John Lee is not well remembered today, but in his lifetime he was known across Britain and Ireland, South Africa, North America, and north Africa. Lee’s home, Hartwell, was celebrated for its observatory and for his private collection of ancient artefacts. How did a merchant’s son rise to such celebrity in scientific and antiquarian circles?
Early Life and Studies
Lee was born on 28 April 1783 to John Fiott, a London merchant, and Harriet Lee of Hartwell House. Altogether, nine children were born to John and Harriet Fiott, but only seven survived infancy. Harriet died in 1794, and John in 1797, leaving the seven surviving children in the guardianship of their 33-year-old bachelor uncle, William Lee Antonie of Colworth House, Bedfordshire.
Antonie was a careful guardian, and his concerns for the welfare of his nieces and nephews is clear in the surviving correspondence. Of the seven children, John was the eldest and he entered Cambridge University in 1801 to study mathematics. His time at university is partly documented in surviving correspondence with his friends and extended family. It appears that Lee enjoyed his studies and he remained in contact with some of his classmates after graduation, including Hugh Percy, later 3rd duke of Northumberland, and the Kent barrister William Longley.
Lee’s Travels
Lee graduated fifth wrangler in 1806, and immediately set his sights on winning a fellowship to allow him to continue his studies. His friends wrote to advise him that it was more likely that he would be successful in the following year, so Lee embarked on a seven-month walking tour of England, Wales and Ireland.
Lee completed his pedestrian tour in early summer 1807 and then returned to Cambridge briefly, to take up a Worts Travelling Bachelorship. The fellowship was intended to provide worthy graduates with the means to travel and, in return, the recipient was required to write monthly reports in Latin, detailing all they had learned of the religion, education, laws, politics, customs and natural history of their host country. Lee spent the duration of his fellowship in Sweden, but managed to complete and send only one of the required reports; it survives in the archives department at Cambridge University Library.
In June 1809, Lee returned to Cambridge once more, to take his MA degree. This was immediately followed in 1810 with a five-year tour of the Mediterranean and middle east, where Lee laid the foundations of his international scholarly network and began to amass his celebrated private collection of antiquarian and Egyptian artefacts.
Each of Lee’s early tours will be discussed in more detail in later blog posts.
Lee’s Reputation Established
Lee’s uncle and guardian, William Lee Antonie Lee, died in September 1815 at the age of 50. This brought Lee back to Britain – as the eldest of Lee Antonie’s charges, he inherited a number of estates. Their encumbrances were sufficient to prevent his becoming a gentleman of leisure, however, and he returned to Cambridge to take his law degree. Graduating in the following year, he also gained admission to Doctors’ Commons. (In David Copperfield, Charles Dickens famously mocked Doctors’ Commons as “cosey, dosey, old-fashioned, time-forgotten, sleepy-headed”.)
In 1827, a second inheritance brought great change to Lee’s life. He was now owner of Hartwell House, a fine Jacobean mansion near Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, that had been the Lee seat since 1617. Lee was now able to continue practicing law for the advantages it brought (for one, a London townhouse) while also indulging his scientific and antiquarian interests.
Lee soon set about making Hartwell a centre of scientific and antiquarian enquiry. In 1831, he erected an observatory at Hartwell – sadly, the structure no longer exists. This helped to secure his reputation in astronomical circles, as he was a founding member of the Astronomical Society in 1824 and would later, in 1861-2, serve as its president. He was also actively involved in the Royal Geographical Society, the Geological Society, the British Association for the Advancement of Science, and the British Meteorological Society. He funded the publication of Admiral William Smyth’s The Cycle of Celestial Objects [Speculum Hartwellianum] (1844) and Aedes Hartwellianae (1851). Many astronomers were welcomed to Hartwell over a 30 year period, including the American astronomer Maria Mitchell, who visited Hartwell in 1857 as part of a tour of British observatories. She enjoyed the company of Admiral Smyth and his family, finding his wife Annarella “a very clever astronomer”, but had a much lower opinion of Lee, who she called a “whimsical old man”.
As a landlord, Lee also took an active interest in social issues and politics. He supported a number of charitable projects, including Aylesbury infirmary and mechanics’ institute. He ran – unsuccessfully – for parliament on at least four occasions, on a platform of Temperance, pacifism, and women’s suffrage. From 1848 into the 1860s, Lee hosted the Hartwell Peace and Temperance Festival, headlined by famous speakers including the American pacifist Elihu Burritt. Lee married twice: first to Cecilia Rutter in 1833, and a year after her death in 1854, he married Louise Catherine Wilkinson. There were no children from either marriage.
The variety and depth of Lee’s interests is striking, and his surviving correspondence demonstrates that he spread himself widely, but never thinly. Lee’s letters and papers are held today in archives in Britain, Canada, Australia, the USA and Sweden, a startling reminder of the extent of his international networks.
Stay tuned for follow-up posts on Lee’s travels in Britain, Ireland, Scandinavia and the Mediterranean.
Further reading:
H. W. Buxton, ‘Obituary. John Lee’, Records of Buckinghamshire, iii, 1866, pp. 215–236.
H. A. Hanley, Dr John Lee of Hartwell, 1783–1866, Aylesbury, 1983.
Anita McConnell, ‘Lee , John (1783–1866)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, Sept 2004; online edn, May 2009 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/16297, accessed 14 Nov 2016]