John King,the Bristol surgeon and friend of artists and poets

Abstract

The Bristol School of Artists developed between 1800 and 1840 and was a collaboration between professional and amateur artists, one of whom was Dr John King. King started his professional life in Bristol as assistant to Thomas Beddoes where one of his colleagues was Humphry Davy and the three of them worked in the Pneumatic Institute, attempting to cure tuberculosis with gases. King subsequently became a popular general practitioner in Clifton and his correspondence with patrons of art, romantic poets and his friends gives much information about the social life in Bristol in the early part of the 19th century.

Keywords

John King Thomas Beddoes Clifton Bristol artists poets

Dr John King worked in the Pneumatic Institute of Clifton, Bristol, that was created by Dr Thomas Beddoes in 1793. Beddoes was trying to find cures for illnesses such as tuberculosis, with gases and had been a reader in Chemistry at Oxford before moving to Bristol. After Beddoes’ death in 1809, King continued as a popular doctor and became particularly well known from his association with a group of Bristol artists.

King was born in Switzerland in 1766 as Johan Koenig¹ and rebelled against his family’s expectation that he should enter the Church. He came to London hoping to make his living by writing and engraving but decided to train in surgery under Mr Abernethy at St Bartholomew’s Hospital. After qualifying, he was commissioned in 1799 as an Ensign in the Second Shropshire Regiment of Militia. Abernethy put him in touch with Beddoes in Bristol who was looking for someone to accompany his friend and financial sponsor, Thomas Wedgwood, to the West Indies for health reasons. After a few months, the two returned to Bristol and King joined Beddoes in his Pneumatic Medical Institute to help look after the patients and to assist in the experiments.

Beddoes was the centre of an interesting social circle that included poets such as Samuel T. Coleridge and Robert Southey and his scientific assistant Humphry Davy who ultimately moved to London to become Professor of Chemistry at the Royal Institution. King and Davy shared accommodation at the top of the Institute in Dowry Square. King’s role was to look after the patients in the Institute and to help with the experiments. His engraving expertise was useful in the publications. Beddoes mentioned King several times in his book Rules of the Medical Institute for the benefit of the Sick and Drooping Poor. The longest comment relates to the records of the diseases patients suffered that attended the Institute and which were kept by King between 1802 and 1803. Beddoes also commented that ‘Mr King will get made patterns for proper dress’,² which related to types of clothing that he thought the poor should adopt as one of a long list of preventive health measures.

Dr John Edmonds Stock, who also worked with Beddoes and was his first biographer, described King³ thus:

(He) united an accurate acquaintance with anatomy, an insatiable ardour for physiological researches, a hand habituated to the arts of design and promptness of mechanical ingenuity, which enabled him to devise a mode of executing the experiments which the Doctor suggested. Nor was this a trifling task … the prompt resources of Mr King seldom failed to supply them. An immense variety of physiological experiments, therefore, was performed.

In 1802, King married Emmeline Edgeworth, the sister of Beddoes’ wife and they had four children. The eldest, Zoe, was a very difficult delivery and Robert Southey wrote to a friend saying⁴:

Poor King, who is our bleeder and purger in ordinary keeps house with his wife, who is, I fear, past all hope in a childbed fever, so that instead of having him to keep us, I am obliged to go and look after him, and find a far worse house than I left at home.

King wrote to Southey shortly after this stating how much he had missed him for sharing his hopes and fears.⁵ ‘Emmeline is now in perfect health and so much dearer to me since she escaped all her dreadful sufferings…. many of the evils that sprang from her illness are not yet remedied.’

He then described how his maid had suffered at the hand of nurses

poor Mary Holland! You recollect with what zeal she managed my house in the most tempestuous days of my life… she was suspected of the foulest dishonesty – I had proofs, battled every insinuation. I could not suspect her though almost every impartial friend I had made to believe her dishonest. I converted every sly hint into an open accusation. Her innocence as well as her merit shone manifest, but in vain. I thought myself above calumny – the nurses called me a fool. The neighbours were filled with the belief that Mary Holland was my mistress, that Emmeline’s illness was the work of a conspiracy between the girl and myself – nay they said she had boasted of her expectation to succeed her mistress.

Only two of the Kings’ children survived to adulthood – the two girls. Edgeworth King born in 1807 died aged 10 and Albert born in 1809 died aged 2 years. In 1811, the family moved from Dowry Square to 26 The Mall, Clifton. In a letter to Josiah Wedgwood, Thomas Wedgwood's father, King wrote⁶:

In 1811, when there was no prospect of peace and Clifton in its most flourishing state, it became advisable for me to fix my residence in a more eligible part of the parish, the home which I now inhabit was to be sold. Two friends joined in purchasing it for me – the purchase money was £2000, the estimate for repairs £500.

There were many doctors living in The Mall in the early 19th century: Goodeve, Colthurst, Smerdon and Burroughs were all there in the census of 1841. William Goodeve was apprenticed to King for four years from November 1813, paying King 700 guineas for the indenture. King and Goodeve then were in partnership as surgeons until 1825 when the partnership was dissolved by ‘mutual consent’, but from a draft letter it looks as if the breakup of the partnership came about because Goodeve seems to have taken one of King’s patients under his care.⁷ King applied unsuccessfully to be a surgeon at the Infirmary on two occasions.⁸ In 1807, he was last of five with 36 votes and in 1810, he managed only 9 votes. King had major money worries during his early years in Clifton. His father-in-law Edgeworth settled an annuity of £80 on King, but after providing King with a loan of 400 guineas, the annuity was reduced by £25 per year as interest on the loan.⁹ King also borrowed from Thomas Wedgwood. From 1808 until 1814, he earned between £1300 and £1600 a year but had problems maintaining this after fracturing his leg in 1810 and having a serious liver inflammation in 1812. In 1820, Josiah Wedgwood threatened a solicitor to help retrieve the debt.

King's medical records

King’s medical records give a good indication of his various interests. It seems that he wrote memoranda most days to remind himself of things to do (usually visits to make to patients), diary entries of events that had occurred and a running total of income and expenses. Six sheets of about 5 in. × 2 in. size remain in the Bristol Archives and are dated from Thursday 14 April–16 April and Friday 17 December–18 December and Tuesday 31 December. The first three are from 1818, the next two 1819 and the last one 1822 – see Figure 1.

Figure 1.

King’s memorandum for 31 December 1822 (source: Bristol Archives).

On 14 April 1818, King mentioned that he had received a long letter from William Goodeve (his partner) and one from Bird (a Bristol artist) who wanted a cast of Alderman Bengough’s head as he was preparing a bust of Bengough. King wrote that he had walked with the 38-year-old Francis Gold, a colleague and fellow amateur artist, to Brandon Hill. In the financial statement on the page, he received five shillings for drawing a tooth and paid five shillings for a warm bath. The next few days he reported details of an illness of Lady Storin. It looks as if she had an obstructed birth, where the baby was broken up in the uterus. The record dated Monday, 13 April included the following.¹⁰

I returned to Lady Storin where I had a parley with Mr H Sitwell. I removed some bones from the vagina…. I went to Lady Storin again, removed more bone and home to dinner. After tea Gold came – went with me to Lady Storin we found her in a very active paroxysm … Gold was called away… I went home at eleven and took some tea etc…. Gold returned… I was engaged to sleep at Lady Storin’s which I did having to rise 4 times in the night

The last of these separate memoranda is for the last day of 1822 when King was 56 years old.

All of these memoranda are set out in the same way with people to be visited in the top left corner and the accounts for the day on the top right corner. There are a series of vertical strokes at the top of the page that presumably indicate the number of patients he saw during the day. The remainder of the page is taken up with a diary of the day’s events. The total income for 1822 is £1520 and apparently the profit was a mere £13 5s 10d. His wife was given £6 ‘for the house’ and the Bristol Infirmary received £2 2s as his annual subscription. Paying this subscription¹¹ enabled King (and all subscribers – whether medical or not) to be Trustees of the Infirmary who would be responsible for managing the hospital. Each Trustee was entitled to have one in-patient and three out-patients at any one time and was responsible for ensuring that no patient was capable of subscribing to the Charity.

Much later records are contained in a small booklet about 3 in. long and 2 in. wide and are over the month of December 1837. The writing is minute. Each page is dated, but there is no year and determining the year in question is not easy and must be done using a simple software tool¹² together with names of people mentioned in the contents. There are two possible years from when the weekday and date agree – 1826 and 1837. As King asked Dr John Addington Symonds to see Margaret Eagles for him on 16 and 19 December, the former year is impossible as Symonds only arrived in Bristol in 1831. 1837 is also the only likely year for Zoe (his daughter) to ask the newly qualified Dr William Coates to bleed Margaret (12 December).

King mentions two families frequently during the month of December 1837 – the Eagles and the Coates. Revd John Eagles was one of the important lay members of the Bristol School of Artists and was born in 1783. His youngest child Margaret born 1827 was causing King and his friend Eagles considerable concern because of a feverish illness. King and Eagles appear to have spent a lot of time together. Joseph Coates born 1797 was the eldest son of a Bristol solicitor who had died in 1829 and was a magistrate and his younger brother William born 1806 was another local doctor.

King’s friends and colleagues

The Bristol painters that King had most to do with were Edward Bird, Francis Danby, Edward Villiers Rippingille and William West, and he maintained friendships with the poets Robert Southey and Samuel T Coleridge and with the scientist, Humphry Davy.

Southey recommended many patients to King, and Humphry Davy wrote to King in 1801:¹³

I think of you often – my heart often yearns toward the old ideas of Clifton, the hot wells and the novel and natural beings that beautify them, for I am in London connected with new scenes and new beings by which the old beings can never be modified.

Davy ended one of his letters acknowledging King’s atheism¹⁴:

I do not remember you in my prayers but I remember you when I am enraptured with the great and the fair; you are in my dreams of Tintern abbey and the Vincent; though you are a murderer – of cats and dogs, I shall always be your affectionate friend.

In 1839 John King described the evolution of the Bristol School of Artists:¹⁵

About 40 years ago the late Edw. Bird was the only artist of talent in this city. It was here that his genius developed itself with rapid strides; his society soon became the centre of attraction to all those who had enough of good taste to appreciate his works, and of liberal feeling to value his amiable character. Thus was spontaneously framed a small society of art-loving friends, from all that Bristol now can boast of artist and amateurs has descended. One of his earliest friends and pupils was the Rev. John Eagles, who then, already excelling in literary attainments, associated with his other pursuits the study of landscape painting, and followed it with a zeal that ensured him a success equal to that of a professed artist. Several other accomplished amateurs united with these in their social intercourse, and instituted periodical meetings in each member’s houses, in rotation, for the purpose of sketching and conversation; these were occasionally diversified by excursions for sketching from nature in the country….

In October 1834, when aged 68, King visited Switzerland to see his family and took the opportunity of meeting up with his artist friend, Francis Danby who was then living near Geneva. Apparently, Danby didn’t share King’s enthusiasm for the local scenery and King wrote to Gibbons that Danby reported¹⁶ ‘he had never seen any scenery suited to his style of composition, nothing but commonplace views, and … had never gone out at all out of the beaten track’.

William West was described as having King as a ‘mentor and friend’¹⁷ and King wrote to John Gibbons on 8 April 1829:¹⁸

The expectations concerning West are of late prodigiously revived and rising – for obstinacy and contempt of advice he beats Rip [Rippingille] hollow, but I think he possesses an industry of the highest temper and a tenacity of purpose that makes everything he sets about. His observatory¹⁹ proves to him a most lucky hit – I have no doubt that in a few years it will make some mark among regular astronomical observations and will contribute to diffusion of that sort of knowledge among people who are not professed astronomers. He has now completed a very excellent camera obscura on the top of his tower which will greatly swell his harvest of shillings in the course of the summer….he makes sketches at the drawing parties which delight all who see them, they are chiefly Eastern scenes, buildings, gardens, baths, fountains, subterranean scenes, dark interiors tastefully and ingeniously composed illuminated by hot sun, cold moons, torchlight and all kinds of natural and preternatural light and often supplied with most appropriate figures he has lately produced some landscapes which are far better than anything he has done before and shew that if he would but condescend to make studies from nature he would soon become a shining man in that line.

King was introduced to Washington Allston by Coleridge in 1813. Allston was an American painter who was visiting England and Allston believed that he owed his life to King who had performed several operations on him. Allston painted portraits of Coleridge and King and King’s wife Emmeline, and held an exhibition in Bristol in 1814 that lasted three months. During the exhibition, Coleridge delivered six lectures on the fine arts, illustrated by the paintings and these were published in the local newspaper.²⁰ Coleridge wrote to a friend about Allston’s illness²¹:

It appears that I was too much in the right in penning it to be an analogous case to Thomas Wedgwood’s – it is a stricture or thickening of the colon – but it will not put a period to his Life. I trust, indeed, he is very much better – & out of pain.

The portrait of King painted by Allston can be contrasted with other similar portraits. Edward Bird painted King as a doctor holding a skull in his hands, but Allston’s painting depicts King ‘in his role as a patron and art collector, and especially as amateur, for he holds a small book and a watercolour brush rather th a n, for instance, a scalpel in his hand’.²²

In the latter part of his life, King maintained a good friendship with John Gibbons, an ironmaster, who was in 1822 living in Stoke Bishop, in north Bristol, but who became wealthy and moved to his family home in Staffordshire. King acted as an intermediary between the Bristol artists and their patron, Gibbons. King had Gibbons’s great nephew, William as a pupil for a premium of £525²³ and William subsequently married King’s younger daughter Phoebe. On one occasion King wrote to Gibbons about Gibbons's wife:²⁴

Every new change for the worse, however slight, will depress her spirits – and aggravate all her sufferings – particularly when she has not your conversation, or some of my argument to charm away or to frighten away her ingenious fears. In this she does not at all differ from other hypochondriac patients; but she has the advantage over the majority of individuals of that unhappy class …

In 1836, King wrote a letter to the Bristol Journal in defence of Beddoes at whose expense a joke had been made at the British Association by Dr Buckland (Professor of Geology, University of Oxford).²⁵ This long letter provides us with information about King’s work with Beddoes.

Dr Beddoes was next represented to have been a devoted admirer of the fair sex, and in his solicitude for the health of the ladies, to have discovered that their liability to nervous diseases, and frequent deaths from pulmonary consumption, originated in their intemperate use of tea, and in order to convince them of that error, he devised a scheme of stocking two ponds, one containing an infusion of green tea, the other pure water, each with an equal number of live frogs; that he bespoke a cargo of these animals from a friend in Shropshire, who sent him ten thousand frogs in a huge hogshead, perforated with ten thousand holes, similar to those afterwards bored by Davy in the floor of the House of Lords; the cask duly directed to Dr Beddoes, at Clifton, being landed on the quay at Bristol, fell from the crane and broke, so that ten thousand frogs over-ran the quay, and many hopped into the Frome, an event which threatened the most dire consequences to Dr Beddoes – the burning of his house, and perhaps that of the city, because the common people being at that time very loyal, and Dr B suspected of sinister political designs, imagined that the frogs were intended as provision for some French jacobins concealed in the doctor’s cellar, would have proceeded to patriotic acts of revenge, had they not been timely restrained, and brought to their senses by the harangue of a benevolent physician²⁶ arriving by chance on the spot etc etc.

Now for the sober truth of this matter….Though he also had his facetious moments Dr Beddoes’s conversation was always terse, and epigrammatic, like his respiration, not long-winded, and I do not believe that even in answer to some silly enquiries about the destination of the frogs, he would have said he meant to poison them with green tea. The fact was, that for some of Davy’s galvanic, as well as other physiological experiments, carried on at that time, at Dr Beddoes’ desire, by the writer of this letter, a supply of live cold-blooded animals was required. The toads of Clifton Down had been nearly extirpated by the experimenter, zealously aided by two fine boys, the pupils of Dr Beddoes. The doctor wrote for a supply, and a cask containing about 300 frogs, was sent. Through the carelessness or curiosity of the men engaged in landing it, the cask was opened, and many of the frogs were liberated, to die in the deadly waters of the Frome. The rest were saved, to be sacrificed in galvanic and physiological experiments.

This, Mr Editor, is the bare groundwork of the story, which required so much embellishment for the entertainment of a Bristol audience…. Should Professor Buckland ever see Stock’s memoir of Dr Beddoes, he will find a mass of facts, proving that Dr Beddoes’s memory should have been treated with more forbearance at Bristol, by a man who enjoys so large and well-deserved a fame in the sphere of science.

In the 1841 census King, his wife and daughter Zoe were living in the Mall house with two servants. The house was sold in 1844 and the sale of its contents lasted six days. About 20 years later, the house was bought by the Bristol Old Bank and remained a bank for almost 150 years.

The catalogue²⁷ of the sale is interesting for various reasons. Maby comments on the books in the sale,²⁸ some three thousand, and the general impression given is that they were the collection of a gentleman scholar. They show a good general selection with the exception of theology and natural history. It is especially good on Literature, Drama, History and Languages, showing a taste for both poetry and prose. The collection does not reveal any evidence of particular enthusiasms and his interest in the structure of language would seem as great as the literature of the language. There is rather surprisingly no evidence of an interest in geology as this had been a matter of great interest to Dr Beddoes and his circle in the early days of John King’s stay in Bristol. The section on medicine shows that besides the classic works, many of which were in Latin, he made a great effort to keep up to date with anything new that was published. It is hardly surprising that King’s library should contain many of Southey’s works and Humphry Davy’s ‘Nitrous Oxide’. It includes Gibbons’ ‘Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire’ and a 1760 edition of Locke’s Essays. His radical interests were obvious from the French section with 22 volumes of Diderot, 37 volumes of Rousseau and 22 volumes of Voltaire.

In the section of the catalogue dealing with paintings and drawings, the highest price paid was £26 for a landscape by Washington Allston. There was a portrait of Southey by Rippingille and a drawing by Danby of Dolbadden Lake and Castle which fetched the second highest price of £23.

He sold numerous surgical instruments including amputating instruments, a Parisian lithotrite, a case of trepanning instruments and a complete case of instruments for autopsy. There were also stethoscopes, several microscopes, cupping and scarifier, midwifery instruments and instruments for operating on the eye. Rather surprisingly, there were specimens in pots: a preparation of the heart where death was occasioned by a rupture of the left ventricle that was sold for 9 shillings; a strangulated right inguinal hernia not reduced. The patient died of a wounded femoral artery through a mistake of the operator, who thought the hernia was femoral, sold for two shillings and sixpence. Why, one must wonder, did he have these remaining in his house. Perhaps he had acquired these from his friend Francis Gold, the anatomist, when he left for India.

King was a multi-talented man, clearly demonstrated by the following that were included in the sale:

A forge – sold for £3 9s 0d; iron moulds for casting ingots; 3and half inch anvil; bench for wire-drawing 13 feet long; an excellent lathe sold for £13 10s 0d; extensive set of turning tools; a 2 foot Plate Electrical Machine by Cuthbertson with small Leyden Jars £5 5s 0d. A double cylinder air pump and over 300 human teeth. There was also a grand piano.

After leaving 26 The Mall, the Kings went to Bath for two years where they lived at 13 Orange Grove and then they returned to Clifton where they stayed at 3 Boyce’s Buildings, Clifton. King died 18 August 1848 aged 82 and is buried in Arno’s Vale cemetery with his wife and daughter, Zoe.

Maby²⁹ described King’s marriage and his relationships with members of his family:

His marriage seems to have been a tempestuous one at least at the beginning – this has always been the family tradition and there are references in the various correspondences which support this theory but other references lead one to suppose that it suffered only the normal ups and downs of most marriages. Certainly he was devoted to his children and they to him, and in the social life of the literary and artistic world which struggled for survival in Bristol, he found relaxation and great interest. It was said at the time that the Swiss when they lived abroad always suffered from homesickness and King was no exception to this rule. The trip he made to Switzerland in 1834 was a cause of real pleasure and his delight in seeing his relations again after so long a lapse of time was very deep indeed, so deep in fact that he was unable to speak to one of his sisters who had been kind to him in his boyhood because of the intensity of the emotion he felt at seeing her again, although he was able to speak fluently in the German of the locality to everyone else. However, the fact that he abandoned his scheme for retiring to Switzerland at the end of his life on his own, shows that the family ties in Clifton were stronger than might have been thought at times.

Figure 2.

Portrait of John King by Allston 1814. Height: 113.03 cm (44.5 in.), Width: 86.36 cm (34 in.) (source: Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco).

Footnotes

References

Maby M. John King, Surgeon of Clifton. Bristol Connections. The Temple Local History Group. 1996.

Beddoes

. Rules of the medical institution for the benefit of the sick and drooping poor, Bristol: J Mills, 1804, pp. 218–218.

Stock

. Memoirs of the life of Thomas Beddoes, MD, London: John Murray, 1811, pp. 181–181.

The collected Letters of Robert Southey Part Two 819 Robert Southey to John Rickman (7 August 1803) accessed 20 August 2019. https://romantic-circles.org.

Maby MG. The life and letters of John King Esq Surgeon Bristol Reference Library B28753, p.207.

Maby MG. The Life and letters of John King Esq Surgeon Bristol Reference Library B28753, p.46.

Bristol Archives Draft letter from John King 32688/29.

Smith GM. History of the Bristol Royal Infirmary. London: J.W. Arrowsmith Ltd, 1908, pp.437, 439.

Maby MG. The life and letters of John King Esq Surgeon Bristol Reference Library B28753, p.36.

10.

Maby MG. The life and letters of John King Esq Surgeon Bristol Reference Library B28753, p.193.

11.

Rules confirmed by the Subscribers to the Bristol Infirmary 1806 Bristol Reference Library B 13597.

12.

www.timeanddate.com/date/weekday.html (accessed 20 August 2019).

13.

Bristol Archives 32688/33 letter from Davey to King.

14.

Bristol Archives letter from Davy to King 32688/32.

15.

Bristol Archives 32688/45 Observations on the Exhibition of Paintings by John King.

16.

Gibbons papers J King to J Gibbons 31 Dec 1834–3 Jan 1835.

17.

Coward M. Clifton Observatory. Bristol: J publishing, 2018, p.53.

18.

Maby MG. The life and letters of John King Esq Surgeon Bristol Reference Library B28753, p.131.

19.

The observatory that was built by West overlooks the Clifton Suspension Bridge and still contains a camera obscura.

20.

Wright N (ed.). The correspondence of Washington Allston. Kentucky: University of Kentucky Press, 2015, pp.74, 75.

21.

Welsh JR. An Anglo-American friendship Allston and Coleridge. Journal of American Studies 1971; 5: 85.

22.

Gerdts WH and Stebbins TE Jr. “A man of genius” the Art of Washington Allston. Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1980 p84.

23.

Maby MG. The life and letters of John King Esq Surgeon Bristol Reference Library B28753, p.87.

24.

Bristol Archives 41197/4/1-38 dated 15 September 1822.

25.

Maby MG. The life and letters of John King Esq Surgeon Bristol Reference Library B28753, p.198.

26.

Dr E. Long Fox – physician at the Bristol Infirmary.

27.

Bristol Museum and Art Gallery Fine Art (Mb3740) Catalogue of sale.

28.

Maby MG. The life and letters of John King Esq Surgeon Bristol Reference Library B28753, p.211.

29.

Maby MG. The life and letters of John King Esq Surgeon Bristol Reference Library B28753, p.204.