display at the Hammersmith Palladium. Everything relating to the show was preserved there among Uncle Harry’s things: copies of contracts (… that the aforementioned Joseph, having the appearance of a chimpanzee, shall agree to display himself, naked but for a covering for the loins, for a fee of …) , copies of flyers, a folder of press cuttings (“A remarkable if somewhat gruesome experience,” in the view of the Liverpool Daily Post ), even a photograph (sepia, blurred) of the entrance to the show itself, with the name displayed in a curve of lights above the ticket booth:
And in the foreground the owner and son, Gottlieb, now with a large beard, and his son Heinrich sporting a fine, curly mustache.
The last tour was dated 1914. Perhaps the war and the changing of names put an end to it; whatever the reason, Gottlieb had metamorphosed into Godley by the time the next enterprise surfaced among Uncle Harry’s papers:
D OCTOR G ODLEY W ISE
Confidant of the Crowned Heads of Europe
Adviser to Princes and Presidents
Analyst of the Viennese School
Descendant of the Founder of Genetics
Lectures at the Masonic Hall, Pimlico.
13th May 1922
Admission free to all men and women of Intelligence & Culture
About what did Great-grandfather Godley lecture? I opened a pamphlet and discovered that he lectured about the “Science of Human Genetics, founded on the new Mendelian Principles, being a Full Exposition of the Danger faced by the British Race through a Deterioration of its Genetic Stock.”
Former freak-show manager Godley Wise had become a eugenicist. There was a list of initial subscribers to his society. Did they, I wonder, ever see a satisfactory intellectual return on their investment? They included Mr. H. G. Wells, Mr. G. B. Shaw, Mr. H. Belloc. Strange bedfellows, indeed.
Great-great-great-uncle Gregor was sent to the University of Vienna in October 1851, to prepare for another attempt at the teaching examination. Nowadays Vienna is the overblown capital of a small, smug province, but then it was Imperial Vienna, the Vienna of the Habsburgs: Vienna, Wien, Viden, Bécs, a crucible, a melting pot of nations, a fusion of genes—German, Slav, Magyar, Gypsy, Jew, half a million souls, all the nations of Mitteleuropa bubbling, arguing, creating, protesting, seething together. The revolution of 1848 was a recent memory. The city was a place of intellectual turmoil and vitality, with the rationalists and democrats in conflict with the church and state. Sigmund Freud was on the way. So too was Vienna’s guilty secret, Adolf Hitler. It was to this city that the callow young priest from Heinzendorf set off on the night train from Brünn on October 27, 1851. He carried with him a letter from Abbot Napp to the minister Andreas von Baumgartner. What else did he bring from provincial Brünn to cosmopolitan Vienna? A fine-honed and perceptive mind? An incisive brilliance? An inspired imagination? Genius?
He never even took a degree. He attended Doppler’s lectures on experimental physics, and Franz Unger’s on botany, as well asa course in higher mathematical physics given by von Ettinghausen; but he never took a degree. Thus is genius educated. But the influence of Unger—an avowed and controversial evolutionist who earned the enmity of the Church—was decisive, as was the mathematics learned at the feet of the physicists. For a while the young friar acted as a demonstrator in Doppler’s Physical Institute. He also joined the Zoological and Botanical Society of Vienna. He listened and he thought. He acquired ideas, but little in the way of self-confidence; he acquired intellectual ambition, but little self-assurance.
In 1853 he returned to Brünn, and in the spring of the next year he began work as an unqualified substitute teacher at the Brünn Modern School. He was thirty-one years old, the product of an approximate and inconsistent education; yet somewhere within him an ember glowed. He began to breed plants,
And in the foreground the owner and son, Gottlieb, now with a large beard, and his son Heinrich sporting a fine, curly mustache.
The last tour was dated 1914. Perhaps the war and the changing of names put an end to it; whatever the reason, Gottlieb had metamorphosed into Godley by the time the next enterprise surfaced among Uncle Harry’s papers:
D OCTOR G ODLEY W ISE
Confidant of the Crowned Heads of Europe
Adviser to Princes and Presidents
Analyst of the Viennese School
Descendant of the Founder of Genetics
Lectures at the Masonic Hall, Pimlico.
13th May 1922
Admission free to all men and women of Intelligence & Culture
About what did Great-grandfather Godley lecture? I opened a pamphlet and discovered that he lectured about the “Science of Human Genetics, founded on the new Mendelian Principles, being a Full Exposition of the Danger faced by the British Race through a Deterioration of its Genetic Stock.”
Former freak-show manager Godley Wise had become a eugenicist. There was a list of initial subscribers to his society. Did they, I wonder, ever see a satisfactory intellectual return on their investment? They included Mr. H. G. Wells, Mr. G. B. Shaw, Mr. H. Belloc. Strange bedfellows, indeed.
Great-great-great-uncle Gregor was sent to the University of Vienna in October 1851, to prepare for another attempt at the teaching examination. Nowadays Vienna is the overblown capital of a small, smug province, but then it was Imperial Vienna, the Vienna of the Habsburgs: Vienna, Wien, Viden, Bécs, a crucible, a melting pot of nations, a fusion of genes—German, Slav, Magyar, Gypsy, Jew, half a million souls, all the nations of Mitteleuropa bubbling, arguing, creating, protesting, seething together. The revolution of 1848 was a recent memory. The city was a place of intellectual turmoil and vitality, with the rationalists and democrats in conflict with the church and state. Sigmund Freud was on the way. So too was Vienna’s guilty secret, Adolf Hitler. It was to this city that the callow young priest from Heinzendorf set off on the night train from Brünn on October 27, 1851. He carried with him a letter from Abbot Napp to the minister Andreas von Baumgartner. What else did he bring from provincial Brünn to cosmopolitan Vienna? A fine-honed and perceptive mind? An incisive brilliance? An inspired imagination? Genius?
He never even took a degree. He attended Doppler’s lectures on experimental physics, and Franz Unger’s on botany, as well asa course in higher mathematical physics given by von Ettinghausen; but he never took a degree. Thus is genius educated. But the influence of Unger—an avowed and controversial evolutionist who earned the enmity of the Church—was decisive, as was the mathematics learned at the feet of the physicists. For a while the young friar acted as a demonstrator in Doppler’s Physical Institute. He also joined the Zoological and Botanical Society of Vienna. He listened and he thought. He acquired ideas, but little in the way of self-confidence; he acquired intellectual ambition, but little self-assurance.
In 1853 he returned to Brünn, and in the spring of the next year he began work as an unqualified substitute teacher at the Brünn Modern School. He was thirty-one years old, the product of an approximate and inconsistent education; yet somewhere within him an ember glowed. He began to breed plants,
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