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By Root 1963 0

it in the Easter holidays of 1897 and said to himself that if he were Tom he would find the book unforgivable. By then Tom was apparently back to “normal,” running wild in the woods, and still doing Latin with Vasily Tartarinov and English with Toby Youlgreave. Olive had given him a copy of Blacktowers, inscribed “To my dear son, Tom,” but it was not clear to her, or to anyone, whether he had read it. He had developed a habit of simply not speaking about a great number of things. Olive did not write any more of Tom Underground until after the publication of Blacktowers. She rewrote the last section she had sent to Marlowe, with the company trapped in a shaft which was a dead end, and made them hear a silvery tapping on the other side of what had seemed impenetrable rock. Gathorn wielded his pick from one side, and the other pick echoed his blows, until the rock suddenly crumbled, and they were in a large chamber, lit by silver lamps, where a creature neither woman nor spider, but with features of both, was spinning long silvery threads …

18

Eighteen ninety-six was a gloomy year. William Morris died in October, as Tom was hiding in thickets and Olive was pacing her corridors. Prosper Cain, still grieving over the suicide of his Director in June, was harassed, both personally and professionally, by the sustained Press campaign against the military presence in the Museum. The military, accused of muddle and incompetence, hit back with statistics and oratory. A Parliamentary Select Committee was formed to go into it, which met twenty-seven times in 1897 and twenty-six times in 1898. It included Sir Mancherjee Bhownaggree, Conservative Member for Bethnal Green, where objects from the Museum were on display. It also included John Burns, the socialist MP for Battersea. The committee recommended that the whole Department of Science and Art be reorganised, and the duties of all the officials redefined.

All sorts of institutions were coming to life. The Tate Gallery opened on Millbank in 1896, the National Portrait Gallery moved from Bethnal Green to a site next to the National Gallery, in the same year. The Whitechapel Gallery, a solid and elegant Art Nouveau building by C. Harrison Townsend, and an offshoot of all the teaching, studying and social enthusiasm in Toynbee Hall, was built between 1897 and 1901. A Fabian Society member, incurably ill, committed suicide and left his fortune to the Fabians, to forward their ends. Sidney and Beatrice Webb decided that this could best be done by the founding of the London School of Economics, and in 1896 the rich Irishwoman Charlotte Payne-Townshend took the top floor of no. 10 Adelphi Terrace for the first students and lecturers—though this move was not wholly approved of by all the Fabians. The dissenting Fabians included John Burns, and Sir Sydney Olivier, who worked in the Colonial Office and had taught at Toynbee Hall.

There were other suicides: in 1897 Barney Barnato, the bankrupt Randlord, jumped overboard and drowned on his way back from the Cape to a monstrous party, in his newly built monstrous house in Park Lane, to celebrate Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. In 1898 Eleanor Marx, socialist, new woman, trade unionist, Ibsen translator, poisoned herself on finding that her lover, Edward Aveling, had secretly married an actress, and needed her to sell her father’s papers to keep her. The Yellow Book produced its last issue in 1897, destroyed at least partly by Oscar Wilde. (Aubrey Beardsley had made a cover, which was not used, for the first edition of the Savoy, in 1896, which depicted a naked putto pissing on the discarded Yellow Book. The cover, when it appeared, was without Yellow Book, and showed a putto innocent of cock and balls.)

In 1899, in May, the little old Empress of India, having been celebrated in flaming summer weather by a swelter of loyal emotion in 1897, was driven up in a semi-state open landau to perform what turned out to be her last public duty, the ceremonial laying of the foundation stone of Aston Webb’s new buildings at what was now to be called