Charles Valentine Riley: Founder of Modern Entomology - Hardcover

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 Chapter 1: The Thames, the Channel, the Rhine, 1843--1859
 
"I was born at Caroline Cottage, Queen Street, Chelsea, September 18, 1843.  I was taken down in the country with my brother George, when I was 3 years old, stayed with Mrs. Miller, Walton-on-Thames, Surrey about 2 years, after which we went to Mrs. Bissett's who lived North of Walton near the river in a large red-brick house in which two other families lived, Mrs. Greathead and Mr. Groom."
 
            On Monday, September 18, 1843, in Caroline Cottage in genteel Chelsea, West London, Mary Louisa Cannon gave birth to a boy whom she named Charles Valentine Riley.  A year and a half later, on January 20, 1845, again in Caroline Cottage, she gave birth to a second boy whom she named George Riley.  The father of the two boys, Charles Edmund Wylde, a middle-aged married Anglican clergyman who sired the two boys out of wedlock, was likely not present at their births.  His sexual affair with an unmarried woman in her twenties might raise some eyebrows in middle class London circles; however, more attention would likely be focused on the likelihood that Wylde's mother, Emma Prichard Wylde, assisted with the births of her son's two illegitimate offspring.  It was well known that Emma's father, Robert Prichard, and his wife owned Caroline Cottage.  It seems altogether likely that Wylde's parents knew about, perhaps even supported their son's extramarital affair. 
        
If so, Charles Wylde's behavior in his mid-thirties may reflect a nonconformist streak in his upbringing.  Born and raised in a clergy house, Wylde studied theology at Cambridge University with the intention of following in his father's footsteps.  In 1835, while a student, he married Jane Derby Knox, a young widow.  In 1837, he graduated with a degree of Bachelor of Arts.  That year Jane gave birth to a baby girl.  The baby was given no name and apparently died soon thereafter, possibly causing stress in the Wyldes’ marriage.  At the time Wylde became involved with Mary Cannon, he was a "Clerk in Holy Orders and Incumbent" [Rector] at Trinity Church in Lambeth, on the south bank of the Thames, across from Chelsea.
            Mary seems to have had a defiant streak that likely came by way of her father, George Cannon, an associate of William Cobbett, who led the radical dissenters, a heterogeneous group of reformers who opposed social inequities they blamed on the industrial revolution.  It is not clear to what extent Cannon supported Corbett's program of returning England to an idealized pre-industrial commonwealth when English gentry and commoners supposedly enjoyed equality and self-sufficiency.  It is clear that he agreed with Cobbett's denunciation of the established church.  Cannon and Corbett objected to the church's dogmatism, intolerance, and its alliance with the monarchy, made explicit in the Anti-Sedition Act (1817).  Under the sedition laws, a person who questioned the literal truth of the Bible could be jailed for libelous blasphemy.  Many of Cannon's fellow radicals, like the poet Leigh Hunt, William Benbow, a non-conformist preacher and publisher, and Daniel Isaac Eaton, a political activist, were imprisoned under the anti-sedition laws.  In 1815-1816, Cannon published the Theological Inquirer; or Polemical Magazine, a periodical in which he wrote under the pseudonyms, Reverend Erasmus Perkins or Philosemus, in order to avoid charges of blasphemy.  There, he published portions of Percy Bysshe Shelley's poem Queen Mab, a utopian fantasy advocating peaceful revolution of a commonwealth through moral transformation of individuals.  Queen Mab's thinly disguised Jacobin leanings infuriated the Society for the Prevention of Vice and led to the prosecution of several publishers of the poem, probably including Cannon.  In 1815, perhaps in response to Cannon's publication of the Queen Mab excerpts, the mayor of London demanded that Cannon sign an oath of allegiance to the crown, an oath to the supremacy of the Anglican Church, a declaration against popery, and a declaration of his Christian faith.  Although Cannon avoided imprisonment on this occasion, he soon experienced prison conditions firsthand.  In 1821-22, when married but without children, he served a one-year sentence in debtor's prison in place of his father who was also named George Cannon.
            About 1820, while participating in a Unitarian-style meeting, George Cannon met Mary Miller, a woman considerably younger than himself.  Reportedly “electrified” by Cannon’s argument that the truth of religion should stand separate from the personality of its teachers, Mary married him soon thereafter, although for several years they kept their marriage secret.  Following several miscarriages, Mary gave birth to three daughters:  Mary (Charles and George's mother), Laura, and Mira.  Mary also gave birth to a son who died when a child.  Shortly after the son’s death, a woman appeared at the Cannon house with a two- or three-year-old girl she said was George Cannon's illegitimate daughter.  Overcoming her initial shock at this revelation, Mary Cannon accepted the girl, Amelia, thus making a family of four daughters.
            Cannon's restless, innovative, and crusading nature led him to law and medicine and finally to theology and polemics.  His many interests, however, distracted him from the practicalities of family finances and his daughters' futures.  Eventually, his brother-in-law, William Miller, seeing his sister's plight, urged Cannon to capitalize on his knowledge of old books.  With start-up capital furnished by William, Cannon achieved moderate success as a dealer in antique books and manuscripts.  When his eldest daughter, Mary, reached age eighteen, Cannon sent her to a Catholic finishing school in France.
Mary returned in 1842, an attractive, educated, impetuous, and strong-willed woman in her early twenties, and promptly began her affair with thirty-five year old Wylde.  When Wylde's wife died in 1844 between the births of Charles and George Mary probably expected Wylde to marry her, but he declined.  What exactly occurred between the two is not clear, but Wylde may have envisioned an "open marriage," not uncommon in London's upper class circles, with Mary as his extra-marital partner.  Mary, for her part, may have expressed her sexual freedom and independence in the style of Flaubert’s Madam Bovary.  Whatever their motivations, by 1846 the union between Charles Wylde and Mary Cannon that had produced Charles and George Riley was unraveling.   That year, Mary married Antonio Hippolito Lafargue, a ship’s agent.