HISTORY OF A MAN OF GENIUS.
The course of my narrative now requires a brief account of my mother's
only brother, whose example and conversation, more than anything else,
taught me to turn my thoughts westwards, and finally to follow his
example by crossing the Atlantic ocean, and seeking "fresh fields and
pastures new" under a transatlantic sky.
John Isaac Hawkins was a name well known, both in European and American
scientific circles, fifty years ago, as an inventor of the most fertile
resource, and an expert in all matters relating to civil engineering. He
must have left England for America somewhere about the year 1790, full
of republican enthusiasm and of schemes of universal benevolence. Of his
record in the United States I know very little, except that he married a
wife in New Jersey, that he resided at Bordenton, that he acquired some
property adjacent to Philadelphia, that he was intimate with the elder
Adams, Jefferson, and many other eminent men. Returning with his wife to
England, after twenty-five years' absence, he established a sugar
refinery in Titchfield Street, Cavendish square, London, patronized his
English relatives with much condescension, and won my childish heart by
great lumps of rock-candy, and scientific experiments of a delightfully
awful character. Also, he borrowed my mother's money, to be expended for
the good of mankind, and the elaboration of the teeming offspring of his
inexhaustible inventive faculty. Morden's patent lead pencils, Bramah's
patent locks, and, I think, Gillott's steel pens were among his numerous
useful achievements, from some or all of which he enjoyed to the day of
his death a small income, in the shape of a royalty on the profits. He
assisted in the perfecting of Perkins's steam-gun, which the Duke of
Wellington condemned as too barbarous for civilized warfare, but which
its discoverer, Mr. Perkins, looked upon as the destined extirpator of
all warfare, by the simple process of rendering resistance utterly
impossible. This appalling and destructive weapon has culminated in
these times in the famous mitrailleuses of Napoleon III, at Woerth and
Sedan, which, however, certainly neither exterminated the Prussians nor
added glory to the French empire.
At his home I was in the habit of meeting the leading men of the Royal
Society and the Society of Arts, of which he was a member, and of
listening to their discussions about scientific novelties. The
eccentric Duke of Norfolk, Earl Stanhope, the inventor of the Stanhope
press, and other noble amateur scientists, availed themselves of his
practical skill, and his name became known throughout Europe. In 1825 or
thereabouts, he was selected by the Emperor Francis Joseph, of Austria,
to design and superintend the first extensive works erected in Vienna
for the promotion of the new manufacture of beet-root sugar, now an
important national industry throughout Germany. He described the
intercourse of the Austrian Imperial-Royal family with all who
approached them, and even with the mendicants who were daily admitted to
an audience with the Emperor at five o'clock in the morning, as of the
most cordial and lovable character.
From Vienna my uncle went to Paris, and performed the same duties there
for the French Government, in the erection of extensive sugar works. The
chief difficulty he encountered there, was in parrying the determination
of the Parisian artisans not to lose their Sunday's labour. They could
not, they said, support their families on six days' wages, and unless he
paid them for remaining idle on the Sabbath day, they must and would
work seven days in the week. I believe they gained their point, much to
his distress and chagrin.
His next exploit was in the construction of the Thames tunnel, in
connection with which he acted as superintendent of the works under Sir
Isambert Brunel. This occupied him nearly up to the time of my own
departure for Canada, in 1833. The sequel of his story is a melancholy
one. He made fortunes for other men who bought his inventions but
himself sank into debt, and at last died in obscurity at Rahway, New
Jersey, whither he had returned as a last resort, there to find his
former friends dead, his beloved republic become a paradise for
office-grabbers and sharpers, his life a mere tale of talents
dissipated, and vague ambition unsatisfied.[1]
After his return from Vienna, I lived much at my uncle's house, in
London, as my mother had removed to the pleasant village of Epsom in
Surrey. There I studied German with some degree of success, and learnt
much about foreign nations and the world at large. There too I learnt to
distrust my own ability to make my way amidst the crowded industries of
the old country, and began to cast a longing eye to lands where there
was plenty of room for individual effort, and a reasonable prospect of
a life unblighted by the dread of the parish workhouse and a pauper's
grave.
[Footnote 1: Since writing the above, I find in _Scribner's Monthly_ for
November 1880, the following notice of my uncle, which forms a sad
sequel to a long career of untiring enthusiasm in the service of his
fellow-creatures. It is the closing paragraph of an article headed
"Bordentown and the Bonapartes," from the pen of Joseph B. Gilder:
"It yet remains to say a few words of Dr. John Isaac Hawkins--civil
engineer, inventor, poet, preacher, phrenologist and 'mentor-general to
mankind,'--who visited the village towards the close of the last
century, married and lived there for many years; then disappeared, and,
after a long absence, returned a gray old man, with a wife barely out of
her teens. 'This isn't the wife you, took away, doctor,' some one
ventured to remark. 'No,' the blushing girl replied, 'and he's buried
one between us.' The poor fellow had hard work to gain a livelihood. For
a time, the ladies paid him to lecture to them in their parlours; but
when he brought a bag of skulls, and the heart and windpipe of his
[adopted] son preserved in spirits, they would have nothing more to do
with him. As a last resort, he started the 'Journal of Human Nature and
Human Progress,' his wife 'setting up' for the press her husband's
contributions in prose and rhyme. But the 'Journal' died after a brief
and inglorious career. Hawkins claimed to have made the first survey for
a tunnel under the Thames, and he invented the 'ever-pointed pencil,'
the 'iridium-pointed gold pen,' and a method of condensing coffee. He
also constructed a little stove with a handle, which he carried into the
kitchen to cook his meals or into the reception-room when visitors
called, and at night into his bedroom. He invented also a new religion,
whose altar was erected in his own small parlour, where Dr. John Isaac
Hawkins, priest, held forth to Mrs. John Isaac Hawkins, people. But a
shadow stretched along the poor man's path from the loss of his only
[adopted] son--'a companion in all of his philosophical researches,' who
died and was dissected at the early age of seven. Thereafter the old man
wandered, as 'lonely as a cloud,' sometimes in England, sometimes in
America; but attended patiently and faithfully by his first wife, then
by a second, and finally by a third, who clung to him with the devotion
of Little Nell to her doting grandfather."]