Have you ever had the feeling that someone was stalking you, 120 years ago? Ladies and Gentlemen, Sir Francis Galton (1822-1911):
I had a vague knowledge of Galton when Natasha McEnroe at the Grant Museum, UCL threw me in his general direction following a discussion at the last LitSciMed event. I’m glad she did, because I’m now writing pretty much an entire chapter of my thesis on the guy. He’s incredibly interesting and provides a crucible in which many of the issues I want to discuss can be examined. About which, perhaps, more anon.
I knew he was from Birmingham when I started, and as a Brummie myself I was naturally drawn to that. In the Galton Archive recently I discovered that had actually attended the same secondary school as me. That was interesting, but it didn’t get unnerving until I found out that he went to KCL as well. Then I learned that he not only went to my school, he also lived in the same area of Birmingham as I used to – Five Ways – and recalls in his autobiography the walk to school down about a mile of roads: the route I cycled every day for seven years. All of this would be fine if I had chosen the coincidence as the reason for looking into Galton in the first place, but it seems to have happened accidentally. Either that, or the good people running UCL special collections are inserting new documents into the Galton archive to mess with my head..!
As well as inventing eugenics, the weather map, fingerprinting and a primitive kind of bicycle odometer, Galton is famous for being one of the subjects treated of in A. S. Byatt’s novel The Biographer’s Tale (2001), in which a scholar is overtaken by the lives of the people he sets out to document. The mind boils.
Will Tattersdill
Spooky!