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Buckets from an English Sea
1832 and the Making of
Charles Darwin
Louis B. Rosenblatt
1
1
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers
the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education
by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University
Press in the UK and certain other countries.
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

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© Oxford University Press 2018
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above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above.
You must not circulate this work in any other form

and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Rosenblatt, Louis Barry, author.
Title: Buckets from an English Sea : 1832 and the making
of Charles Darwin / Louis B. Rosenblatt.
Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2018] |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017030144 | ISBN 9780190654405
Subjects: LCSH: Darwin, Charles, 1809–1882. | Beagle Expedition (1831–1836) |
Naturalists—England—Biography. | Evolution (Biology)—History.
Classification: LCC QH31.D2 R57 2018 | DDC 576.8/2092 [B]—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017030144
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America
Contents
List of Illustrations vii

Acknowledgments ix
1. Prelude: A Word on Beginnings and Ends 1
2. Outrageous to Morality, Pernicious to Government 16
3. A Meeting at the Athenaeum 32
4. A Banker’s Son and a Philosophic Radical 53
5. The Victorian Idea of Science 70
6. The Child Is Father to the Man 100
7. Is the Map Any Good? 119
8. In the Wild 140
9. And So . . . 178
Bibliography 187
Index 201
list of illustrations
1.1 R obert Baker’s map of the cholera epidemic in Leeds, 1833, from
E. Chadwick’s Report on the Sanitary Conditions, 1842. 8
1.2 William Hogarth’s engraving Reward of Cruelty, plate iv in a series
of four, 1751. 9
1.3 J. M. W. Turner’s Helveotsluys, 1832. 12
3.1 John O’Connor’s Pentonville Road, 1884. 47
6.1 Map of Rye, Romney Marsh, from Cinque Ports by Montagu Burrows,
early sixteenth century. 111
6.2 John Norden’s map of 1595 of the coast of East Sussex, from Cinque Ports
by Montagu Burrows. 112
8.1 Ruins of the Temple of Serapis by Canonico Andrea de Jorio, 1820, and
used by Lyell as the frontispiece of vol. i of his Principles, 1830. 151
vii
Acknowledgments
I am indebted to so many. To all my former students who sought more than I could
readily offer, so I had to push what I knew. To former teachers, like Drs. Hannaway,
Pocock, and the Fabers, who engaged what I offered. And to a myriad of others whom
I only knew through their writings, like Popper and Havelock, who offered clar-
ity of judgment where I had only seen “stuff.” And thanks to those who read early
drafts: Bobby Loftus, Roy Baxandall, Dave Kinne, Marshall Gordon, and especially
Dale Beran. I also want to thank my family, grown now beyond the four of us to include
Shanna, Gabe, and Nora, for all our talks and walks. And finally Bonnie, companion,
critic, and lovely at both.
ix
1
Prelude: A Word on
Beginnings and Ends
History is mostly clouds and clouds don’t have doors. But every once in a while tran-
sition becomes visible change, a sense that we are passing through a doorway. The
year 1832 was such a moment in England and in the life of the young Charles Darwin.
Hence the two centers of our tale. This is not an almanac of 1832, nor is it a biography
of Charles Darwin, though both are at the heart of things. It is a look at 1832 with an
eye on Darwin and a look at the life and work of Darwin with an eye on 1832 . . . but
let’s go back to clouds and doors.
It is always possible to adjust history’s lens so that any wrinkle becomes a smooth
surface; where the more things change, the more they stay the same. The camera shows
us what is there, but it has many tricks. There’s slow film: transient objects leave no
mark. Take a picture of a crowded street and the crowds disappear. No individual is
“there” long enough for its image to be recorded. Only the buildings, the street, and
sidewalk leave their mark.
There is a photo of a tumbling spring, but the water flows thickly, like treacle. No
ripples or eddies, no splashes or sprays of droplets off of rock and boulder. It is what
the eye would see if time were slower off the mark.
Adjust our lens again and it is all busy-ness. A mote dances quixotically in a win-
ter’s sunbeam, but this only hints at the frenzy that is really there. The molecules of
air are rushing at a thousand miles per hour, careening into one another with a vio-
lence that makes NASCAR look stately, even sedated. The same incessant motion,
the same incessant change is in the crowd that the camera didn’t see. Each individ-
ual is navigating his or her way through the sidewalk, through the minute, through
the day. A young woman, who is deaf, has left the office at the end of the day. She
is happy with her work with the Encyclopaedia Britannica Company in downtown
Chicago. Her first real job. She is walking down State Street or maybe it’s Randolph
and a man catches her eye and asks what time it is. She says “4:25” and sees his face
change; a look of disgust comes over his face. It was her voice, the strangeness of a
deaf person who has spent a lifetime not hearing her own voice. She works hard not
to catch anyone’s eye after that.
1
2 Buckets from an English Sea
The street is full of such scars. Or appointments filled with possibility: lunch with a
new friend, a host of decisions made or postponed. It is Carl Sandburg’s city, as in this
snippet where the city says to the people:
I am the woman, the home, the family,

I get breakfast and pay the rent;
I telephone the doctor, the milkman, the undertaker;
I fix the streets
For your first and your last ride—1
It’s a matter of your lens, the comings and goings, paying the rent, fixing the street.
It is the incessant busy-ness of the city “whistled in a ragtime jig down the sunset.” It
is the incessant busy-ness of history, that busy-ness which carries yesterday forward
to today.
In his rambling commentary England and the English (1833), politician and man
of letters Lord Bulwer-Lytton observed: “Every age may be called an age of transi-
tion . . . but in our age, the transition is visible.”2 It’s a matter of one’s lens.
The sun rises and the sun sets. Seasons give way to one another. However we might
adjust our lens, a unit like the year 1832 must be arbitrary. For sure; yet that does not
mean it cannot have been a year apart from other years. At the start of a lovely essay,
Stephen Jay Gould tells a story about “Skyline Arch” of Arches National Park and about
a pamphlet published by the Park Service. The pamphlet tells us the world changes in
imperceptible ways. Rub a canyon wall and hundreds of grains of sand are dislodged.
This might seem insignificant, but that is how canyons are formed. Indeed most of the
time the pace is slower, the pamphlet goes on to say, but in time you can tear down a
mountain or create a canyon, just a few grains at a time. Yet a few pages later in the
same pamphlet we learn that in 1940 a large block of stone had fallen from Skyline
Arch and it was suddenly twice as large, opening up now to greater vistas.3 A few grains
of sand . . . a massive collapse of rock. Every age may be called an age of transition, but
sometimes the transition is visible.
A large block of stone fell in England in1832—and the young Darwin was struck
by his own metaphorical block while off in the unhappy wilds of Tierra del Fuego, a
barren cluster of islands off the southern tip of South America. For England as a whole
and for Darwin on his own there was a doorway in 1832 and new horizons posing both
threat and promise.
THE PROTAGONIST
I have a story to tell about a young man, but when I mention his name, Charles Darwin,
he ceases to be a young man and becomes the young Charles Darwin—a very different
thing. That difference is really what the story is about. There was a time when Darwin
was a lad: I am tempted to say “just a lad,” with the potential to become a great scien-
tist. What happened so that a young man, perhaps not so different from many another,
became a young Charles Darwin? As it happened, it had a lot to do with events in 1832.
3 Prelude: A Word on Beginnings and Ends
Something happened in 1832, something that constituted a problem Darwin could

not let go of. It would lead him across decades to his theory of evolution and on to a
theory about the descent of humankind . . . a long lifetime’s work.
For students of the history of ideas, Darwin is a “problem shift.” Before his work we
thought about things one way, afterward we thought about them differently. The gaze of
scientist and layperson took in new vistas and new issues appeared in the landscape. But
we should not forget that Darwin was also a person, and in 1832 he was young, a recent
graduate of Cambridge, and out in the world far from family and friends. It is hard for
us to appreciate just how far away he would have felt himself. Unlike today, there were
no cell phones, no Internet, and no familiar businesses in universal malls; only an occa-
sional ship carrying news of England and perhaps some mail. The world he met with in
his travels would have carried everywhere a very different stamp from life back home,
especially in the bitterly cold and relentlessly wet archipelago of Tierra del Fuego.
There is an extensive literature surrounding Darwin, most of it given to Darwin as a
problem shift—to the arguments he offered, their various elements and the evidence he
pointed to. But what led him to this set of issues in the first place? The pace of evolution
is so slow, the changes from one generation to the next so meager that he could not
have witnessed evolution and then wondered what had caused it. Evolution was, and
is indiscernible, and like the atom it was invented long before it could be discovered.
Consider: atoms are small, so small that you cannot hold one up to the light to see
it. You cannot put one on a scale to weigh it, nor point to one in your hand or on a
table. It cannot be experienced, and so exactly unlike the New World, it could not have
been bumped into on the way to somewhere else. It could not have been discovered;
it was invented.
Evolution is not an object. It’s an explanatory framework, a way of understanding
the history of life. So the analogy with the atom is not with the theory Darwin offered,
but with the notion of evolutionary change—that bit of difference from one genera-
tion to the next that Darwin posited must be there and would accumulate over time
to carry you from pond scum to fish and on to frogs and dogs and people. But what
led Darwin to posit these evolutionary bits of change? He could not have seen them,
could not have discovered them; why invent them? And still more compellingly, why
pursue them for years? Darwin begins his first notebook on evolution in 1837, shortly
after he settles in London on his return from the voyage of the Beagle.4 On the Origin
of Species is not published until late in the 1850s. That’s twenty years, a long time to
look for the vanishingly small ghosts of departed entities. We will find that the answer
lies in Tiera del Fuego, and it requires that we consider Darwin as the person he was.
Looking at Darwin with an eye on 1832 is crucial. It gives us the press of a problem,
the push behind his work.
The year 1832 also gives us the engine, the analytical machinery that carried his
work. This is the other leading aspect of our study: 1832 with an eye on Darwin. As
it happened, Darwin comes to the analytical framework that shapes his work in 1832.
And there you have it, both motive and means; hence the “making” of Charles Darwin.
“Making,” by the way, instead of “formation,” for example, because “formation” is more
definite. It’s closed. The deed has been accomplished. But “making” takes you more
directly to the moment. It’s the act of becoming. It’s the way things were at a moment,
if we were slower off the mark.
REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS UNKNOWN

We have already borrowed from Carl Sandburg once, let’s do so again. In “Good morn-
ing, America” he wrote: “History is a living horse laughing at a wooden horse.”5 What a
delightful image. A wooden horse is such a feeble imitation. How natural to laugh at it.
Just so, the actual past laughs at the feeble imitation of the past fashioned in our efforts
to understand. It will laugh at our tale, too.
“History” is a distinctly ambiguous term. Usually, we distinguish what we think
about something and the thing itself. Biology is about living things, geology about the
earth. But “history” refers to both the past and how we understand it. History is about
history. Sandburg pits the quixotic vitality of the real thing, the relentless unfolding
of yesterday into today across a myriad of days, against the shadow of history . . . our
wooden understanding.
In England in 1832 nothing seemed to be what it had always been. Traditional soci-
ety had given way to transformation. Successive generations had worked on the lord of
the manor’s estate, living in the same cottages, working the same soil, toiling the same
toil. But no longer. Now vast numbers were “operatives” tending the new machines of
industry in Southwark and other parts of London, in Birmingham, Manchester, and
Leeds—without tether or community.
Where are we headed? Am I safe? How can I make my way? Such were the pressing
questions history addressed, even though it was a mere wooden horse.
At the close of one of his chapters in the Principles of Geology, Charles Lyell quotes
Niebuhr’s History of Rome: “He who calls what has vanished back again into being
enjoys a bliss like that of creating.”6 But Sandburg trumps Niebuhr and Lyell here, for
what they bring into being is but a wooden replica, a Pinocchio who never becomes
a child.
Nevertheless, we are drawn to the making of wooden horses, and we respond to
the feel of the past with a certain reverence. In the seventeenth and eighteenth cen-
turies gentlemen would have cabinets displaying valued objects, oftentimes objects of
history—a Roman coin, a fossil, perhaps a Saxon shield—objects that inspired awe
and prompted a story. We stand in an ancient square and in the worn contours of its
cobblestones we feel the ages of its busy-ness. We gaze at statuary in a fountain and feel
the thirst for both water and art in the countless thousands of souls who would have
stood gazing just as we are over its hundreds of years. We pick up a well-worn, dusty
text of commentary on a wisdom of a distant past we only know as a footnote—what
was once vital and mainstream is now only marginalia—and we feel the weighing of
words, the careful appreciation of nuance without knowing its real meaning. This is
what Bernard Malamud is pointing to in a story he tells about a man who has worked
hard all his life and takes himself from the Bronx to Italy for a year of museum-going
and study. He wanders the streets of Rome, captivated by the richness of its past, a
richness he feels more than knows . . . this feel of history he calls “the remembrance of
things unknown.”7 For sure the history we compose is a poor reflection of the actual
complexity of things, yet it resonates with a need to connect with our past, even as we
know we cannot really know.
BUCKETS FROM AN ENGLISH SEA

Our world was not made in 1832, but history passed through its streets and a deep
mark was made, a scar carved into its busy-ness. A rock may remember a scar for
centuries, till weathering wears it away. It is the same with ideas and the feelings they
arouse. The intensity fades as edges wear away and scars smooth out. There was an
intensity to 1832 both for England and for the young Charles Darwin in the wilds of
Tierra del Fuego. If we work at it, perhaps we can bring it back, even though time has
long since worn away its edges.
Some of what happened in 1832 was the culmination of long-brewing changes. The
reform of Parliament finally occurred after centuries of failed efforts: a few grains of
sand . . . a massive collapse of rock. England in 1832 was not scarred by war, but there
was violence. People took to the streets. The scent of revolution was in the air. For
many that was the odor of fear, fear of the mob. But there was no stand-off at Concord
Bridge, no storming of the Bastille. Profound political change took place, but it was by
the ballot, of the ballot, and for the ballot. This is where our tale will begin, with polit-
ical change and the Reform Bill of 1832.
Nor was Darwin scarred by physical violence in 1832, but there was violence for
him as well, a violence done to understanding, to deeply held sensibilities. The scent of
cruelty was in the air, prompting a discomfort so deep that it shaped a lifetime’s work.
This is where our tale will end, with the descent of man.
But the question of resolution, of the number of pixels per inch on our screen,
remains. In the preface to his fine study Eminent Victorians, Lytton Strachey suggested
no one would ever write a history of the nineteenth century. There was simply too
much information. Certainly one could never hope to write anything like Henry Fynes
Clinton’s Fasti Hellenici. Written in 1826, this was a “spreadsheet” on ancient Greece,
chronicling political and military events, artistic and literary creations, scholarship,
key details on key figures, and the like, year by year, across hundreds of years from
before the first Olympiad in 776 b.c. to the death of Rome’s first emperor, Augustus,
in 14 a.d. To do this for even one year of the nineteenth century in England would
be overwhelming. Strachey suggested the best we could do is “row out over that great
ocean of material, and lower down into it, here and there, a little bucket, which will
bring up to the light of day some characteristic specimen, from those far depths, to be
examined with a careful curiosity.”8
The image seems apt. If we go along by bucketfuls we can maintain a resolution
that allows us to capture the tone of the times. A parliamentary speech, snippets
from journals and autobiographical sketches, a sermon, some scholarly articles and
manuscripts, these are the stuff of our study . . . all “to be examined with a careful
curiosity.”
There are many stories to tell. Let’s sample from our English sea.
THREE BUCKETS FULL

Plague
We learn among a host of items that there had been an outbreak of cholera in Leeds in
1832 that killed over seven hundred people. Dr. Robert Baker’s report to the Board of
Health on this epidemic read in part:
We are of the opinion that the streets in which malignant cholera prevailed most
severely, were those in which the drainage was most imperfect; and that the state of
the general health of the inhabitants would be greatly improved, and the probabil-
ity of a future visitation from such malignant epidemics diminished, by a general
and efficient system of drainage, sewerage and paving, and the enforcement of bet-
ter regulations as to the cleanliness of the streets.9
The prevailing theory at the time was that cholera was caused by bad air, a miasma—
perhaps as we might think of the flu. We can see this very clearly in a book that was also
published in 1832 and carried the striking title The Working-Man’s Companion: The
Physician.1.Cholera. This self-help book was written by John Conolly, who had been
appointed Professor of the Practice of Medicine at the newly founded University
College of London in 1828, where he began to revolutionize the care of the mentally ill.
The Working-Man’s Companion was one of the first titles published by the also recently
formed Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. As the preface explains, the
Society was seeking to provide “in a cheap form . . . such plain and useful information
relating to Medicine as may be serviceable to the working-class of readers.”10 There had
been several recent outbreaks of cholera on the continent and now in Britain. People
needed to be alerted to what they could and should do. The Companion begins with
a primer on the human body, skeleton, musculature, internal organs, and so on, and
then proceeds to basic notions about good and ill health, focusing on cholera.
For cholera, as for yellow fever, the plague, and several other diseases, the author
explains: “Something hurtful is supposed to be added to the usual air,—something hurt-
ful, but which science has not yet succeeded in detecting. It cannot be seen, or tasted, or
touched, or smelt; it has neither palpable substance or colour; but we believe that it exists,
because of certain effects which we know not to arise from those parts of the air which
we can see and examine.”11 Conolly’s study offers the prevailing understanding of cholera
before the technology and techniques that established the existence of bacteria and viruses.
Baker’s study of Leeds was a crucial shift. Not because of a new theory about the
causes of cholera, but because of his focus on the community rather than the indi-
vidual. The report contains a schedule of the streets, lanes, and alleys where cases of
cholera occurred. Rather than any link between the disease and the victims’ age, sex,
occupation, diet, or even moral character, a common notion at the time, he linked the
spread of the disease to sanitation. Baker divided the population of Leeds into two
roughly equal portions. In that half where there were sewers, drainage, and pavement,
there were 245 cases of cholera. But in the other part of town, lacking such basic ame-
nities, there were 1,203 cases.12
It is hard to appreciate how unsanitary were the prevailing conditions. Half of Leeds
lived along unpaved streets with no sewers. Commonly dwellings clustered in “yards.”
The Boot and Shoe Yard, for example, was home to 340 people in 34 units. As many
of these houses took in itinerant workers, numbers could swell to over 600. All of
these homes were without any plumbing. The “necessary” or toilet was often a wooden
screen around a hole in the ground, and sometimes no more than a bucket that could
be emptied into a common midden (see figure 1.1).
Later, Baker’s views would be incorporated by Edwin Chadwick in his Report on the
Sanitary Conditions of the Labouring Population of Great Britain of 1842, and they were
part of the background for Dr. John Snow’s work with a cholera epidemic in London
in 1854. Snow was able to link the outbreak to a particular well, thereby demonstrating
that cholera was carried in the water. Given the importance of these studies, Baker’s
work on the outbreak in Leeds in 1832 played a key role in the rise of the discipline of
public health.
Murder
Drawing our bucket for a second time, we discover the Anatomy Act of 1832. As Baker’s
report effectively marks a new and promising chapter, the Anatomy Act brought to a
close an old and unhappy chapter. There had long been a tension between the pursuit
of medical knowledge and taboos about dissection. Over time a system had evolved
whereby the bodies of executed criminals were given to hospitals. The Royal College
of Physicians had been allotted up to six corpses by Queen Elizabeth, and a royal grant
further allocated up to four to the Company of Barber-Surgeons.13
Public executions were relevant here, as the hanged felon forfeited his claim
on his own body. As a consequence, executions, already quite the spectacle, often
became a battle scene. Francis Place, whom we will come to know shortly, com-
mented: “The whole vagabond population of London, all the thieves, and all the
prostitutes, all those who were evil-minded, and some, a comparatively few curious
people made up the mob on those brutalizing occasions.”14 The families and friends
of the deceased were offended by the ensuing violation of the sanctity of the body.
It was enough that life should be taken away. They felt this so strongly that they
would often rush the gallows to steal away the body from the authorities. Here is
one description from 1740:
As soon as the poor creatures were half-dead, I was much surprised before such a
number of peace officers, to see the populace fall to hauling and pulling the car-
casses with so much earnestness, as to occasion several warm reencounters, and
broken heads. These were the friends of the person executed . . . and some per-
sons sent by private surgeons to obtain bodies for dissection. The contests between
these were fierce and bloody, and frightful to look at.15
To add fuel to the proverbial fire, sensibilities changed within the medical community
across the eighteenth century. Early in the 1700s the format for dissection had been
Figure 1.1 Robert Baker’s map of the cholera epidemic in Leeds, 1833, from E. Chadwick’s Report on the Sanitary Conditions, 1842. Courtesy of British Library.
a demonstration. A barber-surgeon would perform the incisions, while a professor

would address the attending students. To witness was training enough.
The print in fi
gure 1.2 was accompanied by a poem, composed by the Rev. James
Townley, a friend of Hogarth’s. The first stanza reads:
Behold the Villain's dire disgrace!

Not Death itself can end.
He finds no peaceful Burial-Place,
His breathless Corse, no friend.
Here was the issue in a nutshell—he finds no peace, his corpse, no friend.
Figure 1.2 William Hogarth’s engraving Reward of Cruelty, plate iv in a series of four, 1751.
Courtesy of Tate Britain.
Across the century, the direct experience of the dissection came to be valued over a
mere witnessing. This put a far greater premium on cadavers. The shortage of corpses
in turn meant medical schools did not scrutinize their suppliers too closely. A lucrative
trade emerged in body snatching and grave robbing.
In response, night watchmen were hired. Their stalls or stations can still be found in
older cemeteries.16 Grave robbing was bad enough, but the lure of money in hard times
led to an even more horrific practice. Likely candidates, such as the down and out, were
murdered and their bodies sold for cash!
This was the case in the famous Burke–Hare murders in Edinburgh. Burke and
Hare murdered sixteen victims in 1828. They were caught and their testimony
revealed that they had been supplying a Dr. Robert Knox, a surgeon who regularly
lectured on anatomy for a fee. They were paid 10 pounds sterling on average for these
corpses.
The scale of the problem can be seen from the 1831 confessions of one London
group who admitted to stealing five hundred to a thousand bodies for anatomists,
over a twelve-year career. They received 8 to 10 pounds for each cadaver accepted.
To try to gauge the value of this amount, a tradesman might make 17 shillings
a week. A single cadaver would thus correspond to more than three months of a
tradesman’s pay.17
These practices caused widespread fear and revulsion, and led to a parliamentary
investigation. In February of 1832 a bill was brought to the floor. Among those com-
menting on the bill was Thomas Macaulay. He begins by asking: “What are the evils
against which we are attempting to make provision?” “Two especially,” he continues,
“the practice of Burking, and bad surgery.” Macaulay then offers that the poor alone are
exposed to these two horrors:
• “What man, in our rank of life, runs the smallest risk of being Burked? That a man
has property, that he has connections, that he is likely to be missed and sought for,
are circumstances which secure him against the Burker. . . . The more wretched,
the more lonely, any human being may be, the more desirable prey is he to these
wretches. It is the man, the mere naked man, that they pursue.”
• “Again, as to bad surgery; this is, of all evils, the evil by which the rich suffer
least, and the poor most. . . . The higher orders in England will always be able to
procure the best medical assistance. Who suffers by the bad state of the Russian
school of surgery? The Emperor Nicholas? By no means. The whole evil falls on
the peasantry. If the education of a surgeon should become very extensive, if the
fees of surgeons should consequently rise, if the supply of regular surgeons should
diminish, the sufferers would be, not the rich, but the poor in our country villages,
who would again be left to mountebanks, and barbers, and old women, and
charms and quack medicines.”
And Macaulay concludes: “I think this a bill which tends to the good of the people, and
which tends especially to the good of the poor. Therefore I support it. If it is unpopular,
I am sorry for it. But I shall cheerfully take my share of its unpopularity. For such, I am
convinced, ought to be the conduct of one whose object it is, not to flatter the people,
but to serve them.”18
The bill passed, providing medical schools with an adequate supply of cadavers of
those who were already dead.
Art
Our third bucket comes from the world of art. Constable and Turner were leading
painters of the day, and both were exhibiting paintings at the gallery of the Royal
Academy of Art in 1832. An intriguing practice at the time was that members of the
Academy were invited to set their paintings up and continue to work on them in the
company of fellow members and the public prior to the formal opening of the exhi-
bition. During this period Turner, it seems, added a splash of red paint to one of his
seascapes, and then left without saying a word. Evidently, he felt the painting needed
more focus.
Constable, struck by Turner’s deft touch, remarked: “He has been here and fired a
gun.”19
Turner is a most intriguing character. Across a long life (1775–1851), he painted
and sketched a host of works, perhaps as many as fifty thousand. He began as a lad in
his father’s barber shop, selling portraits of the customers. He trained hard, working as
a topographical draughtsman for an engraver and later as a copyist of other painters’
works. This early training may have been the key, for he was able to immerse himself
in both the careful delineation of beautiful and picturesque views and the more imag-
inative use of landscapes.20
Turner is one of those figures of whom it is often said he was ahead of his time. And
certainly his mature work evokes atmosphere and uses light in ways that speak to the
work of the Impressionists decades later at the end of the century and beyond, qualities
we can see in figure 1.3. Yet we should not see him as out of sync with his day. His art
resonated with the times. He was certainly commercially successful and was a leading
member of the Royal Academy. But he also pushed his art. How should we understand
this push?
We may start with the notion of authenticity of place, acknowledging his training as
a young man in preparing detailed views of particular places at the heart of topograph-
ical works.21 On top of this, we can see Turner working to evoke the authenticity of the
moment as well, with all the vagaries of light on a given day. The topographical painter
brought the clarity of studio light to the landscape. Turner, and later the Impressionists,
went further to render authentically the light of nature. His images became shrouded
in mists and fogs, set at dawns and dusks, even in the middle of the night, midst storms
and squalls. There is detail and structure, but it is now more suggested than delineated,
and so it required different techniques to attract the eye and hold the imagination.
When Turner added that splash of red, we can see him satisfying the demands of an
emerging aesthetic that revolved around authenticity.22
Figure 1.3 J. M. W. Turner’s Helveotsluys, 1832. Courtesy of Tokyo Fuji Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan/
Bridgeman Images.
Turner, we may add, returned to the painting a second time and reworked the patch
of red into a buoy. He had first to meet the demands of the aesthetic. Only afterward
did he fashion it into something that might plausibly be a part of the scene. Here was
transition made most vibrantly visible.
MORE THAN BUCKETS

Here, then, are three buckets from the English sea in 1832. Such a random sampling
of items may include many a good story, but it will not take us where we want to go.
We have our eyes on Darwin and on the influences that pushed and pulled him about.
Casting our bucket widely across this English sea, we will sample the waters of politics,
classical history, and geology, looking for how people sought solutions and what strate-
gies they leaned upon. We will find deep commonalities, commonalities that suggest
two distinct and far-reaching structures of analysis that resonated with 1832 as indi-
viduals sought to meet the needs of a society confronting profound changes.
As a unit of time, 1832 is crisp and well-defined: 12 months, 52 weeks, 366 days (it
was a leap year). Yet as we tease out the analytical influences at play in this moment,
we will find that the geographical reach is extraordinary. The context for the young
Darwin, fresh out of university and ready to make his mark, to assert his place in the
scheme of things, takes in the books he was reading while on board the Beagle, such
as Alexander von Humboldt’s Personal Narrative, the account of his travels into the
tropics of South America. As he waited for the Beagle to set sail, Darwin wrote his
mentor, John Henslow, Professor of Botany at Cambridge, describing his excitement
at the prospect of going to Tenerife in the Canary Islands and visiting the sites and
vistas that Humboldt had so vividly portrayed. As we sample buckets, follow leads,
and trace lines of reasoning we will find ourselves visiting sites and conjuring vistas
across the globe: a shop for the making of leather britches in London’s East End, and a
bookbinder’s off Piccadilly Circus; the beach at Tyneside; an astronomical observatory
in Cape Town, South Africa; the Chapel at Trinity College; the hill country of North
Wales; a bishop’s palace not far away; and the bleak rocky islands of Tiera del Fuego.
All of these are part of the English sea we will sample.
PUSHING TOWARD THE END

This aspect of our study focuses on the resources individuals drew upon as they coped
with the challenges before them. “Resources” is too bland a term. It is a lot more active
than that—there is a push involved.
The word “push” has its own tale, one that takes us all the way back to ancient
Greece and the emergence of the sciences. By tradition, the first book on science,
On the Nature of Things, was composed by Anaximander (about 590 b.c.). Giorgio
de Santillana explains that actually it was On the Physis, where the Greek “physis”
is the root of such English words as “physics” and “physician” and also of the verb
“to push.” “Physis” was originally an agricultural term, referring to the push of a
seedling as it broke the soil and asserted itself in the scheme of things. Though this
is a nicely naturalist sort of phenomenon, why was it seen as capturing the quali-
ties Anaximander and his fellow “scientists” were after? What is it about a seedling
asserting itself that captured this new arena, “science”? Things begin to fall in place
once we realize that there was a corresponding Latin term, “natura,” that was also
originally about the push of a seedling. Though we tend to think of “nature” as what
is out there, in fact it is very much more about what is within.23 We preserve this
internal, assertive quality when we speak of someone’s nature, something innate that
makes them what they are.
What had interested the ancient Greeks was the push within things to make them
behave the way they did: their nature. Our interests lie chiefly in the thinking behind
the events and scholarship of 1832 that led to their unfolding the way they did. What
was the nature of the push behind things at this moment, a moment when change was
all about and you couldn’t simply go on about your busy-ness, when you had to stop
and figure things out? As we examine our buckets, patterns will emerge and these pat-
terns will enable us to appreciate the making of the young Darwin as he coped with a
profound challenge raised during his voyage on the Beagle.
We will start with the Reform Bill, the flagship of the changes of this era. Then
we will move from Parliament to scholarship, but without leaving worldly affairs. The
image of the scholar is often otherworldly, and no doubt there is an escape from the
press of everyday life in concerning yourself with the nuance of an interpretation or a
variation in a standard lab procedure. But scholarship need not be indifferent to the
times.24 The central cast of figures in our study presents an intriguing array of profes-
sions, including a tailor, a professor, a banker, and a bishop. Each was an intellectual,
and each confronted the deepest problems England faced in 1832—its institutions and
its core cultural values.
The end of our study, then, is to sample the waters of politics, science, and letters
in England, focusing on the year 1832, with our eye clearly fixed on the events and
scholarship of this year and further, how they led the young Darwin to tackle the
task of forging a powerful understanding of the history of life. In 1832 transition was
palpable: there was political unrest, with riots in Bristol and the streets of London
resounding with marching, charging feet, and there were also powerful new ideas in
scholarship—in the lines and lessons that would be drawn from myth and from fossil
in the effort to make sense of things anew.
And though I hardly expect to avoid the laughter of the living horse, I do hope to set
before you a significant and engaging tale of the effort to cope in an age where the air
was charged with the scent of change.
NOTES
1. “The Windy City,” in Sandburg, Complete Poems, 278.
2. Bulwer-Lytton, England and the English, vol. ii, 108.
3. Gould, The Panda’s Thumb, 194–95.
4. Darwin’s first notebook on transmutation is notebook “b.” Other early notebooks on evo-
lution: “red,” “c,” and “m.” These jottings related to evolution are from 1837–1838. See
Darwin, Charles Darwin’s Notebooks, 1836–1844.
5. Sandburg, Complete Poems, 326.
6. Niebuhr, History of Rome, 5. Cited in Lyell, Principles, vol. i, 74. There is an intriguing issue
here. As it happens, I have studied with three scholars who sought a fictional or hypothet-
ical setting for their critical scholarship. Imre Lakatos wrote a brilliant piece, Proofs and
Refutations (1976), where he brought mathematicians together in an imaginary classroom
for a discussion of a particular hypothesis. In the course of their discussion they each gave
voice to what they had written on the topic, but more richly Lakatos was able to use their
exchange to tease out a powerful set of notions about the growth of mathematical ideas.
Russell MacCormmach wrote a biography of an imaginary German physicist toward the
end of the nineteenth century, drawing attention to both the state of the discipline and the
many pressures within the German scholarly world: Night Thoughts of a Classical Physicist
(1982). Lastly, Robert Bakker used his many paleontological studies to pull together a
memoir in the voice of a velociraptor. Raptor Red (1985) was an extraordinary piece, as
were the other two. Each was historical and each author presumably could feel Sandburg’s
horse laughing in the background. They wanted, somehow, to bring their subject more
fully to life.
7. Malamud, The Magic Barrel, 162.
8. Strachey, Eminent Victorians, vii.
9. Baker, Report; Chadwick, Report on the Sanitary Conditions of the Labouring Population;
and Snow, On the Mode of Communication of Cholera.
10. Conolly, Working-Man’s Companion, 7.
11. Ibid., 43.
12. Baker, Report, 14. See also Brooke, “A Tidal Wave of Disease,” 41–44; and also Discovering
Leeds, section on poverty and riches, at www.leodis.net.
13. Linebaugh, “The Tyburn Riot Against the Surgeons,” 70–71. Linebaugh cites both a peti-
tion recorded in the Commons’ Journals and The Annals of the Barber-Surgeons of London,
as well as R. Shyrock’s The Development of Modern Medicine.
14. Place, British Museum, Add. Mss 27,826 Place Collection “Grossness,” fo. 107; cited in
Linebaugh, “The Tyburn Riot,” 68.
15. Linebaugh, “The Tyburn Riot,” 81.
16. Vale, Curiosities of Town and Countryside. Opposite p. 14 is a photograph: “The Regency
Watchman’s shelter, Old Wanstead Church, Essex. A reminder of body-snatching days.”
17. On the Burke–Hare murders see Thomas, The Doctor and the Devils; Rankin, The Falls.
One pound sterling from 1830 is roughly equivalent to $100 in 2010 dollars: see mea-
sureworth.com. Finally, there is a curious link between our first two buckets: Dr. Baker of
Leeds had been tried for paying for a snatched corpse! He was acquitted because it was to
advance knowledge. See Rosenhek, “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.”
18. Macaulay, Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, vol. iv, 425–26.
19. Jones, “Turner and Constable Exhibitions,” Guardian, August 24, 2014. See also Chambers’s
Journal of Popular Literature, Science, and Art, 4th series #234(1868)395.
20. Butlin, “J. M. W. Turner,” 9.
21. Ball, Science of Aspects; Ladd, Victorian Morality of Art; Ruskin, Modern Painters, vols.
i and v.
22. Consider another painting by Turner in 1832, Venice. It is a view late in the evening and
a large building, perhaps a grand home or a warehouse, is really a large block of shadow
marked by a narrow slash of light, along with its reflection in the canal. The effect is more
commanding and I find this painting more compelling, but it was a less public event.
23. De Santillana, Origins of Scientific Thought, 27.
24. See de Santillana, The Crime of Galileo. It is not always the case that scholars will so explic-
itly link their work to affairs of the day; nevertheless, there are many instances where they
have clearly responded to the issues of the day, be it philosophy, as in Karl Popper’s The
Open Society and its Enemies (1945), a reading of the history of philosophy written during
World War II and directed against fascism; or psychology, as in Robert Coles’s The Moral
Intelligence of Children (1997) about racism; or literary criticism, as in Gilbert Murray’s
Aeschylus (1940), aimed at academic freedom.
2
Outrageous to Morality,
Pernicious to Government
Parliament has been around for a long time. Back as early as the seventh century, well
before William the Conqueror and the Norman invasion, kings would on occasion seek
the advice of the landed elite, meeting with a council of leading barons in a meadow at
Runnymede, the same site where the barons would force King John to sign the Magna
Carta in 1215: a key moment in the long-standing struggle between the power of the
king and that of the aristocracy. In 1295 King Edward the first called leading barons
and prelates for advice, but this time he also included elected representatives of smaller
rural landowners and of townsfolk. Over the generations this notion of both landed
elite and elected representatives would go through various transformations, but after
the turmoil of the English Civil War and the return of the monarchy in the seventeenth
century things so settled into place that there would be little change through to 1832.
The system of representation in the House of Commons was fairly elaborate. There
were 658 seats, 514 of those from England and Wales. These were broadly of two sorts.
Most counties had two representatives, the idea being that these members reflected the
interest of the landed gentry and elite. In addition, there were members who repre-
sented boroughs or towns and their mercantile and trading interests. We should note
that the lord of the manor had pervasive influence over adjoining communities, and so
MPs from particular towns would be beholden to the local lord. This is further under-
lined when we note that voting was a public pronouncement and not by secret ballot.
It would have taken considerable courage to vote for someone other than the candidate
favored by the lord of the manor.
The House of Commons had not been envisioned as representing the population
numerically, but rather by leading interests. The bishops of the Church sat in the House
of Lords and both Oxford and Cambridge universities had their own MPs, for instance.
This was an intriguing approach that saw Parliament as an arena for the core institu-
tions of society to safeguard their interests. Though the House of Commons today is
based upon population, we learn from a charming collection of letters to the editor of
the London Times that of the 615 MPs after the election of 1935, twelve represented
universities—a trailing residue of the old ways that persisted until 1950.1
Returning to the state of things on the eve of the Reform Bill in 1832, the system
had accumulated a number of peculiarities. Dunwich, for example, which had been a
leading town in medieval East Anglia, had pretty much fallen into the sea late in the
16
17 Outrageous to Morality, Pernicious to Government
thirteenth century, but still had a seat in parliament. No one lived in Old Sarum any-
more either. Indeed, no one had lived there for a long time. Folks moved out from this
hill top settlement down to the banks of the Avon River early in the thirteenth century.
Over time, New Sarum became the cathedral city of Salisbury, but Old Sarum retained
its member of parliament. Such boroughs were called “pocket boroughs” because
the representative in Parliament for that seat was in the pocket of some member of
the landed elite. Further, since no new borough seats had been added after 1661, the
growth of such industrial centers as Manchester, Leeds, Sheffield, and Birmingham was
not represented. The system had utterly failed to keep up with the dramatic changes of
the Industrial Revolution.
REFORM AND CHARLES JAMES FOX

In the various debates across the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nine-
teenth centuries, the most formidable voice calling for the reform of parliament was
that of the great Whig leader Sir Charles James Fox.
The son of the Duke of Holland was a fine teller of tales, a notorious carouser and
gambler, and a gentleman of means. Sam Johnson was a creature of very different hab-
its, but he made an exception with Sir Charles. Fox was an early member of Johnson’s
Literary Club, a small group of ten or so who met frequently for good food and good
talk. It says a lot about Sir Charles that he found favor in the eyes of Sam Johnson.
In a lovely passage on Fox, the historian G. M. Trevelyan sums up his character with
these words: “Oratory at its highest, politics at its keenest, long days of tramping after
partridges, village cricket, endless talk as good as ever was talked, and a passion for
Greek, Latin, Italian and English poetry and history—all these, and alas also the mad-
ness of the gambler, Fox had enjoyed and had shared with innumerable friends who
loved him.” And, Trevelyan adds: “Nor had he been less happy during the long wet day
at Holkham which he spent sitting under a hedge, regardless of the rain, making friends
with a ploughman who explained to him the mystery of the culture of turnips.”2 This
hints at the fuller measure of the man, but we can round it out still more if we turn to
another matter altogether.
It was 1968 or 1969 when the Washington Post ran an op-ed piece written by Sir
Charles James Fox. It was extracted from a speech Fox had given nearly 170 years ear-
lier on the evening of February 3, 1800, but the Post piece simply gave him the byline
with no further explanation. Here is the gist of it: William Pitt, still Prime Minister,
had defended his prolonging of the war against Napoleon as he sought an honorable
peace—or was that Nixon’s phrase? Hard to keep these things straight sometimes. It
was clear to everyone it was a war we wanted no part of any more, and so the gov-
ernment was beating a retreat but not a hasty one lest anyone suspect it had been a
mistake in the first place. So, said Pitt, the war had been suspended. It was not really a
war at all, but a holding action, and with this Sir Charles, the leader of the opposition
in the House of Commons, rose to his feet and addressed the divided house, inviting
them to put themselves in the field of battle. Imagine what it means to pause: “But if
a man were present now at a field of slaughter, and were to inquire for what they were
fighting—‘Fighting!’ would be the answer; ‘they are not fighting, they are pausing.’ ”
And, Sir Charles continued: “ ‘Why is that man expiring? Why is that other writhing
with agony?’ . . . The answer must be, ‘You are quite wrong, sir; you deceive yourself—
they are not fighting—do not disturb them—they are merely pausing!—this man is not
expiring with agony—that man is not dead—he is only pausing! . . . All that you see, sir,
is nothing like fighting—there is no harm, nor cruelty, nor bloodshed in it whatever—
it is nothing more than a political pause.’ ”3
A bullet fired in a holding action would shed blood as readily as any fired in war,
whether it was the continental campaigns of 1798 or Vietnam late in the 1960s.
Charles James Fox was the parliamentary leader of the Whigs in the House of
Commons for a long time, urging not only a true end to the war with France, but a
host of reforms that would transform the character of the government. He sought to
recast English politics, moving its center closer to the people.
There had been a number of efforts to reform parliament over the years, but we
may pick things up on the evening of May 26, 1797, when Fox addressed his fellow
members of the House of Commons in support of Grey’s second effort to initiate par-
liamentary reform. “The whole of this system, as it is now carried on,” he urged, “is as
outrageous to morality as it is pernicious to government.”4 To illustrate the corruption
of the system, Fox referred to a member selling a seat in parliament for four or five
thousand pounds, and then on a later occasion moving to send a poor soul from his
district to prison for having sold his vote for less than two pounds. But an even greater
sin was the way the existing system denied the people a voice in government. Fox then
recalled events some twenty years earlier, when the government had lost the confi-
dence of the people who no longer supported the war against the American colonies.
An election was held. Despite the strength of anti-war sentiment, only three or four
seats were gained by the opposition.
Parliament’s systemic insensitivity to the will of the people was a serious matter and
Fox’s most prescient argument. He described at length more recent events in Ireland,
where the number of radicals had grown dramatically. In 1791 there were, perhaps,
ten thousand men prepared for violence. It was estimated that this number had now
increased tenfold because the government had failed to support moderate elements. As
he closed his speech, Fox asked what should be gained by passing reform. He answered:
I think we shall gain at least the chance of warding off the evil of confusion, grow-
ing out of accumulated discontent. I think we shall save ourselves from the evil
that has fallen upon Ireland. I think we shall satisfy the moderate, and take even
from the violent if any such there be, the power of increasing their numbers and of
making converts to their schemes.5
For sure, the threat of violence would enshroud the events of 1832, like gray skies
before a storm, but as we shall see, it was more complicated than one might have
thought. A key party of reformers had inherited Fox’s view that reform was the best
way to enhance political order and replace the anger and confusion which grows out of
discontent with a more positive civic spirit.
The division that evening was ninety-three votes in support of Grey’s motion
and 258 opposed. That parliament would reform itself, that power would graciously
acknowledge that it did not comply with principle, certainly seemed unlikely. And so
things stood as they had for centuries. Fox died long before the Reform Bill passed, but
he had by then passed his discontent and his clarity on to a new generation.
“WHERE THE EVIL IS THUS

IMPERFECTLY CONCEIVED”
England never had a French Revolution. The French ruling elite was either executed or
exiled in the wake of events at the close of the eighteenth century. And though there
were oscillations politically in the succeeding decades, the grip of aristocratic families
had been broken.
England stands in contrast. It may be that England’s wealth is no longer as concen-
trated in the holdings of her most ancient aristocratic families, but whatever changes
there have been to their fortunes have been the result of the ebb and flow of “ordinary”
history, as opposed to the extraordinary proportions of revolution.
Why then is the transition in the England of his day so visible for Bulwer-Lytton? If
England did not have a French revolution, it nevertheless had a revolution of its own—
the Industrial Revolution. The changes wrought by the development of the factory sys-
tem and the mass production of cloth and what-have-you transformed virtually every
aspect of life. Take the making of straight pins.
One of the first stories Adam Smith tells in the Wealth of Nations (1776) is about
straight pins. Back before the factory system, the making of straight pins had been a
cottage industry. A “jobber” had a circuit. He would deliver a roll of steel wire to work-
ers in cottages across the county.
These workers would then cold-draw the wire. That is, in order to reduce the diameter
of the wire, they would draw it through successively smaller holes in a frame. (The same
thing was done for piano and harpsichord “strings.”) After the wire had been thinned, you
would snip it, and lay it over a notch in an anvil and hammer it to produce a point. Several
such operations were necessary to make the head and then to whiten the pin. Finally, you
would pack it in a roll of paper. All in all some eighteen distinct operations were necessary.
The typical worker could make a handful of pins in a day, fewer than twenty; bringing
together a small group of ten workers, however, so that each could specialize in a few tasks,
increased production to over 48,000 pins a day.6 Even without the steam engine to drive
conveyor belts, the division of labor was an engine of extraordinary productivity.
Industrialization transformed far more than the baubles, bangles, and bright shiny
beads you could buy at the store. It changed how people worked and where. The lat-
ter half of the eighteenth century saw the growth of several major industrial centers.
London reached a population of a million; in addition Birmingham, Manchester,
Leeds, Sheffield, and other towns grew markedly. Manchester, for example, had a pop-
ulation of approximately 15,000 in 1760 and more than a quarter of a million in 1831,
and in the decade from 1821 to 1831 the population of both Liverpool and Manchester
would grow by 40 percent.7
Just as factories produced steel rails and cloth, so too did they manufacture slums
with cholera and other maladies. Much of England’s population shifted from the estates
of the landed elite to factories and providing housing was a real test for the economy.
Homes needed to be built on a huge scale for a population that would not be able to
purchase them. The result was a system of company towns or developments, most
often featuring “back-to-backs.” Imagine a block of row or terrace houses with two
long rows of homes separated by small gardens in the back and an alley between them.
Now get rid of the gardens and alley. The homes were back-to-back. Two rooms down,
two rooms up, and your back wall was their back wall. The same efficiency that marked
the new factory workplace had been brought to workers’ homes. And it worked, except
for the fact that such density allowed for the rampant spread of disease, as witnessed in
the deadly outbreak of cholera in Leeds in 1832 that was our first bucket.
James Kay makes this point in his pamphlet The Moral and Physical Conditions of
the Working Classes, a study of Manchester in 1832 which echoes Baker’s study of Leeds
in many ways.8 Manchester set up fourteen boards of health across the city with inspec-
tors who examined the city, street by street, taking inventory of conditions and survey-
ing the inhabitants. The poor were generally housed in back-to-backs, which meant
they had no yards, no privies, and no receptacles for trash: “Consequently the narrow,
unpaved streets, in which mud and water stagnate, become the common receptacles of
offal and ordure.” Such are the conditions that coupled with the exhausting work of the
operative in a factory constituted a “predisposition to contagious disease.”9
In 1831, John Stuart Mill began a series of articles titled “The Spirit of the Age.” Here
are a few snippets from his effort to capture the tenor of the times:
The conviction is already not far from being universal, that the times are pregnant
with change; and that the nineteenth century will be known to posterity as the era
of one of the greatest revolutions of which history has preserved the remembrance,
in the human mind, and in the whole constitution of human society. . . .
It is felt that men are henceforth to be held together by new ties, and separated
by new barriers; for the ancient bonds will now no longer unite, nor the ancient
boundaries confine. . . .
The first of the leading peculiarities of the present age is, that it is an age of tran-
sition. Mankind have outgrown old institutions and old doctrines, and have not yet
acquired new ones. When we say outgrown, we intend to prejudge nothing. A man
may not be either better or happier at six-and-twenty, than he was at six years of
age: but the same jacket which fitted him then, will not fit him now. . . .
Worldly power must pass from the hands of the stationary part of mankind into
those of the progressive part. There must be a moral and social revolution, which
shall, indeed, take away no men’s lives or property, but which shall leave to no man
one fraction of unearned distinction or unearned importance.10
Mill’s broad observations were complemented in 1831 by an influential pamphlet on

parliamentary reform by his friend George Grote. Grote was a banker and had already
earned his reformer’s credentials by this time. An active member of the circle variously
called Benthamians, Utilitarians, or Philosophic Radicals, Grote had among other

projects taken a leading role in the formation of the University of London. We will
come to know him well, as we take up his History of Greece later in our study.
Grote’s pamphlet does not dwell on the outrageous inequalities of pocket bor-
oughs like Old Sarum in contrast to large industrial cities like Manchester and
Birmingham with only token representation, though he does note a telling observa-
tion Lord Grey had made back in 1793. The young Charles Grey, who would become
the second Earl Grey, had been only twenty-two when he entered Parliament in
1786, having only recently graduated from Cambridge. He quickly became one of
Charles James Fox’s most trusted lieutenants and in 1793 he introduced a bill for the
reform of Parliament. Grote goes back to Grey’s address where Grey had noted that
fewer than two hundred families, partly Peer and partly Commoner, return a major-
ity of Parliament.11 Grote then added regarding pocket boroughs: “Such abuses are
indeed indefensible; but they ought to be attacked, not as vicious excrescences on a
system sound in the main, but as symptoms, rather gross and magnified, of wide-
spread internal corruption.”12 This is a critical shift. It is worth following Grote to see
where he takes it.
Grote is confident that reform will be secured, but he is concerned that it achieve the
desired end. In the measured cadence of his Victorian prose, he wrote: “Where the evil
is thus imperfectly conceived, the remedies demanded are likely to be equally incom-
plete and superficial.”13 And so he takes the conversation beneath the surface, in order
to more perfectly understand the evils of the system. Grote takes his analysis back to
the Glorious Revolution of the late seventeenth century where Parliament united with
popular sentiment against their common foe, the Stuart monarchy. Since that time
Parliament had traded on its supposed common interest with the people, but this had
forever been false. Those who see Parliament as the guarantors of the security of the
people have “overlooked the fact that elections by the people were a pure fiction: that
the persons who elected formed only a fraction of the people; and that to this electoral
fraction, in the last resort, all the security was to be traced.”14
We may add this note underlying Grote’s point from Antonia Fraser’s recent study
of the Reform Bill: “Where elections were concerned, just over 3 per cent of the pop-
ulation voted in 1830, some 400,000-odd people out of a population of approximately
sixteen million: all were, of course, male.”15
Grote sees through the gloss that presents MPs as abstractions in touch with the
will of the people that mysteriously arises from the practice of England’s government.
They were, in fact, either members of the ruling aristocracy themselves or were deeply
beholden to them. Consequently, Grote links parliamentary reform to the expansion
of the electorate, for that is the only reform that promises a harmony of the actions of
Parliament and the needs of the people.
Subsequent events show that Grote’s shift from rectifying the glaring abuses of parlia-
mentary districting to basic matters of representation was right on target. Later reform
bills, after that of 1832, addressed precisely this matter of the expansion of the electorate.
In order for it to be a government for the people, it would have to be a government
elected by the people.
FRANCIS PLACE AND THE MEN IN RAGGED COATS

Though England never had a French Revolution, it came close in 1832, and at the
center of things was agitation for the Reform Bill. Let’s turn from leaders in parliament
like Grey and Fox to take up the story of a working man, Francis Place. Place was born
in London in 1771. He trained in the craft of making leather breeches and in his early
twenties, newly married with an infant son, he began to work in earnest, only to find
himself in the middle of labor strife. And though he had not sought a strike, he decided
to make the best of things, helping, for example, to write out a statement of grievances.
The strike failed. Place’s story, already a story of hardship, now took a horrific turn. He
was blackballed because he was seen as one of the leaders of the strike. Unable to work,
he and his wife faced starvation and lost their son to smallpox.
As hard as it is to fathom the despair that comes from such events, their plight
was not far from common among the working classes. Thirty years later, when he had
become a wealthy man, Place wrote movingly of this period in his life: how “the disap-
pointments are more than can be steadily met; and men give up in despair, become
reckless, and after a life of poverty, end their days prematurely in misery.” He went on to
talk about the distinctive way such misfortune hits “the better sort of persons . . . who
have set their hearts on bettering their condition,” reflecting on how “disappointment
preys on them . . . hope leaves them . . . their hearts sink as toil becomes useless.” Place
then noted the overlay of class on all this, writing “it is not the habit of men to care for
others beneath them in rank.”16
Place turned his life around by virtue of extraordinary discipline. The failure of the
strike and the suffering it had caused underlined the value of organizing. He worked
with carpenters, plumbers, and other tradesmen, helping them to come together
effectively. He also did whatever piecework in tailoring he could secure. And, strik-
ingly, he read—at least two or three hours an evening. He borrowed books wherever
he could: books by Hume, Locke, Adam Smith, Blackstone. In time, he ventured to
set up a shop for himself and was remarkably successful. As a breeches-maker in 1793
he had earned 17 shillings a week, approximately 45 pounds a year. In 1817 when he
turned the shop over to his eldest son, he was earning some three thousand pounds
per year.
Where does such strength come from? Place has told us it is not from hardship—
for hardship preys on people and drives hope away. It was the injustice of it all and
the extraordinary disproportion of the consequences. After he had earned a more
comfortable standing he did not boast of being a self-made man. He did not rush
about with Falstaffian exuberance, or carry himself with the bombast of a man big-
ger than life, but quietly and steadily he determined to make life less harsh for the
working poor.
He became interested in politics, but not as a candidate. He extended his organizing
from trades groups to politics. In 1807, while Place was still a tailor, there were parlia-
mentary elections. Francis Burdett, a popular figure in London, was willing to stand
for election, but not to spend any more of his substantial funds in the effort. Place and
a few others proceeded to organize for him, canvassing in earnest. Burdett was elected
and the small group that had worked for him, the Westminster Committee, became the
district’s central political authority. And so began Place’s second career.
Throwing himself into public affairs, Place quickly expanded his work and his con-
tacts. He came to know James Mill well, and through Mill Jeremy Bentham. Place
visited Bentham regularly, becoming one of the central figures within the Benthamian
circle. Though a practical man of affairs, Place was keen on the exchange of ideas
within the circle. One reflection of this is the role he played in the preparation of
several of Bentham’s notes and manuscripts for publication. This was far more than
a matter of sorting out details. Bentham wrote virtually every day of his long life on
a range of topics. By 1820 he had accumulated a host of manuscripts, often including
several different approaches to the same topic. John Stuart Mill reduced a large num-
ber of these to a five-volume work on legal practices, Rationale of Judicial Evidence;
George Grote wrote a work on natural religion from some 1,500 pages of manu-
script; Place worked on several of these manuscripts, including one on schooling,
Chrestomathia, and another titled Not Paul, but Jesus, and he assisted with a third, A
Handbook of Political Fallacies.
The Handbook was quickly and favorably reviewed in the Edinburgh Review by
the editor, Sydney Smith, and the review clues us in on the matter at heart here in a
delightful way: “Whether it is necessary that there should be a middleman between the
cultivator and the possessor, learned economists have doubted. But neither gods, nor
men, nor booksellers can doubt the necessity of a middleman between Mr. Bentham
and the public.” The review goes on: “Mr. Bentham is long; Mr. Bentham is occa-
sionally involved and obscure; Mr. Bentham invents new and alarming expressions;
Mr. Bentham loves division and subdivision—and he loves method itself, more than
its consequences.” And the passage concludes: “Those only therefore who know his
originality, his knowledge, his vigor, and his boldness, will recur to the works them-
selves. The great mass of readers will not purchase improvement at so dear a rate, but
will choose rather to become acquainted with Mr. Bentham through the medium of
Reviews—after that eminent philosopher has been washed, trimmed, shaved, and
forced into clean linen.”17
So one of Place’s activities was as “butler” to Bentham’s writings, along with other
Benthamian projects and everything else he was doing. Place would come to be relied
upon as ex officio staff for a number of Members of Parliament, often with regard
to labor and tradesmen matters. He was a unique figure in this class society. He had
solid footing within the working classes. He had been there, and there is no doubt but
that he always remembered being a breeches maker and how powerless he had been
to secure work. Since those days, he had also come to have a rich array of political
connections with the ruling classes through his electoral organizing, and he was sen-
sitive to the deeper character of political and economic matters. For example, in a two
year stretch in the 1820s he worked toward the repeal of various laws regulating such
trades as curriers, tanners, and hackney coachmen. He devised schemes to improve
the administration of finances, of laws pertaining to debtors and creditors, and crimes
at sea. Meanwhile he also supported the formation of mechanics’ institutes and helped
to negotiate various labor disputes. A charming article in European Magazine in 1826
captures Place’s reach and his influence with a line borrowed from Archimedes: “Give
me place for my fulcrum and I’ll move the world.”18
Perhaps Place’s single most significant accomplishment across this period was the
repeal of the Combination Acts, laws prohibiting the formation of unions or collectives
for various trades. He wrote letters to trade societies and newspapers, became involved
in disputes, and worked steadily to educate the public. In a letter to Sir John Cam
Hobhouse shortly before he, Hobhouse, became MP for Westminster, Place looked
forward to a parliamentary committee on labor and wages convinced the repeal of the
Combination Laws was at hand, and further that it “would make thousands of reform-
ers among the master tradesmen and manufacturers.”19
Place’s regard for the making of moderates is a recurrent theme, echoing the obser-
vations of Fox in his speech for reform back in 1797. Again and again we find Place
working to steer public opinion toward reform without revolution. A notable example
can be seen in the events of 1819, following the Peterloo Massacre. In July of that year
there had been a large gathering in St. Peter’s Fields, Manchester in support of par-
liamentary reform. Manchester, you will recall, had no representation in parliament,
though it was already a city of two hundred thousand. Though a peaceful gathering,
the authorities had issued a proclamation against seditious meetings. The authorities
moved to arrest the speakers, and within moments the military charged to disperse the
crowd. Eleven spectators were killed and hundreds wounded.20
Reformers across the country were alarmed, fearing that England was losing its
cherished right to hold public meetings. There was a desire right away to rally in
London, but Place urged caution and the march was not held until September 2—a
gathering of one hundred thousand. All “at the risk of military execution and under the
musquetry of the household army,” wrote Hobhouse.21 What an extraordinary event
this march must have been.
Afterward Place picked up on a phrase in a letter to a friend: “You say, ‘the men in
ragged coats have proved by their conduct and their resolutions that they understand the
business they are about.’ This is very true.” Until very lately one might have feared a gath-
ering of five hundred, he continued: “Now 100,000 people may be collected together and
no riot ensue, and why? . . . the people have an object, the pursuit of which gives them
importance in their own eyes, elevates them in their own opinion, and thus it is that the
very individuals that would have been the leaders of the riot are the keepers of the peace.”22
MAKING REFORM HAPPEN

1830
We come now to the events surrounding the passage of the Reform Bill. We may take
our beginning with Lord John Russell’s proposal in February of 1830 to enfranchise
three industrial cities: Leeds, Birmingham, and Manchester. Yet even this modest
extension of parliamentary seats was defeated (180 to 140). With the death of King
George IV in June of that year new parliamentary elections were called for. At this
time, events in Paris had captured the imagination. There had been a coup and a
constitutional monarchy under Louis Philippe had replaced the despotism of Charles
X. “This new Revolution produced a very extraordinary effect on the middle classes,”
Place wrote. “Every one was glorified with the courage, the humanity, and the honesty
of the Parisians, and the common people became eagerly desirous to prove they too
were brave, humane, and honest.”23 The Tory majority in the House of Commons was
sharply reduced in this election, but nonetheless they held a majority and the Duke of
Wellington formed a government.
Even so, there was a difference. The system had lost its credibility. Place wrote: “There
never can be a strong government again in England until there has been a change in
its very form.”24
The Duke’s government fell to divisions within the Tory party, and in November of
1830 Earl Grey formed a Whig government with Lord John Russell as the leader in the
House of Commons. The press for reform grew steadily with political unions in the
towns and fires in the countryside. The faculty at Cambridge stopped speaking to those
on the other side of the issue, and Place observed that “their steady perseverance, their
activity and skill, astounded the enemies of reform.”25
1831
On March 1, 1831 a reform bill was introduced, generating widespread excitement. It
was expected the bill might impose new penalties for bribery, and replace such pocket
boroughs as Old Sarum with seats for the likes of Leeds. The Tories were stunned by
the scale of the new bill. It dropped sixty of the smallest boroughs, extended the repre-
sentation of the larger cities, and broadened the franchise to a significantly larger pro-
portion of the population. The Victorian historian Thomas Escott tells us in Gentlemen
of the House of Commons that Lord Russell “resumed his seat amid cheers,” adding
that some MPs could be heard whispering to each other Talleyrand’s recent mot, “the
Reform Parliament was the convocation of the Estates General, which at Paris had
preceded the French Revolution.”26
On March 2, the day after Lord Russell had introduced the bill, Thomas Macaulay,
MP for Calne—a seat “in the pocket” of Lord Lansdowne—rose to encourage its pas-
sage. It was by all accounts an electrifying speech, and one that carries us back to
Charles James Fox and his fear that if we did not reform Parliament, we would nurture
radicalism. Here is part of Macaulay’s closing:
Save property divided against itself. Save the multitude, endangered by its own
ungovernable passion. Save the aristocracy, endangered by its own unpopular
power. Save the greatest and fairest, and most highly civilized community that ever
existed, from calamities which may in a few days sweep away all the rich heritage
of so many ages of wisdom and glory.27
Three weeks later the bill passed its second reading with a majority of one in what was
the largest vote in parliamentary history, with 608 members in attendance. The elation,
however, was short-lived as the bill suffered in subsequent committees. The Whigs
decided to dissolve their government and seek a greater majority in new elections.
The new parliament met in June of 1831with a solid majority of over a hundred for
reform. The second reform bill cleared the House of Commons easily, only to falter in
the House of Lords by forty-one votes. It had been hoped that the Lords would defer to
popular sentiment, but it was not to be.
Place realized reform was now caught between two dangers. On the one hand, the
Whigs might capitulate in order to secure passage of some bill. On the other hand,
increased agitation—there were riots in Derby, Nottingham, and Bristol—might lead
to armed rebellion. Place opted to support a mass demonstration, a procession in
London to present the King with a clear call for reform. It was successful, but rumors
of compromise continued to float about.
The pressure for reform from both the middle class and the working class was
relentless and in December the Whigs put forward the bill again. It passed the House
of Commons with an even greater margin.
1832
This bill was sent to the House of Lords late in March of 1832. After several weeks of
parliamentary maneuvers, it became clear that the Lords would not pass a bill compa-
rable to that passed by the Commons. Lord Grey resigned and the Tories were given
the task of forming a new government. The Duke of Wellington stepped forward and
over the next several days tried to form a government.
Such are the practices of parliamentary democracy, but they only added fuel to the
flame. As word of these events spread, the intensity of agitation ratcheted even higher.
Place records that on Friday, May 11 he met with a delegation from Birmingham,
reporting that they’d had a spontaneous gathering of a hundred thousand persons and
had determined both not to pay taxes and to arm themselves. While these two options
may seem incongruous—on the one hand civil disobedience, on the other armed
rebellion—what they really signaled was the determination to do something.
The next day at another meeting at Place’s home, it was decided that should the
Duke succeed in forming an administration it was likely he would act at once to put
down the people by force. It was also felt his administration would immediately pro-
voke a general panic. Fearing such a panic would spur an armed rebellion, Place went
back to the notion of withholding taxes. An economic strike of some sort might well
be effective. We can see where this comes from in a comment Place made several years
later as he reflected upon the failure of the Chartist Movement:
All these persons thought as most of the politically associated working men still
do, that—noise and clamour, threats, menaces and denunciations will operate
upon the government, so as to produce fear in sufficient quantity to insure the
adoption of the Charter—they have yet to learn that these notions and proceed-
ings contain not one element of power—that the Government as mere matter of
course will, as every Government must, hold people very cheap who mistake such
matters, as have been mentioned, for power . . . they have not a glimpse of their
own, much less of the actual condition or relation of the several portions of society,
who must concur, before any great organic change can be even put in progress.28
It was not that Place was a pacifist. He felt the threat of force among the working and
underclasses must be accompanied by a clear signal that the middle classes are fellow
travelers, equally discontented. Otherwise, they were simply playing onto the hands of
those who wished to maintain the existing order. The Iron Duke, the victor at Waterloo,
would not hesitate to call out the army.
The special thrust of an economic challenge to the government was very appealing,
but Place was not keen on withholding taxes. He sought something bolder: a run on
the banks. He took a large sheet of paper and wrote out this slogan: “To Stop the Duke,
go for gold.”29
England’s might lay in its accumulated wealth. The empire was essentially a financial
engine. The colonies were there to serve the needs of London’s financial institutions.
But this mechanism was fragile; it depended on confidence. Destroy the reputation of
the banks and it would all crumble.
This was Place’s idea. It would not be the first time anyone deliberately set out to
drain a bank’s reserves. In Old and New London, Walter Thornbury tells of a time early
in the eighteenth century when the Bank of England set out to break the Child and
Co. Bank, one of the oldest financial institutions in England, having been established
in the 1670s. It was the practice in the early 1700s to give a receipt for the deposit of
funds which could then be used in exchange for money. It was somewhat like a check.
The Bank of England decided to collect such receipts and when they grew to a sizeable
amount to go and demand the money, hoping the bank would not have sufficient funds
to cover. The bank caught wind of the scheme and applied to an aristocratic friend, the
Duchess of Marlborough, who gave them a check of ₤700,000 drawn on the Bank of
England. Thus, when a clerk from the Bank of England arrived with a bag of receipts,
Child’s sent one of its own clerks to the Bank of England to cash the Duchess’s check.
By moving slowly through the receipts, Child’s was able to cover the demand with the
Bank of England’s own money.30
The important difference with Place’s scheme is that its motives were political,
not financial. He didn’t want the Bank of England to fail. He wanted to so scare the
Duke so that he would capitulate and allow the passage of the Reform Bill. Place knew
those who supported reform went far beyond the discontented working classes. The
Industrial Revolution had created great wealth, both industrialists and a rising bour-
geoisie. This new wealth was as disenfranchised as any other resident of London, or
Manchester, Birmingham, or Leeds. Going for gold would make clear the power of
this wealth.
If it worked. Grote was not convinced it would. A run on the banks is so unsettling;
he feared the commercial interests would turn against reform. Place mulled over his
friend’s fears, but decided to stay the course.
Place’s slogan energized the reformers. Money was put on the table and within hours
bills were being printed and posted throughout London and in provincial centers. One
and a half million pounds were withdrawn in just a few days. And heady days these
were. In short order the House of Lords rejected reform, the Whigs dissolved their gov-
ernment, and the Tories could not form one of their own. It is often suggested that the
Tories ultimately gave way because the King had let it be known that he would create
sufficient new Whig peers to carry a vote through the House of Lords.31 This may have
been the case; it is hard to tell with so many rumors and speculations floating about.
We do know that for over a week neither the Whigs nor Tories could navigate these
turbulent waters. We also know the King was not happy about stacking the Lords. He
demurred, as if such a ploy were too tawdry.
But though one might pause, hoping for some gambit that would unlock the politi-
cal stalemate, the threat of economic turmoil was galvanizing.
The call for gold began on Monday, May 14. On Friday, May 18 a representative of
the Bank of England met with Grey, Wellington, and the King, telling them of his fears
of an imminent collapse of the bank. The Duke withdrew from his efforts to form a
government. Earl Grey formed a new government, the run on the bank ceased, and the
Tory peers of the House of Lords agreed to abstain rather than oppose reform. On June
2 the Reform Bill became law.32
But even before the bill had passed, the government made clear its concerns. On
May 21, the first day of the new Whig government and only three days after the
King had met with the representative of the Bank of England, a secret Parliamentary
committee was set up to examine the condition of the Bank of England and whether
changes should be initiated. The government was riveted by the question: was the
Bank safe?
On July 20 Grote was a witness before this committee. When asked if he had any
suggestions, he replied that the Bank should regularly report on its holdings. That is,
it should make public how it stands during a run against its holdings. After some dis-
cussion of the nature of the reporting Grote thought advisable, Lord Althorp, a leading
Whig minister and head of the committee, then asked the crucial question: “You are
probably aware that in May last there was a considerable draft upon the treasure of the
Bank of England, and the consequence of that demand was that the cash of the Bank
of England became unusually low; do you think if the amount at the time had been
published (that demand arising from political causes) the publication would not have
created a material inducement to withdraw the whole of the treasure of the Bank of
England that remained?”33
What an extraordinary phrase, “You are probably aware.” Grote was widely
known as a Benthamian reformer and had been right in the thick of things; though
he had not been convinced that going for gold would work. Furthermore, on the day
following the posting of the placards across London and key provincial cities, the
Evening Standard accused Grote of having originated them. What an extraordinary
situation. About a dozen witnesses appeared before the committee, including the
governor of the Bank of England and two directors. Grote was the only Benthamian
in the crowd.
Grote, by the way, replied “no” to Lord Althorp’s question; that in a matter of politi-
cal motives the publication of the state of the Bank’s bullion holdings would not matter.
So?
The Reform Bill passed. Seats in the House of Commons were redistricted. Why is this
significant? After all the fuss and bother, why would getting rid of a bunch of small
boroughs matter so much? What sort of changes follow from redistricting?
Certainly trading Old Sarum, Dunwich, and a host of small boroughs for the likes
of Leeds and Manchester was a move toward greater popular representation, but did
this represent anything deeper? One might assume, for example, that the new elector-
ate, coming as it did from more urban quarters, would be more committed to issues
arising from industrialization and that there might be parliamentary commissions and
subsequent legislation to limit abuses, and this was the case. More subtly and perhaps
more importantly, the election for the new reformed Parliament attracted a host of
candidates who had little to do with the aristocracy. More than sixty seats were taken
from the pockets of the landed elite and turned over to an electorate less firmly tied to
the lord of the manor.
There was a new game in town and people were excited. But the changes set into
motion by the Reform Bill were deeper than parliamentary commissions or legislation.
If we go back to Mill’s “Spirit of the Age,” to his call for a social and moral revolu-
tion that would deny unearned distinctions and importance, we can feel that some-
thing more was in the air. The elite felt the challenge. Writing toward the end of the
century, Thomas Escott goes so far as to suggest that herein lay the central push for
one of the more profound changes in English society. The patrician elite redefined
themselves, moving beyond such questions as “Who is he?” and “How much does
he have a year?” to “What has he done?” Prestige by achievement replaced prestige
by position.34 Escott may well have caught that such a change had taken place by his
own day, a new seriousness of purpose among the landed elite, but it is difficult to
locate the moment such changes are set in motion. Doors are hard to find in clouds,
especially in storm clouds.
The early nineteenth century was a period of marked change. Industrialization
disrupted the traditional economy around the lord’s estate and fed the rise of factory
towns. We can see this in population numbers, in literature, in parliamentary commis-
sions on the conditions of the working classes, and in the outbreak of urban plagues.
We can also see it in the realization of a potential for a new kind of political protest: the
mass march, now familiar, but then new. It is oftentimes hard to gauge the onset of the
modern era, especially as so often change is a mixed bag. But the peaceful intimidation
by a hundred thousand souls marching to underline their demand for Reform is cer-
tainly progress over a call to arms. This was a positive step in the practice of politics in
a mass democracy.
At the same time, we need to recall that 1832 was a long time ago. In a charm-
ing book, Age of Scandal, T. H. White suggests that in the general sorting of ages and
epochs in England we have overlooked a distinct era. Rather than see the march of
sensibilities and events as stepping from the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century
to the Industrial Age of the nineteenth, he suggests we interpose England under the
Georges—roughly the stretch from the 1740s to the 1820s—as its own entity. Hume
and Voltaire notwithstanding, England at this time was still a very Christian nation
with a rather small landed elite of fewer than two hundred titled families who still ran
things very much as they had over the centuries. Quoting G. M. Trevelyan, he observes
that “it was an age of aristocracy and liberty; of the rule of law and the absence of
reform.”35
It was also, White tells us, a time which valued “bottom.” Life was hard, and it was
crucial to be prepared to handle its pains and sufferings. “Bottom” was a nautical term,
in praise of the capacity to hold one’s course, despite the wash of tempest and storm.
And here we see most clearly how distant this world was at bottom. It was an age of
curious elixirs: turnip water, snail tea, or a posset, a drink made with warmed ale or
wine and milk, which became medicinal by adding horse dung.36 We forget how neces-
sary stoic acceptance would have been in an age before anesthetics and modern medi-
cine. Childbirth, for example, was often deadly.
Eighteen thirty-two was a long time ago, but it was also charged with elements of
the modern era. The Reform Bill would seem to mark that moment when people col-
lectively acknowledged a tumble of transformations. They no longer lived in their par-
ents’ England. Recall Mill’s conviction that they had outgrown old institutions and
doctrines, and further that old bonds no longer held. The Reform Bill marked the
public affirmation that this was indeed so. In this sense, we can agree with Escott when
he links an act of parliamentary redistricting to pronounced changes in class norms.
Reform was a statement about old and new ways.
“Old and new ways” seems just the right note to sound as we move from the march-
ing, charging feet of tens of thousands of protesters first to the quiet study of the classi-
cal scholar and then to the fieldwork of the geologist, before we settle on a young man’s
encounter with the cruelty of life in Tierra del Fuego.
And so we turn to the Athenaeum and a meeting of Connop Thirlwall and
George Grote.
NOTES
1. Gregory, Second Cuckoo, 154–56. We may add that Charles Lyell was proposed to be the
MP for the University of London in 1861, but he declined; see Lyell, Life, Letters, vol. ii,
343. This notion of representing leading interests continues to this day in Hong Kong,
where half the seats in the city council are “functional constituencies” linked to industries
rather than population. See Hilgers, “The Rise of Hong Kong’s Democracy Movement.”
2. Trevelyan, Illustrated English Social History, 109.
3. Fox, Speeches, 714.
4. Ibid., 688.
5. Ibid., 676.
6. Smith, Wealth of Nations, vol. i, 6–7. It is worth noting that at this time it was still the case
that most homes were workplaces of one sort or another. Only later with the development
of factories would the home become essentially a residence; see Jackson, The Necessity for
Ruins, especially 116–19.
7. Schweber, “Scientists as Intellectuals,” 4.
8. Kay, Moral and Physical Condition. Kay’s study, we may add, was cited by Friedrich Engels
in his Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844.
9. Ibid., 25, 13.
10. Mill, “The Spirit of the Age,” Collected Works, 228–29, 230, 245. There were four instal-
ments of this essay in the Examiner, all of them collected in vol. xxii of the Collected
Works. See also Himmelfarb, Spirit of the Age.
11. Grote, “The Essentials of Parliamentary Reform,” in Bain, Minor Works, 17.
12. Ibid., 12–13.
13. Ibid., 11.
14. Ibid., 15.
15. Ibid.
16. Wallas, Life of Francis Place, 13–14.
17. Smith, “Bentham on Fallacies,” 209.
19. Ibid., 206.
20. Ibid., 141.
21. Ibid., 144.
22. Ibid., 145–46.
23. Ibid., 244.
24. Ibid., 250.
25. Clark, Old Friends, 108–09; Wallas, Life of Francis Place, 256.
26. Escott, Gentlemen, vol. ii, 274.
27. Macaulay, “Parliamentary address of March 2, 1831,” 162.
28. Place, “Letter to Harrison,” in Rowe, London Radicalism, vol. v, 228.
29. Wallas, Life of Francis Place, 310.
30. Thornbury, Old and New London, 461.
31. For example, in Fraser’s Perilous Question.
33. Report from the Committee of Secrecy, 368.
34. Escott, England, 318–19. There is an echo of Escott’s thesis in a story Jerome Bruner
tells about the historian Sir Alan Bullock, who found himself seated alongside Queen
Elizabeth. Knowing of her disdain for small talk, Sir Alan asked her when the Royal
Family had decided to become respectable. She replied, “it was during Victoria’s reign,
when it was realized that the middle class had become central to Britain’s prosperity and
stability.” Bruner, Culture of Education, 128.
35. White, Age of Scandal, 30.
36. Ibid., 38–40.
3
A Meeting at the Athenaeum
Imagine two young men, old friends, have arranged to meet at the Athenaeum, a
London club. Such clubs already had a long history by 1832, providing a home away
from home for the landed elite who would come up to London for the season. The
Athenaeum was somewhat different, founded only a few years earlier for individuals
distinguished in science, literature, or the arts, as well as those who were patrons of
such efforts: a meeting place for the mind. As such it signals the rise of the public intel-
lectual and the rise of a London season for scholars, most notably scientists and their
many new societies, including the Geological Society, whose annual meeting was the
prompt that brought Thirlwall to London this February.
Both Grote and Thirlwall have gained their stride since their school days together,
accomplished significant things with the promise of more to come. Connop Thirlwall
is thirty-four in February 1832, and George Grote is thirty-seven.
Thirlwall had been a most precocious child; he had learned to read so well at so
young an age that he was taught Latin at three and Greek at four. It was said that at
Charterhouse, an old red brick public school that had been founded in the early sev-
enteenth century, the young Thirlwall did not care to join in on the games of the other
boys, but would withdraw to some corner with a pile of books. The child was father to
the man, and all his life he carried books with him wherever he went. But more than
this, Thirlwall retained a certain freshness and gentleness across his many years, and
with it the capacity to enjoy life’s more simple pleasures.
Ironically, a collection of his letters begins with one written when he was twelve,
in which he confidently affirms both that Oxford was much the better university and
that classical studies are no longer relevant to men of affairs. Despite such sentiments,
Thirlwall would leave Charterhouse for Trinity College, Cambridge and a career
much indebted to classical studies. Thirlwall sparkled at Trinity, earning a fellowship
which enabled him to travel. He spent just over a year on the continent, living “the
most enchanting of my day-dreams.” When he returned he began study at Lincoln’s
Inn Fields, hoping that law would enable him to pass “a quiet but not indolent life,
obscure but not useless,” and looking forward “to contemplating the sights and sounds
of nature and the finest productions of the human intellect.”1
There was much to occupy Thirlwall in London in mid-1820. John Stuart Mill tells
of hearing Thirlwall in a debate at the Co-operative Society, finding him to be much the
best debater he had heard till then and indeed ever. These debates proved to be so stim-
ulating that a small coterie formed a debating society of their own, including not only
32
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Señora Vallejo’s hand went out, but there flashed from the eyes of
Anita Fernandez a warning, and the hand was withdrawn. The
caballero arose and tendered the handkerchief again, to have
Señora Vallejo turn her back and face the girl.
“Perhaps, Anita dear, we should return now,” she said. “Evening
approaches, and there will be a fog rolling up the valley.”
“As you please, Señora Vallejo.”
The girl turned from the creek and started walking up the slope. The
caballero stood in the path before her, determined. Anita Fernandez
stopped, and seemed to look through him and at the mission
beyond. From the adobe wall hurried Pedro, the giant neophyte, who
had been watching and feared an affront to the women.
“You are being annoyed, señorita?” he asked.
“How could that be?” she demanded, laughing lightly. “There is none
here to annoy me, unless it be Señora Vallejo.”
“I beg your pardon, señorita. I thought I heard someone speak.”
“’Twas but the distant barking of a coyote, Pedro. You may follow us
to the guest house, if you wish. I will give you something for your
little girl.”
They started toward the caballero again and for a moment it seemed
that they must recognise his presence. But Anita Fernandez had a
subterfuge to prevent that. Just before reaching him, she turned
aside, and the others followed.
“I must speak to the padre about the neophytes allowing rubbish to
collect so near the mission,” she said. “It always should be burned.
Look at the stuff here!”
She pointed to the caballero’s cloak, and with one tiny foot she
kicked scornfully at the guitar. Then she swerved back toward the
path again, and the others followed her toward the plaza. The
caballero picked up the guitar and pressed his lips to the place
where her foot had struck, knowing well that Señora Vallejo was
watching him, though she pretended not to be.
He looked after them until the girl and woman had passed around
the end of the adobe wall and Pedro had gone to his own hut.
Darkness was gathering rapidly now; lights appeared in the
buildings; before the door of the storehouse sat a circle of men,
talking and laughing, sipping bowls of wine. Sitting on the ground, his
back against a rock, the caballero watched the scene.
“A beautiful woman,” he mused. “Proud, spirited, kind though she
does not suspect it, naturally intelligent, very much to be desired.”
One by one the lights in the buildings disappeared. The men before
the storehouse crept away to rest. A fray called to a neophyte
standing guard. And then there was no noise save for the singing of
the breeze through the orchard, and the distant howling of a coyote.
Presently the caballero arose and picked up his guitar, and crept up
the slope until he reached the adobe wall. He followed it to the end
of the plaza; made his way slowly through the darkness to the guest
house. There he stationed himself below an open window and began
playing softly. Several minutes he played, knowing a neophyte stood
a score of feet away, watching; and then he began to sing a love
song of Old Spain, a song of strong men and fair women. Between
two verses he heard the voice of Señora Vallejo.
“Anita, child, do you hear?”
“Yes, Señora Vallejo,” the girl replied, clearly. “The coyotes are
growing bold again. One is howling now beneath my window.”
CHAPTER V
TWO GOOD SAMARITANS
It is a matter of history—that big rain of a certain year. The torrents

poured from the sky at an unexpected time until the country was
drenched and tiny streams swollen, and watercourses that had been
dry were turned into turbulent yellow floods that carried on the
surface brush and grass and logs from the hills, menacing many a
rancho, undermining huts and adobe houses, ruining wells.
Returning from his ineffectual serenade, the caballero observed that
the stars were disappearing, but believed it was because of a fog
that came from the sea. As he reached the place where he had
picketed his horse and built his fire, a drop of water splashed on his
cheek. At the most, he anticipated nothing worse than half an hour’s
shower, and so he merely built up his fire and put some dry moss
and grass to one side under his cloak, and prepared to sleep on the
ground.
He slept soundly after his long journey and the unexpected events of
the past two days. He awoke to find the fire out and a chill in his
body, to find that water was flowing down the slope about him, and
the ground but a sea of mud, with the torrent continuing to pour from
the sky.
It was not more than midnight and the storm gave no indication of
ceasing. The caballero stood up and threw aside his sodden cloak,
picked up guitar and sword and pistol, and left the camp to hurry in
the direction of the mission orchard.
It was so dark he could see nothing, and he could not locate a path.
Roots half washed from the ground tripped him, water flowed down
the back of his neck. On and on he stumbled, until he ran against the
orchard wall. He managed to get over it, carrying his property, and
searched for a place where the trees would shield him partially from
the storm.
He came to a giant palm and crept close to the bole where the wind
drove the rain against him, but where it was not quite so bad as in
the open. And there the caballero stood, hour after hour, gradually
getting colder and more miserable, hugging his guitar under one arm
and his sword under the other.
Dawn came, a grey dawn that made the world look dismal. He left
the semi-protection of the palm, went over the wall, and hurried back
to his camp. His horse was standing with back to the tempest, his
head hanging low, his tail tucked between his legs. Water was
pouring down the slope; the dry grass he had gathered was
drenched; the little creek was a roaring torrent rushing down the
valley toward the sea.
The caballero was cold, hungry, miserable. Across the plaza he
could see smoke pouring from the chimneys, and to his nostrils
came the odour of food being prepared. The mission bells rang.
Neophytes left their huts to hurry toward the chapel. Señor Lopez
came from the storehouse and went to the guest house, carrying a
huge umbrella made from skins, and there Anita Fernandez and
Señora Vallejo joined him and walked across the plaza to the church
beneath the protecting parasol. A fray was placing stepping stones in
the mud before the chapel door.
“I must have a fire!” the caballero remarked, to nobody in particular.
He walked some distance up the swollen creek, until he came to a
ledge of rock, and there he found some dry grass; but there was no
possibility, of course, of using the glass-button again, since the sun
was not shining. He collected a quantity of the grass and fired into it
with his pistol, but no spark caught. Again and again he fired, without
success, finally ceasing in disgust.
He went back and stood near the horse, looking up at the heavens.
The clouds were black, ominous; there was no decrease in the
volume of water that poured from the sky. There was no place near
where he could make a dry camp. And it was fire he needed—fire at
which to warm himself and dry his clothing and cook another rabbit,
if he could kill it.
For the remainder of his life he remembered that day and the two
following. Such misery he never had known before, nor knew
afterward. Now he crept into the wet orchard; now he braved the
open on the slope. At times he ran back and forth beside the raging
creek, trying to warm his blood by the exertion. Men and women of
San Diego de Alcalá went about their business, but none gave him
attention.
Each hour seemed a day and each day a lifetime. His clothing was
soaked, his boots covered with muddy clay. He stood beside the
horse and looked at the mission buildings and at the smoke pouring
from the chimneys until he could bear to look no longer. Once he
heard a child laugh, and the laugh plunged him into the depths of
despair.
He rattled the coins in his purse. Worthless they were here in San
Diego de Alcalá; and he would have traded them all for five minutes
of bright sunshine.
He began to grow desperate. Playing the game as the men and
women of the mission played it, they could not recognise his
presence; so he decided to walk boldly into the storehouse, to warm
and dry himself there, ignoring them as they ignored him. He would
take what food he desired, and throw money in payment for it down
on the counter, and walk out. They would have to recognise him to
prevent it.
The caballero laughed wildly as he reached this decision and started
up the slope toward the plaza. He reached the door of the
storehouse and tried the latch, but the door was locked, for Señor
Lopez had seen his approach. He tried a window, and found that
locked also. He went to the guest house, to find the door fastened
there.
For a moment he considered raiding one of the Indian huts, sword in
hand, but his pride came to him then; and he walked back down the
slope, his face flushed with shame because of what he already had
done. He would last it out, he determined! If he died of the cold and
misery, then he would die, but he would fight the battle alone without
any help from those of the mission.
And then he remembered the presidio.
Fool, not to have thought of it before! He laughed again, this time in
relief, as he put saddle and bridle on his horse, and then, waving his
hand in derision at the group of mission buildings, he galloped
toward the bay. There was the presidio only six miles away, where a
caballero could get food and wine and have companionship while he
dried his clothes before the roaring fire!
He rode like the wind along the highway, facing the storm as it blew
in from the sea, his horse running gladly, plunging down wet
embankments, splashing through the mud, wading streams where
there had been no water twenty-four hours before. Up the road
toward the structure on the crest of the knoll, the caballero forced his
steed. Before the gate stood a sentry with a musket on his arm. The
sound of laughter came from the barracks-room, and it carried cheer
to the caballero’s heart. Smoke poured from the chimney, the odour
of cooking meat was in the damp air.
The sentry’s musket came up and his challenge rang out. Through
the gate the caballero could see an officer standing in the door of the
nearest building.
“Your business?” the sentry demanded.
“Take me to your commanding officer! Call an Indian to care for my
horse!”
The sentry’s cry was answered. A corporal came running across the
enclosure, an Indian at his heels. They stopped short when they saw
the caballero; the Indian looked frightened, the corporal grinned.
“Well?” he demanded.
“I want to see your commanding officer,” the caballero said. “I have
had enough rain without waiting here for you to make up your mind.”
“Dismount and follow me,” the corporal said.
The Indian went forward and took the horse by the bit. A muddy and
bedraggled caballero got stiffly out of the wet saddle and paced
through the sticky clay to the door of the barracks-room. The officer
was still standing there; he had scarcely moved.
“I want food, wine, a chance to dry my clothing and get warm,” the
caballero said. “There seems to be a superabundance of rain just
now at San Diego de Alcalá.”
“Did you ask hospitality at the mission?” the lieutenant wanted to
know.
The caballero’s face flushed as he met the other’s eyes.
“Your manner,” he replied, “tells me you know of my reception at the
mission. I did not look for the same sort of reception here. I have a
pass from his excellency that should command respect.”
The caballero handed over the pass, which was wet, and the officer
glanced over it.
“The pass is regular, caballero,” he said, “except that it does not
name you. It cannot, therefore, have weight with me.”
“Do you mean to say you will not extend the ordinary hospitality of
the road?”
“In a few words I can tell you where this presidio stands regarding
yourself,” the lieutenant answered. “Your recent boast concerning an
estimable young lady is well known, Captain Fly-by-Night. Also is
your general reputation. Soldiers, ordinarily, welcome a man of your
ilk, if he is merry and given to gambling, even if he cheats with the
cards. But Señorita Anita Fernandez stands in the relation of
daughter of our company, señor. Not a man of the post who would
not die for her. And when the priests and people of the mission
decide you are beneath their notice, we of the presidio stand with
them, even though in other matters the mission and the presidio are
as far apart as north and south.”
“Indeed?”
“Indeed, caballero. In regard to the pass—so far as I know, it may
have been stolen. I’ll stand any consequences that may come from
refusing to honour it.”
They faced each other while a man could have counted ten, the eyes
of neither flinching, hands clenched, breath coming in quick gasps,
each waiting for the other to make the first move. Like lightning the
caballero’s mind acted then.
He looked into the future and into the past, considering things of
which the lieutenant did not know. And in that instant of time he
decided that it would be the honourable thing to accept a slight now
for the good that might come from it later.
“You refuse me hospitality?” he asked again.
“I do, señor.”
“There may come a time when I shall call you to account for it,
officer.”
“You cannot taunt me into a quarrel, caballero. It was expected that
such would be your method when you found yourself ostracized, and
it was agreed that none would accommodate you. An officer of
standing, moreover, does not fight with an adventurer who lives by
his wits and his ability to insult women and swindle men.”
The caballero choked in sudden rage and his hand went toward the
hilt of his sword. But thoughts of the future came to him again, and
he took a step backward and swept off his sombrero in a stately bow.
“For the time being, it shall be as you say, officer,” he said. “But do
not doubt that there will be a reckoning, and when it comes I shall
take the matter into my own hands, not hand you over to court-
martial for ignoring his excellency’s pass.”
He turned his back and started toward the gate.
“A moment, caballero,” the lieutenant called. “While we have decided
not to hold intercourse with you in a social way, it does not follow that
you are entirely ignored. There are alert eyes about you, señor. And
treason has a merited reward!”
“May I ask your meaning?”
“Leave a picketed horse long enough, señor, and he’ll throw himself
with his own rope. I trust my meaning is clear?”
“As clear as the sky at present, señor,” the caballero replied. “I shall
recommend to his excellency, when next I greet him, that he place
an officer with brains at San Diego de Alcalá!”
He sprang to the saddle and spurred the horse cruelly. Back along
the road toward the mission he urged the animal at utmost speed,
careless of the treacherous ground and of what a stumble might
mean. Once more he reached the slope before the mission, and
picketed the horse. He stacked the saddle and bridle together, got
his guitar from a corner by the orchard wall and put it with them, and
covered all with his cloak. Then he started up the slope, walking
swiftly.
He had but a remnant of his pride left and did not think it necessary
under the circumstances to conserve that. He went around the end
of the wall and splashed across the plaza, scarcely looking at the
neophytes and frailes. Straight to the church he went, opened the
door, and entered. He made his way to the chapel. There was
sanctuary; there none could molest him without special order; and
here he stubbornly decided to remain.
But there was no warmth, no food, no drink. A couple of candles
glowed. A padre knelt. Two neophytes were at work patching a hole
in the wall. The caballero paced back and forth in the narrow aisle,
listening to the beating of the storm outside, wondering whether a
fray would speak to him and offer relief.
The neophytes went out, and in time the padre followed. The
caballero did not speak as he passed, for he felt that the other would
not answer. He wondered whether the entire world had turned
against him. He contrasted his present condition with the hospitality
he had received at Santa Barbara and San Fernando, and in the
adobe house of Gonzales at Reina de Los Angeles. He longed for
the companionship of the aged Indian at San Luis Rey de Francia,
for his poor hut and coarse food and hard bunk.
And then his pride returned to him in a surge. He would seek
sanctuary in no chapel where his presence was not welcomed by all!
Out into the rain he went again, across the plaza, down the slope to
where he had picketed his horse. Back and forth he ran to warm his
blood. The sky darkened, the night came. He saw the lights in the
buildings again, and the odours of cooking food almost drove him
frantic. In the guest house, someone was singing. He guessed that it
was Señorita Anita Fernandez.
He spent that night in the orchard under the big palm, shivering
because of the cold and his wet clothes, miserable because of his
hunger, and when the dawn came, and the storm had not abated, he
went back to the horse with an armful of dry grass he had found in
the corner by the orchard wall.
Bravado came to him now. He took the guitar from beneath his
cloak, and, standing out on the slope where all could see, he played
and sang at the top of his voice.
Still it rained, and the creek grew broader, flooding the highway and
threatening the plaza wall. The caballero sat on the muddy ground,
his cloak over his head, huddled forward, grim, awaiting the end of
the rain.
“The poor man!” observed Señora Vallejo, watching from a window
of the guest house.
“He has brought it upon himself,” Señor Lopez reminded her. “Had
he returned when I warned him he would have been in comfort
somewhere along the highway long since.”
“If the rain could but wash his soul as it does his body!” sighed Anita,
standing closer to the big fireplace.
“The man will die,” Señora Vallejo said. “His clothing is soaked, and
he cannot build a fire and cook food.”
“Perhaps it will teach him a lesson,” Lopez snarled. “We must watch;
he may try to break into the storehouse to-night.”
“Listen! He is singing again,” Anita called.
“Oh, the man has courage enough!” Lopez said. “They tell a
thousand stories of his daring. The men at one of the missions were
going to whip him down the highway once, and he sang them out of
it. Moreover, he got them to play at cards, and finally went down the
highway with a drove of mules loaded with goods he had won.”
“You are certain all the stories are true?” the girl asked.
“More stories are true than you may be told, señorita. It is best not to
ask too much,” Señora Vallejo put in; and she frowned a warning at
the storekeeper.
They sat down to the evening meal, to a table loaded with food as if
for a feast. The man down on the slope was still singing.
“Perhaps he will go away after the storm,” Anita suggested. “He will
be too miserable to remain.”
“And when the story gets up and down El Camino Real, he will be
forced to leave the country,” Lopez added. “He is the sort of man
who cannot stand ridicule.”
Darkness descended swiftly that night, and down beside the swollen
creek the caballero, now downhearted, tried to think of some
expedient that would make his lot better. When the lights were
burning brightly in the guest house, he took his guitar and slipped
across the plaza, to stand beneath Anita’s window again and play
and sing. The howling of the wind almost drowned his voice, and he
doubted whether those inside could hear. Once the giant Pedro
walked within a dozen feet of him, but did not speak, and the
caballero knew that he was being watched.
He crept into the orchard again, and for a time slept on the wet
ground because of his exhaustion, and as he slept the rain pelted
him and water dripped upon him from the fronds. Awaking to face
another dawn, the third day of the downpour, his face and hands
were tender from the continual washing of the water, and his hunger
had become a pain.
The rain ceased about midday, but the sun did not come from behind
the clouds. Behind a jumble of rocks half a mile up the valley, the
caballero removed some of his clothes and wrung the water from
them as well as he could before he put them on again. He scraped
the clay from his boots; and searched beneath the rocks until he
found a small quantity of dry grass and sticks, getting them ready for
his fire when the sun should shine.
But the drizzle continued, and the sun did not show its face. The
caballero stood beside the creek and watched the rushing stream,
one arm around the neck of his horse. Less than a hundred feet
away neophytes were toiling to strengthen the adobe wall where the
water had undermined it, a couple of frailes giving them orders; but
none spoke to the caballero or looked his way.
Again night came. He sat on a rock at the edge of the creek,
thoroughly miserable, hoping that the sun would shine on the
morrow, that he’d be able to kill a rabbit for food. He thought he
heard someone splashing through the mud, and looking around, saw
a dark shape approach.
Something struck the ground at his feet, and he saw the dark shape
retreat again. The caballero took a few steps and picked up a
package; he tore away the wrapper—and found flint and steel!
The caballero chuckled now and hurried to the pile of dry grass and
twigs he had collected. Soon the welcome blaze sprang up. He
threw on more fuel, stretched his hands to the fire, spread his cloak
to dry. He was too busy now to speculate as to the identity of his
benefactress; for he had guessed that it was a woman who had
befriended him, else a gowned fray, and he doubted the latter.
The fire roared, and the caballero stood near it, first facing the blaze
and then letting it warm his back, while the steam poured from his
wet clothes. The fire was good, but he needed food also—he would
have to wait for morning for that, he supposed.
Another sound of someone slipping on the wet ground, and the
caballero whirled around and looked up the slope. But there was
silence, and he did not hear the sound again. Once more he faced
the fire, and presently the sound of footsteps came to him, and this
time he did not turn.
The steps stopped, retreated, and he felt sure that he heard a bit of
laughter carried to him on the rushing wind. He waited an instant,
then walked slowly up the slope toward his horse. He came upon
another package. Hurrying back to the fire, he opened it. There was
a roast leg of mutton, a bottle of wine, cold cakes of wheat-paste, a
tiny package of salt, a jar of honey!
With the roast leg of mutton in his hands he did not stop to wonder
as to the good samaritan who had left the package there. He ate
until the last of the roast had been devoured; drank deeply of the
invigorating wine; stored honey and cakes and salt away in his cloak,
and then he sat before the fire thinking the world considerably better
than it had been an hour before. Now and then he chuckled, and his
eyes were sparkling.
For, when he had gone to pick up the second package, he had
carried a brand from the fire to light his way, and he had seen
footprints in the soft clay.
They had not been made by Señora Vallejo, for he had noticed three
evenings before down by the creek that the feet of Señora Vallejo
were not of the daintiest. Neither had they been made by some
Indian woman from one of the huts, since those women always wore
moccasins.
They had been made by two tiny shoes with fashionable heels, such
as might have been imported from Mexico for the daughter of a
wealthy rancho owner!
CHAPTER VI
VISITORS
The fire died down for lack of fuel, until only a small bed of coals
remained to glow like a great red eye in the black night. There was
no moon. The caballero, warm and dry, had spread his cloak on the
ground and was stretched upon it, half asleep, listening to the
rushing of the creek and the screeching of the wind that swept up the
valley from the sea.
He sensed the presence of human beings near him, and without
changing his position on the cloak he let his right hand slip slowly
along his side until it gripped the butt of his pistol. And there he
remained, trying to pierce the black night with his eyes, ears strained
to catch the slightest sound.
His horse snorted in sudden fear; the caballero gripped the pistol
tighter, half minded to spring to his feet, yet declining to do so for
fear it might be some prowling neophyte attempting to frighten him
and carry a tale back to the huts in the plaza of how the caballero
had been stricken with fear in the night.
“Señor!” The warning hiss seemed to come from a great distance,
borne on the raging wind. He knew it was an Indian who spoke; and
the inflection of the single word expressed that the speaker was
merely trying to attract his attention, not threatening, not warning of
some imminent peril.
The caballero rolled over slowly and sat up, yawning behind his
hand, like a man displeased at an interruption. Though every sense
was alert, there was nothing in his manner to indicate to a watcher
that he had been startled or that the unknown voice out of the night
had carried fright to him.
He looked across the bed of coals, and saw nothing. He glanced at
either side, but no leering face came from the blackness, no dark
form slipped toward him, knife in hand to attack, or finger on lips to
caution silence. The horse snorted again.
“Señor!” Once more the hiss, and it seemed nearer.
“Well?” the caballero demanded, half angrily and in a questioning
tone.
“It is a friend who would aid you.”
A handful of dry grass and leaves remained near the fire; now the
caballero arose slowly, picked up the fuel and took a quick step
toward the glowing coals.
“Not that, señor!” came the sudden warning. “Guards about the
mission will see!”
The caballero hesitated, not knowing whether to treat the man in the
darkness as friend or foe. Then he laughed lightly and dropped the
grass and leaves.
“Approach, then, so I may see you!” he commanded.
He heard someone slipping through the mud. Gazing across the bed
of coals he saw an Indian face come from the darkness, just the bare
outline of a face half seen in the night—thick black hair bound back
from the forehead, two piercing eyes, an aggressive chin. The Indian
stooped so that the reflection from the dying fire illuminated his
features for an instant.
At the point of speaking, the caballero felt his tongue seem to grow
paralyzed. Beside the face of the Indian another had appeared—and
another—another, until six faces peered at him from the darkness
and six Indians squatted in the mud on the other side of the bed of
coals.
“We have come, señor,” the spokesman said.
“That is plainly to be seen.”
“At first we were not sure, and then word came to-day by a runner
from an old man at San Luis Rey de Francia, who said he had given
you lodging for a night, and, also, we saw how you were treated by
the people of the mission and the presidio. So we came.”
“And now—?” the caballero asked.
“What is your wish, señor? In a cañon five miles away there is a
comfortable camp, and if you desire we’ll guide you to it.”
“I am of the opinion I’d much rather remain where am.”
“We do not understand your ways, señor, yet we trust you. If it is
your desire to remain here beneath the mission walls, undoubtedly
you have some good reason. But you must have a camp, señor—
shelter and food and drink—and those of the mission will give you
none.”
“You speak truth there,” the caballero admitted.
“Thinking, perhaps, you may decide to remain near the mission, we
carried with us material for your camp. We can pitch it for you beside
the creek in a very short time, señor. When the dawn comes, those
of the mission will find Captain Fly-by-Night in a comfortable teepee,
with skins for his bed, an abundance of food and wine, cooking
vessels, a heap of fuel. Every night one of us will fetch fresh meat
and other food, and hear what you may have to say in the way of
orders.”
“This kindness will be the death of me,” said the caballero.
“We cannot do too much for Captain Fly-by-Night. We may build your
camp?”
“I always accept what Heaven provides. On the level spot half a
hundred feet from the creek would be an acceptable place.”
The six Indians bowed before him and merged into the darkness.
Chuckling to himself, the caballero sank back on his cloak and
listened, but he did not release his grip on the butt of his pistol.
Sounds came to him through the night from a short distance away—
muttering voices, flapping skins, the squashing of wet moccasins in
the mud. Half an hour passed, and then he heard the voice of the
spokesman again:
“Señor.”
“Well?”
“The camp is prepared; everything is ready. It is best that we slip
away before being heard or seen. At midnight each night some one
of us will visit you, señor, and bring provisions. And now—is there
anything you would command this night?”
“Nothing. You have done well, it seems.”
“You will be guarded, señor. There are friends of Captain Fly-by-
Night inside the mission walls, but they must move carefully.”
“I should think so.”
“Everything is in the teepee, even to food for your horse. The fire is
laid before it, and you have but to strike flint and steel. Adios, señor.”
“Adios!”
The Indian’s face disappeared again, the caballero heard the
slipping steps retreating, another fragment of language, and then
silence except for the rushing wind and the roaring creek.
For half an hour he waited, smiling, fumbling at his pistol, listening,
and then he got up and stepped away from the bed of coals to be
swallowed up in the darkness. He was taking no chances with the
unknown, however. Step by step, and silently, he made a wide circle
and approached the teepee. Standing beside it he listened intently,
but heard nothing.
Before the crude habitation was a heap of dry grass and wood, as
the Indian had said. He sent sparks flying among the fuel, fanned
them to a blaze, and waited back in the darkness a few minutes
longer. Then he hurried forward and threw back the skins from the
door of the teepee.
The work had been well done. Boughs were on the ground, skins
spread upon them. In a corner was a jug of wine, another of water, a
quarter of mutton, a quantity of wheat-paste. Two rabbits, skinned
and cleaned and spread on forked sticks, were beside the mutton. A
dirty, ragged blanket, folded, was against the wall.
There was no fear of treachery in the heart of the caballero now. As
quickly as possible he got his cloak, sword and guitar, and carried
them into the teepee; he found grain and hay where the Indians had
left them—near the fire—and carried a generous amount to his
horse. Then he returned to the teepee, threw himself upon the
blanket facing the fire, and slept.
Slept—and awoke to find the bright sun beating down upon his face,
that the creek had fallen until it was scarcely more than its normal
size, that neophytes and frailes were at work again repairing the
base of the abode wall, and that now and then one of them looked
with wonder at the teepee that had been pitched during the night.
“Curiosity will do them good,” the caballero mused.
It was a royal meal he prepared that bright morning. Steaks of
mutton, one of the rabbits he broiled over a bed of coals, cakes of
wheat-paste were made, and, sitting out where all could see, the
caballero ate his fill and washed down the food with wine so rich and
rare that he knew no Indian had taken it from his own store. It was
good mission wine such as no Indian possessed unless he had
purloined it in a raid.
He stretched a skin and poured half the water on it for the horse, for
that in the creek was not yet fit for drinking. He gave the animal
another measure of grain and wiped his coat smooth with a skin, and
polished the silver on saddle and bridle, singing as he worked so that
his voice carried to the plaza.
At an early hour he observed a neophyte ride away in the direction of
the presidio, to return within a short time with the comandante. In the
plaza the officer held a consultation with a fray, looking often at the
teepee down by the creek, and then the man in uniform stalked
down the slope, swaggering and twirling his moustache. The
caballero arose as the other approached.
“It appears that you have a habitation, Captain Fly-by-Night,” the
lieutenant said.
“As a temporary refuge, it will do.”
“The manner of your getting it is mysterious, to say the least.
Teepees do not sprout overnight from the mud.”
“Yet it came during the night, señor.”
“From whom?”
“That is a question concerning myself, officer.”
“Perhaps it concerns others at San Diego de Alcalá. The frailes at
the mission seem to know naught of it.”
“There are many things the frailes of the mission do not know,” the
caballero replied. “There are things, also, unknown to the soldiers of
the presidio.”
“You are over bold to say it, señor. Is your hand so strong that you
can throw secrecy and pretence aside?”
“When you speak of secrecy and pretence, officer, I do not know
your meaning. It is my own business how I acquired a habitation and
food. I am a man of resource, señor. And are you not afraid that
you’ll be ostracized if you are observed speaking to me?”
“It is a part of my business to investigate suspicious characters,” the
lieutenant said.
“Have a care, officer! The score I hold against you already is a heavy
one!”
“Your presence here, and your manifest determination to remain, are
annoying, señor.”
“Were you at your post at the presidio, it would not annoy you, allow
me to say.”
“Those of the mission——”
“I have been given to understand, señor,” the caballero interrupted,
“that I do not exist for those at the mission. As for yourself, if you
seek hospitality I have none to offer you. Suppose you give me the
pleasure of your absence.”
“Señor!”
“Señor!” the caballero mocked, sweeping sombrero from his head
and bowing low.
The comandante snarled in sudden rage and his blade leaped half
from its scabbard. Taking a step backward, the caballero put hand to
hilt again, and waited. Thus they faced each other beside the creek,
while frailes and neophytes watched from the wall, expecting the two
men to clash. But the rage died from the officer’s face, and he
snapped his sword back in place again.
“You are a clever rogue, Captain Fly-by-Night,” he said. “Almost you
taunted me to combat. An officer of his excellency’s forces cannot
stoop to fight with such as you.”
“You fear such a thing, perhaps?”
“Señor!” the officer cried.
He looked for a moment at the smiling face of the caballero, ground
his teeth in his rage, whirled upon his heel, and strode away up the
slope, anger in the very swing of his body. Before the teepee the
caballero picked up guitar and began to play and sing.
Mud flew from beneath the hoofs of the comandante’s horse as he
galloped back toward the presidio. Frailes and neophytes resumed
their work. Two hours passed—and then there appeared two
soldiers, mounted, who stopped at the plaza, spoke to the frailes,
handed their horses over to Indians, and strolled down toward the
creek.
They did not approach near the teepee, nor did they seemingly give
the caballero more than a passing glance. Yet he knew that he was
to be under surveillance, that he would be watched by these men
night and day, others from the presidio relieving them from time to
time. And he expected guests at midnight!

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Buckets from an English Sea: 1832 and

the Making of Charles Darwin Louis B.

Call of the Sea Emily B. Rose

From the Ashes of History: Collective Trauma and the

Between the Hills and the Sea K. B. Gilden

Peasants Making History: Living In an English Region

From the Ashes of History Adam B. Lerner

Disaffected Parties: Political Estrangement and the

Hacking Darwin: Genetic Engineering and the Future of

Making Content Comprehensible for English Learners: The

Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

© Oxford University Press 2018

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

You must not circulate this work in any other form

Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data

List of Illustrations vii

1. Prelude: A Word on Beginnings and Ends 1

2. Outrageous to Morality, Pernicious to Government 16

3. A Meeting at the Athenaeum 32

4. A Banker’s Son and a Philosophic Radical 53

5. The Victorian Idea of Science 70

6. The Child Is Father to the Man 100

7. Is the Map Any Good? 119

8. In the Wild 140

I am the woman, the home, the family,

Something happened in 1832, something that constituted a problem Darwin could

REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS UNKNOWN

BUCKETS FROM AN ENGLISH SEA

THREE BUCKETS FULL

a demonstration. A barber-​surgeon would perform the incisions, while a professor

Behold the Villain's dire disgrace!

MORE THAN BUCKETS

PUSHING TOWARD THE END

REFORM AND CHARLES JAMES FOX

“WHERE THE EVIL IS THUS

Mill’s broad observations were complemented in 1831 by an influential pamphlet on

called Benthamians, Utilitarians, or Philosophic Radicals, Grote had among other

FRANCIS PLACE AND THE MEN IN RAGGED COATS

MAKING REFORM HAPPEN

TWO GOOD SAMARITANS

It is a matter of history—that big rain of a certain year. The torrents

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

a demonstration. A barber-surgeon would perform the incisions, while a professor