The Map That Changed the World (30 page)

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 wondering 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. 31
^st
Aug
^st
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.

I
t 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:

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,

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 gen
tlemen 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.

Cardioceras cordatum

I
n 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.

None of these efforts seem to have done Smith much good. His financial situation did not improve. His standing with the Geological Society did not change. His acceptance into the salons of London’s intellectual
demimonde
remained on hold. John Farey had made generous mention of Smith’s working progress ten years before, in the pages of the
Monthly Magazine
and the
Philosophical Magazine
and in Abraham Rees’s
Cyclopaedia
—but none of these efforts seemed to have enhanced Smith’s standing, and it looked more than likely that this new blizzard of panegyrics was going to be similarly ineffectual.

It was not until in the early summer of the following year that a wider public began to sit up and take notice. Only a very small number of appreciative people began to take Smith seriously—and not enough still to avert his impending disaster. But the mood, in the middle of 1818, most definitely began to change. And it did so purely because of William Fitton, because he did write his assessment—and a glowing assessment it was—of Smith’s work, and he saw to it that it was published in one of the country’s most respected journals of the day, the
Edinburgh Review
.

His paper, which he entitled
Notes on the History of English Geology
, was only seven pages long. But short though it was, it was a concentrated tincture of approbation. It looked almost entirely at Smith’s contributions to the new science—it examined in a disinterested way, but in detail, everything of importance that had Smith’s name on it—the great map, the memoir that accompanied it, the first volume of the illustrated catalog of British fos
sils (the second volume of which was published the day after he was released from prison), the small geological cross-section between Snowdon and London drawn on the side of the large wall map, and the first proofs of the first of Smith’s seventeen large-scale county maps, which were to be published by John Cary over the coming six years, and which Fitton, cunningly and without Smith’s knowledge, had managed to get to see.

The paper was an almost undiluted paean, a document that was destined (though probably not designed) to delight Smith in what was turning out to be the most troubled period of his life. Fitton had examined everything in the closest detail and written a considered criticism—noting errors, questioning judgments, criticizing lapses. But overall the tone was that of a man overjoyed by the serendipity of the experience, the enthusiastic pleasure of a man who has discovered a rare and special talent.

William Smith, Fitton told his readers, was “a most ingenious man,” whose only fault was that he had been “singularly deficient in the art of introducing himself to public notice.” There could be no doubt but that William Smith was performing work that constituted a truly historical development in the evolution of an entirely new science. He did not go so far as to suggest that Smith’s map would change the world, but the implication in the paper was undeniably that, with the appearance of this immense and beautiful document, the world—of commerce, of industry, of agriculture, and of intellectual endeavor—would never be quite the same again.

A year later, though, Smith was a destroyed man, fleeing London for good and forever (or so he supposed), disillusioned, bitter, the victim of those he claimed were cheats and scientific pilferers. So what if William Fitton had been so kind as to write with such generosity of spirit? His doing so had made no essential difference. His fine words had manifestly buttered no parsnips. The map, now three years before the public, still hadn’t sold as well as he had hoped. The quarry had gone bankrupt. The land
lord had foreclosed on his mortgage and had called in a long-owed debt. The bailiffs had done their worst. He had been turfed out of the Buckingham Street house. His goods and chattels had been confiscated and sold. And now he was in Yorkshire, two hundred muddy miles away from London, and heartily glad—if, that is, he knew the meaning of gladness—to be there.

Smith was never to own a home again, never to settle anywhere other than as a tenant. As John Phillips was to write about his uncle, with the timbre of a true Victorian melodramatist:

It was seven years of nights at inns and coaching stations and weeks in cheap lodging houses, in towns and villages as far flung as Doncaster and Kirkby Lonsdale, Sheffield and Hesket Newmarket, Bennetthorpe and Durham Town. There was a curiously surreal, Gypsylike contentment to some of these years, which his nephew hinted at when he wrote, soon after they began their self-imposed exile:

T
he pursuit of geology, apparently for its own sake alone, was never far from Smith’s mind. “The road up Boziate Hill,” his nephew continued, now writing of the pair’s time in Northamptonshire,

Day after day there was the same goading restlessness about Smith—picking up, as he would for seven long years, a little work here, leaving his calling card at some great hall or grange or castle there, endlessly looking up old acquaintances in the search for work or contacts or rooms for the night, his journals always filled with references to local geology, with narratives of local lore, and lovingly noting his occasional encounters with famous men (as with Adam Sedgwick, the godfather of the Ordovician and coidentifier of the Devonian, whom he met in Kirkby Lonsdale; and the great Oxford geologist William
Buckland, whom he met on this very walking trip, and whose eccentric decency came to figure prominently, along with Sedgwick’s in the next, and more gloriously culminating, chapter of Smith’s life).

There was during this period an absence of any sustaining central core to his life—there was no home, no family, no single glorious project, except for completion (which never happened) of the series of county maps. He did a little work on these each time he went south to London, where he would see John Cary, take cheap rooms in Charing Cross, and knuckle down to coloring the new information he had gleaned, onto a series of charts and cross-sections that—when seen today—appear more beautiful than anything he did before.

The cross-sections have found particular favor in the United States, where they can be seen in a popular poster published in Oklahoma. Certain of his county maps, in reproduction, can be bought today in London: But the half dozen or so that are for sale hint at another of the melancholy realities of Smith’s life—that though he had the time, and presumably the energy, and though he had the assistance of a young nephew of ever-increasing ability, he did little during this period of his life of any real merit, and rarely finished the greater projects that he had started in the years before. It was almost as though he wanted to shrug off the work he had already accomplished—to live off the reputation he had won from it, but not to return to it, in case he suffered the same measure of disappointments from it that had dogged him all his life so far.

He became fond, however, of two particular places during his long sojourn in the north. One, the seaside town of Scarborough, has today a charming, if rather vague, remem
brance of his long association with it. He first went there in 1820, just a year after his exile began. He had been asked by the town corporation to see if he could advise on improving the water supply—a task he accomplished with ease. But what impressed him most about the town was its setting, its fresh sea air, its obvious charm—all of which might help to improve the health of his wife, now deteriorating fast. Phillips, who rarely wrote about Mary Ann Smith, includes a line that speaks volumes for this fraught period in his uncle’s life: He had come “to this romantic and delightful town in hope to soothe the mental aberration of his wife, which became very manifest in this year.”