Mauve. Simon Garfield
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learnt that his grandfather had been an alchemist, and had attempted to transmute base metal into gold.
Thomas Perkin’s leatherwork led him to London, where he appears to have switched trades to become a carpenter and boat-builder. His only son, George Fowler Perkin, who was born in 1802, also became a carpenter, and a successful one. He employed twelve men, and engaged them exclusively in building the new terraced housing for the local dock workers. By today’s standards, his family would be judged parvenu middle class.
Not long after his birth, William Perkin’s family moved into a larger three-storey house close by, a few yards north of the High Street, a place known as King David Fort. They employed servants, and were one of the wealthiest families in the area. Their house stood out, a neighbourhood talking point. Shadwell, particularly the lower side by the docks, had some of the most wretched and crowded slums in the East End. One visitor in the early nineteenth century noted that ‘thousands of useful tradesmen, artisans and mechanics inhabit, but their homes and workshops will not bear description, nor are the streets, courts, lanes and alleys by any means inviting.’
Victorian writers liked to remark on the extremes of London’s poverty and wealth, virtue and iniquity. When Henry Mayhew viewed the city from a hot-air balloon in the middle of the century he was struck by the presence of mass destitution so close to the great institutions of trade, finance and empire. In Shadwell, the Perkins encountered such extremes on a daily basis. Disease was all around them. William Perkin was to lose both eldest sister and brother to tuberculosis. Their mother Sarah, a woman of Scottish descent who had moved to east London when she was a child, was thought never to have recovered from her losses.
The Perkins grew up opposite the police station, from where they witnessed an endless stream of the drunk and lawless. Much of the police work centred on a pub named Paddy’s Goose, where local seamen sought prostitutes, and the unwary were press-ganged into the Royal Navy.
William Perkin attended the private Arbour Terrace School in Commercial Road, a few hundreds yards from his home. He was a gifted student, with many interests outside the standard curriculum. ‘He showed remarkable dexterity in all kinds of hobbies,’ his nephew Arthur H. Waters recalled. Waters’s mother was about two years older than Perkin. ‘They were fond of taking long rambles together, and William was particularly keen on natural history and botany. On one occasion he produced a large pipe and tobacco and proceeded to puff away manfully. But after a time he became so confoundedly ill that his sister had some difficulty in getting him home. William’s craze for probing into everything, especially small things, seems to show that his wonderful instinct for research was present at a very early age.’
He became interested in photography when he was twelve, and at fourteen he took his own picture: he has a stony look, his broad forehead and strong features framed by dense black hair. He is done up in evening gear, or perhaps his church best, and he looks about twenty.
‘I do not quite know where to begin,’ he wrote to his colleague Heinrich Caro in 1891. ‘But as the circumstances connected with my childhood and youth had, I believe, a good deal to do in influencing me in respect to practical matters, I have ventured to relate a little connected with that period for your private information.’
Caro, from 1869 to 1890 the principal investor at BASF, had written to Perkin a few weeks earlier, explaining that he was preparing the first major history of the dye industry and would like more details about his early life. Perkin wrote that he would help him with the facts as he could remember them, but midway through his reply he had a change of heart. ‘I have now written you out an account of my early days, which I have never done before, and now I have done so feel some hesitation in sending it to you.’ Why this should be so he did not say, but he remained a meek and demure man throughout his life. He said later that he believed only his work was important.
At the beginning he had no idea what he wanted to do with his life, though he fancied something artistic, or something practical he could do with his hands. ‘Being interested in what I saw going on around me, I thought I would follow in my father’s footsteps,’ he wrote. He built wooden models, among other things of the steam trains he saw passing near his home. He was also drawn to engineering, and liked the illustrations of levers and pulleys he saw in a book called The Artisan. Published in 1828, this contained a popular summary of what was then known about mechanics, optics, magnetism and pneumatics, all of it written with an element of wonder and disbelief that science was moving so rapidly.
But Perkin was being pulled in other ways. ‘I took a great interest in painting,’ he explained, ‘and for a short time had the mad idea that I should like to be an artist.’ There was also music – he learnt the violin and double bass, and he and his brother and two sisters entertained thoughts of becoming a travelling quartet. But just before his thirteenth birthday a friend showed him some elementary experiments with crystals that he regarded as ‘quite marvellous’.
‘I saw chemistry was something far higher than any other subject that had come before me,’ he remembered. ‘I thought that if I could be articled to a pharmacist I should be happy.’
In another telling of the story, Perkin again flattened the drama. ‘The possibility also of making new discoveries impressed me very much. I determined if possible to accumulate bottles of chemicals and make experiments.’
When he was thirteen he joined 600 other boys at the City of London School in a narrow street by Cheapside, not far from St Paul’s. It was a strict institution with painful punishments for misbehaviour, but its educational outlook was progressive. On his arrival, Perkin was delighted to learn that it was one of the few schools in the country to offer lessons in chemistry, a subject believed to have little practical use (and certainly less than Latin or Greek). The course was taught twice a week in the lunch-hour by a writing master called Thomas Hall, and Perkin persuaded his father to pay an extra seven shillings each term for the privilege. He skipped lunch to attend. ‘Thomas Hall noticed that I took a great interest in the lectures, and made me one of his helpers to prepare his lecture experiments. This was a wonderful lift for me . . . to work in the dismal place that was called a laboratory in that school.’
Hall suggested that Perkin might like to conduct some of the safer experiments at home, and helped him buy some glassware. Perkin’s father again agreed to pay for his son’s enthusiasms, although he made it clear he wished him to become an architect. Chemistry was fascinating, but there was no money in it.
Outside school, Perkin attended chemistry talks given by Henry Letheby at the London Hospital in Whitechapel Road, and both Letheby and Thomas Hall suggested to Perkin that he write to their friend Michael Faraday requesting permission to attend his monumental lectures at the Royal Institution. Faraday replied in his own hand, an act that delighted Perkin greatly, and so it was that on Saturday afternoons a fourteen-year-old boy found himself the youngest spectator of the latest developments in the peculiar science of electricity.
A few years before, the leading German scientist Justus Liebig had had some damning news for the delegates to the British Association meeting in Liverpool in 1837. ‘England is not the land of science,’ he declared. ‘There is only widespread dilettantism, their chemists are ashamed to be known by that name because it has been assumed by the apothecaries, who are despised.’
In contrast, Liebig’s teaching laboratory at the University of Giessen was the envy of all experimental chemists, and men travelled hundreds of miles to engage in what their own countries believed to be an unrewarding pursuit. There were chairs in chemistry at both Oxford and Cambridge, but the idea that the subject should be taught and learnt in the laboratory was unheard of; students were merely taught chemical history as part of a wider science course. At the University of Glasgow, a man named Thomas Thomson was probably the first to open up his laboratory to his students for practical instruction, and Thomas Graham, singled out by Liebig as a rare example of a forward-looking scientist, did the same at the city’s Andersonian Institution in 1830. At the time of Perkin’s birth there was no college anywhere in the country dedicated to the study of chemistry.
Liebig was an inspirational speaker, and it was his British lecture tour in the early 1840s which convinced men of influence that London needed a specialist chemical school (Liebig met