The magnificent copperplate script that appears at the bottom of the page of the Commitment Book of the King’s Bench Prison for the year 1819—below the records of the imprisonment of the equally unfortunate Thomas Mackrell, Charles Dibdin (the Younger), Mary Ann Russell, and Thomas Smith is brief indeed. All it says is: “No. 19, William Smith, Ent&d 11th June 1819 in discharge of his bail at the suit of Charles Conolly Esq., Oath £300 and upwd, and was thereupon commd. By C. Abbott.”
If there is to be a villain in this piece, then it was Charles Conolly. He was the owner of Midford Castle in Somerset, and the holder of Smith’s mortgage at Tucking Mill House. Conolly had been financially involved with Smith since 1798, when he helped him to buy the house and small estate at Tucking Mill. He would have been involved in the refinancing that Smith had to arrange when buying the Combe Down quarry, and he had born the initial burden when, in 1815, Smith’s misjudgment (or bad luck) as to the quality of the oolite precipitated the venture’s collapse.
He must have tried countless times during the following years to win some of the money back: But Smith’s financial recklessness would have put paid to any hopes of his doing so. Inevitably he is cast as the Scrooge of the story, as the pitiless landlord who consigned one who should have been a hero to years of humiliation and ruin. But then again, one can hardly blame a man who had been owed a formidable sum of money—the “£300 and upwd” of the suit—for twenty years, and now saw no prospect of it ever being repaid, heading off in exasperation to plead before the King’s Bench for satisfaction—even if that satisfaction meant no more than to have Smith committed to prison and his goods sold by fiat of the court.
Smith records all too dryly, with the detachment one might find in a geological fieldbook, the events leading up to the day of his arrest.
On May 15 he was looking over another nearby house in Buckingham Street, number 12, which was up for rent—it might have been cheaper; he might have wondered if he should move or knew that he might soon have to.
On June 2 he sent a report—perhaps about the parlous state of his finances—to a firm called Dosse & Co; his friend Brogden had come around a little earlier to tell him he “should move something for me this day in the House of Commons.”
On the fourth he was at the Court of Common Pleas in Westminster Hall, face to face with Conolly at last, debating the merits of the latter’s various claims. The next day Smith “made out accounts and sent them to Sir G. Alderson.” I found no G. Alderson listed, but there was a Sir John Alderson, reporter to the King’s Bench at precisely this time—and it may well have been that this judge demanded of Smith that he produce his accounts to show how severe his financial situation was.
One thing was clear, however. Smith was in no sense a trader—a dealer in goods and chattels. Had he been so he might have claimed protection under the 1759 bankruptcy legislation, as all traders owing more than one hundred pounds had a right to do. As it was, the judgment of the Court of Common Pleas was clear enough: Smith was found to be an insolvent debtor, and Conolly could have him committed to prison forthwith, and see that enough of his goods were sold so as to make up the sum that the court agreed was owed.
The next day finds Smith working on coloring more of the county maps he had in the making. No mention is made in his diary of the court, of the debt, of any sense of impending doom. But two days later, early on the cool and clear morning of Friday* June 11, 1819, the ax for which all had been grimly waiting finally fell.
The bailiff duly arrived outside the door of the Buckingham Street house, armed with Conolly’s court-approved warrant, signed and sealed by the officials at the Court of Common Pleas. There would and could have been no further argument: Smith knew he was finally compelled, by all the majesty of English law, to do as he was told.
The bailiff and his charge would have ridden in the court post-chaise, along beside the Thames (a confusing journey, dodging among the wharves, since there would not be a Thames Embankment built for another forty years), and across the river either by way of what was officially called the William Pitt Bridge—Londoners called it Blackfriars, as they do today—or John Rennie’s* newly completed Southwark Bridge, to the Borough. Fifteen minutes of patient trotting, and the carriage with its myrmidon and his charge would have drawn up outside the high brick walls and the formidable miseries of the King’s Bench Prison.
London’s three great debtors’ prisons were private institutions, owned by corporations, run for profit, and with men in charge as wardens who could make an income of thousands a year. For one of the many puzzlements of the entire debt-imprisonment system is that it cost money to be in prison. It cost the prisoner money to enter a debtors’ prison and then to stay there—nearly two pounds to get in, a scattering of other charges (such as the six shillings and eight pence due to the tipstaff for his service at court), and payment of at least one shilling a week for an unfurnished room with the most basic kind of bedding.
If the incoming prisoner was utterly without funds, or unwilling to part with whatever he had, he would be put into a chummage—a dormitory—with fellow prisoners, with whom one lived closely together, as “chums.” It usually took only a few days of such discomfort and indignity for the prisoner to be persuaded of the good sense of moving to a private room—whereupon the warden would regard him as a source of revenue, treat him well enough, and offer him the kind of privileges that made many debtors think of the King’s Bench and the Fleet prisons as comfortable, hotel-like retreats, where they could seek sanctuary from the pressing problems beyond the walls. Not that they were always pinioned behind bars and brick: there was an area around all debtors’ prisons called the Rules, in which such prisoners as were trusted not to abscond were allowed to live and carry on their businesses—but to be free from harassment by those to whom they owed money.
The King’s Bench Prison in Southwark, in which William Smith—and Dickens’s Mr. Micawber—were locked up for debt.
The precise circumstances of William Smith’s stretch in prison can never be known. The King’s Bench records are unhelpful—it was a private institution, its officers had no incentive to keep records of much more the prisoners’ dates of admission and release. Smith himself has expunged from his diary all material relating to his time inside. His nephew, John Phillips, who tried to remain in the Buckingham Street house while his uncle was away—he was told by the court officials to leave, however, as the landlord promptly cancelled Smith’s tenancy and bailiffs came in to seize his somewhat pathetic collection of personal property—made no mention of any predicament in the biography he was later to write. The horrors of his imprisonment and the miseries of his marriage remain the two great nonsubjects in William Smith’s recorded life: All reference to them has been expurgated from his works, all muted, hidden, or efficiently bowdlerized,* both from Smith’s writings, and from all other contemporary accounts.
His prison walls were fifteen feet high, topped with rows of sharp iron spikes. It was impossible for passersby to see inside, and prisoners, even in the topmost rooms, could not see beyond the wall. Provided he paid, each man was given a cell, nine feet square. He could either remain there for his term, or socialize: And if he chose to mingle, he would likely find his fellow prisoners a congenial lot—the prison population after all comprised men and women who, because they had been loaned money, were by and large prosperous by nature and habit. Debtors’ prisons were generally populated by the middle classes—not by the criminal classes or the undeserving poor. The twenty thousand prisoners for debt were, it was said, from “the better strata” of society, a phrase William Smith would have found doubly ironic.
There was ample food and plenty of grog. Visitors were allowed. Men with access to funds could have young women sent in, for pleasure and amusement. And in the courtyards of the prison, all manner of games were played—the King’s Bench is known as one of the places where, thanks to the happy combination of high walls and a large population of bored and competitive men wonder
ing what to do with them, the game of racquets was invented. Visitors might think they had entered a gymnasium or a pleasure garden: Since there was no enforced routine or attempt at punishment, inmates were free to do more or less as they pleased—and callers report on the games of ninepins going on, or wrestling matches, or on groups of inmates sitting in the sun under a tent, drinking beer.
It was in the King’s Bench that Mr. Micawber reminded David Copperfield of the debtors’ maxim, about “annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.” But in reality, the life that Micawber lived—with the agreeable and Gypsylike dinners in the prison cells, the evident camaraderie of two hundred men and women there cursed with similar situations, and the free-and-easy manner of the warden and his staff—was none too bad. And it has to be supposed that William Smith’s eleven weeks in the prison were none too bad either—except for the shocking fact that so clever, decent, talented, and hardworking a man was incarcerated there in the first place.
Whether his by now very sickly wife visited we cannot know. Nothing in the diaries left by John Phillips records a visit by either his aunt or by Phillips himself. Nor do either Sir Joseph Banks or James Brogden ever mention traveling across the river from their offices in Somerset House and Westminster, respectively, to see their friend in Southwark. Similarly John Cary, who was on the brink of publishing a second volume of William Smith’s Geological Atlas, seems either to have stayed away or merely remains silent on the matter of ever going down to see his mapmaker. But whether they did or did not, the ordeal was over more rapidly than Smith must have supposed when he went in.
The Commitment Book records his leaving as matter-of-factly as if he were a guest at a hotel: “Dis. 31st Augst 1819. PPer Atty.” A lawyer had apparently called to say that the chief creditor, Charles Conolly, was now satisfied. Sufficient of Smith’s goods and chattels had now been sold to meet the demands of the man from Midford Castle. There was no longer any need to keep Smith in custody as guarantor that this should happen. After eighty nights in one of the world’s most notorious houses of incarceration, he was free to go. He was escorted from his cell to the main door, given back his belongings, and the gate swung open. He stepped out into the street, and into the throng of the curious bystanders, soon after first light.
He arrived home in Buckingham Street to find the house locked and bolted and a court official at the door. His goods, this bailiff informed him coldly, were still being organized, filed, and valued. After some while he was permitted inside to get such of his papers as the court officials deemed valueless, and to take them away. Some of his more valuable papers, he learned, had indeed been sold—but to an anonymous friend (one imagines either Joseph Banks, John Farey, or [as we shall soon see] William Fitton) who had then arranged for Smith to have them back.
There was now no further point in his staying around. He sought out his wife—who had in part as a consequence of these events fallen savagely ill and, according to contemporaries, was near-deranged. He found his nephew John Phillips, who had left a message to say where he was staying. The three of them went to Holborn, to the inn where the postilions gathered, and caught the Northern Mail, the overnight stage bound for Yorkshire.
It was a trying time. His first reaction was indeed one of embitterment, and he wrote savagely of his relief at turning his back at last on a capital city in which, he insisted, he had never been made welcome, in which unhappiness had attended almost all his days. “London quitted with disgust,” we have already seen him note, and with sardonic pleasure. “The cheering fields regained.”
A while later and his mood had become calmer, his manner more philosophical. He wrote a long, rambling, and at times barely coherent note to himself that he titled Difficult Times Briefly Investigated, by an Accurate Observer of Passing Events. It reflected, with some poignancy, on the brutality of life, on the trying nature of hard times:
Time will show that my geological labours are not properly the work of an individual in my humble circumstances, but such as might be generously encouraged as public works—and my journeys of so many thousands of miles a year for 20 years at great expense, had they been upon discoveries in the interior of Africa instead of England, might have been a national object.
It is his later musings on the sad situation that are more memorable. Writing some twenty years after the events, he was able, quite succinctly, to compare his own fate with that of his fossils, which he knew had never been properly displayed, and which he felt were every bit as imprisoned in the bowels of the British Museum as he had been in his nine-foot cell in the King’s Bench Prison.
Little would anyone suspect, he wrote of the museum,
that in such premises there was a prison in which these innocent tell-tales of the true history of our planet were to be immured for a term of more than 21 years…. The man and his fossils might be imprisoned, but his discoveries could not…. The collection was lost, books and papers scattered, and he was deprived of everything but the stores of his mind.
He was cheered by an old couplet he had learned in childhood: “When house and land is gone and spent/Then Learning is most excellent.”
It was armed with his learning alone, a few papers, his hammer and acid bottle, magnifying glass and compass, a theodolite and a chain, and in the company of his half-crazy wife, Mary Ann, and his nineteen-year-old nephew John Phillips, that he then boarded the night coach for the Great North Road. He owned no property. He had no home. His only achievements—his map, and the atlas that would be published on the very day he traveled—brought him no income to speak of. He was penniless, homeless, out of work, and—in comparison with the gentlemen of the Geological Society—out of fashion and out of favor.
He would get down from the coach three days later in the windswept Yorkshire town of Northallerton, in an effort to rebuild his life as a nomad, to wander northern England in search of a means of earning a living. In the event, he was to spend the rest of his life in the North Country; he was to find work there and, in that uncertain labor, satisfaction of a kind.
And in due course he was also to find vindication. When, after a dozen years of the hand-to-mouth existence of a fugitive journeyman, he returned to London for a lengthy stay, he reentered his capital in triumph, and he was showered with the honors, gratitude, and recognition that had for too long been steadfastly denied. Though he did not know it when he stepped down from the Northern Mail on that bleak early autumn morning, the tide that had challenged his life was, in due course, though some long time off, assuredly going to turn.
16
The Lost and Found Man
Cardioceras cordatum
In the fractious and rebellious days of late-eighteenth-century Ireland it would have been foolhardy, to say the very least, for a young man to carry in his bag a sharp hammer, a magnetic compass, and a bottle of hydrochloric acid. For William Fitton, who was an eighteen-year-old student in Dublin at the time, it was positively dangerous: The English soldiers who found him, hammer and compass in hand, and promptly arrested him on the quite reasonable suspicion of being what would later be called a Fenian subversive, took a great deal of persuading that he was merely a student of the newfangled science of geology. His explanation—that the menacing-looking items in his bag were no more than the tools of his trade—was not something the troops of Empire were eager to believe in 1798.
But then the authorities at Trinity College interceded on his behalf, and Fitton was released. He resumed his studies, behaved more prudently as the rebellions raged away outside his college walls, and by the end of the century had taken a degree. He worked only for a short while as a field geologist, in Ireland itself as well as in Wales and Cornwall. It seemed an arduous way of making a living; and in time he made his way to Edinburgh, took a degree there in the less controversial field of medicine, and after a spell in London established himself in Northampton as a doctor, specializing in the study and treatment of pneumonia.
His
fascination with geology never left him, though. He joined the Geological Society, demonstrating in his papers and debates—and with his furious clashes with men like George Greenough, whom he regarded as enemies, both intellectual and social—that already the time of the dilettante was over, that science was in the ascendant, and that good men were in the process of taking charge of a new field of study that Fitton and his like believed was coming to be of truly profound importance.
It was his determination to see that good men won due acclaim that led Fitton to become the instrument through which William Smith, whom he first met in November 1817, eventually won the recognition and reputation he had long deserved. Fitton, in short, was the means by which the tides of Smith’s fortune began to turn—except that by the cruelest stroke of Fate his efforts began to bear fruit only at the very moment that the poor man was about to suffer his greatest humiliation, in the King’s Bench debtors’ prison.
By 1815 Fitton was already a well-respected member of England’s scientific establishment: He had a solid medical practice, he was a close friend of men like the near-ubiquitous Sir Joseph Banks, he had been elected to the Royal Society, and he had married well and had a considerable fortune. He was, despite being only thirty-five, a man of influence; and when in 1817 he asked to be put in touch* with William Smith, to see the nature of his work, a ripple of interest stirred the waters of intellectual London.
Smith’s diary, which is erratic at the best of times, notes only that a meeting was arranged for early December but hints that Fitton himself never came. Others of Smith’s allies did, however; and for a while afterward a small barrage of papers made their way around the learned journals of London, trying to establish Smith’s credentials as the creator of stratigraphy and the creator of the map that had been on sale now for the past two years.