He managed to eke out a living in the North as a freelance surveyor and lecturer, as the study of geology was beginning to take on a certain amount of popularity. Smith helped to set up the Scarborough City Museum, with thousands of fossils to be displayed in their proper relative positions. In 1828 Smith had the good fortune to be hired by a baronet, Sir John Vanden Bempe Johnstone, as his land steward. This gave Smith free room and board and the opportunity to meditate and write about geology.
Smith lived in relative obscurity until William Hyde Wollaston set up a fund that was to create an award for the Geological Society (which had previously denied Smith membership). Smith's supporters were able to successfully campaign that he receive the first year's award in 1831. (The Wollaston Medal has since become the most prestigious award for the study of geology. The Reverend William Buckland and Charles Darwin were both past recipients.) In addition to the medal, he also received a cash award and was soon after given a stipend by the King, granting him the financial security he had long struggled to attain. The rest of his life was happy. In 1836 he was granted an honorary doctorate from Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, and on August 27th, 1839, he died in Northampton.
Smith's fossils received greater attention after his death. In 1880, after the British Museum had been moved to its present site in South Kensington, his fossil collection was moved to a prominent gallery of its own. A marble bust of Smith and dozens of his own hand-colored illustrations were also displayed. Unfortunately, the collection went back into storage in the late 1970's and can only be seen by request. Visitors to Burlington House in Piccadilly, the home of the Geological Society of London, can view both of Smith's maps.
Winchester's style of writing is a bit formal and stilted, but due to the time he is writing about this style is actually quite fitting and I did not find it terribly distracting. I enjoyed Winchester's elaborations about the religious and social moods of Smith's lifetime, and his historical commentary is very helpful in understanding the world of William Smith. His linguistic commentary is also interesting -- we often forget that words like "geology" and "stratigraphy," used so often today by scientists, were uncommon when William "Strata" Smith first began working. (Smith acquired the nickname "Strata" in the nineteenth century due to his own use of the word in his work, especially after his 1817 publication of a book about stratigraphy.)
