The Trial of Elizabeth Cree (13 page)

The day before, he had visited the manufacturing works in Limehouse where the last calculating machine had been assembled. As early as the 1830s Charles Babbage had managed to construct a “Difference Engine” which could perform simple sums, but he soon became preoccupied with the far more complicated “Analytical Engine” which could add, subtract, multiply and divide as well as solve both algebraic and numerical equations; it had also been able to print out the results of its calculations onto stereotype plates. This was the engine which Gissing had come to see. He was a novelist rather than a philosopher, and had decided that the best way of understanding Babbage’s concepts was to look upon the great object itself. The manufactory, which housed both the calculating engine and two workshops, was situated at the lower end of Limehouse Causeway just beyond the church of St. Anne’s. It was said that Babbage had chosen this location because of his fascination with the large white pyramid which had been erected in the church grounds, and he is supposed to have remarked to a friend that “the number of stones combined in a triangular pyramid can be calculated by simply adding successive differences, the third of which is constant.” But the friend did not understand him and, in any case, the truth is more prosaic: Babbage had worked before with Mr. Turner, a maker of machine tools, and had purchased the building near that gentleman’s house along the Commercial Road in order to expedite his work. Gissing found it easily enough and was greeted by a now very elderly Turner whose present function, according to the terms of Babbage’s will, was to maintain the engine “until the public mind is fully prepared for its use.”

Gissing presented him with a letter from the editor of the
Pall Mall Review
which confirmed his identity, and his intention to write about the work of Charles Babbage; such precautions were necessary because there had, all that year, been rumors of industrial spies sent over from France to glean the latest mechanical intelligence. Mr. Turner took an inordinate amount of time reading the letter, which he seemed to regard as a document of the utmost complexity, and then he returned it to Gissing with an old-fashioned bow. “Would you care to see the engine at once?” was the first question he put to him.

“I should very much like to see it. Thank you.” Gissing had a harsh and nervous manner of speaking which, perhaps, reflected the chaos which he sensed within himself.

“Then if you would follow me.” He took Gissing through an old workshop which had obviously not been used for some time: it was perfectly neat and, with its wooden tables scrubbed and its instruments highly polished, had become a finished memorial to the work of Babbage and of Turner himself. Here they had labored together over the wheels and cogs which comprised what was called the “mill” of the calculating engine. Samuel Rogers, the famous wit, professed to believe that it had been named in honor of John Stuart Mill; but Babbage assured him that it was a reference to the Albion Mills by the Westminster Bridge Road which he had first seen as a child. Those flour-making devices had convinced him even then of the benefits of mechanical advancement.

“If you care to go through, sir. Do mind your step, for the stone can be treacherous.” The old man led Gissing into the great room which housed Babbage’s calculating engine; a row of neo-Gothic windows decorated the upper level of the chamber, and their light filtered downwards onto the glistening machine. This was the dream of Charles Babbage—a computer built more than a hundred years before any of its modern counterparts, which now gleamed like a hallucination in the light of September
1880. The scientists and professional mechanics of the nineteenth century had instinctively turned away from it, without realizing why they had done so: this engine was not in its proper time and, as yet, could have no real existence upon the earth.

So how had it come to be created? Charles Babbage had once been found in the reading room of the Analytical Society, poring over a table of logarithms, and a colleague asked him what problem he was considering. “I wish to God,” he replied, “that these calculations could be accomplished by steam.” It is one of the most wonderful sentences of the nineteenth century, and in an oblique fashion confirms another of Babbage’s extraordinary suppositions. He had once declared that “the pulsations of the air, once set in motion by the human voice, continue into infinity,” and he went on to speculate about this constant movement of atoms. “Thus considered,” he wrote, “what a strange chaos is this wide atmosphere we breathe! Every atom, impressed with good and with ill, retains at once the motion which philosophers and sages have imparted to it, mixed and combined in ten thousand ways with all that is worthless and base. The air itself is one vast library, on whose pages are forever written all that man has ever said or woman whispered.” Charles Dickens read this account, which was published as part of Babbage’s “Advertisement” for an edition of his
Ninth Bridgewater Treatise
, and was profoundly impressed by a vision which so closely resembled his own. Certainly it seemed to correspond with Dickens’s understanding of London, amplified in
Bleak House
and
Little Dorrit
, but in fact Babbage’s ideas were most effectively conveyed in
The Mystery of Edwin Drood
—Dickens’s unfinished novel which was preoccupied with the themes of death and murder and which opened, curiously enough, in the very area of Limehouse where George Gissing now stood.

“Here, sir, are the cards.” Mr. Turner took from his pocket a number of perforated pieces of zinc. “Some are variable cards.
The rest are numerical or combinatorial. Mr. Babbage got the notion from the workings of a loom, and he applied it here.” But Gissing was staring at the mechanism itself. It seemed to be in four separate sections, with a central engine rising some fifteen feet towards the roof; to Gissing it was a giant form of rods and wheels and squared pieces of metal, so imposing and yet so alien an artifice that he was tempted to kneel down and worship it as if it were some strange new god. How could such a thing have been erected in the middle of teeming Limehouse? “The heart of the engine is here, sir.” Mr. Turner walked over to the largest section of the machine, and gently touched a tall vertical axis of wheels and cards. “Mr. Babbage devised a mechanism which allowed the engine to anticipate the numbers which had to be carried over. It stored the operations it had already used, and could then predict the movement of the figures. Do you see the beauty of it?”

“It is a very ingenious contrivance.” Gissing hardly understood what he was being told but it already seemed to him, as to his contemporaries, some eccentric monstrosity; he had just been reading Swinburne’s study of William Blake, for an article he had proposed to the
Westminster Review
, and the parallel that occurred to him was with Blake’s Prophetic Books. These works—the Analytical Engine and Blake’s mad verses—seemed equally the work of curious and obsessive men who labored in the production of designs which only they themselves could fully comprehend.

“The mill itself has ten distinct features, which include the digit counting apparatus, the repeating apparatus and the combinatorial counting apparatus. By means of these racks and cages, sir, the carriages of the engine can step down or step up. The cards here push forward the levers, which in turn cause the motion of these wheels.”

“I am afraid it is baffling to someone like myself. It requires too great a leap into the mysteries of mechanism.”

“But if you wish to write—”

Gissing anticipated the criticism. “That is true, of course. But I intend to discuss Mr. Babbage’s social philosophy which, I am sure, lay behind all of these calculations. He was a philanthropist, was he not, who believed in the greatest good of the greatest number?”

“Oh, that was always his concern. He came here two days before his death, sir, to superintend the making of some new number cards out of zinc. He was as busy as ever. Always the same. Always with his energy.”

“He died eight or nine years ago?”

“October 1871. I had been his foreman for twenty years, sir, and knew how he was harassed and frustrated on every side by officials and scientists who could not understand him. He was highly intelligent, sir, and so he was an object of suspicion to lesser men. He had the dream of a grand analytical engine to assist in the affairs of the entire nation, but it came to nothing. Now, you see, I am getting to your point.” Gissing realized that he was not dealing with a mere foreman; this man had obviously shared in the aspirations of his employer. “There are many problems and difficulties in Limehouse, sir, as you must have realized. You need only to have walked through the streets to this manufactory, and you would have seen what no man in a Christian country should see. The loose women even ply their trade against the walls of the church opposite.” Turner could hardly have suspected that the man he addressed was married to one such woman. “And then there have been these terrible killings.”

“Corruption exists everywhere, I know. But surely it is the poverty and misery in a place such as this which bring it on?”

“That was going to be my own precise point, sir. That was
what Mr. Babbage also believed: if only we could calculate the incidence and growth of the poor, then we could take proper measures to alleviate their condition. I have lived along the Commercial Road for many years, sir, and I know that with notation and data we might take away all the sorrow.” Turner was not here directly quoting his employer, who had in fact written that “the errors which arise from unsound reasoning neglecting true data are far more numerous and more durable than those which result from the absence of facts.” Babbage went on to describe the virtues of “mechanical notation” which might be used to create tables concerning “the atomic weight of bodies, specific gravity, elasticity, specific heat, conducting power, melting point, weight of different gases and solids, strength of different materials, velocity of flight of birds and speed of animals …” This was his vision of the world, in which all phenomena were notated and tabulated; it had been conjured up like some golem here, in Limehouse, among the disease and suffering.

Gissing has been looking intently at the giant machine—could this voluminous and intricate engine truly be the agent of progress and improvement? No, it could hardly be so. For why was it that he felt a shrinking uneasiness in its presence? He was tired and hungry (all he had eaten that day was a slice of bread and butter), and in his enfeebled condition he was suddenly invaded by a further and more acute sense of anxiety. It seemed to him, for a moment, that this machine was like some metal demon summoned by the sullen appetites of men. But then the panic passed, and he was able to consider it more soberly. He no more believed in progress than he believed in science, and he could not imagine a world in which either of them proved to be an irresistible force. He had been a poor man all of his life, and was even now living with Nell in a garret room off the Tottenham Court Road, but he placed no faith in those who considered
that urban poverty could be miraculously removed or even alleviated. He knew enough of London to realize that its condition was irredeemable. He thought of himself as an “individualist,” in the idiom of the time, who understood the true nature of the world. In fact, despite the connotations in the title of his first novel,
Workers in the Dawn
, Gissing was neither a radical nor a philanthropist; he had no real pity for the sufferings of the poor, except as a form of self-pity, and at a later date he was to write: “I have always regarded as a fact of infinite pathos the ability men have to subdue themselves to the conditions of life.” He wrote, too, that “suffering and sorrow are the great Doctors of Metaphysic.” He may have been condoning here his own failure to pursue an academic career but, in any case, was such a man likely to be convinced of the efficacy of the Analytical Engine? But then why, when he observed it glistening in the autumn light of East London, was he filled with a sense of fear? He had seen enough now. He thanked Mr. Turner for showing him the engine, and stepped out into Limehouse Causeway.

A man and woman were fighting in the street and, as he passed, he smelt the unmistakable aroma of spirit drinkers; he knew it well. Then a window opened above him, and he heard a woman calling, “As long as you live in this ’ere ’ouse, it shan’t go on!” These were what Gissing knew to be the “conditions of life,” but he ought to have understood that these same “conditions” had created the giant machine which he had just examined. There was an intimate connection between the vast computer lodged in the manufactory and the very atmosphere of Limehouse. He might have noticed, for example, the white pyramid in the grounds of the church of St. Anne’s which had so impressed Charles Babbage himself. A journey towards the mysteries of London might then begin with an examination of that pyramid and the Analytical Engine; both stood in some direct relation to sorrow, and to the desire for purgation or escape.
Indeed this might be how the modern computer was conceived, as part of a narrative far more extraordinary and capacious than
Workers in the Dawn
.

In the novels which Gissing subsequently wrote, there are often coincidental events and chance encounters; when asked about these devices he generally declared that “this is what happens” or “this is the way life is.” He may have been correct in this assumption but he was also speaking from direct experience: as he now walked through Limehouse Causeway towards Scofield Street, for example, he saw his wife running across the road ahead of him. He had not seen her for three days, but he was accustomed to her sudden absences. He hardly had time to consider what she might be doing in this place, and he shouted out “Nell!” The woman turned, and then stepped into an alley. He followed as quickly as he could, but by the time he came to the entrance of the alley she had disappeared into a warren of dilapidated lodgings which hung over it. He could not just leave her here and walk away: he guessed that she was pursuing her old profession in a fresh locality, if only to earn the money for her drink, and without any certain sense of direction he entered the house closest to him. He peered up a narrow staircase and began to climb the first flight, but then he turned around and through the porch saw his wife hastening back into the street. Once more he followed and observed her moving quickly northwards; it became a long pursuit but he kept her in sight until she came out into Whitecross Street by Fore Lane, where she entered a mean tenement. Gissing stood on the opposite side of the street, in the shadow of a derelict coffee shop. A German band passed as he waited there expectantly, and caused such a distraction among the taverns and beer parlors of the neighborhood (where any diversion was welcomed) that Gissing was afraid Nell had somehow managed to slip away into the surrounding courts and alleys. He approached the house slowly but
then, in a sudden moment of fury at the behavior of his wife, he banged very loudly upon the door. It was opened at once by a small, pretty young woman who was curiously dressed in a riding outfit.