Some Eminent Women of Our Times: Short Biographical Sketches
by Dame Millicent Garrett Fawcett · English · Gutenberg #49765 · 471,446 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Some Eminent Women of Our Times: Short Biographical Sketches
Author: Dame Millicent Garrett Fawcett
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SOME EMINENT WOMEN OF OUR TIMES: SHORT BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES ***
Transcriber’s Note:
Words in italics are surrounded by _underscores_. Some corrections have
been made to the original text. These are listed in a second
transcriber’s note at the end of the text.
SOME EMINENT WOMEN
OF OUR TIMES
“Non aver tema, disse il mio Signore:
Fatti sicur, chè noi siamo a buon punto:
Non stringer, ma rallarga ogni vigore.”
_Purgatorio_, Canto 9, v. 46-48.
“‘I have a belief of my own, and it comforts me.’
“‘What is that?’ said Will....
“‘That by desiring what is perfectly good, even when we don’t quite know
what it is and cannot do what we would, we are part of the divine power
against evil—widening the skirts of light and making the struggle with
darkness narrower.’”—_Middlemarch_, Book iv.
SOME
EMINENT WOMEN
OF OUR TIMES
SHORT BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES
BY
MRS. HENRY FAWCETT
London
MACMILLAN AND CO.
AND NEW YORK
1889
_All rights reserved_
PREFACE
THE following short sketches of the lives of some of the eminent women
of our times were written for _The Mothers’ Companion_, and are now
republished by the kind permission of the proprietors and publishers,
Messrs. Partridge.
They were suggested by the fact that nearly all the best contributions
of women to literature have been made during the last hundred years, and
simultaneously with this remarkable development of literary activity
among women, there has been an equally remarkable activity in spheres of
work held to be peculiarly feminine. So far, therefore, from greater
freedom and better education encouraging women to neglect womanly work,
it has caused them to apply themselves to it more systematically and
more successfully. The names of Elizabeth Fry, Mary Carpenter, Sarah
Martin, Agnes Jones, Florence Nightingale, and Sister Dora are a proof
of this. I believe that we owe their achievements to the same impulse
which in another kind of excellence has given us Jane Austen, Charlotte
Brontë, and Elizabeth Browning.
The sketches were intended chiefly for working women and young people;
it was hoped it would be an encouragement to them to be reminded how
much good work had been done in various ways by women.
An apology should, perhaps, be offered to the reader for the want of
arrangement in the sequence of these sketches. As they appeared month by
month, in 1887 and 1888, the incidents of the day sometimes suggested
the subject. Thus the papers on Queen Victoria and on Queen Louisa of
Prussia were suggested by the celebration of the Jubilee in June 1887,
and by the universal grief felt for the death of Queen Louisa’s son and
grandson in 1888. As the incidents mentioned in some sketches are
sometimes referred to in those that follow, it has been thought best not
to alter the sequence in which they originally appeared. The authorities
relied on are quoted in each paper.
MILLICENT GARRETT FAWCETT.
LONDON, 1889.
CONTENTS
PAGE
1. ELIZABETH FRY 1
2. MARY CARPENTER 9
3. CAROLINE HERSCHEL 18
4. SARAH MARTIN 29
5. MARY SOMERVILLE 35
6. QUEEN VICTORIA 46
7. HARRIET MARTINEAU 57
8. FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE 69
9. MARY LAMB 79
10. AGNES ELIZABETH JONES 91
11. CHARLOTTE AND EMILY BRONTË 99
12. ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING 111
13. LADY SALE AND HER FELLOW-HOSTAGES IN AFGHANISTAN 117
14. ELIZABETH GILBERT 128
15. JANE AUSTEN 136
16. MARIA EDGEWORTH 145
17. QUEEN LOUISA OF PRUSSIA 163
18. DOROTHY WORDSWORTH 176
19. SISTER DORA 186
20. MRS. BARBAULD 198
21. JOANNA BAILLIE 205
22. HANNAH MORE 211
23. THE AMERICAN ABOLITIONISTS—PRUDENCE CRANDALL AND LUCRETIA MOTT 223
I
ELIZABETH FRY
“Humanity is erroneously considered among the commonplace virtues.
If it deserved such a place there would be less urgent need than,
alas! there is for its daily exercise among us. In its pale shape of
kindly sentiment and bland pity it is common enough, and is always
the portion of the cultivated. But humanity armed, aggressive, and
alert, never slumbering and never wearying, moving like an ancient
hero over the land to slay monsters, is the rarest of virtues.”—JOHN
MORLEY.
THE present century is one that is distinguished by the active part
women have taken in careers that were previously closed to them. Some
people would have us believe that if women write books, paint pictures,
and understand science and ancient languages, they will cease to be true
women, and cease to care for those womanly occupations and
responsibilities that have always been entrusted to them. This is an
essentially false and mistaken notion. True cultivation of the
understanding makes a sensible woman value at their real high worth all
her womanly duties, and so far from making her neglect them, causes her
to appreciate them more highly than she would otherwise have done. It
has always been held—at least, in Christian countries—that the most
womanly of women’s duties are to be found in works of mercy to those who
are desolate and miserable. To be thirsty, hungry, naked, sick, or in
prison, is to have a claim for compassion and comfort upon womanly pity
and tenderness. And we shall see, if we look back over recent years,
that never have these womanly tasks been more zealously fulfilled than
they have been in the century which has produced Elizabeth Fry, Florence
Nightingale, Josephine Butler, and Octavia Hill.
Mrs. Fry was born before the beginning of this century—in 1780—but the
great public work with which her memory will always be connected was not
begun till about 1813. She was born of the wealthy Quaker family, the
Gurneys of Norwich. Her parents were not very strict members of the sect
to which they belonged, for they allowed their children to learn music
and dancing—pursuits that were then considered very worldly even by many
who did not belong to the Society of Friends. The gentle poet, William
Cowper, speaks in one of his letters, written about the time of
Elizabeth Fry’s childhood, of love of music as a thing which tends “to
weaken and destroy the spiritual discernment.” Mr. and Mrs. Gurney,
however, seem to have been very free from such prejudices, as well as
from others which were much more universal, for their children not only
learnt music and dancing, but also—girls as well as boys—Latin and
mathematics.
Mrs. Gurney seems to have discerned that she had an especial treasure in
her little Elizabeth. She is spoken of in her mother’s journal as “my
dove-like Betsy.” The authoress of the biography of Elizabeth Fry in the
Eminent Women series, says: “Her faculty for independent investigation,
her unswerving loyalty to duty, and her fearless perseverance in works
of benevolence, were all foreshadowed” in her childhood. She had as a
young girl what appears to us now a very extraordinary dread of
enthusiasm in religion. One would think that if ever a woman needed
enthusiasm for her life’s work, Elizabeth Fry was that woman. But she
confesses in her journal, written when she was seventeen years of age,
“the greatest fear of religion” because it is generally allied with
enthusiasm. Perhaps the truth is that she had so deep a natural fount of
enthusiasm in her heart that she dreaded the work that it would impel
her to, when once it was allowed a free course. She had a very strong,
innate repugnance to anything which drew public attention upon herself,
and only the imperative sense of duty enabled her to overcome this
feeling. In her heart she said what her Master had said before her:
“Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me.”
When the sphere of public duty first revealed itself to her, she records
in her diary what it cost her to enter upon it, and writes of it as “the
humiliating path that has appeared to be opening before me.” It must be
noticed, however, that in her case, as always, the steep and difficult
path of duty becomes easier to those who do not flinch from it. In a
later passage of her diary, the public work which she had at first
called a path of humiliation she speaks of as “this great mercy.”
In the little book to which reference has just been made, we read that
the first great change in Elizabeth Gurney’s life was caused by the deep
impression made upon her by the sermons of William Savery. It is rather
strange to find the girl who had such a terror of enthusiasm, weeping
passionately while William Savery was preaching. Her sister has
described what took place. “Betsy astonished us all by the great feeling
she showed. She wept most of the way home.... What she went through in
her own mind I cannot say; but the results were most powerful and most
evident” (p. 11, _Elizabeth Fry_. By Mrs. E. R. Pitman). Her emotion was
not of the kind that passes away and leaves no trace behind. The whole
course of her life and tenor of her thoughts were changed. She became a
strict Quakeress, not, however, without some conflict with herself.
There are pleasant little touches of human nature in the facts that she
found it a trial to say “thee” and “thou,” and to give up her scarlet
riding habit. Soon after this, at the age of twenty, she became the wife
of Mr. Joseph Fry, and removed to London, where she lived in St.
Mildred’s Court, in the City. The family into which she married were
Quakers, like her own, but of a much more severe and strict kind. Her
marriage was, however, in every respect a fortunate one. Her husband
sympathised deeply with her in all her efforts for the good of others,
and encouraged her in her public work, although many in the Society of
Friends did not scruple to protest that a married woman has no duties
except to her husband and children. Her journal shows how anxiously she
guarded herself against any temptation to neglect her home duties. She
was a tender and devoted mother to her twelve children, and it was
through her knowledge of the strength of a mother’s love that she was
able to reach the hearts of many of the poor prisoners whom she
afterwards helped out of the wretchedness into which they had fallen.
Her study of the problem, how to help the poor, began in this way. A
beggar-woman with a child in her arms stopped her in the street. Mrs.
Fry, seeing that the child had whooping-cough and was dangerously ill,
offered to go with the woman to her home in order more effectually to
assist her. To Mrs. Fry’s surprise, the woman immediately tried to make
off; it was evident what she wanted was a gift of money, not any help to
the suffering child. Mrs. Fry followed her, and found that her rooms
were filled with a crowd of farmed-out children in every stage of
sickness and misery; the more pitiable the appearance of one of these
poor mites, the more useful an implement was it in the beggar’s
stock-in-trade. From this time onwards the condition of women and
children in the lowest and most degraded of the criminal classes became
the study of Mrs. Fry’s life. She had the gift of speech on any subject
which deeply moved her. From about 1809 she began to speak at the
Friends’ meeting-house. This power of speaking, as well as working,
enabled her to draw about her an active band of co-workers. When she
first began visiting the female prisoners in Newgate it is probable that
she could not have supported all that she had to go through if it had
not been for the sympathy and companionship of Anna Buxton and other
Quaker ladies whom she had roused through her power of speech, just as
she had herself been roused when a girl by the preaching of William
Savery.
The condition of the women and children in Newgate Prison, when Mrs. Fry
first began visiting them in 1813, was more horrible than anything that
can be easily imagined. Three hundred poor wretches were herded together
in two wards and two cells, with no furniture, no bedding of any kind,
and no arrangements for decency or privacy. Cursing and swearing, foul
language, and personal filthiness, made the dens in which the women were
confined equally offensive to ear, eye, nose, and sense of modesty. The
punishment of death at that time existed for 300 different offences, and
though there were many mitigations of the sentence in the case of those
who had only committed minor breaches of the law, yet the fact that
nearly all had by law incurred the penalty of death, gave an apparent
justification for herding the prisoners indiscriminately together. It
thus happened that many a poor girl who had committed a comparatively
trivial offence, became absolutely ruined in body and mind through her
contact in prison with the vilest and most degraded of women. No attempt
whatever was made to reform or discipline the prisoners, or to teach
them any trade whereby, on leaving the gaol, they might earn an honest
livelihood. Add to this that there were no female warders nor female
officers of any kind in the prison, and that the male warders were
frequently men of depraved life, and it is not difficult to see that no
element of degradation was wanting to make the female wards of Newgate
what they were often called—a hell on earth.
When Elizabeth Fry and Anna Buxton first visited this Inferno, there was
so little pretence at any kind of control over the prisoners, that the
Governor of Newgate advised the ladies to leave their watches behind
them at home. Mrs. Fry, with a wise instinct, felt that the best way of
influencing the poor, wild, rough women was to show her care for their
children. Many of the prisoners had their children with them in gaol,
and there were very few even of the worst who could not be reached by
care for their little ones. Even those who had no children were often
not without the motherly instinct, and could be roused to some measure
of self-restraint and decency for the sake of the children who were
being corrupted by their example. So Mrs. Fry’s first step towards
reforming the women took the form of starting a school for the children
in the prison. As usual in all good work of a novel kind, those who knew
nothing about it were quite sure that Mrs. Fry would have been much more
usefully employed if she had turned her energies in a different
direction. People who have never stirred a finger to lighten the misery
of mankind always know, so much better than the workers, what to do and
how to do it. They would probably tell a fireman who is entering a
burning house at the risk of his life, that he would be more usefully
employed in studying the chemical action of fire, or in pondering over
the indestructibility of matter. The popular feeling with regard to Mrs.
Fry’s work in Newgate was embodied by Thomas Hood in a ballad which is
preserved in his collected works, and serves now to show how wrong a
good and tender-hearted man may be in passing judgment on a work of the
value of which he was entirely unqualified to form an opinion. The
refrain of the poem is “Keep your school out of Newgate, Mrs. Fry”—
I like the pity in your full-brimmed eye.
I like your carriage and your silken gray,
Your dove-like habits and your silent preaching,
But I _don’t_ like your Newgatory teaching.
· · · · ·
No, I’ll be your friend, and like a friend
Point out your very worst defect. Nay, never
Start at that word! But I must ask you why
You keep your school in Newgate, Mrs. Fry.
Mrs. Fry’s philanthropy was not of a kind to be checked by a ballad, and
she went on perseveringly with her work; the school was formed, and a
prisoner, named Mary Cormor, was the first schoolmistress. A wonderful
change gradually became apparent in the demeanour, language, and
appearance of the women in prison. In 1817 an association was formed for
carrying on the work Mrs. Fry had begun. It was called “An Association
for the Improvement of the Female Prisoners in Newgate.” Its first
members were eleven Quakeresses and one clergyman’s wife. Public
attention was now alive to the importance of the work; and in the
following year a Select Committee of the House of Commons was appointed
to inquire and report upon the condition of the London prisons. Mrs. Fry
was examined before this committee. Her chief recommendations were that
the prisoners should be employed in some industry, and be paid for their
work, and that good conduct should be encouraged by rewards; she was
also most urgent that the women prisoners should be in the charge of
women warders. Her work in the prison naturally led her to consider the
condition and ultimate fate of women who were transported.
Transportation was then carried out upon a large scale, and all the
evils of the prison existed in an intensified form on board the
transport ships. The horrors of the voyage were followed by a brutal and
licentious distribution of the women on their arrival to colonists,
soldiers, and convicts, who went on board and took their choice of the
human cargo. Mrs. Fry’s efforts resulted in a check being placed on
these shameful barbarities. The women were, owing to her exertions, sent
out in charge of female warders, and they were provided with decent
accommodation on their arrival.
Like Howard, Mrs. Fry did not confine her efforts to the poor and
wretched of her own country. She visited foreign countries in order
thoroughly to study various methods of prison work and discipline. On
one occasion she found in Paris a congenial task in bringing the force
of public opinion to bear on the treatment of children in the Foundling
Hospital there. The poor babies were done up in swaddling clothes that
were only unwrapped once in twelve hours. There was no healthy screaming
in the wards, only a sound that a hearer compared to the faint and
pitiful bleating of lambs. A lady who visited the hospital said she
never made the round of the spotlessly clean white cots, without finding
at least one dead baby! Everything in the hospital was regulated by
clockwork; its outward appearance was clean and orderly in the extreme,
but the babies died like flies! The Archbishop of Paris was vastly
annoyed with Mrs. Fry for pointing out this drawback to the perfect
organisation of the institution; but when once the light was let in,
improvement followed.
There were many other classes of neglected or unfortunate people whose
circumstances were improved by Mrs. Fry’s exertions. The lonely
shepherds of Salisbury Plain were provided with a library after she had
visited the desolate region where they lived. She also organised a
lending library for coastguardsmen and for domestic servants. There was
no end to her active exertions for the good of others except that of her
life.
She died at Ramsgate in 1845, and was buried at Barking.
Her private life was not without deep sorrows and anxieties. She lost a
passionately beloved child in 1815; in 1828 her husband was unfortunate
in his business affairs. They suffered from a great diminution of
fortune, and were obliged to remove to a smaller house and adopt a less
expensive style of living. She did not pretend to any indifference she
was far from feeling under these trials; but they were powerless to turn
her from the duties which she had marked out for herself. The work which
she had undertaken for the good of others probably became, in its turn,
her own solace and support in the hour of trial and affliction. In
helping others she had unconsciously built up a strong refuge for
herself, thus giving a new illustration to the truth of the words: “He
that findeth his life shall lose it: and he that loseth his life, for my
sake, shall find it.”
II
MARY CARPENTER
“That it may please Thee ... to show Thy pity upon all prisoners and
captives.”
MARY CARPENTER was thirty-eight years old when Mrs. Fry died in 1845. We
do not hear, in reading the lives of either, that the two women ever
met, or that the elder directly stimulated the activity of the younger.
Yet the one most surely prepared the way for the other; their work was
upon the same lines, and Miss Carpenter, the Unitarian, of Bristol, was
the spiritual heir and successor of Mrs. Fry, the Quaker, of Norwich.
There is, it is true, a contrast in the manner in which the two women
approached their work in life. The aim of both was the rescue of what
Mary Carpenter called “the perishing and dangerous classes.” But while
Mrs. Fry was led, through her efforts on behalf of convicts, to
establish schools for them and their children, Mary Carpenter’s first
object was the school for neglected children, and through the knowledge
gained there she was led to form schemes for the reformation of
criminals and for a new system of prison discipline. Mrs. Fry worked
through convicts to schools; Mary Carpenter through schools to convicts.
It will not therefore be imagined that there is any want of appreciation
of Mrs. Fry when it is said that Mary Carpenter’s labours were more
effective, inasmuch as they were directed to the cause of the evil,
rather than to its results. By establishing reformatory and industrial
schools, and by obtaining, after long years of patient effort, the
sanction and support of Parliament for them, she virtually did more than
had up to that time ever been done in England, to stop the supply of
criminals. Children who were on the brink of crime, and those who had
actually fallen into criminal courses, were, through her efforts,
snatched away from their evil surroundings, and helped to become
respectable and industrious men and women. Before her time, magistrates
and judges had no choice, when a child criminal stood convicted before
them, but to sentence him to prison, whence he would probably come out
hopelessly corrupted and condemned for life to the existence of a beast
of prey. She says, in one of her letters, dated 1850: “A Bristol
magistrate told me that for twenty years he had felt quite unhappy at
going on committing these young culprits. And yet he had _done_
nothing!” The worse than uselessness of prisons for juvenile offenders
was a fact that was burnt into Mary Carpenter’s mind and heart by the
experience of her life. She was absolutely incapable of recognising the
evil and at the same time calmly acquiescing in it. Her magisterial
friend is the type of the common run of humanity, who satisfy their
consciences by saying, “Very grievous! very wrong!” and who do nothing
to remove the grievance and the wrong; she is the type of the
knights-errant of humanity, who never see a wrong without assailing it,
and endeavouring to remove the causes which produce it.
Mary Carpenter was born at Exeter in 1807, the eldest of five children,
several of whom have left their mark on the intellectual and moral
history of this century. There was all through her life a great deal of
the elder sister—one may almost say, of the mother—in Mary Carpenter. In
an early letter her mother speaks of the wonderfully tranquillising
influence of dolls on her little Mary. She never shrank from
responsibility, and she had a special capacity for protecting love—a
capacity that stood her in good stead in reclaiming the little waifs and
strays to whom she afterwards devoted herself. Her motherliness comes
out in a hundred ways in the story of her life. Her endless patience
with the truant and naughty children was such as many a real mother
might envy. She was especially proud of the title of “the old mother”
which the Indian women, whom she visited towards the close of her life,
gave her. In writing to a friend, she once said: “There is a verse in
the prophecies, ‘I have given thee children whom thou hast not borne,’
and the motherly love of my heart has been given to many who have never
known before a mother’s love.” She adopted a child in 1858 to be a
daughter to her, and writes gleefully: “Just think of me with a little
girl of _my own_! about five years old, ready-made to my hand, without
the trouble of marrying—a darling little thing, an orphan,” etc. etc.
Her friends spoke of her eager delight in buying the baby’s outfit.
It was her motherliness that made her so successful with the children in
the reformatories and industrial schools; moreover, the children
believed in her love for them. One little ragged urchin told a clergyman
that Miss Carpenter was a lady who gave away all her money for naughty
boys, and only kept enough to make herself clean and decent. On one
occasion she heard that two of her ex-pupils had “got into trouble,” and
were in prison at Winchester. She quickly found an opportunity of
visiting them, and one of them exclaimed, directly he saw her, “Oh! Miss
Carpenter, I knew you would not desert us!”
Another secret of her power, and also of her elasticity of spirit, was
her sense of humour. It was like a silver thread running through her
laborious life, saving her from dulness and despondency. In one of her
reports, which has to record the return of a runaway, she said: “He came
back resembling the prodigal in everything except his repentance!”
The motto which she especially made her own was _Dum doceo disco—While I
teach, I learn_. Her father had a school for boys in Bristol, and Mary
and her sister were educated in it. They were among the best of their
father’s pupils, one of whom, the Rev. James Martineau, has left a
record of the great impression Mary’s learning made upon him. She was
indeed very proficient in many branches of knowledge. Her education
included Latin, Greek, mathematics, and natural history; and the
exactness which her father and the nature of her studies demanded of
her, formed a most invaluable training for her after career. For many
years the acquisition of knowledge, for its own sake, was the chief joy
of her life; but a time came when it ceased to satisfy her. She was
rudely awakened from the delightful dreams of a student’s life by a
severe visitation of cholera at Bristol in 1832. From this period, and
indeed from a special day—that set apart as a fast-day in consequence of
the cholera—dates a solemn dedication of herself to the service of her
fellow-creatures. She wrote in her journal 31st March 1832, what her
resolution was, and concluded: “These things I have written to be a
witness against me, if ever I should forget what ought to be the object
of all my active exertions in life.” These solemn self-dedications are
seldom or never spoken of by those who make them. Records of them are
found sometimes in journals long after the hand that has written them is
cold. But, either written or unwritten, they are probably the rule
rather than the exception on the part of those who devote themselves to
the good of others. The world has recently learned that this was the
case with Lord Shaftesbury. There is a time when the knight-errant
consciously enrols himself a member of the noble band of warriors
against wrong and oppression, and takes upon himself his baptismal
vow—manfully to fight against sin, the world, and the devil, and to
continue Christ’s faithful soldier and servant to his life’s end.
It must be remembered that when Mary Carpenter first began to exert
herself for the benefit of neglected children, there were no reformatory
or industrial schools, except those which had been established by the
voluntary efforts of philanthropists like herself. Aided by a band of
fellow-workers and wise advisers, chief of whom were Mr. Matthew
Davenport Hill, the Recorder of Birmingham, and his daughters; Dr.
Tuckerman, of the U.S.A.; Mr. Russell Scott, of Bath; Mr. Sheriff
Watson, of Aberdeen; and Lady Byron, Mary Carpenter set to work to
establish a voluntary reformatory school at Kingswood, near Bristol. Her
principle was that by surrounding children, who would otherwise be
criminals, with all the influences of a wholesome home life, there was a
better chance than by any other course, of reclaiming these children,
and making them useful members of society. To herd children together in
large, unhomelike institutions, was always, in Mary Carpenter’s view,
undesirable; the effect on character is bad; the more perfectly such
places are managed, the more nearly do the children in them become part
of a huge machine, and the less are their faculties, as responsible
human beings, developed. Over and over again, in books, in addresses,
and by the example of the institutions which she managed herself, Mary
Carpenter reiterated the lesson that if a child is to be rescued and
reformed, he must be placed in a family; and that where it is necessary,
for the good of society, to separate children on account of their own
viciousness, or that of their parents, from their own homes, the
institutions receiving them should be based on the family ideal so far
as possible. With this end in view, the children at Kingswood were
surrounded by as many home influences as possible. Miss Carpenter at one
time thought of living there herself, but this scheme was given up, in
deference to her mother’s wishes. She was, however, a constant visitor,
and a little room, which had once been John Wesley’s study, was fitted
up as a resting-place for her. On a pane of one of the windows of this
room her predecessor had written the words, “God is here.” She taught
the children herself, and provided them with rabbits, fowls, and pigs,
the care of which she felt would exercise a humanising influence upon
them. The whole discipline of the place was directed by her; one of her
chief difficulties was to get a staff of assistants with sufficient
faith in her methods to give them an honest trial. She did not believe
in a physical force morality. “We must not attempt,” she wrote, “to
_break_ the will, but to train it to govern itself wisely; and it must
be our great aim to call out the good, which exists even in the most
degraded, and make it conquer the bad.” After a year’s work at Kingswood
in this spirit, she writes very hopefully of the improvement already
visible in the sixteen boys and thirteen girls in her charge. The boys
could be trusted to go into Bristol on messages, and even “thievish
girls” could be sent out to shops with money, which they never thought
of appropriating.
But although the success of the institution was so gratifying, it had no
legal sanction; it had consequently no power to deal with runaways, and
the great mass of juvenile delinquents were still sentenced to prisons,
from which they emerged, like the man into whom seven devils entered, in
a state far worse than their first. Mary Carpenter’s work was not only
to prove the success of her methods of dealing with young criminals,
but, secondly, to convince the Government that the established system
was a bad one, and thirdly, and most difficult of all, to get them to
legislate on the subject. A long history of her efforts to obtain
satisfactory legislation for children of the perishing and dangerous
classes is given in her life, written by her nephew, Mr. J. Estlin
Carpenter. It is enough here to say that in the House of Lords, Lord
Shaftesbury, and in the House of Commons, Sir Stafford Northcote and Mr.
Adderley (afterwards Lord Iddesleigh and Lord Norton), were her chief
supporters. Mr. Lowe (now Lord Sherbrooke) was her chief opposer.
Liberal as she was, born and bred, as well as by heart’s conviction, she
confessed with some feeling of shame, that the Tories “are best in
_this_ work.” At last, in 1854, her efforts were crowned with success,
and the Royal Assent was given to the Youthful Offenders Bill, which
authorised the establishment of reformatory schools, under the sanction
of the Home Secretary.
It is a striking proof of the change that has taken place in the sphere
and social status of women, that Mary Carpenter, in the first half of
her active life, suffered what can be called nothing less than anguish,
from any effort which demanded from herself the least departure from
absolute privacy. When she began her work of convincing the public and
Parliament of the principles which ought to govern the education of
juvenile criminals, her nephew writes that to have spoken at a
conference in the presence of gentlemen, she would have felt, at that
time (1851), as tantamount to unsexing herself. When she was called upon
to give evidence before a Select Committee of the House of Commons in
1852, her profound personal timidity made the occasion a painful ordeal
to her, which she was only enabled to support by the consciousness of
the needs of the children. Surely this excessive timidity arises from
morbid self-consciousness, rather than from true womanly modesty. Mary
Carpenter was enabled, by increasing absorption in her work, to throw it
off, and for her work’s sake she became able to speak in public with
ease and self-possession. She frequently spoke and read papers at the
Social Science Congresses, and at meetings of the British Association. A
letter from her brother Philip describes one of these occasions, at the
meeting in 1860 of the British Association at Oxford, when her subject
was, “Educational Help from the Government Grant to the Destitute and
Neglected Children of Great Britain.”
_“July ——, 1860._
“There was a great gathering of celebrities to hear her. It was in one
of the ancient schools or lecture-halls, which was crowded, evidently
not by the curious, but by those who really wanted to know what she had
to say. She stood up and read in her usual clear voice and expressive
enunciation.... It was, I suppose, the first time a woman’s voice had
read a lecture there before dignitaries of learning and the Church; but
as there was not the slightest affectation on the one hand, so on the
other hand there was neither a scorn nor an etiquettish politeness; but
they all listened to her as they would have listened to Dr. Rae about
Franklin, only with the additional feeling (expressed by the President,
Mr. Nassau Senior) that it was a matter of heart and duty, as well as
head.”
As years passed by, her work and responsibilities rapidly increased. It
is astonishing to read of the number of institutions, from ragged
schools upwards, of which she was practically the head and chief. Her
thoroughly practical and business-like methods of work, as well as her
obvious self-devotion and earnestness, ensured to her a large share of
public confidence and esteem, and although she was a Unitarian,
sectarian prejudices did not often thwart her usefulness. Two instances
to the contrary must, however, be given. In 1856 the Somersetshire
magistrates at the Quarter Sessions at Wells refused to sanction the
Girls’ Reformatory, established by Miss Carpenter at the Red Lodge,
Bristol, on account of the religious opinions of its foundress. They
appeared to have forgotten that “Pure religion and undefiled before God
and the Father is this, to visit the fatherless and widows in their
affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world.” A more deeply
and truly religious spirit than Mary Carpenter’s never existed; but that
is the last thing that sectarian rancour takes heed of. The other little
bit of persecution she met with was regarded by herself and her friends
as something between a compliment and a joke. In 1864 she wrote a book
entitled _Our Convicts_. The work was received with commendation by
jurists in France, Germany, and the United States, but the crowning
honour of all was that the Pope placed her and her books on the “Index
Expurgatorius.” After this she felt that if she had lived in earlier
times she might have aspired to the crown of martyrdom.
The extraordinary energy and vitality of Mary Carpenter never declined.
When she was over sixty years of age she made four successive visits to
India, with the double object of arousing public opinion there about the
education of women, and the condition of convicts, especially of female
convicts. At the age of sixty-six she visited America. She had long been
deeply interested in the social and political condition of the United
States, and had many warm personal friends there. Her first impulse to
reformatory work had come from an American citizen, Dr. Tuckerman; her
sympathy and help had been abundantly bestowed upon the Abolitionist
party, and she was of course deeply thankful when the Civil War in
America ended as it did in the victory of the North, and in the complete
abolition of negro slavery in the United States. Her mind remained
vigorous and susceptible to new impressions and new enthusiasms to the
last. Every movement for elevating the position of women had her
encouragement. She frequently showed her approval of the movement for
women’s suffrage by signing petitions in its favour, and was convinced
that legislation affecting both sexes would never be what it ought to be
until women as well as men had the power of voting for Members of
Parliament. In 1877, within a month of her death, she signed the
memorial to the Senate of the London University in favour of the
admission of women to medical degrees.
She passed away peacefully in her sleep, without previous illness or
decline of mental powers, in June 1877, leaving an honoured name, and a
network of institutions for the reform of young criminals, and the
prevention of crime, of which our country will for many years to come
reap the benefit.
III
CAROLINE HERSCHEL
“As when by night the glass
Of Galileo less assured observes
Imagined lands and regions in the moon.”—_Paradise Lost._
EVERY one knows the fame of Sir William Herschel, the first
distinguished astronomer of that name, the builder and designer of the
forty-foot telescope, and the discoverer of the planet, called after
George III., Georgium Sidus. Hardly less well known is the name of his
sister, Caroline Herschel, who was her brother’s constant helper for
fifty years. She was the discoverer of eight comets; she received, for
her distinguished services to science, the gold medal of the Royal
Astronomical Society, and the gold medal conferred annually by the King
of Prussia for science; she was also made an honorary member of the
Royal Astronomical Society and of the Royal Irish Academy, and received
many other public marks of appreciation of the value of her astronomical
labours. Few women have done as much as she for the promotion of
science, and few have been more genuinely humble in their estimate of
their own attainments. Nothing made her more angry than any praise which
appeared, even in the slightest degree, to detract from the reputation
of her brother; over and over again she asserted that she was nothing
more than a tool which he had taken the trouble to sharpen. One of her
favourite expressions about herself was that she only “minded the
heavens” for her brother. “I am nothing,” she wrote; “I have done
nothing: all I am, all I know, I owe to my brother. I am only a tool
which he shaped to his use—a well-trained puppy-dog would have done as
much.”
Scientific men and scientific societies did not endorse Caroline
Herschel’s extremely humble estimate of herself. In the address to the
Astronomical Society by Mr. South, on presenting the medal to Miss
Herschel in 1828, the highest praise was conferred upon her as her
brother’s fellow-worker, and as an original observer. “She it was,” said
Mr. South, “who reduced every observation, made every calculation; she
it was who arranged everything in systematic order; and she it was who
helped him (Sir W. Herschel) to obtain his imperishable name. But her
claims to our gratitude do not end here: as an original observer she
demands, and I am sure she has, our unfeigned thanks.” He then narrates
the series of her astronomical discoveries, and adds, referring to the
brother and sister: “Indeed, in looking at the joint labours of these
extraordinary personages, we scarcely know whether most to admire the
intellectual power of the brother, or the unconquerable industry of his
sister.”
The sharpest tool, or the best-trained puppy-dog in the world, could
hardly have earned such praise as this. Without endorsing what Caroline
said of herself in her generous wish to heighten the fame of her
brother, it must, however, be conceded that in a remarkable degree she
was what he made her. With an excellent, and indeed an exceptionally
powerful, natural understanding, she was ready to apply it in any
direction her brother chose. She was far from being a mere tool, but her
mind resembled a fine musical instrument upon which her brother was able
to play the lightest air or the grandest symphony, according as he
pleased. At his bidding she became, first, a prima donna, then an
astronomer; if he had so wished it, she would probably with equal
readiness and versatility have turned her attention to any other branch
of science or art. Caroline Herschel was, indeed, a fine example of what
devoted love can do to elevate the character and develop the natural
capacity of the understanding.
She was born in Hanover on the 16th March 1750, the youngest but one of
six children. Her exceptionally long life of nearly ninety-eight years
closed in January 1848. Her memory, therefore, included the earthquake
of Lisbon, the whole French Revolution, the meteor-like rise and fall of
Napoleon, and all the history of modern Europe to the eve of the
socialistic outbreak of 1848. Her family life, before she left Germany,
was of the narrowest possible kind. She had only one sister, seventeen
years older than herself; and as Sophia Herschel married early, Caroline
became the only girl in her family circle, and to the full was she kept
to those exclusively feminine pursuits and occupations which the
proprieties of Germany at that time enforced. Her mother appears to have
been enthusiastically opposed to the education of girls. Her father
wished to give her a good education, but the mother insisted that
nothing of the kind should be attempted. How she learned to read and
write we are not told in the biography written by her grand-niece, Mrs.
J. Herschel. These accomplishments were by no means common among German
women of the humbler middle class a hundred years ago. She did, however,
acquire them, in spite of her mother’s decree that two or three months’
training in the art of making household linen was all the education that
Caroline required. Her father, who was a professional musician himself,
wished to teach her music, but could only do so by stealth, or by taking
advantage of half an hour now and then, when his wife was in an
exceptionally good temper. In a letter, written when she was
eighty-eight years old, Caroline recalls these furtive hours stolen from
the serious occupations of her life, which then consisted in sewing,
“ornamental needlework, knitting, plaiting hair, and stringing beads and
bugles.” “It was my lot,” she writes, “to be the Cinderella of the
family.... I could never find time for improving myself in many things I
knew, and which, after all, proved of no use to me afterwards, except
what little I knew of music ... which my father took a pleasure in
teaching me—_N.B., when my mother was not at home. Amen._”
Very early in her life her brother William became Caroline’s idol and
hero. He was twelve years older than herself, and distinguished himself
among the group of brothers for tenderness and kindness to the little
maiden. Her eldest brother, Jacob, was a fastidious gentleman, and
Caroline’s inability to satisfy his requirements for nicety at table and
as a waitress, often earned her a whipping. But her brother William’s
gentility was of a different order. She narrates one instance, which
doubtless was a specimen of others, when “My dear brother William threw
down his knife and fork and ran to welcome and crouched down to me,
which made me forget all my grievances.” Little did William or Caroline
guess that in the kind brother soothing the little sister’s trouble, the
future astronomer was “sharpening the tool” that was hereafter to be of
such inestimable service to him.
The connection of England and Hanover under one crown caused an intimate
association between the two countries. William Herschel’s first visit to
England was as a member of the band of the regiment of which his father
was bandmaster. On this first visit to England, William expended his
little savings in buying Locke’s “Essay on the Human Understanding.”
Jacob made an equally characteristic purchase of specimens of English
tailoring art. These professional journeys to England led, in the course
of time, to William Herschel establishing himself as a music-master and
professional musician at Bath. This, however, he very early regarded
merely as a means to an end. He taught music to live, but he lived for
his astronomical studies and for the inventions and improvements in
telescopes which he afterwards introduced to the world. When Caroline
was seventeen years old, her father died, leaving his family very ill
provided for; Caroline was more closely than ever confined to the tasks
of a household drudge and to endeavouring to supply home-made luxuries
for Jacob. This went on for five years, the mother and sister slaving
night and day in order that Jacob might cut a figure in the world not
humbling to the family pride. In 1772 William Herschel unexpectedly
arrived from England, and his short visit ended in his sister Caroline
returning with him to Bath. She left, as she writes with some awe, even
after an interval of many years, “without receiving the consent of my
eldest brother to my going.”
There could not possibly be a greater contrast than that between
Caroline’s life in Hanover and her life in England. From being a
maid-of-all-work in a not very interesting family, where there was a
dull monotony in her daily routine of drudgery, she found she was to
become a public singer, an astronomer’s apprentice, and an assistant
manufacturer of scientific instruments; she was not only her brother’s
housekeeper, but his helper and coadjutor in every act of his life.
Nothing is more remarkable than the account of the life of William and
Caroline Herschel at Bath. He frequently gave from thirty-five to forty
music-lessons a week; this, with his work as director of public
concerts, kept the wolf from the door, and, needless to say, occupied
his daylight hours with tolerable completeness. The nights were given to
“minding the heavens,” or to making instruments necessary for minding
them much more efficiently than had hitherto been possible. Every room
in the house was converted into a workshop. William Herschel literally
worked on, night and day, without rest, his sister on several occasions
keeping him alive by putting bits of food into his mouth while he was
still working. Once when he was finishing a seven-foot mirror for his
telescope, he never took his hands from it for sixteen hours. The great
work of constructing the forty-foot telescope took place at Bath; and at
Bath also, while still practising the profession of a music-master,
Herschel discovered the Georgium Sidus, and was acknowledged as the
leading authority on astronomy in England.
Up to the time of Herschel’s improvements, six or eight inches used to
be considered a large size for the mirror of an astronomical telescope.
His first great telescope had a twelve-foot mirror. There is a most
exciting account in Mrs. Herschel’s Life of Caroline Herschel, of the
failure of the first casting of the mirror for the thirty-foot
reflector. The molten metal leaked from the vessel containing it and
fell on the stone floor, pieces of which flew about in all directions as
high as the ceiling. The operators fortunately escaped without serious
injury. “My poor brother fell, exhausted with heat and exertion, on a
heap of brickbats.” The disappointment must have been intense, but
nothing ever baffled these indefatigable workers, and the second casting
was a complete success.
Five years after she had joined her brother at Bath, Caroline made her
first appearance as a public singer. She was very successful, and her
friends anticipated that her well-cultivated and beautiful voice would
become a means of providing her with an ample income. She, however, had
so fully identified herself with her brother’s astronomical labours,
that she only regarded her musical acquirements as a means of setting
him free to devote himself more completely to the real object of his
life. His fame as a maker of telescopes had by this time spread all over
Europe, and many scientific societies, royal persons, and other
celebrities, ordered telescopes of him. On these orders he was able to
realise a large profit, but Caroline always grudged the time devoted to
their execution. Her aim for her brother was not that he should become
rich or even well-to-do, but that he should devote himself unreservedly
to advance the progress of astronomical science. She was ready to live
on a crust, and to give herself up to the most pinching economies and
even privations, for this end. She was the keeper of her brother’s
purse, and received his commands to spend therefrom anything that was
necessary for herself; her thrift and self-denial may be judged from the
fact that the sum thus abstracted for her own personal wants seldom
amounted to more than £7 or £8 a year.
The next great change in the life of the brother and sister took place
in 1782, when William Herschel left Bath and was appointed
Astronomer-Royal by George the Third. His salary of only £200 a year
involved a great loss of income, but this, in his eyes, was a small
matter in comparison with the advantage of having his time entirely free
to give up to his favourite studies. They bade farewell to Bath, and
settled first at Datchet, shortly after, however, removing to Slough.
Caroline had dismal visions of bankruptcy, but William was in the
highest spirits, and declared that they would live on eggs and bacon,
“which would cost nothing to speak of, now that they were really in the
country.”
Caroline was now installed as an assistant astronomer, and was given a
telescope, which she calls a “seven-foot Newtonian Sweeper”; and she was
instructed, whenever she had an evening not in attendance on her
brother, to “sweep for comets”; but her principal business appears, at
this time, to have been waiting on her brother, and writing down the
results of his observations; they worked quite as hard as they had done
at Bath. They laboured at the manufacture of instruments all day, and at
the observation of the heavens all night. No severity of weather, if the
sky was clear, ever kept them from their posts. The ink often froze with
which Caroline was writing down the results of her brother’s
observations. It has been well said that if it had not been for
occasional cloudy nights, they must have died of overwork. The apparatus
for erecting the great forty-foot telescope, and the iron and woodwork
for its various motions, were all designed by William Herschel, and
fixed under his immediate direction. His sister, in her _Recollections_,
wrote: “I have seen him stretched many an hour in the burning sun across
the top beam, whilst the iron-work for the various motions was being
fixed.” The penurious salary granted to William Herschel was
supplemented by special grants for the removal and the erection of all
this machinery; and in 1787 Caroline’s services to her brother were
publicly recognised by her receiving the appointment of assistant to her
brother at a salary of £50 a year. She was at all times grateful to
members of the royal family for acts of kindness shown by them to her
brother and herself; but it is evident that she felt that, so far as
money was concerned, she had not much cause for gratitude to the royal
bounty. She points out that at the time when Parliament was granting
George III. the sum of £80,000 a year for encouraging science, £200 was
considered a sufficient salary for the first astronomer of the day; and
yet money could flow liberally enough in some directions, for £30,000
was at that time being spent on the altar-piece of St. George’s Chapel,
Windsor. Even Caroline’s little salary of £50 a year was not regularly
paid. It was a trial to her again to become a pensioner on her brother’s
purse, and it was not till nine quarters of her official salary remained
unpaid, that she reluctantly applied to him for help. No wonder that in
reading, after her brother’s death, an account of his life and its
achievements, she remarks, “The favours of monarchs ought to have been
mentioned, _but once would have been enough_.”
It was after her brother’s marriage, in 1788, that the majority of
Caroline’s astronomical discoveries were made. She discovered her first
comet in 1786, her eighth and last in 1797. She was recognised as a
comrade by all the leading astronomers of Europe, and received many
letters complimenting her on her discoveries. One from De la Lande
addressed her as “Savante Miss,” while another from the Rev. Dr.
Maskelyne saluted her as “My worthy sister in astronomy.” Royal and
other distinguished visitors constantly visited the wonderful forty-foot
telescope at Slough, and either William Herschel or his sister were
required to be in attendance to explain its marvels. The Prince of
Orange, on one occasion, called, and left an extraordinary message “to
ask Mr. Herschel, or if he was not at home, Miss Herschel, if it was
true that Mr. Herschel had discovered a new star, whose light was not as
that of the common stars, but with swallow-tails, as stars in
embroidery.” The only glimpse we get, through the peaceful labours of
Caroline’s long life, of the strife and turmoil of the French
Revolution, is the note she makes of the visit, to her brother’s
observatory, of the Princesse de Lamballe. “About a fortnight after
this,” the diarist observes, “her head was off.” The absence of all
comment upon the wonderful political events of the time is noticeable,
and so also is Caroline’s thinly-veiled contempt for any science less
sublime than that to which she and her brother were devoted. Her
youngest brother, Dietrich, was a student of the insect world. “He
amuses himself with insects,” she wrote to her nephew; “it is well he
does not see the word _amuses_, for whenever he catches a fly with a leg
more than usual, he says it is as good as catching a comet.” Her
brother’s marriage, though far from welcome at the time it took place,
was a great blessing to her; for it gave her a most tender and
affectionate sister, and ultimately a nephew, the inheritor of his
father’s great gifts, and the being to whom, after William Herschel’s
death in 1822, Caroline transferred all the devoted and passionate
attachment of which her nature was capable.
The great mistake of her life was going back to Germany after Sir W.
Herschel’s death in 1822. She was then seventy-two years of age, and the
previous fifty years of her life, containing all her most precious
memories and associations, had been spent in England. In this country,
also, were all those who were dearest to her. Yet, no sooner was her
brother dead, than she felt life in England to be an impossibility. She
little thought that she had still twenty-six years to live; indeed she
had long been under the impression that her end was near, but while her
brother lived she kept this to herself, because she wished to be useful
to him as long as she possibly could. She never really re-acclimatised
herself to Germany. “Why did I leave happy England?” she often said. The
one German institution she thoroughly enjoyed was the winter series of
concerts and operas, which she constantly attended, and she mentions
with pleasure, in her letters, that she was “always sure to be noticed
by the Duke of Cambridge as his countrywoman, and that is what I want; I
will be no Hanoverian.” She laments the death of William IV., chiefly
because, by causing a separation of the crowns of England and Hanover,
it seemed to break a link between herself and the country of her
adoption.
She never revisited England, but she kept up a constant communication
with it by letters to her sister-in-law, her nephew, and later to her
niece, Sir John Herschel’s wife. At that time the post between London
and Hanover was an affair of fifteen days, and letters were carried by a
monthly messenger, of whose services she seldom failed to avail herself.
She took the keenest interest in her nephew’s distinguished career. His
letters to her are full of astronomy. In 1832 he made a voyage to the
Cape to observe the stars in the Southern Hemisphere. When Miss Herschel
first heard of the intended voyage she refused to believe it. But when
she was really convinced of it, the old impulse was as strong upon her
as upon a war-horse who hears the trumpet. “Ja! if I was thirty or forty
years younger and could go too!” she exclaimed.
On 1st January 1840 the tube of the celebrated forty-foot telescope was
closed with a sort of family celebration. A requiem, composed by Sir
John Herschel for the occasion, was chanted, and he and Lady Herschel,
with their seven children and some old servants, walked in procession
round it, singing as they went. On hearing of this from Slough, Miss
Herschel recalls that the famous telescope had also been inaugurated
with music. “God save the King” had then been sung in it, the whole
company from the dinner-table mounting into the tube, and taking any
musical instruments they could get hold of, to form a band and
orchestra.
The most laborious of all her undertakings she accomplished after her
brother’s death. It was “The Reduction and Arrangement in the form of a
catalogue, in Zones, of all the Star Clusters and Nebulæ, observed by
Sir W. Herschel in his Sweeps.” It was for this that the gold medal of
the Royal Astronomical Society was voted to her in 1828.
All through her life in Hanover she lived with the most careful economy,
seldom or never consenting to draw upon Sir John Herschel for the
annuity of £100 that had been left her by her brother. She said it was
impossible for her to spend more than £50 a year without making herself
ridiculous. The only luxuries she granted herself were her concert and
opera tickets, and her English bed, which all sufferers from the inhuman
German bedding must be thankful to hear she possessed. The
self-forgetfulness and devotion to others which had characterised her in
youth accompanied her to her grave. Every detail with regard to the
disposition of her property and the arrangements for her funeral had
been made by herself, with the view of giving as little trouble as
possible to her nephew, and making the smallest encroachment upon his
time. In her latest moments her only thought for herself was embodied in
a request that a lock of her beloved brother’s hair might be laid with
her in her coffin.
IV
SARAH MARTIN
THE DRESSMAKER AND PRISON VISITOR OF YARMOUTH
“Two men I honour and no third. First the toilworn craftsman that
with earth-made Implement laboriously conquers the earth and makes
her man’s.... A second man I honour, and still more highly: Him who
is seen toiling for the spiritually indispensable; not daily bread,
but the bread of Life.... Unspeakably touching is it however when I
find both dignities united; and he that must toil outwardly for the
lowest of man’s wants, is also toiling inwardly for the highest.
Sublimer in this world know I nothing than the Peasant Saint, could
such now anywhere be met with. Such a one will take thee back to
Nazareth itself; thou wilt see the splendour of Heaven spring forth
from the humblest depths of Earth, like a light shining in great
darkness.”—_Sartor Resartus_, pp. 157, 158.
EVERY one of us has probably been tempted at one time or another to say
or think when asked to join in some good work, “If only I had more time
or more money, I would take it up.” It is good for us, therefore, to be
reminded that neither leisure nor wealth are necessary to those whose
hearts are fixed upon the earnest desire to leave this world a little
better and a little happier than they found it.
This lesson was wonderfully taught by Sarah Martin, a poor dressmaker,
who was born at Caister, near Great Yarmouth, in 1791. In her own
locality she did as great a work in solving the problems of prison
discipline, and how to improve the moral condition of prisoners, as Mrs.
Fry was doing about the same time upon a larger scale in London. It is
very extraordinary that this poor woman, who was almost entirely
self-educated, and who was dependent on daily toil for daily bread,
should have been able, through her own mother-wit and native goodness of
heart, to see the evil and provide the same remedies for it as were in
course of time provided throughout the land, as the result of study
given to the subject, by statesmen, philosophers, and philanthropists.
When Sarah Martin first began to visit the prison at Great Yarmouth,
there was no sort of provision for the moral or educational improvement
of the prisoners. There was no chaplain, there were no religious
services, there was no school, and there was no employment of any kind,
except what Satan finds for idle hands to do. The quiet, little,
gentle-voiced dressmaker changed all this.
She was first led to visit the prison in 1819, through the compassionate
horror which filled her when she heard of the committal to prison of a
woman for brutally ill-treating her child. Without any introduction or
recommendation from influential persons, she knocked timidly at the gate
of the prison, and asked leave to see this woman. She had not told a
single human creature of her intention, not even her grandmother, with
whom she lived. She was fearful lest she should be overcome by the
counsels of worldly wisdom that she had better mind her own business,
that the woman’s wickedness was no concern of hers, and so forth. Her
first application at the gaol was unsuccessful; but she tried again, and
the second time she was admitted without any question whatever. Once in
the presence of the prisoner, the first inquiry by which she was met was
a somewhat rough one as to the object of her visit. When the poor
creature heard and felt all the deep compassion which had moved Sarah
Martin to her side, she burst into tears, and with many expressions of
contrition and gratitude besought her visitor to help her to be a better
woman.
From the date of this visit, the best energies of Sarah Martin’s life
were devoted to improving the lot of the prisoners in Great Yarmouth
Gaol. She did not—indeed, she could not—give up her dressmaking. She
worked out at her customers’ houses, earning about 1s. 3d. a day. Her
first resolve was to give up always one day a week to her prison work,
and as many other days as she could spare. She began teaching the
prisoners to read and write; she also read to them, and told them
stories. A deeply religious woman herself, it pained her that there were
no services of any kind in the prison, and she prevailed upon the
prisoners to gather together on Sunday mornings and read to one another.
To encourage them in this she attended herself, not at first as the
conductor of the service, but as a fellow-worshipper. This was very
typical of her method and character. She was among them as one who
served, not as one seeking power and authority. Another illustration of
this sweet humility in her character may be given. She wished those of
her pupils who could read to learn each day a few Bible texts; and she
always learned some herself, and said them with the prisoners. Sometimes
an objection was made. In her own words, “Many said at first, ‘It would
be of no use,’ and my reply was, ‘It is of use to me, and why should it
not be so to you? You have not tried it, but I have.’” There was a
simplicity in this, a complete absence of the “Depart from me, for I am
holier than thou,” which was irresistible, and always silenced excuse.
Soon after the commencement of the Sunday services in the prison, it was
found necessary, through the difficulty of finding a reader, that Sarah
Martin herself should conduct the service. At first she used to read a
sermon from a book, but later she wrote her own sermons, and later still
she was able to preach without writing beforehand. According to the
testimony of Captain Williams, the Inspector of Prisons for the
district, the whole service was in a high degree reverent and
impressive. The prisoners listened with deep attention to the clear,
melodious voice of their self-appointed pastor.
At no time did she seek to obtain from the governor of the prison any
authority over the prisoners; that is, she never sought to control them
against their will; authority over them she had, but it was the
authority which proceeded from her own personal influence. The prisoners
did what she wished, because they knew her devotion to them. Her hold
over them is best proved by the fact that never but once did she meet
from them with anything that could be called rudeness or insult.
Next to her care for godliness and education, her chief thoughts were
given to provide employment for the prisoners, first for the women, and
then for the men. A gentleman gave her 10s., and in the same week
another gave her £1. Her gratitude for the possession of this small
capital is touching to read of. She expended it in the purchase of
materials for baby-clothes, and borrowing patterns, she set the women to
work upon making little shifts and wrappers. The garments, when
completed, were sold for the benefit of the women who had made them.
Her capital grew from thirty shillings to seven guineas, and in all more
than £400 worth of clothing, made in this way, was sold. The advantages
were twofold. First, the women were employed and taught to sew, and
secondly, each woman was enabled to earn a small sum, which was saved
for her till the time of her release from prison. This money was
frequently the means of giving the discharged prisoner a chance of
starting a new life and gaining an honest livelihood.
Sarah Martin gave particular attention to this very important branch of
her work. A man or a woman just out of prison, branded with all the
stigma and disgrace of the gaol, is too often almost forced back into
crime as the only means of livelihood. Endless were the devices and
schemes which Sarah Martin employed to prevent this. She would seek out
respectable lodgings for the prisoners on their discharge; she would see
their former employers and entreat that another chance might be given;
her note-books and diaries are filled with items of her own personal
expenditure in setting up her poor clients with the small stock-in-trade
or the tools necessary to start some simple business on their own
account.
After many years of patient and devoted work she was well known
throughout the whole town and neighbourhood, and was no longer entirely
dependent on her own slender earnings. Her grandmother died in 1826, and
she then inherited a small income of about £12 a year. She removed into
Yarmouth, and hired two rooms in a poor part of the town. Shortly after
this she entirely gave up working as a dressmaker. She could not, of
course, live on the little annuity she inherited from her grandmother;
this was not much more than enough to pay for her rooms. But she did not
fear for herself. Her personal wants were of the simplest description,
and she said herself that she had no care: “God, who had called me into
the vineyard, had said, ‘Whatsoever is right, I will give you.’” It
would, indeed, have been to the discredit of Yarmouth if such a woman
had been suffered to be in want. Many gifts were sent to her, but she
scrupulously devoted everything that reached her to the prisoners,
unless the donor expressly stated that it was not for her charities but
for herself. About 1840, after twenty-one years’ work in the prison and
workhouse of the town, the Corporation of Yarmouth urged her to accept a
small salary from the borough funds. She at first refused, because it
was painful to her that the prisoners should ever regard her in any
other light than as their disinterested friend; she feared that if she
accepted the money of the Corporation she would be looked upon as merely
one of the gaol functionaries, and that they would “rank her with the
turnkeys and others who got their living by the duties which they
discharged.” It was urged upon her that this view was a mistaken one,
and she was advised at least to accept a small salary as an experiment.
She replied, “To try the experiment, which might injure the thing I live
and breathe for, seems like applying a knife to your child’s throat to
know if it will cut. As for my circumstances, I have not a wish
ungratified, and am more than content.” The following year, however, it
was evident that her health was giving way, and another attempt was
made, which ended in the Corporation voting her the small sum of £12 a
year, not as a salary, but as a voluntary gift to one who had been of
such inestimable service to the town. She did not live long after this.
Her health gradually became feebler, but she continued her daily work at
the gaol till 17th April 1843. After that date she never again left her
rooms, and after a few months of intense suffering, she died on the 15th
October. When the nurse who was with her told her the end was near, she
clasped her hands together and exclaimed, “Thank God, thank God.” They
were her last words. She was buried at Caister; the tombstone which
marks her grave bears an inscription dictated by herself, giving simply
her name and the dates of her birth and death, with a reference to the
chapter of Corinthians which forms part of the Church of England Service
for the Burial of the Dead. Well, indeed, is it near that grave, and
full of the thoughts inspired by that life, for us to feel that “Death
is swallowed up in victory.”
The citizens of Yarmouth marked their gratitude and veneration for her
by putting a stained-glass window to her memory in St. Nicholas’s
Church. Her name is reverently cherished in her native town. Dr.
Stanley, who was Bishop of Norwich at the time of her death, gave
expression to the general feeling when he said, “I would canonise Sarah
Martin if I could!”
V
MARY SOMERVILLE
MARY SOMERVILLE, the most remarkable scientific woman our country has
produced, was born at Jedburgh in 1780. Her father was a naval officer,
and in December 1780 had just parted from his wife to go on foreign
service for some years. She had accompanied her husband to London, and
on returning home to Scotland was obliged to stay at the Manse of
Jedburgh, the home of her brother-in-law and sister, Dr. and Mrs.
Somerville. Here little Mary was born, in the house of her uncle and
aunt, who afterwards became her father and mother-in-law, for her second
husband was their son. In the interesting reminiscences she has left of
her life, she records the curious fact that she was born in the home of
her future husband, and was nursed by his mother.
Mary was of good birth on both sides. Her father was Admiral Sir William
Fairfax, of the well-known Yorkshire family of that name, which had
furnished a General to the Parliamentary army in the civil wars of the
reign of Charles I. This family was connected with that of the famous
American patriot, George Washington. During the American War of
Independence, Mary Somerville’s father, then Lieutenant Fairfax, was on
board his ship on an American station, when he received a letter from
General Washington, claiming cousinship with him, and inviting the young
man to pay him a visit. The invitation was not accepted, but Lieutenant
Fairfax’s daughter lived to regret that the letter which conveyed it had
not been preserved. Admiral Fairfax was concerned with Admiral Duncan in
the famous victory of Camperdown, and gave many proofs that he was in
every way a gallant sailor and a brave man. Mary Somerville’s mother was
of an ancient Scottish family named Charters. The pride of descent was
very strongly marked among her Scotch relatives. Lady Fairfax does not
seem much to have sympathised with her remarkable child. Mary, however,
inherited some excellent qualities from both parents. Lady Fairfax was,
in some ways, as courageous as her husband; notwithstanding a full
allowance of Scotch superstitions and a special terror of storms and
darkness, she had what her daughter called “presence of mind and the
courage of necessity.” On one occasion the house she was living in was
in the greatest danger of being burned down. The flames of a
neighbouring fire had spread till they reached the next house but one to
that which she occupied. Casks of turpentine and oil in a neighbouring
carriage manufactory were exploding with the heat. Lady Fairfax made all
the needful preparations for saving her furniture, and had her family
plate and papers securely packed. She assembled in the house a
sufficient number of men to move the furniture out, if needs were. Then
she quietly remarked, “Now let us breakfast; it is time enough for us to
move our things when the next house takes fire.” The next house, after
all, did not take fire, and, while her neighbours lost half their
property by throwing it recklessly into the street, before the actual
necessity for doing so had arisen, Lady Fairfax suffered no loss at all.
The same kind of cool courage was often exhibited by Mary Somerville in
later life. On one occasion she stayed with her family at Florence
during a severe outbreak of cholera there, when almost every one who
could do so had fled panic-stricken from the city.
During the long absences of Sir William Fairfax on foreign service, Lady
Fairfax and her children led a very quiet life at the little seaside
village of Burntisland, just opposite to Edinburgh, on the Firth of
Forth. As a young child, Mary led a wild, outdoor life, with hardly any
education, in the ordinary sense of the word, though there is no doubt
that in collecting shells, fossils, and seaweeds, in watching and
studying the habits and appearance of wild birds, and in gazing at the
stars through her little bedroom window, the whole life of this
wonderful child was really an education of the great powers of her mind.
However, when her father returned from sea about 1789 he was shocked to
find Mary “such a little savage”; and it was resolved that she must be
sent to a boarding school. She remained there a year and learned nothing
at all. Her lithesome, active, well-formed body was enclosed in stiff
stays, with a steel busk in front; a metal rod, with a semicircle which
went under the chin, was clasped to this busk, and in this instrument of
torture she was set to learn columns of Johnson’s dictionary by heart.
This was the process which at that time went by the name of education in
girls’ schools. Fortunately she was not kept long at school. Mary had
learned nothing, and her mother was angry that she had spent so much
money in vain. She would have been content, she said, if Mary had only
learnt to write well and keep accounts, which was all that a woman was
expected to know. After this Mary soon commenced the process of
self-education which only ended with her long life of ninety-two years.
She not only learnt all she could about birds, beasts, fishes, plants,
eggs and seaweeds, but she also found a Shakespeare which she read at
every moment when she could do so undisturbed. A little later her mother
moved into Edinburgh for the winter, and Mary had music lessons, and by
degrees taught herself Latin. The studious bent of her mind had now
thoroughly declared itself; but till she was about fourteen she had
never received a word of encouragement about her studies. At that age
she had the good fortune to pay a visit to her uncle and aunt at
Jedburgh, in whose house she had been born. Her uncle, Dr. Somerville,
was the first person who ever encouraged and helped her in her studies.
She ventured to confide in him that she had been trying to learn Latin
by herself, but feared it was no use. He reassured her by telling her of
the women in ancient times who had been classical scholars. He moreover
read Virgil with her for two hours every morning in his study. A few
years later than this she taught herself Greek enough to read Xenophon
and Herodotus, and in time she became sufficiently proficient in the
language to thoroughly appreciate its greatest literature.
One of the most striking things about her was the many-sided character
of her mind. Some people—men as well as women—who are scientific or
mathematical seem to care for nothing but science or mathematics; but it
may be truly said of her that “Everything was grist that came to her
mill.” There was hardly any branch of art or knowledge which she did not
delight in. She studied painting under Mr. Nasmyth in Edinburgh, and he
declared her to be the best pupil he had ever had. Almost to the day of
her death she delighted in painting and drawing. She was also an
excellent musician and botanist. The special study with which her name
will always be associated was mathematics as applied to the study of the
heavens, but she also wrote on physical geography and on microscopic
science. It is sometimes thought that if women are learned they are
nearly sure to neglect their domestic duties, or that, in the witty
words of Sydney Smith, “if women are permitted to eat of the tree of
knowledge, the rest of the family will soon be reduced to the same
aerial and unsatisfactory diet.” Mrs. Somerville was a living proof of
the folly of this opinion. She was an excellent housewife and a
particularly skilful needlewoman. She astonished those who thought a
scientific woman could not understand anything of cookery, by her
notable preparation of black currant jelly for her husband’s throat on
their wedding journey. On one occasion she supplied with marmalade, made
by her own hands, one of the ships that were being fitted out for a
Polar expedition. She was a most loving wife and tender mother as well
as a devoted and faithful friend. She gave up far more time than most
mothers do to the education of her children. Her love of animals,
especially of birds, was very strongly developed. With all her devotion
to science she was horrified at the barbarities of vivisection, and
cordially supported those who have successfully exerted themselves to
prevent it from spreading in England to the same hideous proportions
which it has reached on the continent of Europe. Many pages of one of
her learned works were written with a little tame mountain sparrow
sitting on her shoulder. On one occasion, having been introduced to the
Hon. Mountstuart Elphinstone, she says he quite won her heart by
exclaiming, in reference to the number of little birds that were eaten
in Italy, “What! robins! Eat a robin! I would as soon eat a child.”
Her first husband, Mr. Samuel Greig, only lived three years after their
marriage in 1804. He appears to have been one of those men of inferior
capacity, who dislike and dread intellectual power in women. He had a
very low opinion of the intelligence of women, and had himself no
interest in, nor knowledge of, any kind of science. When his wife was
left a widow with two sons at the early age of twenty-seven, she
returned to her father’s house in Scotland, and worked steadily at
mathematics. She profited by the instructions of Professor Wallace, of
the University of Edinburgh, and gained a silver medal from one of the
mathematical societies of that day. Nearly all the members of her family
were still loud in their condemnation of what they chose to regard as
her eccentric and foolish behaviour in devoting herself to science
instead of society. There were, however, exceptions. Her Uncle and Aunt
Somerville and their son William did not join in the chorus of
disapprobation which her studies provoked. With them she found a real
home of loving sympathy and encouragement. In 1812 she and her cousin
William were married. His delight and pride in her during their long
married life of nearly fifty years were unbounded. For the first time in
her life she now had the daily companionship of a thoroughly sympathetic
spirit. Much of what the world owes to her it owes indirectly to him,
because he stimulated her powers, and delighted in anything that brought
them out. He was in the medical department of the army, and scientific
pursuits were thoroughly congenial to him. He had a fine and well
cultivated mind which he delighted in using to further his wife’s
pursuits. He searched libraries for the books she required, “copying and
recopying her manuscripts to save her time.” In the words of one of
their daughters, “No trouble seemed too great which he bestowed upon
her; it was a labour of love.” When Mrs. Somerville became famous
through her scientific writings, the other members of her family, who
had formerly ridiculed and blamed her, became loud in her praise. She
knew how to value such commendation in comparison with that which she
had constantly received from her husband. She wrote about this, “The
warmth with which my husband entered into my success deeply affected me;
for not one in ten thousand would have rejoiced at it as he did; but he
was of a generous nature, far above jealousy, and he continued through
life to take the kindest interest in all I did.” Mrs. Somerville’s first
work, _The Mechanism of the Heavens_, would probably never have been
written but at the instance of Lord Brougham, whose efforts were warmly
supported by those of Mr. Somerville. In March 1827 Lord Brougham, on
behalf of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, wrote a
letter begging Mrs. Somerville to write an account of Newton’s
_Principia_ and of La Place’s _Mécanique Céleste_. In reference to the
latter book he wrote, “In England there are now not twenty people who
know this great work, except by name, and not a hundred who know it even
by name. My firm belief is that Mrs. Somerville could add two cyphers to
each of these figures.” Mrs. Somerville was overwhelmed with
astonishment at this request. She was most modest and diffident of her
own powers, and honestly believed that her self-acquired knowledge was
so greatly inferior to that of the men who had been educated at the
universities, that it would be the height of presumption for her to
attempt to write on the subject. The persuasions of Lord Brougham and of
her husband at last prevailed so far that she promised to make the
attempt; on the express condition, however, that her manuscript should
be put into the fire unless it fulfilled the expectations of those who
urged its production. “Thus suddenly,” she writes, “the whole character
and course of my future life was changed.” One is tempted to believe
that this first plunge into authorship was, to some extent, stimulated
by a loss of nearly all their fortune which had a short time before
befallen Mr. and Mrs. Somerville. Before authorship has become a habit,
the whip of poverty is often needed to rouse a student to the exertion
and labour it requires. The impediments to authorship in Mrs.
Somerville’s case were more than usually formidable. In the memoirs she
has left of this part of her life, she speaks of the difficulty which
she experienced as the mother of a family and the head of a household in
keeping any time free for her work. It was only after she had attended
to social and family duties that she had time for writing, and even then
she was subjected to many interruptions. The Somervilles were then
living at Chelsea, and she felt at that distance from town, it would be
ungracious to decline to receive those who had come out to call upon
her. But she groans at the remembrance of the annoyance she sometimes
felt when she was engaged in solving a difficult problem, by the entry
of a well-meaning friend, who would calmly announce, “I have come to
spend an hour or two with you.” Her work, to which she gave the name of
_The Mechanism of the Heavens_, progressed, however, in spite of
interruptions, to such good purpose that in less than a year it was
complete, and it immediately placed its author in the first rank among
the scientific thinkers and writers of the day. She was elected an
honorary member of the Astronomical Society, at the same time with
Caroline Herschel, and honours and rewards of all kinds flowed in upon
her. Her bust, by Chantrey, was placed in the great hall of the Royal
Society, and she was elected an honorary member of the Royal Academy of
Dublin, and of many other scientific societies. It was a little later
than this, in 1835, that Sir Robert Peel, on behalf of the Government,
conferred a civil list pension of £200 a year upon Mrs. Somerville; the
announcement of this came almost simultaneously with the news of the
loss of the remainder of her own and her husband’s private fortune,
through the treachery of those who had been entrusted with it. The
public recognition of her services to science came therefore at a very
appropriate time; the pension was a few years later increased to £300 a
year by Lord John Russell.
Throughout her life Mrs. Somerville was a staunch advocate of all that
tended to raise up and improve the lot of women. When quite a young girl
she was stimulated to work hard by the feeling that it was in her power
thus to serve the cause of her fellow-women. Writing of the period when
she was only sixteen years old, she says: “I must say the idea of making
money had never entered my head in any of my pursuits, but I was
intensely ambitious to excel in something, for I felt in my own breast
that women were capable of taking a higher place in creation than that
assigned to them in my early days, which was very low.” It is
interesting to observe that her enthusiasm for what are sometimes called
“women’s rights” was as warm at the end of her life as it had been at
its dawn. When she was eighty-nine, she was as keen as she had been at
sixteen for all that lifts up the lot of women. She was a firm supporter
of Mr. John Stuart Mill in the effort he made to extend to women the
benefit and protection of Parliamentary representation. She recognised
that many of the English laws are unjust to women, and clearly saw that
there can be no security for their being made just and equal until the
law-makers are chosen partly by women and partly by men. The first name
to the petition in favour of women’s suffrage which was presented to
Parliament by Mr. J. S. Mill in 1868 was that of Mary Somerville. She
also joined in the first petition to the Senate of the London
University, praying that degrees might be granted to women. At the time
this petition was unsuccessful, but its prayer was granted within a very
few years. One cannot but regret that Mrs. Somerville did not live to
see this fulfilment of her wishes. She showed her sympathy with the
movement for the higher education of women, by bequeathing her
mathematical and scientific library to Girton College. It is one of the
possessions of which the College is most justly proud. The books are
enclosed in a very beautifully designed case, which also forms a sort of
framework for a cast of Chantrey’s bust of Mrs. Somerville. The fine and
delicate lines of her beautiful face offer to the students of the
College a worthy ideal of completely developed womanhood, in which
intellect and emotion balance one another and make a perfect whole.
Mrs. Somerville’s other works, written after _The Mechanism of the
Heavens_, were _The Connection of the Physical Sciences_, _Physical
Geography_, and _Molecular and Microscopic Science_. The last book was
commenced after she had completed her eightieth year. Her mental powers
remained unimpaired to a remarkably late period, and she also had
extraordinary physical vigour to the end of her life. She affords a
striking instance of the fallacy of supposing that intellectual labour
undermines the physical strength of women. Her last occupations,
continued till the actual day of her death, were the revision and
completion of a treatise on _The Theory of Differences_, and the study
of a book on _Quaternions_. Her only physical infirmity in extreme old
age was deafness. She was able to go out and enjoy life up to the time
of her death, which took place in 1872, at the great age of ninety-two
years.
She was a woman of deep and strong religious feeling. Her beautiful
character shines through every word and action of her life. Her deep
humility was very striking, as was also her tenderness for, and her
sympathy with, the sufferings of all who were wretched and oppressed.
One of the last entries in her journal refers again to her love of
animals, and she says, “Among the numerous plans for the education of
the young, let us hope that mercy may be taught as a part of religion.”
The reflections in these last pages of her diary give such a lovely
picture of serene, noble, and dignified old age that they may well be
quoted here. They show the warm heart of the generous woman, as well as
the trained intellect of a reverent student of the laws of nature.
“Though far advanced in years, I take as lively an interest as ever in
passing events. I regret that I shall not live to know the result of the
expedition to determine the currents of the ocean, the distance of the
earth from the sun determined by the transits of Venus, and the source
of the most renowned of rivers, the discovery of which will immortalise
the name of Dr. Livingstone. But I regret most of all that I shall not
see the suppression of the most atrocious system of slavery that ever
disgraced humanity—that made known to the world by Dr. Livingstone and
by Mr. Stanley, and which Sir Bartle Frere has gone to suppress, by
order of the British Government.” A later entry still, and the last,
gives another view of her happy, faithful spirit. The Admiral’s daughter
speaks in it: “The Blue Peter has been long flying at my foremast, and
now that I am in my ninety-second year I must soon expect the signal for
sailing. It is a solemn voyage, but it does not disturb my tranquillity.
Deeply sensible of my utter unworthiness, and profoundly grateful for
the innumerable blessings I have received, I trust in the infinite mercy
of my Almighty Creator.” She then expresses her gratitude for the loving
care of her daughters, and her journal concludes with the words, “I am
perfectly happy.” She died and was buried at Naples. Her death took
place in her sleep, on 29th November 1872. Her daughter writes, “Her
pure spirit passed away so gently that those around her scarcely
perceived when she left them. It was the beautiful and painless close of
a noble and happy life.” Wordsworth’s words about old age were fully
realised in her case—
Thy thoughts and feelings shall not die,
Nor leave thee when gray hairs are nigh,
A melancholy slave;
But an old age, serene and bright,
And lovely as a Lapland night,
Shall lead thee to thy grave.
VI
QUEEN VICTORIA[1]
A JUBILEE, or a fiftieth anniversary of the reign of a king or queen, is
a very rare event in our history. Rather more than a thousand years have
rolled away since the time when Egbert was the first king of all
England. And in all these thousand years there have only been _three_
jubilees before that now being celebrated, and these three have each
been clouded by some national or personal misfortune casting a gloom
over the rejoicings which would naturally have taken place on such an
occasion. It is rather curious that each of the three kings of England
who has reached a fiftieth year of sovereignty has been the third of his
name to occupy the throne. Henry III., Edward III., and George III. are
the only English sovereigns, before Victoria, who have reigned for as
long as fifty years. In the case of Henry the Third, the fifty years of
his reign are a record of bad government, rebellion, and civil war.
Edward the Third’s reign, which began so triumphantly, ended in
disaster; the king had fallen into a kind of dotage; Edward the Black
Prince had died before his father, and the kingdom was ruled by the
incompetent and unscrupulous John of Gaunt; the last years of this reign
were characterised by military disasters, by harsh and unjust methods of
taxation, and by subservience to the papacy. Those who thus sowed the
wind were not long in reaping the whirlwind; for these misfortunes were
followed by the one hundred years’ war with France, by the peasants’ war
under Wat Tyler, and by the persecution of heretics in England, when for
the first time in our history a statute was passed forfeiting the lives
of men and women for their religious opinions. Passing on to the reign
of George III., the jubilee of 1810 must have been a sad one, for the
poor king had twice had attacks of madness, and one of exceptional
severity began in the very year of the jubilee.
Happily, on the present occasion the spell is broken. The Queen is not
the third, but the first of her name, and although there are no doubt
many causes for anxiety as regards the outlook in our political and
social history, yet there are still greater causes for hopefulness and
for confidence that the marvellous improvement in the social, moral, and
material condition of the people which has marked the reign in the past
will be continued in the future.
It is not very easy at this distance of time to picture to one’s self
the passion of loyalty and devotion inspired by the young girl who
became Queen of England in 1837. To realise what was felt for her, one
must look at the character of the monarchs who had immediately preceded
her. The immorality and faithlessness of George IV. are too well known
to need emphasis. He was probably one of the most contemptible human
beings who ever occupied a throne; he was eaten up by vanity,
self-indulgence, and grossness. With no pretence to conjugal fidelity
himself, he attempted to visit with the severest punishment the supposed
infidelity of the unhappy woman who had been condemned to be his wife.
Recklessly extravagant where his own glorification or pleasure was
concerned, he could be penurious enough to a former boon companion who
had fallen into want. There is hardly a feature in his character, either
as a man or a sovereign, that could win genuine esteem or love. Mrs.
Somerville was present at the gorgeous scene of his coronation, when
something more than a quarter of a million of money was spent in
decorations and ceremonial. She describes the tremendous effect produced
upon every one by the knocking at the door which announced that Queen
Caroline was claiming admittance. She says every heart stood still; it
was like the handwriting on the wall at Belshazzar’s feast. Only by
contrast with such a man as George IV. could William IV. be regarded
with favour. Several prominent offices about the Court were occupied by
the Fitz Clarences, his illegitimate children. His manners were
described as “bluff” by those who wished to make the best of them;
“brutal” would have been a more accurate word. On one occasion a guest
at one of his dinner parties asked for water, and the king, with an
oath, exclaimed that no water should be drunk at his table. On another
occasion, on his birthday, he took the opportunity, in the presence of
the young Princess Victoria and her mother, the Duchess of Kent, to make
the most unmanly and ungenerous attack upon the latter, who was sitting
by his side. Greville speaks of this outburst as an extraordinary and
outrageous speech. The Princess burst into tears, and her mother rose
and ordered her carriage for her immediate departure.
It is no wonder that the Duchess of Kent was anxious, as far as
possible, to keep her daughter from the influence of such a Court as
this. Much of the Queen’s conscientiousness and punctual discharge of
the political duties of her station may be attributed to her careful
education by her mother and her uncle Leopold, the widower of Princess
Charlotte, and afterwards King of the Belgians. It is not possible to
tell from the published memorials what clouds overshadowed the Princess
Victoria’s childhood. She seems to have had a most loving mother,
excellent health and abilities, and a judicious training in every way;
yet she says herself, in reference to the choice of the name of Leopold
for her youngest son, “It is a name which is the dearest to me after
Albert, one which recalls the almost only happy days of my sad
childhood.”
It is evident, therefore, that her young life was not so happy and
tranquil as it appeared to be to outsiders. Perhaps her extreme and
almost abnormal sense of responsibility was hardly compatible with the
joyousness of childhood. There is a story that it was not till the
Princess was eleven years old that her future destiny was revealed to
her. Her governess then purposely put a genealogical table of the royal
family into her history book. The child gazed earnestly at it, and by
degrees she comprehended what it meant, namely, that she herself was
next in succession to the ancient crown of England; she put her hand
into her governess’s and said, “I will be good. I understand now why you
wanted me to learn so much, even Latin.... I understand all better now.”
And she repeated more than once, “I will be good.” The anecdote shows an
unusually keen sense of duty and of conscientiousness in so young a
child, and there are other anecdotes which show the same characteristic.
Who, therefore, can wonder at the unbounded joy which filled all hearts
in England when this young girl, pure, sweet, innocent, conscientious,
and unselfish, ascended the throne of George IV. and William IV.? Her
manners were frank, natural, simple, and dignified. The bright young
presence of the girl Queen filled every one, high and low, throughout
the nation with enthusiasm.
The American author, Mr. N. P. Willis, republican as he was, spoke of
her in one of his letters as “quite unnecessarily pretty and interesting
for the heir of such a crown as that of England.” Daniel O’Connell, then
the leader of the movement for the repeal of the union between England
and Ireland, was as great an enthusiast for her as any one in the three
kingdoms. His stentorian voice led the cheering of the crowd outside of
St. James’s Palace who welcomed her at the ceremony of proclamation. He
said, when some of the gossips of the day chattered of a scheme to
depose “the all but infant Queen” in favour of the hated Duke of
Cumberland, “If necessary I can get 500,000 brave Irishmen to defend the
life, the honour, and the person of the beloved young lady by whom
England’s throne is now filled.”
The picture of the Queen’s first council by Wilkie was shown in 1887 in
the winter exhibition at the Royal Academy. It helps one very much to
understand the sort of enthusiasm which she created. The sweet, girlish
dignity and quiet simplicity with which she performed all the duties of
her station filled every one with admiration. Surrounded by aged
politicians, statesmen, and soldiers, she presides over them all with
the grace and dignity associated with a complete absence of affectation
and self-consciousness. Greville, the Clerk of the Council then, and for
many years before and after, writes of this occasion: “Never was
anything like the impression she produced, or the chorus of praise and
admiration which is raised about her manner and behaviour, and certainly
not without justice. It was something very extraordinary and far beyond
what was looked for.” Melbourne, her first Prime Minister, loved her as
a daughter; the Duke of Wellington had a similar feeling for her, which
she returned with unstinted confidence and reliance. The first request
made by the girl Queen to her mother, immediately after the
proclamation, was that she might be left for two hours quite alone to
think over her position and strengthen the resolutions that were to
guide her future life. The childish words, “I will be good,” probably
gave the forecast of the tone of the young Queen’s reflections. She must
have felt the difficulties and peculiar temptations of her position very
keenly, for when she was awakened from her sleep on the night of the
20th June 1837, to be told of William the Fourth’s death, and that she
was Queen of England, her first words to the Archbishop of Canterbury,
who made the announcement, were, “I beg your Grace to pray for me.”
The Queen was very careful from the beginning of her reign thoroughly to
understand all the business of the State, and never to put her signature
to any document till she had mastered its contents. Lord Melbourne was
heard to declare that this sort of thing was quite new in his experience
as Prime Minister, and he said jokingly that he would rather manage ten
kings than one Queen. On one occasion he brought a document to her, and
urged its importance on the ground of expediency. She looked up quietly,
and said, “I have been taught to judge between what is right and what is
wrong; but ‘expediency’ is a word I neither wish to hear nor to
understand.” Thirty years later one of the best men who ever sat in the
House of Commons, John Stuart Mill, said, “There is an important branch
of expediency called justice.” But this was probably not the kind of
expediency that Lord Melbourne recommended, and the Queen condemned.
In the _Memoirs of Mrs. Jameson_, by Mrs. Macpherson, there is a letter,
dated December 1838, containing the following illustration of the way in
which the Queen regarded the duties of her position. “Spring Rice told a
friend of mine that he once carried her (the Queen) some papers to sign,
and said something about managing so as to give Her Majesty less
trouble. She looked up from her paper and said quietly, ‘Pray never let
me hear those words again; never mention the word “trouble.” Only tell
me how the thing is to be done, to be done rightly, and I will do it if
I can.’” Everything that is known of the Queen at that time shows a
similar high conception of duty and right. She was resolved to be no
mere pleasure-seeking, self-indulgent monarch, but one who strove
earnestly to understand her duties, and was determined to throw her best
strength into their fulfilment.
It is this conscientious fulfilment of her political duties which gives
the Queen such a very strong claim upon the gratitude of all her
subjects. People do not always understand how hard and constant her work
is, nor how deeply she feels her responsibilities. She is sometimes
blamed for not leading society as she did in the earlier years of her
reign, and it is no doubt true that her good influence in this way is
much missed. Mrs. Oliphant has spoken of the way in which in those early
years of her married life she was “in the foreground of the national
life, affecting it always for good, and setting an example of purity and
virtue. The theatres to which she went, and which both she and her
husband enjoyed, were purified by her presence; evils which had been the
growth of years disappearing before the face of the young Queen.” That
good influence at the head of society has been withdrawn by the Queen’s
withdrawal from fashionable life; and there is another disadvantage
arising from her seclusion, in the degree to which it prevents her from
feeling the force and value of many of the most important social
movements of our time. Except in opening Holloway College, and in the
impetus which she has given to providing medical women for the women of
India, she has never, for instance, shown any special sympathy with any
of the various branches of the movement for improving and lifting up the
lives of women. Still, fully allowing all this, it is beyond doubt that
her subjects, and especially her women subjects, have deep cause for
gratitude and affection to the Queen. She has set a high example of duty
and faithfulness to the whole nation. The childish resolve, “I will be
good,” has never been lost sight of. With almost boundless opportunities
for self-indulgence, and living in an atmosphere where she is
necessarily almost entirely removed from the wholesome criticism of
equals and friends, she has clung tenaciously to the ideal with which
she started on her more than fifty years of sovereignty. Simplicity of
daily life and daily hard work are the antidotes which she has
constantly applied to counteract the unwholesome influences associated
with royalty. Women have special cause for gratitude to her, because she
has shown, as no other woman could, how absurd is the statement that
political duties unsex a woman, and make her lose womanly tenderness and
sympathy. The passionate worship which she bestowed upon her husband,
the deep love she constantly shows for her children and grandchildren,
and the eager sympathy which she extends to every creature on whom the
load of suffering or sorrow has fallen, prove that being the first
political officer of the greatest empire in the world cannot harden her
heart or dull her sympathy. A woman’s a woman “for a’ that.”
So much has lately been written about the supreme happiness of the
Queen’s married life, and so much has been revealed of her inner family
circle, that no more is needed to make every woman realise the anguish
of the great bereavement of her life. In earlier and happier years she
wrote to her uncle Leopold on the occasion of one of the Prince
Consort’s short absences from her: “You cannot think how much this costs
me, nor how completely forlorn I am and feel when he is away, or how I
count the hours till he returns. All the numerous children are as
nothing to me when he is away. It seems as if the whole life of the
house and home were gone.” Poor Queen, poor woman! Surely it is
ungenerous, while she so strenuously goes on working at the duties of
her position, to blame her because she cannot again join in what are
supposed to be its pleasures.
One of the princesses lately spoke of the loneliness of the Queen. “You
can have no idea,” she is reported to have said, “how lonely mamma is.”
All who were her elders, and in a sense her guardians and protectors in
the earlier part of her reign, have been removed by death. Her strongest
affections are in the past, and with the dead. She is reported to have
said on the death of one of those nearest to her: “There is no one left
to call me Victoria now!” The etiquette which, in public at any rate,
rules the behaviour of her children and grandchildren to the Queen,
seems to render her isolation more painful than it would otherwise be.
Lady Lyttelton, who was governess to the royal children, is stated in
the _Greville Memoirs_ to have said that “the Queen was very fond of
them, but severe in her manner, and a strict disciplinarian.” This may
have perhaps increased her present loneliness, if it created a sense of
reserve and formality between her children and herself.
The Queen has always shown a truly royal appreciation of those who were
great in art, science, or literature. It is well known that she sent her
book, _Leaves from our Journal in the Highlands_, to Charles Dickens,
with the inscription, “From one of the humblest of writers to one of the
greatest.” Mrs. Somerville, in her _Reminiscences_, speaks of the
gracious reception given to herself by the Queen while she was still
Princess Victoria, when the authoress presented a copy of her _Mechanism
of the Heavens_ to the Duchess of Kent and her daughter. More than
twenty years later Mrs. Somerville wrote, “I am glad to hear that the
Queen has been so kind to my friend Faraday. It seems she has given him
an apartment at Hampton Court, nicely fitted up. She went to see it
herself, and having consulted scientific men as to the instruments
necessary for his pursuits, she had a laboratory fitted up with them,
and made him a present of the whole. That is doing things handsomely,
and no one since Newton has deserved so much.” The Queen was also very
ready to show her warm appreciation of Carlyle and other eminent
writers. In an interview with Carlyle, at the Deanery, Westminster, she
quite charmed the rugged old philosopher by her kind and gracious
manner. Many years ago, when the fame of Jenny Lind was at its height,
she was invited to sing in private before the Queen at Buckingham
Palace. Owing to some contemptible spite or jealousy, her accompanist
did not play what was set down in the music, and this of course had a
very discomposing effect upon the singer. The Queen’s quick ear
immediately detected what was going on, and at the conclusion of the
song, when another was about to be commenced, she stepped up to the
piano and said, “I will accompany Miss Lind.”
The Queen’s strong personal interest in all that concerns the welfare of
her kingdom is well known. She became almost ill with anxiety about the
sufferings of our troops in the Crimea, and she wrote frequently to Lord
Raglan on the subject. Before the end of the siege of Sebastopol, Lord
Cardigan returned from the Crimea on a short visit to England, and came
to see the Queen at Windsor. One of the royal children said to him, “You
must hurry back to Sebastopol and take it, else it will kill mamma!” In
the summer of 1886, during the anxious political crisis of that time, a
gentleman, who had just seen the Queen, was asked how she looked. “Ten
years younger than she did a fortnight ago,” was the reply. The severity
of the crisis was for the time averted, and the relief of mind it
brought to the Queen could be plainly read in the change in her aspect.
A wise and good clergyman, who was also a witty and powerful writer, the
Rev. Sydney Smith, preached a sermon in St. Paul’s Cathedral on the
Queen’s accession, in which he gave utterance to the hope that she would
promote the spread of national education, and would “worship God by
loving peace.” “The young Queen,” he said, “at that period of life which
is commonly given up to frivolous amusement, sees at once the great
principles by which she should be guided, and steps at once into the
great duties of her station.” He then spoke again of peace and of
education as the two objects towards which a patriot Queen ought most
earnestly to strive, and concluded: “And then this youthful monarch,
profoundly but wisely religious, disdaining hypocrisy, and far above the
childish follies of false piety, casts herself upon God, and seeks from
the Gospel of His blessed Son a path for her steps and a comfort for her
soul. Here is a picture which warms every English heart and could bring
all this congregation upon their bended knees before Almighty God to
pray it may be realised. What limits to the glory and happiness of our
native land, if the Creator should in His mercy have placed in the heart
of this Royal Woman the rudiments of wisdom and mercy; and if giving
them time to expand, and to bless our children’s children with her
goodness, He should grant to her a long sojourning on earth, and leave
her to reign over us till she is well stricken in years! What glory!
what happiness! what joy! what bounty of God!”
The preacher’s anticipations of a long reign have been fulfilled, and
the bright hopes of that seedtime of promise and resolution can now be
compared with the harvest of achievement and fulfilment. There is always
a great gap between such anticipations and the accomplished fact; but it
will be well for us all, high or low, if we are able, when we stand near
the end of life and review the past, to feel that we have been equally
steadfast to the high resolves of our youth, as the Queen has been to
the words, “I will be good,” which she uttered sixty years ago.
Footnote 1:
Written for the Jubilee, June 1887.
VII
HARRIET MARTINEAU
HARRIET MARTINEAU is one of the most distinguished literary women this
century has produced. She is among the few women who have succeeded in
the craft of journalism, and one of the still smaller number who
succeeded for a time in moulding and shaping the current politics of her
day. There are many things in her career which make it a particularly
instructive one. Her vivid remembrance of her own childhood gave her a
very strong sympathy with the feelings and sufferings of children; all
mothers, especially the mothers of uncommonly intellectual children,
ought to read, in the early part of Harriet Martineau’s autobiography,
her record of her own childhood, and its peculiar sufferings.
The Martineaus were descended from a French Huguenot surgeon, who left
his native country in 1688, after the revocation of the edict of Nantes.
He settled at Norwich, and became the progenitor of a long line of
distinguished surgeons in that city. Harriet’s father was a
manufacturer; she was born on the 12th June 1802, the sixth of eight
children. There is nothing in the outward circumstances of her youth to
distinguish it from that of the substantial but simple comfort of any
middle class family of that period, save that her education was above
the average. The independence of judgment in religious matters that had
made their ancestor a Huguenot, made the latter Martineaus Unitarians;
and it was to this fact that the excellence of the education of the
family was in part due. For the Rev. Isaac Perry, the head of a large
and flourishing boys’ school in Norwich, became converted to the
principles of Unitarianism, with the consequence of losing nearly all
his pupils. The Unitarian community felt it their duty to rally round
him, and support him to the utmost of their power. Hence those who, like
the Martineaus, had children to educate sent them, girls as well as
boys, to him. Harriet therefore had the inestimable advantage of
beginning her career with a mind well equipped with stores of knowledge
that were at that time usually considered quite outside the range of
what was necessary for a woman.
She speaks of herself as having, especially in her childhood, “a
beggarly nervous system”; and her description of her utterly
unreasonable terrors, which she bore in silence, because of the want of
insight and sympathy around her, ought to be a lesson to every parent.
“Sometimes,” she says, “I was panic-struck at the head of the stairs,
and was sure I could never get down; and I could never cross the yard
into the garden without flying and panting, and fearing to look behind,
because a wild beast was after me. The starlight sky was the worst; it
was always coming down to stifle and crush me, and rest upon my head.”
“The extremest terror of all,” she says, was occasioned by the dull thud
of beating feather beds with a stick, a process in which the housewives
of Norwich were wont to indulge on the breezy area below the Castle
Hill. A magic-lantern, or the prismatic lights cast by glass lustres
upon the wall, threw her into the same unaccountable terror-stricken
state. If she could have been coaxed into speaking of these panics, they
might probably have ceased to assail her. But this she never dreamed of
doing. There was too little tenderness in her family life to overcome
her natural timidity. Once when her terror at a magic-lantern so far
overcame her as to find vent in a shriek of dismay, “a pretty lady, who
sat next us, took me on her lap, and let me hide my face in her bosom,
and held me fast. How intensely I loved her, without at all knowing who
she was.”
When Harriet Martineau was more than fifty, she wrote a detailed account
of all she had suffered in childhood, not from any want of gratitude or
affection to her parents, but because she felt that mothers ought to
know what their children sometimes suffer, so that they might protect
them by tender watchfulness from becoming victims of these imaginary
terrors. It is not, it must be remembered, stupid children who are most
subject to these “ghostly enemies,” but much more frequently it is the
children of vivid imagination and bright intelligence who are most
subject to them. A child who is frightened of the dark ought not to be
unkindly ridiculed or forced to endure what terrifies it; it ought to be
helped by all gentle means to overcome its fear, and all other
unreasonable fears conjured up by its imagination.
That Harriet Martineau showed in early childhood that she was gifted
with extraordinary mental powers cannot be doubted. At seven years old
she “discovered” _Paradise Lost_. She had been left at home one Sunday
evening, when all the rest of the family had gone to chapel, and she
began looking at the books on the table. One of them was turned down
open. She took it up, and began looking at it. It was _Paradise Lost_.
The first thing she saw was the word “Argument” at the head of a
chapter, which she thought must mean a dispute, and could make nothing
of; but something about Satan cleaving Chaos made her turn to the
poetry, and, in her own words, that evening’s reading fixed her mental
destiny for the next seven years; the volume was henceforth never to be
found, but by asking her for it. “In a few months, I believe there was
hardly a line in _Paradise Lost_ that I could not have instantly turned
to. I sent myself to sleep by repeating it, and when my curtains were
drawn back in the morning, descriptions of heavenly light rushed into my
memory.” Her keen appreciation of Milton’s great poem was the
compensation nature provided for the imaginative terrors which made her
childhood such a sad one.
Another misfortune was in store for her, which might have embittered the
whole of her future existence. When she was about twelve years old it
was recognised that her hearing was not good; by sixteen her deafness
had become very noticeable, and excessively painful to herself; and
before she was twenty she had become extremely deaf, so that she could
hear little or nothing without the help of a trumpet. Few people can
realise how much the loss of this all-important sense must have cost
her. At the outset of life, to be deprived of a faculty on which almost
all free and pleasant social intercourse depends must be a bitter trial.
One striking characteristic of Harriet Martineau’s mind was brought into
relief by it. Throughout her life a misfortune never overtook her
without calling out the strength necessary to bear it, not only with
patience, but with cheerfulness. As soon as it was clear that her
deafness was a trial that would last as long as her life, she made a
resolution with regard to it. She determined never to inquire what was
said, but to trust to her friends to repeat to her what was important
and worth hearing. This she rightly regarded as the only way of
preventing her deafness becoming as irksome and trying to her companions
as it was to herself. It was not till she was nearly thirty that she
began to use a trumpet, and she blamed herself seriously for the delay;
for she felt it to be the duty of the deaf to spare other people as much
fatigue as possible, and also to preserve their own natural capacity for
sound, and the habit of receiving it, as long as possible.
Harriet’s first attempt at authorship was undertaken at the age of
nineteen; she was tenderly devoted to her brother James, who was two
years her junior. When he left home for college, the brightness of her
life departed; he told her she must not permit herself to be so
miserable, and advised her to take refuge, each time he left her, in
some new pursuit; her first new pursuit was writing, and with a beating
heart she posted her manuscript to the Editor of the _Monthly
Repository_, a Unitarian magazine of that day. She adopted the signature
of “V. of Norwich”; all authors will sympathise with what she felt when
her manuscript was accepted, and she saw herself for the first time in
print. She had not told any member of her family of her enterprise.
Imagine therefore her delight when her eldest brother, whom she regarded
with the utmost veneration, selected this article by V. of Norwich for
special commendation, reading passages from it aloud, and calling upon
Harriet to say whether she did not think it first-rate. After a brief
attempt to keep her secret, she blurted out, “I never could baffle
anybody. The truth is, that paper is mine.” The kind brother read on in
silence, and as she was going he laid his hand on her shoulder and said
gravely (calling her “dear” for the first time), “Now, dear, leave it to
other women to make shirts and darn stockings; and do you devote
yourself to this.” “I went home,” she adds, “in a sort of dream, so that
the squares of the pavement seemed to float before my eyes. That evening
made me an authoress.”
The trials of her life, however, shortly after this time began to
thicken round her. Her beloved elder brother, whose advice had so
greatly encouraged her, died of consumption. Her father’s business
declined rapidly in prosperity; it was a period of great commercial
depression, and for a time absolute ruin seemed to stare the family in
the face. The cares and the mental strain of this time brought the
father to his grave; he died in 1826, when Harriet was twenty-four years
of age, leaving his family in comparatively straitened circumstances.
Shortly after this Harriet became engaged to be married; but this,
instead of bringing happiness, was a source of special trial; for
shortly after the engagement had been entered into, her lover became
suddenly insane, and after months of severe illness, bodily and mental,
he died. The next misfortune was the loss, in 1829, by the mother and
daughters of the Martineau family, of nearly all they had in the world.
The old manufactory, in which their money had been placed, failed. The
way in which she treated this event is very characteristic. “I call it,”
she wrote, “a misfortune, because in common parlance it would be so
treated; but I believe that my mother and all her other daughters would
have joined heartily, if asked, in my conviction that it was one of the
best things that ever happened to us.... We never recovered more than
the merest pittance.... The effect upon me of this new ‘calamity,’ as
people called it, was like that of a blister upon a dull, weary pain or
series of pains. _I rather enjoyed it, even at the time_; for there was
scope for action, whereas in the long, dreary series of preceding
trials, there was nothing possible but endurance. In a very short time
my two sisters at home and I began to feel the blessings of a wholly new
freedom. I, who had been obliged to write before breakfast, or in some
private way, had henceforth liberty to do my own work in my own way; for
we had lost our gentility. Many and many a time have we said that, but
for the loss of that money, we might have lived on in the ordinary
provincial method of ladies with small means, sewing and economising,
and growing narrower every year; whereas by being thrown, while it was
yet time, on our own resources, we have worked hard and usefully, won
friends, reputation, and independence, seen the world abundantly, abroad
and at home, and, in short, have truly lived instead of vegetated”
(_Autobiography_, pp. 141, 142).
For a time, notwithstanding the kind brother’s advice to Harriet, to
leave sewing to other women and devote herself to literature, pressure
was brought upon her to get her living by needlework instead of by her
pen. She tried to follow both the advice of her friends and her own
inclinations. By day she pored over fine needlework, by night she
studied and wrote till two or three o’clock in the morning. Instead of
being crushed by the double strain, her spirit rose victorious over it.
“It was truly _life_ I lived during those days,” she wrote, “of strong,
intellectual, and moral effort.” And again: “Yet I was very happy; the
deep-felt sense of progress and expansion was delightful; and so was the
exertion of all my faculties, and, not least, that of will to overcome
any obstructions, and force my way to that power of public speech of
which I believed myself more or less worthy.” Her first marked literary
success was the winning of each of three prizes which had been offered
by the Unitarian body for essays presenting the arguments in favour of
Unitarianism to the notice of Catholics, Jews, and Mohammedans.
She took every precaution to prevent the discovery that her three essays
were by the same hand; and great was the sensation caused by the
discovery that this was indeed the case. The most important result to
herself of this achievement was that it finally silenced those who
wished her to believe that she was fit to do nothing more difficult in
the world than bead-work and embroidery. It also set her up in funds to
the extent of £45, and she immediately began to plan the work which
brought her fame—a series of tales illustrating the most important
doctrines of political economy, such as the effect of machinery on
wages, the relation of wages and population, free trade, protective
duties, and so on. The difficulties she encountered, before she could
induce any publisher to accept her series, were such as would have
broken any spirit less heroic and determined than her own. “I knew the
work wanted doing,” she said, “and that I could do it”; and this
confidence prevented her from losing heart when one rebuff after another
fell upon her. Almost every publisher to whom she applied repeated the
cry that the public would attend to nothing at that time (1831) but the
cholera and the Reform Bill. She says she became as sick of the Reform
Bill as poor King William himself. At length, after a most exhausting
and, to any one else, heart-breaking succession of disappointments, her
series was accepted, but on terms that made her success in finding a
publisher very little pleasure to her. The first stipulation was that
500 copies of the work must be subscribed for before publication, and
the agreement was to cease if a thousand copies did not sell in the
first fortnight. The dismal business of obtaining subscribers to an
unknown work by an unknown author nearly broke her down. But in her
darkest hour, alone in London, without money or friends, leaning over
some dirty palings, really to recover from an attack of giddiness, but
pretending to look at a cabbage bed, she said to herself, as she stood
with closed eyes, “My book will do yet.”
The day of publication came at last, and Harriet, who had now rejoined
her mother in Norwich, eagerly awaited the result. For about ten days
she heard nothing, and she began to prepare herself to bear the
disappointment of failure. Then at last a letter came, desiring her to
make any corrections necessary for a second edition, as the publisher
had hardly any copies left. He proposed, he said, to print an additional
2000. A postscript altered the number to 3000, a second postscript
suggested 4000, and a third 5000! Her first feeling was that all her
cares were now over. Whatever she had to say would now command a
hearing, and her anxiety in future would be limited to making a good
choice what to write about. Her series made a remarkable sensation; she
was overwhelmed with praise from all quarters. Every one who had a hobby
wanted her to write a tale to illustrate its importance. Advantageous
offers from publishers poured in upon her. Lord Brougham, who was then
the leading spirit of the Diffusion of Knowledge Society, declared that
the whole Society had been “driven out of the field by a little deaf
woman at Norwich.”
It soon became evident, from the amount of political and literary work
which was pressed upon her, that it was necessary for her to live in
London. She accordingly took a small house in Fludyer Street,
Westminster, in 1832, where she lived for seven years with her mother
and aunt. No change could be greater than that from the provincial
society in which she had been brought up, to that into which she was now
welcomed. The best of London literary and political society was freely
offered her. Cabinet ministers consulted her about their measures, and
she enjoyed the acquaintance or friendship of all the foremost men and
women of the day. But her head was not turned, and she was not spoiled.
Sydney Smith said he had watched her anxiously for one season, and he
then declared her unspoilable. The well-founded self-confidence that had
made her say to herself, when almost any one else would have despaired,
“My book will do yet,” prevented her from being dazzled by flattery and
social distinction. She knew perfectly well what she could do and what
she could not do. It made her angry to hear herself spoken of as a woman
of genius; and in correcting a series of errors that had been made in an
account given of her personal history in _Men of the Time_, she drily
remarks, “Nobody has witnessed ‘flashes of wit’ from me. The giving me
credit for wit shows that the writer is wholly unacquainted with me.”
She was a woman of the utmost determination and endurance in carrying
out anything she had made up her mind to be right. She once remarked
that she had thought the worst that could befall her would be to die of
starvation on a doorstep, and added gleefully, “I think I could bear
it.” Her courage was put rather unexpectedly to the test in 1835, when
she visited the United States. As every one is aware, negro slavery was
lawful all over the United States until the civil war of 1862. But every
one does not know that the heroic little band of men and women who first
protested against the wickedness of slavery in America did so at the
peril of their lives. The abolitionists, as they were called, were the
objects, even in cities like Boston, usually considered the centres of
culture and refinement, of most brutal outrage and cruelty. The
abolitionists could not then even hold a meeting but at the peril of
their lives. Miss Martineau found herself therefore in a society divided
into two hostile factions—one rich, strong, and numerous; the other
poor, small, and intensely hated. When she arrived she was disposed to
be rather prejudiced against the abolitionists. She condemned slavery as
a matter of course, but she thought those who had undertaken the battle
against it in America had been fanatical, sentimental, and misguided.
This disposition of her mind was diligently fostered by the defenders of
slavery, who represented the abolitionists to her as bloodthirsty
ruffians who were trying to incite the slaves to the murder of their
masters.
It was not long before her clear intellect discerned the true bearings
of the case. She soon acknowledged that, however distasteful to her
might be the language used by the abolitionists, they were completely
innocent of the charges made against them, and were, in fact, the
blameless apostles of a most holy cause. From the time of forming this
judgment, her course was clear. She boldly avowed abolitionist
principles, and took an early opportunity of attending an anti-slavery
meeting at which, in a short speech, she avowed her conviction that
slavery was inconsistent with the law of God, and incompatible with the
course of His providence. It is unnecessary at this distance of time to
recount in detail the fury with which this declaration was regarded by
the bulk of American society, and by almost the whole American press.
Insult and contumely now met her at every turn, in quarters where she
had before received nothing but adulation and flattery. But she was not
of a nature to be induced by threats of personal violence to consent to
that which her reason and conscience condemned. She remained then and
always an ardent abolitionist, and when the great question of the
existence of slavery in the United States was submitted to the
arbitrament of war, she was one of the chief among the leaders of
political opinion in England who kept our country as a nation free from
the guilt and folly of supporting the secession of the Southern States
from the American Union. The late Mr. W. E. Forster said at the time
that it seemed to him as if Harriet Martineau alone were keeping this
country straight in regard to America.
After her return from America she resumed for a time her usual life of
work and social activity in London. In a few years, however, her health
broke down, and she removed to Tynemouth, suffering, as was then
thought, from an incurable disorder. For five years (1837-42) she lay on
her couch a helpless, but by no means an idle, invalid. Some of her best
books, including her delightful stories for children, _Feats on the
Fiord_, _The Crofton Boys_, etc., were written during this period. She
was under the care of a medical brother-in-law, who resided at
Newcastle, and some of the most leading of London physicians visited her
professionally. But her case was considered chronic, and she resigned
herself to the belief that her health was gone for ever. After five
years some one persuaded her to try the effects of mesmerism, and some
members of her family and many of her former friends were very angry
with her for getting well through its means. Her remarks on the subject
are characteristic. “For my part,” she writes, “if any friend of mine
had been lying in a suffering and hopeless state for nearly six years,
and if she had fancied she might get well by standing on her head
instead of her heels, or reciting charms, or bestriding a broomstick, I
should have helped her to try; and thus was I aided by some of my family
and by a further sympathy in others, but two or three of them were
induced to regard my experiment and recovery as an unpardonable offence,
and by them I never was pardoned.”
After her recovery she plunged again as heartily as ever into the
enjoyment of travel and of work, and finally settled in a little home,
which she built for herself, in the Lake country at Ambleside. Here she
continued her literary activity, writing her _History of the Peace_, her
version of Auguste Comte’s philosophy, and at one time contributing as
many as six articles a week to the _Daily News_. But she was not content
with merely literary labour; she exerted herself most effectually to set
on foot, for the benefit of her poorer neighbours, all kinds of means
for improving their social, moral, and intellectual position. She showed
them, by example, how a farm of two acres could be made to pay. She
started a building society, a mechanics’ institute, and evening lectures
for the people. She was almost worshipped by her servants and immediate
dependents, and was a powerful influence for good on all around her. On
all moral questions, and all questions affecting the position of women,
she was a tower of strength upon the right side. She heartily
sympathised with Mrs. Butler in the work with which her name is
identified. “I am told,” she said, “that this is discreditable work for
women, especially for an _old_ woman. But it has always been esteemed
our special function as women to mount guard over society and social
life—the spring of national existence—and to keep them pure; and who so
fit as an _old_ woman?”
In 1854 it was discovered that she had a heart complaint, which might
have been fatal at any moment, but her life was prolonged for more than
twenty years after this, closing at Ambleside on 27th June 1876. The
words of her friend, Florence Nightingale, might have served as her
epitaph—“She served the Right, that is, God, all her life.”
VIII
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE
AMONG the personal influences that have altered the everyday life of the
present century, the future historian will probably allot a prominent
place to that of Florence Nightingale. Before she took up the work of
her life, the art of sick nursing in England can hardly have been said
to exist. Almost every one had a well-founded horror of the hired nurse;
she was often ignorant, cruel, rapacious, and drunken; and when she was
not quite as bad as that, she was prejudiced, superstitious, and
impervious to new ideas or knowledge. The worst type of the nurse of the
pre-Nightingale era has been portrayed by Dickens in his “Sairey Gamp”
with her bottle of gin or rum upon the “chimbley piece,” handy for her
to put it to her lips when she was “so dispoged.” “Sairey Gamp” is one
of the blessings of the good old days which have now vanished for ever;
with her disappearance has also gradually disappeared the repugnance
with which the professional nurse was at one time almost universally
regarded; and there is now hardly any one who has not had cause to be
thankful for the quick, gentle, and skilful assistance of the trained
nurse whose existence we owe to the example and precepts of Florence
Nightingale.
Miss Nightingale has never favoured the curiosity of those who would
wish to pry into the details of her private history. She has indeed been
so retiring that there is some difficulty in getting accurate
information about anything concerning her, with the exception of her
public work. In a letter she has allowed to be published, she says,
“Being naturally a very shy person, most of my life has been distasteful
to me.” It would be very ungrateful and unbecoming in those who have
benefited by her self-forgetful labours to attempt in any way to thwart
her desire for privacy as to her personal affairs. The attention of the
readers of this sketch will therefore be directed to Miss Nightingale’s
public work, and what the world, and women in particular, have gained by
the noble example she has set of how women’s work should be done.
From time immemorial it has been universally recognised that the care of
the sick is women’s work; but somehow, partly from the low standard of
women’s education, partly from the false notion that all paid work was
in a way degrading to a woman’s gentility, it seemed to be imagined that
women could do this work of caring for the sick without any special
teaching or preparation for it; and as all paid work was supposed to be
unladylike, no woman undertook it unless she was driven to it by the
dire stress of poverty, and had therefore neither the time nor means to
acquire the training necessary to do it well. The lesson of Florence
Nightingale’s life is that painstaking study and preparation are just as
necessary for women’s work as they are for men’s work. No young man
attempts responsible work as a doctor, a lawyer, an engineer, or even a
gardener or mechanic, without spending long years in fitting himself for
his work; but in old times women seemed to think they could do all their
work, in governessing, nursing, or what not, by the light of nature, and
without any special teaching and preparation whatever. There is still
some temptation on the part of women to fall into this fatal error. A
young woman, not long ago, who had studied medicine in India only two
years, was placed at the head of a dispensary and hospital for native
women. Who would have dreamt of taking a boy, after only two years’
study, for a post of similar responsibility and difficulty? Of course
failure and disappointment resulted, and it will probably be a long time
before the native community in that part of India recover their
confidence in lady doctors.
Miss Nightingale spent nearly ten years in studying nursing before she
considered herself qualified to undertake the sanitary direction of even
a small hospital. She went from place to place, not confining her
studies to her own country. She spent about a year at the hospital and
nursing institution at Kaiserswerth on the Rhine in 1849. This had been
founded by Pastor Fliedner, and was under the care of a Protestant
Sisterhood who had perfected the art of sick nursing to a degree unknown
at that time in any other part of Europe. From Kaiserswerth she visited
institutions for similar purposes, in other parts of Germany, and in
France and Italy. It is obvious she could not have devoted the time and
money which all this preparation must have cost if she had not been a
member of a wealthy family. The fact that she was so makes her example
all the more valuable. She was the daughter and co-heiress of a wealthy
country gentleman of Lea Hurst in Derbyshire, and Embly Park in
Hampshire. As a young girl she had the choice of all that wealth,
luxury, and fashion could offer in the way of self-indulgence and ease,
and she set them all on one side for the sake of learning how to benefit
suffering humanity by making sick nursing an art in England. In the
letter already quoted Miss Nightingale gives, in reply to a special
appeal, advice to young women about their work: “1. I would say also to
all young ladies who are called to any particular vocation, qualify
yourselves for it, as a man does for his work. Don’t think you can
undertake it otherwise. No one should attempt to teach the Greek
language until he is master of the language; and this he can only become
by hard study. 2. If you are called to man’s work, do not exact a
woman’s privileges—the privilege of inaccuracy, of weakness, ye
muddleheads. Submit yourselves to the rules of business, as men do, by
which alone you can make God’s business succeed; for He has never said
that He will give His success and His blessing to inefficiency, to
sketchy and unfinished work.”
Here, without intending it, Miss Nightingale drew a picture of her own
character and methods. Years of hard study prepared her for her work; no
inaccuracy, no weakness, no muddleheadedness was to be found in what she
undertook; everything was business-like, orderly, and thorough. Those
who knew her in the hospital spoke of her as combining “the voice of
velvet and the will of steel.” She was not content with having a natural
vocation for her work. It is said that when she was a young girl she was
accustomed to dress the wounds of those who were hurt in the lead mines
and quarries of her Derbyshire home, and that the saying was, “Our good
young miss is better than nurse or doctor.” If this is accurate, she did
not err by burying her talent in the earth, and thinking that because
she had a natural gift there was no need to cultivate it. She saw rather
that _because_ she had a natural gift it was her duty to increase it and
make it of the utmost benefit to mankind. At the end of her ten years’
training, she came to the nursing home and hospital for governesses in
Harley Street, an excellent institution, which at that time had fallen
into some disorder through mismanagement. She stayed here from August
1853 till October 1854, and in those fourteen months placed the
domestic, financial, and sanitary affairs of the little hospital on a
sound footing.
Now, however, the work with which her name will always be associated,
and for which she will always be loved and honoured, was about to
commence. The Crimean war broke out early in 1854, and within a very few
weeks of the commencement of actual fighting, every one at home was
horrified and ashamed to hear of the frightful disorganisation of the
supplies, and of the utter breakdown of the commissariat and medical
arrangements. The most hopeless hugger-mugger reigned triumphant. The
tinned meats sent out from England were little better than poison; ships
arrived with stores of boots which proved all to be for the left foot.
(Muddleheads do not all belong to one sex.) The medical arrangements for
the sick and wounded were on a par with the rest. Mr. Justin M’Carthy,
in his _History of Our Own Times_, speaks of the hospitals for the sick
and wounded at Scutari as being in an absolutely chaotic condition. “In
some instances,” he writes, “medical stores were left to decay at Varna,
or were found lying useless in the holds of vessels in Balaklava Bay,
which were needed for the wounded at Scutari. The medical officers were
able and zealous men; the stores were provided and paid for so far as
our Government was concerned; but the stores were not brought to the
medical men. These had their hands all but idle, their eyes and souls
tortured by the sight of sufferings which they were unable to relieve
for want of the commonest appliances of the hospital” (vol. ii. p. 316).
The result was that the most frightful mortality prevailed, not so much
from the inevitable risks of battle, but from the insanitary conditions
of the camp, the want of proper food, clothing, and fuel, and the
wretched hospital arrangements. Mr. Mackenzie, author of a _History of
the Nineteenth Century_, gives the following facts and figures with
regard to our total losses in the Crimea: “Out of a total loss of
20,656, only 2598 were slain in battle; 18,058 died in hospital.”
“Several regiments became literally extinct. One had but seven men left
fit for duty; another had thirty. When the sick were put on board
transports, to be conveyed to hospital, the mortality was shocking. In
some ships one man in every four died in a voyage of seven days. In some
of the hospitals recovery was the rare exception. At one time
four-fifths of the poor fellows who underwent amputation died of
hospital gangrene. During the first seven months of the siege the men
perished by disease at a rate which would have extinguished the entire
force in little more than a year and a half” (p. 171). When these facts
became known in England, the mingled grief, shame, and anger of the
whole nation were unbounded. It was then that Mr. Sidney Herbert, who
was Minister of War, appealed to Miss Nightingale to organise and take
out with her a band of trained nurses. It is needless to say that she
consented. She was armed with full authority to cut the swathes of red
tape that had proved shrouds to so many of our soldiers. On the 21st of
October 1854 Miss Nightingale, accompanied by forty-two other ladies,
all trained nurses, set sail for the Crimea. They arrived at
Constantinople on 4th November, the eve of Inkerman, which was fought on
5th November. Their first work, therefore, was to receive into the
wards, which were already filled by 2300 men, the wounded from what
proved the severest and fiercest engagement of the campaign. Miss
Nightingale and her band of nurses proved fully equal to the charge they
had undertaken. She, by a combination of inexorable firmness with
unvarying gentleness, evolved order out of chaos. After her arrival,
there were no more complaints of the inefficiency of the hospital
arrangements for the army. The extraordinary way in which she spent
herself and let herself be spent will never be forgotten. She has been
known to stand for twenty hours at a stretch, in order to see the
wounded provided with every means of easing their condition. Her
attention was directed not only to nursing the sick and wounded, but to
removing the causes which had made the camp and the hospitals so deadly
to their inmates. The extent of the work of mere nursing may be
estimated by the fact that a few months after her arrival ten thousand
sick men were under her care, and the rows of beds in one hospital
alone, the Barrack Hospital at Scutari, measured two miles and one-third
in length, with an average distance between each bed of two feet six
inches. Miss Nightingale’s personal influence and authority over the men
were immensely and deservedly strong. They knew she had left the
comforts and refinements of a wealthy home to be of service to them. Her
slight delicate form, her steady nerve, her kindly conciliating manner,
and her absolute self-devotion, awoke a passion of chivalrous feeling on
the part of the men she tended. Sometimes a soldier would refuse to
submit to a painful but necessary operation until a few calm sentences
of hers seemed at once to allay the storm, and the man would submit
willingly to the ordeal he had to undergo. One soldier said, “Before she
came here, there was such cursin’ and swearing, and after that it was as
holy as a church.” Another said to Mr. Sidney Herbert, “She would speak
to one and another, and nod and smile to many more; but she could not do
it to all, you know—we lay there in hundreds—but we could kiss her
shadow as it fell, and lay our heads on the pillow again, content.” This
incident, of the wounded soldier turning to kiss her shadow as it
passed, has been woven into a beautiful poem by Longfellow. It is called
“Santa Filomena.” The fact that she had been born in, and had been named
after, the city of Florence, may have suggested to the poet to turn her
name into the language of the country of her birth.
Miss Nightingale suffered from an attack of hospital fever in the spring
of 1855, but as soon as possible she returned to her laborious post, and
never quitted it till the war was over and the last of our soldiers was
on his way home. When she returned to England she received such a
welcome as probably has fallen to no other woman; all distinctions of
party and of rank were forgotten in the one wish to do her honour. She
was presented by the Queen with a jewel in commemoration of her work in
the Crimea, and a national testimonial was set on foot, to which a sum
of £50,000 was subscribed. It is unnecessary to say that Miss
Nightingale did not accept this testimonial for her own personal
benefit. The sum was devoted to the permanent endowment of schools for
the training of nurses in St. Thomas’s and King’s College Hospitals.
Since the Crimea no European war has taken place without calling forth
the service of trained bands of skilled nurses. Within ten years of
Florence Nightingale’s labours in the East, the nations of Europe agreed
at the Geneva Convention upon certain rules and regulations, with the
object of ameliorating the condition of the sick and wounded in war. By
this convention all ambulances and military hospitals were neutralised,
and their inmates and staff were henceforth to be regarded as
non-combatants. The distinguishing red cross of the Geneva Convention is
now universally recognised as the one civilised element in the savagery
of war.
During a great part of the years that have passed since Miss Nightingale
returned from the Crimea, she has suffered from extremely bad health;
but few people, even of the most robust frame, have done better and more
invaluable work. She has been the adviser of successive Governments on
the sanitary condition of the army in India; her experience in the
Crimea convinced her that the death-rate in the army, even in time of
peace, could be reduced by nearly one-half by proper sanitary
arrangements. She contributed valuable state papers on the subject to
the Government of the day, and her advice has had important effects, not
only on the condition of the army, but also on the sanitary reform of
many of the towns of India, and on the extension of irrigation in that
country. Besides this department of useful public work, she has written
many books on the subjects she has made particularly her own; among them
may be mentioned _Notes on Hospitals_ and _Notes on Nursing_; the latter
in particular is a book which no family ought to be without.
It will surprise no one to hear that she is very zealous for all that
can lift up and improve the lives of women, and give them a higher
conception of their duties and responsibilities. She supports the
extension of parliamentary representation to women, generally, however,
putting in a word in what she writes on the subject, to remind people
that representatives will never be better than the people they
represent. Therefore the most important thing for men, as well as for
women, is to improve the education and morality of the elector, and then
Parliament will improve itself. Every honest effort for the good of men
or women has her sympathy, and a large number her generous support. May
she long be spared to the country she has served so well, a living
example of strength, courage, and self-forgetfulness—
A noble type of good
Heroic womanhood.
SANTA FILOMENA.
BY H. W. LONGFELLOW.
WHENE’ER a noble deed is wrought,
Whene’er is spoken a noble thought,
Our hearts, in glad surprise,
To higher levels rise.
The tidal wave of deeper souls
Into our inmost being rolls,
And lifts us unawares
Out of all meaner cares.
Honour to those whose words or deeds
Thus help us in our daily needs,
And by their overflow
Raise us from what is low.
Thus thought I, as by night I read
Of the great army of the dead,
The trenches cold and damp,
The starved and frozen camp.
The wounded from the battle plain
In dreary hospitals of pain,
The cheerless corridors,
The cold and stony floors.
Lo! in that house of misery
A lady with a lamp I see
Pass through the glimmering gloom,
And flit from room to room.
And slow, as in a dream of bliss,
The speechless sufferer turns to kiss
Her shadow, as it falls
Upon the darkening walls.
As if a door in heaven should be
Opened, and then closed suddenly,
The vision came and went,
The light shone and was spent.
On England’s annals, through the long
Hereafter of her speech and song,
That light its rays shall cast
From portals of the past.
A lady with a lamp shall stand
In the great history of the land,
A noble type of good
Heroic womanhood.
Nor even shall be wanting here
The palm, the lily, and the spear,
The symbols that of yore
Saint Filomena bore.
IX
MARY LAMB
THE name of Mary Lamb can never be mentioned without recalling that of
her brother Charles, and the devoted, self-sacrificing love that existed
between the two. It was one of Harriet Martineau’s sayings, that of all
relations that between brother and sister was apt to be the least
satisfactory. There have been some notable examples to the contrary, and
perhaps the most notable is that given by Charles and Mary Lamb. When a
brother and sister are linked together by an unusually strong bond of
affection and admiration, it is generally the sister who, by inclination
and natural selection, sacrifices all individual and personal objects
for the sake of the brother. For instance, she frequently remains
unmarried in order to be able to devote herself to his pursuits and
further his interests. There is no more devotedly unselfish love than
that of a sister and brother when it is at its best. The love of a wife
for a husband, or a parent for a child, has something in it more of the
element of self. In both these relationships, the husband and wife and
the parent and child are so closely and indissolubly identified with one
another that it is comparatively easy to merge the love between them
into self-love. But between a brother and sister this is not the case.
The bond that unites the two can be set aside by either of them at will.
It is partly voluntary in its character, and, as previously remarked, in
the give and take of this affection, it is, speaking generally, the
brother who takes and the sister who gives. The contrary, however, was
the case with Charles and Mary Lamb. Between these two, it was the
brother who laid down his life for his sister, sacrificing for her sake,
at the outset of his own career, his prospects of love and marriage, the
ease and comfort of his life, and his opportunities of devoting himself
exclusively to his darling studies.
The story of these two beautiful lives is worth more than even their
contributions to English literature, and makes us love Lamb and his
sister quite independently of the _Essays of Elia_, and the _Tales from
Shakespeare_. Mary Lamb was born in 1764, eleven years before her
brother Charles. Her childhood, till the birth of this precious brother,
seems to have had little brightness in it. There was a tendency to
insanity in the Lamb family, and this tendency was probably intensified
in Mary’s case by the harshness and want of sympathy with which it was
then the fashion to treat children. “Polly, what are those poor crazy,
moythered brains of yours thinking, always?” was a speech of her
grandmother’s that made a lasting impression on the sensitive child. The
love of her parents, her mother especially, seems to have been centred
on her brother John, older than herself by two years. “‘Dear little
selfish, craving John,’ he was in childhood, and dear big selfish John
he remained in manhood” (Mrs. Gilchrist’s _Life of Mary Lamb_, p. 4).
The first creature upon whom the wealth of affection in Mary’s nature
could be freely bestowed was, therefore, the baby brother. She spoke in
after years of the curative influence on her mind of the almost maternal
affection which she lavished on the boy who was, to a great extent,
committed to her care. Henceforward she was no longer lonely, but had
gained a companion and object in life. Her education consisted mainly in
having been “tumbled early, by accident or design, into a spacious
closet of good old English reading, without much selection or
prohibition, and she browsed at will upon that fair and wholesome
pasturage.” This was the library of Mr. Salt, a bencher of the Inner
Temple, to whom her father was clerk. In 1782, when Charles was seven
and Mary eighteen, he became a scholar of the Blue Coat School, where he
formed a lifelong friendship with the poet Coleridge. The circumstances
of the Lambs gradually narrowed. The father was superannuated, and his
income was consequently reduced. The elder brother, John, held a good
appointment in the South Sea House, but he was much more intent on
enjoying himself and surrounding himself with luxuries than upon
providing for the wants of his family. For eleven years, from the age of
twenty-one to thirty-two, Mary supported herself by her needle.
The father’s mental faculties gradually gave way more and more. By the
time Charles was fifteen he left school, and the care and maintenance of
his family in a short time devolved mainly on him. He first obtained a
clerkship in the same establishment where his brother was employed, and
two years later he received a better paid appointment, with a salary of
£70 a year, in the India House. Domestic troubles, however, thickened
upon the family; the mother became a confirmed invalid, and in 1795
Charles was seized by an attack of the madness hereditary in the family.
This affliction must have weighed terribly upon Mary, who thus saw her
one prop and solace taken from her. She was left alone, with her father
in his second childhood, her mother an exacting and imperious invalid,
and an old Aunt Hetty, who was for ever poring over devotional books,
without apparently the capacity of sharing any of the household burdens.
No sooner was Charles restored to reason than a new trouble began. John
met with a serious accident, and, though in his days of prosperity his
family saw little or nothing of him, he now returned home to be nursed.
This seems to have been the last straw that broke poor Mary down. In
September 1796 the mania, with which she had been often threatened,
broke out; she seized a knife from the table and stabbed her mother to
the heart. The poor old father was almost unconscious of what had taken
place; Aunt Hetty fainted. It was Charles who seized the knife from his
sister’s grasp, but not before she had, in her frenzy, inflicted a
slight wound on her father. The horror of the whole scene can be with
difficulty pictured. Yet Charles, who had only lately been released from
an asylum, had the power to cope with it, to maintain his calmness and
courage, and above all to resolve that the terrible calamity which had
overtaken them should not be allowed to enshroud the whole of his dear
sister’s life in the gloom of a madhouse. He wrote to his friend
Coleridge five days after the tragedy, and his letter speaks nothing but
tender fortitude. “God has preserved to me my senses,” he writes. “I
eat, and drink, and sleep, and have my judgment, I believe, very sound.
My poor father was slightly wounded, and I am left to take care of him
and of my aunt.... With me ‘the former things are passed away,’ and I
have something more to do than to feel.”
Severe self-mastery is perceived in every word of this letter. Lamb was
evidently sensible that his own reason would totter if it were not
controlled by a strong effort of will. In another letter written a week
later to the same friend, the same spirit is shown; he had already
formed the determination not to allow his sister to remain in a
madhouse; he resolved to devote his life to her, and to give up all
thought of other happiness for himself than what was consistent with his
being her constant companion and guardian—“Your letter was an
inestimable treasure to me. It will be a comfort to you, I know, to know
that my prospects are somewhat brighter. My poor dear, dearest
sister—the unhappy and unconscious instrument of the Almighty’s
judgments on our house—is restored to her senses, to a dreadful sense
and recollection of what has past, awful to her mind, and impressive (as
it must be to the end of life), but tempered with religious resignation
and the reasonings of a sound judgment, which in this early stage knows
how to distinguish between a deed committed in a transient fit of frenzy
and the terrible guilt of a mother’s murder. I have seen her. I found
her this morning calm and serene, far, very far, from an indecent,
forgetful serenity; she has a most affectionate and tender concern for
what has happened. Indeed from the beginning, frightful and hopeless as
her disorder seemed, I had confidence enough in her strength of mind and
religious principle to look forward to a time when _even she_ might
recover tranquillity. God be praised, Coleridge, wonderful as it is to
tell, I have never once been otherwise than collected and calm; even on
the dreadful day, and in the midst of the terrible scene, I preserved a
tranquillity which bystanders may have construed into indifference—a
tranquillity not of despair. Is it folly or sin in me to say that it was
a religious principle that most supported me?... I felt I had something
else to do than to regret. On that first evening, my aunt was lying
insensible, to all appearance like one dying,—my father with his poor
forehead plastered over from a wound he had received from a daughter
dearly loved by him, who loved him no less dearly,—my mother, a dead and
murdered corpse in the next room,—yet was I wonderfully supported. I
closed not my eyes that night, but lay without terrors and without
despair. I have lost no sleep since. I had been long used not to rest in
things of sense, had endeavoured after a comprehension of mind
unsatisfied with the ignorant present time; and this kept me up. I had
the whole weight of the family thrown on me, for my brother, little
disposed (I speak not without tenderness for him) at any time to take
care of old age and infirmities, had now, with his bad leg, an exemption
from such duties; and I was now left alone.” He then speaks of the
kindness of various friends, and reckons up the resources of the family,
resolving to spare £50 or £60 a year to keep Mary at a private asylum at
Islington. “I know John will make speeches about it, but she shall not
go into an hospital.... If my father, and old maid-servant, and I, can’t
live, and live comfortably, on £130 or £120 a year, we ought to burn by
slow fires; and I almost would, that Mary might not go into an hospital.
Let me not leave an unfavourable impression on your mind respecting my
brother. Since this has happened, he has been very kind and brotherly,
but I fear for his mind. He has taken his ease in the world, and is not
fit to struggle with difficulties, nor has much accustomed himself to
throw himself into their way; and I know his language is already,
‘Charles, you must take care of yourself, you must not abridge yourself
of a single pleasure you have been used to,’ etc.; and in that style of
talking.” Charles goes on to explain that his sister would form one of
the family she had been placed with rather than a patient. “They, as the
saying is, take to her extraordinarily, if it is extraordinary that
people who see my sister should love her. Of all the people I ever saw
in the world, my poor sister was most thoroughly devoid of the quality
of selfishness. I will enlarge upon her qualities, dearest soul, in a
future letter for my own comfort, for I understand her thoroughly; and
if I mistake not, in the most trying situation that a human being can be
found in, she will be found ... uniformly great and amiable. God keep
her in her present mind, to whom be thanks and praise for all His
dispensations to mankind.”
The whole of the rest of Lamb’s life was a fulfilment of the loving
resolutions which had sustained him in the terrible hour of his mother’s
death. His love for the beautiful Alice W——n was relinquished as one of
the “tender fond records” for ever blotted out by a sterner, more
imperative claim of affection and duty. As soon as the old father died,
Mary and Charles were reunited in one home, and her brother’s
guardianship was accepted by the authorities as a sufficient guarantee
that any future return of her malady should not be accompanied by danger
to the lives of others. He was faithful to his self-imposed task. He
himself was never again attacked by the cruel malady, but his sister to
the end of her life was subject to recurring periods of insanity, which
latterly isolated her from her friends for months in every year. Through
their joint care and caution no fatal results again attended these
attacks of mania. There is something inexpressibly touching in the fact
that on their holiday excursions together, Mary invariably, with her own
hands, packed a strait-waistcoat for herself. She was able to foretell,
by premonitory symptoms, when she was likely to be attacked; and a
friend of the Lambs has related how he had met them walking together,
hand in hand, towards the asylum, both weeping bitterly.
Lamb’s strong feeling against allowing his sister to be placed in an
hospital for lunatics is more than justified by the accounts given, in
the _Life of Lord Shaftesbury_, of the frightfully barbarous treatment
to which insane people were subjected in the early part of the present
century. Their keepers always visited them whip in hand. They were
sometimes spun round on rotatory chairs at a tremendous speed; sometimes
they were chained in wells, in which the water was made to rise till it
reached their chins; sometimes they were left quite alone, chained to
their beds, from Saturday afternoon to Monday morning, unable to rise,
and with nothing but bread and water within their reach. No wonder that
Charles Lamb said he would burn by slow fires rather than let his sister
be treated like this.
The strong restorative of work done and duty fulfilled enabled Charles,
within little more than a year of the dreadful calamity which had
darkened his life, to make his first appearance as an author. These
first poems were dedicated to “the author’s best friend and sister.” He
wished to fence her round, as it were, by assurances of the high value
he set on her, and of the depth of his love. “I wish,” he wrote to
Coleridge, “to accumulate perpetuating tokens of my affection to poor
Mary.” When she was restored to his daily companionship, there was
nothing in her outward manner or appearance to indicate what a terrible
cloud rested on her past life. Her manners were tranquil and composed.
De Quincey speaks of her as that “Madonna-like lady.” There was no
appearance of settled melancholy in consequence of the fatal deed she
had been led to commit, but that it left a wound which was hidden rather
than healed is indicated by the words written long years after the
event: “My dear mother who, though you do not know it, is always in my
poor head and heart.” On another occasion, a child Mary loved asked her
why she never spoke of her mother. A cry of pain was the only response.
Her dependence on her brother was an ever-visible presence in both their
lives. Mrs. Cowden Clarke relates: “He once said, with his peculiar mode
of tenderness beneath blunt, abrupt speech, ‘You must die first, Mary.’
She nodded, with her little quiet nod and sweet smile, ‘Yes, I must die
first, Charles.’” The event was contrary to the wish and expectation
thus expressed. Charles preceded Mary to the grave by thirteen years;
but during the greater part of that time her intellect was so clouded as
to deprive her of the power of the acute suffering the loss of her
brother would otherwise have caused.
The literary fame of Mary Lamb rests chiefly on her _Tales from
Shakespeare_, and a collection of beautiful little stories for children,
called _Mrs. Leicester’s School_. The _Tales from Shakespeare_ were
written, as so much good work has been, under the stress of poverty. Six
of the great tragedies were undertaken by Charles, and fourteen other
plays by Mary. The scheme was to render each play into a prose story fit
for the comprehension and capacity of children; and the work was done
with inimitable felicity of diction, and critical insight into the
situations and characters of the world of men and women who live in
Shakespeare’s dramas. There is a letter of Mary’s describing herself and
Charles at work: “Charles has written _Macbeth_, _Othello_, _King Lear_,
and has begun _Hamlet_. You would like to see us, as we often sit
writing on one table (but not on one cushion sitting, like Hermia and
Helena in the _Midsummer Nights Dream_); or rather, like an old literary
Darby and Joan, I taking snuff, and he groaning all the while and saying
he can make nothing of it, which he always says till he has finished,
and then he finds out that he has made something of it” (Mrs.
Gilchrist’s _Life_, p. 119). The _Tales_ were written for William
Godwin, whose first wife was Mary Wollstonecraft. His second wife helped
him a great deal with his publishing business. She was a vulgar-minded
woman, and a pet aversion of the Lambs, especially of Charles, who said,
referring to her, “I will be buried with this inscription over me, ‘Here
lies C. L., the woman-hater’—I mean, that hated one woman; for the rest,
God bless ’em.” The success of the _Tales_ could not, however, be marred
by the unpopularity of the publisher and his wife. The book rapidly ran
through several editions, and even now a year seldom passes without the
_Tales from Shakespeare_ being presented to the public in some new form.
A portrait of Mary Lamb has been drawn by the master hand of her
brother. She is the Bridget of the _Essays of Elia_, as all lovers of
the essays well know. The humour and delicate insight into character for
which the writings of Charles Lamb are so distinguished, are also
characteristic of Mary, though the humour in her case is less
rollicking, and never breaks out in pure high spirits, as his often
does. Some of the most charming of Mary’s writings are her letters,
which have been published in Mrs. Gilchrist’s _Life_, especially those
to a young friend, named Sarah Stoddart.
This young lady had a most “business-like determination to marry”; and
as she generally had more than one string to her bow, as the saying is,
it is no wonder that she sometimes needed the help of an older and wiser
woman than herself, to get her out of the difficulties in which she
found herself. Much of Mary’s own character comes out in the advice she
gives her friend. She speaks in one place of her power of valuing people
for what they are, without demanding or expecting perfection. It is a
“knack I know I have, of looking into people’s real character, and never
expecting them to act out of it—never expecting another to do as I would
in the same case.” How much practical wisdom there is in this, and what
misunderstandings and heart-burnings would be saved if it were more
common not to expect people to act out of their own characters! There is
a funny little bit in another letter to the effect that women should not
be constantly admonishing men as to the right line of thought and
conduct. “I make it a point of conscience never to interfere or cross my
brother in the humour he happens to be in. It always appears to me a
vexatious kind of tyranny, that women have no business to exercise over
men, which merely because, _they having a better judgment_, they have
power to do. Let _men_ alone, and at last we find they come round to the
right way which _we_, by a kind of intuition, perceive at once. But
better, far better, that we should let them often do wrong than that
they should have the torment of a monitor always at their elbows.”
To begin quoting from the letters of Charles and Mary Lamb is such an
enticing task that it would be easy to fill more pages than this little
book contains. One more only shall be quoted from each. The most
beautiful of Mary’s letters is perhaps that which she wrote to Dorothy
Wordsworth, soon after the death by drowning of Wordsworth’s brother
John. The beautiful poem by Wordsworth, “The Happy Warrior,” is supposed
to have been written partly in reference to this brother, and partly in
reference to Nelson, whose death took place the same year (1805). “I
thank you,” Mary wrote, “my kind friend, for your most comfortable
letter; till I saw your own handwriting I could not persuade myself that
I should do well to write to you, though I have often attempted it.... I
wished to tell you that you would one day feel the kind of peaceful
state of mind and sweet memory of the dead which you so happily describe
as now almost begun; but I felt that it was improper, and most grating
to the feelings of the afflicted, to say to them that the memory of
their affliction would in time become a constant part, not only of their
dream, but of their most wakeful sense of happiness. That you would see
every object with, and through, your lost brother, and that that would
at last become a real and everlasting source of comfort to you, I felt
and well knew from my own experience in sorrow; but till you yourself
began to feel this I didn’t dare tell you so.”
How terrible that the mind and heart which could dictate such words as
these were weighed down by the lifelong burden of insanity! Before Miss
Wordsworth’s reply reached her, she was again attacked, and Charles
wrote in her place: “I have every reason to suppose that this illness,
like all the former ones, will be but temporary; but I cannot always
feel so. Meantime she is dead to me, and I miss a prop. All my strength
is gone, and I am like a fool, bereft of her co-operation. I dare not
think, lest I should think wrong, so used am I to look up to her in the
least as in the biggest perplexity. To say all that I know of her would
be more than I think anybody could believe, or even understand; and when
I hope to have her well again with me, it would be sinning against her
feelings to go about praising her, for I can conceal nothing that I do
from her. She is older and wiser and better than I, and all my wretched
imperfections I cover to myself by resolutely thinking on her goodness.
She would share life and death, heaven and hell, with me. She lives but
for me; and I know I have been wasting and teasing her life for five
years past incessantly, with my cursed drinking and ways of going on.
But even in thus upbraiding myself I am offending against her, for I
know that she has clung to me for better, for worse; and if the balance
has been against her hitherto it was a noble trade.”
Great, noble spirits they both were, even in their weaknesses and
imperfections, showing an example of devoted unselfishness, tenderness,
and generosity that many who “tithe mint and anise and cummin” might
envy. Mary Lamb survived to old age, dying in May 1847, aged
seventy-three. She was buried by her brother’s side in the churchyard at
Edmonton.
X
AGNES ELIZABETH JONES
“Count not that man’s life short who has had time to do noble
deeds.”—From CICERO.
THERE is something very interesting in tracing, as we are sometimes able
to do, the connection of one piece of good work with another. The
energy, devotion, and success of one worker stimulates the enthusiasm of
others; this enthusiasm does not always show itself in carrying on or
developing what has been already begun, but sometimes manifests itself
in the more difficult task of breaking new ground; and thus one good
work becomes the parent of another. An example of what is here referred
to is to be found in the work of Mrs. Fry. To her initiative may be
traced not only the kindred labours of Mary Carpenter in reformatory and
industrial schools, and the still more modern efforts for the better
care of neglected children by the boarding-out system, and by such
societies as the Metropolitan Association for Befriending Young
Servants, but to her also may indirectly be traced the success with
which women have devoted themselves to the art of sick nursing, and from
this again has spread or grown out the movement for extending to women a
thorough medical education and training.
Mrs. Fry’s connection with the art of sick nursing came about in this
way. In the first quarter of this century a young German named Fliedner
was appointed pastor to the little weaving village of Kaiserswerth on
the Rhine. He endeared himself to his people by his devotion to them;
but the time came when he was forced to leave them. The whole village
was involved in ruin because of the failure of the industry on which its
inhabitants depended. The people not only could not support their
pastor, but were themselves reduced to the greatest straits of actual
want. He left them in order to seek in wealthier places, not maintenance
for himself, but help for them. After travelling for some time in
Germany, he came to England, and while here, still intent on making
known the wants of Kaiserswerth, he met with Mrs. Fry, and was deeply
interested in all she was doing for the benefit of prisoners. Not long
after this he returned to Kaiserswerth, bearing with him the gifts he
had collected to relieve the pressing wants of his people; but his mind
was now full of Mrs. Fry, and of what was being done in England by and
for women. He and his wife resolved to begin similar work in Germany.
They began with two young women just discharged from a neighbouring
prison, whose relations refused to receive them or have anything further
to do with them. Soon the number of discharged prisoners increased, and
the pastor and his wife felt that they must have help; a friend
therefore came to join them in their work. In this way and from this
small beginning grew in time a very large institution, comprising not
only an organisation to enable discharged prisoners to get work and
regain their character, but a home and school for orphans, a hospital
for the sick, and an asylum for lunatics. The whole of the work of this
institution, which occupied several houses and comprised more than 300
persons, was done by carefully-trained women, called deaconesses.
Kaiserswerth was the parent of all the other deaconesses’ institutions
which now exist in almost every part of the world. The predominating
spirit at Kaiserswerth, after that of religious self-devotion, to which
a first place was given, was that the work of caring for the poor, the
sick, and the afflicted can only be rightly undertaken after a long
course of special preparation and training. It was a Protestant
sisterhood; those who entered were first called novices; in time the
novices became deaconesses, and the deaconesses were expected to bind
themselves to remain in the institution five years. They were, however,
bound by no vows, and could always leave if other duties seemed to
require that they should do so. In this institution the art of sick
nursing acquired a perfection at that time unknown in any other part of
Europe. It was here, mainly, that Florence Nightingale received the
training which enabled her to save the lives of so many of our soldiers
in the Crimea, and to introduce into England a new era in the history of
nursing. Here too Agnes Elizabeth Jones was trained.
Miss Nightingale’s often-repeated lesson on the subject of the necessity
of long and careful training was not lost upon Agnes Jones. When she
left Kaiserswerth, she knew, as Miss Nightingale said, “more than most
hospital matrons know when they undertake matronship.” But she was not
content with this. After working for a time with the London Bible
Women’s Mission, she applied to the training-school for nurses at St.
Thomas’s Hospital for another year’s training. She entered the hospital
as a “Nightingale probationer.” She went through, while she was there,
the whole training of a nurse. To quote Miss Nightingale again,
referring to this period, “Her reports of cases were admirable as to
nursing details. She was our best pupil; _she went through all the work
of a soldier, and she thereby fitted herself for being the best general
we ever had_.”
Before referring to Agnes Jones’s crowning work in reorganising the
nursing staff of the Liverpool Workhouse Infirmary, it will be well to
recall the story of her life. There are few incidents in it, none at all
of a sensational character; but perhaps this makes the lesson to be
learnt from it all the more plain and simple.
She was born at Cambridge, of Irish parents, in 1832. Her father was a
colonel in the 12th Regiment, and her descent was from the north Irish
stock that has furnished so many great names to the roll-call of the
worthies of our nation. She was a Protestant evangelical, of the type
which northern Ireland produces. It is easy to label the religious sect
to which she belonged as narrow and unattractive; but however this may
be, as exemplified in her personally, her religion was too intense a
reality to be unattractive. It permeated her whole life, from the time
when as a child of seven her dream was to become a missionary, to the
hour when she died of typhus taken from a patient in the Liverpool
Infirmary to whom she had given up her own room and bed. Another deep
and permanent influence on her mind and character was her love for
Ireland. Over and over again in her letters we come across expressions
which show how close to her heart lay her country’s good. The training
at Kaiserswerth was intended to be utilised for the good of Ireland. “I
have no desire,” she wrote, “to become a deaconess; that would not, I
think, be the place I should be called upon to occupy. No, my own
Ireland first. It was for Ireland’s good that my first desire to be used
as a blessed instrument in God’s hand was breathed, ... and in Ireland
is it my heart’s desire to labour....”
In another letter she refers to the time when she “then and there”
dedicated herself to do what she could for Ireland, in its workhouses,
infirmaries, and hospitals. In another place she speaks of being
retained in England for another year’s training, and exclaims, “My last
English sojourn, I hope, as Ireland is ever my bourn!” And again, “My
heart is ever in Ireland, where I hope ultimately to work.” Her heart’s
desire was never gratified; she laid down her life, at the age of
thirty-five, in the Liverpool Workhouse, before she had had an
opportunity of giving to her own dear land the benefit of all she had
learned by the patient years of training at Kaiserswerth and in London.
Ulster Protestant as she was to the backbone, and a member of the Church
of England, she was a true patriot, and showed her patriotism by
labouring with self-denying earnestness to fit herself to lift up to a
higher level an important branch of the social life of her country.
She was very much stimulated, as so many women were, by the heroism of
the Nightingale band of nurses who left England for the Crimea in 1854.
She listened with vehement inward dissent to those who cast contempt and
blame on them, and, in her own words, “almost worshipped” their brave
leader.
She had paid a visit of a week to Kaiserswerth in 1853, but home duties,
especially the care of a widowed sister, at that time and for some years
prevented her from fulfilling her strong desire for a course of thorough
training in the art of nursing. It was not till 1860 that she returned
to Kaiserswerth for this purpose. Very soon after her year of
preparation there, she received, through Miss Nightingale, an invitation
from Mr. W. Rathbone to undertake the superintendence of the Liverpool
Training School for Nurses of the Poor. She was overwhelmed by a genuine
sense of her inadequacy to the task. She was a sincerely humble-minded
woman, and not only craved more training in the mechanical difficulties
of nursing, but doubted her own powers of organising, directing, and
superintending. She hesitated, and while hesitating, joined Mrs. Ranyard
in her London Biblewoman’s Mission. Her work here was interrupted by a
telegram summoning her to Rome to nurse a sick sister. As soon as the
sister recovered, another invalid relative claimed her. By their
bedsides she felt, to a certain extent, her own power, and the question
often arose in her mind, “Could I govern and teach others?” As soon as
these private cares were over, she visited nursing institutions in
Switzerland, France, and Germany, and before she returned to England she
determined to go for another year’s training to St. Thomas’s Hospital,
and then to offer herself for the difficult post at Liverpool. “I
determined,” she writes, “at least to try.... If every one shrinks back
because incompetent, who will ever do anything? ‘Lord, here am I; send
me.’”
She did not on leaving St. Thomas’s immediately commence her work at
Liverpool. She was for a short time superintendent of a small hospital
in Bolsover Street, and later she filled a similar post at the Great
Northern Hospital. It was not till the spring of 1865 that she took the
place at Liverpool with which her name is chiefly connected.
The old system in pauper infirmaries was to allow the patients to be
“nursed” by old inmates of the workhouse. Among those to whom the care
of the sick was confided were “worn-out old thieves, worn-out old
drunkards,” and worse. Mr. W. Rathbone, of Liverpool, strongly urged on
the guardians of that place to do away with this wretched system, and to
substitute in the place of these ignorant, and often vicious, women a
staff of trained paid nurses. He generously undertook to defray the
whole cost of the new scheme for three years, by which time he believed
the improvement effected would be so great that no one would for a
moment dream of going back to the old plan. It was to the post of
superintendent of the band of trained nurses that Agnes Jones was called
in the spring of 1865.
It was no light task for a young woman of thirty-three. She had under
her about 50 nurses, 150 pauper “scourers,” and from 1220 to 1350
patients. The winters of 1865 and 1866 will long be remembered as the
terrible period of the cotton famine in Lancashire. The workhouse
infirmary at Liverpool was not only full, but overflowing; a number of
patients often arrived when every bed was full. Then the gentle
authority of Sister Agnes, as she was called, had to be exercised to
induce the wild, rough patients to make way for one another. Sometimes
she had to persuade them to let her put the beds together and place
three or even four in two beds. The children had to be packed together,
some at the head and some at the foot of the bed. She speaks of them as
“nests of children,” and mentions that forty under twelve were sent in
one day. This over-filling of the workhouse was of course no ordinary
occurrence, and was due to the exceptional distress in Lancashire at
that time. The number of deaths that took place, for the same reason,
was unusually large. Sister Agnes speaks in one of her letters of seven
deaths having occurred between Sunday night and Tuesday morning.
The dreadful melancholy of the place bore upon her with terrible weight.
There was not only the depressing thought that most of the inmates were
there in consequence of their own wickedness or folly, but added to this
the patients were isolated from friends and relatives whose visits do so
much to cheer an ordinary hospital. There were patients with _delirium
tremens_ wandering about the wards in their shirts; there were little
children, some not more than seven, steeped in every kind of vice and
infamy. “I sometimes wonder,” she wrote, in a moment of despair, “if
there is a worse place on earth than Liverpool, and I am sure its
workhouse is burdened with a large proportion of its vilest.”
Some of the best and most deeply-rooted instincts of human nature seemed
to turn into cruelty and gall in this terrible place. One of the
difficulties of the nurses was to prevent the mothers of the babies, who
were still at the breast, from fighting and stealing one another’s food.
They had nothing to do but nurse their babies, and they would hardly do
that. The noise, quarrelling, and dirt prevailing in their neighbourhood
was a constant source of trouble and anxiety. Another trouble was the
mixture among the patients of criminal cases, necessitating the presence
of policemen constantly on the premises. The ex-pauper women, too, whom
Sister Agnes was endeavouring to train as assistant nurses, were a great
anxiety. One morning, after they had been paid their wages, five arrived
at the hospital tipsy; after some months of constant effort and constant
disappointment, the attempt to train these women was given up. Besides
the strain on nerves, temper, and spirit arising from all these causes,
the physical work of Agnes Jones’s post was no light matter. Her day
began at 5.30 A.M. and ended after 11; added to this, if there was any
case about which she was specially anxious, or any nurse about whose
competence she did not feel fully assured, she would be up two or three
times in the night to satisfy herself that all was going well. Her
nurses were devoted to her, and, as a rule, gave her no anxiety or
discomfort which could be avoided. Her only distress on their account
arose from a severe outbreak of fever and small-pox among them, which
was a source of much painful anxiety to her. Miss Nightingale said of
her that “she had a greater power of carrying her followers with her
than any woman (or man) I ever knew.” “Her influence with her nurses was
unbounded. They would have died for her.”
All witnesses concur in speaking of her wonderful personal influence and
the effect it produced. The infirmary began to show the results of her
presence within a month of her arrival. In the three years she spent
there, she completely changed the whole place. At first the police, to
whose presence reference has already been made, were astonished that it
was safe for a number of young women to be about in the men’s wards, for
they well knew what a rough lot some of the patients were; but “in less
than three years she had reduced one of the most disorderly hospital
populations in the world to something like Christian discipline, such as
the police themselves wondered at. She had led, so as to be of one mind
and one heart with her, upwards of fifty nurses and probationers.... She
had converted a vestry to the conviction of the economy as well as the
humanity of nursing pauper sick by trained nurses.... She had converted
the Poor Law Board to the same view, and she had disarmed all
opposition, all sectarian zealotism; so that Roman Catholic and
Unitarian, High Church and Low Church, all literally rose up and called
her blessed.”
The manner of her death has been already referred to. It was in unison
with her unselfish, devoted life. She died on the 19th February 1868,
and her body was committed to the earth of her beloved Ireland, at
Fahan, on Lough Swilly, the home of her early years.
XI
CHARLOTTE AND EMILY BRONTË
IN the quiet Yorkshire village of Haworth, on the bleak moorland
hillside above Keighley, were born two of the greatest imaginative
writers of the present century, Charlotte and Emily Brontë. The
wonderful gifts of the Brontë family, the grief and tragedy that
overshadowed their lives, and their early deaths, will always cast about
their story a peculiarly touching interest. Their father, the Rev.
Patrick Brontë, was of Irish birth. He was born in the County Down, of a
Protestant family—one that had migrated from the south to the north of
Ireland. His character was that which we are more accustomed to
associate with Scotland than with Ireland. Resolute, stern, independent,
and self-denying, he had the virtues of an old Covenanter rather than
the facile graces which so often distinguish those of Celtic blood. His
father was a farmer, but Patrick Brontë had no desire to live by
agricultural industry. At sixteen years of age he separated himself from
his family and opened a school. What amount of success he had in this
undertaking does not appear, but it is evident that he had a distinct
object in view, namely, to obtain money enough to complete his own
education; in this he was successful, for after nine years’ labour in
instructing others, he entered as a student in St. John’s College,
Cambridge, remained there four years, obtained the B.A. degree of the
University, and was ordained as a clergyman of the Church of England. He
kept up no intercourse with his family, and showed no trace of his Irish
blood, either in speech or character. He loved and married Miss
Branwell, of Penzance, a lady of much sweetness and refinement. Their
six children were destined, through the writings of two of them, to be
known wherever the English language is spoken, all over the world. After
holding livings in Essex and at Thornton, in Yorkshire, Mr. Brontë was
appointed to the Rectory of Haworth, which is now so often visited on
account of its association with the authors of _Jane Eyre_ and
_Wuthering Heights_.
Mrs. Brontë’s six children were born in rapid succession, and her
naturally delicate constitution was further tried by the constant labour
and anxiety involved in providing, on very limited means, for the wants
of the little brood. Mrs. Gaskell, in her _Life of Charlotte Brontë_,
appears to imply that, more than is even usually the case, the weight of
family cares and anxieties fell upon the mother rather than the father.
“Mr. Brontë,” she says, “was, of course, much engaged in his study, and
besides, he was not naturally fond of children, and felt their frequent
appearance upon the scene as a drag both on his wife’s strength and as
an interruption to the comfort of the household.” One feels disposed to
comment on this by saying that children ought never to be born if either
of their parents inclines to regard them “as an interruption to the
comfort of the household.” To give life and grudge it at the same time
is not an attractive combination of qualities. Though not much helped by
her husband, Mrs. Brontë was, however, not alone in her domestic cares
and duties; the eldest of the “interruptions to the comfort of the
household,” Maria, was a child of wonderfully precocious intellect and
heart. Her remarkable character was described in after years by her
sister Charlotte as the Helen Burns of _Jane Eyre_. In her, her mother
found a sympathising companion and a helper in her domestic cares. The
time was rapidly approaching when the mother’s place in the household
would be vacant, and when many of its duties and responsibilities would
be discharged by Maria.
The little Brontës were from their birth unlike other children. The room
dedicated to their use was not, even in their babyhood, called their
nursery; it was their “study.” Little Maria at seven years old would
shut herself up in this study with the newspaper, and be able to
converse with her father on all the public events of the day, and
instruct the other children as to current politics, and upon the
characters of the chief personages of the political world.
Mrs. Brontë died in 1821. Maria was then eight; Elizabeth, seven;
Charlotte, five; Patrick Branwell, four; Emily, three; and Anne, one.
The little motherless brood were left alone for a year, when an elder
sister of their mother came to live at the parsonage, but she does not
seem to have had any real influence over them. She taught the girls to
stitch and sew, and to become proficient in various domestic arts, but
she had no sympathy or communion with them, and their real life was
lived quite apart from hers. As soon almost as they could read and write
at all, they began to compose plays and act them; they had no society
bu
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