The Times Great Victorian Lives

It will not be supposed that Mr. Robert Stephenson’s labours were confined to the construction and survey of railways. We have reports of his on the London and Liverpool systems of waterworks. In 1847 he was returned as member of Parliament for Whitby, in the Conservative interest. He took a great interest in all scientific investigations and was a member of more than one Scientific Society. As a specimen of his liberality in the cause of science, it may be mentioned that he placed his yacht the Titania – and it is said he had the best manned yacht in the Squadron – at the disposal of Professor Piazzi Smyth, who was sent out with very limited means to Tenerife to make sundry scientific observations, and thus materially assisted the researches of that gentleman. In the same spirit he came forward in 1855, and paid off a debt amounting to 3,100l., which the Newcastle Literary and Philosophical Society had incurred, his motive being, to use his own phrase, gratitude for the benefits which he himself had received from it in early life, and a hope that other young men might find it equally useful. It was like the man to do so, for, as we have already suggested, his heart was worthy of his head, and in one form or another he was always doing good.

Robert Stephenson, the only son of George Stephenson, died at his house in Gloucester Square, north of Hyde Park, on 12 October 1859, just short of a month after Brunel. The achievements of both men were a matter of national pride but Stephenson’s relatively humble origins and somewhat basic education rendered him all the more heroic as a prime example of what Samuel Smiles styled ‘Self Help’. Smiles approvingly quotes Stephenson’s modest claim that the development of the railway locomotive was due to ‘not one man, but to the efforts of a nation of mechanical engineers.’ Robert Stephenson was buried in Westminster Abbey underneath a monumental brass designed by Sir George Gilbert Scott. A window in the west aisle of the north transept of the Abbey, installed in 1862, commemorates both Stephensons, father and son.

WILLIAM MAKEPEACE THACKERAY

Novelist and humourist: ‘He…shrouded an over tender heart in a transparent veil of cynicism.’

24 DECEMBER 1863

MR. THACKERAY was found dead in his bed on Thursday morning. Sudden as the loss of Peel, or of Talfourd, or of Lord Macaulay, whose death saddened the Christmas holydays three years ago, – sudden, also, as other recent deaths of able men who laboured worthily in the world’s eye, but whose calling did not bring them so near as that of a foremost novelist to the world’s heart, has been this new cause of public grief. For a few days past Mr. Thackeray had been slightly unwell, yet he was about among his friends, and he was out even on Wednesday evening. But when called at about 9 o’clock on Thursday morning he was found dead in his bed, with placid face, having apparently died without suffering pain. Mr. Thackeray’s age was but 52, and he seemed a man large, vigorous, cheerful, with yet a quarter of a century of life in him. There were some parts of his character that never felt the touch of his years, and these were tenderly remembered yesterday at many a Christmas fireside. There was to the last in him the sensibility of a child’s generous heart that time had not sheathed against light touches of pleasure and pain. His sympathy was prompt and keen, but the same quick feeling made him also over sensitive to the small annoyances that men usually learn to take for granted as but one form of the friction that belongs to movements of all kinds. He was sensitive to his sensitiveness, and did in his writings what thousands of men do in their lives, shrouded an over tender heart in a transparent veil of cynicism. Often he seemed to his readers to be trifling or nervously obtruding himself into his story when he was but shrinking from the fell discovery of his own simple intensity of feeling. In his most polished works, Vanity Fair, Esmond, or the Newcomes – in which last book the affected cynicism, that, after all, could not strike deeper than into the mere surface of things, is set aside, and more nearly than in any other of his works discharge is made of the whole true mind of William Makepeace Thackeray – in these his masterpieces there is nothing better, nothing more absolutely genuine and perfect in its way than the pure spirit of frolic in some of his comic rhymes. He could play with his ‘Pleaseman X,’ very much as a happy child plays with a toy; and how freely and delightfully the strength of his wit flowed into the child’s pantomime tale of the Rose and the Ring. It is not now the time for taking exact measure of the genius of the true writer we have lost. What sort of hold it took upon the English mind and heart his countrymen knew by the sad and gentle words that yesterday connected the sense of his loss in almost every household with the great English festival of lovingkindness. There are men who, appealing to widely spread forms of ignorance or prejudice, have more readers than Mr. Thackeray, and yet the loss of one of these writers on the eve of Christmas would have struck home nowhere beyond the private circle of his friends. Whatever the extent or limit of his genius, Mr. Thackeray found the way to the great generous English heart. And the chief secret of his power was the simple strength of sympathy within him, that he might flinch from expressing fully but that was none the less the very soul of his successful work. Quickly impressible, his mind was raw to a rough touch; but the same quality gave all the force of its truth to his writing, all the lively graces to his style. That part of him which was the mere blind he put up at the inconveniently large window in his breast, degenerated into formula; and there were some who might be pardoned for becoming weary at the repetition of old patterns of sarcasm at the skin-deep vanities of life. But the eye was a dull one that could not look through this muslin work into a mind that so to speak, was always keeping Christmas, although half ashamed to be known at the clubs as guilty of so much indulgence in the luxuries of kindly fellowship, and so continual an enjoyment of the purest side of life. Whatever little feuds may have gathered about Mr. Thackeray’s public life lay lightly on the surface of the minds that chanced to be in contest with him. They could be thrown off in a moment, at the first shock of the news that he was dead. In the course of his active career there are few of his literary brethren with whom he has not been brought into contact. At one time he was a fellow-worker with us in this journal. He worked much and variously; many and various also were his friends. To some of the worthiest in the land he was joined in friendship that had endured throughout the lifetime of a generation, and there are very humble rooms in London where there were tears yesterday for him whose left hand did not know what his right hand had done in silent charity.—Examiner

Thackeray was found dead on Christmas Eve morning in 1863 at the house he had built for himself at Palace Green in Kensington. The obituary reflects both the admiration and affection in which he was held by his contemporaries, but it makes no mention of his education, his early struggles to make a name for himself in the literary world and, above all, of his difficult private circumstances. In 1836, by which time he had squandered most of his inheritance, he married Isabella Shawe who was to bear him three daughters (two of whom survived into adulthood). In 1840, after an attempted suicide, Isabella was diagnosed as incurably insane and was confined to a private mental asylum. She was not to die until 1894. Charlotte Brontë, who was ignorant of Isabella’s condition, had caused some real embarrassment to Thackeray when she dedicated the second edition of Jane Eyre to him in January 1848. There was idle speculation concerning a supposed connection between the character of Mr. Rochester and Thackeray himself.

NICHOLAS, CARDINAL WISEMAN

First Archbishop of Westminster: ‘the only [English Roman Catholic] who had earned for himself a wide and lasting reputation for ability and learning.’

15 FEBRUARY 1865

WE REGRET TO learn that the long illness of his Eminence Cardinal Wiseman has at length reached a fatal termination. He died yesterday, at the comparatively early age of 62.

Nicholas Wiseman was the son of the late Mr. James Wiseman, merchant, of Waterford and of Seville, in which latter city the late Cardinal was born on the 2nd of August, 1802. The family of Wiseman is one of considerable antiquity, and they appear to have had lands in the county of Essex since the reign of Edward IV. Soon after the Reformation Sir John Wiseman, who had been one of the Auditors of the Exchequer under Henry VIII, and was knighted for his bravery at the Battle of Spurs, acquired by purchase Much Canfield-park in that county. His grandson, William, who married into the noble family of Capel, afterwards Earls of Essex, was created a baronet by King Charles I in 1628, and a younger brother of the second baronet was Lord Bishop of Dromore. The title has continued in a direct line of succession down to the present time and is now represented by Sir William Saltonstall Wiseman, eighth baronet, who is a captain in the Royal Navy. From a younger branch of this family the late Cardinal traditionally claimed descent. His Eminence’s mother, whose maiden name was Strange, and whose family, in spite of large confiscations of their property under Oliver Cromwell, is still seated at Aylward’s Town Castle, in the county of Kilkenny, lived to see her son elevated to a Cardinal’s hat, and died full of years in 1851.

Though born upon Spanish soil, young Nicholas Wiseman, when he was little more than five years old, was sent to England. He arrived at Portsmouth in January, 1808, in the Melpomene frigate, Captain Parker, and was sent, while still very young, to a boarding school at Waterford. In March, 1810, he was transferred thence to the Roman Catholic College of St. Cuthbert, at Ushaw, near Durham, where he remained until 1818. In that year he obtained leave to quit Ushaw for Rome, where he arrived in the December of that year and became one of the first members of the English College, then recently founded at Rome. In the next year he had the honour of preaching before the then Pope, Pius VII, and, having pursued with diligence the usual course of philosophical and theological studies, he maintained a public disputation on theology, and was created a doctor in Divinity July 7, 1824, shortly before the completion of his 22nd year.

In the following Spring he received holy orders, and in 1827 was nominated Professor of Oriental languages in the Roman University, being at that time Vice-Rector of the English College, to the rectorship of which he was promoted in the year 1829. He had already distinguished himself, not merely as a theologian, but also as a scholar, for in 1827 he composed and printed a learned work, entitled Horoe Syriacæ chiefly drawn from Oriental manuscripts in the Library of the Vatican.

Dr. Wiseman returned to England in 1835, and in the winter of that year delivered a series of lectures, during the season of Advent, at the Sardinian Chapel in Lincoln’s-inn fields. In the Lent of the following year, at the request of the late Bishop Bramston, then Vicar-Apostolic of the London District, he delivered at St. Mary’s, Moorfields, another course of lectures, in which he vindicated, at considerable length, the principal doctrines and practices of the Roman Catholic Church, and with such success, that the Roman Catholics of the metropolis presented him with a gold medal, commemorative of their gratitude and of their high regard for his talents and acquirements. These ‘Lectures’ were speedily followed by a ‘Treatise on the Holy Eucharist,’ which occasioned a theological controversy with Dr. Turton, the late Bishop of Ely, and by another work, in two volumes, entitled ‘Lectures on the Connexion between Science and Revealed Religion.’ In the Lent of the year 1837, when he happened to be in Rome, he delivered four lectures on the ‘Offices and Ceremonies of Holy Week,’ which were afterwards given to the world as a separate publication.

In 1840 the late Pope Gregory XVI increased the number of his Vicars Apostolic in England from four to eight, and Dr. Wiseman was appointed coadjutor to the late Bishop Walsh, then Vicar Apostolic of the Midland District, being at the same time elevated to the Presidency of St. Mary’s College, Oscott, near Birmingham. While there he took the deepest interest in the theological movement at Oxford which is associated with the names of Dr. Newman and Dr. Pusey, and which has furnished Rome with such an abundant store of recruits. In 1848, on the death of Bishop Griffiths, Dr. Wiseman became Pro-Vicar-Apostolic of the London district, and subsequently was nominated coadjutor to Dr. Walsh, cum jure successionis on the translation of that prelate to London. Bishop Walsh survived his translation but a short time, and on his death, in 1849, Bishop Wiseman succeeded him as Vicar Apostolic.

The next stage in Dr. Wiseman’s life is that which, as it has been more controverted than any other, so also is that by which his name will be longest remembered. In August, 1850, Bishop Wiseman was summoned to Rome to the ‘threshold of the Apostles,’ by his Holiness Pope Pius IX, who on the 29th of the following September issued his celebrated ‘Apostolical Letter,’ re-establishing the Roman Catholic hierarchy in England and Wales, at the same time issuing a ‘Brief’ elevating Dr. Wiseman to the ‘Archbishopric of Westminster.’ In a private consistory, held the following day, the new ‘Archbishop’ was raised by the Sovereign Pontiff to the dignity of a Cardinal Priest, the ancient church of St. Pudentiana, at Rome, in conformity with the ecclesiastical custom, being selected by him as his title. His Eminence was the seventh Englishman who has been elevated to the hat of a Cardinal since the Reformation, his predecessors in this respect having been Cardinal Pole, Cardinal Allen, Cardinal Howard, Cardinal York, Cardinal Weld and Cardinal Acton.

The name of Cardinal Wiseman was well known in that portion of the literary world which interests itself in controversy, as one of the most frequent and able contributors to the Dublin Review, of which he was for some years the joint editor. Among other productions of his pen which appeared in that periodical we may name his Strictures on the High Church Movement in Oxford, which were reprinted by the Catholic Institute about 20 years ago for circulation in a cheap form, under the attractive title of High Church Claims. His Eminence’s Essays and Contributions to the Dublin Review were collected and published, with a preface by the author, in 3 volumes 8vo. in 1853. It is also understood that he contributed to the Penny Cyclopaedia the article which treats on the ‘Catholic Church.’ Among the best known of his Eminence’s other controversial and miscellaneous publications are his Fabiola, a tale of the Early Christians; his Reminiscences of the Four last Popes; A Letter on Catholic Unity, addressed to the late Earl of Shrewsbury; A Letter to the Rev. J. H. Newman, on the Controversy relating to the Oxford Tracts for the Times; and A Letter addressed to John Poynder, Esq., upon his Work entitled ‘Popery in Alliance with Heathenism.’ To these must be added his Appeal to the Reason and Good Feeling of the People of England, respecting the Papal aggression, in which he endeavoured to prove that the matter at issue was merely a question relating to the internal and spiritual organization of the English Roman Catholics and in no sense a temporal measure, or one which involved any practical assault on the freedom of Protestants.

To the London world and to the public at large Cardinal Wiseman’s name was rendered most familiar by his frequent appearance upon the platform as a public lecturer upon a wide range of subjects connected with education, history, art and science; and in this capacity his Eminence always found an attentive and eager audience, even among those who were most conscientiously opposed to his spiritual claims and pretensions, and who most thoroughly noted him as ‘Archbishop of Westminster.’

The illness of which his Eminence has died has been of long standing, and when he left England for Rome in the Spring of 1860, there were many of his friends who feared that they would see his face no more. But he lived to return to England, and to recover some portion of his former health. It is almost superfluous to add that his Eminence’s loss will be severely felt among the English Roman Catholics, both lay and clerical, as he was nearly the only member of their body who had earned for himself a wide and lasting reputation for ability and learning.

Given the continuing antipathy to Roman Catholicism in England and indeed the furore which had greeted the announcement of Wiseman’s appointment to the newly created see of Westminster, this obituary offers a surprisingly sympathetic commentary on his achievement. In the eighteenth century the religious lives of the small body of English Catholics had been regulated by Vicars Apostolic. Plans to create a series of new dioceses to cope with increasing numbers of the faithful were formulated in the late 1840s but had to be shelved due to legal problems in England and to the eviction of Pius IX from his see by the short-lived Roman Republic. On 7 October 1850, however, Wiseman was able to issue a florid pastoral letter ‘from out the Flaminian Gate’ announcing the new hierarchy and his own elevation to be both Cardinal and Archbishop of Westminster and asserting that ‘Catholic England has been restored to its orbit in the ecclesiastical firmament’. Popular, and official, wrath was stirred by the supposed presumption of the Vatican in usurping the title of ‘Westminster’, the seat of British Government, hence The Times’s patronising adoption here of apostrophes for Wiseman’s dignity and see. On 22 October 1850 an editorial in the same newspaper had greeted the appointment as ‘one of the grossest acts of folly and impertinence which the court of Rome has ventured to commit since the crown and people of England threw off its yoke’.

ABRAHAM LINCOLN

American statesman: ‘a singular depth of insight.’

15 APRIL 1865

The News of the Assassination in New York (from our Special Southern Correspondent)

IT MAY SAFELY be affirmed that in the history of mankind no civilized capital ever wore the aspect which, upon the receipt of the ghastly tidings of this morning, New York at this hour presents. There was excitement, doubtless, in Paris when Henry I of Navarre fell before Ravaillac’s dagger, – in London when Mr. Perceval yielded his life to a maniac’s bullet, – in Rome when Cardinal Rossi fell slaughtered in the public streets; but what facilities had Paris, London, or Rome for thrilling in an instant the public heart and brain compared with those which the diffusive penny press and swiftly recurring telegrams of America place at this hour at the disposal of New York? Or was there ever a nation so sensitively plastic to the impress of great national sentiments as the keenly sentient, mercurial, quick witted population which, in wild bewilderment, surges and sways through the thronging streets now under my gaze? Last night the people of this great city went to bed, lulled by their cheerful optimism, reckoning of the rebellion as already a thing of the past, little heeding difficulties, social, financial, and economical, which might well make a statesman stand aghast; believing that Abraham Lincoln and William H. Seward were the chief apostles of the revived American Union, which is described in a work recently published as synonymous with the new Heaven and the new Earth. This morning they woke to the stunning consciousness that in the night the shadow of a great and ghastly crime had passed over the land; that assassination, sudden and unlooked for, executed with remorseless cruelty, but intrepid effrontery, had engraven its hideous tale upon that page which records four years of horrors without parallel, culminating in the abhorred crime which has added to the victims of this war the names of Abraham Lincoln, and, as seems too probable, of William H. Seward. A thousand American cities, linked together by a network of lightning, have this morning awakened to the simultaneous knowledge that he who 12 hours ago was their first citizen, the chief architect of their fabric of a resuscitated Union, the figure-head round which clustered their hopes and pride, is numbered with the dead. Already over hundreds of thousands of square miles is every particular and detail of the rash and bloody deed of last night scrutinized by millions of eager eyes. It is believed that precisely at the same hour two ruffians, manifestly in concert with each other, lifted their hands against the two most valued lives of the Republican party – that upon the night of Good Friday Abraham Lincoln was stricken with his death-wound in his private box at Ford’s Theatre; that the small pocket pistol which launched the fatal bullet was found, still smoking, on the floor of the box; that the undaunted assassin, having entered the box from the rear, stretched his hand over Mrs. Lincoln’s shoulder until the muzzle of his pistol almost touched the President’s head; that the bullet, designedly (as it would seem) propelled by a small charge of powder, did not pass through the head, but lodged in the brain about three inches from its point of entrance; that the ruffian who fired it, rescuing himself without difficulty from Colonel Parker, of General Grant’s Staff, who was in the box with Mr. and Mrs. Lincoln, calmly stepped from the private box upon the stage; that, brandishing with melodramatic gesture a naked dagger in his hand, he pronounced the well-known motto of the State of Virginia, ‘Sic semper tyrannis,’ in apparent justification of a deed against the atrocity of which all that is noble and manly in that proud old State will recoil with indignant execration; that, turning with unruffled imperturbability, he left the stage and made his exit from the theatre by one of the side scenes with which he seemed familiar, and, mounting a horse which was attached to a tree in the immediate neighbourhood of the theatre, galloped swiftly off into the night, and was lost.

But it was reserved for his accomplice to exhibit still more undaunted nerve, although wherever this tale is read humanity will shudder at the heartless cruelty which could instigate an assassin to force his way to the bedside of a suffering old man already half dead, and to anticipate by a savage act of vindictive butchery the fatal event whereby Mr. Seward’s life seemed yesterday but too gravely menaced. It must be remembered that Mr. Seward is 65 years old, and it would appear there are justifiable grounds for the general belief that the sufferer, if ever he arose from his sick bed again, could scarcely have recovered, even without the horrible events of last night, from a fracture of the arm and jawbone, and from the exhaustion which is known to have followed his accident, without a sensible abatement of those singular powers, physical and mental, which have enabled him during these last four years to flood every European Foreign-office with a deluge of despatches such as never issued in like space of time from any single pen. Boldly entering Mr. Seward’s residence under the pretext of being the bearer of some important medicine which Dr. Verdi designed for his patient, the assassin, undeterred by three men who attempted to interpose, forced a road to his victim’s bedside, and with his knife deeply wounded Dr. Seward’s face and throat. Closing with Mr. Frederick Seward (the Assistant-Secretary of State, and eldest son to the sufferer), the ruffian dealt him a blow upon the head which fractured his skull in two places, and has probably terminated Mr. Frederick Seward’s earthly career. Almost simultaneously he poniarded a male nurse in attendance upon Mr. Seward, inflicting wounds since pronounced to be mortal. Upon Major Seward (another son, if I am not mistaken, of the Secretary of State) the miscreant inflicted injuries which, though not likely to be fatal, effectually prevented any further interference with his own escape from under a roof which had looked down within a few seconds upon the grim horrors of a fourfold assassination. Mounting his horse outside the door he saved himself, like his associate by swift flight, and up to the present hour both have escaped detection and capture. The public voice seems unanimous in pronouncing the assassin of President Lincoln to be an actor named Wilkes Booth (the brother of the more celebrated Edwin Booth, who has lately won high reputation in this city by his admirable impersonation for 100 nights of Hamlet), whose face, it is asserted, was recognized by many spectators acquainted with him. As I write, revelations flashed along the electric wires, indicating the existence of a preconcerted conspiracy, in which Wilkes Booth was a principal, and which was designed to have taken effect on the 4th of March, are placarded at the corners of the street, and devoured by thousands of hungry eyes. The feeling with which the brief record ‘Abraham Lincoln expired at 22 minutes past 7 this morning’ is read may be conceived by those of your readers who are acquainted with the character and temperament of Americans.