Just found this prospectus for a book as I was rummaging through a box of old materials. It was written in late 1995, when Empire and things imperial were fairly new -- cutting edge even. I wrote it in a vain attempt to seem like a British historian, since I certainly didn't seem to be an African-American one. I am still working on parts of this. I intend to finish this history, but in the short term I have penned a screenplay of a movie set in Tasmania, a short screenplay featuring doctors in London and Philadelphia, and half a novel on... well, it is a fictionalized version of parts of this.
* * * * *
This work covers six generations of the Thomson family from
roughly the 1750s to post-World War II Britain. The story is unique for a
number of reasons: for its perspective, which enlarges the boundaries of
British history to make the Empire a central part of the story; for its focus
on Scots in that empire – about whom much has been said concerning their role
in forging empire, but little shown; for its scope, which ranges from 18th-century
Savannah, Georgia, to mid-19th-century Ceylon, to Egypt and Fiji at
the turn of the 20th century, and back to England in the late
twentieth; for its wide range of themes, from the consolidation of medical
practices, to education, legal practice, art, literature, history, Orientalism,
and the roles of women in British families and society; and last but not least,
for its endeavor to bring ordinary individuals to life through their own
private papers, journals and photographs.
At first glance, the family may seem unremarkable and only a
few of its members have made it into The
Dictionary of National Biography or The
Encyclopaedia Britannica. The outline, the approach, and the scope all
resemble the narrative of The Sassoons
(Stanley Jackson, Dutton, 1968), but there is no Siegfried; or those of Dreyfus: A Family Affair (Michael Burns,
HarperCollins, 1991), without “the affair.” But to the extent that this is so
(and there are many noteworthy people in this study) this is one of the points
of the story. There were many families like the Thomsons in the British
Empire’s heyday, formed and allowed to thrive within, even soar over expanding
imperial horizons, and then brought down to the ground with a firm thud as
those horizons drew inward. Moreover, while the members of this particular
family did not change the course of British History, events that did just this
seemed to occur around them.
And by “British” here, I mean the Empire. For what this work
demonstrates is the centrality of empire to the lives of average middle-class
family in Britain throughout the 19th and early 20th century. This family history confirms recent [now not so recent] scholarship
[see, for example, C.A. Bayly’s Imperial
Meridian (Longman, 1989), Linda Colley’s Britons (Yale, 1992), Paul Gilroy’s Black Atlantic (Verso, 1993), Catherine Hall’s White, Male and Middle Class (Routledge, 1992), or Antoinette
Burton’s, Burdens of History (Duke,
1995) [Not to mention my own Inside Out,
Outside In (Macmillan, 2000) which has come out since I wrote this in
1995], which places British history in an imperial framework. It intends,
therefore, to complement the view of the English middle-class family found in
Leonore Davidoff’s and Catherine Hall’s Family
Fortunes (U. Chicago, 1987). The existence of empire is seen shaping the
experiences of the Thomsons, and also molding the very nature and definition of
the family itself.
Having noted that many of the individuals may appear
unremarkable, the list of their achievements is considerable. The first person
of note is Anthony Todd Thomson, who as one of the founders of University
College Hospital in London made a significant impact on developments in the
study and practice of medicine during the first part of the nineteenth century.
Anthony Todd’s second wife, Katherine Byerley Thomson, one of the Byerley
sisters of Warwick, who established the Avonbank school and who were cousins of
the Wedgwood family, became a widely-known author of historical romances. While
her name has now been dropped from the canon and she is largely forgotten,
between 1820 and her death in 1862 she was one of the leading popular
historians, publishing over thirty volumes in innumerable editions on both
sides of the Atlantic. One of her sons, John Cockburn, was the first person to
translate the Bhagavadgita from the Mahabharata into English, and he studied
with the leading Orientalists at Oxford before drowning at the early age of
twenty-seven (he also was a close childhood friend of Edward Bulwer Lytton’s
son, Robert, who went on to be the Viceroy of India, and he had a very strange
connection to the death Robert’s sister, Emily, who died in 1848, aged 19). Another son, Henry William Byerley, became a judge in Ceylon and helped to
shape legal practices on the Indian sub-continent and around the empire.
The scope of the project is large therefore. It begins, as I
noted, in Savannah, just prior to the American Revolution where Alexander
Thomson served as Postmaster General. It follows Alexander’s marriage and
experiences as a loyalist during the war, and his return to Edinburgh after it.
In Edinburgh, it turns to the story of his sons’ early years, growing up and
getting an education at Edinburgh University: the elder brother, William John,
would become a noted portrait painter in Edinburgh (a famous portrait of
Elizabeth Gaskell – his sister would become her step-mother – was one of his),
the younger son was a doctor. The book then describes Anthony Todd’s
connections with the Edinburgh intellectuals, such as Lords Brougham and
Cockburn, at a time when The Edinburgh
Review was just being established as a leading shaper of political opinion
throughout the British Empire. The story moves on to London where Anthony Todd
established his Sloane Street practice (becoming the physician for, among other
people, Elizabeth Stevenson, later Gaskell), and we observe the prodigious
growth of University College Hospital, which would make a considerable
contribution to the spread of medical practices around the British Empire.
With Anthony’s second marriage to Katherine Byerley in 1820 we are introduced to London’s literary society. The circle around the Thomsons included many notable figures, among them Campbell, Wilkie, Jeffrey, Edward Bulwer Lytton, Sir James Mackintosh, Thackeray, Browning, and especially the most revered poetess of her day, L.E.L. (Letitia Elizabeth Landon, 1802-1838), with whom Katherine became a close confidant. L.E.L. married a young soldier and went off to live with him at a British station in West Africa (overseeing the eradication of the slave trade) and within a few days was found poisoned. The account of this event and the subsequent inquest in London reveals a great deal about race, class and gender practices in England when Queen Victoria ascended to the throne. The fact that the medicine chest from which the poison came was provided to L.E.L. by Anthony Todd Thomson is also intriguing.
The story then moves to France, where Anthony Francis became
a clergyman for the English community in Normandy, and to Ceylon, where Henry
William Byerley was a practicing judge. Meanwhile, we find John Cockburn at
Oxford undertaking Oriental studies before moving to Paris with his mother
(following his father’s death), where he co-authored historical studies with
her until his accident. This generation also included Marion Jane, wife of
Captain Ivan Andrea Herford, a participant in both the Crimean War and in the
putting down of the “Indian Mutiny” (one of the most pivotal events in
nineteenth-century British history).
Anthony Francis Thomson’s many children (10 in all) widened
the horizons of the family still further. Captain Anthony Standidge served in
the merchant navy, and traveled the world over laying telegraph cable
(something that would leater be crucial to the outcome of the First World War).
Among his records are a ship’s log from 1870 and two photograph albums,
including many pictures of the members of his and his parents’ generations and
places from Georgetown, British Guiana, through Europe and Africa, to Fiji,
where Francis Byerley served on a sugar plantation overseeing Indian indentured
laborers. Ernest Malcolm was a Lieutenant in the Navy, Arthur Victor was an
insurance broker in Cairo, and Henry Maxwell was an art student in London until
his death from consumption at the age of nineteen.
Besides Katherine Byerley there were many other women in the
family who achieved prominence in their own right, or who through marriage
extended the imperial connections further – notably those with the Herfords,
Maxwells, and Rennell Rodds. A chapter, therefore, deals specifically with the
roles of women in this imperial family and more generally with the nature of
gender roles in the Victorian empire.
Among the wide range of sources tapped for this study are
the many published works by members of the family: Anthony Todd wrote numerous
volumes on medicine and botany (an edited an edition of the poet James
Thomson’s The Seasons); Katherine
Byerley authored histories, novels, and a memoir; Anthony Francis wrote a study
of the English schoolroom; Byerley worked in law and wrote guides to help
people choosing a profession, as well as studies of military defense; Cockburn
was the Orientalist, but he also published a studies of Reformatory Schools and
of life at Oxford University; Henrietta followed her mother in writing
historical romances; and lastly, Anthony Standidge wrote on shipping. There are
other unpublished works which include Anthony Todd’s journal of a tour through
England and the Scottish Highlands in 1823, Anthony Standidge’s ship’s log and
photograph albums, and Henry Maxwell’s illustrated journal of 1886 (a year
noted for riots and other important events in London), and other illustrated
story books. There are many other contemporaneous works of relevance,
particularly relating to the Byerleys (Mrs. Parkes, the world-renowned author
on domesticity was Katherine’s sister), and the many members of the Sloane
literary circle.
So that’s an introduction of sorts to a book that is still
in progress. Check back and you should see more of it taking shape in different
guises.
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