Between Man and Beast Read online

  CHAPTER 21

  The Unveiling

  The storms that had broken windows and scattered shingles had finally moved on, leaving behind a damp, windless chill. Slowly, the city’s doors began to open, and those who’d spent days huddling inside their homes stepped out, testing the weather. Steam rose from the muzzles of the horses in the streets, but the cold was tolerable—nothing a heavy cape or a couple of petticoats couldn’t handle. The gas lamps flared a pale yellow, throwing long shadows across the wet cobblestones. By early evening, a cast of thousands was drawn moth-like into the city’s social swirl.

  Bonneted women in crowded omnibuses bumped shoulders in rhythm to the hollow clop of horse hooves. Aproned servants steered handcarts through the traffic. Men stumbled out of the smoky private clubs on St. James’s Street, joining a pedestrian flow that seemed headed in only one direction: toward Piccadilly Circus, the teeming roundabout that united Regent Street and Piccadilly.

  This was the beating heart of London’s West End, and the neighborhood offered something for anyone lucky enough to have a few shillings rattling around in his pockets on this Monday evening, February 25, 1861. Two blocks north on Drury Lane, Charles Kean, one of the most celebrated stage actors alive and a personal favorite of Queen Victoria’s, was getting ready to take the stage as Hamlet. A block to the west, Belgium’s Henri Vieuxtemps, the greatest violinist in the world, was about to perform Mozart in B-flat. At the Egyptian Hall, the actress and singer Emma Stanley was preparing to unveil a one-woman musical extravaganza that required her to make no fewer than thirty-seven complete costume changes.

  But those were sideshows, really. The main event—the hottest ticket in town—was about to start inside Burlington House, the enormous Palladian-style mansion that dominated Piccadilly.

  The private carriages that stopped in front of the building’s imposing brick gate unloaded a very particular breed of Londoner on this evening. Their clothes were designed not to merely fend off the cold but to be seen. The women wore evening dresses, puffy confections of crinoline and silk. The men wore black dress coats with velvet collars and fashionably wide lapels. Many had traveled in straight lines down Piccadilly from the stone mansions that lined Green Park. These were London’s aristocrats: lords and ladies, captains of industry, international statesmen, and intellectuals poised on the leading edge of science.

  But tonight they were content to be mere spectators, to fade into a crowd, and to be wonder-struck.

  INSIDE BURLINGTON House’s west wing, Paul clacked across the marble floors toward a stately grand hall. From high oak-paneled walls, enormous portraits of the men who put England at the symbolic center of the universe looked down with unblinking severity. Lion-maned heroes with penetrating eyes. Christopher Wren, Isaac Newton, Joseph Banks—giants who’d lifted English culture to unprecedented heights through the force of intellect and discovery. Each of them had, at various times, presided over one of the learned societies that anchored London’s intellectual life. Several of those institutions—the Royal Society, the Linnean Society, and the Royal Geographical Society—were now based here, inside this mansion. The men looking down from the walls were legends, and Burlington House was their legacy.

  Everything about the building, from the fluted Corinthian columns to the ornate chandeliers, exuded a regal confidence, and everyone pouring into the mansion’s great hall seemed right at home within that atmosphere.

  Everyone, that is, except Paul.

  He was embarrassingly unfamiliar with the rigors of Victorian etiquette. His English was tainted not only with French inflections but also with liberal doses of American slang. He flitted among the bystanders looking very much like the teenager washed up from the river. Even at the age of twenty-nine, he stood about five feet three and weighed just over a hundred pounds. Surrounded by the wintry complexions of Britain’s elite, his face looked like that of a sunbaked kid who’d spent too much time playing on a beach. His dark eyes were forever in motion, drinking in details, twinkling with something acquaintances invariably labeled “child-like wonder.” Almost everywhere he went in London—but never more so than here in Burlington House—he seemed a boy among men.

  From a small riser at the front of the hall, he looked out over the multitudes. The room was built to hold up to a thousand people, and it was packed to capacity. The crowd was thick with “savants”—those Victorian luminaries who were responsible for a frenzied percolation of ideas that would challenge the fundamental assumptions upon which Western society had been built. They were in the process of becoming legends, destined to take their places among the immortals on the walls. Together they were creating a new language for the whole world. Owen, who’d coined the term “dinosaur,” sat near the front of the room. Huxley, credited with inventing the word “agnostic,” lingered within striking distance. So did Francis Galton, who came up with the concept of eugenics. William Gladstone, who would lead England as prime minister four times, remarked that evening that he felt like “the lowest schoolboy in the school” when gazing upon the assembly.

  Paul struggled to control his nerves. His name was called. He walked to the center of the rostrum.

  HE BEGAN to speak but faltered. He sheepishly admitted to the audience that he felt a bit overwhelmed. He said that as a New Yorker, he couldn’t help but feel out of place. He knew it was an impossibly distinguished crowd, but the only person he recognized by sight was George Mifflin Dallas, who’d been the American vice president under Polk and was now the ambassador in London. “I trust he will offer me his protection,” Paul told the audience, risking a little humor.

  His humble admission of discomfort charmed the audience. As he continued to speak, some of his inhibitions began to melt. Animated gestures gave shape to his words. He slipped into the narrative flow of a natural storyteller.

  PAUL’S IRREPRESSIBLE energy, even when it wasn’t fueled by anxiety, often gave him the appearance of someone who was seconds away from boiling over with excitement. His hands rarely kept still, and his eyes never did. Young people loved him, seeing something playful inside him that invited connection. Owen’s children swarmed him when he visited Sheen Lodge, and Murray’s kids would beg the “Monkey Man” to tell them stories of the jungle. He always obliged, whispering when suspense required it, exploding in a pantomime of ferocity when their anticipation reached a breathless peak. One of his friends in London, Edward Clodd, remembered how Paul could hold his children spellbound with his animated tale of encountering the gorilla in the wild for the first time. “My children will never forget his telling it to them,” Clodd recalled. “His vivid imitation of the awful roar of the animal as he beat his breast with his huge fists, and of the terrible human groan with which he fell prone on his face, made them shriek with fear, so realistic was it.” Unlike most adults, Paul seemed to lack the veils that separated inner emotion from outward expression. His mix of vulnerability and indefatigable optimism could charm even the hardest hearts. Anyone with a natural tendency to root for the underdog tended to feel some indefinable tug toward him.

  At Burlington House, he unloosed that infectious charm on the crowd. In his quirky accent, he described the dangers he faced with an élan that flirted with false naïveté: it was as if encounters with unknown beasts and deadly serpents were inevitable hurdles in the life he had chosen and therefore didn’t warrant complaint. His youthful appearance and diminutive size made his hair-raising tales seem all the more dramatic. He wasn’t above mocking himself, and the audience rewarded him with laughter and applause. He was, in one magazine’s words, “almost the last man whom one at first sight would set down as a great explorer, adventurous traveler, and a naturalist of no ordinary attainments.”

  During his first lecture in England, his stage props boldly underscored the startling disconnect between the stoutness of his adventures and the frailness of his frame.

  Workmen had lugged the props into the building, two bulky parcels swaddled in coarse drugget. They eventually
unwrapped them on the riser behind Paul like fragile mummies recovered from dusty tombs. Under those layers of rough fabric, the parcels were revealed as oddly misshapen assemblages of arms, legs, teeth, and fur.

  They were stuffed gorillas, two full-grown adults positioned in attitudes of diabolical menace. No one in the crowd had ever seen anything quite like them, and they didn’t simply attract attention; they commanded it. Compared with the impish little man who lectured in front of them, they appeared to prove the idea that the monsters of nightmare really do exist.

  THE AUDIENCE was hooked on Paul’s every word as he described how he encountered the beasts and slew them. It didn’t matter that the gorillas had been displayed before in the United States. The lecture at Burlington House was the animal’s true unveiling—its red-carpet debut.

  As soon as the applause for Paul died down, Richard Owen made his way to the podium to make sure that no one in the room had missed the significance of what they’d just witnessed—“the most strange and extraordinary animal of the brute creation.”

  Before that night, the gorilla had been largely a mystery whose nature could only be guessed at. But now, Owen said, this young man had opened the world’s eyes to a wonder of the natural world that could not be more relevant or timely.

  “In natural history, as we go on comparing form with form, of course we soon become impressed with the idea of a connected scale, and the interest increases as we ascend,” Owen explained, dropping a reference to the theory of evolution. “But when we come so near to ourselves as we do in the comparison of this tailless anthropoid ape, the interest becomes truly exciting.”

  The crowd continued to stare at the gorillas, but if they looked very closely, they might have noticed that something was missing, and it spoke to Paul’s uncertainty addressing such a terrifyingly respectable audience. There were dozens of ladies in the lecture hall—unusual for the era, but indicative of the interest that Murchison and Owen had whipped up—and their attendance had concerned the young speaker.

  Fearful of offending, he had modified his exhibits to conform to what he assumed were proper codes of display in Victorian England.

  He had castrated them.

  THE NEXT day, when Paul and his friends looked to see what the press had written about the meeting, they discovered that the event had been almost completely overlooked. The Times, the paper of record in London, gave it only the slightest mention two days later.

  A few days after that, an anonymous reader identifying himself as “one of the oldest Fellows of the Royal Geographical Society” published a long letter to the Times to remedy the oversight. He wrote that he’d never attended a meeting at which more interest had been excited and that this “citizen of New York” deserved recognition on both sides of the Atlantic.

  Well-intentioned though it was, the letter proved unnecessary. Others were making more direct appeals for the newspaper’s attentions. The evening after Paul’s lecture, the editor of the Times, John Thadeus Delane, received a dinner invitation from Roderick Murchison.

  When Delane arrived at Murchison’s home in Mayfair, he found a dinner table crowded with luminaries. The Duke of Wellington was there. So was Owen. Joseph Dalton Hooker, who happened to be Charles Darwin’s best friend in addition to being a preeminent botanist, had also arrived. The guest of honor, the one Murchison wanted them to meet, was Paul.

  Delane was famous for keeping his cards close to his vest, rarely revealing what he thought of an issue or a person when in public, content to let his newspaper speak for him. The newspaper’s voice was his voice, and it was one of incontrovertible authority. Anthony Trollope created a recurring character based on Delane in his Barsetshire novels: Tom Towers, the editor of the Jupiter newspaper. According to Trollope, Delane sat in his office like a god atop Mount Olympus, “where, with amazing chemistry, Tom Towers compounded thunderbolts for the destruction of all that is evil, and for the furtherance of all that is good, in this and other hemispheres.” His opinion, so difficult to predict and so warily anticipated, was the only one that truly mattered throughout the British Empire. Trollope wrote that politicians yearned for his approval, the church feared him, and generals based their strategies less on their enemies than on what the editor might write about them. “It is probable,” Trollope wrote, “that Tom Towers considered himself the most powerful man in Europe; and so he walked on from day to day, studiously striving to look a man, but knowing within his breast that he was a god.”

  After that dinner, Delane didn’t reveal what he thought of Paul. But with Murray rushing to publish the adventurer’s book, Delane’s newspaper would get a chance to publicly judge the unknown young man who’d dined with so many bold-lettered names.

  Within weeks, Paul would become a bigger celebrity than any of the other men who’d been sitting around that dinner table.

  CHAPTER 22

  The Great White Hunter

  On a spring morning in Bloomsbury, deliverymen began hauling several heavy boxes into Mudie’s Lending Library.

  Huffing their way up the iron staircase, they could look down upon the library’s grand salon and get a bird’s-eye view of one of the liveliest businesses in the city. Men and women shouldered past one another through the door that led out to New Oxford Street. Dozens scoured the bookshelves for new titles, while others clamored around the front desk. It was a typical Saturday morning in the salon. Which is to say it was a madhouse.

  Charles Mudie, an aptly bookish man of forty-two years, lorded over this domain with the understated authority of someone with nothing to prove. His father had made a living selling magazines and secondhand books, and Mudie had been expected to follow in his footsteps as a traditional newsagent. But by the time he was twenty-three, he had completely transformed the family business—and the entire publishing world—by creating a lending library that would dictate the reading habits of Victorian masses for decades to come. If you asked someone in London to name the most influential man in the publishing world, you’d likely get one of two answers: those who knew anything about literature would say John Murray; those who knew anything about business would say Charles Mudie.

  Mudie’s big idea had been deceptively simple and absolutely irresistible for those who found the prices of books prohibitive: for a subscription fee of just a guinea—a little more than one English pound—a person could borrow an unlimited number of books during the course of a year, provided he or she checked out only one at a time. It was a business model that required a high volume of stock and steady flow of customers. Mudie had been wildly successful in securing both. In 1860, with business booming, he was able to open new branches in Manchester, York, Birmingham, and several other English cities.

  At his flagship location on New Oxford Street, the Ionic columns that stood in the main salon were mere decoration; what really supported the place was the books, which rose to the ceiling against every wall and numbered no fewer than 800,000 volumes. Light iron walkways allowed customers to browse the higher shelves. The long counter near the door was swarmed by subscribers returning books or checking out new titles. An average of 3,000 volumes changed hands over that counter each day. The books that had suffered too much wear and tear were tossed into a pile bound for the on-site “infirmary,” where broken spines were mended and ripped covers replaced. Those beyond hope were exiled to the “charnel house,” to be ground to pulp and mixed into manure.

  This was where almost everyone in Victorian London, with the notable exception of the wealthy, got their books. The market dominance of this single library meant that publishers catered to Mudie’s demands, and he exploited that power. Because he bought hundreds of copies of titles that he predicted would be popular, Mudie had the ability to single-handedly determine a book’s print run.

  When Mudie recognized an increasing public demand for long novels, he demanded that publishers break those stories into separate volumes, which enabled him to speed up his turnover and fulfill the demands of more of his subscribe
rs. In this way, Mudie invented the “Victorian three-decker.” He profoundly influenced the way many of the most influential novelists of all time structured, plotted, and paced their stories. He also forced publishers to charge the public artificially high prices—a scheme from which only Mudie was exempt. An average three-decker cost the reading public more than thirty-one shillings; Mudie paid just fifteen shillings.

  The publishers played along because it was the only way their books might find a place on Mudie’s advertised list of “Principal New and Choice Books in Circulation.” It was the Victorian version of the best-seller list, and it was determined by both popular demand and Mudie’s own sense of what was worth reading. If he considered a book salacious or improper, he banned it from the list.

  Since Mudie opened his lending library in 1842, a handful of titles had distinguished themselves as noteworthy successes, capturing the fancy of both Mudie and his loyal subscribers. The first was Macaulay’s History of England, which appeared in 1849. To fulfill demand, Mudie alone bought 2,500 copies of the book—more than most books sold in total. In 1858, Livingstone’s Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa superseded it, with Mudie eventually buying 3,250 copies from Murray and circulating them to an estimated thirty thousand readers.

  On this Saturday morning, the boxes lugged upstairs to Mudie’s storage room were filled with Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial Africa. Mudie, who’d had good luck with travel narratives and took a personal interest in them, ordered an unusually large initial quantity from Murray: 500 copies. He immediately cleared space to display the title on a prominent shelf.

  A long, jagged stripe of the new books ran halfway across the main salon. As more men and women reached for the copies, Mudie watched the length of the stripe steadily dwindle. On Monday, he sent a message to Murray informing him that he wanted to order 250 more copies. After that order was filled, Mudie on Wednesday requested another 500. On Friday, he ordered another 250 copies.