The Philosophical Breakfast Club (19 page)

As Jones often put it, if we want to understand the way different nations of the earth produce and distribute their revenues, “I really know of but one way … and that is to look and see.”
³⁷
Such a careful, inductive process required the sifting of much historical and current information, and would take time.

A
S TIME WENT
on, Jones’s work began to have even more relevance and importance. Heated debates were going on in Parliament and in the cities and towns about how to reform the poor laws. Jones had witnessed problems arising from the poor laws firsthand: Brasted was a focal point for riots and rebellions against the government due to its mismanagement of the welfare system there.
³⁸
Whewell, too, saw glimmerings of discontent in Cambridgeshire, where fires were set by angry mobs close enough to illuminate the Great Court at Trinity.
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Whewell assured Jones that his book would change things: “We will live through this storm and teach the world wise things when the winds have lulled again.”
⁴⁰

The writings of Malthus and Ricardo had succeeded in influencing public thinking about the problem of poverty, in a way that worried Whewell and Jones. If it was true that, as Ricardo supposed, men do as little as possible to get the most they can, then, people believed, Malthus was right: giving money to a poor man would not make him more industrious, but less so. Why should he work if he could be supported for free? The nineteenth-century equivalent of our modern-day refrain
about “welfare queens” was the image of an indolent, drunken pauper who used his relief money at the local pub and had more children in order to receive a larger family allowance. This iconic figure of the pauper led even clergymen like Whately, soon to be appointed archbishop of Dublin, to “thank God” he “never gave a penny to a beggar.”
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The combination of Malthus and Ricardo was a deadly cocktail for the poor, soon responsible for the imposition of a penalty for poverty that struck fear in the hearts of laborers throughout England: the workhouse.

Workhouses had existed before, but the Elizabethan statutes had led to their abandonment in favor of money payments. Slowly, however, as the influence of Malthus (and, later, Ricardo) spread, the workhouse was again seen as the panacea for poverty. In 1808 the parish of Southwell, in Nottinghamshire (where Lord Byron stayed with his mother on his holidays from Cambridge), built a workhouse for the poor members of the community. Holding eighty-four “inmates,” as they were called, the workhouse was intended to replace all aid to the poor. Instead of remaining in their own homes, with their families, while living on subsidies paid for by the rates on landowners, the poor were now forced to give up their homes and all possessions and enter into the workhouse in order to be fed. Families were separated, with men, women, and children living in separate quarters and allowed outside only in separate yards. Inmates were issued drab uniforms. The food was just enough to sustain life; the inmates were always hungry.
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The inmates worked hard for ten to fourteen hours a day: the women did the laundry and the mending and the scrubbing, men broke rocks in the yard or crushed bones for fertilizer, while children and the elderly “picked oakum,” untwining rough and inflexible rope fibers that were then sold to shipbuilders, mixed with pine tar, and used for caulking wooden ships. It was a grim existence, and was meant to be so: the idea was to dissuade all but the most desperate from entering. Many inmates would deliberately break the strict workhouse rules so that they would be transferred to prison, where the conditions were more comfortable and the rations more generous.
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Others preferred to starve in their homes rather than in the workhouse. The Reverend John Becher, who designed the workhouse at Southwell, later noted proudly in a book called
The Anti-Pauper System
that the parish expenditures on poor relief had been cut in half after the workhouse was open for business.
⁴⁴
In 1834
a new poor law was passed by Parliament, mandating that all aid to the able-bodied poor must take place in workhouses.

J
ONES AND
W
HEWELL
believed that the workhouse system was cruel, indeed evil. Having grown up in the shadow of Lancaster Castle’s debtors’ prison, Whewell was particularly compassionate toward the poor. He and Jones agreed that the current system needed to be reformed. Giving able-bodied laborers money without requiring work might well make them lazy, and less inclined to seek labor. But a more purely economic result was that it drove down the wages that employers paid; they knew they could get away with paying less than what a worker could live on, because the worker would receive aid from the parish to top off his wages. At the same time, Jones and Whewell felt strongly that the workhouse system was not the answer. Although the philosopher and political radical Jeremy Bentham had once described the workhouse as “a mill to grind rogues honest,” Jones and Whewell believed such places did nothing but turn honest and proud laborers into cowed and frightened men or, even worse, criminals and bullies.
⁴⁵
Moreover, as Jones told Herschel, “liberty and comforts of the
mass
are the conditions of obtaining great productive power.”
⁴⁶
A strong economy could not rest on the broken backs of enslaved laborers.

In a later book,
The Elements of Morality, Including Polity
(1845), published a decade after the new poor law was enacted, Whewell sharply noted the irony that at the very time Britain was emancipating the slaves throughout most of its empire, with the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, it had enslaved its own laborers. A worker was required to sell all of his belongings, including the furniture from his house and the tools of his trade, in order to receive relief in the workhouse. This made it impossible for a man to leave the workhouse and take up his trade again, as he could not earn the money to buy back those tools while in the workhouse, and thus reduced him to permanent “servitude.”
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Whewell suggested instead that the poor be educated, so that they could be trained to take up positions manufacturing and selling the new consumer goods that were beginning to flood the market as a result of the Industrial Revolution—glassware, textiles, iron pots, ceramics, and porcelain—and thus join the growing middle classes. This solution
contrasts markedly with the view of another prominent man of science, Davies Gilbert, a president of the Royal Society, who complained that “giving education to the laboring classes … would be prejudicial to their morals and happiness; it would teach them to despise their lot in life, instead of making them good servants.”
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The very year that Whewell’s book was published, a scandal at the workhouse in Andover, Hampshire, was splashed across the nation’s newspapers. The inmates at the workhouse had been put to work crushing bones for use as fertilizer. Conditions were so bleak that the men were found to be gnawing the remaining bits of meat and marrow off the moldering bones. It was whispered that not all of these bones were of animal origin; some had come from local graveyards. The intimation of cannibalism added to the public’s interest, and their horror. As a result of the publicity surrounding the shocking conditions at this workhouse and others, a tighter system of centralized control over the workhouses was enacted. Before long, relief was once again being offered to able-bodied paupers outside of the workhouse system.
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In this at least, Jones and Whewell would prevail.

W
HILE
W
HEWELL
was exhorting Jones to complete the book on political economy, he was running up against problems in his own domestic economy. As a fellow of Trinity, he was financially secure, even comfortably so. But this plush situation would have to be abandoned if he were to take a wife. Many of Whewell’s friends and acquaintances were aware that Whewell, then in his early thirties, wished to marry someday. Only Jones knew that there was someone in particular Whewell had in mind.

In 1823, Whewell had met Sir John Malcolm in his friend Julius Hare’s rooms at Cambridge. Sir John had written a history of Persia, and a political history of India that Jones would use as a resource for his political economy book. He had served in Bombay with General Arthur Wellesley, later created the Duke of Wellington. Hare, Whewell, and their friend Adam Sedgwick soon became frequent guests at Sir Malcolm’s estate, Hyde Hall, thirty miles from Cambridge.
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Lady Malcolm was a charming hostess; the three young dons were flattered and fawned over, given dinners and dances and hunting expeditions. The dons repaid their hostess by being charming, flirtatious, and highly entertaining guests. Whewell was described at one of these social evenings as perhaps going a
bit overboard, “overwhelming the young simplicity of a little girl with the guns of his great eloquence!”
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Everyone knew that Hare was smitten with Mary Manning, the Scottish governess to the Malcolms’ daughters. Hare’s nephew would later describe her in somewhat ambivalent terms: “She was very tall, serene, and had a beautiful countenance.… She had a melodious low voice, a delicate Scotch accent, a perfectly self-possessed manner, and a sweet and gentle dignity.” At the same time, however, her strong personality annoyed some, including Hare’s nephew, who also found her to be “the most egotistical woman in the world.” She flattered those she considered superior to her, but could be cruel to subordinates. The combination of wit and flattery was dangerous to a group of young dons, already inclined to share the belief that they were superior men.
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Hare was not the only one in love with Miss Manning. So was Whewell. But only Jones knew how serious this attachment was. Reading between the lines of a series of carefully written letters, it is clear that Whewell was weighing the pros and cons of asking Miss Manning to be his wife.

The first sign lies in Jones’s response to Whewell’s query about whether he should apply for the Lucasian Professorship of Mathematics when it became available in 1826. The Lucasian chair—Isaac Newton’s old position—was, and still is, one of the most prestigious professorships at Cambridge, held until 2009 by the brilliant physicist Stephen Hawking. Yet Jones discouraged Whewell, reminding him that the Lucasian could not be held at the same time as a church position or a college tutorship—it was not, then, a good situation for a married man without independent means, because the salary of the professorship itself could not support a family in comfort.
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Instead, Jones counseled, Whewell should hope to be appointed to the Mineralogy professorship, because the holder of that chair was free to seek a post as vicar or curate in a nearby village in order to supplement his income (Whewell had recently been ordained as a minister in the Anglican Church). Whewell had put himself forward for the Mineralogy chair the year before, but because of some confusion about whether the professorship would be filled at all, Whewell was in limbo until his appointment in 1828.

In 1827, while Whewell was still waiting to hear about the Mineralogy professorship, the Malcolms made a sudden, startling announcement: they would soon be leaving Hyde Hall, as Sir John had been appointed mayor of Bombay. This gave a greater urgency to Whewell’s deliberations
about whether or not to ask Miss Manning to marry him. Several letters between Whewell and Jones seem to be missing from this crucial period. No doubt Jones later burned some letters on Whewell’s request. But Jones kept a letter from Whewell describing his decision. “As to other matters, my purpose, and … my views are now quite clear and untroubled,” Whewell confided. “I have no hopes or wishes
there
, but at the same time I do not hope that any spot of the future contains so much of the elements of happiness.”

One problem was Whewell’s lack of position; to marry now would mean a bleak and penurious existence as, at best, a parish priest. Although sometimes Whewell romanticized the serenity of that life, he saw how hard it was for Jones to write his book while he and his wife struggled to subsist on the wages of a country cleric. It was still nearly impossible for a man of science to live on science alone. But Whewell also realized that Miss Manning, though alluring, was not the woman for him. “I can easily see great difference of feelings & character & manners, and a change on one side or both would have been requisite and would I doubt not have taken place if frequent intercourse and hopes not too distant had favored it,” Whewell explained to Jones. “But as the time is, and with the uncertain events & situations & feelings of the future … there is but one way; and though this is dark & dreary it is not very difficult. It is not very difficult to fix the thoughts upon the discordances I have [in the missing letters] spoken of, and upon the disappointment … of not attempting that which did not depend upon one’s self alone.”
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When the family finally left Hyde Hall for good, Whewell groaned to Jones that he would never be as happy again.
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Jones comforted him: “I can imagine how the final desertion of Hyde Hall chilled your bosom but I do not despair of seeing it warmed by a pleasure of better women.”
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Whewell’s bosom may indeed have been warmed by other women, but he would not marry for another fourteen years. His wife would be almost the polar opposite of Mary Manning.

J
UST AS
W
HEWELL
was deciding to forgo the pleasures of married life, Herschel was succumbing to them. His friends were relieved that Herschel had finally married; for a while it had seemed that he would never take this step, and would continue stumbling in and out of ill-conceived love affairs. (Babbage even accused Herschel of falling in love too easily.)
⁵⁷
After a second engagement, which almost resulted in a breach-of-contract lawsuit against him when he changed his mind, Herschel had buried himself in work. Having completed his study of the double stars, he decided to review each of the 2,500 nebulae that had been recorded by his father, most of which had not been viewed by anyone else since. Sir William had recently died, and it seemed a fitting tribute to him to provide confirmation of his observations.