An unexpectedly long queue, a millipede queue, wound through all four corridors of the museum’s upstairs galleries, past the collections of crustaceans, each with a name as long as itself penned across a label in minute copperplate; past the boxes of small fossils that Gosse claimed had been created by God simultaneously with the earth; past the six-legged insects and eight-legged spiders of a thousand different species, each pinned in order of size inside gigantic display cabinets. Alice doubted the value of giving names to insects if they wouldn’t answer to them, but the newly-built University Museum was to be read as a book of Nature, and labels were thus everywhere, even upon the gallery columns, each made of a different British ornamental rock, and supporting cast-iron girders between whose ribs blossomed metal branches of leaf and flower. The remarkable synthesis between iron, stone and glass, to say nothing of the range of Natural History exhibits, made of the museum a miniature Gothic Crystal Palace in which it was impossible not to be educated, even while dawdling in a queue.
Mr James and I had arrived early, having caught the 6.05 that morning from Clapham, and changed at Reading. The lecture was due to begin at midday but Mr James wanted me to get a taste of the colleges, as it was generally considered I would continue my zoological studies at Oxford. In fact, this introduction to the City of Spires was unnecessary, for even as I stepped off the train on to the Oxford railway platform and lifted my eyes to the cold sky-line apparently pierced by inverted icicles, I knew I had found my home. A few snowflakes materialised out of the grey air, as if in welcome.
This overwhelming sensation of arrival, of return to a place I had not yet visited, was interrupted by the practical necessity of removing Mr James from the compartment we had shared. As arranged, the wheelchair was rushed to the door of our carriage, and, with a great deal of heaving and general advice from passengers, we succeeded in transferring my guardian into his chariot (as he called it), the train’s engine panting out clouds of impatient steam as we too panted under James’s great weight. I was thankful we had dissuaded him from bringing his photographic equipment, which inconveniently included a range of pungent chemicals, a handcart and a portable dark-room.
Mr James knew the colleges well, having once supplied them with exotica from foreign lands. He directed me to Christ Church Meadows, Magdalen Deerpark and Trinity Gardens with an assurance that disregarded the considerable effort involved in pushing him to these far-flung spots at top speed, if we were to arrive at the museum in good time.
It turned out that we had dramatically misjudged the hour which would allow us entrance, for the queue already extended from the museum’s front door a good hour before the lecture was due to begin. I stood with my guardian in the bitter February wind, underneath a window arched in the Venetian Gothic style, the stone flowers and leaves at its edges ending half-way down, on account of the peremptory dismissal of the wild Irish stonemasons. While the queue inched forward my guardian pointed out to me the stone monkeys which had displeased the authorities (still sensitive about their ancestors) and which had been converted into cats – until we at last passed through the outer archway into that extraordinary edifice which was the museum. Some members of the public removed their hats. And in the diaphanous light of the glazed courtyard, as we enjoyed the skeletons of giraffes and dinosaurs and examined the oak cabinets of shells and stuffed birds, it occurred to me that we had entered a futuristic glass cathedral in which the bodies of animals replaced the body of Christ and his martyrs. Indeed, the filigree nature of the cast-iron ribs supporting the transparent roof seemed to me but an extension of the gigantic animal ribcages on display, the visitor thus being able to enter the very body of Science and becoming as much an exhibit as the butterfly pinned inside its display box.
I knew only too well that Mr James had visited the museum with my late father shortly after it had opened its unfinished doors to the public, ten years earlier, in order to attend a debate on Mr Darwin’s inflammatory Theory in the very lecture theatre we were hoping shortly to occupy. On that occasion the family gardener had accompanied the two men, in order to lift Mr James up the flight of stairs that led to the lecture theatre. Now it would be necessary to find a muscular gentleman who might help me transport Mr James in his wheelchair up the stairs, as I was of too slight a build to carry him over my shoulder, in the manner of the gardener, without a great deal of assistance.
We were by this stage at the bottom of the staircase, next to a glass box which, according to its label, contained ‘The Head and Foot of the last living Dodo seen in Europe’, which had been of especial interest to my father. Beside the remains was displayed a portrait of the flightless bird whose physical ineptness had resulted in its extinction. The doleful eyes were the same as those that stared at Alice in Wonderland in the Tenniel illustration, and attracted much interest from the members of the queue as they passed beneath it. It was rumoured that Charles Dodgson himself was present among the flurry of dons who scampered up and down the stairs in some agitation as it became increasingly apparent that the lecture theatre was not large enough to hold the ever growing audience.
A slender youth of my own age, but considerably taller, with a pronounced Adam’s apple, lounged against a door behind us, pensively fingering the fret-cut foliage of its brass lock. While the rest of the queue chattered and quibbled in a state of high animation, this young man seemed at ease with his own company, and made no attempt to communicate with the members of the public who stood on either side of him, locked in argument over the genius of the newly-appointed art professor whose inaugural lecture was about to commence within the half-hour. He raised his head abruptly as I addressed him: I felt a slight shiver as his large pale eyes focused themselves with appalling intensity upon my face, as though he were emerging from the solidity of some dream, and wondered if I was yet part of it. However, as he heard out my stammering request, and followed my gaze to Mr James, smiling encouragement from his wheelchair, the expression on his features relaxed and he nodded agreement. No doubt attracted by the weather-beaten, manly face of my tutor, so at odds with the lower half of his ruined body, the now-alert youth even abandoned his more advanced position in the queue and came to join us in readiness for the moment when it would be necessary for us to lift the chair up the steps. At once Mr James engaged him in furious debate about John Ruskin’s challenging political and social views. The youth, not much more than an overgrown boy, replied haltingly in a light, girlish voice which made me wonder if his vocal cords had yet undergone the rites of adolescence; I tested my own with a quick but reassuring growl, disguised as a contribution to the dialogue.
Mr James had been a disciple of John Ruskin ever since reading his slim volume on political economy some eight years earlier. I had thought Ruskin was an art critic who had rescued Turner from obscurity and abuse, but it seemed he also had strong views on social reform for ordinary working people enslaved by the factory hooter and living in miserable poverty; Ruskin’s solution was free education, fixed wages, and pensions. Mr James announced his support of these views in a voice booming with the confidence that everyone would agree with him. To my surprise, the dreamy boy had an opinion on these topics and dared to differ with my tutor over the issue of free wages.
A man who stood behind us with his wife, their eyes bright with excitement, interrupted the argument: ‘Ah, but they do say his brains is affected now – too many grand thoughts hammerin’ away inside them, I’ll be bound. I’m told he suffers from bouts of the madness quite regular these days.’
His wife giggled nervously: ‘He must have his brains addled to fall in love with a ten-year-old girl, I’d say!’ She lowered her eyelids and bit her smiling lip as proof of her own demureness. The couple, local innkeepers, had heard much about the celebrated Mr Ruskin’s performances upon the lecture podium: they hoped he would ‘rave like a loony’, as, apparently, was his wont.
Mr James rolled his head towards our new acquaintance, his mouth twisted with satire. ‘It seems we have all come to witness a different aspect of Mr Ruskin’s personality!’ he said cheerfully. ‘May I ask what you hope to gain from this afternoon’s lecture, young man?’
A slightly feverish light entered the youth’s eyes as he exclaimed in his soprano voice: ‘Sir, I seek my destiny!’
At this moment a pink and plump don in flowing academic robes clapped his hands in the middle of the courtyard, directly under the grinning jaws of a dinosaur skeleton, and begged for our attention. So many people would be disappointed of admission into the lecture theatre, he announced, that it had been decided to move the venue to the much larger Sheldonian Theatre, just down Parks Road. Professor Ruskin himself had volunteered to lead the way, and would be found waiting on the lawns outside the main entrance.
In the excitement we lost our young man, whose services by now were in any case no longer necessary, and rushed with the crowd to join the lean, stooped conger eel of a professor. Mr James pointed out to me the slight figure of the Reverend Dodgson himself, with whom he had corresponded on the topic of wet collodion plates. Dodgson, smiling with only one side of his mouth and walking with a quick unevenness that almost amounted to a hobble, led the way with Ruskin. So keen were the two men to arrive at the grand new venue that they soon broke into a run, which induced something of a stampede in the flock that followed them.
More snowflakes fell, but did not settle.