The latest in Robert J Lloyd’s Hunt and Hooke crime novels takes Robert Hooke and Henry Hunt to Bedlam, the recently-rebuilt Bethlehem Hospital — which Hooke himself designed. Rob looks at the extraordinarily wide range of interests these two 17th-century scientists had in real life.
The two main characters in my Hunt & Hooke series were real people. They were ‘natural philosophers’ or ‘experimental philosophers’; their late-17th-century endeavours underpin my stories.
Robert Hooke was the Royal Society’s first Curator of Experiments. Henry Hunt served as his apprentice, then his assistant. Employed by the Royal Society as an Operator, some accounts have him as succeeding Hooke as Curator. (This to me seems doubtful.) He certainly became the Keeper of the Library, and later, the Keeper of the Repository.
Both men had an astonishingly wide range of knowledge and expertise. (Useful for a crime-fighting duo!) When planning The Bedlam Cadaver, the third book of the series, I decided to emphasise skills mostly absent from the first two.
The Bloodless Boy uses blood transfusion experiments Hooke and others in the early Royal Society carried out, and references William Harvey’s earlier work on the heart and blood. Hooke’s ‘Air-pump’ also appears; this had a glass receiver from which air could be removed, or into which, added. Hooke used it to investigate combustion, respiration, and preservation; its transparency allowed observation.
In The Poison Machine, Hunt suffers humiliation when he fails to demonstrate the piezoelectric effect to the Royal Society Fellows. It’s the two men’s shared knowledge of gases, poisons, and horology that helps them battle the fictitious machine of the title.
Just listing Hooke’s interests would use up my allowed word count for this feature. These included microscopy — for which he’s probably best remembered because of his book Micrographia, which he also illustrated.
He used the telescopes he designed to become one of the foremost astronomers of his time. He was a mathematician, employed as Gresham College’s Professor of Geometry for over forty years. His expertise also encompassed horology, meteorology, palaeontology, and anatomy.
He was also (a lot of alsos with Hooke) a prodigious inventor, credited with a brick-making machine, the sash window, the universal joint, the adjustable spanner, inflatable tyres. (Again, too many to list all.) Richard Waller, Hooke’s contemporary, tells us there were “some hundreds”. Hooke himself said they were “not fewer than a thousand.’” Among my favourites are his ‘bouncing shoes’, able to propel their wearer 12 feet up in the air. He also invented “thirty-severall” ways of flying.
But an aspect I wished to emphasise this time around was his architecture. As the Surveyor to the City of London, Hooke surveyed hundreds of buildings destroyed or damaged after the Fire of London, and issued certificates for their rebuilding. He was on the committee set up to regulate the materials to be used to build a more flame-proof city.
A close friend of Sir Christopher Wren, he helped with various churches often mistakenly wholly credited to the more famous man, including St. Paul’s Cathedral. Together, they designed the Greenwich Observatory and the Monument to the Fire. They built the Monument as a huge instrument: a zenith telescope, meant to help them measure the distance to stars using parallax. (As the vibration from traffic through the stone column interfered with their observations, it never really worked.)
Hooke designed various buildings of his own. I decided to set much of The Bedlam Cadaver in the most impressive of them. You guessed it: the Bethlehem Hospital, or ‘Bedlam’.
Replacing a far smaller, dilapidated old building, Hooke’s was recently completed when my book’s set. Stretching over Moorfields, it housed 120 patients in two galleries, one above the other. Some two hundred yards across, it was so large that Sir Roger L’Estrange wrote “…the Vast Length of the Galleries wearies [the] Travelling eyes of visiting Strangers.”
To save money, most of the Hospital was of brick. (Perhaps made using Hooke’s brick-making machine.) But in the centre and at each end were stone pavilions with large cupolas. Beneath the galleries was a basement, with the kitchens and washrooms and so on. (An aside: the East India Company rented some of these cellar rooms for storage. The place must have smelled of spices.)
Unlike the later Hogarthian image we have of it, when new, Hooke’s Bethlehem was light and bright. It allowed fresh air to circulate, felt to be conducive to the patients’ recovery. But already, as reading of the staff disciplinary records shows, abuse of patients had begun. (This abuse gave me the initial idea for The Bedlam Cadaver’s plot.)
We know a lot about Robert Hooke. I completed my MA thesis about him in 1994 — crikey, that long! — and felt I was turning over new ground, but since then various articles, books, and full-length biographies have appeared.
Far more shadowy is Henry Hunt. He’s a constant presence in Hooke’s diary, and in the Hooke Folio. These give glimpses of what he did for Hooke and the Royal Society, constructing models and apparatus, or fetching books and so on. Hooke’s mentions of him are tantalisingly vague — which of course I quite like, as then I’m free to invent.
The Hooke Folio shows him accepting objects thought interesting enough to store in the Royal Society’s repository: a branch of white coral; a globe; the claw of a West Indian spider (thought to be a cure for toothache, presumably to be swallowed rather than nipped by); and a small ivory box containing curious writing “being the 10 Commandement the creed & the Lords prayer all written wthing the compasse of a silver penny.” A glass urn found at Spitalfields when digging cellars, and a “very large whitestone-cutt out of the bladder of a Dogge at Cambridge.” (My list could go on. Of course it could.)
The Folio also mentions Hunt helping Hooke with experiments, such as “some experiments he had made wth. mr. Hunt & mr. Crawley at the Piller on fish street hill [the Monument], concerning the Difference of the pressure of the air at the top & Bottom of the Column.”
So, clearly Henry Hunt was a skilled natural philosopher. He was also — that word again — like Hooke, an accomplished artist. As I hadn’t really mentioned it in The Bloodless Boy or The Poison Machine, I sought to emphasise this ‘new’ aspect of him in The Bedlam Cadaver.
This leads to the section of the story based in Sir Peter Lely’s house in Covent Garden. Whether Hunt had any formal training in art I don’t know, but I give him such, and a friendship with Lely and Lely’s assistants. Hooke briefly trained under Lely when he first went to London from the Isle of Wight.
John Aubrey, in his Brief Life of Hooke, tells us, “When his father died, his son Robert was but 13 years old, to whom he left one hundred pounds, which was sent up to London with him, with an intention to have him bound to Mr Lely the painter, with whom he was a little while upon trial; who liked him very well, but Mr Hooke quickly perceived what was to be done, so, thought he, ‘why cannot I do this by myself and keep my hundred pounds?’”
Some of Hunt’s illustrations survive. [There are links to several of his illustrations for the Royal Society below.] He recorded specimens presented to the Royal Society and made illustrations for its regular publication, Philosophical Transactions. I make further use of this ability, this time as a forensic artist, in the fourth book of the series, The London Maiden.
But that’s another story…
The Bedlam Cadaver by Robert J Lloyd is published on 20 June, 2024.
See more about this book.
Illustrations by Henry Hunt:
- A ‘monstrous puppy’
- A ‘monstrous cat’
- A lumpfish
- An Egyptian god
- A Hyena kept at the Tower of London
- A Vietnamese pot-bellied pig
- Jon Bushell’s article, Bird Hunt, which shows Hunt’s illustrations of a hoopoe bird, and of a silver bodkin encrusted in a woman’s bladder stone
- Hooke’s Folio online
Some related features you may enjoy include:
Fire! Fire! by Imogen Robertson
In search of the animals in the Great Fire of London by Deborah Swift
Reviews of two of Andrew Taylor’s books set in the aftermath of the Great Fire, and featuring an architect: The Ashes of London, reviewed by Toby Clements and The Fire Court, reviewed by Frances Owen
And so to bed – a goodbye to Pepys’s diary by Deborah Swift
Thomas Blood and the Theft of the Crown Jewels by Angus Donald
Fake news, or the Horrid Popish Plot by Anna Abney
London in 1708: a surprisingly modern city by David Fairer
Asylums and prisons: locking women away in madhouses by Nicola Pryce
Images:
- Most of Bethlehem Hospital (also known as Bedlam) by William Henry Toms for the History of London by William Maitland, 1739: Wikimedia (public domain)
- Gresham College, engraving, 1828, after George Vertue, 1739: Wellcome Collection (public domain)
- Robert Hooke’s fold-out illustration of a flea in Micrographia, 1665: Wellcome Images via Wikimedia (CC BY 4.0)
- Flamsteed House (Royal Observatory, Greenwich Park) by Rudolph Ackermann and Thomas Hosmer Shepherd, 1824: Royal Museums Greenwich (CC-BY-NC-ND)
- A Rake’s Progress, Plate VIII: In Bedlam by William Hogarth, 1735: Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection (public domain)
- Engraving of a microscope by Robert Hooke in Micrographia, 1665: Wellcome Collection (CC BY 4.0)
