Significant Sisters

by Margaret Forster

  By the time William had been packed off to China as a naval chaplain Emily had come of age. She was not frivolous, she had no yearning for balls and parties, but she craved interesting companionship and it was hard to come by. Those who knew her well (few in number) were aware that behind the rather stiff façade there was a great sense of humour but others thought her reserved and cold. She was never immediately popular or attractive and because of this apparent gravity she tended to be overlooked in company even though she had decided opinions to offer. It was not that she was shy but that she weighed people carefully and they did not always like it. She was, in fact, exactly the kind of young lady who in Victorian times was particularly trapped by her very common situation. She had neither the means nor the opportunity nor the daring to break out of the mould into which her circumstances were pushing her. She was the dutiful daughter upon whom Fortune had not smiled in the way of beauty or wealth, destined to stay at home and serve. And that home itself was not the home of a Florence Nightingale with all that this implied – it was a remote North Country rectory inhabited by an anti-social reclusive father. The days were long and dreary, the treats tame and sparse.

  Then real misfortune hit Emily. In 1857, her sister Jane developed lung symptoms. Emily was sent to the south coast with her but Jane died the following year. Henry, the youngest of the family, meanwhile fell ill in Algiers. As soon as Jane was buried Emily set out to nurse Henry, accompanied by her friend Jane Crow and chaperoned by Llewelyn on the journey. She nursed her brother devotedly and brought him home but he too died. To complete the agony, news arrived from China that William was also dead. There were only Emily and Llewelyn, the eldest, left. Since Llewelyn was by then a curate in Limehouse it was obvious that Emily must take charge of her heartbroken parents in Gateshead.

  Life for her was suddenly twice as grim as she had ever thought it. The enormous rectory was the very worst place to be stuck with sorrowing parents and there seemed nothing Emily could do to alleviate not just their grief but her own. What was even more cruel was that she had met in Algiers, in the intervals between nursing Henry, an extraordinary woman who had changed her life. This was Barbara Bodichon (née Leigh-Smith), the woman who seems ubiquitous in the histories of so many active feminists in the nineteenth century. Barbara and her sister Annie, who was Emily’s original contact, were the first people, she wrote “who sympathised with my feelings of resentment at the subjection of women.”12 Before meeting them, she had never even heard of Mary Wollstonecraft (with whose books they immediately supplied her); she had thought her outlook entirely her own. Occasionally, she had met other women, like her friend Elizabeth Garrett, who she felt shared her general sympathies, but even Elizabeth was a pale shadow compared to Barbara who said things Emily had never expected to hear uttered. Moreover, Barbara had been amused at the idea that Emily thought her unique. On the contrary, she assured her little North Country friend, there were lots of other women who shared her views and spoke openly of wishing to change the lot of women in all sorts of ways, there was an actual body of opinion existing and a real movement beginning. The excitement Emily had felt was painful. Although she was not at all the sort of person who adored anyone, adoration being quite foreign to her critical nature, she quickly came to adore Barbara. She even approved of how she dressed, in loose flowing clothes with her long blonde hair flowing down her back. She was, in every sense, a revelation.

  Back in Gateshead, the revelation dimmed. Emily wrote to Barbara, who replied, and she drew courage from the correspondence but she felt very remote and isolated again. “On my return to Gateshead,” she wrote, “I went back to parish work but tried to combine it with some effort in another direction.”13 But “other directions” were limited in Gateshead. Everything that was revolutionary happened in London. Emily began a reading class, did a little teaching of arithmetic and became increasingly and miserably aware that not only was there not much else she could do, there was not much else she was equipped to do. Her own inadequacies pressed heavily upon her. She began to wonder which came first, the lack of opportunities or the lack of any training to take them. “It is no wonder,” she wrote, “that people who have not learned to do anything cannot find anything to do.”14

  Up in London that “body of opinion” of which Barbara and Annie Leigh-Smith had spoken agreed with her. Her sole surviving brother, Llewelyn, had himself become interested in the subject. When Emily went to visit him in the spring of 1859 he discussed with her the subject of girls’ education and their possible employment and then Emily went to tea with Elizabeth Garrett at the Leigh-Smith family home in Blandford Square, where Barbara still spent half the year. Here she met, among others, Barbara’s great friend Bessie Parkes, another member of what was becoming known as the Langham Place set because 19 Langham Place was where the newly-formed Society for Promoting the Employment of Women met. It was also the headquarters of the Englishwoman’s Journal which had begun the year before. Emily went to Langham Place and felt she had come home. But of course she had not. Home was the rectory in Gateshead. Home was a monotonous routine far removed from this hive of activity. Back she was obliged to go, but she was determined to take with her some of the enterprise and enthusiasm which characterized the Langham Place set who now counted her as an honorary, if absent, member.

  As soon as she got home, Emily started a Northumberland and Durham Branch of the Society for Promoting the Employment of Women, with herself as treasurer. She also formed a committee of prominent local people which opened a Register for Governesses and began making enquiries about conditions of working for women in the local factories. As well as giving Emily the kind of activity she needed it also brought her a new and valuable friend – Anna Richardson, a highly intelligent well-read woman, who agreed to teach Emily Greek and to attend with her a course of lectures on Physiology in Newcastle. “Though I did not care for the subject,” Emily confessed, “I very much enjoyed being associated with others in learning anything.”15 She also discovered that she enjoyed committee work. The detail and organization which others found dreary and irritating she actually found stimulating. She was a natural committee woman, rejoicing in the meticulous preparation of agenda and circulars, of reports and resolutions. To her surprise she found that not only did committee work bring gratification but it also brought power. She controlled the work of the committee to such an extent that through her familiarity with its workings she exercised great influence. How to use that influence for the best began to interest her. The main problem, she decided, was enlarging the scope of the committee’s work – many more people needed to be informed and stimulated into helping.

  So, in 1860, a year after the committee had been launched, Emily wrote a series of letters to the Newcastle daily paper on the subject of women’s employment. In them, she painted a graphic picture of the typical life of a young middle-class woman: a few years at a so-called “school”, followed by days of “laborious trifling” helping mother. If she did not marry what were the options of such a lady? She could be a governess, keep a school, or do “good works”. Yet in Mr Ward’s Trades’ Directory for Newcastle there were listed 320 different trades and professions open to men. Why was a large proportion of them not also open to women? There was surely no natural incapacity which prevented women administering estates or managing businesses. “It is certainly not easy,” wrote Emily, “to see why it should be unfeminine for a girl to sit in her father’s office under his immediate eye.” As for keeping a shop, surely women were much more suited, so how had men come to monopolize that trade? What was masculine about shop-keeping? Even more extraordinary, how had they come to be hairdressers? “It is scarcely credible though I am afraid true that at this moment,” Emily wrote, “it would be useless to ask a respectable hairdresser to take a female apprentice.” She then tried to examine the objections to widening female employment. They divided, she thought, into two main groups: moral and economic. The first line of argument was hardly worth bothering with.
Women were already in public life and suffering no ill-effects. They appeared at bazaars and all sorts of public functions involving commercial transactions. It was only false notions of propriety which confined their appearances to this category and she appealed to readers to break these down. As for the economic worry, she argued that, far from robbing men of jobs, women would only fill existing gaps and would by working relieve their families of a burden. “No man in his senses,” Emily pointed out, “would keep two or three sons doing nothing.” Yet all over England large numbers of able-bodied girls were kept at home because of the assumption that indolence was “feminine and refined”.

  The letters were well-received and Emily was pleased to have contributed something solid to the general debate. When she visited Llewelyn again and once more went almost daily to Langham Place she felt she could hold her head up at last. She was pleased to be asked to help edit the Englishwoman’s Journal and even more pleased to become actively involved in helping her old friend Elizabeth Garrett gain a medical education. She accompanied Elizabeth on her depressing rounds of colleges and doctors seeking assistance and “cut up her style” in her written applications. But then, as ever, it was back to Gateshead and that familiar, sickening feeling that whatever she did in Gateshead, whatever miracles she performed there, it was all basically trivial. She was thirty-years-old and the pattern seemed irrevocably set.

  But then another family tragedy brought an unexpected change. John Davies had an attack of bronchitis while on holiday at Ilkley in the summer of 1860 and died very suddenly. Within six months Emily and her mother had moved to 17 Cunningham Place in St Johns Wood, London. At once, a new life opened up. Emily, who already had more than a foot in the door was now at the very centre of all that happened in Langham Place. All it had needed was accessibility to make her indispensable in twenty different ways. Nor was her new life all work – her social life blossomed. Every day she helped in Langham Place, every evening she went to soirees and parties, enjoying them almost more than she dared to admit. “The love of dissipation grows on me as I get more at home in society,” she wrote. London was spoiling her. “I feel quite injured now,” she wrote home to poor Jane Crow still stuck in Gateshead, “if I don’t see everything that’s going the moment it comes out.”16 She saw Garibaldi, met Trollope, Holman Hunt, Robert Browning (“nice and genial”) and heard Jenny Lind sing. It was all quite intoxicating and revealed to Emily more than she had ever guessed about herself. She discovered that quiet and serious though she might be she could more than hold her own in discussion, quite losing her habitual reserve in the cut-and-thrust of intellectual debate. She also, for the first time, was able to indulge her passion for people. She had always loved to stare, to speculate, to analyse people’s appearances and now she was provided with wonderful material to satisfy her urgent curiosity. It was an unexpected side to her which amused her friends. Take Emily to a concert and afterwards she would describe the audience, not the music. Take her to an art exhibition and she would record not the paintings but the people looking at the paintings. For such a committee woman it was out of character to find her in love with human beings and not the statistics she was so adept at mastering.

  And yet, for all the pleasure of this new way of life, Emily felt even more anxious about her future. What was she going to do? If she received any marriage proposals or entertained any notions on matrimony as a prospect there is not a whisper of them surviving among her own papers nor do any contemporaries record anyone having designs upon her. In fact, rather the reverse. Most men were afraid, even repelled, by her – not because of her appearance, which was quite pretty when she was young and certainly diminutively feminine in the best Victorian tradition, but because of her sharp tongue and steely eye. Men felt nervous in her presence (James Stuart said later he found it hard to concentrate on lecturing with her formidable person in the room). They had to get to know her very well indeed through working with her before they warmed to her lighter side and at that stage in her life few had done so. At thirty, then, Emily had no marriage prospects and she began to think “what to do for the future in the changed circumstances”. She came to the conclusion that the best thing to do would be “to follow Elizabeth Garrett” and try to become a doctor. But as soon as she tried to do so Emily discovered she was unsuited. It was not just that she was not basically attracted to medicine (neither was Elizabeth Blackwell) but that her heart was not in it. She, who was so determined, lacked true determination in this one respect. She pretended to herself that the real stumbling block was the impossibility of leaving her mother during the training which would require her to leave London but more honestly she also mentioned17 that her diaries for the time reveal a certain listlessness about lessons and that there were unaccountable gaps between them. It was at this crucial point that Emily heard through the Langham Place grapevine that the University of London was about to apply for a new charter. It was her idea to seize the chance this presented and ask for the new charter to include women as eligible students for degrees.

  It was a daring, and in many ways an absurd idea, for where would such women come from? Where were the women educated enough to be able to go on to study for degrees? There were in fact only a handful of girls’ schools worthy of the name turning out girls capable of further study. Emily knew this but since her contact with the Langham Place set she had grown to admire the products of these schools and to wish both that there could be more of them and that they could go further. Her own brother Llewelyn had become involved with one of these schools, Queens’ College, because it had been opened in 1848 by his friend F. D. Maurice, the Christian Socialist lecturer of King’s College. Maurice had begun by giving lectures to oblige the Governesses Benevolent Institution and had felt that the instruction he gave could well do with starting further down the line. The “college” establishment had classes open to girls over twelve, preparatory classes for younger girls and also evening classes for girls already governessing (to which Frances Mary Buss walked each night from Camden). The following year Bedford College had opened on much the same lines.18 Both schools quickly drew to themselves all the intelligent, middle-class girls in London whose thwarted ambition to learn was recognized and approved by liberal parents. Emily envied them in retrospect but her envy did not hold her back either from wishing many more to enjoy what she had not enjoyed or from wanting to raise the sights even higher for those already receiving this privileged kind of girls’ education. She resolved to organize a memorial to all university members and other prominent people. She roped in her mother to help (several surviving letters are in Mary Davies’ handwriting) and wrote to each person individually. “It was thought best,” she wrote later, “not to give my christian name in full Mary Llewelyn Davies [her sister in law] remarking that they’d think it was some horrid woman in spectacles and in consequence I receive many letters addressed to S. E. Davies esq.”19 But in spite of prodigious efforts the application failed.

  Emily, however, was stimulated rather than disheartened by the experience. It seemed to her that there had been a real and impressive response to her letters and that the application had certainly not failed through lack of support. She began to think that possibly she had begun too high – perhaps it would be better to attempt something that appeared more reasonable to the reactionary authorities who would always stand in the way. The new Local Examinations seemed the perfect test case. These were a recent invention, only started in 1858 to provide some external measure of achievement for all the many middle-class schools not covered by HM Inspectors who kept the National Schools up to the mark. Emily saw them as a halfway house to getting entry to degree examinations. There was also the point that the Locals were administered by Oxford and Cambridge Universities and so access to them would influence the other universities.