One Hot Summer Read online

  ONE HOT SUMMER

  Copyright © 2017 Rosemary Ashton

  All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press) without written permission from the publishers.

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  Set in Adobe Garamond Pro by IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd

  Printed in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2017936996

  ISBN 978-0-300-22726-0

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Contents

  List of illustrations

  Prologue

  One:1858 in history

  Moments of consequence

  The rise of Disraeli

  Medicine and marriage

  Literature and art

  Two:May 1858

  Dickens in distress

  Derby Day

  Marriage mischief

  Three:June 1858, part I

  Darwin and the pursuit of science

  Dickens dissolves his marriage

  Midsummer madness

  Meltdown in Clubland

  Four:June 1858, part II

  The silver Thames

  Queen Victoria, Cruiser, and the Great Eastern

  Crinolineomania

  More marriage troubles

  Darwin’s dilemma

  Five:July 1858

  Darwin in distress

  ‘Mad’ wives and vengeful husbands

  Disraeli tames the Thames

  Rothschild enters the Commons at last

  Six:July–August 1858

  Hot heads at the Garrick Club

  Dickens on tour

  The exploits of Dickens’s Mr Stryver

  Disraeli’s whitebait dinner

  Seven:The aftermath of the hot summer

  The fallout from the Garrick Club affair

  Success and embarrassment for Dickens

  The end of the Robinson case

  Darwin triumphant

  Epilogue

  The year in pantomime

  One hot summer’s consequences

  Endnotes

  Select bibliography

  Index

  Illustrations

  1.Augustus Egg, Past and Present, No. 3, 1858. © Tate, London 2016.

  2.William Powell Frith, The Derby Day, 1856–8. © Tate, London 2016.

  3.Cast of The Frozen Deep, from Francesco Berger, Reminiscences, Impressions, and Anecdotes, 1913. © The British Library Board (10632.tt.6).

  4.Tavistock House.

  5.Charles Dickens, photograph by Herbert Watkins, 1858.

  6.Catherine Dickens, photograph by J.E. Mayall, c. 1863. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

  7.Ellen Ternan, undated photograph. Senate House Library, University of London.

  8.Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton, carte de visite, 1857. © National Portrait Gallery, London.

  9.Charles Darwin, photograph by Maull & Fox, 1860.

  10.Alfred Parsons, illustration of Down House and garden, 1883.

  11.Male greater bird of paradise, hand-coloured engraving by Fournier after Edouard Travies, from Charles d’Orbigny's Dictionnaire Universel d'Histoire Naturelle, 1849. © Florilegius / Science & Society Picture Library – All rights reserved.

  12.Alfred Russel Wallace, 1862.

  13.‘Interior of the Court of Queen’s Bench’, in G.A. Sala, Twice Round the Clock, 1859.

  14.Isambard Kingdom Brunel, photograph by Robert Howlett, 1857–8. © National Portrait Gallery, London.

  15.‘A Wholesome Conclusion’, Punch, 6 February 1858.

  16.Burial register, Downe, Kent. Courtesy of Bromley Historic Collections and the vicar and churchwardens of St Mary’s, Downe.

  17.Extraordinary Narrative of … the Forcible Seizure and Incarceration of Lady Lytton Bulwer, 1858. Courtesy of www.knebworthhouse.com.

  18.Benjamin Disraeli, undated photograph by W&D Downey. Mary Evans Picture Library / Alamy Stock Photo.

  19.‘Father Thames Introducing his Offspring to the City of London’, Punch, 3 July 1858.

  20.‘Palace of Westminster: Members’ Entrance to the House of Commons’, wood engraving, 1850s. London Metropolitan Archives, City of London.

  21.Sir John Gilbert, ‘The Smoking Room of the Garrick Club, at King Street, London, 18 October 1859’, 1859. © Royal Academy of Arts, London.

  22.Dickens reading ‘Little Dombey’, Illustrated London News, 31 July 1858.

  23.‘The Smiler with the Knife’, drawing by William Makepeace Thackeray, 1858.

  24.Thackeray, photograph by Ernest Edwards, c. 1863. © National Portrait Gallery, London.

  25.Sir Richard Owen, photograph by Maull & Polyblank, c. 1855. © National Portrait Gallery, London.

  26.Thomas Henry Huxley, photograph by Maull & Polyblank, photo-gravure by Walker & Boutall, 1857. © National Portrait Gallery, London.

  27.Joseph Bazalgette, photograph by George B. Black, 1863. London Metropolitan Archives, City of London.

  1. Augustus Egg, third part of the triptych of adultery and destitution, Past and Present, exhibited at the Royal Academy exhibition in summer 1858.

  2. W.P. Frith, The Derby Day, the most popular painting at that exhibition.

  3. Group photograph of the cast of actors in Dickens’s amateur production of Wilkie Collins’s play The Frozen Deep, 1857.

  4. Tavistock House, where Dickens and his family lived from 1851 to 1858, when the household split up following Dickens’s separation from Catherine.

  5. Dickens photographed by Herbert Watkins, 17 June 1858.

  6. Catherine Dickens photographed by J.J.E. Mayall, c. 1863.

  7. Undated photograph of Ellen Ternan.

  8. Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton’s carte de visite, J.J.E. Mayall, 1857.

  9. Charles Darwin photographed by Maull & Fox, 1860.

  10. Down House and garden illustrated by Alfred Parsons, 1883.

  11. Male greater bird of paradise, from Charles d’Orbigny’s Dictionnaire Universel d’Histoire Naturelle, 1849.

  12. Alfred Russel Wallace photographed in Singapore, 1862.

  13. ‘Interior of the Court of Queen’s Bench’, 1858, in G.A. Sala, Twice Round the Clock, 1859.

  14. Isambard Kingdom Brunel standing beside the launching chains of the Great Eastern, photographed by Robert Howlett, 1857–8.

  15. ‘A Wholesome Conclusion’, Punch, 6 February 1858.

  16. Notice of the burial of Charles Waring Darwin, aged eighteen months, in the parish of Downe, Kent, 1 July 1858.

  17. Title page of the pamphlet printed to publicise the incarceration of Lady Bulwer Lytton in a lunatic asylum, July 1858.

  18. A photograph of Benjamin Disraeli by W&D Downey.

  19. ‘Father Thames Introducing his Offspring to the City of London’, Punch, 3 July 1858.

  20. The Members’ Entrance, House of Commons, in the 1850s.

  21. Sir John Gilbert’s pen and ink drawing of the Smoking Room of the Garrick Club at the time.

  22. Dickens reading ‘Little Dombey’, Illustrated London News, 31 July 1858.

  23. ‘The Smiler with the Knife’: William Makepeace Thackeray’s drawing of Edmund Yates preparing to stab him at the Garrick Club, 1858.

  24. Thackeray photographed by Ernest Edwards, c. 1863.

  25. Sir Richard Owen photographed by Maull & Polyblank, c. 1855.

  26. Tho
mas Henry Huxley photographed by Maull & Polyblank, 1857.

  27. Joseph Bazalgette photographed by George B. Black, 1863.

  Prologue

  WHAT WAS IT LIKE to live in London through one of the hottest summers on record, with the Thames emitting a sickening smell as a result of the sewage of over two million inhabitants being discharged into the river? How did people cope with the extraordinary heat leading up to the hottest recorded day, Wednesday, 16 June 1858? What did those living or working near the Thames – including at the Houses of Parliament and the law courts in Westminster Hall – do when they found their circumstances intolerable? What did the newspapers say?

  The summer of 1858 was remarkable for the adoption of the engineer Joseph Bazalgette’s major civil engineering plan to embank the Thames and convey the capital’s waste in intercepting sewers to outfalls east of London. Though the transmission of diseases like cholera, which had afflicted London in a series of outbreaks, most recently in 1854, was generally misunderstood to be airborne rather than waterborne, it was clear to all that the state of the Thames was dangerous to the health of Londoners.

  Newspapers, which had increased hugely in number since the progressive repeal of taxes on paper and stamp duty up to 1855, were more than ever before a vital source of information and opinion for the population. From the long-established and respectable Times down to new arrivals such as the gossipy Reynolds’s Newspaper, founded in 1850, the press kept up constant pressure on the authorities to ‘do something’. The solving of the problem of the Thames, begun in the summer of 1858, was a major feat of engineering with lasting influence on the health of London’s population, on the city’s traffic flow, and on its appearance, once it had been adorned with its grand embankments, the Victoria, the Albert, and the Chelsea, as well as new streets and parks, all part of the Bazalgette scheme to improve London. Other important advances were made, or at least got under way, in that hot summer. The Great Eastern, Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s huge iron-hulled ship, by far the largest built to date, was launched and sat at Deptford on the stinking river awaiting financial support before it could set out on its ambitious voyages. Two other ships, the Niagara and the Agamemnon, joined their telegraph cables in the middle of the Atlantic in August, enabling instant communication between Britain and America.

  Engineering was not the only branch of science to flourish in summer 1858. One event which was to change the prevailing opinion on the nature of evolution, the publication in November 1859 of Darwin’s groundbreaking Origin of Species, had its catalyst in June 1858. That was when Darwin, working away slowly at proving and illustrating the theory of natural selection which he had formed over the twenty years since his voyage on the Beagle, received out of the blue a letter and brief essay from a fellow scientist, Alfred Russel Wallace. The essay shocked him; he thought he might be forestalled, might lose precedence, by continuing to delay publication of his painstaking researches. Darwin was galvanised into writing up his findings quickly and having them published in one readable volume. As he later freely admitted when looking back at this time in his life, the longer, more detailed book he planned would not have reached a general readership or had the immediate impact of the one volume of 1859 with its winning combination of careful scholarship and infectious enthusiasm. To follow Darwin through weeks of trauma – family troubles, health problems, as well as the fright he got over his life’s work – is to see how in his case the summer of 1858 was crucial, a period of crisis (though not at that time visibly so outside the small circle of Darwin’s family and a few faithful friends). Undoubtedly for Darwin, summer 1858, when he was forty-nine, was one of the most pivotal moments of his career.

  Two other important figures who experienced crisis and triumph that summer were Dickens and Disraeli. Like Darwin, each is recognised for his tremendous achievements in his own field of endeavour. Science, literature, and politics were lit up by these three men, all of whom came to be seen as representative of the best of the Victorian age. For Dickens the summer of 1858 was one of horror. Aged forty-six and already the famous author of several successful novels, he lost his head and publicly advertised his separation from Catherine, his wife of twenty-two years and the mother of his nine surviving children, while disclaiming rumours of a relationship with either his sister-in-law or an actress aged nineteen, the same age as his own second daughter Katey. He acted impulsively and brutally, losing friends, dismissing his publishers, causing anguish to his wife and children, as well as getting foolishly entangled in a dispute with Thackeray over a storm in a teacup at the Garrick Club, of which they were both members. The two novelists, rivals for public esteem and never close, had hitherto been on amicable terms (while their daughters were good friends), but now they became permanently estranged. Heads were hot in Clubland in summer 1858; a number of young writers and lawyers, many of them acolytes and imitators of either Dickens or Thackeray, became embroiled in the so-called ‘Garrick Club affair’, which newspapers followed avidly on behalf of their readers. Dickens’s fiction-writing dried up temporarily; that summer he turned in desperation to a new venture, for the first time travelling the length and breadth of the country giving dramatic – and exhausting – public readings from his works. He came within a whisker of losing the admiration of his readers, as well as his friends, but his tremendous determination and the power of his personality, whether speaking, acting, or writing, carried him through his crisis. He returned to novel-writing with A Tale of Two Cities, which was published in 1859, and his great imaginative investigations of guilt and shame, Great Expectations (1860) and Our Mutual Friend (1864–5).

  As for Disraeli, he was fifty-three in 1858, but only just making his mark in office. He had been in opposition for almost all his political career since being elected to parliament in 1837, but now he was chancellor of the Exchequer in Lord Derby’s reforming Tory government. As leader of the House of Commons, he was responsible for pushing through a number of important pieces of legislation as parliament sat on through the horrible heat and the smell of the Thames just under its collective nose until all its bills were passed on 2 August. A number of these bills would have far-reaching effects on British life. Most notable among them was the act for cleansing the Thames, the so-called ‘Thames Purification Bill’, which Disraeli got through a disputatious parliament in the gruelling heat of June and July by the sheer force of his rhetoric and his clever management of awkward MPs determined to question or delay every suggestion for improvement. Disraeli’s letters to friends and colleagues give a lively sense of his activities. Those to Queen Victoria, telling her the results of each debate in the ‘field of battle’, quite won her over to a politician whom she, along with Prince Albert, most members of parliament, the newspapers, and even his boss Lord Derby, had distrusted as flashy, reckless, and disloyal. Disraeli also played a major role in the efforts of the Whig Lord John Russell to pass an act which would allow the Jewish MP Lionel de Rothschild to take his seat in the House of Commons without having to swear ‘on the true faith of a Christian’. (Disraeli, though Jewish, had been confirmed in the Church of England as a teenager.)

  Another of the far-reaching successes for the Derby–Disraeli government that summer was the Medical Act, which founded the Medical Register and the General Medical Council in an important move to regularise a hitherto chaotic, unequal, and unprofessional occupation. Also vital for the future direction of social policy were the discussion of and amendment to the Divorce Act, which had come into force on 1 January 1858. During the following summer a particularly difficult and scandalous case filled the columns of the newspapers. Robinson v. Robinson and Lane lasted several months and the country’s best legal minds were required to work out how to amend the new act in order to resolve the problems raised. Darwin was aghast to read the reports of his friend Dr Edward Lane’s alleged adultery with his patient Isabella Robinson, which were printed day after day for several weeks. Dickens had a nasty moment in June when he feared that he himself might fe
ature in the Divorce Court, with all the attendant adverse publicity that would attract. Meanwhile Disraeli worried that the public scandal concerning the marriage of his close friend and cabinet colleague Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton, also taking up column inches in the press during June and July, would drag down not only Bulwer Lytton, but also Disraeli himself, and possibly the vulnerable Tory government too.

  With the recent digitisation of The Times and the large mass of nineteenth-century newspapers held by the British Library, it has become possible to delve deeply into the news and current affairs of a specific period of time. So much material relating to the Victorian period is now available in searchable databases that we are able as never before to get a feel for the fabric and structure of daily life. Not only newspapers, periodicals, and magazines, but parliamentary debates, committee minutes, and law court cases can be accessed digitally. We can therefore study in detail the lives of Darwin, Dickens, Disraeli, and others, both as they were experienced and described in their letters and journals, and also as they were viewed by their contemporaries, from friends and colleagues to the host of writers working for the daily and weekly press, in newspaper articles conservative and radical, serious and trivial, friendly and hostile. Hitherto obscure individuals, or those once celebrated – or notorious – but now forgotten, whose experiences contribute to the picture of the time, can be resurrected from the newspaper reports which gave them their moment of fame. Among these are Edwin James, the successful but dubious lawyer known to Dickens; Edmund Yates, the young journalist who unthinkingly and unintentionally caused the Garrick Club affair and the consequent rift between Dickens and Thackeray; the engineers, like Goldsworthy Gurney, who offered solutions to the Thames problem but were not engaged to solve it; and the unsung partners and financial backers of Brunel in his pioneering shipbuilding venture.