by Bart Schultz
spartan, spare building in the Tudor-gothic style of Waterhouse, everything geared
to proving that women could compete on equal terms with men. But Sidgwick
got his friend Champneys to design Newnham in the Queen Anne style: the
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students’ rooms were papered with Morris wallpaper, and his wife . . . insisted that the corridors should have windows on both sides for cheerfulness.
Sidgwick was even responsible for the road called Sidgwick Avenue,
which was built to accommodate the expanding college, though the battle
to get it built put him at odds with his old Apostolic friend Jebb, whose
property was appropriated for the purpose. (M –)
None of this is to deny, of course, that both the Sidgwicks were cau-
tious reformers in the extreme, worrying at every turn that Cambridge
was not ripe for change. If Newnham was effectively a Millian experi-
ment in living, involving various experiments in fostering individuality,
autonomy, and marital friendship, it was therefore just the kind of thing
that could be threatened by excessive public recognition of its radicalness.
And if Mill could have witnessed their sad experience in the s, he
would have reverted to his low opinion of the ancient universities. More-
over, it was in this painful context that Sidgwick took up the business of
the Symonds biography. He lost Symonds, Noel, and Benson in quick
succession, but the death of the first was in many ways the hardest. And
beyond his disenchantment with Cambridge politics, there was the public
spectacle of Oscar Wilde’s ruin, at the very point when he was working on
assembling the biography. His justified sense that matters of sex reform
were being threatened by a conservative backlash surely helps to explain
why he so insistently guided Horatio Brown to ensure that Symonds’s
sexual concerns would be carefully masked to appear as good old religious
agonizing.
Still, it bears repeating that the Sidgwicks were more than “first-wave”
feminists focused on changing such legal impediments to women as dis-
enfranchisement. They clearly did recognize the insidious elements of
domination in marriage, the family, and domesticity that kept women
back, kept them from even thinking of taking up the new educational
and career opportunities for which they were fighting. If they were pre-
dictably restrained and decorous when it came to the politics of the body
and of sex, they were at least engaged in a determined effort to reduce
the pressures to marry and to improve the sympathetic quality of future
marriages. (And given Henry’s ambivalent and limited libido, he cannot
be accused of dominating or brutalizing via sex in his own marriage.) Nor
is it at all far-fetched to think that Henry’s views on marriage had been
shaped by his friendship with Symonds. As he well knew, there were many
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reasons why marriage was not for everyone, why people capable of other
forms of sympathetic development ought to be allowed to follow out their
own processes. On many fronts, Sidgwickian feminism was a complemen-
tary force to Symonds’s Whitmanian challenge to sex law and custom.
As the following chapter will show, this is evident even in the Methods.
Sidgwick was plainly persuaded, with Symonds, that the whole vast region
of sex, male and female, was another in which free and open inquiry had
been quashed by religious orthodoxy and dogmatism posing as science.
How, given his work with Newnham, could he have been anything but an
interested supporter of Symonds and Ellis in their investigations?
And in the end, his work did have the personal touch. Ironically, Reba
Soffer has even compared Eleanor Sidgwick and Newnham to Jowett and
Balliol: “shy, diminutive Eleanor Sidgwick consistently thought of herself
as Henry Sidgwick’s wife rather than as a public figure”; nonetheless,
“warning her graduates that marriage was no substitute for an engaged
life, she forcefully pushed them into public activity. Newnham’s graduates,
like Balliol’s, were meant to succeed not for their own sakes, but for college
and country.” In fact, the Sidgwicks did make a point of getting to
know their students, and Eleanor was apparently rather happy to allow
her appendage to range about as a free critic – a role to which he was
much looking forward as a compromise escape from his station and its
duties. He had been practicing for many years. As one of the very first
Newnham students, Mary Paley (later Marshall) recalled:
Mr Sidgwick was the most delightful conversationalist on any subject. I have
known only one to equal him, Henry Smith of Oxford. Every subject Mr Sidgwick
touched upon was never the same again. As someone said of him: ‘If you so
much as mentioned a duster in his presence he would glorify it on the spot.’
His conversation made him sometimes inattentive to ordinary affairs and one
day when he was helping us at dinner after using a tablespoon for the soup
he pulled out the entire contents of the apple pie with the soup ladle, to our
great delight. Though we were only five he found us rather troublesome. In an-
other letter he writes: ‘There is such a strong impulse towards liberty among the
young women attracted by the movement that they will not submit to maternal
government.’
Eleanor was of course among the early women students attending
Cambridge lectures. And as her best friends were wont to say, she was
not really shy – she was silent “only because she was thinking hard.”
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And she could and did advise her students in a way bespeaking the old
Balliol mode of personal guidance. One of her students gave an account:
I asked her when I might come, and went rather in fear and trembling on Wednes-
day night. I had nearly / hours alone with her, and she was angelic, talking
so much herself. . . . She told me of a good many things I could do in a political way, organising and speaking, etc., but she advised me if I did that, only to do one question – perhaps Education – study it theoretically and practically – try to get on a County Council Committee. . . . But what she really advised me to do was to go on with my work for some time, and perhaps try to write some little thing, because
she said with a view to my doing college work ultimately . . . it would rather stand me in place of a degree. . . . The marvellous thing is that thou
gh she hardly ever talks to a student, she seems to know by instinct exactly what stages of thought
they are all in. I don’t know what people may call her, but to me she seems to be
one of the most deeply religious women I’ve ever met, and one feels able to talk
to her about religion in a perfectly free and natural way, which one couldn’t do if
she was the least out of sympathy.
Such encounters suggest that the comparison to Jowett is judicious,
except that Jowett used to explain that people were wrong to suppose that
he was thinking when he remained silent. The Sidgwicks as a team, an
early example of the academic couple, achieved a similar but more benign
effect than Jowett:
He [Henry] liked the presence of youth all about him again. There can be no doubt
that having him at hand, through a thin partition, to sweeten her intercourse with
the students, as well as to counsel in private, altered the aspect of her daily task
to Mrs. Sidgwick – how much, she was realising when those passages in the Life
were written. She and he dined once a week in hall with the staff and students, and
third - and fourth-year girls were invited, four at a time, to breakfast: those fearful occasions to which old students have referred. Mrs. Sidgwick was “at home” to
the girls once a week, when the master would extract himself from the mazes of
his books to wander about the drawing-room with a teacup and talk to them, or
read aloud from the newest poet. Students could now come to and fro under cover
on the stormiest evening; there was the pleasant sense of being “all under one
roof.” The doors between the halls were open, day and night, and the new rooms
over the Principal’s lodging took in the last wanderers from without – at present.
The spirit of growth was not extinct.
Given the “stupid conservatism” of so many of the male Cambridge un-
dergraduates – including Sidgwick’s nephew A. C. Benson – it is perhaps
not surprising that his increased dealing with independent young women
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students did help stave off his depressive tendencies. When he was not
“boring” Russell and Moore with his one-joke lectures – the lectures that
he hated giving, since he thought the whole practice another worthless
educational encumbrance – he was lecturing to the women of Newnham.
But better still, from his angle, was this opportunity to deploy his sym-
pathetic conversational talents in helping young women feel at home in
the academic men’s club that was Cambridge. Sidgwick the talker still
believed in the value of talk. And he no longer had to worry very much
about making his students too much resemble him – they were not likely
to go too far in submitting to his maternal government. Indeed, in his last
decade he was beginning to think that the students, whether religious or
agnostic, needed rather more skepticism.
Perforce, Newnham was a remarkably well-connected place, largely
thanks to “Nora.” In June of , no less than three of the honorary
degrees awarded to Cambridge were to her relatives: “Nora’s brother and
brother-in-law and uncle” – that is, “A. J. Balfour, Lord Rayleigh, and
Lord Salisbury.” The occasion made for a memorable “Garden Party” at
Newnham:
[I]t was an exciting time, especially as we achieved for Newnham the triumph of
getting all the Swells (including the Prince and Princess of Wales) to come to its
Garden Party. This was partly due to the cordiality of the Vice-Chancellor, who
was, I think, anxious to show that though Cambridge will not give women degrees,
it does not in any way draw back the hand it has held out to them.
We had the Premier, Lady Salisbury, and Gwendolen Cecil, as well as Arthur
and Alice Balfour [staying with us]. It strained the resources of our humble
establishment, but I like having the Salisburys. I think Lord S. is particularly
attractive in private life – one recognizes the style of his speeches in his hu-
mourous observations; otherwise I should describe his manner as simple, gentle,
and unassuming. (M –)
Given the nature of Newnham, its leadership and political connections,
it might well seem as elitist as Jowett’s Balliol, committed to training young
women, if not to go out and rule the world, at least to go out and work
as intellectual equals with the men who were. Was this, then, the form
that Sidgwick’s supposed “Government House” utilitarianism actually
took? Was the Millian and Mauricean ideal meant strictly for domestic
consumption, for the vanguard of English civilization? And even then
only for the fortunate few? Precisely when was the promotion of that
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Millian vision of saving sympathetic friendship and expanded culture an
egalitarian matter, and when not?
The larger political context of the Sidgwicks’ reform efforts is of course
troubling and calls for further investigation. But before moving on, it is
worth adding here that the epistemological side of Sidgwick’s educational
and cultural vision was neither as crude nor as masculinist as some fem-
inist critics have charged. The notions of knowledge and authority that
Henry and Eleanor shared were, admittedly, shaped by what they deemed
the successes of scientific method. But they were also seeking a different
understanding of the forms of inquiry that might be necessary in para-
psychology or depth psychology, covering research on sex and gender.
Indeed, the eclectic, social epistemological form of intuitionism described
in earlier chapters allowed for precisely this type of interpretation and
implementation: much sensitive soul searching was required in the effort
to penetrate to one’s deepest convictions, and much sympathetic listen-
ing was required in order to find common ground, the free consensus of
impartial inquirers. This was especially true in the realm of the “deepest
problems,” the problems that Henry and Eleanor, like Henry and Johnnie,
were so thoroughly devoted to exploring.
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Both the last talkers deal much in points of conduct and religion studied in the ‘dry light’ of prose. Indirectly and as if against his will the same elements from time
to time appear in the troubled and poetic talk of Opalstein. His various and exotic
knowledge, complete although unready sympathies, and fine, full, discriminative
flow of language, fit him out to be the best of talke
rs; so perhaps he is with some,
not quite with me – proxime accessit, I should say. He sings the praises of the earth and arts, flowers and jewels, wine and music, in a moonlight, serenading manner,
as to the light guitar; even wisdom comes from his tongue like singing; no one
is, indeed, more tuneful in the upper notes. But even while he sings the song of
the Sirens, he still hearkens to the barking of the Sphinx. Jarring Byronic notes
interrupt the flow of his Horatian humours. His mirth has somethng of the tragedy
of the world for its perpetual background; and he feasts like Don Giovanni to a
double orchestra, one lightly sounding for the dance, one pealing Beethoven in
the distance. He is not truly reconciled either with life or with himself; and this
instant war in his members sometimes divides the man’s attention. He does not
always, perhaps not often, frankly surrender himself in conversation. He brings
into the talk other thoughts than those which he expresses; you are conscious
that he keeps an eye on something else, that he does not shake off the world, nor
quite forget himself. Hence arise occasional disappointments; even an occasional
unfairness for his companions, who find themselves one day giving too much, and
the next, when they are wary out of season, giving perhaps too little.
Robert Louis Stevenson, “Talk and Talkers”
I. Purity and Suicide
Symonds did not much care for his friend Stevenson’s characterization of
him as “Opalstein.” It mistook the species for the genus, he suggested. Yet
Stevenson had a fine ear for this world of talk and talkers, in which so much
rested with the conversational virtues; the author of The Strange Case of
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Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde knew a dipsychical self when he saw one, and
these were times when he often saw little else. A complex and many-
faceted affair, the frank surrender of Apostolic soaring was not easily
achieved in the larger and often unsympathetic world, even though, as we
have seen, this aspect of the Platonic revival figured in nearly everything