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The Gilbert Club was founded in 1889 by Silvanus Phillips Thompson and his
friends to produce an English translation of William Gilbert's pioneering
treatise on magnetism and electricity, De Magnete (1600). In addition, the
Club's promoters wanted to ensure that Gilbert's place in the history of
English science was appreciated and that the tercentenaries of his book
(1900) and death (1903) were observed appropriately. The key tool in their
project was the publication of a "facsimile" edition of their translation,
using antique typefaces and reproducing the exact layout and woodcuts of the
Latin text. This allowed their translation to appear as if it had really been
published in 1600, and made Gilbert accessible to a late nineteenth-century
world in which electricity was suddenly everywhere. Thompson, a physical
scientist, engineer, educator, and keen literary enthusiast, hinted cleverly
at the tension between these two functions of the translation in the notes he
compiled to accompany it. Although Thompson's project suffered a setback with
the appearance of a rival American translation before the Gilbert Club
edition was complete, he recovered in time to ensure that Gilbert was given a
place in the Elizabethan pantheon in 1903. The celebration of Gilbert
provided common ground for the diverse and often controversy-ridden community
of British electrical scientists and engineers, and the publication of the
facsimile English translation of De Magnete, together with Thompson 's
tireless attempts to uncover the authentic details of Gilbert s life, should
be viewed in the context of the late Victorian "invention of tradition, " in
which an imagined common past was used as a source of present cohesion.
Suitably reconstructed and commemorated, Gilbert himself was translated into
modern form as the founder of late nineteenth-century electrical science.
Translation can have many meanings. In this essay, I examine an act of
linguistic translation that constituted two other kinds of translation as
well: a movement of a person or object through space or time, and a
fundamental change in form or substance. When a group of British
"electricians" (physicists and electrical engineers) published in 1900 a
tercentenary commemorative translation of De Magnete, William Gilbert's
pioneering treatise on magnetism and electricity, they made more than just
the meaning of Gilbert's Latin words available to English readers. In going
to great lengths to make their On the Magnet virtually identical in
appearance to De Magnete, the Gilbert Club transported the sixteenth-century
London physician author into their late nineteenth-century world, and at the
same time located the origins of their own electrical science in the
revolutionary days of Kepler and Galileo. Their literary translation of the
text was also a temporal shifting of man, book, and science through three
centuries, and an ontological transformation of William Gilbert himself, from
an anti-Aristotelian Renaissance philosopher to the father of English
experimental science.
This essay is not a formal textual study of the Gilbert Club's translation of
the words of De Magnete from Latin into English, which would be an entirely
separate project. Nor, of course, is it a study of William Gilbert
(1544-1603), the royal physician and early advocate of experimental
methodology who was an important English figure in the Scientific Revolution,
and who has himself been the subject of recent substantial re-examination.
Instead, my analysis draws on the classic literature concerning late
nineteenth-century celebrations of national historical traditions,
particularly in Britain and on recent work on both commemorations and
translations in science in an effort to interpret the meanings of the Gilbert
Club's edition of On the Magnet for its contemporary audience. In
particular, I examine the central role of Silvanus P. Thompson (1851-1916),
the Quaker scientist-engineer who was, as principal of Finsbury Technical
College and a noted textbook author, one of the best-known and most-respected
figures in British technical education. With his wide-ranging scientific and
literary interests, Thompson obsessively collected and publicized information
about Gilbert, acted as the driving force behind the Gilbert Club, and
coordinated production of the edition. I argue that Thompson was well aware
of the competing roles that De Magnete had to play as an authentic document
simultaneously of 1600 and of 1900, and that his self-conscious reflections
on this tension are evident in the way he chose to present his own
contribution to the edition.
The Gilbert Club was officially formed on 28 November 1889. Advertised by a
specially printed circular sent to select scientists, engineers, and other
enthusiasts, the proposed association was also mentioned in the Times and in
the leading British and American scientific weeklies, Nature and Science. By
the time of the inaugural meeting, eighty-seven members had already signed
up, many of whom were gathered in the chambers of the Society of Arts that
afternoon to hear Silvanus Phillips Thompson describe the eminence and
importance of William Gilbert of Colchester (1544-1603), the doctor whose
early experimental investigations "constituted the absolute starting-point of
the science of electricity." Thompson argued that Gilbert's pioneering
accomplishments in electricity and magnetism had been unduly neglected by
British electricians, and he proposed that a Gilbert Club be formed to remedy
this in two ways: by organizing the tercentenary celebration of the
publication of De Magnete in 1900 and by underwriting a translation of
Gilbert's great work into English for the very first time. This would not be
just any translation: the intention of the Club's founders, Thompson and his
long-time friend and fellow Quaker, electrical engineer Conrad W. Cooke
(1843-1926), was to publish their text as a replica of the original 1600
edition of De Magnete: "as like the original in appearance as it can be made;
it will, in fact, be a fac-simile reprint in everything except the
language in which it is reproduced." The only function of the "Club" itself was
to provide a high-profile audience and a willing market for these endeavours -
that is, subscribers willing to commit to paying a guinea for the edition upon
publication - making it reminiscent of the short-lived Historical Society of
Science, which had undertaken similar projects a half-century earlier. As such,
the Gilbert Club counted among its first members numerous Fellows of the Royal
Society and other prominent scientists in all fields, including Lord Rayleigh,
John Tyndall, John Lubbock, Oliver Lodge, and the Presidents of the Physical
Society and the Royal College of Surgeons. Leading these luminaries at the
inaugural meeting was the most famous living British physicist and current
President of the Institution of Electrical Engineers, Sir William Thomson
(later Lord Kelvin). Sir William consented to act as the Gilbert Club's
nominal President, which was unanimously approved, and this, along with the
equally-enthusiastic passage of Cooke's motion describing the Club's formal
objects, put the project of resurrecting William Gilbert well on its way. The
all-important honorary secretaries, who had called the meeting and upon whose
shoulders the work of bringing this project to fruition would really fall,
were Silvanus Thompson, Conrad Cooke, and Thompson's Finsbury chemist
colleague Raphael Meldola, who was helpful for his connections to Gilbert's
native county Essex, but took a less active part in the commemorative
activities, possibly because he was also occupied with other projects.
Both Nature and the Times reported on the foundation of the Gilbert Club, and
the following month Cooke helped to spread the word with a longer article on
Gilbert and his new admirers in a professional journal, Engineering. These
accounts help us understand not only the explicitly stated goals of the
Gilbert Club, but also why it arose at this time and attracted the interest
that it did.
First of all, beyond the approaching three-hundredth anniversaries of De
Magnete (1900), and Gilbert's death (1903), it was universally recognized
that electricity and magnetism were sciences that were just now in the midst
of acquiring a vast technological importance, from telegraphy and telephony
to electric lighting and power (which were less than a decade old). Nature
called them "now all-important subjects," and Cooke opened his article in
Engineering by reminding readers that "the whole civilised world is at last
awakened to the value of the application of electricity to the use and
convenience of man," pointing out its importance not only to the standard of
living, but also in creating a new profession, new industries and employment
for thousands. According to his advocates, William Gilbert deserved some
credit for having made all this possible, and all the more urgently for
having been neglected so severely for so long. Since Gilbert had been the
first great English scientist, and his work had "constituted the absolute
starting point of the science of electricity," it was particularly incumbent
upon British physicists to remove the "reproach upon [their] scientific
patriotism," and make their forefather's name and work better known. In
addition to vying for the attention of the general public, however, the
Gilbert Club also had an important role to play for its own members, by
providing common ground in unruly times. Exactly because the challenges of
electrical technology were new, the commercial stakes were high, and theories
were constantly being revised, controversies and disputes were common in the
engineering community. It was frequently difficult to judge the correct
approach to problems faced in rapidly-developing telecommunications and
power-generation technologies, or even to know what principles could be
validly invoked to explain the phenomena observed. Historians of electrical
engineering controversies in this period have described a fundamental
conflict between "practical men," engineers like W.H. Preece of the Post
Office, who was repsonsible for the national telegraph and telephone systems,
and university-trained "theoreticians," such as Oliver Lodge, who were
followers of Maxwell's advanced mathematical approach to electricity and
magnetism. In 1887, Silvanus Thompson himself had participated in a lengthy
and acrimonious exchange with Preece over the invention of the telephone, and
in 1888 Preece and Lodge had a highly-publicized showdown at the meeting of
the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Yet the following
year, when the Gilbert Club was formed, Preece and Lodge were among the first
members. In July 1890, Thompson brought Preece as an invited guest to a
meeting of the Sette of Odd Volumes, a whimsical literary dining club that he
and Cooke had recently joined. Thompson delivered a long, specially-prepared
lecture on Gilbert, and exhibited his collection of rare early works by
Gilbert and his contemporaries. In response, Preece "paid very high
tribute" to Gilbert and to his followers, Thompson and Cooke, alike.
In the uncontroversial terrain of distant history, then, representatives of
both "theory" and "practice" could find common cause. This was why Sir
William Thomson, the future Lord Kelvin, was the Club's perfect figurehead
president. As Cooke explained, Thomson "more than any one else is the
representative fo the combination of abstract mathematical electricity and
magnetism with their applications to the service of man," and, like Gilbert,
he was always careful to ground his theories in experimental evidence. For
very similar reasons, the figure of Michael Faraday (1791-1867), whose
contributions had made him the more immediate father of British electrical
science, was also highly influential in this period: all varieties of
electrical engineers could identify with his legacy of basic theory combined
with practical experimentation. Faraday's name thus served as a useful
rallying point at times when consensus was sorely needed, such as during the
establishment of units of electrical quantities; symbolically, his portrait
was chosen in 1899 for the official seal of the Institution of Electrical
Engineers.
If the promotion of William Gilbert represented a similar opportunity for
consensus and professional unity, a translation of his work was especially
necessary because the new generation of electrical engineers was being
trained in scientific and technical rather than classical subjects and thus
would not have the opportunity to read De Magnete in the original Latin. It
is no coincidence that Thompson, as principal of Finsbury Technical College,
oversaw a revolutionary (for England) educational curriculum aimed at
training young men for direct entry into technical jobs, and thus appreciated
the need to make their own scientific heritage available to them through
other means. This was accomplished in the same way for public and
professional audiences alike: by the careful recovery and cultivation of
historical slivers of information that helped to provide an imaginative
connection to the "real" Gilbert of long ago. Whether in promoting national
pride, or reconciling quarrelling engineers, the strategy was the same.
It must be remembered that the activities of Silvanus Thompson and the
Gilbert Club occurred in exactly the period that has been characterized by
the "invention of tradition." From roughly 1870 to the First World War, and
especially in Britain during Victoria's jubilees of 1887 and 1897, the
monarchy and other institutions mined their past for symbols and ceremonies
which could be used to generate popular support and social cohesion. When
embellished with details that seemed to demonstrate their antiquity, rituals
acquired authenticity and thus authority, replacing that which was being lost
to modernization and cultural fragmentation. Faced with rapid change, social
disruption, and growing secularization, late Victorians (or at least some of
them) turned to national history as a source of continuity, and of
reassurance about a common British identity. Scientific heroes were certainly
perfectly capable of being commemorated for specific national ends, as
competing German and Polish celebrations of Copernicus show. In London, the
increasingly widespread adoption of electrical technologies, such as
telephone and urban lighting systems from the late 187Os onwards, was one
source of upheaval in established patterns and practices; all the better,
then, if the birth of electricity with Gilbert in the distant past could be
made into a stabilizing force for the present.
There was just one problem with elevating William Gilbert to the pantheon of
England's intellectual heritage: the scarcity of any authentic information
about him. Other than his two published books, De Magnete and a
posthumously-edited collection of treatises under the name of De Mundo nostro
Sublunari Philosophia Nova (1651), essentially none of Gilbert's own papers
and artifacts had survived, having been destroyed at the Royal College of
Physicians in the Great Fire of 1666, or simply lost through neglect over the
years. Although Gilbert's status had long been appreciated by previous
writers on electricity and magnetism - the important eighteenth-century
natural philosopher Joseph Priestley wrote that Gilbert "may justly be called
the father of modern electricity," and the pioneering mid-nineteenth-century
historian and philosopher of science William Whewell said his work on
magnetism "contains all the fundamental facts of the science, so fully
examined indeed, that even at this day we have little to add to them" - very
few details of his life were known, and not even his signature, much less a
portrait, was available. To commemorate William Gilbert, then, the Gilbert
Club would first have to create him.
The task of supplying the necessary authentic details of Gilbert's life was
taken up enthusiastically by Silvanus Thompson, who invested great effort in
his searches for artifacts such as signatures, books, portraits, coats of
arms, contemporary references to Gilbert, and even his correct year of birth
(1544, not 1540) - canvassing libraries foreign and domestic, the British
Museum, and the Public Record Office. An avid rare book collector, Thompson
eventually owned five copies of De Magnete. By the time of the Gilbert
tercentenary in 1903 even Thompson felt as though he might have overextended
himself, writing that "I have spent so much time (& money) over Gilbert
during the last few years, and so much time over London University reform,
that I have seriously touched my financial position, and shall have to
abandon these unremunerative delights." Another historian of electricity
wrote to him, "Goodness me - still at Gilbert! I thought he had been
thoroughly done for." Thompson's assiduity was extreme in Gilbert's case,
but not atypical; he had earlier undertaken an ambitious project to attempt
to gain recognition for an alternative inventor of the telephone, and in the
189Os he was also engaged in researching and writing a well-received and
influential biography of Michael Faraday. Thompson's success in turning up
samples of Gilbert's handwriting, and a copy of Aristotle with Gilbert's name
in it, provided an important physical basis for the commemorative efforts to
come.
On a rainy July day in 1890 a special meeting of the Gilbert Club was held in
Colchester, Gilbert's birthplace, in conjunction with the Essex Field Club,
in which Thompson's colleague and Gilbert Club co-secretary Raphael Meldola
was an active member. Some fifty delegates dutifully visited the house in
which Gilbert was said to have been born, viewed the Holy Trinity church in
which he was buried, and examined the memorial tablet erected there by his
relatives. Later, in the evening, Silvanus Thompson gave an illustrated
lecture on Gilbert's experiments; modern electrical technologies were also
exhibited, including incandescent lights powered from a generating station
across the road. These events demonstrate well what the Gilbert Club, or at
least Thompson, was trying to do: to situate Gilbert in the national past and
at the same time to connect him in a positive way to the most modern elements
of contemporary society. The relationship between viewing authentic relics of
Gilbert and being able to appreciate his current significance was expressed
in Thompson's later description of the family house in Colchester as "the
very Mecca to which all electricians would go to make a pilgrimage." This
idea played on one of his favourite seventeenth-century texts, which claimed
that Gilbert's reputation would be everlasting, just like "Mahomet's Tombe at
Mecha," because both were eternally supported by a lodestone. Colchester
itself in the late nineteenth century was an especially appropriate place in
which to go about inventing a tradition, because it was home to the
celebrated Oyster Feast, an old private ritual that was just at this time
being reinvented and promoted as a massive public spectacle. The celebration
of William Gilbert (or Gilberd as he is locally known) fit perfectly with
Colchester's municipal transformation in this period and its recasting of its
identity in terms of a selectively-narrated glorious past.
Despite this initial success, it remained clear that the most important
project by far was still the translation and facsimile edition of De Magnete
in time for its tercentenary in 1900. After all, it was the book itself that
was to be the main link between the past and present Gilberts. It seems
evident that Thompson and Cooke had a well-developed idea of what they wanted
the finished volume to look like: samples of the title page (dated 1890) and
a translated interior page, showing the antique font and layout designed to
match the Latin original perfectly, had already been included with the
initial circular of November 1889. Their printer, the Chiswick Press, initially
under the direction of Charles Whittingham the younger, had been known since
mid-century as the leader in old-face typography and specialty printing; they
cast their own antique type-faces, had an extensive collection of initials and
ornaments, and could also arrange special paper and binding for any private
printing job. Despite this planning, though, it appears that production began
to fall behind schedule very soon, probably in no small part due to the
enormous teaching, research, and administrative load borne by Thompson, in
addition to his proclivity for taking on additional projects like the Faraday
biography already mentioned. In September 1891, Cooke wrote to Thompson asking,
"What is happening to Gilbert's book? We really ought to do something for the
subscribers. It will soon be two years since our inaugural meeting, and twenty
months since the last meeting, and some of the subscribers have already paid
their subscriptions. How do matters stand? and when shall we have something to
show?" The answer to Cooke's question was that it would take the rest of
the decade before the Gilbert Club had a book to give its members. In the
meantime, something transpired that was far worse than a mere delay: a rival
translation appeared. Engineering, the same journal in which Cooke had proudly
described the ambitions of the Gilbert Club three years before, trumpeted the
news in December 1892, in no uncertain terms. "We are very glad to see the
announcement that a reliable translation of Dr. Gilbert's 'De Magnete' will
shortly be published in New York," the note began.
A special interest attaches itself to this forthcoming publication. Some
years ago, we forget exactly how many, we heard a good deal of a so-called
"Gilbert Club," though why called so we never understood. One announced
purpose of this 'club' was to prepare a translation of the great work of Dr.
Gilbert. . . . Much talk went forth, especially from Mr. Sylvanus P. Thompson,
as to what was to be accomplished, and how this translation was to be better
than any translation of any other book that had ever been seen before, until we
began to expect that it would far outshine the original work. But time passed
and we heard nothing, except that the difficult work was progressing. . . . We
believe that one of the intended features of the work was that each chapter of
the translation was to commence with a facsimile reproduction of the great
initial letter of the original. As a large number of these are varying designs
of the letter "Q," the delay may be caused by the difficulty of finding English
equivalents commencing in the same way. Meantime Mr. Mottelay, of New York . .
. has completed and is publishing his translation, which will render the
further struggles of Mr. Thompson with the letter "Q" wholly unnecessary.
Thompson responded to this news with disbelief, because he had briefly met
Mottelay in person the year before, and had not been told of any such plans.
The bulk of his wrath, however, was directed at the American publishers, John
Wiley, which he said had earned an "evil notoriety" for their "pirated
editions," making them a tainted source that the Gilbert Club could safely
ignore. Unfortunately for Thompson, the controversy continued in the pages
of British and American engineering journals for several months, getting him
involved in a personal dispute with James Dredge, a co-editor of Engineering
who had previous ties to the Wiley family. Thompson tried in vain to
explain that his concern was aesthetic rather than moral or intellectual, and
that Wiley's low-quality unauthorized editions of John Ruskin's works proved
that an American De Magnete could not conceivably compete with the
specialty-printed limited-edition facsimile that the Gilbert Club planned to
issue to its subscribers. Such niceties were lost on most commentators,
though, and a negative view of Thompson soon prevailed, especially in
America. According to the New York Times, Thompson was "a rather noisy
scientist" who "talks as if the copyright in Gilbert's mediaeval book rested
in him."
This affair, in which the consensus was that Thompson was "so evidently in
the wrong," was still fresh in reviewers' mind when Mottelay's translation
appeared in the spring of 1893; as Science pointed out, the "rather
acrimonious discussion . . . has attracted even more attention to this book
than it would otherwise have received." Thompson's friend in the Sette of
Odd Volumes, the bookseller Bernard Quaritch, was in fact the London
publisher of the competing edition, which Thompson himself reviewed in the
Electrician, picking apart Mottelay's scholarship but refusing to comment on
the merits of the translation "for reasons that will be appreciated." He
did grudgingly admit, though, that the physical quality of the volume was
better than expected, which "comes as a surprise and a pleasure." Nature
chose to remain silent on the issue of hurt feelings, but the pointed
reference to the Gilbert Club's Colchester field trip in its brief review of
the Mottelay translation was comment enough. Nevertheless, the two rival
translators did eventually became friends and collaborators, with Mottelay
visiting Thompson to see his library in 1909 and assisting in the preparation
of the hand list to Thompson's rare book collection in 1914. Still, the
question remains why, in 1893, Thompson and the Gilbert Club did not simply
cancel their project, as the writer in Engineering (quite probably Dredge
himself) so helpfully suggested: "abandon [the] search after English
equivalents with 'Q,' and return their guineas to those hopeful subscribers
who paid in advance - so long in advance - for the still invisible 'De
Magnete'."
Exactly because there was no obviously necessary reason for the Club's
translation project to continue, the fact that it did is highly illuminating.
Fundamentally, Thompson believed that his edition was something more than a
mere English-language text of Gilbert's work. One indication of this
difference is clearly apparent in the complaint made by the petulant column
in Engineering, that the Gilbert Club was primarily concerned with the
aesthetic appearance of its publication in making the initial capitals match.
The key thus is not that Gilbert Club edition was meant to differ from other
translations, but that it was supposed to be identical to Gilbert's original
book - the one published in 1600 - in every possible respect (although an
index was added to the English version and the list of printer's errors
removed). Recall the original statement of the Club's purpose, that their
volume would be, "as like the original in appearance as it can be made; it
will, in fact, be a facsimile reprint in everything except the language in
which it is reproduced." This fit with Thompson's aims of using the edition
simultaneously as an authentic artifact of the historic Gilbert and as a way
of reaching out to modern readers; the visual appearance of the book was part
of its content and meaning. However, the project of making the two editions
identical even went beyond using the same typeface and ornamental designs:
Thompson and his colleagues went so far as to pretend that the English itself
had been written and printed in 1600 rather than 1900, adding an affected "k"
to the end of words like "magnetick." Explaining why deliberately archaic
language had been used, such as "orbe of magnetick virtue" instead of "sphere
of influence," Thompson wrote: "This choice has been determined by the desire
to adopt such an English phrase as Gilbert would himself have used had he
been writing in English."
When the Gilbert Club folio finally reached the hands of subscribers in 1901
or perhaps 1902, bearing the symbolic publication date 1900, it was warmly
received in both Nature and in the Times Literary Supplement. The reviewer in
Nature "envied" the members of the Gilbert Club for having the chance to own
"this splendid volume," while the TLS admired the "sumptuous" reproduction of
all "the decorative headings, colophons, and printers' marks with which books
were embellished in an age more leisurely than ours," and the quality of the
sheets, "printed from beautifully clear old-faced type upon thick hand-made
Van Gelder paper." Only two hundred and fifty copies were printed. Subscribers
had their choice of two bindings: half-holland, at the price of ￡1/1/6, or
whole limp vellum at ￡1/12/6; by May of 1903 there were still copies available
to anyone wishing to join the Club, such as the telegraph engineer and science
historian JJ. Fahie, then living in Italy, whom Thompson reassured: "membership
in the Club means nothing more than this - that you become one of the
guarantors to take a copy. The 'club' has no other responsibilities."
While the translation was generally credited mainly to Thompson (and has been
ever since), he tried to correct this impression by drawing attention to the
assistance he had received from nine other collaborators. In fact, back in
1892 he had claimed that "it is not my fault that the work is not already
published," the rough translation having been "all but complete two years
ago," and that progress was limited by members of the "Editorial Committee"
who could only donate so much of their time to the revisions. It was his
own extensive research, though, that led to the writing and inclusion of
sixty-four pages of detailed Notes on Gilbert's text, nominally a separate
publication under Thompson's own name (dated 1901), but which were printed in
the same style and bundled together with the commemorative edition, and were
part of the reason its distribution was delayed. By the end of 1915, as
Thompson was winding up the Club's affairs, he reported that some thirty
copies of the English edition of De Magnete remained, mostly unbound, and
that these should either be sold to a dealer or given to libraries; of the
Notes, 120 copies remained, valued at 10/- each, which were his own
property. Thompson also noted that the outbreak of war had prevented him
and Meldola from proceeding with plans to dispose of the remaining copies of
On the Magnet; indeed, he did not live to see the end of the war.
In order for the Gilbert Club edition to function as a link to the past, it
had to resemble an object of the past as closely as possible. A modern
edition like Mottelay's simply would not do: it had no value as an icon and
lacked "charm," as Thompson's biographers (his wife Jane and daughter Helen)
put it, possibly connoting power as well as prettiness. One might be
tempted to reach the conclusion that, on these grounds, the Club should have
reproduced the original edition of 1600 instead. But of course that text was
in Latin, and the main reason for the deplorable neglect of Gilbert had
always been that his work did not exist in English, despite the fact,
ironically, that a translation had been called for by Gilbert's friend
William Barlow as early as 1616. In order to meet their goals of enhancing
and spreading Gilbert's reputation, and of increasing British "scientific
patriotism," it was absolutely necessary that the Gilbert Club edition be in
English.
What the Gilbert Club really wanted then, to meet all their needs, was an
English edition from 1600, much as Barlow had wanted even at the time, as
Conrad Cooke pointed out back in 1889. They did not want a new edition so
much as, in Cooke's own words, "a facsimile reprint." But a "reprint" of
what? There was no English text from 1600, so none could be "reprinted." Of
course, Cooke did not really mean a literal reprint, since he qualified his
statement with "except the language in which it is reproduced." This is a
very large exception indeed. However, his statement is revealing of what the
Club's promoters had in mind and it was something along these lines,
simultaneously old and new, that Silvanus Thompson tried to produce.
Important evidence for Thompson's response to this tension comes from his
handling of the part of the project which was more flexible, namely the notes
he prepared for separate publication. Specifically, the three epigraphs that
Thompson chose for his Notes say a great deal about his attitude to the
translation and what he thought it meant.
The longest epigraph, and the only one that Thompson provided a full citation
for, comes from the preface to a 1598 English translation of an Italian work
on painting. It begins:
I find that you have used in this your translation greate art, knowledge and
discretion. For walking as it were in golden fetters (as al Translators doe),
you notwithstanding so warilie follow your Auctor, that where he trippeth you
hold him up, and where he goeth out of the way, you better direct his foot.
You have not only with the Bee sucked out the best juyce from so sweete a
flower, but with the Silke-worme as it were woven out of your owne bowels,
the finest silk; and that which is more, not rude and raw si Ike, but finely
died with the fresh colour of your own Art, Invention, and Practise.
If there is one problem common to all reproductions of texts, whether
translations, reprints, or both, it is that the meaning of the original can
never be truly recaptured outside of the original context. In different
contexts, even superficially identical texts have different meanings. And
in the nineteenth century, there were already several examples of
contemporary scientific translations that had agendas quite different than
those of their source texts, in such contested areas as divine design and
evolutionary theory. Thompson recognized that it was impossible to make
Gilbert intelligible to a late-nineteenth-century audience, with a
late-nineteenth-century understanding of electricity and magnetism, without
sometimes making it seem like Gilbert was a nineteenth rather than a
sixteenth-century thinker. This was equally a problem with Mottelay's
translation, as some perceptive reviewers noted: the use of a modern term
such as "force" or "energy," inevitably made Gilbert seem to be saying things
that he assuredly was not. With this first epigraph, however, Thompson
acknowledged that the late nineteenth-century English De Magnete was indeed
partly his own work, not only Gilbert's.
Thompson took his second epigraph from William Caxton, the late
fifteenth-century pioneer of English printing and an important figure to
Thompson, who was ever the enthusiast of early books and their impact on book
design in the work of William Morris. The quotation reads: "This booke is
not for every rude and unconnynge man to see, but for clerkys and very
gentylmen that understand gentylness and scyence." To the casual reader, this
seems apt enough; the Gilbert Club edition was indeed aimed at gentlemen who
understood "science" (albeit in a different sense). In fact, however, there
is much more to the epigraph than meets the eye, once its source (not given
by Thompson) has been determined. It comes from the preface to Caxton's
Eneydos, his 1490 translation of a French version of Virgil's Aeneid. Its
thematic context is exactly the linguistic difficulties of translation,
especially when a considerable amount of time or distance separates the
source text from the receiving culture. In his preface, Caxton explained how
varied the English language itself was and how it could be difficult for two
people to understand each other even when they both believed they spoke the
same language. As a result, Caxton had to make a careful balance, to the best
of his ability, between the technical, obscure, or foreign terms that his
best-educated readers expected and the common language of everyday use.
This was very much the same problem that Thompson faced: if he attempted to
render Gilbert's Aristotelian terminology literally, the result would have
been incomprehensible, but if the translation was too free it would
unreasonably distort the sense of the original and introduce blatant
anachronisms. It is worth noting that, although there was very little change
in the design of the Gilbert Club edition between the sample page shown in
the 1889 circular and the same page in the 1900 volume, substantial
differences exist between the two translations. Where the proposal page
refers to "polarity," the finished version chooses instead "verticity," a
reflection of the fact that Gilbert had to coin many of his own terms and
that it would not always be wise to render them directly into modern
scientific "equivalents," a problem Mottelay had already encountered.
However, when it came to explaining Gilbert's significance to contemporary
audiences, such as in illustrated lectures, Thompson did not hesitate to
employ current terms, freely equating the untranslated term "versorium" (a
swinging needle), for example, with the modern electroscope.
Finally, the third quotation that Thompson chose as an epigraph to his text
is from Chaucer, who as the first great English poet was a natural
counterpart to Gilbert, seen (however anachronistically) as the first great
English scientist. The passage reads: "For out of olde feldes, as men
seith/ Cometh al this newe corn fro yeer to yere;/And out of olde bokes, in
good feith,/ Cometh al this newe science that men lere." Once again,
Thompson's meaning seems clear enough at first glance, De Magnete being the
old book out of which the important new science of electricity has come. Once
again, however, a look at the context of these lines, from Chaucer's
Parliament of Fowls (circa 1383), reveals that there is more to the story. In
the next stanza, we learn that the specific old book in question in the poem
is Cicero's "Dream of Scipio." Chaucer goes on to describe the part of that
book which was most important to Renaissance natural philosophers: the
Pythagorean idea of the music, or harmony, of the nine celestial spheres.
Through this seemingly straightforward quotation, Silvanus Thompson was able
to remind readers of Johannes Kepler, Gilbert's important contemporary,
admirer, and fellow Copernican, who was inspired both by the music of the
spheres and by De Magnete in developing his explanation of elliptical
planetary orbits (which he thought were connected to magnetism), one of the
key achievements of the Scientific Revolution. Thompson's choice of
epigraph thus comments not only on his 1900 edition and the contemporary
relevance of electrical science, but is also plausible in the context of
1600, when "newe science" was also being inspired by "olde bokes."
None of the three quotations chosen by Thompson betrays the recent origins of
the Gilbert Club's project: all three are in English and date from before
1600, so each would have been just as appropriate for a seventeenth-century
translation of De Magnete. And Silvanus Thompson was not only a voracious
reader, a keen researcher, and a devoted collector of old books (including
works of Kepler among many others), he was also very fond of composing
verses, playing word games, solving literary mysteries, and finding apt
quotations for an occasion, as exemplified by his membership in the "Sette of
Odd Volumes." Taken together, the epigraphs show that Thompson was well
aware of the difference between the context of 1600 and the context of 1900.
De Magnete and On the Magnet were not really the same book by the same
author, but the nearest Thompson could come to acknowledging this without
undermining the purpose of the Gilbert Club edition was to express his
observations in pre-1600 prose.
The Gilbert Club's translation of De Magnete functioned in two ways: as a
physical, visual text that was a symbol of the sixteenth century, helping to
support the invented tradition of Gilbert as the English father of
electricity; and as a nineteenth-century text, promoting pride and unity
among British electrical scientists and engineers. Both of these functions
were related to the revolution in electrical science and technology that was
underway in the late Victorian period, to the social and economic effects
of that revolution on a variety of levels, and indeed to the overall changes
in British society that were occurring, in which the Gilbert Club played but
a very small part. Silvanus Thompson, as the chief architect of the Gilbert
Club, saw well the ways in which these two aspects of the English On the
Magnet existed in harmony, but also in constant tension: after all, there was
a certain incongruity in claiming a Renaissance philosopher as the father of
a heavy power industry that even Faraday would have had trouble recognizing.
Translation, in this case, was also multiplication, for bringing Gilbert into
the late nineteenth century entailed writing his book anew, even though it was
simultaneously necessary to conceal this change by making the volume a visual
mimic of its source text. While translations of modern works, intended for
actual scientific use, commonly modified the meaning of the original by adding
or omitting textual material, the (unction of On the Magnet was ornamental and
its meaning lay in its claim to be exactly the same as the venerable De Magnete
: "nothing but a translation, and that the best possible."
Fortunately for Thompson, the peak of popular interest in William Gilbert
came in 1903 with the tercentenaries of the deaths of both Gilbert and
Elizabeth I. Thompson and his collection of Gilbert artifacts played a
significant role in the Elizabethan tercentenary celebrations on 23 March
1903 at the Royal Geographical Society, which saw the establishment of
Gilbert as an equal to Drake and Raleigh as a founder of the first English
Empire, because of his magnetic contributions to navigation. He was
compared favourably to Shakespeare, Spenser, and Bacon, securing his place in
the elite group of founders of British culture and power, "the men who made
great the age of Queen Elizabeth, who added lustre to the England over which
she ruled." The Institution of Electrical Engineers contributed to this
project by commissioning a special painting showing Gilbert (who had been a
royal physician) demonstrating his experiments to Queen Elizabeth and her
court, including Raleigh, Drake, and William Cecil Lord Burghley. This
imagined scene was a perfect example of late Victorian invented tradition; as
Thompson explained to assembled dignitaries in London on 10 December 1903,
the exact tercentenary of Gilbert's death, the artist A. Ackland Hunt had
"been faithful even to the historic costumes of the period and to the best
that could be done in portraiture to bring back with historic accuracy the
episode it commemorates." The painting was presented as a gift to the town
of Colchester at this special meeting, and the mayor, himself an electrician,
pledged that it would hang ever after in the new town hall, which was itself
a centrepiece of civic historical pageantry.
One of Thompson's favourite and most frequently-quoted references to Gilbert
came from a John Dryden poem that celebrated English scientific prowess:
"Gilbert shall live, till loadstones cease to draw,/ Or British fleets the
boundless ocean awe." This couplet suggested that there was a
transcendental connection between Gilbert, magnetism, and British maritime
power, which was of course just as much a source of pride and confidence in
1900 as it had been in 1600. To achieve this apparent timelessness, however,
to establish Gilbert's place in the annals of British triumph, and to make
him real to contemporary scientists and engineers, required great effort on
the parts of Silvanus P. Thompson, Conrad Cooke, and other members of the
Gilbert Club. In reward, they saw their depiction of Gilbert gain wide
acceptance, although, to be sure, they did not face the same challenges as
commemorators of a complex contemporary figure like Charles Darwin. Rather,
their project of translating William Gilbert into the late nineteenth
century, based on the translation and "facsimile" edition of his book De
Magnete, was also a translation of Gilbert himself, bringing him forward
through three centuries, and giving him a new identity as the founder of the
burgeoning electrical industry and profession.
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