The Lost Journals of William Tanner

By Alan Donald

Meet Will Tanner -- Nineteenth Century adventurer, sex addict, murderer. And probably the greatest scientific genius ever lost to history. In his recently-discovered journals, Tanner reveals how he beat Mendel, Darwin and Einstein to the secrets of genetics, evolution and relativity. But Tanner never has time to develop and publish his theories: he's too much on the lam, pursued by jealous husbands and pistol-wielding deceived lovers. As he puts it himself: "You don't discuss sexual ethics with an armed lover after she's discovered you've been bedding her maid on the side. I suppose there's a lesson in that somewhere." The armed lover in this case is Lady Ada Byron, later Countess Lovelace, daughter of the poet Lord Byron and collaborator with Charles Babbage in programming Babbage's Analytic Engine, the world's first computer. At least, that's the accepted story. Will Tanner has a different take -- the computer was his invention. And Babbage stole it.

We first meet William Tanner as a motherless adolescent known as Jack Riordan, who has grown up in a Manchester brothel, run by his aunt, Judy Riordan. Judy tells Jack about the death of his mother (her sister), but refuses to reveal the identity of his father. Jack's life changes radically when he survives the Peterloo Massacre of 1819 by murdering a policeman. To escape capture, he allows himself to be adopted by Mary Tanner, a dotty middle-aged heiress who believes him to be her dead son, William, and who indulges "William" in developing his scientific theories. But events do not go smoothly for Will Tanner. True, his experience of playing cards with Mary Tanner inspires his discovery of Mendelian genetics. And he is able to sample the attractions of the brothel. But his invention of the electric telegraph causes a riot at the brothel. Other events lead to the mysterious disappearance of Judy Riordan and to a life or death struggle with Mary's estranged husband, Ralph Tanner, on the muddy banks of a canal.

Will decamps to London where he takes rooms with geologist Frank Chadwick and physician Clarence Dowbiggin, who share a secret that would spell disaster for them both if it ever came out. (And you are wrong if you guessed what I think you are guessing.) As a university student, Will meets Charles Babbage and offers advice on the construction of a computer, advice at which Babbage sneers.

Running low on cash, Will signs on as tutor to the late Lord Byron's only legitimate child, 17-year-old Ada. But living in a house with three attractive women (Ada, her mother Annabella and her maid Annie) proves too much for Will's ravenous libido and he is forced to flee to Europe where he winds up, years later, in The Leads, Venice's infamous prison, occupying the same cell from which the Italian reprobate Giacomo Casanova had escaped nearly a century before. Ironically, Will escapes using the same method employed by Casanova.

Tanner's first journal ends with events at the house of Ada Byron, now Countess Lovelace, where Will learns the truth behind the machinations of Ralph Tanner, the fate of his aunt and, most important, the identity of his father, news that floors the usually stout-hearted Will Tanner.

Tanner seasons his narrative with anecdotes about and meetings with the scientific and artistic luminaries of the Nineteenth Century. We meet John Dalton, the Quaker chemist who invented atomic theory, and Luigi Menabrea, the mathematician who became prime minister of Italy. Sam Clemens tells how an earthquake jolted him into creating Tom Sawyer. And we learn that Charles Dickens based Great Expectations on incidents from Will Tanner's life. Less believable is Tanner's dubious suggestion that he, not Richard Wagner, came up with the idea of a leitmotif. You may choose, however, not to dispute Tanner's claim that he, with help from Luigi Menabrea, invented that Twentieth Century panacea, the vodka martini.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Alan Donald
• Release date: Mar 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9780994031983

Alan Donald

Alan Donald is the author of The Lost Journals of William Tanner, a ripping yarn involving science, sex and sin in the Nineteenth Century. In these recently discovered diaries, Will Tanner recalls his narrow escape from death at the Peterloo Massacre of 1819, his discovery of the dominant-recessive nature of genetics (50 years before Mendel) and his affair with computer pioneer Countess Ada Lovelace (daughter of Lord Byron). Along the way Tanner claims that he, not Charles Babbage, invented the theory of the computer; that he, not Charles Darwin, was responsible for the theory of evolution by natural selection; and that he explained the theory of relativity to Einstein. Tanner's problem is that his libido too often rules his actions and he spends too much time escaping from sabre-wielding jealous husbands or pistol-waving furious lovers, a defect that leaves little time for getting credit for his discoveries.Alan Donald was born in England during the Second World War and emigrated to Canada in the late 1950s. (The photo on this page is his 1957 passport picture. He looks older now.) After spending several years as a newspaper reporter, he enrolled in university to study mathematics and spent the last part of his working life as a university professor. Now retired, he lives in Vancouver, British Columbia.The Lost Journals of William Tanner, his first novel, will be published electronically in March 2015.

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The Lost Journals of William Tanner

Alan Donald

The Lost Journals of William Tanner

Copyright © 2014 Alan Donald

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Table of Contents

Editor's Note

Entries in Tanner's Diary

Part 1: Jack Riordan

Part 2: William Tanner

Part 3: London

Part 4: Byron's Daughter

Part 5: The Analytic Engine

Appendices

Notes

About the author

Editor’s Note

The journals of William Tanner, comprising hundreds of notebooks, were discovered at an auction in Vancouver, British Columbia, in 2011. How these English records came to be in Canada one hundred years after the last entry was written is a mystery the solution to which may be buried in one of the books still to be transcribed.

The books vary in condition. The oldest, which date from the 1820s, are yellowed, mildewed and often illegible; they appear to be notes Tanner made while conducting his studies and experiments on heredity and electricity.

There is, however, a second set of notebooks, written between 1903 and 1905, when Tanner was nearing one hundred. These books contain Tanner’s personal memoirs and they are in good enough condition to be easily read. They raise questions with grave implications for the history of science in the Nineteenth Century. Did Tanner discover the theory of heredity more than fifty years before Mendel? Did he construct a voice telegraph in the 1820s? Was he responsible for the discovery, commonly attributed to Ignaz Semmelweis and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., that puerperal fever is transmitted by bacteria and could have been prevented by hand-washing on the part of medical staff? Or consider the central idea of the modern computer – the separation of the central processing unit from the memory, a concept usually attributed to Charles Babbage. Is Tanner right in claiming that idea for himself?

The answer to those questions appears to be yes. Analysis of the ink and paper from the early journals has established that Tanner wrote his scientific notes well before the times historians usually date these discoveries. The other discoveries that Tanner claims, including the law of natural selection (attributed to Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace) and both special and general theories of relativity (attributed to Albert Einstein) await verification.

All this raises the question of why Tanner is unknown to historians of science. He appears in no Who’s Who of science, nor can I find a paper authored by him. He is a blank, a cipher. The memoirs, written in the tenth decade of his life, give two partial answers to this puzzle.

The first is Tanner’s distractibility. His mind dances about – as he would have it -- like a harlot with a flea in her stays. One day he is consumed by the complexities of number theory, the next by the puzzles of heredity; a week later he is dabbling in electrical theory. He rushes from one project to another, leaving comprehensible but inchoate notes that others use later to finish the work and gain credit for it.

The second answer is more intriguing: sex. William Tanner cannot let a petticoat go unlifted or a breast uncaressed. And that idiosyncrasy – some might call it a pathology – too often spells the end of scientific enquiry. Nothing illustrates this more than his relationship with Ada Augusta Byron, later Countess Lovelace, the daughter of the depraved English poet. Ada’s work on Charles Babbage’s Analytic Engine has lately gained her the reputation of being the world’s first computer programmer. If Tanner’s account is to be believed, he should share the title. His prime motivation, however, was carnal. Her bed allured him more than the halls of scientific fame.

The first five notebooks of memoirs are linked by a common theme – Tanner’s search for the identity of his father. But they also tell of his boyhood in a brothel run by his aunt, explain why he changed his name from Jack Riordan to William Tanner, and recount his stormy affair with Ada Byron.

Apart from correcting the odd spelling error, I have made few changes to the text. The more technical sections – and Tanner does tend to run on about his mathematics – I have removed to appendices where the more numerically inclined reader may peruse them.

Alan Donald, Ph.D.

Vancouver, 2014

Entries in Tanner’s Diary – January, 1903

Wednesday, January the Fourth, 1903

This morning’s post brings a letter from Einstein that is, for once, agreeable. Writing in German – his English is weak – he commends and thanks me for pointing out how to generalize relativity to include gravitation. I had postulated an imaginary experiment in which a scientist is confined in a closed chamber accelerating upwards at a velocity that increases thirty-two feet per second every second. Then there’s no test, I say, that the scientist can do that will distinguish between the force of acceleration and that of gravity.

Einstein says he’s already thought of this. Well, perhaps he has. He’s clever enough; though it took a while for him to catch on to the idea of relativity in the first place. But on a more emulous note, he scorns my idea that the generalization could be used to power machinery or build a bomb. Still, he’s a bright spark considering he’s a German.

Not that I’ve a grudge against Germans, of course. Contrary to the hatred stirred up these days by the likes of Winston Churchill, I’ve found them a congenial lot. Gauss when I knew him was always up for a litre of their thin tasteless lager, which I detested, or a visit to a Gottingen knocking shop to blur the thoughts of his second wife, whom he detested. And Prince Albert, though pompous, was a good-hearted host, liberal with the brandy; though ever spouting useless twaddle about reforming the army. As though the English would let a Hun suit up their grenadiers. But he was grateful to find a German speaker in Britain.

So, Herr Tanner, he says, in German, How is it that an Englishman speaks German so well. It was on one of my visits to Windsor in the late 50's,

Scotsman, if you please, Highness, says I.

Ah, my apologies. That is like calling a Swiss a German, no? But your German, although accented, has a Saxon lilt to it. You lived in Dresden, I think. He puffed himself up at the guess. I decided to butter him up, which I have learned is the best approach with royalty.

Your Highness has an ear for dialect. But it was Gottingen. A mere hundred miles away.

And how did you come to be there, Herr Tanner?

Well, I thought, because Lady Ada Byron tried to shoot my balls off, and the thought of pursuit by her vengeful mother, Annabella, out to finish the job, put me in a dreadful funk. No matter that Ada was the daughter of England’s most famous poet, and a mathematical genius to boot. She was also a dead shot with a pistol, so I grabbed the purse full of cash and got out of that hotel room. You don’t discuss sexual ethics with an armed lover after she’s discovered you’ve been tumbling her maid on the side. I suppose there’s a lesson in that somewhere. But all that was no story for the prince.

I visited my old German mathematics tutor, I said.

And that was the truth, though I neglected to tell him Maria was a former whore, partner to my aunt in running the best house in Manchester. It was Maria who taught me my letters and numbers.

I pick up the morning paper and on page seven there’s a report that workmen dredging Manchester’s Bridgewater Canal have disinterred the body of a man thought to have been buried in the mud there for at least fifty and as many as ninety years.

So they’ve found him at last.

Monday, January the Ninth, 1903

Learning last week of the discovery of Ralph Tanner’s corpse gave me quite a turn. For a moment, I felt such panic that I glanced out of the window expecting to see stern coppers striding up to my front door. Then reason swept aside my funk. After eighty years, there cannot be a shred of evidence left on the remains. Still, it may be worth feeling out Conan Doyle on the matter when I see him next.

But even after the jitters had evaporated, I found myself in an uncommonly contemplative mood. Thinking about the murder opened up memories of Mary Tanner and the Chadwicks, of my transformation after the massacre of Peterloo, of the angel, and especially of my search for my father. It was not long before I resolved to put all the important events together into a single coherent narrative.

Oh, yes, the bookshelves in my study are crammed with my scientific notebooks and, true, these often contain personal notes. I did, for example, record my first rattle with a wench somewhere in the middle of expounding my theory of heredity. That’s in one of the earlier volumes, written when I was fourteen. But for the most part, the journals are unrelievedly staid, sombre tomes of science and mathematics. What’s needed is a straightforward account of my early life leading up to the discomforting discovery, that night at Ada Byron’s London house, of my father’s identity.

True the story will leap from year to year, twisting like a harlot with a flea in her stays. But those events – the brothel, the angel, Peterloo, Charles Babbage’s theft of my computing engine idea and Ada Byron’s jealous fury – although disconnected in time, lead inexorably to the exposure of the reprobate who sired me.

I shall resist the temptation to record intervening events, such as the fiasco with Darwin and the Beagle or the altercation with Gauss over the electric telegraph. The women stay though – Estelle, Lucy, Becky, Ada, Annie and the rest. Prudes and wantons, I’ve loved them all. My life has been a constant battle between my brain and my body. Not that I’d have it any other way; they’ve both given me good rattles. Which leads me right to the angel.

Part One: Jack Riordan

December, 1818 -- Manchester

It was a frosty day a week or so before Christmas in 1818 and I had just come from morning mass at Saint Ann’s when I saw the angel.

Now, don’t leap to conclusions. I was a thoroughgoing atheist even by age eleven. My Catholic upbringing, replete with mindless parroting of catechistic nonsense and the tuneless bleating of foreign gibberish, had seen to that. So please rid your mind of me as a junior Saint Francis, reverently averting my eyes as I knelt, trembling in the radiance of a white-robed winged cove with a divine injunction fresh from heaven.

No, nothing like that. For one thing, the angel was human; for another, she bore no celestial missive. And she did not appear in the sky; I saw her in a shop window. But she did give me such a turn that I dropped my copy of Euclid.

Like most life’s cusps, this one occurred by happenstance. I had just walked past that window when an odd question came to me. I stepped back and gazed at my reflection in the glass. It was not a typical Manchester winter morning. The grime and murk that usually coloured that industrial northern English city were absent. True, there was still a hint of that sooty, acrid smell that cloys the nostrils of the city’s inhabitants to this day, but that December the sun shone brightly from a cloudless sky. So my image was clear. I raised my right hand. The image raised his left. I stared at the contents of the window. It was a milliner’s shop and my reflected face appeared under a pink bonnet decorated with roses. I was an ugly boy who made an even uglier girl.

Then the angel appeared over the image’s left shoulder, an oval face framed with golden curls.

Are you seeking to purchase a bonnet for yourself, miss, said a silver-belled voice behind me.

I jerked about. The angel was a girl perhaps a year older and a little taller than I was. A black fur hat was perched on top of her head and she clasped a matching fur cape around her shoulders. The yellow locks escaped the hat and fell to her shoulders. Her large eyes were a startling deep blue set in an unflawed creamy complexion; she had a turned-up snub of a nose and her chin was a graceful curve. She was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. I dropped my book and stepped back, breathless, as though I had taken a body blow. My back came up against the glass of the milliner’s window.

It’s common, of course, for boys nearing puberty, to be struck dumb by love. But it has puzzled me since that it should have happened to me at that time of my life. After all, had I not bathed that very morning with a half dozen naked young women? And had not dark-haired Lucy pressed her soft breasts against my back as she soaped me down, her nimble hands deliberately straying to my groin? I was as familiar with women’s bodies as any immature boy could be. Yet here I was, paralysed by yearning, staring at the angel, breathless.

A man’s voice intruded. Estelle, leave the boy alone. Don’t mind her, young man.

But I stood transfixed. I was aware of the man beside me, bending down to pick up the book.

Here you are, my boy. I am sorry for my daughter’s behaviour. Lad? Are you well?

I snapped out of my contemplation of the beauty before me and looked up at the man. He was tall and elegantly dressed, and he was looking concerned.

Are you ill?

No.

Good. For a moment I feared I had spent these twelve years raising a Gorgon. He chuckled.

Papa! said Estelle, obviously miffed.

Oh, I am sure he is not old enough to know about Gorgons.

Perseus looked in a mirror, I said. Like that. I gestured at the shop window. I saw her reflection. I gazed again at Estelle’s halo of golden hair. You are not Medusa.

Well, I certainly have turned you to stone. I have never seen such a stupid boy. Let us go, Papa.

Estelle’s father had been leafing through my book.

A boy who knows about Medusa and carries Euclid with him. How old are you, lad?

Eleven.

And you have read Euclid?

Not all, I admitted. There are pages missing from my book.

That is difficult.

Oh, I can fill in the missing theorems if I see where he’s going. I think I got most of them right. Do you know the missing theorems? Does he say anything about the mirror puzzle?

The mirror puzzle?

A mirror exchanges left and right. Why does it not also turn you upside down?

The man laughed, but Estelle stamped her foot, making her blond curls bob. The effect was so heart-stopping that I wondered how I could make her do it again.

Really, Papa. What a silly question. Let us hurry or we shall miss Mr. Dalton’s lecture and he will be angry with me.

No he won’t, my dear. We are in good time. He turned back to me. But I wonder if Estelle is not right. The question does seem ludicrous. He pulled a leather notebook from his pocket and extracted a pencil from its spine. What is your name?

I told him.

Well, Jack Riordan, I am Edward Chadwick and the young lady is my daughter, Estelle. And where do you live?

In Trafford. At the Longford House.

That had the usual effect. He stopped writing and his eyes shot wide. The Longford House. He glanced about quickly for his daughter’s whereabouts, but Estelle was gazing in the window of a dress shop next door. Nevertheless, he lowered his voice. And your mother works there?

No. My mother is dead. My aunt looks after me. And Maria. She does the accounting.

Chadwick looked stern. I, of course, was used to perturbation when I told respectable adults that I lived at one of Manchester’s most notorious knocking shops, though I had no idea why such information should agitate them. Still, it amused me. Chadwick recovered.

And what are you doing this Sunday afternoon?

The interrogation was getting tedious; I stole a glance at Estelle before answering him.

Walking. We go to mass and have dinner. Then I go walking. I can think better when I walk.

Think?

Even at that early age I was annoyed by people who repeated my clear statements as a question. I was silent.

What do you think about? he asked.

I had long since learned that the best way to shut people up was to tell the unadorned truth. The fifth postulate of Euclid.

The fifth postulate? There. The duffer had done it again, repeating my declaration as a question. I turned my attention to Estelle, who was now standing facing away from me. The blond curls were long enough to caress the small of her back.

Chadwick interrupted my reverie. Would you like to come with Estelle and me to hear Mr. Dalton? It will give you more to think about.

I hesitated. My first thought was to reject the offer and continue mulling my mirror puzzle as I walked alone. But so bleak was the thought of letting the angel out of my sight that I agreed.

I set out with them, the stream of my life taking a new course. While Estelle paced beside us in sullen silence, Mr. Chadwick told me about Mr. Dalton and his theory that all matter is composed of small particles, which he called atoms. Intrigued, I waved my hand through the air, imagining it to swish aside these fantastic motes. It seemed plausible.

∞

We came soon to a wooden building little more than the size of a house, resting in the shadow of Saint Peter’s Church. A carved board over the entrance proclaimed it to be the Friends’ Meeting House.

John Dalton is a Quaker, said Mr. Chadwick. Do you know what that is?

A sort of heretic?

Mr. Chadwick laughed. Fortunately we live in a country where heresy can flourish, Jack.

Such flippancy caught me off guard and my atheism stumbled into a lacuna. According to my lessons in catechism class, heretics’ miserable lives were rounded by hideous forms of death. I entered the house of the Quakers cautiously. Was I to witness some bizarre pagan rite? Perhaps there would be a sacrifice, maybe of a dog or a baby, and the drinking of blood. That would have distressed even an atheist such as I was.

And there were no blood rites, just a lecture. Mr. Dalton was a large man, dressed in black, whose dark eyes peered out from under black, bushy eyebrows, which contrasted sharply with his thinning hair. He calmly and clearly described his theory of atoms. What surprised me most was the fact that Dalton’s atoms could combine, one with another. Two atoms of hydrogen clung to a single atom of oxygen – I had no idea at the time what hydrogen and oxygen were, but inferred they were gases, like air – and the result was water. I withheld judgement. Grown-ups, I had learned, were apt to jump to conclusions that suited their convenience rather than stark evidence. No doubt Mr. Dalton would soon be blethering on about God and sin. But instead, he held up three cardboard discs – two blue ones in his right hand and one red disc in his left.

On my right – your left, said Dalton, are two atoms of hydrogen.

I slapped my knee and Dalton paused. Chadwick looked down at me in consternation. I had solved the mirror puzzle.

Dalton continued, merging the blue and red discs into a single clump, which he called a molecule. The main point of his argument was that water was composed of hydrogen and oxygen in an exact ratio of two to one.

After the lecture, Mr. Chadwick cornered Dalton and they spoke quietly for five minutes, leaving me alone with Estelle’s stony silence. I dared not speak to her for I dreaded the sting of her insults. I scanned the hall. The audience had gathered into small groups of men and women conversing quietly. There was no hint of incense in the air and no bells had sounded during the meeting. I decided I liked these Quakers, though I missed the hymns we sang at chapel.

Chadwick and Dalton eventually broke off their conversation and approached us. Estelle dipped a curtsy to Dalton, whom she evidently knew. Chadwick introduced me.

You are the boy who interrupted my lecture, said Mr. Dalton. Why?

I explained the mirror puzzle. Dalton did not laugh.

And what is your solution to this conundrum, Jack?

I told him. He nodded.

Terse, elegant and true, he said.[1] Did you understand my talk, Jack?

I told him I did not understand how the atoms glued themselves together. And if two hydrogens stick to one oxygen, what is to prevent more joining them?

I don’t know, Jack. It is just that this is what happens. Perhaps you will be able to find out.

I thought about this, but no ideas came to mind. Besides, I was distracted by Estelle, impatiently rustling her dress beside me.

Jack, do you go to school? asked Dalton.

No. Maria used to help me, but she just gets me books now. I do go to catechism school on Saturday mornings. It is very boring. I liked your Quaker mass.

Oof, said Estelle. How ridiculous. This was no mass, boy. This was a talk by Mr. Dalton. And Quakers do not hold silly Papist masses. Besides, my father and I are not Quakers. We are Unitarians.

She spoke as though knowledge of this was common to all but the utterly witless; I felt my eyes brim.

Pride, Estelle, said Chadwick, is just as much a sin for us as for Catholics. He turned to me and, ignoring my tears, said: Would you like to go to school, Jack?

I told him my aunt planned to send me to a Catholic school next year.

I think we can do better than that, said Chadwick. Mr. Dalton here tutored my, er, Frank, my son, who is now at Harvard in America. And he is nobly struggling with Estelle’s education. He glanced at his daughter who turned away. There is room for one more in our library if you would care to join Estelle in Mr. Dalton’s classes.

Ah! We all turned to look at Estelle from whom the gasp had issued. She stepped backwards, came up against a loose chair and sat down heavily, revealing the curve of a stocking-clad ankle below the lace of her petticoats. My heart beat so rapidly I thought my chest would burst.

Chadwick went on. I am sure Estelle will come to appreciate your company. You will be great pals.

I objected that my aunt would not assent.

I shall speak with her. There will be no fee.

I was staring at Estelle who was leaning forward, cradling her temples in her hands, the fall of her long golden tresses obscuring her face. She was shaking her head. I wanted to comfort her; I even considered rejecting the offer in the hope that would have made her happy.

But Chadwick, oblivious to her distress, went on. I shall take it upon myself to arrange it. Consider it done.

December, 1818 – Trafford

Of course I never expected to see Chadwick, Dalton or Estelle again: my experience with adults was that they were seldom true to their word. So it came as a surprise when my aunt announced that I would attend studies at the Chadwick house beginning in January. I gasped with delight: I would be with the angel.

I wonder now how Chadwick managed to present himself at the mansion without looking like a randy customer, up for an afternoon bounce. Perhaps my aunt offered just that and perhaps he took advantage of it. I am intrigued by the thought of Edward Chadwick’s fat white bottom plunging away between the legs of Lucy or Anne-Marie or Martha, while on the other side of Manchester his wife, Charlotte, distributed used clothes to the poor. It could well have happened. After all, he was proposing a plan that would save Aunt Judy the cost of sending me to Saint Ann’s church school and she, ever the canny business woman, knew that the occasional complementary rattle would pay future dividends.

My aunt, incidentally, was never a whore herself. At least that is what she averred, and it is one of the few things she told me that I believed. Much of the rest was lies. Her story was that she and her sister, my mother, had started out as maids for an Aberdeen family, but both were tossed on to the street when my mother was found to be pregnant. My birth killed my mother, but before she died she asked her sister to ensure a proper upbringing for me, a demand, as it turned out later, that was backed with a purse full of money. Aunt Judy promised, of course; I can imagine the entrepreneurial sparkle in her eyes.

Scotland being populated largely by dour Presbyterians who loved their wallets more than any whore, my aunt’s gleaming eyes turned south and lighted on Manchester.

A good choice it was. By 1700, Manchester’s population had taken advantage of Lancashire’s cold, wet weather and turned to spinning cotton, which was much more malleable when moist. It was an excellent scheme if you had money to invest in it, for you could buy cotton from the spinners, turn it into cloth and use the profits to finance the buying and transportation of slaves from Africa to America, where the poor black devils were put to work in cotton fields. You filled your slave ship with cotton for the voyage back and sold it to the spinners, setting the cycle off again like a perpetual motion spinning wheel. Then along came Hargreaves’ spinning Jenny and Watt’s steam engine, which pulled the spinners out of their cottages into Manchester’s new mills.

When my aunt and I arrived, land and houses were cheap in Manchester’s suburbs. She used my mother’s money to buy a hundred-year-old mansion that lay on a good plot of land with trees and a separate lodge for servants. The mansion with its three floors she turned into the brothel; I lived with her and her business partner Maria in the lodge. The Longford house, set in the suburb of Trafford, opened for business in 1810.

The name ‘suburb’ fit, for at that time it meant what its Latin roots meant – inferior to the city. The suburbs of Manchester, like those of London, were notable for their drinking houses, theatres and brothels. They were within easy reach, by horse or carriage, of the fine houses of the city; so a man with money in his pocket could spend his afternoon in an alehouse with his friends, his evening in a dance hall and his night with one of my aunt’s doxies.

The business flourished. Through my childhood and youth I never lacked for a full stomach and warm clothes. And I was kept very clean, for next to money, Aunt Judy revered hygiene. She firmly held that disease was caused by dirt – an astonishingly modern belief for those filthy days – and that the way to stop whores from getting ill – by the clap or consumption – was to scrub them every morning. She even had her gardener cum handy-man, an ancient laconic, heat water for the baths, administered roughly and thoroughly in the cavernous stone scullery of the old mansion. The girls objected, of course; they believed that bathing gave them fevers. But their protests were futile. They could endure the daily loofahings or be gone, and my aunt showed a few obstinates the door.

But she was decent to the ones who stayed and bathed. So long as they pleased the customers and brought in the money, she paid them well, clothed them, fed them three times a day and never laid a hand on them. To a harlot, this was heaven, at least in comparison with other brothels, where the girls were starved, beaten or even murdered. My aunt had long since escaped the mean-spiritedness of that day: while most employers were busy Scrooging their employees to make sure no unearned ha’penny went astray, she treated her whores as favoured children.

As a child, I took my own morning bath with the girls, an event whose retelling has shocked my primmer acquaintances, survivors of the reign of the black-clad dwarf, Victoria. But my aunt saw nothing prurient about nudity and I was soaped and rinsed in the company of naked girls. So the female body was to me never the mystery it is to modern youth, who find the mere glimpse of a feminine ankle a cause for erotic delight. [2] My aunt would have thought that aberrant, and she would have been right. It’s my belief that this horror of the natural human body is the root of perversions. You may think that my childish thoughts would twist my proclivities into deviance, but as a child I had no intelligence of any other sort of life and it surprised me later when I learned that other boys had never seen, let alone bathed with, a naked woman. Perhaps if poor old Oscar Wilde had soaped a few whores as a child, he would never have seen the inside of the gaol that killed him.

The girls were delighted by my company at their morning ablutions. They sponged me down, kissing me all the while and giggling as they competed to induce a response from my infant penis. My aunt was unfazed by this exercise, and I have often wondered if she would have eventually put a stop to it had I not been forced to abandon the house, police in pursuit, when I was twelve.

After the morning bath, we crowded into the downstairs parlour of the old manor where the maid would give me a breakfast of oats with salt (a remnant of my aunt’s Scotch days) and the girls bread and cheese and tea. The whores all chattered except for Maria, who read a book or a newspaper if there was one about. Now this was unusual, especially for an ex-harlot, for most of the population of England was illiterate at the time – and they still are in spite of public education – and whores are particularly averse to exercise above the neck. But the fact that simply looking at marks on paper consumed her attention intrigued me. There was no obvious action, no play, no laughter: only absorption.

Maria had started out working in the mansion, but my aunt soon recognized her talents in business and accounting and promoted her to manager. It was Maria who made sure the coal man, the butcher and the grocer were paid in full and on time. It was she who collected from the customers and divided up the income. Sixpence of every shilling went to the house, one penny to the girl and the remaining five pence into a savings box, kept under lock and key upstairs in the lodge. Each girl had her own savings box, though she did not see a penny of its contents until she left. Not that the girls needed money: they had their food, their clothes and their noon tot of gin. Some of the denser girls resented the system, unable to foresee the tidy sum awaiting them when they retired.

Maria was not beautiful. Her black curly hair fell over most of her short feral forehead and her dark brown eyes peered menacingly out at the world from under thick eyebrows. The lower half of her face contrasted sharply with the upper. She had a straight nose, a full mouth and a gracefully curved chin. I have a miniature of Lady Caroline Lamb, Lord Byron’s mistress, whose mouth always reminds me of Maria. But whereas Lady Caroline’s rank and beauty conveyed her through a life of privilege, Maria had to contend with the near poverty that accompanied plain looks. I suppose by today’s standards – the Gibson girl setting those standards – Maria would be considered too fat to attract male attention. But back then, plumpness in a woman was expected.

Each morning, Maria set down her book to supervise the cleaning of the house, and for an hour the girls swept, dusted and mopped. These impositions were met with sulky compliance, for harlots, resentful at the condemnation heaped upon them by outside society, still rated themselves above servants. Looking back, I realize that my infant brain had classified this menial work as the object of my aunt’s vocation, that she occupied the house merely to maintain it and that the girls were employed to keep it clean.

Maria assented to my demands, and made it a habit, when she returned from supervising the laggards, to teach me to read. We began with the book she was on at the time – Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, by that spinner of doggerel, Lord Byron.

I might have asked for an alternative, simpler primer. English is a confounded hard language to learn to read, both for the foreigner and the child. The spelling is chaotic, something that Bernard Shaw is ever on about these days, and Byron had a yen for hyperbaton and obscure archaisms. But the rhymes in the poem helped me decipher the words. We pressed on and within a week I was reading stanzas, slowly but aloud, to Maria. Sometimes the girls tarried to listen. They most liked my stumbling recitation of the stanza about Harold’s early profligate life.

Whilome in Albion's isle there dwelt a youth,

Who ne in virtue's ways did take delight;

But spent his days in riot most uncouth,

And vex'd with mirth the drowsy ear of Night.

Ah me! in sooth he was a shameless wight,

Sore given to revel and ungodly glee;

Few earthly things found favour in his sight

Save concubines and carnal companie,

And flaunting wassailers of high and low degree

I, of course, understood little of the meaning, but the whores always sang out in laughter at my description of concubines and carnal companie, slapping the table and nudging each other.

I felt proud of my reading, but the occurrence of strange symbols at the top of each page puzzled me. I asked Maria, and she taught me arithmetic.

That led me to one of the most momentous discoveries of my life – the cipher 0. Historians say it was some Mohammedan or Hindoo genius in medieval Persia or India who struck upon this overwhelmingly simple idea. Nevertheless, it was the Arabs who built upon it the system of counting we still use. They saw that numbers could be written in descending orders of powers of ten and that the cipher might hold a place just as any other digit. We are agog these days with motor carriages, zeppelins, wireless telegraph and now heavy flying machines – all ingenious and wonderful to me. But without that simple 0, we’d have none of them.

That led me to consider the nature of the largest number. Clearly, one could add as many zeroes as desired to the tail of any number. But was there a limit? Maria gave a stock answer: Only God knows, Jack.

At which I proclaimed in triumph: But if God writes down the biggest number, I can write one bigger. This victory over the divine filled me with pride, though it gave Catholic Maria the jitters.

∞

My discovery of the defect in God’s mathematical abilities coincided with my third birthday. I remember that clearly because I was musing on it while posing for my portrait. This artistic rite, I learned later, had occurred on my first and second birthdays, but I remembered nothing of those events; I suppose the mental mechanism for setting down memories is a late development in children. But I do remember my aunt chivying me into an artist’s studio, where I was seated on a hard stool while a young man transferred my likeness to canvas, exhorting me all the time to control my wriggling body. My aunt had brought along a swatch of tartan and a leather case with some pictures of men in Scottish highland dress. Waving the pictures and cloth around, she harangued the artist until he produced a picture of a boy tarted up in a kilt and plaid of the same tartan as the swatch. I learned later that it was the dress Royal Stewart, one of the better patterns in that rather ugly genre, Scottish tartans. I don’t remember much of the portrait, however, for it was whisked away after my first glance.

It was nearly forty years before I saw it again.

What will happen to the picture? I asked my aunt on the way home.

I am sending it to your father.

Is he coming to see me?

No. You will not see him.

And that was that, for a year at least. I had others painted, one after each birthday until I turned twelve when my aunt used that unexpected event, the Peterloo massacre, as an excuse to halt the observance. It is likely that my aunt made a profit from not having it done. Or, just as likely, it is possible that my father simply lost interest.

So I had two conundrums to ponder: the nature of the largest number and the identity of my father. Both continued to occupy my mind for days, while Maria moved me on to geometry. One thing she was adamant about – and it’s stayed with me all these years – was that the fact that two things look alike fails to establish that they are alike.

Euclid says you must prove everything, Jack, she said firmly. She was talking German at the time and I was speaking it back at her, a habit that annoyed my aunt. I suppose that is why I took Maria so seriously. Unlike my aunt, she was truthful

Her point about proof was dead on, of course. She did not mean it to happen, being a Catholic, but by introducing me to Euclid she helped make an atheist out of me. To this day, I refuse to accept propositions, no matter how plausible, without proof . So much for revelation, and out with revelation goes all religion.

Maria, however, rested comfortably in her German Catholicism, oblivious to my growing heresy.

I use that word carefully, for my catechism classes had taught me well what a heretic was. I began attending these musty but alarming affairs at my aunt’s insistence when I was five. My father, she said – and I have every reason to disbelieve her -- wished me to become a Catholic. For a time as an adult, I believed that she had been atoning for her sister’s sin in committing adultery. It transpired later, however, that she had a sin of her own to pay down, and it was not whoremongering.

It was I who paid the penance, though. Catechism class robbed me of my Saturday mornings and replaced them with three hours of mindless chanting interspersed with bullying from a large, stupid German boy called Johann Nepomuk Hiedler. He was three years older than I. His favourite sport was football, which