FROM: Thomas Jerwood Esq.

An Essay on Nature, Nurture and Negative

How may human paternity be established beyond doubt? It is a question which has perplexed the male of the species down the generations. For, whilst motherhood is an undeniable fact, fatherhood can be regarded as a relationship that is always under suspicion.

Take, by example, the experience of a most august scientific friend of mine who has generously agreed to the retelling (with complete anonymity) of his own sorry attempt to discover consanguinity with a person who was otherwise a stranger. The circumstances of his salutary tale had begun more than twenty years earlier when my friend, most unhappy in his marriage and frustrated by repeated failures in academia, found some solace in an anthropological study within his own household. The subject of this study was his kitchen maid; a lively, willing girl who was always pleased to engage in his investigations. The more world-worn readers amongst you will have no surprise in learning how this unsuitable association progressed, or that it ended with the girl falling into a shameful condition that consumed my scientific friend with regret.

Happily for my friend, the kitchen maid departed the household of her own accord before her condition was entirely apparent. Enquiries were made thereafter into her whereabouts but she had disappeared so completely that my friend could only conclude that she had returned to her north-country home, or had adopted a new name. There the matter seemed to end until, many years later and quite by chance, my friend found himself again confronted by the kitchen maid. He found her in the very lowest situation of society imaginable, yet the girl had not apparently aged nor changed in any way he could divine, except for the colour of her eyes. The reader may jeer. What sort of man of science is he, you might ask, to ignore the obvious? This girl was clearly related to the kitchen maid; perhaps even her daughter and so, quite possibly, his own. Yet I must sympathise with my friend’s initial disorientation. The very striking resemblance of the two females threw him back into the stew of youthful emotions that had infused his sweet but doomed liaison with the kitchen maid.

The daughter’s name gave no clue to her parentage but sensing the accuracy of his intuition and the possibility for a prodigious advance of his anthropological studies, my friend invited the girl to take up a place in his household. At this point, knowing my own interest in heredity, he asked me for advice regarding the best way to establish his new servant’s paternity without her having any awareness of his investigations. The two methods which I recommended, namely: the composite photographic likeness, and the numerically quantifiable moral test, have both been described in contributions of mine to earlier issues of this journal (viz. Character, Crime and Composite Photography WQ Summer 1885, Experiments in Human Nature WQ Autumn 1885) and I shall not bore the loyal reader by repeating my commentary on these techniques. Suffice it to say that a correlation of physiognomy and character is the best measure for determining paternal kinship that we currently possess.

I will not embarrass my scientific friend with an account of the subterfuge he embarked upon in order to obtain the data – photographic and otherwise – for his comparisons. He was nevertheless successful in producing a composite likeness of himself and the girl, as well as several well-observed moral test scores. The results of these investigations, however, were not conclusive. Although some of my friend’s facial measurements were replicated in the girl, her maternal resemblance was overwhelmingly dominant. Measures of intelligence and character may have pointed to features in common with my friend’s highly developed rational mind, but these were counteracted by the girl’s illogical urges. These must stem, he assumed, from the same excess of passion that had been displayed by her kitchen maid mother. In the end, my friend began to feel that the girl he had found was, indeed, his own offspring but sadly, no test yet invented could prove it.

I was most disheartened by my inability to assist but this episode at least allowed me to revise my theory of human development which has been so long in germination. My photographic endeavours have also provided a simile which, I hope, illustrates my conclusions. In my analogy, the production of a man is likened to the manufacture of a photographic print. The flash of creation (by which I mean conception in the case of the human and a timed exposure of light in the case of the photograph) determines the influence of Nature. It is then Nurture (upbringing in the case of the human, or the developing process in the case of the negative plate) which provides the detail, the finesse and the fulfilment of the final outcome. Any photographer, amateur or otherwise, will tell you the many ways in which inadequate skills in the developing room can alter or indeed ruin a perfectly good image. Excessive or inadequate application of chemicals, an accidental ingress of light, clumsiness, or a fault in the timings can all result in a final print which is too light or too dark, or which is lacking in definition and detail or which, indeed, is fatally smudged. I do not need to spell out how accidents and errors in the upbringing of a child can have parallel effects.

So I must ultimately conclude that nature and nurture have separate but complementary effects on the ‘negative’ that is each human being. One force cannot be said to have pre-eminence over the other; both are working together to fashion the final product. Although it may have taken me many years to arrive at this theoretical position, I now feel the truth of it with vital conviction. I must therefore declare that my long study into the workings of heredity and human development is at an end. Although I feel sympathy for the pain and anguish expended by my scientific friend in his quest for proof about his natural child, I must also confess that I cannot help but be glad of his travails. Without them, I should not have reached my final conclusion which, I have no doubt, will stand firm against the buffeting of newer theories and more sophisticated research for many years to come.

Thomas Jerwood Esq.

Spark Hill, Warks.