steepholm

You may remember my reporting on Francis Galton's experiment (ostensibly concerning research into heredity) which involved his creating a pocket device with a little hole-punch that allowed him to discreetly rate the attractiveness of every woman he met. I speculated at the time that this might not have played too well with his wife, Louisa.


What I hadn't realised was that he also made observations on Louisa's own family - which happens to be mine too - although these were rather less obnoxious in character. He reported to Charles Darwin in 1871 that Louisa's father, George Butler (for more on whom, see here), had a peculiar way of napping:

[He] used to take after dinner naps in his arm chair, during which he had a strange habit of raising & laying his forearm across the top of his head,—whence, as he nodded, it dropped in front of his face, striking his nose as it fell, usually awakening him with a start. The bridge of his somewhat prominent nose was frequently sore & sometimes raw from this curious habit.

What was interesting to Galton was that this quirk was not confined to George. His son Montagu, and one of Montagu's daughters, had the same habit - and in another letter a few years later he was able to confirm that the same was true of the child of another of George's children, Spencer. He thereupon produced the following map of the heritability of napping with one's arm on one's head:



Here, he puts George at the top of the tree, but there's no particular reason to suppose that the arm-napping mutation started with him. Perhaps it was also to be found in the descendants of George's brother Weeden, my own great-great-great grandfather?

Now, I don't nap in this way myself (though I do often assume this posture when lying in bed), but I'm sorely tempted to do a round-robin of my various cousins.

On the other hand, Francis, perhaps Montagu et al. got the habit from observing their respective parents (or uncles or cousins)? And perhaps it just isn't very unusual in the first place? Maybe you should think about things like that, before you go bothering Mr Darwin?

Further research, and a grant to match, are urgently required. Meanwhile, I'm more pleased to have inherited the ability to nap at will from my maternal grandfather, a skill most pleasant and profitable for sailors and academics alike.

Still dipping my way through great-great-aunt Annie's Glimpses of Maori Land. Interesting as it is on colonial New Zealand, the truth is of course that I'm more intent on finding biographical material, so my heart races a little when I encounter passages such as this one, describing a Wellington library:



So, her father, Thomas, used to knock off at 4pm? Were those the usual hours of work for nineteenth-century gentlemen? I've a feeling it may be so - some frail memory is whispering as much in my ear. I know he eventually became Assistant Secretary to the BM, but it seems unlikely he would have risen that high when Annie was a young child (he was born in 1809, she in 1841). Still these things are checkable, when I have the time. The idea of a private tour of any museum is of course highly appealing.

It's hard to justify the institution, of course, as James Acaster has pointed out very amusingly. If I were to make an inventory of items to be returned, I would put frankly looted things such as the Benin Bronzes at the top of my list, but no doubt the Parthenon marbles would have to go too.

On the other hand, it's often occurred to me that the space the marbles vacate could be used to house the Bayeaux tapestry - a work central to English history, made in England by Englishwomen - but still held by the former colonial power. What about a campaign to get that back?

A Bristol Esperantist must have died recently, or perhaps one of their children, because a whole bunch of books on the subject, most inscribed to Albert or Gladys King or both, turned up in a local second-hand book shop. I came across them when seeking a Japanese dictionary with Rei today. They include several books by my grandfather that had been lacking from my collection, notably his 1926 Kantaro Esperanta and his 1934 translation of Dickens's life of Jesus, La Vivo de Nia Sinjoro Jesus, which I'd been seeking for a while in a vain. Very pleasing, and the latter in particular is rather a handsome hardback - a steal for £2. Apparently I was already the third person to trawl through the collection, so goodness knows what escaped my sticky grasp, but I'm happy enough with my haul.

Also included was a short (undated) introductory pamphlet-cum-advert for the language, Esperanto for All, which includes a letter signed by Tolkien, among others, the month the Second World War broke out. No doubt this is already familiar to kalimac and others with a bibliographical interest in JRRT, but just in case...

It's almost a year since I bought my great-great-great grandfather Weeden's rather antsy letter to the Gentleman's Magazine, and tomorrow it will be exactly 200 years since he wrote it. As I promised at the time, I subsequently hung it above my desk as a stern warning to myself (as an author) to show patience with editors, and also (as an editor) to do the same with authors.



1821 was perhaps the last year Weeden can be said to have been happy. His wife Annabella, adored father (also Weeden) and daughter Emma, were all were dead within the year, and he appears to have gone into a deep depression. In the words of Annie Robina Butler, his granddaughter:

The very foundation of the earth must have seemed to those poor Cheyne Walk children to be shaking, more especially as their father——too utterly crushed to take further active interest in either home or school——buried himself in the study amongst his books, in a perfect abandonment of grief, and left them, practically, to bring themselves up.

That, unfortunately, is another occupational hazard - but one I've so far avoided.

I'm looking a bit more into the activities of Arthur Gardiner Butler, lepidopterist, ornithologist, oologist, and my great-grandfather's brother. I've always found his dapper (for a Butler) appearance rather striking, and seemed to perceive a twinkling humour in his eye that isn't always terribly obvious with my forebears.



(What kind of flower is he wearing in his buttonhole, by the way? I know his father favoured jessamine.)

I'm sure Arthur was never less than respectable, but one of the appealing things about him is his willingness to let the personal intrude into his scientific accounts. I've recorded elsewhere his habit of breeding finches in cigar boxes and his use of homely comparisons, which give his professional studies (he was for many decades Assistant Keeper of the Department of Zoology at the British Museum) an air of hobbyist enthusiasm. There's also something quite disarming about such confessions as this, from his British Birds' Eggs: A Handbook of British Oology (1886):

To draw an egg correctly is no easy task, as I found to my cost. Not only must all the spots be drawn reversed and in perspective, but (in order to give rotundity to the figure) the egg must be correctly shaded. After spoiling the appearance of my first six or seven plates by carefully indicating the shadows visible upon them, and, instead of a rounded surface, producing a resemblance to a dish, a mushroom, or a plum, it became evident that most of these malformed appearances were the result of shadows cast upon the eggs by window-sashes, box-lids, and other objects which intercepted the light.

As someone even less capable of drawing an egg, I entirely sympathise - but how many scientists would record their failures in such a way?

I've exchanged contracts on a new house, and will (COVID-19 willing) be moving in on Monday! This is very pleasing after such a long delay - my offer was first accepted all the way back in January - but naturally it happens to fall on the first day of the new semester, so these are proving to be rather busy days...

All the same, it's hard not to get a little distracted by some of the things I keep discovering as I pack. Like this, for example - perhaps my grandfather's first ever publication. Aged 16, in 1901, he took to the letters pages of The Vegetarian to engage in a protracted correspondence about the relationship of vegetarianism and Christianity, of which this is the opening salvo:



But I must get back to my packing!

(If you would like my new address, by the way, feel free to message me.)

Inspired by my recent purchase of my great*3 grandfather Weeden's 1821 letter about a poetry review, I decided to do a bit more digging.

I've often thought that Weeden was not a particularly happy ancestor. His father, Weeden Sr., was quite a difficult person to live up to; he may also have felt overshadowed by his younger brother George, who was not only Senior Wrangler at Cambridge but went on to be Headmaster of Harrow, while Weeden just carried on with the family school in Chelsea. Hints dropped in a memoir by his granddaughter suggest that Weeden Jr. was cast into a depression by the deaths of his wife and teenage son - the latter, in 1830, being followed swiftly by his own, at the age of 58.

That happened in 1831. Working backwards, we can see a kind of trajectory, and it's a rather unhappy one. In 1821, in his late '40s, he's writing his slightly snippy letter to the Gentleman's Magazine. Do we hear a batsqueak of disappointed literary ambition - or am I just projecting?

In 1814, he's taking over the school from his father, who's just retired - shaken, no doubt, by the death that year of Weeden and George's younger brother Charles, who was master of the East Indiaman William Pitt and drowned with all hands off Algoa Bay. Still, it's a new beginning of sorts, and Weeden's pupils include a young Isambard Kingdom Brunel, whose family lived down the road.

In 1800, still in his late '20s, he's writing his passionate-if-eccentric anti-slavery volume, Zimao the African. How widely read it was I don't know. No one speaks of Weeden in the same breath as Wilberforce, but he was doing his bit for the cause...

Then there are the Bagatelles. This collection of poems and translations was published in 1795, when Weeden had only just come down from Cambridge - it includes some pieces written in his teens. What kind of person do they speak of?

Well, here's the Preface, in which literary ambition is scarcely suppressed:



The contents are a very mixed bag. The first poem, "The Slave," is striking enough in its subject, which anticipates Zimao. The first-person speaker, the slave Maratan, adopts a very eighteenth-century idiom, but Weeden's sympathies are clearly already engaged by the cruelties of the slave trade. Weeden was no fair-weather abolitionist:

Can I think upon the day
When I left my native home,
Forc'd reluctantly away,
To these barbarous climes to come?
Torn from countries, friends, relations,
Torn from all my soul holds dear,
To endure the worst vexations,
Under cruel bondage, here!

Yet, though thus deceiv'd I be,
And by fraud enroll'd a slave,
Still the inward man is free,
And unfetter'd as the wave.

Nor is Maratan the only oppressed speaker in the volume. The first four poems are all laments by various persecuted peoples of Weeden's time: 'The Indian Warrior, bound to the stake,' 'The American Warrior, after a defeat' ('the sad Carandoc left his native home/ Compell'd through drear Columbia's wilds to roam') and 'The Indian in Despair.' They may not be great poetry, but they're hardly the kind of frivolous production implied by 'bagatelles.'

However, after this quadruple whammy of contemporary oppression, and a fifth more historical piece, 'Belisario' ('A young Roman recites the misfortunes of his general, to a concourse of peasants, upon an extensive plain'), we move to a far more mixed set. Sadly, I have to report that much of it is the kind of thing that Lyrical Ballads (published just three years later) was destined - and designed - to make obsolete. Take the opening of 'A Night Storm':

Now gloomy Night expands her sable wings:
Now a dread silence o'er the plain is cast,
Save where the warbling Philomela sings,
Or dry leaves rustle in the eddying blast.

I mean, it's not terrible, but it's sixty years out of date. No need to look ahead to Romantics: put it next to Thompson's Seasons from the 1720s and its stiffness is too plain.

There are love poems (in which Weeden assumes the poetic moniker, Edwin); there are poems in praise of Chelsea and his father, a number of translations, a comic poem written in the person of 'A Rusticated Cantab' under the name Phileleutherus Cantabrigiensis, and so on. One possibly telling composition is called 'On Poetry,' and records Weeden's preference for poetry over science, in which study he admits that he has little skill:

Ill suits, dear Emma, with thine Edwin's powers,
The mighty lore of Newton to peruse,
[He first explain'd dame Nature's laws abstruse,
In that great work whose ample volume showers
A blaze of light, rich knowledge to diffuse
O'er each young student's mind, midst Granta's bowers.]

I love to cull the gay luxuriant flowers
Of gentle poetry, and rather chuse
To greet with numbers wild the fleeting hours,
And taste those joys Ambition's sons refuse.

I can't help wondering whether this is a preemptive attempt to claim (in the way some families have) a certain territory for himself, while ceding the fields of mathematics and ambition to clever brother George, whose Senior Wranglership happened the year before Bagatelles was published. (Having struggled with the Principia myself, I do sympathise.)

Another poem, 'Upon the Death,' is dedicated to 'A Gallant Young Naval Officer, Who Was Shot in the Action of the First of June, 1794.' The officer in question is Weeden's cousin, Richard Dawes, two of whose brothers had already been killed in the service of the East India Company, in Mysore and Bangalore. (Another cousin, Daniel Southwell, whose earlier adventures with the First Fleet I've recounted before, was present at the same battle, and wrote an exultant letter to Weeden Sr. the same day, being presumably ignorant of Richard's death. It would be three more years before Daniel too was killed, in Tenerife.)


In 'The Wish,' we find Weeden looking forward to the moment of his own death:

So, when the close of life draws nigh,
All anxious fears may I defy,
To leave this world unmov'd.
And may each liberal person say,
As tow'rd my grave he bends his way,
"Him all the virtues lov'd:
No sordid views his mind opprest,
In blessing he himself was blest,
He scorn'd all foolish pride:
The tears he wip'd from every eye,
And, ripe for Heav'n, without a sigh,
At length serenely died."

I would like to think that happened. However, the only time I find Weeden really happy is on his nineteenth birthday:

Thanks to kind Providence that plac'd me here,
To-day I enter on my twentieth year.
Oh! may no future time disturb the bliss,
The peace of conscience, that I feel at this.

I'd like to think that happened, too. But appearances and circumstances both are against it.

This may be the last letter my grandfather ever wrote. It was written on the 3rd May, 1970. The envelope was post marked on the 4th, and the addressee, my aunt Naomi, probably received it on the 6th (for my grandfather used a second-class stamp). By that time, however, the writer was dead. He was found on 5th May, in his bath, having died from heart failure.

In case you're having trouble with the typos, handwritten corrections, cut-off words, and the stains from Naomi's tears, I've made a tidy transcript:

Sunday 3 May 1970

Dear Naomi

This is just a short business letter.
You very kindly suggested that I might visit you somewhere about May 23, or a little earlier, and return 28th or 29th if you could arrange transport.
I should be very pleased to come, if you can do this easily.
I should like to pay you all costs of petrol there and back. That is the least I could do. If Myfy has taken me in I have usually paid her a reasonable amount for bed and board (this is between ourselves) which will not of course in any way […] for the trouble caused her in many ways by my visit. I should wish to do the same for you…. Of course.
I have cut off all engagements here, of various kinds, for that period, and rearranged visits to me from the chiropodist or home nursing (injection). So I could be ready to come any day from the 29th onwards (if I have notice), returning about 28th or 29th at latest.
If you find it inconvenient please call it off.
The Choir at the Methodist church in Kingston (Fairfield) where I usually attend, have taken my MAG and NUNC and think of performing this. The choir meets on Friday nights, and they had the music Friday night May 1st, so I suppose that they might be ready to sing it end of May or beginning of June. I rather hope it won’t be June 4th as this is the Esperanto Service. But it might I imagine be any time from May 31 onward. I have told them that I shall be away from May 24th.
If I have the date I shall send a circular round to various people to let them know. It will be a red letter day for me as the Mag and Nunc has been performed only twice since I wrote it in 1905, and I should like to hear it again.
If I get envelopes ready perhaps I might be able to duplicate a circular about it when I am in Rugeley and post the circular there. I suppose you know of some firm in Rugeley able to do duplicating.
The Esperanto Congress (British) is in Harrogate May 22-25, but in any case I can’t think of attending this. It would be too much for me.
Thanks to you, I have at last got two pairs of trousers and two pullovers. Also new shoes. So I am a real daddy.
I am rushing this off just to give you these details. There really is not much news otherwise. In haste,
Much love to all,
PATRO-AVO

I look forward to eating the strawberries, peaches, figs and apricots, in your garden.

It's a very ordinary letter, but I think his personality comes through quite strongly, all the same. One thing I'm struck by is how much Avo lives in the future. (He was 86 when he wrote this, which in those days was a fair age.) It's all about his plans and arrangements, and even his one moment of looking backwards (to 1905) is in the service of a splendid future revival.

Otherwise, that combination of anxious consideration for others with a garrulous focus on his own affairs fits what I know of him, and indeed what he wrote of himself. For yes, he wrote his own obituary for the Esperanto Association ("to help them when I die"), and in it he remarks:

What chiefly attracted him to Esperanto was the amazing beauty and literary capability of the language; propaganda stunts and organization problems interested him little except as necessary evils. As a lecturer he was at home on the platform - if he had to speak on a definite subject - and he knew how to keep the attention and interest of an audience of children. But he was a social failure, being too shy to make friends and unable to take part in small talk; he was happiest when alone. An inability to remember faces was a life-long handicap, and a continual source of embarrassment. He loathed controversy, but was forced continually to write controversial articles in reply to opponents of Esperanto, or on other matters - this was necessary and useful work, but foreign to his nature, and (he felt) sometimes increased his isolation and endangered friendships.

I can't pretend that I don't recognise my own character in quite a lot of this - and certainly my prosopagnosia. What he might have made of an age of people being so profligately Wrong on the Internet, though, I shudder to think.

I just told this anecdote to my friend Clémentine, but thought I might leave it here too, as offering an insight into my upbringing and character...

When I was in primary school I lived in a house with a stream at the bottom of the garden. There were two mallard ducks that used to walk up to our house, and we’d often feed them bread: we called them Walter and Emily.

One day in Spring, they appeared with six fluffy little ducklings in tow, and at school that day, on being instructed to draw something in pastels, I was inspired to sketch their offspring. I have no talent at all for drawing, but this was a pretty good picture by my standards (I was about 8 at the time), and my father, an art teacher who no doubt hoped I would follow at least a little way in his footsteps, preserved it. He even had it framed, and for many years it hung just outside the downstairs toilet.

Eventually I went on, as you know, to have a simply glittering career as an academic and novelist. My father read and sometimes quite liked my books, but he would always cast a sentimental eye in the general direction of the toilet, as if to say, “What genius you had in those days!”

Once, when my children were fairly young – but old enough to read between the lines of adult conversation – I asked my father what he saw in that bloody picture. I mean, it was quite good for an eight-year-old, but really nothing special. Hadn’t I surpassed that achievement, albeit in other fields? He could be very vague when he wanted to, and replied to the effect that Isaac Newton had already made his greatest discoveries by the time he was 23 – it was a common story…

My children, ever after, teased me mercilessly about it. Every time we visited, they would rush to ‘The Six Chicks’ and exclaim, “This really ought to be a museum!” Once or twice I threatened to throw it out, but especially after my father died they said (in so many words) that to do so would be a double sacrilege, compounding iconoclasm with filial impiety. I knew this was bullshit, but it was enough to stay my hand.

And so the picture still sits in the room where I type this. I haven’t hung it on the wall – that’s the extent of my rebellion – but it leans against the skirting board, a mute reminder of the vanity of all things.

It's exactly a year since my mother died. (By a sinister coincidence, I also find myself exactly one year nearer my own death - what are the chances?)

I don't really have anything to add to that, but I'll share this picture that my brother just put on Facebook, of our family in 1963: my mother, my father, my brother, me and our dog, Topsy. I think it's fair to describe these as simpler days, at least from my point of view.