Caroline Chisholm

by Sarah Goldman

  Caroline’s introduction to Archibald’s clan may well have been the occasion when she most clearly displayed the flexibility and liberalism she had inherited from her father — like him she welcomed change with exceptional ebullience — for around this time she became a Catholic. There is no firm evidence as to why she decided to convert, although it is reasonable to suppose that she did so simply because Archibald was a Catholic. Caroline, however, was not a weak-willed creature who could be moulded to her husband’s convictions. Her decision would have been taken rationally and after considerable thought. The precise date and place of her conversion is unknown, but from the beginning she embraced her new creed wholeheartedly and seems to have swiftly adopted the more mystical beliefs and elaborate rituals of the Catholic Church while maintaining her clear and practical understanding of human nature. By converting, Caroline also took another step away from her siblings, yet this does not seem to have brought any recrimination from them. How remarkable that William Jones’s diverse brood would end up straddling three different mainstream religions — Church of England, Wesleyan and Catholic — while maintaining a harmonious family network.17

  Like her understanding of a woman’s sexual needs and vulnerabilities, Caroline’s pragmatic tolerance of all religious backgrounds, developed in childhood, continued to grow following her marriage and ultimately became one of her defining characteristics. Later on, in India and in New South Wales, despite the fears and preconceptions of various senior clergy and laity, Caroline rejected dogma and prejudice while seeking to provide assistance to women of any creed, even those of non-Christian backgrounds, such as often-ostracised Jewish girls.18

  Caroline’s own decision to convert to Catholicism acknowledged her husband’s status as the ostensible governing force of their union, the arbiter of their values. Archibald certainly would have expected his children to be baptised within his faith, making it not just an emotional but an expedient imperative for Caroline to enter the Catholic fold. In doing so, she was conforming to prevailing beliefs regarding the importance of religion in a happy marriage, as echoed in contemporary conduct tomes: “It is desirable that the husband and wife belong to the same Christian denomination; and that the family they constitute may worship in one church,” recommended one such work.19

  Despite Caroline’s enthusiasm for her new religion, the welcome from Archibald’s family and the understanding from her own, her conversion set her at odds with the predominantly Protestant society in which she lived. The last of the Catholic Emancipation Acts had only been passed within the previous eighteen months, finally allowing Catholics the right to sit in parliament at Westminster, and join the judiciary and upper echelons of the civil service. Caroline would have known that the bill had been strenuously opposed in Northampton by the anti-Catholic Brunswick Club20 and by senior Church of England clergy who even petitioned parliament.21 Like most of the country, Northampton was furiously divided on religious grounds. Yet this was her home, the place where she had grown up a Protestant — with little thought of being anything else until she met and married Archibald — and this was the place she returned to with her husband to learn to be a Catholic. There is no evidence that she was self-conscious about her changed circumstances, either material or religious; her emotional resilience was unwavering, giving her the strength to ignore or deflect the prejudices of others. It was a strength that would stand her in good stead some years later in Sydney, when her religion would make many in the colonial establishment suspicious of her motives.

  The newlyweds chose a home in Leicester Terrace, an ideal compromise, being an affluent area but only a few minutes’ walk north of the older, working-class Mayorhold and close to where most of Caroline’s family lived and to the property left to her by her father. Just as importantly, it was an even shorter stroll south from the newly built Catholic Chapel, and around the corner was the home of the presiding Catholic priest.22 The location was a testament as much to Caroline’s improved social position as to her new religion.

  By mid-1831, Archibald had already extended his two-year furlough from the East India Company by a year. Now he sought and was given a further six months’ leave. Obviously keen to be in England for the arrival of his first child, due in early October, he would have been equally concerned about his wife surviving the harrowing experience of childbirth. For Caroline it would be her most terrifying ordeal yet.

  CHAPTER 3

  Life and Death

  1831–33

  Leicester Terrace, Northampton, early October 1831

  Hours dragged by, the pain grew steadily. The others chattered from time to time or ate the meals sent up to them. Now and then, they took turns walking outside or dozing in a chair, but there was no such luxury for Caroline. She lost all track of time; with windows bolted and curtains drawn, there was no way of telling that the night had turned into day and now the day was fading back into night. The intensity of the spasms worsened with every passing minute; it was all she could do to stop from screaming out in terror as the exquisite pain came in waves. She had never questioned her strength of mind, but now she was unable to control the confusion of her aching body, and incapable of concentrating on the priceless reward that awaited her at the end of it all.

  She was trapped in a breathless, dark world. The room, lit only by dull gas lamps and a blazing fire, was stifling, suffocating. Caroline felt she was entombed in a nightmare, eerie with flickering lights. She called out for wine and was given weak tea to drink. The doctor was saying that if the baby didn’t come soon, he would bleed her — he held up a bottle of leeches, the black parasites sliming over each other. She vaguely remembered him saying something about bloodletting reducing fever, but it didn’t seem important to her now, no more than the sight of him scratching the cat with the end of the forceps. The pain had dulled her mind; nothing seemed to make sense to her.

  By now Caroline was all but hysterical. Sweat trickled over her face; her heavy clothes, wet with perspiration, clung to her body. As another shuddering contraction engulfed her, she screamed again, clenched her fists and sobbed. Her strength was almost gone. The agony eased for a moment and she lay back on the damp pillows, closing her eyes during a short but blessed reprieve.

  Finally, the midwife announced that she could see the baby’s head. The doctor poured a measure of laudanum into a glass and told Caroline’s maid to make her mistress drink it as soon as the baby was out. Clutching the metal forceps, he positioned himself at the end of the bed without once looking at Caroline. Then, feeling under the sheet covering the lower part of her body, he located the baby’s skull, positioned the blades on either side of the child’s head, and pulled.

  Caroline could never later even describe the searing pain. She heard screams, but they were so divorced from her own body that she did not realise that she was the one shrieking. She dimly heard the order to push. With one final blood-curdling howl, she felt the baby move out of her body. Exhausted, barely conscious of the activity around her, Caroline had no idea what had happened. She could not even focus on the child. Then she heard a faint mewing and knew it was her baby’s first voice. Instinctively, she held out her hand. “My baby, let me hold my baby,” she gasped.

  Ignoring Caroline’s outstretched arm, the midwife snatched the child away to clean it up. Desperate, Caroline called again for her baby. In response, the midwife came back and tipped the dose of laudanum down her throat. Caroline slipped into unconsciousness, not even aware that her infant was a baby girl.1

  Nothing could have prepared Caroline for labour. Being the youngest child in her family, She was unlikely to have been present at any births, and, as with sex, little information on childbirth was available to women. The scarcity of detail cannot only be attributed to self-censorship by squeamish authors, although without doubt that did play a part. Curiously, in a world where mathematicians had devised calculus, scientists the telescope and engineers the steam engine, doctors and midwives were still guided as much by folklore
and pseudoscience as by genuine medical knowledge. The first reliable surveys were not conducted until 1850, but it’s estimated that close to six per cent of women died in childbirth in Britain at that time; it’s therefore reasonable to suppose that twenty years earlier the risks were even higher.2 Caroline was one of the lucky ones.

  The greatest killer was puerperal fever, an infection transmitted from one birthing woman to another by the midwife or attending physician. It would be another fifteen years before a Hungarian doctor, Ignaz Semmelweis, realised that infection could be prevented if the medical staff simply washed their hands after each procedure. Incredibly, his findings were initially considered so dangerously radical that they were ridiculed and rejected by doctors, who, moreover, resented the suggestion that they were to blame for many deaths through their poor hygiene.3 Similar ignorance extended to other female concerns, such as menstruation. Caroline would have been totally unaware that her failure to bleed for nine months was related to her pregnancy because it was only in that same year (1831) that a French doctor linked menstruation and ovulation. Until then, it was widely believed (amongst a raft of other bizarre superstitions) that women bled monthly because, being intensely sensitive creatures, they needed to dispose of superfluous blood to cool their overheated emotions.4

  Over the next twenty years, Caroline would endure eight pregnancies and give birth on three continents and even at sea, often in primitive, sometimes harrowing conditions, without any apparent lasting damage to her own health. This first birth, though, ended in tragedy — a tragedy that would shape her future. The infant, named Caroline after her mother, died just three weeks later and was buried on Wednesday, 26 October, near her grandfather, William Jones, in the graveyard of the Anglican Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Northampton.5

  Previous biographers have either ignored this daughter or glibly passed over her demise. Certainly, children dying was not unusual in the nineteenth century — some sixteen per cent of infants perished in their first two years of life in Britain in the 1840s and 1850s.6 Confronted with such overwhelming data, it’s tempting to shrug a metaphorical shoulder, but that is to neglect the likely emotional impact on Caroline. The baby was not just another statistic. A young woman devoted to her god, in love with her husband and passionate about her humanity could not lose her first child without the consequences lodging deep within her psyche. She had carried the baby for nine months, had nursed her for just three weeks and within that time had invested her own hopes and dreams in the infant she had planned to take with her as she ventured across the seas. The heartbreak of burying a tiny daughter, one who, moreover, carried Caroline’s own name — a sure sign of not just tradition but also strong maternal devotion — would profoundly affect her. Seventeen years and the births of four sons would pass before Caroline had another daughter. In the intervening period, she would be drawn, almost subconsciously, to protecting helpless and broken young women. She seemed determined to defend other women’s daughters, as if to make up for not saving her own. When she had told Archibald that she intended to lead a life of charitable work, she was still unaware of what direction that would take. The death of her baby most likely helped define her path.

  An early portrait of Caroline Chisholm (courtesy of Don Chisholm)

  It’s hard to know how long Caroline grieved for her child, but little more than two months later she was left alone with her heartache. Archibald was on the high seas, bound for India. They had been married for just over a year, and it would be more than eighteen months before they were reunited.

  A number of reasons could explain why Caroline did not initially accompany Archibald to Madras (modern-day Chennai). After such an extended furlough, it was obviously imperative that Archibald rejoin his regiment as soon as possible; he sailed from Gravesend on the Elphinstone, departing on 6 January 1832.7 It is unlikely that Archibald and Caroline had ever envisaged travelling together. If the child had lived, they would no doubt have wanted her to be older and stronger before undertaking an arduous four-to five-month sea voyage with only limited medical assistance on board. Then, too, Caroline may have needed extra time to recover, both physically and emotionally, from the birth — middle- and upper-class women of the era were advised to stay in bed for at least seven days after a confinement and not to undertake anything more strenuous than a slow, short stroll until at least a month later.8 Caroline would have been counselled against undertaking, within two months of the birth, the rigorous preparations for departure, let alone the 130-kilometre coach journey from Northampton to Gravesend followed by months at sea in an East Indiaman sloop. Finally, there may have been practical concerns of a different kind. Sometime just before or after her marriage to Archibald, Caroline’s property in Bearward Street seems to have been sold to her tenant and brother William Jones.9

  The sale of the property could have funded Caroline’s passage to India in March 1833; it probably also paid for, amongst other things, a curious little side trip that she took by herself before leaving England. Humans are complex creatures and Caroline was no different. At this point it seems that her own inner strength and fervent belief in herself and God may have faltered a little. Perhaps it’s understandable. At almost twenty-five and despite an absent husband, her married state gave her more autonomy than she had ever enjoyed previously; but still her circumstances were challenging. She was living in Leicester Terrace, apart from her siblings and without her husband’s support, grieving for her first child and now facing the enormous challenge of sailing some eleven thousand nautical miles from Gravesend to Madras, on a boat full of strangers, to then be disgorged into an alien world. The prospect, however exciting, was also daunting.

  Probably seeking reassurance, Caroline turned to a prevailing fad, the hocus-pocus pseudomedical technique called phrenology. On 30 January 1833, about two months before she left England for Madras, she visited one of its most famous practitioners, James De Ville, to seek what she would have hoped to be a true reading of her character and her abilities.

  Exponents of phrenology claimed to deduce personality and aptitude by examining the shape and size of bumps on a patient’s skull. In twenty-first-century terms, James De Ville could have been described as a “phrenologist to the stars”: amongst his clients were the Duke of Wellington, Prince Albert and the poet William Blake. With such patrons, his services would not have been inexpensive. Although he was based in London, Caroline saw him in Brighton.

  De Ville’s four-page report on Caroline was not written up until July of that year, by which time Caroline was on her way to India. It was presumably posted to her there, although no doubt De Ville would have divulged part of his findings to her at the time of the consultation. The report reveals that he believed Caroline had an extraordinary memory, a very high sense of justice and religion, would be equally proficient at mathematics or poetry, was cheerful in society, had few but very strong friendships, and was kind and benevolent as far as her means allowed her to be. Most notably, though, in the overwritten and repetitive report, De Ville continually identified Caroline’s organisational ability as her key attribute, describing it as “amazingly powerful, more destined by nature for a Male than a Female head”.10 Obviously the highest of praises.

  The rage for phrenology lasted until the early 1840s, by which time attacks from both the scientific community and religious groups had diminished its prestige.11 Despite that, Caroline evidently gave credence to the report, enough anyway for her to stipulate on the final page of the document that when she died it should be given to Henry, her oldest surviving child.

  If her self-confidence had been dented by the agony of her first child’s death and the eighteen-month separation from Archibald, De Ville’s account of Caroline’s abilities no doubt went some way to repairing the damage. Heading out alone to India, she would need every ounce of her poise and temerity to reconnect with her husband and establish herself in an exotic new environment.

  CHAPTER 4

  India

&nb
sp; 1833–38

  Madras, 4 August 1833

  Clutching the ship’s rail, Caroline strained to glimpse her new home. She was as nervous and excited as a young girl attending her first ball. Little of her anxiety at the moment, though, had to do with arriving in India; what was driving the blood through her body in rapid, spasmodic bursts was the thought of seeing Archie again.

  It had been a long separation, their time apart more than they had spent together as a married couple, and she worried about what might have changed between them. Her heart and her mind were in fearful dispute. Once you are together, said her mind, it will be just like when you were first married: you will both be happy, in love. Her heart wasn’t so certain. When Archie had left England, she had still been recovering from their baby’s death, in mourning, a cold and distant wife. She had seen the hurt in his eyes as she had rejected him, but had been unable to give herself to him then. What would happen now? What would he be thinking? Had he been pleased to get away from a morose, weeping wife? Would he still love her? Would he think she had changed? How would he seem to her? She was twenty-five, but he was thirty-five. Would he have aged, begun to look dull and worn? What if I do not love him anymore, she asked herself? What if . . . ? Her heart harped on, but her mind refused to give in. Now you are sounding hysterical, it argued back.