John Phillips and the Business of Victorian Science

Jack Morrell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780815389996
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351154864
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

John Phillips was one of the most remarkable and important scientists of the Victorian period. Orphaned at the age of seven and brought up by his uncle, he rose to hold a number of highly prestigious posts within the British academic and scientific community, despite lacking a university education. By the time of his death in 1874 he was widely regarded as one of the pioneers and champions of the science of geology, yet until now there has been no full length biography of Phillips. In rectifying this lacuna, Jack Morrell has produced a meticulous and magisterial piece of scholarship that does justice to the achievements and legacy of John Phillips. Adopting a broadly chronological approach, the book not only traces the development of Phillips's career but clarifies and highlights his role within Victorian culture, shedding light on many wider themes. It explores how Phillips' love of science was inseparable from his need to earn a living and develop a career which could sustain him. Hence questions of power, authority, reputation and patronage were central to Phillips's career and scientific work. Drawing on a wealth of primary sources and a rich body of recent writings on Victorian science, this biography provides a fascinating and compelling account of John Phillips and his legacy. Pulling together his personal story with the scientific theories and developments of the day, and fixing them firmly within the context of wider society, this biography will be vital reading for anyone with an interest in the history of British and nineteenth-century science.

Part I
The Scientific Apprentice 1800-1834

Chapter 1
The Apprentice Mineral Surveyor

1.1 The education of an orphan

John Phillips was born on Christmas Day 1800 at Marden in Wiltshire. What was in many ways the determining event in his life occurred just seven years later, when both his parents died within the space of six months. Inevitably 1808 was a year of affliction: he was old enough to be able to remember the death of his father and his mother’s death-like woe. For years afterwards his recollection of happy childhood was tinged with deep sorrow: looking backwards was like re-opening half-closed wounds. Phillips realised that he was dependent on others for shelter, food, clothing, and education. It seems that he was left financially destitute. In all his tribulation there was, however, help at hand: William Smith, his uncle, became his kind protector, and he derived support from the closer attachment to his sister, Anne, after his parents had died. It may well be the case that Phillips’ suffering early in his life made him yearn for a contented and secure life free from affliction, helplessness, and poverty. Perhaps, too, the love and charity shown to him as an orphan boy indicated that, cruel as fate might be, neither the hope of God’s blessing nor Christian faith was illusory.¹

Phillips became associated with William Smith as a result of the mobility and marriage of his father, also John. He was the younger son of a Welsh family which for generations had lived at Myddfai in Carmarthenshire. Born in 1769 he was educated to follow several of his relatives into the church but in 1795 he moved to Bristol to pursue a career as an assistant excise officer. Though often reviled, such a post was not humble and required training in mathematics and the use of instruments. Next year Phillips was promoted to be in charge of the Stow-on-the-Wold area in Gloucestershire and moved to nearby Oddington where he met Elizabeth Smith whom he married in her home village of Churchill, Oxfordshire, in 1798. She was the daughter of John Smith, a blacksmith, and had three brothers, William (an engineer and mineral surveyor), Daniel, and John. Soon after his marriage Phillips was transferred to Market and West Lavington in Wiltshire and the couple set up home in Marden where their first two children, Ann (who died in infancy) and John were born. In 1801 Phillips resigned his post with the excise and moved to Midford near Bath where a second daughter, Anne, was born in 1803. The family might then have lived at Tucking Mill House, between Midford and Monckton Combe, which William Smith had bought in 1798. In mid-1803 Phillips rejoined the excise, was put in charge of Deddington, Oxfordshire, and his family moved to nearby Steeple Aston where a second son, Jenkin, was born in 1806. That year he was promoted to an excise post in Coventry to which the family moved. He died there in January 1808. His widow and children moved to Churchill, but she died in July 1808 leaving three orphans. Faced with this double tragedy, her husband’s family did nothing but her three brothers responded nobly: Jenkin stayed at Churchill in the care of Daniel Smith while John and Anne were looked after by William Smith (Fig.1.1). Early in 1809 he took them to his brother, John, who lived at Broadfield Farm, between Hinton Charterhouse and Midford.²

Fig.1.1 Hughes Forau’s painting of 1837 of William Smith, then aged sixty-eight, shows his sturdy strength of mind and body.

Phillips’ early life was nomadic: he lived in at least five different places and attended four different schools. Clearly William Smith realised that his nephew needed stability. Having taken the advice of his friend, the reverend Benjamin Richardson, in 1809 Smith sent Phillips to David Thomson Arnot’s school at Holt in Wiltshire and paid for his education there for five years. John Smith also gave his nephew security by welcoming him and his sister into his household, either at Broadfield Farm or Tucking Mill House, from 1809 to 1815. Phillips never complained about the education he received at Holt. His skill in drawing, so useful to him subsequently, was encouraged. He enjoyed mathematics, via Mole’s Algebra and Simson’s widely used edition of Euclid, an interest he retained for the rest of his life. He became a good Latinist who was able to read and to write the language. He read, spoke, and wrote French in abundance, an acquisition which was particularly useful later when he studied French scientific works and met French savants. He learned enough Greek to be able to master it subsequently. Though there was apparently no formal teaching of science at Holt school, Phillips was given a small microscope which he employed enthusiastically on shells, plants, and insects. This was the origin of Phillips’ interest in instruments, which was subsequently expanded to designing and making them himself.³

By 1814 William Smith’s financial circumstances had deteriorated so much that he was twice arrested in London for debt, being freed only through the intercessions of Sir Joseph Banks, his chief patron and president of the Royal Society. In any event Holt school itself was on the verge of financial collapse: its owner became bankrupt in 1815. In summer 1814 Richardson came directly to Phillips’ aid: he invited the thirteen-year-old boy to live and study with him at his rectory at Farleigh Hungerford, six miles south-east of Bath. Presumably he liked what he had seen of Phillips who, when not at Holt school, lived no more than three miles from Farleigh. Smith had good reasons for approving the invitation. He knew that Richardson would ‘polish’ Phillips and further his education in science and literature. Presumably Smith welcomed the prospect of his nephew being a private pupil of an Anglican clergyman. No doubt, too, Smith looked forward to saving on school fees. The arrangement with Richardson worked so well that Phillips stayed with him for twelve months from summer 1814. For the rest of his life he revered Richardson’s kindness and generosity. In 1844 he took good care to dedicate his life of Smith to Richardson as ‘the loved associate of his early studies ‘. Though Phillips never attended a university he regarded Richardson’s home as the equivalent.⁴

Richardson had graduated in 1781 at Christ Church, Oxford, where he studied classics and mathematics. Though he valued polite literature highly, he esteemed natural history even more and became an accomplished naturalist. after ordination and several curacies, he finally settled in Farleigh as its rector in 1796. In that very year Smith, then surveyor to the Somerset Coal Canal Company, joined the exclusive Bath and West of England Agricultural Society through which by 1797 he met Richardson, an active member who was devoted to experimental agriculture and the provision of allotments for the poor. Though he was a botanist of Linnean persuasion and an archaeologist, his favourite pursuit was collecting and naming local fossils, the provenance of each being noted by him. At that time he had no notion of either the laws of stratification of rocks or the connection between the order of the strata and their fossils. When Smith saw Richardson’s fossil specimens, he applied to them his general principles that the same strata were always found in the same order of superposition and contained the same peculiar fossils. Without knowing their provenance, he arranged Richardson’s specimens in the order of strata from which they had been derived. Richardson was so astonished that Smith knew which strata the fossils exclusively belonged to that he agreed to accompany Smith in a field trip to test his principles. The site chosen was Dundry Hill, south of Bristol, where they were joined by Richardson’s close friend, the reverend Joseph Townsend, rector of Pewsey, Wiltshire. To their amazement, Smith’s principles and inferences were illustrated and confirmed. In June 1799 when this geological triumvirate was dining at Townsend’s house in Bath, Richardson wrote down Smith’s dictated list of strata in the vicinity of Bath, in descending order from the chalk to the coal. To this description was added where possible a list of the most remarkable fossils in each stratum. Their names were mainly supplied by Richardson who also helped Smith to decide finally on terminology for the strata. Copies of this pioneering stratigraphic document were circulated in 1799. Two years later Richardson disseminated extensively copies on cards of the list of strata in the Bath area. By these means Richardson ensured that Smith’s discoveries became widely if informally known. The original version of 1799 in Richardson’s handwriting and Smith’s accompanying geological map of the Bath area, completed in 1799, were presented to the Geological Society of London in 1831 when Smith became the first recipient of its Wollaston medal. The table of strata remained unpublished until 1815 when it was inserted in the memoir which accompanied Smith’s geological map of England and Wales.⁵

After 1799 Richardson tried to spur Smith into publication by giving him useful local information and by urging him to assert his originality. Even in his early seventies Richardson was still lamenting that Smith had not finished what he had begun: he had not completed his Strata identified as the best introduction to Smith’s ‘own science’. In addition to prodding Smith, Richardson made an important contribution to Smith’s memoir, which accompanied his famous map of 1815, by pointing out omissions and mistakes in a proof of a list of strata. Publicly he supported Smith on two important occasions. In February 1815 he certified to the Society of Arts, apropos Smith’s successful application for its £50 prize and medal for a mineralogical map of England and Wales, that it was accurate and the most important work of its kind ever published. One of his last acts before he died was to write in 1831 to Sedgwick, then president of the Geological Society, to testify to Smith’s originality and to justify the award of the Wollaston medal to him. Both affidavits, vital for Smith’s reputation, were published.⁶ Unlike Townsend, a prolific polymath who gave a full exposition of Smith’s discoveries in 1813, Richardson published nothing but he did promulgate Smith’s views whenever he could. The young William Buckland, reader in mineralogy (1813) and geology (1818) in the University of Oxford, was happy to learn from Richardson about the succession of oolitic rocks as enunciated by Smith. Richardson was long and widely known for promoting geology in general. When the reverend William Daniel Conybeare wanted help in fieldwork on the lower oolite strata south of Bath, he was guided by Richardson and published the results in his well-known book. In the late 1820s William Lonsdale, though then resident in the area, was deeply indebted to Richardson for information about the oolitic rocks around Bath. Richardson made the cabinet of his fossils so freely available and donated so many specimens to museums that on his death it was almost empty.⁷

As a person Richardson’s dominating feature was ‘very singularly great benevolence’. Phillips was not the only youngster to benefit from it. Harry Jelly, a relative of Mrs Richardson, was orphaned in 1801 and Richardson brought him up. When Phillips went to Farleigh he began a life-long friendship with his exact contemporary. Jelly went on to become, like Richardson, a parson-geologist and fossil collector. Jelly’s cabinet of fossils was so rich that the adult Phillips used it for two of his monographs. Unlike Richardson, Jelly did field work, discovering while an undergraduate at Oxford fossils in the ironsand on Shotover Hill and in the 1830s publishing papers on Bath fossils. Though nothing is known in detail about Richardson’s religious views, it is clear that for him there was no clash between Christianity and Smithian geology. It is also clear that Richardson was the epitome of generosity and benevolence in his private life. It is not fanciful to suggest that he presented to the impressionable and grateful Phillips an inspiring example of a Christian philosopher. He was a model of practical as opposed to pontificatory Christianity. He showed to the young Phillips that contentment was attainable provided one spurned avarice and used one’s financial affluence unselfishly and charitably.⁸

Richardson opened Phillips’ mind. The clergyman was au fait with recent geological works, he was an expert on zoological and geological nomenclature, and he talked with Phillips endlessly about plants, shells, and fossils.⁹ The surrounding area of south Bath was the boy’s geological playground where he avidly collected oolitic fossils. It is inconceivable that Richardson did not expound to him Smith’s views about stratigraphy and the identification of strata using characteristic fossils. Phillips enjoyed the free run of Richardson’s well-stocked library and used its reference works when sorting, classifying, and naming Richardson’s fossil specimens. By March 1815 and aged fourteen, Phillips was capable of making lists of fossils for Smith and furnishing him with mineralogical information derived from Richardson’s copy of Werner’s account of the formation of metallic veins in rocks. Phillips also improved his skill as a drawer by copying the illustrations of fossils made by Townsend for his Character of Moses.¹⁰ At the end of his idyllic interlude with Richardson, Phillips, not yet fifteen years old, was well informed about natural history and geology, especially the systematic classification of fossils. As Phillips put it in 1819 in a draft preface to a projected work on fossil conchology, he learned from Richardson, not Smith, the general principles of geology and ‘the proper regulative system of classifying fossil shells’.¹¹ When Phillips arrived in London in late 1815 to help his uncle, he did not need to serve a long apprenticeship in cleaning, naming, and cataloguing Smith’s collection: he knew enough to be an effective assistant immediately and much of his knowledge had been derived from Richardson. Though Phillips presented himself from the late 1820s as the nephew and pupil of Smith, his first teacher and father-figure had been Richardson. Indeed, between 1809 and 1815 Smith’s incessant travelling precluded him from teaching his nephew regularly. The boy had no access to his uncle’s main collection of maps and fossils which were housed in London. Perhaps when Smith visited the Bath area Phillips may have learned from him something about surveying. Apart from receiving instruction from Smith in 1810 about fossil sea lilies in the cornbrash stratum, Phillips learned no geology directly from his uncle until late 1815.¹²

1.2 Cabinet assistant to Smith

When Phillips’ pleasant interlude at Farleigh ended in summer 1815, he spent some time at Tucking Mill before joining his uncle in London in November. The fourteen-year-old orphan lost his beloved oolitic hills of Somerset: they were replaced by a view of the river Thames from his uncle’s house at the eastern end of Buckingham Street, off the Strand. Phillips exchanged the rural calm of the rectory at Farleigh for the bustle, noise, and impersonality of the metropolis. He left all his friends and all his relatives back in the west and south-west of England. His sister, Anne, did not come with him and he was not to meet her for over a decade. The only person he knew in London was his uncle and guardian who needed the help of his nephew in order to keep afloat financially. Smith’s large geological map of England and Wales had been published in August 1815 and by autumn he was trying to make money by issuing copies to subscribers and purchasers. His financial circumstances were so desperate that he had begun to negotiate with the government about selling his fossil collection to the British Museum. In both these projects Phillips’ knowledge, ingenuity, and ability were prospectively useful. He was therefore brought to London for financial as well as altruistic reasons. As Smith’s six-year-old marria...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations, Conventions, and a Note on Monetary Values
• List of Illustrations
• Introduction
• PART I: THE SCIENTIFIC APPRENTICE 1800-1834
• PART II: MAKING A CAREER 1834-1853
• PART III: THE OXFORD PROFESSOR 1853-1874
• Conclusion
• Appendix 1: Lecture courses given by Phillips to YPS
• Appendix 2: Lecture courses given by Phillips outside York
• Bibliography
• Index