The Philosophical Breakfast Club

by Laura J. Snyder

  After the exams were over, Whewell and some of his Trinity friends amused themselves by writing a series of joke Tripos questions, which they had printed up and distributed widely among the students. Headed “Utopia University,” the questions included, “Given a Berkshire pig, a Johnian pig, and a pig of lead, to compare the respective densities,” and “to determine the least possible quantity of material out of which the modern dress of a fashionable female can be constructed.”49

  WHEWELL REMAINED IN Cambridge to begin studying for the fellowship examination. He was now there alone. Jones had graduated and left Cambridge, and Whewell was desolate. In November 1816 he wrote to Morland, referring to Jones and Herschel, that “two of my most intimate acquaintances, and I will add two men of the greatest intellectual powers and attainments that I ever saw or ever expect to see, have left the University; and their departure has made an irrevocable gap in my enjoyments.” As he lamented, “This is one of the great curses of Cambridge: all the men whom you love and admire, all of any activity of mind, after staying here long enough to teach you to regret them, go abroad into the world and are lost to you for ever.”50 Whewell told Herschel that waking up and finding him gone was “a feeling like coming to yourself after a dose of nitrous gas.”51 (Davy was not the only one experimenting with the laughing gas.) Whewell even began to consider whether he should study for the bar, so that he could reside in London, where Babbage lived and where Herschel often took lodgings. A friend’s advice was sound: “Will your thirst of knowledge be slaked from this one stream?” Whewell agreed that he should stay in Cambridge, at least for the time being.52

  He was feeling other losses as well; the summer before, while Whewell was away on a reading party with a group of his pupils, his father had died. John Whittaker reported to Herschel that Whewell was particularly upset because his father was buried before Whewell had even been notified of his death.53 His greatest regret, as he told his sister Ann, was that his father had not lived to see the “fruits” of his sacrifices made in order to send his son to Cambridge.54

  Whewell tried to replicate the society he had enjoyed with the members of the Philosophical Breakfast Club by joining the Cambridge Union Society, founded in 1814 by the consolidation of three former debating groups. After holding its first meeting in February 1815, it quickly became the most prominent society at the university, a bastion of free speech and political debates that still exists today and has been the former home to famous politicians, pundits, and journalists. In the early days the members would gather in the society’s meeting hall at the Red Lion Hotel to read newspapers, drink ale, and talk about current events.

  There was much to talk about. In 1816 a sharp rise in bread prices, combined with heavy unemployment, led to nationwide calls for revolution. Whewell had written his father that June—soon before the elder Whewell’s death—that there had been rioting in nearby Ely. Things were quiet now, Whewell assured his father; “we have had the yeomanry cavalry raised, and a troop of the Horse Guards who were at Waterloo passed through with two pieces of artillery.”55 At the opening of Parliament in early 1817, a rock smashed through the Prince Regent’s coach window. The government panicked. There were whispered reports of plots to seize the Bank of England, to incite the army to mutiny, to tear open the doors of the Tower of London, to launch a Jacobin revolution. These reports were taken seriously enough that Lord Liverpool, the prime minister, suspended habeas corpus.56

  The same fear shook the Cambridge administrators when they considered the political debates of the Cambridge Union Society. They were angered to hear of Whewell’s friend Julius Hare’s recent, subversively titled speech “On the Question of the Propriety of the War Against France.” Warnings were issued to the Union Society members to desist from political subjects. When these warnings were ignored, the university took action.

  One Monday in March 1817, Dr. Wood, the master of St. John’s and the university’s vice-chancellor, sent a deputation of proctors to storm into a meeting of the Union Society and close it down. Whewell, president of the society, and by now a confident and brash young man, demanded imperiously that the proctors leave the room while the society discussed whether or not to comply. The proctors refused, noting that the students had no choice. Whewell managed only to negotiate the concession that the leaders of the Union could meet with the vice-chancellor. They approached the vice-chancellor, in his “full silks,” or academic dress, with his “red and ugly” face surmounted by a white wig (it was no longer au courant to wear a powdered wig—young men of this time favored short hair brushed to fall artistically in curls on the forehead—but wigs were still worn by some in the older generation, especially dons and heads of colleges).57 In response to Whewell’s arguments in favor of the society remaining open, the vice-chancellor insisted that it was “against the statutes” of the university to have political clubs, and he had the final word. The Union was closed down for four years.58

  Whewell, at least, did then have more time to study for his fellowship examination. Since John Whewell had left little money to provide for William and his two sisters, William needed the fellowship badly.59 Fellowships were highly sought after; a scholar could be maintained for life on a fellowship, with neither the expectation of teaching nor that of actually studying anything. They were essentially a sinecure awarded for high achievement in undergraduate studies. The only caveats were that the fellow had to remain unmarried, and after seven years he had to become an ordained minister in the Church of England, a requirement based on Cambridge’s status as the training ground for Anglican clergymen.60

  Fellows at Trinity were well compensated; not only did they have their room and board provided for them, but they were paid by a system of “dividends.” Since Elizabethan times, the fellows of Trinity divided the annual surplus income of the college. Each dividend was worth £1,000, and a fellow received £12 out of this. Between 1821 and 1832, each fellow averaged about 16.5 dividends, making an income of £225.61 When no rent or food charges had to come from this, and with no family to support, it allowed for a very comfortable lifestyle. Plus, if a fellow took on twelve pupils, he could make an additional income of £1,320, a truly princely sum.

  Whewell was studying hard. By this point he had comfortable rooms on the Great Court of Trinity, and he spent much of his time there reading. He told his sister Ann, “You can conceive few people more tranquilly happy than your brother in his green plaid dressing gown, his blue morocco slippers, and with a large book before him.”62 The exam began on September 21 and lasted two and a half days. Like the Tripos, this exam was arduous, with “hard scribbling” for eight hours a day. From 9:00 a.m. to noon on the first day the men translated Greek and Latin into English, and translated English (usually Shakespeare) into some classical poetic form, such as Greek iambics or Latin heroics. After a break for lunch, from three until dark the men answered questions in mathematics. There was more on classics the second day, with translations and a paper on Roman history. The morning of the third day was devoted to metaphysics, such as a paper on John Locke. It was known, though, that at Trinity the most important part was the mathematics paper of the first day.

  This time Whewell was prepared; he did not complain about the pace of the writing. He was nervous until winners were announced on October 1, but won a fellowship handily. He informed his friend Hugh James Rose that the seniors “have thought me worthy to be one of their number—so that I may now if I chuse go on imbibing college ale and college politics for the rest of my life.”63

  Soon afterwards, Whewell was appointed to a lectureship in mathematics. He reminded Herschel that his position gave him the power to further their old plan of reforming mathematics at the university by directing the reading of the students and writing textbooks for them. His textbook on mechanics and mathematics was the first of his numerous publications throughout his life.64 In the book Whewell used the new Continental methods exclusively. It was considered far in advance of any then-existing textbook i
n its treatment of bodies in contact, the composition of forces, and the laws of motion.65

  Whewell was now settled into his university life. He felt at times that it was a bit of a “vile grind,” as he described it to Jones: teaching and writing about mathematics in term, taking students on reading vacations out of term. He broke up the tedium by riding frequently. On one occasion Whewell, who was known as a “careless and fearless rider,” was thrown from a horse and left blind and deaf for five full minutes.66

  He began to study minerals and experiment with crystals. And he continued to read widely—in one week in 1817, Whewell took reading notes on books about economics, music history, the polarization of light, the nebular theory in astronomy, Gothic architecture, and “Kent’s hints on soil drainage and agriculture.”67 He started to plot ways to bring about more fully the plans of the Philosophical Breakfast Club, telling Jones that he was dreaming of “undertakings metaphysical, philological, mathematical and others which I would execute if I had the time.”68

  JONES, AS HIS friends knew, was not happy. Soon before graduating, he had been ordained a deacon of the Church of England. After receiving his non-honors “poll” degree, he went to live with his father in Brighton. His father still persisted in his plan that Richard take on a curacy. Richard tried to reason with his father; he had deep religious feelings, but was not interested in religion as a career, and not at all inclined to minister to a parish. But he did not have many options. His father would not support him, and had put an end to his studies at the bar. Richard might have had a chance for a fellowship at Caius, where his talents in classics would have been more valued than at some of the other colleges (such as Trinity). But his father was ill and irascible and insistent. Jones wrote to Herschel, who had invited him for a visit in Slough: “My poor father whom the gradual progress of disease has left a mere mass of hypochondriasm suspicion and irritability positively will not let me leave his sight till I am safe in orders and that I may get there has forced me to take a curacy.” His time with his father had been taxing: “I will not fill my paper with an account of my sufferings for the last two months but seriously and sadly I am worn out—my feelings are exasperated to frenzy, my prospects grim in my face as dark as hell and I am tormented by a hundred silly people who will not let me be miserable in peace but goad me to death with compliments on my filial piety and friendly assurances that ‘it cannot last long.’ ”69

  The next fall, Richard submitted to being made a priest for the Archdiocese of Canterbury, and received a curacy in Ferring, a farming village of 250 inhabitants three miles west of Worthing in Sussex. Later he would be appointed to a second parish, in Lodsworth near Petworth, about twenty miles northwest of Ferring, a three- or four-hour ride. He was probably paid something on the order of thirty to forty pounds for each position. The life of a country parson was often a hard one. The strict divide between the classes in the rest of society was mirrored in the Church. The best-paid positions for clergymen—such as the £7,000 earned by the bishop of Canterbury—were reserved for the well-born and well-connected, generally the second sons of the gentry.70 Some positions were handed down from generation to generation. Whewell’s friend Julius Hare would later inherit his position of the rector of Herstmonceux in Sussex when his uncle, the previous rector, died. Hare earned £1,000 and lived in Herstmonceux Castle, with its huge library and lavish furnishings.71 However, more than half of all positions were worth less than £50 a year, many less than £20. Clergy were forced to hold more than one position in order to survive, especially if they had families. Most farmed the land belonging to the parish (the “glebe”) for their own food. The English historian and Trinity fellow T. B. Macaulay considered the typical clergyman no better than a “menial servant,” reduced to “toiling on his glebe … feeding swine … and loading dung carts.”72

  Jones did not yet have a family to support, so his situation was not as bad as some. Nevertheless, although he had “two lovely sitting rooms” and a bedroom in the parsonage, which he shared with the vicar, the Reverend Francis Whitcombe, Jones was lonely and depressed. He missed his friends and the intellectual stimulation of Cambridge. He wrote often to Herschel and Whewell, begging them to visit. He had few duties in either parish. With such a small population, Ferring did not seem to need both a vicar and a curate. But since the vicar was also responsible for the services at the church in East Preston, two or three miles away, Whitcomb may have had his curate Jones conduct these services.73

  Jones spent much of his time collecting and drinking wine, eating large meals, playing whist (a four-person card game, the ancestor of bridge), studying agriculture, gardening, and riding back and forth between Ferring and Lodsworth, and between Ferring and Brighton to visit his ailing father, who survived until 1821. He also hunted enthusiastically, at one point nearly blowing off his arm when a spark ignited his horn of gunpowder. (Herschel joked to Whewell that this was Jones’s divine punishment for hunting in his clerical surplice.)74 He visited Herschel in Slough and London, and Whewell in Cambridge, and convinced them both to visit him in Sussex. When the three still-unmarried members of the Philosophical Breakfast Club were together, they opened some of Jones’s most prized bottles, and spoke of their college days and of their plans to reform science. Jones began to formulate his own strategy, which he would set in motion over the next few years.

  IN THE SPRING of 1821, when Herschel was twenty-nine, something happened that caused him to give up his chemical and optical experiments for a full eight months, the longest gap in his experimental notebooks: he fell in love. The object of his affections was Miss Gwatkin, one of the daughters of the well-known Robert Lovell Gwatkin and Theophila Palmer, niece of Sir Joshua Reynolds the painter (probably Harriet, who was born in 1795, making her three years younger than Herschel; Herschel’s mother visited her some ten years later).75 Robert Lovell Gwatkin was a respected landowner and political reformer, a cousin of Herschel’s friend and fellow St. John’s student Richard Gwatkin. John and the young woman met in March, perhaps at a party at Richard Gwatkin’s house. John was captivated, and proposed two months later. This impetuous step angered his father, not least because John informed him of the impending marriage in a letter.

  Mary Herschel wrote to her son that the meeting between Sir William and Mr. Gwatkin to discuss John’s proposal to Miss Gwatkin went “better than I expected.” The two fathers agreed that time should be given to the young couple before a marriage settlement was drawn up. John’s mother expressed herself happy with the intended match, praying that God should bless the union “if it takes place.”76 The parents were leaving a way out for the two, should one or both change his or her mind. Meanwhile, Herschel’s mother asked Babbage to talk to John about the marriage settlement, a task that Babbage performed without much relish.77

  Marriages were like mergers in those days, especially where family land and money was involved. For the upper classes, a settlement document—which cost over £100 to draw up—was de rigueur. A daughter received her “portion” of the family’s inheritance when she married; it was her dowry. Actually, the money became her husband’s, but it was typical for wives to receive “pin money,” or a lifetime guaranteed allowance, often equal to one percent of her dowry. If her husband died first, the wife could be provided for by a “jointure,” an income for life from his estate. It was also possible to protect the separate property of the wife, stating that she could not sell it even if she wanted to in order to help her husband, thus keeping it out of reach of his creditors.78 But all of this needed to be put down on paper in legalistic language. As Babbage reminded Herschel, it needed to be done in the proper way, so that the couple could have access to the money in the woman’s portion, which might be in the form of bonds or land. John, a romantic and flighty man, was too “delicate” for such discussions, Babbage complained to Mary Herschel.79 He found such practical matters so distasteful that he refused to discuss them with either Babbage or his intended father-in-law.

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bsp; Babbage promised to take charge, and he did, apparently raising the issue at a dinner he and his wife gave for the Gwatkins and Herschel. Whether because Babbage was too blunt or for other reasons, the engagement was abruptly called off by the Gwatkin family. Herschel barricaded himself in his dark room for days. Babbage was enlisted by Mary Herschel to take Herschel to Europe to “forget” this youthful love affair and its sour end. Babbage persuaded Jones to join them. The three of them traveled to France in July of 1821.

  With the end of the Napoleonic Wars, it was now possible to travel freely to the Continent, and more intercourse was feasible between English men of science and their European counterparts. Before the French Revolution, it had been customary for members of the upper classes in Britain to take the “Grand Tour” to the Continent: from Dover to Calais, then to Paris, Dijon, Geneva, Avignon, Rome, and Naples. During the brief Peace of Amiens in 1802–3, the British desperately flocked back to Paris, and some were trapped in France when war broke out again. They spent the war interned in Verdun, and were freed only in 1814.80 After Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo, the Grand Tours continued, on a slightly smaller scale, with travelers going from Paris to Italy—Rome, Venice, and Florence, with a trip to Naples to climb Vesuvius, and perhaps even descend into the crater itself!—then returning home through the Tyrol and Munich.81