Two days before the start of summer, Caroline, a red-headed baby with an evidently fierce will to live, was born into the prosperous Jones family of the Mayorhold district of the town. For Sarah Jones, a matron of some thirty-seven years, the little girl was to be her seventh and last child. The father, William Jones, was already sixty-four years old and would not live to see this latest infant reach adolescence.
An early nineteenth-century view of the town of Northampton, England (Alamy)
Born just before the midway point of the previous century, William Jones typified not only the upward mobility of the Industrial Revolution but also the relaxed morals of the eighteenth century. There are no pictures of William Jones nor any writings apart from his will, which was transcribed in the legalese of the day by his lawyers. It is probable that he was not even literate, as the document bears his mark, rather than his signature.1 Nonetheless, more than two hundred years later we see a shrewd man with a big heart and a certain joie de vivre, determined on success and with an appetite to enjoy it. He married four times (three wives died in childbed or shortly afterwards; only Sarah survived him), sired sixteen children (at least three died in infancy) and lived seventy years — considerably more than the forty-one years’ average life expectancy of the time.2 There is little doubt that Caroline inherited much of her initiative and vim from her father.
William was just eighteen years old when his first child was born in 1762. He married the mother about six months later. To have a child out of wedlock was not unusual for the working class in the sexually relaxed 1700s. For one thing, it proved the woman’s fertility in a world that considered children both a blessing and a bane.3 If they survived, youngsters were put to work by the age of six, but their birth could also rob a family of its mother, as William could attest.
William began his working life as a farm labourer, occupying the lowest rung of rustic society. Such employment was itinerant, seasonal and paid by the day; a bad harvest or foul weather would mean no work and no money. William was not prepared to accept the poverty of such an existence, and so was constantly on the move, changing jobs almost as often as wives during the next thirty years as he climbed the financial and social ladder. From toiling in the fields, he graduated to shoemaking and then inn-keeping. By the time he married twenty-year-old Sarah Allum in 1791, he was forty-seven years old, owned a number of properties and had become a hog jobber, or pig trader, in Northampton.
Times had changed too, particularly attitudes to women and sex. When William was growing up, the Industrial Revolution was just starting. Of equal importance, the Age of Enlightenment was also shaping society; even in the bucolic backwaters of England there was a ripple-down effect. For much of the 1700s, what was natural was considered veracious, and what is more natural than sex? In the eighteenth century it was widely regarded as a central pleasure, to be enjoyed rather than hidden away. It was also taken for granted that women were less able to bridle their desire and were often responsible for leading men astray.4 The literature of the time, predominantly written by men, backs up these beliefs. “Every woman is at heart a rake,” wrote one serious-minded man in 1739, intent on explaining the cause of unhappy marriages, adding that “As of lewdness, women when they are wicked, generally exceed the men.”5
William, no doubt, would have been little troubled by sexual morality — until, that is, he married Caroline’s mother, Sarah Allum, in 1791. At the end of the eighteenth century, a rolling back of carnal freedom became central to the new evangelical movement within the Christian Church and this in turn gave rise to the Victorians’ more prudish attitude towards sex.6 Little is known about Sarah, except that she was of an evangelical persuasion and very possibly a member of the early Wesleyan Church.7 The flexibility that allowed William to change careers and build his fortune apparently also equipped him to negotiate shifting values.
So, what was there in Sarah to attract a man like William, particularly when she is described by one early biographer as “a clever woman, of quite Quaker-like simplicity in her mode of dressing”? The answer must lie in the rest of the description: “but whose face was dimpled and roguish”.8 It was presumably a happy union, producing seven children in sixteen years, the first three born within just three years, which suggests that the family was wealthy enough to employ a wet nurse.
In the language of the day, William Jones was a “warm man”, a person of wealth, by the time Caroline was born. Maybe more importantly, he was also a very generous one, possibly of his own volition or maybe Sarah’s. Evangelists placed huge importance on charity.9 The leading evangelical minister of the day, John Wesley, had warned his followers that they must help the poor if they wished “to escape everlasting fire, and to inherit the everlasting kingdom”.10 One suspects that Sarah and William did escape the inferno because both were considerable philanthropists. So, it’s likely that from an early age Caroline understood the plight of the poor and that it was within her power to help alleviate it.
William’s mode of charity was far from passive: he was not the sort of man to throw a bit of coinage at a needy individual and walk away, preferring to intervene in a person’s life to some material effect. Indeed, it seems that he was unable to pass a downtrodden waif or stray without interceding — another trait his daughter would inherit. Caroline was still very young when William encountered a broken old soldier and took him home to be nursed.11 The man had lost a leg in the Napoleonic Wars and would most likely have starved without support. In the early 1800s, state-sponsored social welfare, even for maimed veterans, was a concept not yet understood: the deformed, damaged and diseased depended on the goodwill of the community and the church for their survival.
The aged warrior apparently repaid the family in one of the honeyed currencies of the day: storytelling. Having lived and travelled in foreign climes, endured the terrors of battle and witnessed macabre scenes of death and violence, he was able to describe a world unimaginable for a sedate rural family of little education. As well as scenes of combat and privation in Europe, the soldier related tales of the exotic Americas and how Britain had attempted to clone its culture in alien lands. This was probably the first time that Caroline heard of colonisation.
Not long after the soldier departed, William took in another outcast, one who had been harried through the streets of Northampton by crowds pelting him with stones and mud.12 An elderly Catholic priest, a Frenchman escaping the revolution across the Channel, he had been leading a vaguely itinerant life, shifting from one recusant community to another.
In an age when new Protestant religions were emerging in England, Catholicism was still vilified by the government and many citizens. It was therefore a small but highly unusual act for William, a member of the Church of England, to show such compassion to a Catholic priest. The chasm between Catholics and the Anglican English establishment dated back almost three hundred years to Henry VIII’s Reformation. Although never actually stopped in England, Catholic worship — along with basic civil rights for Catholics, such as freedom of occupation, voting and holding public office — was severely curtailed and only grudgingly allowed following a series of Roman Catholic Relief Acts introduced during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. When William went out of his way to save the old priest from the angry mob, there was still bad blood and considerable prejudice between the two religions. William, apparently, had seen enough of life to be interested in the man and not the style of his beliefs; possibly more importantly, William’s standing in the local community was substantial enough to withstand any backlash. The story, told by the essayist Edith Pearson and attributed to one of Caroline’s daughters, suggests that the priest stayed with the family for a number of weeks, again revealing a world outside their restricted view.13 On his departure he blessed the household, making special mention of Caroline, the youngest child and probably his most constant companion during his convalescence.
It is significant that the few stories we know of Caroline’s childhood marry together philan
thropy and religion. As these became her major obsessions, it is reasonable to suppose that they were also what she remembered most of her youthful days and later shared with her children and friends. It is also curious that these stories centre around William rather than Sarah — normally a young girl would have spent much more time with her mother than her father.
The other pertinent memory from her early childhood was an entertainment she devised for herself, a colonisation game, which also addressed themes of charity and religion, with a bit of a twist. She made up the game before she was six years old — about the time her father took in the two wanderers. She described it in detail years later, in a letter she wrote to a friend in Sydney:
I made boats of broad beans; expended all my money in touchwood dolls; removed families, located them in the bed-quilt, and sent the boats, filled with wheat, back to their friends, of which I kept a store in a thimble case. At length I upset the basin, which I judged to be a facsimile of the sea, spoiled a new bed, got punished, and afterwards carried out my plan in a dark cellar, with a rushlight stuck upon a tin kettle . . . I had a Wesleyan minister and a Catholic priest in the same boat. Two of my dolls were very refractory, and would not be obedient; this made me name them after two persons I knew who were always quarrelling . . . at length I put the two into a boat, and told them if they were not careful they would be drowned; and having landed them alive, I knelt to pray to God to make them love each other.14
Caroline’s description of her game provides a wealth of insight into her circumstances and her developing personality. Clearly, she had access to money at a very young age and was allowed to buy herself toys. Similarly, it appears she had considerable leisure time and, unlike her much older step-brothers and sisters at the same age, was not expected to work to supplement the family coffers. Her nearest siblings, Harriet and Robert, four and eight years older respectively, were probably too impatient to befriend the baby of the family. Was Caroline lonely? Possibly, but she wasn’t bored. She delighted in imagining a new world, devising endless possibilities with a mix of religions and a bevy of characters, some based on humorous, cantankerous personalities she already knew, others probably garnered from stories told by the old soldier and the French priest. She doesn’t appear to have picked up any prejudices about different faiths, happily ascribing roles in her game to both Wesleyan and Catholic clerics, with the impartiality of a child who has not been taught to denigrate any other creed. Like so many other little girls down the ages, Caroline was playing dolls; instead of amusing herself with “house” or “dress-ups”, though, she was designing her own domain, establishing rules and settling disputes. It was an early harbinger of what was to follow.
*
Caroline’s father, William Jones, retired from life in early April 1814, just five days after his seventieth birthday. He was survived by Sarah, then aged forty-three, and twelve living children ranging in age from fifty-two down to Caroline, just a few weeks’ shy of six years old. William’s death was the catalyst for Caroline to progress even further from the humble beginnings of her parents and grandparents and would thrust her onto an entirely different trajectory from that of her siblings. It also revealed a conundrum about her background that has never successfully been explained.
Was Caroline the love child of William and a mistress — in all likelihood, forty-one-year-old Sarah Laws, who conveniently lodged just down the road from the Jones family in the Mayorhold in Northampton?15 It may be that, after all, William was loath to forgo the sexual freedoms of his youth for the more restricted ethos of the new century. Possibly confirming the suspicion are records from many years later that show that a Sarah Laws was residing in London with Caroline on the night of the 1851 census, and was described as her “Mother”; that same evening William’s widow, Sarah Jones, was to be found at her home in Northampton.16 If Caroline was actually the bastard child of William and his mistress, then presumably William’s strictly evangelical wife forgave his philandering and accepted the new chick into her brood, like a slightly confused bird nurturing an alien cuckoo hatchling — at least, while William was alive.
Following William’s death, the fledgling was tossed from the nest.17 Without ever apparently repudiating Caroline as her daughter, Sarah Jones sent the child to reside with an older woman in Northampton, possibly even Sarah Laws. The widow may have been aping upper-class families, who quite often sent their children to live elsewhere if the house was overcrowded, or for education. However, given Sarah Jones’s evangelical nature, it is more likely that she was exorcising the misbegotten daughter from her home — particularly because that daughter had been provided for so unusually and so handsomely.
Caroline (as well as her brother Robert) received a substantial individual bequest in William’s will.18 Dated the day he died, the document was remarkably concise for the patriarch of such a diverse, blended family. It proved that he was extremely wealthy: he left £500 cash — equivalent to more than £400,000 today — to be paid to his wife, Sarah, “immediately after my demise”. The oddity in the will, however, was that before any mention of Sarah, or anyone else, it stipulated that thirteen-year-old Robert and Caroline, the fifth and seventh children from his marriage with Sarah, were each to be given a significant property. In Caroline’s case it was a house on Bearward Street (no longer in existence) in Northampton, including all buildings, improvements and rents. At the time Caroline’s thirty-eight-year-old step-brother, also called William, lived and worked on this estate, so Caroline effectively became his landlady. (For his part, the younger William was forgiven all monies that his father had “in the past advanced to or for him”.) There is no evidence of what the younger William thought of becoming his little step-sister’s tenant. One imagines it may have made for some awkwardness at family gatherings.
Apart from various small bequests to Caroline’s other half-siblings, the rest of William’s personal effects and assets and all income went to Sarah, to support herself and the remaining five children from their marriage. Sarah and William Snr’s brother, Plowman Jones, were appointed joint trustees and executors.
It’s still possible that Caroline was simply William’s favourite daughter rather than his illegitimate progeny, and that he just wanted to ensure that she would be financially secure if her mother remarried, in which case her uncle rather than her stepfather would control her inheritance until she came of age (in the early 1800s, only a single woman of legal age or a widow could hold and use income and assets). The bequest would also provide a considerable dowry for Caroline when she married. This, however, immediately begs the question why he didn’t do the same for the other daughters who were also under age when he died — Mary, eighteen; Sarah, sixteen; and Harriet, ten. It is difficult to imagine that William would take such pains to safeguard Caroline’s future, and ignore the claims of the older three. For one daughter, and that the youngest, to be so favoured must have placed great strain on family unity. No wonder she was sent away.
At six years of age, though, what a confusing transformation it must have been. The life that she had known vanished with her father; she was exiled from all that was familiar, and abandoned by the family she had always called her own. One can only imagine the child deserted and heartbroken. Yet she already had some understanding of a solitary existence — it was not so long since she had hidden away down in the cellar to play her made-up colonisation game.
There is only one story that survives from her time with the “older woman” and it is something of an adventure. Caroline and her hostess were sitting in an upstairs room one dark night in the nadir of winter when they were startled by a suspicious creaking from the floor below. Creeping onto the landing they spied an unkempt villain with his foot on the stairs. Caroline and the lady seized large lumps of coal and flung them down onto the intruder’s head until he ran in panic from the house.19 No doubt her hostess led the way, but the story suggests clear thought and steely resolve on Caroline’s part rather than nerves or hysterics: sh
e was acting on necessity rather than emotion. It’s a dramatic and funny tale that she shared with her daughter many years later.
After living with the unknown lady for a time, it’s likely that Caroline was sent to a girls’ boarding school — once more uprooted and hurled amongst strangers. It’s not known which school she might have attended, but there were numerous ladies’ academies in Northampton of varying quality; most were expensive.20 The rent from Caroline’s Bearward property would no doubt have paid the fees and, in all likelihood, a number of extras as well, such as dancing and French lessons. Whilst her siblings and step-siblings received more basic tuition, Caroline’s superior education would enable her to climb the social ladder and, ultimately, build a remarkable career.
Caroline’s days in school would, however, have been ordered and constrained. Female education in the nineteenth century was almost an oxymoron. The upper and middle classes paid some lip service to tutoring young women, but few girls received more than rudimentary instruction. Some authorities even referenced the Bible to justify keeping women in a state of semi-ignorance: “When Eve, the mother of the human race, sinned through a vain desire of knowledge, the most holy God was pleased to punish that vanity,” wrote the Reverend Henry Venn in 1829.21 Reading, writing and basic arithmetic were considered enough to run a household; other lessons focused unashamedly on nurturing those attributes required to successfully ensnare a husband. As one commentator wrote, “There are some exceptions . . . [but] . . . they learn chiefly to dress, to dance, to speak bad French, to prattle much nonsense.”22 Caroline’s prestigious schooling may have been Sarah Jones’s idea, but again it raises the question of why her other daughters did not receive anything close to a similar level of tuition. It may be that boarding school was just another way to keep the child at a distance, and the quality of the education Caroline gained may have been more a matter of luck than design.
Caroline Chisholm Page 2