Josiah Wedgwood IV, a radical Liberal MP in the 1900s, described how when he was young, the boys of the family would be taken around the works. “We turned and threw and blunged and painted and ‘mussed ourselves up,’ coming home in clothes patched with white, and clutching in our hands the largest lumps of cold, moist clay.” His niece, the historian Veronica Wedgwood, explained in a radio talk in the 1950s how it had felt for her as a child of the family who was living away from the Potteries to be taken round for the first time. She had been there in the 1910s, but spoke for her cousins back through the generations. “In the labyrinthine stairs and corridors of the old works, it was fun to walk hand in hand with some purposeful striding elder, some godlike uncle or cousin, who had brought you in for a treat and was introducing you to everything and everyone. Pottery-making has an instant appeal. It was fascinating to see people going to and fro with huge plank-like trays of bowls and cups and coffee pots and sugar basins, looking like enlarged ghosts of the ones we had at home—ghosts because of the grey-white colour of the unbaked clay, and larger than life because they shrink in the firing. Then there was the breathless joy of watching the potter at his wheel. His assistant—how I longed to be that assistant!—slaps together a shapeless handful of wet clay, exactly the right amount, and puts it before him. The skilful hands close around it, and in a matter of seconds, as the wheel turns, it springs up like a live thing, lengthens, takes on a graceful, familiar contour, spins into a bowl or a vase. Then there was the light, open room where girls sat at work, deftly, symmetrically, painting the patterns on plates; in another room craftsmen were pressing clay into tiny delicate moulds of classical wreaths and nymphs and goddesses; and they miraculously released these fragile dancing figures by patting them out with a spatula.”
When Annie went to Etruria in 1847 and 1848, the works were at a low ebb. There were two sections, “Earthenware” for everyday crockery and “OW” standing for Old Wedgwood, the Jasper and Black Basalt urns, vases, ewers and figures that had sold well in the past. The Wedgwood display at the Great Exhibition in 1851 consisted only of the established lines; it attracted little attention and Uncle Frank was not concerned, so long as the business ran smoothly. On his office door in the main courtyard of the works was a notice: “Please do not knock but come in.” He sat inside at the table his grandfather had used, and a dusty showcase of old Wedgwood ware stood in the corner.
When Annie was taken round the factory, she may have met the eyes of children working there: a few girls, perhaps, of little more than her own age, familiar figures to her uncle during the working day, but living a life harshly different from his children’s at home. Josiah II had told the parliamentary committee that he employed three hundred and eighty-seven people, of whom a hundred and three were between ten and seventeen and thirteen were under ten. The children worked the same twelve- to thirteen-hour day as the men “because generally the young children are employed in attending on the men, and assisting them in carrying their moulds and other little services that they can perform for them, the men working by the piece and paying those children themselves.”
Josiah II tried to shrug off responsibility for the way the children were used. “I believe that the employment of children under ten years of age is never desired by the masters; that the employment of children under ten years of age is an accommodation to the workmen themselves, and perhaps in most instances they are employed under the eyes of their own parents.” He recognised that one part of their work, “dipping” in the glaze before firing, was “unwholesome.” The glaze contained white lead and the children, “if careless in their method of living, and dirty, are very subject to disease.” They were employed on that work for one or two years only and if they showed “any symptom of suffering from the nature of their employment,” their parents removed them. Some girls worked “with a camel hair pencil in painting patterns upon the ware, sitting at a table.” The committee asked: “Is the state of health of the children in the painting rooms affected by the work? Are not consumptions found to exist very frequently?” Josiah II said he could not say because he had no information, and tried to suggest that the problem was not peculiar to the pottery industry. The children who painted had “that sort of delicacy which is universal in sedentary employments.”
In the spring of 1849, Charles and Emma announced to the children that they would all be going to stay for a few months at Malvern, the spa village in Worcestershire, while Charles tried Dr. James Gully’s water treatment for his chronic ill-health. The news was so remarkable for the children that Etty could remember sixty years later “the exact place in the road, coming up from the village, by the pond and the tall Lombardy poplars, where I was told.”
After his illness at Maer in 1840, Charles had continued to suffer repeated bouts of sickness. William remembered that “It threw a certain air of sadness over the life at Down.” In 1845 Charles wrote: “Many of my friends, I believe, think me a hypochondriac,” but he was often in acute pain. Joseph Parslow the butler told a neighbour: “Many’s a time when I was helping to nurse him, I’ve thought he would die in my arms.” Charles and Emma understood that his health was often directly affected by his state of mind. When he was worried or upset about something, he could not control his thoughts, and he and Emma saw the physical effects of his mental turmoil. Underlying all his other concerns were his anxieties about the theory of evolution, the strain of living with the secret and his anticipation of the attacks when he announced it and people saw the implications. When he came at last to work on the final text of The Origin of Species, he felt it was the cause of “the main part of the ills which my flesh is heir to.”
Charles had been particularly ill during the winter of 1848-49. He wrote to Hooker: “All this winter I have been bad enough, with dreadful vomiting every week, and my nervous system began to be affected, so that my hands trembled and head was often swimming. I was not able to do anything one day out of three, and was altogether too dispirited to write to you or to do anything but what I was compelled. I thought I was rapidly going the way of all flesh.” He was suffering from insomnia, and whatever he did during the day “haunted” him at night “with vivid and most wearing repetition.” In 1848, an old ship-mate from HMS Beagle, Bartholomew Sulivan, had told him about some friends with stomach ailments who had been treated by Dr. James Gully at Malvern. When Charles then heard from his cousin Fox about two other people who had benefited from the treatment, he decided to find out about it. He read Dr. Gully’s book, The Water Cure in Chronic Disease, and wrote to him. None of their letters to each other survives, but Dr. Gully’s first reply appears to have been cautious and non-committal. Emma commented that he wrote “like a sensible man” and did not “speak too confidently.” Charles wrote to Fox that he had resolved to see “whether there is any truth in Gully and the water cure. Regular doctors cannot check my incessant vomiting at all. It will cause a sad delay in my barnacle work, but if once half-well, I could do more in six months than I now do in two years.”
In his treatment at Malvern, Dr. Gully used water in ways that were conventional in medicine at the time, but he challenged accepted medical practice in rejecting all drugs. Most active preparations in use at the time were emetics, laxatives or purgatives. Some contained heavy metal poisons like arsenic, lead and mercury, and others were toxic substances from plants: opium, strychnine and quinine. Dr. Gully had become interested in the water cure after the death of his two-year-old daughter from croup in 1840. She had been treated with “emetics to prolong nausea, mercury to increase salivation, endless blistering and drastic purgatives,” and she died in extreme pain. Shortly afterwards, Dr. Gully met Dr. James Wilson, who argued that many illnesses were simply “drug diseases.” “Many of the most desperate cases . . . I have seen, owed their forlorn state to little else than mercury, quinine, arsenic, and purgatives.”
Dr. Wilson linked his concerns about drugs with the evils of alcohol and inebriation. “How often have I observed the unde
rtaker’s house placed between a gin palace and a druggist’s shop, and heard at the same time the curse and drunken hiccup, the undertaker’s hammer, and the pestle and mortar of the druggist, blending into strange unison.” One evening in London, Dr. Wilson observed “a quiet, retired-looking undertaker’s, a single candle in the front shop dimly lighting a solitary figure dressed in rusty black. In his hand he held a small hammer, with which he produced a monotonous and unceasing rat-tat . . . on a coffin lid. Did you ever hear while alone at night, the tic-tic-tic of what is called the spider death-watch, or observe it while half hidden at the mouth of its net, watching the passing flies? So seemed to me the position of this solitary figure in black, as the crowd of anxious-looking men and women were hurrying by; numbers of whom suddenly arresting their steps, entered on one side into a gin palace, on the other into a druggist’s shop, both brilliantly illuminated, of festive appearance and inviting aspect. They looked to me, indeed, like gaudy baits, held out by the solitary figure of the hammer and nails, to entice the human flies into the deadly trap—where ‘FUNERALS ARE PERFORMED.’ ”
Searching everywhere for a method of treatment without drugs, Dr. Wilson had visited Vincent Priessnitz, who offered a simple water cure at Graefenberg in the mountains of Silesia. On Wilson’s return to England, he persuaded Dr. Gully to join him in setting up a clinic for hydrotherapy. They took a hotel in Malvern for their enterprise, because the village was already a fashionable watering place with a reputation for a healthy climate in spring and summer. Some years before, a physician had discovered the exceptional purity of the water which flowed from the springs below the steep Malvern Hills to the west. As a local wit put it:
The Malvern water, says Dr John Wall,
Is famous for containing just nothing at all.
The air was invigorating, the hills gave shelter, and there were unrivalled views to the east over the Vale of Severn, and west to the hills of Herefordshire. Princess Victoria had spent some time there in 1830, and Queen Adelaide came a number of times in the following years.
This royal patronage had given Malvern a cachet, but Dr. Gully and Dr. Wilson’s patients gave it a style and atmosphere quite different from other watering places. The spa had two springs; there were also a bath-house, public buildings and a number of villas, all recently built in a heavy classical style. The streets were thronged with invalids old and young, “all resolutely bent on the business of getting health, ‘building themselves up,’ as the phrase of the place is.”
Each of the two doctors had his own theory of the workings of the human body, and their water treatment consisted of a strict diet and a range of special ways of washing and soaking different parts of the body to achieve effects on the nervous system and circulation. Lying wrapped in wet sheets for hours on end was the best known. Sweating with a lamp under a blanket was another, and a third was the “douche,” a special shower with a sudden fall of icy water from a great height. Among Dr. Gully and Dr. Wilson’s patients in the 1840s and 1850s were many prominent writers and thinkers, politicians and churchmen. Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Thomas and Jane Carlyle, Henry Hallam, Alfred Tennyson, Florence Nightingale, Charles Dickens and his wife, and Bishop Samuel Wilberforce all came for the water treatment. Joseph Leech, a journalist in Bristol, described the cure in Three Weeks in Wet Sheets, Being the Diary and Doings of a Moist Visitor to Malvern. He said of those who had lost faith in orthodox medicine: “It is, I think, in medicine as in religion. Let a man once forsake his old faith, and he is sure to make a great many more changes—soon run through the whole cycle of systems. A man may go on for years satisfied with his old family physician—swallow the potions given him with implicit reverence, but let him become a sceptic for a moment, and refuse to believe in drugs, and if he tries one ‘opathy,’ he’ll try them all.” Thomas Carlyle caught an element of the appeal of the water cure to people among his and the Wedgwoods’ freethinking friends when he commented that many of his fellow patients enjoyed the “strange quasi-monastic—godless and yet devotional—way of life which human creatures have here.” It was “useful to them beyond doubt. I foresee this ‘water cure,’ under better forms, will become the Ramadan of the overworked, unbelieving English in time coming, an institution they were dreadfully in want of, this long while!”
Dr. Gully and Dr. Wilson abandoned their partnership after a few years, and a third doctor, James Marsden, came to compete with them. “The three hydropathic doctors . . . have each had their portraits lithographed, and from the window of the bookshop and the bazaar, and even from the walls of the inns, they seem to bid for the possession and management of the visitor’s body on his arrival. With whiskers silkily curled, sitting by a table, and serenely musing, the ‘Great Original,’ Wilson, seems intrepidly to assure the invalid and hypochondriac of a cure. Standing up with arms a-kimbo, pert and pragmatical, Dr Gully appears to push himself forward, and say ‘I am your man—try me’: while Marsden, who unites homoe-opathy with hydropathy, may be said to have a mezzotint manner between both, and looks from his frame upon you as intently as if he were listening to your case.”
Charles and Emma took the family, Miss Thorley and the servants to Malvern in the early summer. They travelled from London to Birmingham on the London & North Western Railway, a three-hour journey by the fastest service. Railway travel was an excitement for the children. Mrs. Marcet wrote about a small boy’s first rail journey in her book Willy’s Travels on the Railroad. When he looked out the window he saw “the houses and trees and fields, looking as if they were moving. ‘I know they do not, but in the railroad, I think everything seems to be moving. And do, Papa, look, how little the cows are in that field. And are those sheep? they seem to be no bigger than lambs; and I declare those houses,’ said he, pointing to them, ‘look almost like baby houses at the toy shop.’ ‘Those houses are really small,’ replied his father, ‘but not so very small as you suppose, for they are large enough for people to live in; everything seen from the train when it is moving fast, appears smaller than it really is.’ ”
At Birmingham the family changed to the Bristol & Birmingham Railway for the short journey to Worcester. When Dickens passed through the city in 1851, he wrote of its quiet “with the lights and shadows of its cathedral architecture, cut sharp by the strong sunlight. Even the central streets are quiet, in comparison with Birmingham; much more so the clean, old-fashioned, red-brick houses within the precincts, where the very pavement seems to be never soiled by the tread of less dainty feet than those of clergy and ladies.”
The last leg of the journey was an eight-mile ride to Malvern in a four-horse coach, the Hereford Queen, the Hereford Mail or the Mazeppa. The road passed first through apple orchards, then past hop-grounds and pear orchards until the Malvern Hills loomed to the west. As Dickens described the approach to the village, he saw first the blue mass of the Malvern Hills, “growing browner and greener with every mile; then the black surface of rich woods, rising from the skirts; then the long, straight row of dwellings, with their white walls shining in the sun.”
The Darwins arrived at Archer’s Royal Kent & Foley Arms Hotel on the Worcester Road, where families were boarded in private apartments. The hotel was royal because Queen Adelaide had stayed there when she came to Malvern. She had allowed the hotel to place her coat of arms on the cast-iron balcony above the entrance, and it is there now with a lion and unicorn supporting the Teck family crest.
Charles took a villa for the family and they were settled there in a few days. The Lodge, as it was then called, was one of a number of large white stucco houses built along the Worcester Road in the 1830s and 1840s for well-to-do visitors to the spa. The house was set in its own grounds on the wooded slope above the road, a three-storey building almost identical to Down House except for the imposing classical ornament and the darkness of the cavernous hall. Charles wrote to Fox: “We have got a very comfortable house, with a little field and wood opening on to the mountain, capital for the children to play in.” Geo
rge remembered the slope of the garden down to the road and a little fountain halfway between the house and the gate on the carriage drive. The fountain is still there under a rough brick arch set into the steeply rising ground beneath a large rhododendron. The water trickles from a marble boss into a stone basin and falls from the lip into a small pool fringed by Solomon’s seal.
Charles wrote to Fox: “I much like and think highly of Dr. Gully. He has been very cautious in his treatment and has even had the charity to stint me only to six pinches of snuff daily. Cold scrubbing in morning, two cold feet baths and compress on stomach is as yet the only treatment, besides change of diet &c. I am, however, tomorrow to commence a sweating process . . . I expect fully that the system will greatly benefit me, and certainly the regular Doctors could do nothing.” To his sister he wrote: “I like Dr Gully much—he is certainly an able man. I have been struck with how many remarks he has made similar to those of my Father. He is very kind and attentive; but seems puzzled with my case—thinks my head or top of spinal cord cause of mischief.”
Annie followed the treatment, and watched with a daughter’s close concern how her father reacted to it. Emma wrote to Fox: “Annie was telling Miss Thorley all her Papa had to do about the water cure and how he liked it. ‘And it makes Papa so angry.’ Miss T must have thought it a very odd effect. He said it did make him feel cross.”
Annie enjoyed the stay. She had a Leghorn hat and a black “polka” knitted jacket. The family explored the neighbourhood, and Etty was struck by a stream widening out into a pool overshadowed with trees, as streams were unknown to the children in the dry chalk country around Downe. George went one day with his father and mother to a toy-bazaar. “They bought me a little jingling organ which made a twanging with wires stretched inside. I remember that with a passion for realism I had it mounted on a stick and tied round me with a piece of string to imitate an organ-grinder, and that I broke it open to examine the inside.” The shop was probably Henry Lamb’s Royal Library and Bazaar, which sold an “immense variety of the newest and most elegant and useful goods, and almost every article connected with the fancy, bookseller’s and stationer’s business.” It had a music saloon with pianos for hire, and a reading room with London and provincial newspapers.
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