Realising Hugh Miller's final book

Early in the morning of Christmas Eve 1856 Scottish geologist, essayist and evangelical

Hugh Miller rose from his bed and wrote a final note to his wife. ‘My brain burns.  I must have walked; and a fearful dream rises upon me. I cannot bear the horrible thought.  God and Father of the Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy upon me.  Dearest Lydia, dear children, farewell.’ He then shot himself in the chest, severing the pulmonary artery at its root. He was 54 years old.  Post-mortem revealed possible early dementia, and death was certified as ‘suicide while insane’. Lydia Mackenzie Falconer Miller, ten years his junior, left their three younger children boarding or with relatives, and travelled with her eldest, Harriet (17), by boat to London, train to Worcester, and carriage to Malvern to seek Dr Gully’s water cure.

It is likely that the water cure was suggested to Lydia by Rev William Samuel Symonds, rector of Pendock near Tewkesbury, and founder and president of the Malvern Naturalists’ Field Club, which Gully joined in 1855. Miller and Symonds had a shared interest in fish fossils and both were authors of geological books. Symonds met the Millers at their home in 1854, observing a simple man, self-educated to a high level, who treated all people with the same ‘kind and gentle manner’, so that ‘to peer and peasant Hugh Miller was the same’. They shared the conviction that ‘the cultivation of intellect was more honoured than the mere presence of rank’.[1]

Symonds was to open his home and family to Lydia Miller. Her letters to him, over the rest of her lifetime, were donated to the Herefordshire libraries by Symonds’ grandson in 1939.[2] Previously unpublished, they offer an insight into the process of editing and preparing Miller’s remaining works for posthumous publication. Sadly, although Lydia refers to keeping and re-reading Symonds’ letters to her, they were lost with most her papers during the London blitz.

The correspondence began shortly after Hugh’s death as Lydia sought help with the revision and publication her late husband’s manuscripts. Lydia and Harriet arrived in Malvern in April 1857, writing from their accommodation at ‘The Palms’ (8, Orchard Road, Great Malvern) that Dr Gully was away, and they had to wait to start the ‘water cure’[3]. There Lydia began to edit the seventh edition of The Old Red Sandstone, writing to Symonds, ‘I forgot to ask you when I had the pleasure of seeing you here to draw your pencil through any passages in the book I gave you which you may think better expunged and likewise to place any remark which occurs to you on the margin’; and asking him to add a passage on new discoveries, with ‘an appropriate reference to the interest these discoveries would have afforded to him for whom they are all now a closed record insofar as the acquirement of knowledge in this world is concerned’. On May 12^th, Lydia thanked Symonds for his ‘kind and prompt execution of the notes’. She was exhausted, writing in a shaky hand, ‘I am obliged to abjure the very sight of a book and almost the use of a pen, the later [sic] causes so much headache and excitement of the nervous system’. In the finished edition, dated April 1857, Lydia offers ‘To the Rev. W. S. Symonds – a well known geologist, intimately acquainted with the Silurian and Old Red of his own neighbourhood, the south-western part of England, and always up to the most recent geological opinions and discoveries of the day … my most cordial thanks for his most generously offered assistance’.

When Gully returned from his travels Lydia’s treatment began. By July 1857, Lydia and Harriet were staying at St James’ Boarding House in West Malvern, where Harriet rubbed her mother ‘every morning with Brandy and salt and at night with olive oil’. In August, Harriet observed ‘such an exciting effect upon [her mother] that her nerves cannot stand it’, and Lydia herself concluded ‘I am in the hands of quacks’. Lydia, whose nerves had steadily improved, left Gully’s establishment. Contemplating the ‘sacred duty’ of editing all of her late husband’s unpublished essays, however, she quickly realised that she was completely unprepared for sorting and preparing technical works on geology and natural history.

Lydia’s biographer suggests that in the early summer of 1857 she was invited to stay with William and Katherine Symonds at Pendock rectory, while they worked on the papers and books for publication. There is no direct evidence for this, although later letters record that Lydia and her children were guests of the Symonds on a number of occasions. Instead, Symonds worked largely alone on the manuscripts, ‘The excitement and anxiety naturally attaching to a revision of her husband’s works proved over much for one suffering under such recent trial and from an affectation of the brain and spine which ensued’.[4] Lydia’s recovery, under the Symonds’ gentle guidance was augmented by various friends in the Malvern Club ‘to whom, as well as yourself, I owe a debt of grateful remembrance’.[5] Lydia still suffered frequent relapses and could see ‘no prospect of being able to leave Malvern this winter. Heaven give me grace and patience for this trial’, adding, ironically, ‘still here at our palace of St James’. Resigned to spending the winter in Malvern, Lydia rented Rock Cottage in Holywell Road, Malvern Wells, on the eastern flanks of the hills and closer to Pendock. On 20 October she decided, on the invitation of a friend, to spend the winter at Ryde on the Isle of Wight.

In early November 1857, the Symonds household suffered its own bereavement when seven-year-old Elsdon Henry died from typhoid fever. Two days later, Lydia wrote from Ryde, to say that she had received ‘the sorrowful intelligence of your boy’s death’. After a lengthy Christian homily, however, she returned the business in hand, informing the grieving Symonds that she had made a decision that Hugh’s lectures on Edinburgh should be published in a separate volume.

Symonds also received the manuscripts of Miller’s unpublished lectures in November - by Northern Rail carrier as Lydia’s agent feared they would go astray if sent by Royal Mail (nothing has changed, apparently, in 150 years!). William set to editing and sorting the various essays that eventually made up The Cruise of the Betsey, noting that he had ‘expunged some passages [concerning schism in the Free Churches of Scotland], which I am assured the author would have omitted had he lived to reprint this interesting narrative of his geological rambles’. Indeed, the majority of readers would ‘rejoice to follow their favourite author among the isles and rocks of the “bonnie land”’. Lydia apparently left him to it as there are no further letters in 1857. Spending Christmas in Rude, she returned home in January, apologising for not writing before leaving England and professing herself glad to hear that Symonds’ leg was ‘so much better’.

The Cruise of the Betsey was published in 1858. Lydia was pleased that William had requested a copy of ‘our book for dear Mrs Tennant’, his sister, adding that she will forward it herself and write a note. The first posthumous publication of Hugh’s new work was a huge relief to Lydia, encouraging her to move forward with her project. On 16 April, she wrote that she was planning a revision of Foot-steps of the Creator, and was also working on a further edition of The Old Red Sandstone, which she said needed a full re-write. She sent Symonds a copy to ‘kindly mark with a cross any place that requires attention and if you would write a little bundle of slips with the pages marked on and send them’. In May, ‘The Lady Harriet’ wrote that she was ‘acting as a scribe’ for her mother, who was ‘in consequence of fatigue once again confined to bed’. Lydia increasingly demonstrated her own understanding of geological concepts, gained from correspondence with many other learned men in the field. Mr & Mrs Symonds were invited to stay with them in Cromarty for ‘a hearty Highland welcome and plenty of walks and long days’.

On 8 October 1858, a recovered Lydia sent a draft of Hugh Miller’s Sketchbook of Popular Geology (1859), dedicated to Symonds. ‘Without your co-operation I believe that neither the “Cruise of the Betsey” nor these pages could by this time have seen the light. When my own overloaded brain refused to do its duty, you gave me to hope, by offers of well-timed assistance, that the task before me might still be accomplished. Your friendly voice, often heard in tones of sympathizing inquiry when I was unable to endure your own or any other human presence, – even that of my own dear child, – was for a time the only sound that brought to my heart any promise or cheer for the future … you have given me all the advantages of your ready store of information, both in carefully scrutinizing the text to see where any addition was required in the form of notes, and in referring me to the best authorities on every point regarding which I consulted you.  And, while so doing, you have confirmed my own judgement, – perhaps too liable to be swayed by any partiality, – by expressing your conviction that this work is calculated to advance the reputation of its author’. 

By April 1859, Lydia was updating Footprints, and writing to Symonds and other authorities to test her understanding. She confessed, ‘I sometimes fear that I pester all you great geologists – but there is a generosity and true friendship among really scientific men which I cannot express any sense of – more than I think is found in the world … What a blessing at least to see one’s way. May God grant me sense enough to do this book justice’. In September 1860 Lydia and her children were touring Holland, Germany and Belgium and not at home to see Symonds when he attended a meeting in Glasgow. She had sent a copy of Sketchbook to Balmoral Castle and received a response to say that the Queen ‘attaches full value to any work proceeding from your distinguished husband’. The revised Footprints was published in 1861. Lydia’s preface is a testament to Symonds’ mentoring, in person and through correspondence, over nearly five years. Now ‘flying solo’, she still quotes the authority of ‘My Friend Mr Symonds’ and includes his table of the Upper and Lower Silurian with their fish fauna.

Lydia Miller and William Samuel Symonds would continue to correspond until the former’s death on 11 March 1876, aged 64, when she was laid to rest beside her beloved husband in Edinburgh’s Grange Cemetery. Their letters include concerns about Lydia’s periodic health problems, her admissions to asylums in Dumfries and Glasgow, and her strong opposition to, and his increasing support of, the theories of Mr Charles Darwin, which were about to challenge both the scientific and evangelical communities.

[1] Symonds, Rev. WS. Stones of the Valley, Richard Bentley (1857).

[2] HARC CF50/82-85

[3] Sutherland, E., Lydia. Wife of Hugh Miller of Cromarty, Tuckwell Press (2002).

[4] Symonds, W.S., Preface to Miller, H. The Cruise of the Betsy. Thomas Constable & Sons (1858).

[5] Miller, L. ‘To the Rev. W. S. Symonds’, in Miller, H.,  Sketch-book of Popular Geology.  Being a Series of Lectures Delivered Before the Philosophical Institution of Edinburgh, Thomas Constable & Sons (1859).