and London. The journey, undertaken all at once, was arduous in itself, for the coaches kept going for six days and nights with breaks only for meals. Relays of horses were replaced at specially equipped inns all along the route. (The mail coaches did it in sixty hours, but with them the changeover of horses had developed into a coordinated exercise timed to the minute.) The great north road resounded to hoofbeats at that period, for it had a better gravelled surface than ever before. In a number of once-quiet provincial towns on or near its route new industries had changed life entirely. A new breed of commercial and business travellers rattled constantly through tracts of country that before had known only the great slow-motion gatherings for cattle fairs and the transactions of the immemorial wool trade.

  Coaches were never a form of mass travel. They were not cheap. They hardly could be, with the high-quality performance of man and beast on which they depended, though it was no doubt also true that the coaching inns profited from having a captive market of relatively well-off travellers to rack up prices. William Smith, one of the first geologists and land surveyors, wrote in his memoirs, which cover the years of Arthur Jacob’s youth: ‘Everyone who travels knows that ready money must be provided for the road. There is no credit at coach offices. A man’s hand is constantly draining his pocket, and so pressing for fees were all the lackey attendants … that I used to say a civil answer could scarcely be obtained on the road for less than sixpence. In taxes and tolls alone the man obliged to travel much pays heavily, however abstemious and economical he may be …’

  Signs from his later life suggest that Arthur was abstemious or, at any rate, not fond of lavish living. Let us suppose, for a moment, that he had taken the coach. He would have travelled ‘on the outside’, that is, on the top, unprotected from wind or rain, as men routinely did. Only old or infirm gentlemen thought it their place to join the ladies in the stuffy interior, which normally accommodated only four to six people anyway. But, even outside, a journey of no more than sixty or seventy miles from central London to the south coast cost a pound, and Edinburgh to London by the shortest route was over five hundred miles. So locomotion alone would have cost Arthur seven or eight pounds, before any of the tolls, taxes and tips that William Smith mentions. And then there would be meals. Travellers’ manuals of the period suggest that the standard coaching-inn meal, with service, would cost each time something like three to four shillings, a far cry from the sixpence (half a shilling) a head that had procured a Sunday feast in a simpler Scottish tavern. So, at twenty shillings to the pound, over six days at least another three pounds must be added, bringing the total cost of the journey to something like twelve pounds. Or far more, of course, if Arthur had used the coaches to pursue his more circuitous route from one town to another. Similarly if, on the direct sixday route, he had permitted himself the luxury of a night or two in an inn bed, to rest from the ceaseless shake and clatter and dust and night-time chill of the journey, the figure would rise much more steeply. At exactly the same period, a young French iron-master, visiting England to try to find out why English iron was of better quality, paid fifteen shillings and sixpence (just over three quarters of a pound) for a brief sojourn in an inn at Deal, where a storm at sea had landed the ship’s passengers precipitantly, and then fourteen shillings for a night and dinner in a hotel in Dover. This, in an era when many ordinary working men did not earn fourteen shillings a week and a servant-keeping member of the modest white-collar class only about three times that.

  So, Arthur set out to walk. The summer of 1814, which followed one of t
he coldest winters on record, was not a warm one, but perhaps, for the comfort of a walker, this was all to the good. For Arthur was not a labourer or yet an impoverished poet, who would sleep out under the stars or seek a night’s shelter in a barn. He could not tramp the muddy or dusty roads of England quite unwashed, in shirtsleeves or a smock. He was a qualified physician; when he reached the town that was his next objective he had to appear presentable at the gates of the infirmary or private house where he hoped to be received.

  I do not know exactly what medical centres he visited on his zigzag path. He seems to have started with Scottish ones, probably Glasgow and Dumfries. Nine hundred and sixty miles, almost twice as far as the direct route to England’s south coast, took him, as he told people long after, as far as Wales on one side and East Anglia on the other. Britain had a fair number of hospitals and infirmaries by then, most of them established in the preceding sixty or seventy years and many of them, like the one in Maryborough, much more recently than that. Arthur would surely have visited the ones at Newcastle-on-Tyne and at York. The growing industrial cities of Hull and Huddersfield had yet to acquire theirs, but Leeds had one. So did Manchester, Sheffield, Stafford, Worcester and Birmingham. Newcastle-under-Lyne, in the Potteries, only opened theirs the following year, but Nottingham, Leicester, Northampton and Bedford each had one, and another had recently opened in Derby. In towns such as these Arthur would have sighted for the first time the ponderous, noise-filled buildings and great smoking chimneys that the new industries had brought in the previous fifty years to England’s ancient agricultural landscape. In the west, he reputedly went to Chester, Shrewsbury, Hereford and Bristol. Did he get as far as Exeter, an old foundation like the one at Bristol, and also to the infirmaries in the other cathedral cities of Salisbury and Winchester? He would not have wanted to miss the one at Oxford, named for the seventeenth-century physician John Radcliffe but only founded in 1770. He certainly visited the older one at Cambridge, since he made the journey into the east as far as Norwich.

  Progress was in the air, and Arthur Jacob’s voyage of discovery was in itself part of this stirring. The old Poor Law system, based on individual parishes, had broken down as people moved from one place to another far more than they had in the past, drawn or driven towards jobs in the expanding towns. In the new mills and workshops, with their unguarded machinery, terrible accidents occurred – limbs torn off, faces battered by grinding stones run too fast – adding to the more traditional ailments of the labouring poor as listed in medical handbooks of the period: scrofula, tuberculosis, ophthalmia, hernia, pleurisy, lumbago and abscesses, not to mention more opaque diagnoses such as ‘swollen brain’ or ‘vita cutis’.

  In an effort to cope with the new urban working class and their ills, old and often inefficient institutions, each run by a handful of surgeons and apothecaries, were being revamped, and new ones opened. There had been passionate arguments in Edinburgh Royal Infirmary itself about which doctors and students had the right to attend patients. The Bristol Royal Infirmary had been founded in 1742, but it was rebuilt in the 1790s and, for the first time, acquired a room specifically designated for operations with an operating table donated by ‘one of the sawbones’. But a set of operating instruments was not bought there till 1811: till then each surgeon carried his own knives with him. Worcester Infirmary was in financial trouble all through the 1800s, and the not-yet-qualified man who was brought in to run it in 1812 was even younger than Arthur. But medicine was rising in status. That boy was to go on to a long career as a pioneer of cleanliness and suitable diet, and eventually a knighthood.1 The year before Arthur’s great walk, the Northampton institution ‘for the Relief of Sick and Lame Poor’ was also reforming itself, and drew up a detailed list of rules about diet, nurses’ duties, visitors and regular inspections.2 Full meals for those considered fit enough to eat them consisted of milk porridge for breakfast, meat on most days for dinner and bread and cheese for most suppers. No strong liquor (i.e. gin or port) was to be allowed in the wards, and ‘no Patients to be, on any account, suffered to drink tea’ anywhere in the Infirmary. Presumably this related more to tea’s status as a luxury commodity than to any supposed harm it might do. Also ‘that no Patients do presume to give to their friends who come to see them, or others, any of their allowance of bread, meat or beer’. It is not hard to guess, from this, and from the insistence that all washing and dressings were to be done early in the day, what the older, unreformed hospitals were like.

  So, pulling the iron bell-handles at the gates of these old and new institutions, Arthur came, dressed for the road probably in ‘buff’ or light brown Irish linen breeches rather than the cream ones then fashionable in summer, and good solid boots or shoes. (Wordsworth, for long tramps, favoured shoes.) Arthur would have worn a waistcoat, a cutaway coat like a riding coat, a neck-cloth folded to cover the top of his shirt, and some sort of traditional broad-brimmed hat rather than the newer town-style that was then in the process of evolving into the ubiquitous nineteenth-century ‘stove-pipe’. William Blake, another fervent walker of the time, showed just such a hat on his little drawing of a traveller ‘hastening in the evening’. Arthur Jacob must also have had a small shoulder bag of leather with a spare shirt, nightshirt and socks, some letters and papers – perhaps a pocket French dictionary to study – and one of the small-scale, approximate maps of the time. He no doubt had his doctor’s pocket knife and lancet in a little case, but not much more than that: the stethoscope had not yet been invented. A shave could be had in any town or village through which he passed, and no one of any class then considered it necessary to bath often, or to change their outer garments.

  Sometimes he would have been received with reserve or open condescension by an elderly surgeon-in-charge in the tie-wig and long, snuff-stained waistcoat of a previous era, but sometimes his newly acquired Edinburgh knowledge would have been welcome and solicited: here and there he would have encountered known faces. No doubt he was accommodated with dinner and a night’s stay, either in the infirmary itself or in the home of one of the medical men, with a servant to clean his boots and brush his coat for the morning. But what about the nights in between towns?

  ‘If you’re passing by Berwick you should look up my people.’ That is the sort of thing a fellow student in Edinburgh would have said. Or –

  ‘I’ve an uncle who’s a surgeon in Shropshire, Ludlow way. I’ll write and tell him to expect you.’ Or yet –

  ‘I’ve some cousins in Lincolnshire. Mostly females. Haven’t seem ’em for some time, but I’m sure they’ll take you in. It’s a quiet life there.’

  For in that pre-railway world, out among the hills and pastures of a still very rural England, the number of those who could be classed as educated gentlefolk was relatively tiny and social life correspondingly restricted. Everyone in this small world knew each other or knew of each other. A new face, with fresh conversation, was readily welcomed, and then passed on as a desirable guest to an acquaintance or relative in the next county (‘Ask for Mr Bailey at the courthouse. I’ll give you a note for him …’). Arthur could have reciprocated hospitality here and there with useful advice on Bessie-Jane’s poisoned finger or an up-to-date opinion on Mother’s dizzy turns. Without means he might be, sustaining himself during his long marches on a few penn’orth of bread, cheese and milk bought from the farms he passed. I suspect he had a distinct Irish accent, perhaps ironed out a little by Edinburgh gentility, but he had his professional credentials and the manner and dress of a gentleman and, as such, many doors would have been opened for him.

  If other resources failed, and another dusk began to overtake him, he could simply seek out the vicarage in the next village to which he came, knowing that the vicar would be unlikely to turn him away. Vicars were honorary members of the network of rural gentry, and as an Anglo-Irishman Arthur was a member of the Established Church of England. He could claim cousins who were churchmen themselves, in the West Country and in Kent, and a great uncle had
been an Archdeacon in Armagh.

  In point of fact, Arthur’s later life reveals a man who had little truck with God. Darwin’s theory of evolution was not to be published till Arthur was old; but already, in his youth, progressive opinion was advancing observations on human and animal physiology which were beginning to lay a long fuse of doubt and uncertainty regarding the conventional Christian view of mankind. Arthur’s eldest son – who later took Holy Orders and ended up as the incumbent of a fashionable church in Bayswater, west London – was, as a teenager, worried by his father’s lack of faith. He wrote him an anguished letter and left it on his plate at breakfast:

  ‘I thought indeed of speaking to you on this subject, but found myself quite incapable of facing the great dislike you have always entertained to conversation on religion … I dare not, as a Christian, or as a son, hold back from this painful task … Perhaps the obstacle is procrastination, putting off religion to a more convenient season. Are we sure that this season will come? Is there no such thing as sudden death?...’

  Addressed to a doctor, this appeal seems particularly inept. However, Arthur must have been to some extent touched by it, or by the emotion behind it, for he did not throw away the little, tightly folded missive but kept it for the rest of his life. It survives among his sparse papers today.

  But in 1814 a long road still separated the eager, energetic, supremely fit young man with the scholar’s eye-glasses and a mop of curly hair from the austere, formidable figure he was to become. Trying to concentrate on the young man, coming in and out of focus in the mind’s eye, I have the same tantalising feeling that is produced when looking at tiny people in an engraved landscape: surely, if I gaze hard enough, I will eventually, as in an enlarged photograph, be able to discern every expression, every thread of cloth?