The Thief at the End of the World

by Joe Jackson

  Victoria had been on her throne for thirteen years. Historians call the 1850s a time of relative peace and prosperity, but the mid-Victorian Pax Britannica was a relative term. During the “long peace” of Victoria’s reign, not a single year passed in which British soldiers were not fighting somewhere in the world for the empire’s greater glory. These were the “savage wars of peace,” as Rudyard Kipling called them, and the year of Henry’s birth saw headlines of the First Sikh War, the War of the Ax, and the Siege of Aden. Such far-flung conflict could not be helped: It was the price that had to be paid to save and civilize the world.

  “No one will ever understand Victorian England,” wrote historian Robert C. K. Ensor, “who does not appreciate that among highly civilized . . . countries it was one of the most religious that the world has known.” Victorians believed that they were “God’s elect,” a belief infusing them with the fervor to spread their brand of civilization through the world. This was their right and duty, their “white man’s burden.” The British Empire was engaged in a righteous mission; though it might stumble, its intentions were ultimately honorable. If the individual faltered or lost heart while engaged in this quest, his nation and empire would come to his aid.

  The empire’s world-shaping creed rested on two broad pedestals. First, a call to spread Christianity and save men’s souls. Second, the spread of free trade. Broadly defined as a belief in the free play of the market without government interference or restriction, free trade was considered an instrument of “world betterment” and peace: The spread of British trade and investment overseas was intrinsically good, since it brought enterprise and progress to the world. If enterprise and the work ethic were civilizing values, capitalism was a moral force: Although greed and self-interest entered the equation, they were secondary, at least in theory. The majority of Victorians may not have understood the dynamics of British investment or quite grasped the actual geography of their empire, but they responded with zeal and ardor to those grand celebrations announcing their empire’s standing in the world. “For them,” said historian John Gardiner, “the empire was hazily exotic but no less a matter of real pride.”

  The instruments of empire are many and diverse; it sometimes takes generations for their importance to be recognized. Such was the case with rubber. Its exploitation in the nineteenth century seemed to explode overnight and involved a cast of characters ranging from ragged adventurers like Henry to investors, inventors, imperialists, and hucksters. All owed allegiance to Columbus, since by most accounts the wayward mariner was the first European to take note of the strange elastic material. He commented on the white milk oozing from felled trees and bushes. Those following him described a legendary ball game in which two teams of Indians pursued a dark, round sphere that leapt wildly, bounced higher than seemed possible, and did so without there “being need for any inflation.” It was played in many places under many names, from batey to Vok-a-tok, and Cortés found the Aztecs playing their own version in the court of King Montezuma II, which they called tlatchl. Others dipped their feet in the milk and held them over a smoking fire to create an instant waterproof shoe. Some called the tree cao o’chu, or “weeping tree.” This was transformed by the Spanish into cauchu, which the French eventually turned into caoutchouc, the term they use today.

  The French were rubber’s first press agents, beginning with French geographer Charles Marie de la Condamine’s 1735 journey to the New World to determine the true shape of the earth. When he returned, he brought with him samples of rubber and details of its botanical characteristics. He coined the term “latex” from the Spanish for “milk,” and found that rubber was an excellent protection for his delicate scientific instruments during the long sea voyage back home. In 1775, French botanist Jean Baptiste Fusée Aublet described the genus and its first species, Hevea guianensis, a variety found in French Guiana. Although the Spanish and Portuguese had the most opportunity for commercial gain due to their long control of the New World, rubber did not smack of instant wealth, and they remained uninterested. Until the end of the Enlightenment, rubber was seen in Europe as a novelty, restricted to toys and Indian-made artifacts.

  It awaited modern chemistry to tease out its secrets. The English discoverer of oxygen, Joseph Priestley, named the strange stuff “India rubber” in 1770 after observing that a sample from India was “excellently adapted to the purpose of wiping from paper the marks of a black lead pencil.” It was also cheap: A “cubical piece of about half an inch [sold] for three shillings” and lasted several years. In 1790, Antoine François de Fourcroy, one of the founders of modern chemistry, tested ways to dissolve rubber, and in 1791, the Englishman Samuel Peal was granted the first English patent for a process that infused rubber into “all kinds of leather, cotton, linen and woolen cloths, silk stuffs, paper, wood,” making them “perfectly waterproof,” he said. Peal’s process seemed simple: He dissolved solid chunks of rubber in a bath of turpentine, then spread the cloth with the tacky sludge. Once dry, it was waterproof—but it never dried completely, creating a garment that, while warm and waterproof, was also smelly and sticky.

  Despite such drawbacks, entrepreneurs were drawn to the odd material. At Pará, near the mouth of the Amazon, Portuguese colonial authorities promoted seringa, or syringe rubber, named after its earliest application. By the 1750s, army boots, knapsacks, and other military items flowed to Pará from Lisbon for waterproofing. By 1800, New England merchants were placing orders for shoes made of seringa. In 1825, the Scotsman Charles Macintosh discovered that rubber would dissolve in the flammable solvent naphtha; he sandwiched his rubber sludge between multiple layers of cloth to create a waterproof garment that was more durable than Peal’s. Macintosh’s success began a rush of small competitors in England, France, and the United States, but rubberized garments still grew tacky in heat and brittle in cold, and they were often returned in a half-melted state by angry customers. By the 1830s, most of these early companies had failed.

  Brazil was the world’s principal supplier of raw rubber, but demand was not great—by 1827, total exports only tallied eight tons a year. Rubber was an enigma, a natural product that chemists and industrialists sensed had wide use, but its chemical instability doomed every investor. There was, however, an alternative to the dissolved sludge of Macintosh and Peal. In 1820, Thomas Hancock opened England’s first rubber factory; his process was based upon the effects of maceration and heat rather than a liquid solution. Hancock recycled rubber in a masticating machine, which, for security’s sake, he called a “pickler,” a hollow wooden drum studded with teeth. One day while turning the pickler, Hancock discovered that the heat generated by the process melted the waste rubber into a ball that was uniform, hot, and almost as good as new. Masticated rubber dissolved more readily in naphtha than the “crude” shipped from the jungle. Industrialists awoke to the fact that this heated, pliable rubber could be molded into any shape—the first cheap plastic. England was soon awash in rubber rollers, printer’s blankets, drive belts, billiard table cushions, and surgical instruments. In 1827, the first rubber fire hose was used to put out a fire at Fresh Wharf, London. That same year, brewers added rubber to their beer (although why someone would ever imagine doing this is not chronicled). Rubber imparted a “vile taste,” but after soaking it in waste liquid from the brewing process, the brewmasters discovered that it subtly sweetened the flavor. In 1830, Hancock and Macintosh merged their companies; in 1835, Hancock’s rubber factory was the world’s largest, and he was using three to four tons of caoutchouc each year.

  Yet the problem of stiffening in cold and melting in heat remained, a problem so serious as to seem insurmountable until the 1839 breakthrough of former hardware dealer Charles Goodyear. Like Wickham, there was something driven about Goodyear. Like Wickham, his history would consist of one great triumph and a multitude of failures. Goodyear considered himself an “instrument in the hands of his Maker”: his decision to turn his attention to rubber was an act of Providence, he�
��d later claim. So single-minded was his quest that his life became a litany of imprisonment, beggary, and lawsuits, all in the name of rubber. The black polymer was more than a natural resource: It assumed the characteristics of a religious icon. “While yet a schoolboy,” he wrote in his Gum-Elastic, “the wonderful and mysterious properties of this substance attracted my attention and made a strong impression on my mind.” That first impression never left him. It was a craving so deep that it approached the divine:The most remarkable quality of this gum, is its wonderful elasticity. In this consists the great difference between it and other substances. It can be extended to eight times its ordinary length, without breaking, when it will again assume its original form. There is probably no other inert substance, the properties of which excite in the human mind . . . an equal amount of curiosity, surprise, and admiration. Who can examine, and reflect upon this property of gum-elastic, without admiring the wisdom of the Creator?

  It would take the famous accident of 1839 to reveal to Goodyear the “cure” for rubber’s instability. According to his account, he was trying the effect of heat on a mixture of rubber, sulfur, and white lead when he spilled some of the concoction on a hot stove. To his surprise, the mixture charred but did not melt. Goodyear tried it again, this time before an open fire. There was charring in the center, but along the edges he found an uncharred section that seemed perfectly cured. Tests showed that the new substance did not harden in cold or melt in heat, and it withstood every solvent that had previously dissolved the native gum. He’d found the object of his long search. In time, the process would be dubbed vulcanization after the Roman god Vulcan, master of the forge.

  Although Goodyear’s discovery was an accident, he was ready to understand it after years of preparation. As he later wrote, it was “one of those cases where the leading of the Creator providentially aids his creatures by what we termed accident, to attain those things which are not attainable by the powers of reasoning he has conferred on them.”

  The Creator may have led Goodyear to his discovery, but He did not reveal the chemical secrets behind the miracle. No one really knew what occurred during vulcanization until the 1960s and 1970s. Rubber is a hydrocarbon, a polymer of isoprene, and is elastic because of its atomic organization into long, crumpled, repeating chains. These are interlinked at a few distant points, and between each pair of links the hydrogen and carbon building blocks rotate freely about their neighbors. This results in a wide range of shapes, like a very loose rope attached to a pair of fixed points on a rock wall. With vulcanization, however, this elasticity is compromised. The polymer chains are joined together by sulfur bridges that create a three-dimensional network: Now there are more bridges between the chains than in the “uncured” state, making each free section of chain shorter and subject to a quicker tightening under strain. This results in a rubber that is harder, less pliable, and far less likely to deteriorate in extremes of temperature.

  With Goodyear’s discovery, rubber turned into a new kind of gold. It was soon the preferred material for the plethora of gaskets essential to steam engines. What had been an obscure and slightly exotic raw material now began to form a triumvirate with iron and steel in factories, railroads, and mines. The railroads used it for air bumpers and coach interiors, and in engines for gaskets, hoses, and belts. Factories used it for machine belting and tubing, in assembly lines, and on floors, where it made a safe, nonskid, and electrically insulated surface. Rubber hoses pumped air, gas, and water out of mines. For the average consumer, rubber softened the ride and protected the wheels of coaches and buggies. It shielded people from wind and rain with rubber boots and slickers, and it provided the balls for their baseball, football, soccer, tennis, golf, and other sports. Office work became a little easier, thanks to rubber bands, erasers, and gloves. Latex condoms became available midcentury, taking some of the guesswork out of family planning.

  In spring 1850, when Henry Wickham was four, his life changed forever. Neither he nor his parents could foresee it as they stood on the crest of Haverstock Hill, enjoying the breeze. Henry was one of the few Londoners privileged to live in what today is considered the suburbs. What now is associated with sameness and sprawl then conjured images of ease and health, a life merely dreamed of by most city dwellers. Haverstock Hill and Hampstead Heath were idyllic spots, the destination for harried Londoners who took the train from the city to walk the country paths or ride the donkeys penned nearby. On their rambles, Henry and his parents could not help but laugh at the otherwise respectable gentlemen who could not control their steeds. Charles Dickens enjoyed the donkeys; Karl Marx showed more enthusiasm in the saddle than skill. Though Haverstock Hill and the Heath stood on the edge of development, herds of cattle and sheep still grazed in the meadows, and thirty ponds dotted the landscape, including the six large ones created to serve as London’s water supply. Henry would gaze at London sprawling beneath him, where the dome of St. Paul’s stuck up like a giant gold thumb. The contrast between the two worlds was mysterious and not a little exciting for a boy of four. Here, the open heath was a mid-Victorian Paradise where nature was tame and beneficent, a cultivated reflection of God’s ordered plan. Down there, the chaotic city tumbled and scattered at his feet like the piles of wooden blocks strewn across his nursery floor.

  Although their home life seemed tidy and quiet, the world around the Wickhams roared forward in full gear. That year, Britain’s Railway Mania reached its peak with 272 acts of Parliament setting up new railroad companies. The Electric Telegraph Company was founded. The potato crop failed in Ireland, and Irish vagrants filled London’s streets. Henry’s father, also named Henry, was a London solicitor, which meant that the small family was comfortably middle class. His mother, Harriette Johnson, was young and attractive, with flashing black eyes and a steady gaze. The Wickhams believed their family was descended from William of Wykeham, the first Bishop of Winchester, who founded New College, Oxford. By the 1700s, the Wickhams had exchanged religious vestments for military red and blue. Ancestors fought and governed in the American Revolution and in the West Indies; Henry’s grandfather, Joseph, nearly lost his life during an amphibious landing against the French during the 1801 Battle of Abukir. Though his leg was torn off by a cannonball, he stopped the bleeding with a tourniquet made from his own sash and the bayonet of a dead soldier beside him. He was fitted with a wooden leg and discharged. Ten years later, he married Sophie Phillips, whose father had been ruined by King George IV in a shady racing wager. According to Gentleman’s Magazine, the Prince of Wales weighted the jockey’s pockets before the race; although the deception was unmasked, Sophie’s father still lost the bet—and his estate. The young couple immediately moved to London, where Henry’s father was born on July 14, 1814, in St. Marylebone Parish in Westminster, known as the “richest and most populous metropolitan parish” in the growing City of London.

  Unlike his predecessors, Henry’s father was not of martial blood. He joined the bar and became a solicitor at age twenty-three. Seven years later, in 1845, he married Harriette, a dark-haired milliner from Wales. Henry was born a year later; a sister, Harriette Jane, was born in 1848. By summer 1850, Henry’s mother expected a third.

  By then, the Wickhams were firmly ensconced in the country. Haverstock Hill had its bohemian side, and that was part of the appeal. The painter William Charles Thomas Dobson, who would influence the pre-Raphaelites, lived nearby at No. 5 Chalcot Villa, as did the eminent Egyptologist Samuel Birch, who lived at No. 17. Several rich courtesans built retirement homes in Haverstock Hill, including Moll King, the model for Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders. But there was a better reason to move from the city, and that was to escape disease. The epidemic diseases of the nineteenth century—tuberculosis, typhoid fever, smallpox, and cholera—were associated with crowded conditions. According to The Lancet, the death rate in 1880 from smallpox in the “open and airy slope of Hampstead” was 12.6 per 1,000, compared to 22.2 per 1,000 “in the metropolis generally.”

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nbsp; The worst by far was cholera. The speed with which it killed was spectacular: a healthy person could die within two or three hours, making it the most rapidly fatal disease known to man. By 1850, the “Asiatic cholera” had swept through London twice, first in 1832, when it was called the scourge of the impious and dissolute, then in 1848-49, when it was evident that this was a worldwide plague. Since the cholera bacteria thrived in the water supply, everyone was vulnerable. Isolating oneself from the crowded city, where the most violent outbreaks occurred, seemed the best course, and Harriette Wickham and her two young children did just that in the healthy spaces of Haverstock Hill.

  It is harder to track the movements of Henry’s father. As a solicitor, he ranged across the city and surrounding suburbs, catching the thirty-minute omnibus ride into London, visiting his one-legged father in Marylebone, conducting business near Bloomsbury and the British Museum, a stone’s throw from St. Giles parish, London’s most famous slum. A popular shilling guidebook, A Week in London, described St. Giles as a place “occupied by the very lowest class of society and through which it is hardly safe to pass alone in the day-time.” In Sketches by Boz, the young Charles Dickens called it a land of “wretched houses with broken windows [and] starvation in the alleys.” The poor were a dangerous “tribe,” the bestial Other lurking at the edge of civilization, slaves to violence, unnatural desire, and disease.