Many of us Europeans have visited the Smithsonian Insti- tution in Washington DC, and most of us have not the foggiest idea how it got its name. If quizzed, we should probably hazard a guess that Smithson was some rich old American codger, earlier in vintage than Frick or Pierpont Morgan, who had endowed one of the great museums of the world in the way that Americans do. But if we thought that, we should be wrong. James Smithson, who for 35 of his 66 years was known as Macie, was an Englishman who had never been to America in his life.
He was the son of the first Duke of Northumberland, but illegitimate, and as far as is known he never met his father. One of the many touching facts spotted by his beady-eyed biographer is that in Smithson’s copy of Dr Johnson’s Highland Tour, the passage is scored where the great lexicographer passed an afternoon at Alnwick, ‘and was treated with great civility by the Duke’. When Smithson (still known as Macie) passed through North- umberland, they stayed in Newcastle, with no visits to the ducal castle. They? He was travelling with an illustrious company of European scientists, Barthélemy Jaujas de St Fond, William Thornton and Count Andreani, to see, among other things, the Isle of Staffa, and to collect minerals. For Smithson (1765-1829), one of the youngest ever Fellows of the Royal Society, was a distinguished mineralogist and chemist in those days, a generation before Charles Lyell, when science was beginning to understand how infinitely older this planet was than had been previously guessed, and how its shape and contours had been moulded by volcanic movement. It was a time when vulcanology provided a metaphor for political change. Smithson who, like so many, made the pilgrimage to see the exploding Vesuvius, described himself in revolutionary Paris as ‘on the crater of a great volcano’. While Vesuvius was ‘laying waste one of the finest countries in the world’, the Revolution was ‘consolidating the throne of justice and reason. [It] pours its destruction only on erroneous or corrupt institutions’ . . . such as ‘monks and convents’. A year and a half as a prisoner of war during the Napoleonic occupation of Denmark and Germany cured Smithson of some of his Francophilia, as did witnessing the Terror. Yet he remained a progressive republican, and when he came to draft his will, he bequeathed his vast mineral collection, his papers and personal effects ‘to the United States of America, to found in Washington, under the name of the Smithsonian Institution, an establishment for the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men’. It is a will unique in legal history. It was a big fortune. Heather Ewing reckons that by some methods of computation it would work out as the equivalent of £97 million in today’s money. And it came not from the Duke but from his mistress, Smithson’s mother, Mrs Macie. All the same, one is glad the great museum is called the Smithsonian and not Macie’s.
Catastrophically, a fire in 1865 destroyed all Smithson’s archives and all his mineral collection, thousands of samples. It must have been idly supposed, by all those men among whom knowledge was being diffused, that there was no possibility of writing a full biography of this remarkable but mysterious man, who spent so much time travelling, who appeared to have few intimacies beyond professional and scientific friendship, and whose documents all went up in smoke so long ago.
But where these generations of men failed, an indefatigible female scholar, sleuth of sleuths and graduate of Yale university, Heather Ewing, has triumphantly succeeded in the remarkable feat of making a handsome brick where others saw no straw. The sheer industry behind this ever-readable book is phenomenal. In order to establish the shadowy whereabouts of Smithson in Paris, Florence and Copenhagen she has had to trawl through an immense amount of archival material in the British Library, in American libraries and in numberless private collections, as well as in huge varieties of printed sources in four languages. To reconstruct the story she has had to be not merely a tireless archivist-detective but also a historian of science. She writes with brio and exhilarating certainty of touch about Smithson’s scientific papers. As she says, his generation ‘had altered the way that man inhabited the world’.
It is also a deliciously gossipy book. Where the new DNB entry for Smithson tells us that his friend and colleague Thompson left Oxford suddenly, Ewing tells us why. (‘Sodomy and other unnatural and detestable practices with a servant boy’.) She is hilarious about the scandalous and compulsively litigious life of Smithson’s mother, and of his friends in aristocratic and scientific circles. Fascin- ating too is all the Jarndyce and Jarndyce stuff about how the US government eventually proved the will in the Court of Chancery in 1836. This is a book which is unputdownable, the sort you find yourself still reading in the small hours when you’d promised yourself an early night.
I withdraw any mention of bricks and straw. If at any stage of composition Ewing made a brick she transformed it, long before publication, into marble. The story it tells is extraordinary — of the intellectually serious, scientifically pioneering child of two rich, irresponsible people in the reign of George III, creating a bond between enlightened America and enlightened Europe which is there for us all to enjoy in Washington DC. She movingly concludes:
The bequest has made him the founder of one of the world’s great museums, a place that serves as curator of America’s dreams and memory, a much-loved ‘nation’s attic’. Smithson’s gift in the end was a spark from the last embers of the English Enlighten- ment, one that managed — against unimaginable odds — to land across an ocean in the dry brushfield of a nation hungry for identity, prestige and progress.
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