The Thames Valley Catastrophe

It can scarcely be necessary for me to mention, I suppose, at this
time of day, that I was one of the earliest and fullest observers of
the sad series of events which finally brought about the transference
of the seat of Government of these islands from London to Manchester.
Nor need I allude here to the conspicuous position which my narrative
naturally occupies in the Blue-book on the Thames Valley Catastrophe
(vol. ii., part vii), ordered by Parliament in its preliminary Session
under the new regime at Birmingham. But I think it also incumbent upon
me, for the benefit of posterity, to supplement that necessarily dry
and formal statement by a more circumstantial account of my personal
adventures during the terrible period.

I am aware, of course, that my poor little story can possess little
interest for our contemporaries, wearied out as they are with details
of the disaster, and surfeited with tedious scientific discussions as
to its origin and nature. But in after years, I venture to believe,
when the crowning calamity of the nineteenth century has grown
picturesque and, so to speak, ivy-clad, by reason of its remoteness
(like the Great Plague or the Great Fire of London with ourselves),
the world may possibly desire to hear how this unparalleled convulsion
affected the feelings and fortunes of a single family in the middle
rank of life, and in a part of London neither squalid nor fashionable.

It is such personal touches of human nature that give reality to
history, which without them must become, as a great writer has finely
said, nothing more than an old almanac. I shall not apologize,
therefore, for being frankly egoistic and domestic in my reminiscences
of that appalling day: for I know that those who desire to seek
scientific information on the subject will look for it, not in vain,
in the eight bulky volumes of the recent Blue-book. I shall concern
myself here with the great event merely as it appeared to myself, a
Government servant of the second grade, and in its relations to my own
wife, my home, and my children.

On the morning of the 21st of August, in the memorable year of the
calamity, I happened to be at Cookham, a pleasant and pretty village
which then occupied the western bank of the Thames just below the spot
where the Look-out Tower of the Earthquake and Eruption Department now
dominates the whole wide plain of the Glassy Rock Desert. In place of
the black lake of basalt which young people see nowadays winding its
solid bays in and out among the grassy downs, most men still living
can well remember a gracious and smiling valley, threaded in the midst
by a beautiful river.

I had cycled down from London the evening before (thus forestalling my
holiday), and had spent the night at a tolerable inn in the village.
By a curious coincidence, the only other visitor at the little hotel
that night was a fellow-cyclist, an American, George W. Ward by name,
who had come over with his "wheel," as he called it, for six weeks in
England, in order to investigate the geology of our southern counties
for himself, and to compare it with that of the far western cretaceous
system. I venture to describe this as a curious coincidence, because,
as it happened, the mere accident of my meeting him gave me my first
inkling of the very existence of that singular phenomenon of which we
were all so soon to receive a startling example. I had never so much
as heard before of fissure-eruptions; and if I had not heard of them
from Ward that evening, I might not have recognised at sight the
actuality when it first appeared, and therefore I might have been
involved in the general disaster. In which case, of course, this
unpretentious narrative would never have been written.