A Long-Distance Londoner

A Long-Distance LondonerAuthor(s): Peter BridgesSource: Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, Vol. 52, No. 1 (Jan., 1998), pp. 121-129Published by: The Royal SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/532081 .

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Notes Rec. R. Soc. Lond. 52 (1), 121-129 (1998)

A LONG-DISTANCE LONDONER

by

PETER BRIDGES

PO. Box 1154, Crested Butte, CO 81224, USA

Walter White (1811-1893), a self-educated cabinet-maker's son from Reading, failed to find success in America but after returning to England became one of the century's great walkers and published nine books about his rambles. Entering the service of the

Royal Society in 1844 as 'attendant' in the Society's library, White was promoted to become the assistant Secretary and Librarian in 1861 and served for over two decades in these key positions, befriending many of England's great writers and scientists.

Figure 1. Walter White (1811-1893)

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Peter Bridges

Walter White, an energetic Victorian, walked through Europe on long summer excursions that led him to write nine remarkable books recording a quieter, simpler, greener time. In the remaining months of the year, over the course of his professional life, White moved into a close and enduring association with England's great scientists and writers. He lived a long life and he went a long way, both professionally and on foot.

The new railroads of nineteenth-century Europe not only sped up industrialization, but made it possible for a new group of Englishmen to travel as never before. Earlier Englishmen who toured the Continent had tended to be wealthy, as indeed they practically had to be, given the cost of travel. The diarist John Evelyn in the 1640s took many months to complete a Grand Tour by slow coach and carriage, as did the young James Boswell in the 1760s. But by the 1850s, railroads were covering the newly industrialized Europe, and stretching beyond. In America, when Abraham Lincoln travelled east from Illinois to Washington to enter Congress in 1847, he had gone most of the way by stagecoach; by 1854, rails had stretched westward across Illinois to the Mississippi. Even in less developed Russia the new line from St Petersburg to Moscow, designed by the painter James Whistler's father, had been finished in 1851. Adventurous Englishmen visiting America came west by rail on their way to the Great American Desert; other adventurous Englishmen aimed at points in Europe, no longer needing weeks but now only a day or two to cover hundreds of miles by train. The physicist John Tyndall, best known today for ascertaining why the sky is blue, went to the Alps in 1849 to study glaciers, and in 1861 was the first man to climb the Weisshorn. Young Edward Whymper first took a train to Switzerland in 1860, to do engravings for his father's business, and five years later was the first person to climb the Matterhorn.

Among these new train-taking Englishmen was Walter White, not a climber but one of his century's great walkers, and also, like Tyndall and Whymper, a master of descriptive writing-although White's books, which went through several editions in his lifetime, have like Tyndall's been out of print for decades. (Whymper's Scrambles amongst the Alps is still in print, presumably because of its account of the tragic deaths of four of his fellow-climbers as they came down from the Matterhorn peak.) Like Tyndall, White did not come from a noble or even upper-class family. Tyndall's father had been a member of the Irish constabulary; White's father was a cabinet-maker and upholsterer at Reading in Berkshire, and Walter White was born there in 1811. He received a good, if brief, elementary education in a local school, and mastered French and German on his own. White was a restless young man. He became an accomplished cabinet-maker, but from boyhood he wanted to be a writer. By his early twenties he was offering articles to London magazines, and accumulating rejections. He had also, in his teens, begun taking long walks alone through the still unspoiled English countryside. He wrote in his diary-in French-that he never felt so much himself as on these solitary trips. On a long hike through Staffordshire when he was only 19 he met, and soon married, a young woman named Maria Hamilton.

Four years later, in 1834, Walter and Maria already had three children. Restless as ever, White took his family to America. It seemed a good time to emigrate. The Reform Bill of 1832 had left oligarchy in place in England, while in America, under

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President Andrew Jackson, there was democracy and opportunity; 1833 had seen the start of what looked like a new era of prosperity in America. A man named Copcutt, who had worked for Walter White's father, had emigrated to America and started a cabinet-making firm, which had made him rich. With great hopes, young White went to work for Copcutt & Son in New York City.

Walter White and his little family were among 600 000 immigrants to America in the 1830s, four times as many as in the previous decade, though far fewer than were to come later. Many of these immigrants prospered. Many others, including Walter White, did not. Clearly his heart was not in cabinet-making. He left Copcutt's and sought work, without great success, up the Hudson valley in Albany, Troy and Poughkeepsie. He disliked North America's cold winters and hot summers. Restless and impractical, he thought of taking his family on to Argentina, where at least the climate was better. Perhaps, he thought after one lecture and some tutoring in French in Schenectady, he could become a teacher and writer. For a moment in 1836 his journal recorded 'great anticipations respecting riches'. He was writing poetry as well as prose, and at one point White heard positive things about his poems, which spurred him to write more. But in the end nothing worked well. His little daughter died. In 1836 the American economy began to slide downhill; the Panic of 1837 began a long depression; wages fell 30 to 50 per cent and there was widespread unemployment among artisans like White.

In 1841 the New York editor Horace Greeley would tell his readers to 'Go west, before you are fitted for no life but that of the factory.' The advice came too late for Walter White, who in the spring of 1839 had already retreated to England with his wife and children, to work again for his father.

White's failure in America left him with bitter memories. Years later, walking through the English countryside, he met a party of emigrants getting ready to sail for America. White, who perhaps exaggerated slightly in his memory the heat and cold of the Hudson valley, wrote later that:

... as they had taken their berths, I did not tell them they would repent their expatriation. Thousands abandon their homes in England ... for a life of unmitigated drudgery in the backwoods ... in a climate which afflicts them with a West Indian summer and a Russian winter.'

The following summer, on a 420-mile hike through the green alps and snowy mountains of the Austrian Tyrol, White was more direct when he fell into conversation with a gang of men who were working on a country bridge in the Kaunserthal. In his 1856 book On Foot through Tyrol, White wrote that 'Some of their acquaintances had once emigrated to America, but sent home such very dismal accounts of their over-sea experiences, that no one felt inclined to follow. I did my best to confirm them in their attachment to fatherland, and cautioned them against seeking fortune beyond the Atlantic ... '2

But if America had meant failure, White found life in England less than ideal after his return in 1839. Although his father had offered him a place, there was simply not enough work. He thought of emigrating again, this time to New Zealand, where the Maoris' cession of sovereignty to Great Britain in 1840 had opened the way for English settlement. White's idea of going to another far country may have been the

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final straw for his wife, who took their four small sons and left him. But then things began, finally, to look up for Walter White, at least in other ways. He found a job in London as clerk to the music popularizer Joseph Mainzer, author of Singing for the Million. Mainzer took him to Edinburgh, where Mainzer was a candidate for a professorship. In Edinburgh, Walter White was befriended by a Scottish advocate named James Simpson, who was impressed with this Englishman in his early thirties who spoke French like a Frenchman, knew German and Italian as well, and was finally beginning to publish small works of poetry and prose. Simpson wrote to Charles Richard Weld, the Assistant Secretary of the Royal Society in London, that '... I was

particularly struck with the quiet efficient activity and discretion of all he did ... he is a self-educated man, but better educated than many gentlemen ... He understands books and can manage a library... It occurred to me to put Mr. White in your way ...'3

In April 1844 Walter White entered the employ of the Royal Society as 'attendant' in the Society's library. White began at a modest salary, £80 a year, but it was more than he had been earning, and he soon found additional compensation in the interesting men he met, some of Britain's great achievers-men like Thomas Carlyle, historian, mathematician, and Rector of Edinburgh University; Charles Kingsley, novelist and chaplain to Queen Victoria; Thomas Babington Macaulay, essayist, statesman and proponent of economic liberalism; and Michael Faraday the pioneer in electromagnetism. In 1846 White wrote of Faraday '...how pleasing it is to observe his recognition of the claims of his contemporaries ... even his subordinate receives honourable mention'. One notes here, as elsewhere in White's journals, his sensitivity as a self-made man to the attitudes of the celebrated and famous. He wanted recognition; and he was beginning to receive it.

White's acquaintances eventually included a number of England's major writers. In October 1850, he met Alfred Tennyson who was about to be named Poet Laureate. The friendship between the gloomy bard and the ambitious, only slightly younger White lasted for two decades. (White himself continued to write poetry; occasionally one of his poems found a place in a magazine; when he was in his sixties Macmillan published a volume of his, Rhymes.) In 1859 White was introduced to William Makepeace Thackeray. Soon afterward the great novelist, who had just written The Virginians as a tribute to America, where he had fared better than Walter White had done, invited White to join a number of distinguished contributors to a new periodical, The Cornhill Magazine. The same year White's journal records conversations with Thomas Carlyle, who criticized Macaulay's 'falsification of history' and Dickens's 'gloomy and depressing' Christmas stories, and with Thomas Henry Huxley, first of a great dynasty of scientists and writers. Huxley, one of Charles Darwin's strong defenders, tells White that Darwin's forthcoming Origin of Species 'will be attacked by naturalists, and by many religious people, but ... the time has come when men of science should refuse to be snubbed by parsons ...' Soon after, Darwin himself tells White that 'He is quite prepared for all the criticism and censure which the book will bring upon him ...' He did well to be prepared; the following year the Bishop of Oxford and other clergymen did their best, but failed, to discredit Darwin's work, which had already gone through three editions.

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White's reputation and responsibilities in the Royal Society continued to rise. After a decade of service, in 1854, his salary was raised to £150 per annum, almost double the initial amount. In 1861, when Charles Richard Weld resigned, Walter White was elected to replace him as the Assistant Secretary and Librarian. White, the first man promoted from below to become Assistant Secretary, continued to serve in that key position, and as Librarian, for more than two decades until he finally retired in 1885 at the age of 74. (After White's promotion, W.B. Wheatley was named to replace him as assistant in the Library, with the title of Clerk, and increasingly took over library affairs as White became more involved in the work of the Royal Society's committees.) On White's retirement, the Council of the Royal Society awarded him, as a mark of their appreciation, a pension equal to his full salary, which he enjoyed until his death in 1893.

White seems never to have found a companion to replace his wife. His published journals speak of large dinner parties and dances, but not of intimacies. He must, whatever his sexual interests, have understood the need for discretion. His predecessor, Weld, had been forced to resign because he had 'introduced a lady' into the apartments of Burlington House, then the seat of the Society, which was where Weld lived.4

White's wife had borne him four sons, in addition to the daughter who died in America, and after she left him he tried to stay close to the boys; for a time two of them lived with him in London. Later, like their father, the four boys all acquired a wanderlust and emigrated-to White's grief, said his brother-first to America and then to Australia. His son Harry, when White last heard from him in 1872 after five years' silence, had become a petty officer on an American vessel in the Pacific. Family life for Walter White proved a failure.

The man at the Royal Society had always found diversions in writing and in walking. Soon after he entered the service of the Society these diversions began to prove rewarding. In 1844 his Scottish friend James Simpson had recommended him not only to the Royal Society but to Chambers's Journal. Within five years Messrs Chambers published more than 200 articles by Walter White. Eventually White contributed to a wide range of journals, and his articles covered a wide range of subjects, from public health to Arctic exploration. The pay from these articles rounded out his salary nicely and soon White was no longer poor, although he was continuing to support his wife's separate household. In late 1849 his journal notes '... what a

change in my ability and circumstances [since 1844]. Then imperfect powers and almost penury-now tolerable command of language ... with an income sufficient for all my wants ...'

In 1850 White started a series of great walks during his summer vacations from the Royal Society, which gave him a month's leave each year. Over the next three decades he published a series of nine beautifully written books on his walks across Britain and on the Continent. Some undoubtedly interesting trips did not result in books, including a walk one summer across the mountains of Norway with an American, G.W. Prime. White's unfortunate experiences across the ocean seem not to have turned him against Americans. However, like many Englishmen his sympathies during the American Civil War lay not with the North, where he had lived, but with the Confederate States. After

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the war, in 1867, he met at least one Northerner he liked, perhaps because he turned White's head. This was Henry Morris, a wealthy Philadelphia foundry owner who came to call on White at the Royal Society. Morris told White that he had first read his books in a Philadelphia library, and had then bought all eight that had so far been published.

White was not the first Englishman to take long walks. The memoirs of walking tours by Thomas Coryate and William Lithgow date from the early 17th century. Before White's time, the 20-year-old William Wordsworth had done a walking tour of the continent in 1790; John Keats, despite poor health, had walked through Scotland in 1818. In White's time, Leslie Stephen, mountaineer and editor of the Dictionary of National Biography, once walked 50 miles from Cambridge to London in 12 hours to attend a dinner of the Alpine Club.5

White was an unusually sturdy walker, and unusual too in how much, and how well, he wrote about his rambles. On each of his first two summer rambles on the Continent, the first through Holland and the second through France to Mont Blanc, he walked over 300 miles. In July 1854 he took a train west from London to Southampton and in the course of a month walked 425 miles to Lands End. In part his route followed what is now the South West Coast Path. White did not walk quite all the way; he took an old and already rare stage-coach for 30 miles through Dorset. Some days, as he records in A Londoner's Walk to the Land's End published in 1855, he walked over 30 miles. He had just turned 43, and was in his prime.

White records an England much quieter and more rural than today, although even today a walker in the New Forest can find, as Walter White did, that:

...you are overshadowed by grand old beeches, the growth of centuries, with gray and

mossy roots that grasp the soil for yards around, and ample spreading branches that tower aloft with their glistening leaves.6

And today a walker in Devon can still see, approaching Dartmouth, '... the windings of the river between the leafy hills and fruitful fields that slope towards it from each side' and then the '... rare little town, quaint old houses-real studies; narrow and hilly streets ...'7

When in late July 1854 White finally reached Lands End, he thought he would find complete solitude, but there was an intrusion, a public house and outbuildings. Worse was to come. Not quite a century and a half later, Lands End had become what the Wall Street Journal would describe in 1996 as a tourist trap with an ersatz seaside village, while an Australian guidebook called it 'the pits' and warned tourists to avoid it.

White turned back eastward from Land's End and walked to Tintagel. He had read his friend Tennyson's 'Morte d'Arthur', published a dozen years earlier, and on at least one occasion had brought the poet's attention to a new scholarly paper on King Arthur and the Round Table. White had Tennyson in mind as he climbed around the ruins of Tintagel, trying to imagine the castle in the days of Arthur.

After White's walk through Cornwall he kept in touch with Tennyson on Arthurian matters. Late one afternoon in March 1859 Tennyson came by White's office and:

He read to me one of the chapters of his Legends of Arthur ... a grand musical intonation in his deep sonorous voice. We stood by the mantelpiece in my office, and he read on one

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hundred and forty pages, until the story was finished. 'Tis admirably told, the contrast between Merlin's and the harlot's nature well sustained ... There is however that in it which will shock the 'unco guid' folks. Spoke my mind and advised him to publish ...8

Whether Tennyson needed encouragement from Walter White is not clear. White himself noted that eminent persons including William Gladstone were encouraging Tennyson in his Arthurian works. In any case, four months later Tennyson published the first installment of Idylls of the King, including what he had read to White from 'Merlin and Vivien'.

One can imagine the Poet Laureate and the librarian of the Royal Society, each of whom had been frustrated in love, standing in the gathering gloom of White's office while Tennyson declaimed what for Victorians must have seemed somewhat erotic verse:

There lay she all her length and kiss'd his feet, As if in deepest reverence and love. A twist of gold was round her hair; a robe Of samite without price, that more exprest Than hid her, hung about her lissome limbs ...9

Several years later, in 1862, Tennyson came to consult White on another subject. He had written a poem set on a tropical island and, never having seen the tropics, he wanted to see some pictures of the tropics to verify his description. White had never been to the tropics, either, but the Society's library apparently provided what the poet needed. Two years later Tennyson published 'Enoch Arden', with its description of:

The sunrise broken into scarlet shafts Among the palms and ferns and precipices; The blaze upon the waters to the east ...10

White seems to have made friends easily, not only with men like Tennyson and Darwin, but with simple people. His accounts of summer walks in Europe are replete with casual conversations in country inns with country people, usually in their own language, French or German or even Italian. It helped that he liked beer. ('The morning was very hot, and the Engel at Goetzis so invitingly clean, that I could not help calling for a Halbe, half-measure, of beer. It was brought in one of those heavy tapering glass tankards, covered by a bright pewter lid, which you find everywhere in use on both sides of the Bavarian frontier ...') Despite White's young dreams of

going to Argentina and New Zealand, the farthest south he ever reached seems to have been the point just beyond 41 degrees north latitude known as Manhattan. His explorer friends and acquaintances reached much farther, south and north. In 1845, White had met that 'fine kind-hearted old gentleman' Sir John Franklin1, who was to sail two months later on his third Arctic expedition, intent on finding the Northwest Passage. Franklin never returned. White's journals for the next decade note the efforts made to find Franklin and his men, concluding with an expedition financed by Lady Franklin. In September 1859, White's journal tells the result. The expedition had found the Northwest Passage, but 'Sir John died in 1847, the ships were abandoned in 1848: the track of the crews was followed to Montreal Island, where the last survivors must have perished miserably ...'

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These were also the years of great exploration in Africa. In 1865 White was introduced to James Grant, who with John Speke had recently discovered the source of the White Nile. The person who brought White and Grant together was Dr David Livingstone, the Scottish doctor and missionary, who had first gone out to Africa in 1840. In 1865 Livingstone, who as White noted was still wearing a gold-banded cap from his service as consul in Mozambique, was preparing yet another journey to Africa. That journey was to last five years, until the journalist Henry Morton Stanley found and rescued the dying explorer in an East African village.

Walter White's own summer excursions were relatively more modest but sometimes adventuresome. His Alpine walks took him to precipitous paths and the edge of abysses, and produced occasional encounters with local officials who wondered if this curious solitary foreigner, who walked instead of riding like others, might be a spy. Once, walking in a snowstorm over the 9000 foot Stelvio Pass into then Austrian-ruled Lombardy, White was stopped by two Austrian gendarmes who insisted he return north into the Austrian Tyrol, even though he produced an Austrian visa good as far south as Venice. After a long argument, White refused to move, and said they would have to carry him. They finally let him go. The indignant Englishman continued his journey thinking about those great rebels of the region, Andreas Hofer and Jan Hus.

After humble beginnings, and sad failure, White made a productive, if often solitary, life. Moder people pressed by office cares, their atmosphere polluted and their vacations all too short, can envy the figure of the middle-aged Walter White sitting by a cool brook under a beech tree in the Black Forest, looking into the distance at the cathedral spire of Freiburg and the pale blue Vosges mountains. It is, he said, no small privilege to be able to come home:

... with recollections of majestic headlands and foam-fringed bays; of breezy moorlands; of heath-clad hills and sheltered valleys; of pleasant field-paths and of lonely lanes, where streamers of hay filched from passing wains hang on the hedgerows and overhanging trees; and, not least, of kindness among strangers.12

The rural England and the rural Europe of Walter White have largely vanished, but the few remaining copies of his books tell us much of what the countryside and country people were like, and how a city man could come to terms with country beauty. In the archives of the Royal Society traces still remain of the hard-working man who, for decades, worked and wrote near the centre of England's intellectual life.

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NOTES

1 W. White, A Londoner's Walk to the Land's End, 2nd edn, p. 110 (London, Chapman and Hall, 1861).

2 W. White, On Foot through Tyrol in the Summer of 1855, pp. 87-88 (London, Chapman and Hall, 1856).

3 Quoted in The Journals of Walter White, pp. 56-57 (London, Chapman and Hall, 1898). 4 Marie Boas Hall, The Library and Archives of the Royal Society 1660-1990, p. 35 (London,

The Royal Society, 1992.) 5 A. Holt, 'The Origins and Early Days of the Ramblers' Association', pp. 7-10 (London, The

Ramblers' Association, 1995). 6 Op. cit., note 1, p. 3. 7 Op. cit., note 1, p. 82. 8 Op. cit., note 3, p. 150. 9 The Complete Poetical Works of Tennyson (ed. W.J. Rolfe), p. 370 (Boston, Houghton

Mifflin Company, 1898). 10 Ibid., p. 235. 11 White, who at 60 was still walking 20 miles a day, was 34 when he met Franklin; the 'old

gentleman' was about to turn 59. 12 Op. cit., note 1, p. 249.

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A Long-Distance Londoner