CHAPTER 1
THE FORTUNATE SON
Later, when his schemes lay in ruin, all the lives lost and loves departed, he would sit in his club in London among the other old imperialists, embellish his sole victory, and call it justified. By then, the legend of Henry Wickham had become iconic, his deception for queen and country part of imperial lore. His lined and sunburned face stared from the newspapers and magazines toward the vague distance, his white shock of hair floating in a nimbus around his oversize head. Detractors claimed he was coarse and self-serving, nothing more than an opportunist who’d been in the right place at the right time. To others, he was an embarrassing reminder of the empire’s rapacity. But these were minority reports, out of touch with popular opinion. By living as long as he had at the ends of the earth, he wore the prestige of the unknown like a medal. He was a force, and forces scoff at analysis. They simply are.
Joseph Conrad knew men like him, and the cost of their ambition. “I will tell you what I believe,” he wrote in his 1913 novella “The Planter of Malata,” a tale some said was modeled after Wickham and his last failed venture. “I believe that when your heart is set on some object, you are a man that doesn’t count the cost to yourself and others.” But one suspects that Henry knew the cost too well. Photos snapped of him in his triumph show a man who looks distant and somehow unsatisfied. The old cravings still reign uppermost, whether in London tweed or white drill suit as he poses beside a sixty-foot rubber tree. He never seems at peace. There was one portrait given to his niece shortly after he was knighted, a private photo never meant for dissemination. For once the expression is soft. He lowers his prominent chin and doesn’t glower. He is relaxed, and descendants insist they can detect the faint shadow of a smile.
If so, it is touched with rue.
Two moments of peace stand recorded in the long life of Henry Alexander Wickham. One was in the jungle. The earlier was in a tamer place—the hills and spacious meadows of Hampstead Heath in North London, his first home.
Henry was born on Friday, May 29, 1846, in Grove Cottage, Haverstock Hill, four miles northwest of St. Paul’s dome in London. It was a good time to be alive—if you were English, one of the “middling” classes, and part of the club. Today’s Britain has been called “a crowded island where towns and cities rub up against one another like rocks in an old stone wall.” Although the island had not yet reached that point, London was growing fast, spreading like an oil slick to absorb the ancient surrounding villages, a foretaste of things to come. For midcentury writers, London had no beginning or end—it was a “province covered with houses,” “a state”; it was Gargantua, absorbing and excreting vast quantities of people and goods. All the world was here, or at least her glories: raw sugar from the West Indies, tea and silk from China, hides and skins from Patagonia, rubber from Brazil.
Victoria had been on her throne for thirteen years. Historians call the 1850s a time of relative peace and prosperity, but the mid-Victorian Pax Britannica was a relative term. During the “long peace” of Victoria’s reign, not a single year passed in which British soldiers were not fighting somewhere in the world for the empire’s greater glory. These were the “savage wars of peace,” as Rudyard Kipling called them, and the year of Henry’s birth saw headlines of the First Sikh War, the War of the Ax, and the Siege of Aden. Such far-flung conflict could not be helped: It was the price that had to be paid to save and civilize the world.
“No one will ever understand Victorian England,” wrote historian Robert C. K. Ensor, “who does not appreciate that among highly civilized . . . countries it was one of the most religious that the world has known.” Victorians believed that they were “God’s elect,” a belief infusing them with the fervor to spread their brand of civilization through the world. This was their right and duty, their “white man’s burden.” The British Empire was engaged in a righteous mission; though it might stumble, its intentions were ultimately honorable. If the individual faltered or lost heart while engaged in this quest, his nation and empire would come to his aid.
The empire’s world-shaping creed rested on two broad pedestals. First, a call to spread Christianity and save men’s souls. Second, the spread of free trade. Broadly defined as a belief in the free play of the market without government interference or restriction, free trade was considered an instrument of “world betterment” and peace: The spread of British trade and investment overseas was intrinsically good, since it brought enterprise and progress to the world. If enterprise and the work ethic were civilizing values, capitalism was a moral force: Although greed and self-interest entered the equation, they were secondary, at least in theory. The majority of Victorians may not have understood the dynamics of British investment or quite grasped the actual geography of their empire, but they responded with zeal and ardor to those grand celebrations announcing their empire’s standing in the world. “For them,” said historian John Gardiner, “the empire was hazily exotic but no less a matter of real pride.”
The instruments of empire are many and diverse; it sometimes takes generations for their importance to be recognized. Such was the case with rubber. Its exploitation in the nineteenth century seemed to explode overnight and involved a cast of characters ranging from ragged adventurers like Henry to investors, inventors, imperialists, and hucksters. All owed allegiance to Columbus, since by most accounts the wayward mariner was the first European to take note of the strange elastic material. He commented on the white milk oozing from felled trees and bushes. Those following him described a legendary ball game in which two teams of Indians pursued a dark, round sphere that leapt wildly, bounced higher than seemed possible, and did so without there “being need for any inflation.” It was played in many places under many names, from batey to Vok-a-tok, and Cortés found the Aztecs playing their own version in the court of King Montezuma II, which they called tlatchl. Others dipped their feet in the milk and held them over a smoking fire to create an instant waterproof shoe. Some called the tree cao o’chu, or “weeping tree.” This was transformed by the Spanish into cauchu, which the French eventually turned into caoutchouc, the term they use today.
The French were rubber’s first press agents, beginning with French geographer Charles Marie de la Condamine’s 1735 journey to the New World to determine the true shape of the earth. When he returned, he brought with him samples of rubber and details of its botanical characteristics. He coined the term “latex” from the Spanish for “milk,” and found that rubber was an excellent protection for his delicate scientific instruments during the long sea voyage back home. In 1775, French botanist Jean Baptiste Fusée Aublet described the genus and its first species, Hevea guianensis, a variety found in French Guiana. Although the Spanish and Portuguese had the most opportunity for commercial gain due to their long control of the New World, rubber did not smack of instant wealth, and they remained uninterested. Until the end of the Enlightenment, rubber was seen in Europe as a novelty, restricted to toys and Indian-made artifacts.
It awaited modern chemistry to tease out its secrets. The English discoverer of oxygen, Joseph Priestley, named the strange stuff “India rubber” in 1770 after observing that a sample from India was “excellently adapted to the purpose of wiping from paper the marks of a black lead pencil.” It was also cheap: A “cubical piece of about half an inch [sold] for three shillings” and lasted several years. In 1790, Antoine François de Fourcroy, one of the founders of modern chemistry, tested ways to dissolve rubber, and in 1791, the Englishman Samuel Peal was granted the first English patent for a process that infused rubber into “all kinds of leather, cotton, linen and woolen cloths, silk stuffs, paper, wood,” making them “perfectly waterproof,” he said. Peal’s process seemed simple: He dissolved solid chunks of rubber in a bath of turpentine, then spread the cloth with the tacky sludge. Once dry, it was waterproof—but it never dried completely, creating a garment that, while warm and waterproof, was also smelly and sticky.
Despite such drawbacks, entrepreneurs were drawn to the odd material. At Pará, near the mouth of the Amazon, Portuguese colonial authorities promoted seringa, or syringe rubber, named after its earliest application. By the 1750s, army boots, knapsacks, and other military items flowed to Pará from Lisbon for waterproofing. By 1800, New England merchants were placing orders for shoes made of seringa. In 1825, the Scotsman Charles Macintosh discovered that rubber would dissolve in the flammable solvent naphtha; he sandwiched his rubber sludge between multiple layers of cloth to create a waterproof garment that was more durable than Peal’s. Macintosh’s success began a rush of small competitors in England, France, and the United States, but rubberized garments still grew tacky in heat and brittle in cold, and they were often returned in a half-melted state by angry customers. By the 1830s, most of these early companies had failed.
Brazil was the world’s principal supplier of raw rubber, but demand was not great—by 1827, total exports only tallied eight tons a year. Rubber was an enigma, a natural product that chemists and industrialists sensed had wide use, but its chemical instability doomed every investor. There was, however, an alternative to the dissolved sludge of Macintosh and Peal. In 1820, Thomas Hancock opened England’s first rubber factory; his process was based upon the effects of maceration and heat rather than a liquid solution. Hancock recycled rubber in a masticating machine, which, for security’s sake, he called a “pickler,” a hollow wooden drum studded with teeth. One day while turning the pickler, Hancock discovered that the heat generated by the process melted the waste rubber into a ball that was uniform, hot, and almost as good as new. Masticated rubber dissolved more readily in naphtha than the “crude” shipped from the jungle. Industrialists awoke to the fact that this heated, pliable rubber could be molded into any shape—the first cheap plastic. England was soon awash in rubber rollers, printer’s blankets, drive belts, billiard table cushions, and surgical instruments. In 1827, the first rubber fire hose was used to put out a fire at Fresh Wharf, London. That same year, brewers added rubber to their beer (although why someone would ever imagine doing this is not chronicled). Rubber imparted a “vile taste,” but after soaking it in waste liquid from the brewing process, the brewmasters discovered that it subtly sweetened the flavor. In 1830, Hancock and Macintosh merged their companies; in 1835, Hancock’s rubber factory was the world’s largest, and he was using three to four tons of caoutchouc each year.
Yet the problem of stiffening in cold and melting in heat remained, a problem so serious as to seem insurmountable until the 1839 breakthrough of former hardware dealer Charles Goodyear. Like Wickham, there was something driven about Goodyear. Like Wickham, his history would consist of one great triumph and a multitude of failures. Goodyear considered himself an “instrument in the hands of his Maker”: his decision to turn his attention to rubber was an act of Providence, he’d later claim. So single-minded was his quest that his life became a litany of imprisonment, beggary, and lawsuits, all in the name of rubber. The black polymer was more than a natural resource: It assumed the characteristics of a religious icon. “While yet a schoolboy,” he wrote in his
Gum-Elastic, “the wonderful and mysterious properties of this substance attracted my attention and made a strong impression on my mind.” That first impression never left him. It was a craving so deep that it approached the divine:
The most remarkable quality of this gum, is its wonderful elasticity. In this consists the great difference between it and other substances. It can be extended to eight times its ordinary length, without breaking, when it will again assume its original form. There is probably no other inert substance, the properties of which excite in the human mind . . . an equal amount of curiosity, surprise, and admiration. Who can examine, and reflect upon this property of gum-elastic, without admiring the wisdom of the Creator?
It would take the famous accident of 1839 to reveal to Goodyear the “cure” for rubber’s instability. According to his account, he was trying the effect of heat on a mixture of rubber, sulfur, and white lead when he spilled some of the concoction on a hot stove. To his surprise, the mixture charred but did not melt. Goodyear tried it again, this time before an open fire. There was charring in the center, but along the edges he found an uncharred section that seemed perfectly cured. Tests showed that the new substance did not harden in cold or melt in heat, and it withstood every solvent that had previously dissolved the native gum. He’d found the object of his long search. In time, the process would be dubbed vulcanization after the Roman god Vulcan, master of the forge.
Although Goodyear’s discovery was an accident, he was ready to understand it after years of preparation. As he later wrote, it was “one of those cases where the leading of the Creator providentially aids his creatures by what we termed accident, to attain those things which are not attainable by the powers of reasoning he has conferred on them.”
The Creator may have led Goodyear to his discovery, but He did not reveal the chemical secrets behind the miracle. No one really knew what occurred during vulcanization until the 1960s and 1970s. Rubber is a hydrocarbon, a polymer of isoprene, and is elastic because of its atomic organization into long, crumpled, repeating chains. These are interlinked at a few distant points, and between each pair of links the hydrogen and carbon building blocks rotate freely about their neighbors. This results in a wide range of shapes, like a very loose rope attached to a pair of fixed points on a rock wall. With vulcanization, however, this elasticity is compromised. The polymer chains are joined together by sulfur bridges that create a three-dimensional network: Now there are more bridges between the chains than in the “uncured” state, making each free section of chain shorter and subject to a quicker tightening under strain. This results in a rubber that is harder, less pliable, and far less likely to deteriorate in extremes of temperature.
With Goodyear’s discovery, rubber turned into a new kind of gold. It was soon the preferred material for the plethora of gaskets essential to steam engines. What had been an obscure and slightly exotic raw material now began to form a triumvirate with iron and steel in factories, railroads, and mines. The railroads used it for air bumpers and coach interiors, and in engines for gaskets, hoses, and belts. Factories used it for machine belting and tubing, in assembly lines, and on floors, where it made a safe, nonskid, and electrically insulated surface. Rubber hoses pumped air, gas, and water out of mines. For the average consumer, rubber softened the ride and protected the wheels of coaches and buggies. It shielded people from wind and rain with rubber boots and slickers, and it provided the balls for their baseball, football, soccer, tennis, golf, and other sports. Office work became a little easier, thanks to rubber bands, erasers, and gloves. Latex condoms became available midcentury, taking some of the guesswork out of family planning.
In spring 1850, when Henry Wickham was four, his life changed forever. Neither he nor his parents could foresee it as they stood on the crest of Haverstock Hill, enjoying the breeze. Henry was one of the few Londoners privileged to live in what today is considered the suburbs. What now is associated with sameness and sprawl then conjured images of ease and health, a life merely dreamed of by most city dwellers. Haverstock Hill and Hampstead Heath were idyllic spots, the destination for harried Londoners who took the train from the city to walk the country paths or ride the donkeys penned nearby. On their rambles, Henry and his parents could not help but laugh at the otherwise respectable gentlemen who could not control their steeds. Charles Dickens enjoyed the donkeys; Karl Marx showed more enthusiasm in the saddle than skill. Though Haverstock Hill and the Heath stood on the edge of development, herds of cattle and sheep still grazed in the meadows, and thirty ponds dotted the landscape, including the six large ones created to serve as London’s water supply. Henry would gaze at London sprawling beneath him, where the dome of St. Paul’s stuck up like a giant gold thumb. The contrast between the two worlds was mysterious and not a little exciting for a boy of four. Here, the open heath was a mid-Victorian Paradise where nature was tame and beneficent, a cultivated reflection of God’s ordered plan. Down there, the chaotic city tumbled and scattered at his feet like the piles of wooden blocks strewn across his nursery floor.
Although their home life seemed tidy and quiet, the world around the Wickhams roared forward in full gear. That year, Britain’s Railway Mania reached its peak with 272 acts of Parliament setting up new railroad companies. The Electric Telegraph Company was founded. The potato crop failed in Ireland, and Irish vagrants filled London’s streets. Henry’s father, also named Henry, was a London solicitor, which meant that the small family was comfortably middle class. His mother, Harriette Johnson, was young and attractive, with flashing black eyes and a steady gaze. The Wickhams believed their family was descended from William of Wykeham, the first Bishop of Winchester, who founded New College, Oxford. By the 1700s, the Wickhams had exchanged religious vestments for military red and blue. Ancestors fought and governed in the American Revolution and in the West Indies; Henry’s grandfather, Joseph, nearly lost his life during an amphibious landing against the French during the 1801 Battle of Abukir. Though his leg was torn off by a cannonball, he stopped the bleeding with a tourniquet made from his own sash and the bayonet of a dead soldier beside him. He was fitted with a wooden leg and discharged. Ten years later, he married Sophie Phillips, whose father had been ruined by King George IV in a shady racing wager. According to Gentleman’s Magazine, the Prince of Wales weighted the jockey’s pockets before the race; although the deception was unmasked, Sophie’s father still lost the bet—and his estate. The young couple immediately moved to London, where Henry’s father was born on July 14, 1814, in St. Marylebone Parish in Westminster, known as the “richest and most populous metropolitan parish” in the growing City of London.
Unlike his predecessors, Henry’s father was not of martial blood. He joined the bar and became a solicitor at age twenty-three. Seven years later, in 1845, he married Harriette, a dark-haired milliner from Wales. Henry was born a year later; a sister, Harriette Jane, was born in 1848. By summer 1850, Henry’s mother expected a third.
By then, the Wickhams were firmly ensconced in the country. Haverstock Hill had its bohemian side, and that was part of the appeal. The painter William Charles Thomas Dobson, who would influence the pre-Raphaelites, lived nearby at No. 5 Chalcot Villa, as did the eminent Egyptologist Samuel Birch, who lived at No. 17. Several rich courtesans built retirement homes in Haverstock Hill, including Moll King, the model for Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders. But there was a better reason to move from the city, and that was to escape disease. The epidemic diseases of the nineteenth century—tuberculosis, typhoid fever, smallpox, and cholera—were associated with crowded conditions. According to The Lancet, the death rate in 1880 from smallpox in the “open and airy slope of Hampstead” was 12.6 per 1,000, compared to 22.2 per 1,000 “in the metropolis generally.”
The worst by far was cholera. The speed with which it killed was spectacular: a healthy person could die within two or three hours, making it the most rapidly fatal disease known to man. By 1850, the “Asiatic cholera” had swept through London twice, first in 1832, when it was called the scourge of the impious and dissolute, then in 1848-49, when it was evident that this was a worldwide plague. Since the cholera bacteria thrived in the water supply, everyone was vulnerable. Isolating oneself from the crowded city, where the most violent outbreaks occurred, seemed the best course, and Harriette Wickham and her two young children did just that in the healthy spaces of Haverstock Hill.
It is harder to track the movements of Henry’s father. As a solicitor, he ranged across the city and surrounding suburbs, catching the thirty-minute omnibus ride into London, visiting his one-legged father in Marylebone, conducting business near Bloomsbury and the British Museum, a stone’s throw from St. Giles parish, London’s most famous slum. A popular shilling guidebook, A Week in London, described St. Giles as a place “occupied by the very lowest class of society and through which it is hardly safe to pass alone in the day-time.” In Sketches by Boz, the young Charles Dickens called it a land of “wretched houses with broken windows [and] starvation in the alleys.” The poor were a dangerous “tribe,” the bestial Other lurking at the edge of civilization, slaves to violence, unnatural desire, and disease.
But Henry’s father did not have to go as far as the city to encounter the poor. Hampstead was an urban center in itself, paved and lit by gas, a polling place for county elections and site of “court leets and baron,” a medieval system that settled disputes and maintained common pastures and ditches. And it had its own slums. The poor lived “in alleys and courts without drainage or water supply,” said an 1848 report by the Metropolitan Association for Improving Dwellings of the Industrial Class. Overcrowding was common, and a workhouse and soup kitchen were built near Haverstock Hill. All the conditions for cholera were present; they lay in the path of many London solicitors.
Thus, it is no surprise that Henry’s father contracted the disease. The microscopic viper acted fast, with a timing that was particularly cruel. The Wickhams survived the winnowing of 1848-49; there would not be another full-blown epidemic until 1854. They must have sighed a breath of relief, for Harriette was due to give birth in the summer. They’d taken every precaution imaginable, but that was not enough. Henry’s father ingested the deadly germ in the prime of his life at age thirty-five.
The disease left victims and their loved ones little time in which to prepare. Nothing in Henry’s memoirs ever touched upon his father’s death, but it would have been one of his first memories. He was four, the age of basic impressions, and his father was dying in the bed-sitting room. The psychological shock was far-reaching. Mortality always lurked. One might seek safety in the assurance of sanitation or class, but they were never enough. Something of fundamental importance was always out of reach that would somehow make things right. Death lurked in the shadows and waited around the corner.
You were always on the run.
The death of Henry’s father changed everything. When John Joseph, the third child, was born a few months after her husband’s funeral, Harriette had three mouths to feed. What had seemed an exciting future, with husband, security, a home in the country, and bohemian friends, now looked like a future of endless worry and toil. Since she could no longer afford the pretty villa at Haverstock Hill, she soon moved. According to the 1871 census, all four listed their address as 25 Fitzroy Road in Marylebone, close to Joseph Wickham, the warhorse grandfather. Marylebone was one of the city’s five wealthiest districts, where the average annual rental rate went far beyond her newly modest means. In all likelihood, Grandfather Joseph became Harriette’s benefactor; they became the “poor relations,” an embarrassing drop in status keenly felt in class-conscious London.
Harriette returned to millinery, the only skill she knew from before her marriage and “set up a not very successful millinery business in Sackville Street,” according to Wickham’s only biographer, historian Edward Valentine Lane. Millinery was one of the only trades at the time in which a woman might be a sole proprietress and hire employees. It was the kind of work a middle-class woman down on her luck might take up, yet the hours were brutal and the pay pitifully low. As late as 1903, Jack London reported the case of a destitute, seventy-two-year-old milliner who applied for relief, since the amount she charged per straw hat—two and a quarter pence—was simply too low to survive.
Yet it was also believed that a well-dressed woman never ventured out without a hat or bonnet, so there was always trade. Small touches made the difference—a smartly-placed rose or bird-of-paradise feather could make or break a sale. But feathers from exotic birds cut into the milliner’s profits. Unless Harriette had a tropical source, she could only gaze in envy at the trendy shops that could afford to stock such finery.
As the oldest child, Henry would normally have been saddled with the most responsibility, but he seemed to evade this burden. “Henry Alexander, deprived of a father’s guidance, grew up something of a spoilt, harum-scarum boy,” Lane reported, apparently quoting family tradition. Henry was not a great scholar and showed little interest in any subject save art. He liked to wander more than anything, and a school-age portrait shows a slightly chubby boy, dressed in black school uniform, with dark, wavy hair and intense, blue-gray eyes. He has a distant look on his face and stands angled forward, as if ready to bolt out the door.
He longed to be outside. Regent Street, one block west of Harriette’s shop, was the heart of the shopping district, the spring of a new kind of leisure. Shops were a medley of brass, gas, and glass—retailing had become an art, borrowing techniques from the theater to catch and hold the eye. Shopping and window-shopping had become the Victorian woman’s entry into the routine of the city; they passed like gaudy moths, and the fine goods or art prints displayed in a window were thought to entrap them like flypaper. The material reverie was said to leave them vulnerable, a hypnotic state charged with sexuality. Predatory males stalked at the edges of sight, ambushing young women with what the press called “The Rape of the Glances.” Pickpockets worked the crowds. One side of Regent Street had become the midday haunt of well-dressed prostitutes who ogled and were ogled. New forms of the old predations were taking shape. London’s “inconvenient populousness” made living and working a daily adventure.
On July 30, 1850, as Henry struggled with the new world of his father’s death, ground was broken in Hyde Park for the wonder of the age: the Great Exhibition and its centerpiece, the Crystal Palace. Two months later, the first column was raised; the glass edifice rose up until the building covered eighteen acres and enclosed the tallest elms beneath its arches. Within seventeen weeks, nearly a million feet of glass were fastened to a lattice of 3,300 columns and 2,300 girders. It rose so fast because each prefabricated column, girder, gutter, and steel bar was identical. The voices of critics rose with it: The Exhibition would serve as a rallying point for riffraff; the Palace’s sparkling roof would be porous, allowing the droppings of fifty million sparrows to rain down. The voices were ignored. The Crystal Palace would be the showplace for the globe’s raw materials, machines, and plastic arts, a temple devoted to “the working bees of the world’s hive.” World peace would radiate from the Crystal Palace like power from a dynamo, for in this assemblage of “industry and skill, countries would find a new brotherhood.”
But beneath the steel and glass lay a deeper theme—the industrialization of the natural world. The Palace’s inspiration was a plant, the giant water lily Victoria amazonica, discovered in British Guiana in 1837, thought to be the largest flowering plant in the world. The water lily’s flower was bigger than a head of cabbage and smelled like a pineapple; its leaves measured six feet across and sported a multitude of ribs that could support impossible weights. On a lark, Joseph Paxton, the Duke of Devonshire’s head gardener, dressed his seven-year-old daughter as a fairy and posed her standing on the water lily. The photo became the national rage, and piqued Paxton’s curiosity about the strength of those ribs. He found he could load a leaf with five children, the equivalent of three hundred pounds. In 1850, Paxton modeled the Crystal Palace after Victoria amazonica, its cantilevered trussing of iron girders supporting nearly three hundred thousand glass panes.
This homage to what one botanist called “a vegetable wonder” bespoke the horticultural mania that gripped Britain. The last vestiges of Holland’s “tulipomania”—the botanical madness of the 1500s when entire fortunes were spent on forty rare tulips from Constantinople—could still be found among the English royalty. A bulb of the “Miss Fanny Kemble” sold for seventy-five pounds, more than the lifetime wage of a shopgirl. Flowers were so adored that “the language of flowers” grew to cult status; wax flower arrangement became a new art; flowers made of human hair commemorated the dead.
On May 1, 1851, the queen opened the Great Exhibition. A six hundred-voice choir burst into the “Hallelujah Chorus” after a short opening prayer. The event was “the greatest day in our history, the most beautiful and imposing and touching spectacle ever seen,” Victoria wrote in her diary. Thousands visited the Exhibition: Commentators noted in particular the pairings of the very old and young, the generation that built the empire to its present state and the one that would take it to further glory. Many headed for the cacophonous Machinery Court. Farmers in their smocks crowded around a giant reaping machine from the United States. The queen herself admired a medal-stamping machine that could produce in a week fifty million medals embossed with her image.
But it was the exhibition of rubber that drew the greatest crowds. Charles Goodyear spent thirty thousand dollars of his own money to create Goodyear’s Vulcanite Court, a three-room display in which everything was made of rubber: furniture, draperies, rugs, and fixtures—even the walls and a large “Elizabethan” sideboard. There were rubber inkstands, knife handles, stockings, bandages, hot water bottles, syringes, dolls, and air cushions. Goodyear spoke of air-inflated saddles, inflatable boxing jackets that could absorb a punch, and a rubber dress for ministers performing full-body baptisms. He envisioned the day that rubber life preservers would eliminate drowning as one of the evils of the world. Rubber could be prefabricated into any shape; it was a protean substance, hailing from nature but perfected by science. It was the material of the future, a true gift from God.
The high spirits of the exhibition were but a brief respite for Harriette and her family. In 1855, Grandfather Joseph stumbled as he left his club and fell, splintering his wooden leg. The old war wound caught up to him four decades late. He died from the injuries on June 30, at age seventy-four.
His death was a doubly cruel blow. For Harriette, there was no longer the financial backup upon which she depended, no champion in the savage wars of class, where “poor relations” were an embarrassment and a financial drain. For the children, and for nine-year-old Henry in particular, there was no longer a father figure on whom to depend. While his sister Harriette Jane helped as best she could in the millinery shop, Henry wandered the London streets and dreamed. His world was a narrow-laned warren of coal soot, sweatshops, and criminal gangs. His mother feared that he would be easily tempted, pushed by the slightest breeze. One slip, one stupid prank, and he’d be destined for the Borstal, another youth sentenced to the workhouse that guaranteed an education in crime.
Parents always worry about their children: after 1857, Harriette’s worries took a new form. That year, the Indian Mutiny burst upon the psychic landscape of the English, and the world that looked bright and promising in the Great Exhibition now seemed sinister. Suddenly, there were many comparisons made between London’s poor and bloodthirsty heathens in foreign lands. Both were described in phrases such as “wild tribes” and “savage races,” often invoked by reform-minded writers like Henry Mayhew and James Greenwood to portray the impoverished. Travelogues treated the city’s rookeries as a new kind of jungle. Shop windows featured a steady stream of books like Legends of the Savage Life, Wild Tribes of London, Low Life Deeps, and The Wild Man at Home. Such “savage” districts as Whitechapel and New Holborn were inhabited by “strange and neglected races”—the feral child, the screaming harridan, the murderer, the Jew. Every district was an unchristian wilderness in which “a clash of contest, man against man, and men against fate” took place daily. Every generation has its metaphor of temptation: in mid-Victorian London, that metaphor was the jungle, and the streets were the tangled paths where children were devoured.
In the space of a few short years, Henry had gone from life to death, comfort to want, open heaths to crowded slums—and now, his mother feared, from innocence to moral ruin. His future as a child had spread before him like the fields surrounding Haverstock Hill; his life as a youth now closed around him like the soot-blackened city. London was a jungle, a cliché today but a metaphor that was new, exciting, and frightening for its time. On the streets, as in the wilderness, warned one schoolmaster, “there is a bitter struggle to live.” Henry was learning about jungle life, but where a mother saw danger, a boy like Henry saw a New World.
