Stonehenge (14 page)

Fig.7. Section through one of the fallen Druidical stones at Stonehegee, showing how much it had sunk into the ground. Scale ½ inch to 1 foot.

21. Darwin’s last book,
The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms
, published in 1881, included his findings from Stonehenge. It showed the stones from an unfamiliar angle, both visually and intellectually and reflected the Victorians’ more pragmatic approach to the subject.

Lyell’s thesis, which came to be called ‘uniformitarianism’, said nothing directly about creation. It worked back from the present, starting with his own field observations and going on to suggest that the same causes had had the same effects throughout time. It was volcanoes and earthquakes, sedimentation and erosion, working over immensely long periods, rather than sudden catastrophic events such as the Creation or the Flood that could best explain the strata of the earth’s surface and the fossil remains within them. By now very few people believed in the Genesis story literally – the creationist Christianity which makes such a belief a tenet of faith is a relatively modern phenomenon – but Lyell replaced Genesis with a prospect of ‘deep time’ which had implications far beyond geology. John Herschel, the astronomer, saw that the
book would ‘work a complete revolution’. The young Darwin found ‘it altered the whole tone of one’s mind’. And many less remarkable minds were in the mood to be altered. The other secret of the
Principles
’ success was timing, the historical moment that it caught, just at the dawn of the steam age. As railway lines were cut and mine shafts sunk, more people saw for themselves the rocks and the traces of ancient life within them. Industrial cities became positively competitive about their fossils, with Liverpool’s tortoise footprints, found at the sandstone quarries at Storeton, countered by Manchester’s much larger fossilised trees. Science had now ‘descended to earth’, as Michael Angelo Garvey put it in his book
The Silent Revolution
, published in 1852. Steam and electricity made it part of everyday life. ‘It penetrates our mines. It enters our workshops. It speeds along with the iron courser of the rail.’

Communication was faster than ever before and the most talked-about book, a far greater sensation than
Principles of Geology
or anything by Darwin, was one that is now largely forgotten.
Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation
, which appeared anonymously in 1844, offered a general theory of everything that drew together the latest ideas in astronomy, geology, physiology, psychology, anthropology and theology.
Vestiges
, whose author was much later revealed to be Robert Chambers, a Scottish journalist with six fingers on each hand and hence a particular interest in inherited characteristics, was frankly populist in its approach. It outsold Dickens and it made evolutionary science a subject of drawing-room conversation suitable even for ladies. Prince Albert read it every afternoon to Queen Victoria and Elizabeth Barrett discussed it with Anna Jameson.
Vestiges
is the book that makes Disraeli’s Lady Constance, in
Tancred
, think she knows everything:

‘it is all explained. But what is most interesting, is the way in which man has been developed. You know all is development … First there was nothing, then there was something; then, I forget the next, I think there were shells, then fishes; then we came, let me see, did we come next? Never mind that; we came at last … it is all science; … Everything is proved; by geology you know.’

The implications that had lurked in Lyell’s Trojan horse burst out in the
Vestiges
, along with much else. Darwin read it and found the author’s geology ‘bad, and his zoology far worse’. But he watched the public response closely with an eye to how his own, more carefully worked-out theories might be received. When it appeared in 1859 his
Origin of Species
generated a great wave of publicity and controversy, and it has come to be seen as the founding text of evolutionary science. ‘Darwinism’ was one of the new words of 1860, but the
Origin
was never a scandalous book or even a sensational one. The debate by now had its own, unstoppable momentum and it rolled through the old disciplines of theology and astronomy, as well as the new ones of anthropology and archaeology.

As for Stonehenge, which had for so long sat in the mind’s eye on windswept Salisbury Plain, it was now set in a whole new intellectual landscape. Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was in Britain in 1847–8, went to visit it directly from Cambridge, where he had been much impressed by the Professor of Geology Adam Sedgwick’s ‘museum of megatheria and mastodons’. With this fresh in his mind, he was quite willing to believe that Stonehenge was the work of some of the ‘cleverer elephants’ of antiquity, but was disappointed that despite the national reverence for this ‘old egg’ out of which so much of its history had hatched, there was still no fully
satisfactory account of it. He was baffled by ‘that exhaustive British sense and perseverance, so whimsical in its choice of objects, which leaves its own Stonehenge or Choir Gaur to the rabbits, whilst it opens pyramids and uncovers Nineveh’. Indeed it is a curious fact that there was no significant excavation at Stonehenge during Queen Victoria’s reign, but this was the result of circumstance rather than whimsy. In 1824 the Amesbury estate passed into the ownership of the Antrobus family, who refused almost all requests to dig. Thus while Colt Hoare and Cunnington could claim to have laid the foundations of British archaeology among the prehistoric remains of Wiltshire, the period in which archaeology came of age, when, as Emerson observed, the British were busily digging all over the world, passed this most famous and important site by almost untouched.

Yet activities elsewhere, in Nineveh and Egypt, Virginia, Devon and the Somme had far-reaching consequences for Stonehenge. Archaeology, a word redefined in 1837 by William Whewell as not merely the study of the past but specifically ‘the scientific study of the remains and monuments of the prehistoric period’, grew up out of the old antiquarianism and the new geology. As well as measuring and drawing monuments, the Victorians began to dig methodically, observing the strata as geologists did. It was a Dane, Christian Jürgen Thomsen, who first had the idea of keeping excavated objects together and showing them as they were found. At the royal museum in Copenhagen, where he was curator, Thomsen eschewed the narrative display style favoured by Cunning-ton and Colt Hoare and instead exhibited his finds as they had been uncovered. From this he developed his ‘three-age’ system, based on the materials used for the cutting tools found
in different sites. Thus were born the Stone, Bronze and Iron Ages and for the first time there was at least an outline map for that vast and newly discovered terrain of the past before the dawn of written history. Thomsen’s theories were borne out by the observations of Thomas Jefferson in the United States and Thomsen’s own assistant Jens Jacob Worsaae in Denmark, establishing ‘stratigraphy’ as a scientific method. With Worsaae’s appointment as Royal Archaeologist to Frederick VII in 1847, professional archaeology was born and in its youth the new discipline much resembled its antiquarian parent, not least in a certain flamboyance of personal style. Worsaae’s appointment brought with it a splendid quasimilitary uniform and on his more important excavations he liked to be accompanied by a brass band.

What the nineteenth century was discovering about the deep past, both before and after Darwin published, changed everything. ‘Evolution’ or ‘development’ became the prism through which all new discoveries were viewed and old ones re-examined. ‘Primitive’ peoples, the roots of language, the origins of mythology, all acquired additional interest and became informed, sometimes it might be truer to say infected, with ideas of evolutionary development. Lecturing on Stonehenge at Oxford in 1889, Arthur Evans described stone circles as if they were a living species, tracing their ‘embryology’ from the earlier barrows and finding some cases, such as New Grange in Ireland, of ‘transitional examples’ where ‘the stone circle is actually seen in the act as it were of separating itself from the earth barrows’. Despite which, Evans had to admit that the mystery of Salisbury Plain remained unsolved, ‘the Sphynx still sits upon those stony portals’. Indeed, as the century wore on the possible answers multiplied. Not only did
time get longer but mankind’s existence within it was being stretched ever further back. Since the late eighteenth century there had been finds of human bones among the remains of extinct animals in caves in France and Britain, but their implications had been either missed or vigorously denied. It became increasingly difficult to ignore them. In the Neander Valley near Düsseldorf the skull later known as Neanderthal Man was found by some limestone quarrymen in 1856. It was clear, as Boucher de Perthes, the French antiquary and archaeologist, put it, that
‘Dieu est éternel, mais l’homme est bien vieux
’ (God is eternal, but Man is pretty old). In 1859, the year Darwin published
Origin of Species
, this view of human antiquity was formally accepted by the Royal Society in London and by most scientists in Europe and the United States.

The most important, and level-headed, attempt to apply all the latest findings of archaeology, ethnography and anthropology to Stonehenge was made by John Lubbock, whose
Prehistoric Times as Illustrated by Ancient Remains and the Manners and Customs of Modern Savages
appeared in 1865. It revolutionised the study of prehistory, not least because he believed that ‘it is wiser to confess our ignorance, than to waste valuable time in useless guesses’. Lubbock was a friend of Darwin and of Ruskin, a banker and a botanist rather than a professional archaeologist, but he had been to the Somme and excavated ‘every gravel pit and section from Amiens down to the sea’. He had learned Danish in order to keep up with the developments there and as part of his research into the nature of mental processes spent three months trying – without success – to teach his poodle to read. Lubbock coined the term ‘cave-man’ and made the distinction within the Stone Age between the ‘Palaeolithic’ and ‘Neolithic’.

He was a synthesiser rather than an original thinker but the weight of combined learning he brought to bear on his subject showed it in a new light. Of Stonehenge itself he came to the conclusion, based on Colt Hoare’s excavations in the barrows, that it belonged to the Bronze Age. There had been only two discoveries of iron in the surrounding burial mounds and these were later interments, while fragments of bluestone and sarsen within the barrows suggested to him that they were contemporary with the monument. But it was still only a comparative chronology. Of what date they all were Lubbock could not say, only that they were probably much older than anyone had yet considered. He was prepared to countenance a past of twenty thousand years, more than three times Ussher’s, but concluded shrewdly that ‘it may be doubted whether even geologists yet realise the great antiquity of our race’.

As for the question of who had built Stonehenge, Lubbock took up Mr Fergusson’s ‘very interesting article’ in the
Quarterly Review
and politely refuted it. Stonehenge could not, he argued, be post-Roman. Of the Buddhist theory, however, as of the Phoenician, he was cautiously accepting. Victorian explorers, missionaries and colonisers were travelling ever further and sending back reports that made the monuments of other civilisations increasingly well known in Britain. Stone circles were turning up all over the world. Lubbock felt that the resemblances were ‘too great to be accidental’. He was, however, more cautious than another friend of Darwin, the botanist Joseph Hooker, who was in the Himalayas in 1850. Hooker had no hesitation in labelling the standing stones he saw there the ‘Nurtiung Stonehenge’. This circle of granite megaliths, ‘split by heat and cold water with great art’ and
‘erected by dint of sheer brute strength, the lever being the only aid’, might suggest how Stonehenge had been built. But Lubbock was not so seduced as some by the metaphorical power of ‘development’, pointing out that there were differences as well as similarities between ‘savage’ peoples. He was not sure that they represented an earlier stage of evolution rather than merely having a different ‘ethnographical characteristic’.

Lubbock was one of the great Victorian optimists, an open-minded Christian who could not believe that honest enquiry could ever damage true faith. He had none of his friend Ruskin’s spiritual difficulties with hammers, but he was very worried about real hammers and their effect on Stonehenge. Tourism continued to grow and so did the popular passion for geology. The stones, by the mid-century, were beginning to suffer serious damage as more and more visitors chipped off souvenirs, and the whole site rang sometimes with the sound of banging and scraping. Meanwhile at Avebury the village, ‘like some beautiful parasite’, threatened to grow and overwhelm its host. ‘As population increases and land grows more valuable, these ancient monuments become more and more liable to mutilation or destruction,’ Lubbock noted. While the sites were still private property there was nothing to compel their owners to protect them or to prevent them from redeveloping them. Might not the government take action, he wondered, to preserve ‘the graves of our ancestors’ by appointing an official Conservator? They could even do as the exemplary Danes had done and purchase some of the monuments for the nation. For the moment it was only a suggestion, but one to which the energetic Lubbock would return later in the century, when he became the active as well as the intellectual hero of Victorian Stonehenge.