Between Man and Beast Page 14

  Lent fathered a child with Pastrana, but the pregnancy was riddled with complications. She gave birth to a son while they were on tour in Moscow, and the boy was afflicted with the same condition as his mother. He died two days later. Pastrana died three days after him.

  Lent, however, wasn’t ready to let go of his livelihood. He preserved the corpses of both his wife and his son.

  In 1861, Lent arrived in London with the remains of his family. He placed them within glass cases. Both were positioned in stiff, upright postures.

  “The figure,” wrote the Lancet, in describing Pastrana’s remains, “is attired in a dress of her own making, and it stands before us without the slightest odour, the slightest change, or the slightest appearance of corruption. The child is preserved with equal success in the same manner.”

  The author of the Lancet piece added that Pastrana’s face appeared to be “the facsimile of the gorilla.”

  AS HE banged out the final chapters of Great Expectations, Charles Dickens continued to edit his weekly magazine, All the Year Round. Between serialized installments of his new novel, he published articles of general and literary interest. It was a demanding job, because Dickens believed every word printed in the magazine should be considered his own.

  In the spring and summer of 1861, the novelist repeatedly indulged a recurring fascination with gorillas. Dickens would later write to Richard Owen, “If you knew how much interest it has awakened in me and how often it has set me a-thinking, you would consider me a more thankless beast than any gorilla that ever lived. But you do not know, and I am not going to tell you.”

  In the pages of All the Year Round, Dickens aired his obsession. His first of two articles about gorillas was both an appreciative summary of Paul’s book and a meditation on what separates all things human from all things beastly. For Dickens, the difference seemed a matter of character development.

  The magical transformation that had turned a gorilla into a man, the article stated, was perhaps the greatest miracle imaginable. Because humans were armed with intellect, morality, and a soul, the separation between mankind and apes was absolute, according to the magazine.

  “The stupid weak savage will still make a prey of the yet more stupid but enormously more powerful gorilla, for the one uses reasons, and the other has only his instincts,” the article stated.

  As he grappled with the ending of Great Expectations, Dickens made sure his characters’ fates were determined by their abilities to engage their intellects, moral sensibilities, and souls. He wrote two endings for his novel: in the first, his hero (Pip) and the girl he loves are kept apart, their love unrequited; in the second version, they exit the narrative hand in hand, presumably together forever.

  Dickens chose the happy ending. Some critics would condemn his decision on the grounds of sentimentality, but the author stood firm, cynics be damned.

  The novelist believed he knew exactly where such pessimists—Englishmen who “put a bad construction upon every word and deed”—should go: they should be thrown among the same deadly serpents, brutal savages, and vicious beasts that Paul Du Chaillu had encountered in Gabon.

  “A gentleman of this disposition would enjoy himself to his entire satisfaction in the Gorilla Country,” according to Dickens, “and the best thing he can do is to go there, and—to stay there.”

  R. M. BALLANTYNE had become the world’s most popular writer of books for boys with the publication of The Coral Island—an adventure about three English youths shipwrecked on a Polynesian island. But by 1861, the success of that book, though just four years old, was already a fading memory. Ballantyne had since written three other books, but none sold as well. So he decided to write a sequel to the story that had made him famous.

  Instead of another remote island, he set the new novel in the place boys now dreamed of being stuck: equatorial Africa.

  In the book, the boys encounter elephants, hippos, biting ants, and slave traders. They hear fantastical legends about “hideous creatures one beholds when oppressed with nightmare.” Eventually, the young heroes encounter the beasts, including one that “had broken Jack’s rifle across, and twisted the barrel as if it had been merely a piece of wire.”

  The boys prevail in the end, earning a reputation among the natives as “the greatest hunters that had ever been born.”

  The sequel to The Coral Island was rushed into print in 1861 with the title The Gorilla Hunters.

  LIKE HIS rival Charles Dickens, the novelist William Makepeace Thackeray edited a literary journal, the Cornhill Magazine, and in 1861 it was serializing chapters of his latest novel.

  Thackeray, a satirist whose novels included Vanity Fair and The Luck of Barry Lyndon, saw the cartoon titled “Am I a Man and a Brother?” in Punch, and he interpreted it as a veiled attack upon his magazine. “About the gorilla,” he wrote in a letter to the co-founder of his magazine. “What do you think? That Punch picture is certainly against us.”

  Thackeray based his hunch, which was almost certainly wrong, on the fact that a recent installment of his novel had described a character with a “tea-spoonful of that dark blood.” Thackeray had written that the character could expect to be rudely treated in America, but in England he’d be considered “a man and a brother.” Somehow, Thackeray thought the editors of Punch were suggesting that he was an ape—a “Literary Gorilla,” as he termed it in a satirical response printed in the Cornhill Magazine.

  It might have been a case of literary paranoia, but Thackeray’s suspicion made one thing clear: comparing someone to a gorilla had become the most fashionable and inflammatory insult of 1861.

  LONDON’S POLICE courts were clogged with clusters of the city’s unemployed, the down on their luck, the desperate.

  On a day in mid-1861, a young woman was brought before one of the court’s magistrates. She was accused of physically assaulting her little brother.

  Her defense was one the court had never heard before. She justified the beating by explaining that her brother had called her “a gorilla.”

  FROM THE wings of the stage inside the Lyceum Theatre in the West End, a man named H. J. Byron watched nearly two thousand people fill the seats. Men and women were decked out in their best evening dress, in the mood for fun. Byron and the other members of the Savage Club—a bohemian social circle that comprised mostly journalists, playwrights, and actors—were eager to oblige.

  The occasion was, officially at least, a fund-raiser for widows and orphans. But unofficially, it was the chance to see some of the most well-known satirists in London show off their wit and drollery in a farcical burlesque full of puns and topical jokes.

  As Byron strode onto the stage to introduce the show, he wore a costume of thick fur underneath his top hat and long-tailed formal coat. It was as if Mr. Gorilla had stepped out of the pages of Punch and onto the Lyceum’s stage.

  “Behold me here!” Byron announced to the crowd. “ ‘The Lion of the Season.’ Mr. Gorilla!”

  In rhyming couplets, Byron explained that the stage-door keeper hadn’t properly introduced him—because the man had run away in terror from the infamous creature of “Monsieur Chaillu.”

  Say, “Am not I a savage and a brother?”

  Do not I bear in this especial case

  A strong resemblance to the human race?

  Then let me hope, with pardonable vanity,

  To prove a link ’twixt our and your humanity.

  In brief—for sure I need no longer pause—

  In your good-will let me insert my claws;

  Spare not, I pray, your purses or your palms,

  The actors crave your hands, the fatherless your alms.

  THE ACTORS from the Savage Club weren’t particularly creative in their choice of material. Every day of June on Regent Street, actors at the Grand Fancy Fair and Musical Festival performed Gorumba and Little Billy, a story about “Monster Gorillas” captured from the wilds of Africa and brought to England.

  Exactly one day after that
play ended its run, another show titled Mr. Gorilla opened at the fifteen-hundred-seat Adelphi Theatre. The playbill advertised Paul J. Bedford in the lead role of Paul Grandy, while an actor identified only as “An African Gentleman” had to settle for second billing in the title role.

  AFTER WITNESSING the success that John Murray was having with Explorations and Adventures, Harper and Brothers published an American edition. Even though the country was in a civil war, it was published with much fanfare. According to some calculations, it was America’s best-selling book of 1861.

  An American critic in the National Quarterly Review chastised his countrymen for overlooking Paul while he’d been among them. He wrote of the “excellent opportunity wasted by them” when the young man had been in New York just a year earlier.

  “And this man we allowed to pass by almost unnoticed,” the reviewer lamented. “One or two interesting evenings at the rooms of the Geographical Society, two or three invitations to exceptional private houses, an almost deserted exhibition in a broken-down building on Broadway, and some cuts in Harper’s Weekly, were our whole welcome to the man who has made all scientific Europe ring again and again with discussion over his discoveries.”

  The gorilla had become an international sensation, a symbol of a new and sometimes frightening era of discovery, and Paul had become an icon in his own right, swept up in a cultural tornado that soon carried him away.

  CHAPTER 24

  Three Motives

  Even the most bleary-eyed patrons of the Elephant & Castle, stumbling out into the street from a fog of pipe smoke and ale stink, couldn’t have helped noticing that this grimy corner of London was in the throes of a dramatic conversion.

  The Surrey side of the Thames, a place where all the city’s omnibus routes originated and the site of one of South London’s busiest train depots, for years had been a drifters’ hangout. The neighborhood’s defining landmark had always been the pub, which had begun as an inn but was now one of the most notorious “gin palaces” in the city. Moral crusaders could often be found outside, temperance pamphlets in hand. But in the first half of 1861, directly across the street from the pub’s swinging green doors, a new structure was rising out of the ground. This massive edifice of gray stone slowly grew to dominate the neighborhood. It was called the Metropolitan Tabernacle, and it was built specifically to accommodate the followers of a young Baptist preacher named Charles Haddon Spurgeon.

  It was a new kind of cathedral, custom-made for a new kind of religion. With six stone columns out front, the exterior of the Greek-style building looked nothing like a traditional church. Inside, instead of rowed pews on the church floor, tiered balconies with iron filigree railings accommodated about five thousand seats, and standing-room sections could hold a thousand more people. There was no pulpit on the large oval stage—just a table, some chairs, and a couch. It looked less like a house of worship than like a concert hall. If it had been built a century and a half later, people might have called it a megachurch.

  Traditionalists were aghast. They couldn’t believe that Spurgeon charged five shillings for entry, as if he were some sort of song-and-dance man. Admission was strictly first come, first served.

  “A monster place of worship, like all other monstrosities, is of a very doubtful propriety,” observed the social critic Philip Cater; “indeed, monsters should not be permitted to live.… Those who have no shillings or sixpences to spare, will please to keep outside the building; for, according to the new order of things, the gospel is no longer without money or without price. It will be useless to make a rush at the doors without tickets, for the police will be stationed there to prevent all unqualified sinners from entering in!”

  Spurgeon didn’t care. He felt that charging admission not only raised money for his ministry but made people value his sermons more. He understood the dynamics of supply and demand, and he wasn’t afraid to apply them to religion.

  “Some persons, you know, will not go if they can get in easily,” he explained to his followers, “but they will go if you tell them they cannot get in without a ticket.”

  His crowd was distinctly working-class, occupying “the social zone between the mechanic and the successful but not fashionable tradesman,” according to one early observer. From the week the doors opened in March 1861, Spurgeon almost always attracted a full house.

  Spurgeon roamed the tabernacle’s stage like a prizefighter, and he had the nicknames to match: the Prince of Preachers, the Soul-Winner, the Son of Thunder.

  He’d started out as a sort of novelty act, a boy preacher who spread the gospel at revivals across the English countryside, reared by a father and grandfather who’d been preachers themselves. By the time he was a teenager, he’d already become the pastor of his own church, the New Park Street Chapel. He was an established phenomenon—the voice of a new evangelicalism.

  “I was told, and I believe, that in Agricultural Hall, in London, a place described as being like an unenclosed space for vastness, he made himself distinctly audible to 12,000 people,” reported William Cleaver Wilkinson, a contemporary who wrote an introduction to Spurgeon’s first biography. “It is even credibly affirmed that in the Crystal Palace, at Sydenham, he spoke, and was everywhere perfectly audible, to an assembly of 20,000 people.”

  In those days before microphones, Spurgeon guarded his voice as carefully as an opera singer. Backstage at the tabernacle, he’d sip chili vinegar with water, and he spiced his tea “as strong with pepper as can be borne” to keep his vocal cords in shape.

  “Let us commence the present service by offering up a word of prayer!” With these words, he began his Sunday services that would attract an average of five thousand people each Sunday for thirty-one years.

  At the exact same time that Charles Spurgeon became England’s first superstar evangelist, he got his hands on Paul’s book.

  He devoured it, reading night and day from the first page to the last. As a traditional Christian, he considered the theory of evolution heresy, and the book’s descriptions of an animal that was supposedly man’s nearest animal relation were of an occupational interest. But the passages that stood out for Spurgeon were the ones in which Paul came across as a shining Christian example among the tribal heathens. Spurgeon took special note of this description of the adventurer among native Africans:

  December 19th was Sunday by my account. I sat in my hut and read the Bible, and a great crowd came around and watched me with wondering eyes. I explained to them that when I read it, it was as though God talked with me. Then, to gratify them, I read aloud, and afterward tried to explain to them something of the teachings of Christ.

  Spurgeon saw Paul not simply as an explorer and hunter but as a torchbearer bringing the light of God to the Dark Continent.

  Shortly after he finished Paul’s book, a member of Spurgeon’s congregation suggested that since all of England seemed to be obsessed with gorillas, why didn’t the reverend address the topic at the tabernacle? The man, a painter, offered to provide Spurgeon with whatever visual props he might need.

  “Let me paint a set of slides on the gorilla, and you give us a lecture,” he told Spurgeon.

  “Very well,” Spurgeon said. “I will do it.”

  He knew that the traditionalists would find it uncouth, to say the least, for a man of the cloth to speak about gorillas in a house of God. But the subject would, Spurgeon knew, draw an awful lot of people to his church’s door.

  ABOUT 150 miles to the north, a Georgian mansion called Walton Hall sat on an island in the middle of a lake. It was the home of one of the most eccentric men in a country that claimed no shortage of them.

  To reach Walton Hall’s front entrance, visitors crossed a cast-iron bridge, then followed a stone footpath. Two large bronze knockers molded into the shapes of human faces stared out from the door. One was smiling. The other was contorted in an agonized grimace. The faces representing mirth and misery offered visitors the opportunity to choose a preference. If the visito
r reached for the smiling face, he’d struggle for a moment before realizing the joke was on him: the rapper was welded down. That left no choice but to pick misery.

  For the uninitiated, entering the vestibule was like stumbling into a nightmare. The sculpture of a mongrel incubus leered overhead—a baroque beast with the face of a man, the horns of a demon, the tusks of a wild boar, the ears of an elephant, and the wings of a bat. One leg ended in a cloven hoof and the other in a talon, which clutched a luckless serpent. The Latin inscription on the sculpture read, Assidens praecordiis pavore somnos auferam: “Sitting on the region of the heart, I take away sleep by fear.”

  With each step deeper into the house, the place got stranger.

  Past the entrance to the dining room hulked the grand staircase, which led up through a dreamlike menagerie of dead creatures stuffed into vague approximations of their living forms. At the foot of the stairs sat something labeled lusus naturae, or “freak of nature”: it appeared to be a sheep’s head, but the horn was protruding from its ear. Each step of the staircase offered a new spectacle of the bizarre: carnival-colored birds from Brazil, monstrous lizards from Africa, an enormous boa constrictor. At the top of the staircase was a caiman—a crocodilian species native to Central and South America—that measured more than ten feet from snout to tail. Legend had it that the owner of this house had wrestled the creature to the death in the jungles of South America.

  But that was when he had been a much younger man.

  Now, in the summer of 1861, he was seventy-nine years old. But he hadn’t lost any of the quirkiness that had defined his character since boyhood.