Significant Sisters

by Margaret Forster

  By that time, fortunate though she was in her circumstances, Josephine had seen a little of that England described in those Blue Books her father made required reading. She knew enough to be aware that not all estates were run as her father ran his, that the beauty of the landscape hid terrible poverty and injustice. The certain knowledge that starvation existed and could be witnessed even near at hand made her wonder if there was a God at all. “I could not love God,” she wrote “who appeared to my darkened and foolish heart to consent to so much which seemed to me cruel and unjust.”6 She felt she was going mad and said she used to shriek out loud for God to come and deliver her. Everywhere she looked she saw the stark contrast between her own life and that of others, between the principles upon which she had been reared and those which governed the world at large. She wrote years later that this made her into a Christian Socialist before she had ever heard the term and that from this period of late adolescence onwards she was no great respecter of “the church” as such.7 She was looking for some other key to an understanding of life than those words spoken by parsons from pulpits which “did not even touch the fringe of my soul’s deep discontent.” Then, in 1850, when she was twenty-two and safely through her period of religious doubt, she met George Butler, aged thirty, a tutor at Durham University.

  The historian J. A. Froude said of George Butler that he was “the most variously gifted man in body and mind that I ever knew,” an opinion shared by all with whom he came into contact. The son of a headmaster of Harrow, George had sown his wild oats early. At Trinity College, Cambridge, he was renowned not just for the effortless brilliance of his Greek iambics but for smashing chimney-pots with unerring aim. He was sent down after a year and spent three more years doing nothing much until he suddenly redeemed himself by winning a scholarship to Oxford where he took a First. By the time Josephine met him he had been on the straight and narrow path of duty and virtue for some time. His popularity at Durham was immense – the boys of University College burned with a poker the words “Butler is a brick” on the stout outer oak door of his room in Castle – and his reputation unsullied. “I have a longing to be of use,”8 he wrote to Josephine early in their courtship. So had she. When George said he disliked parsons and did not want to become one (although eventually he did take orders soon after his marriage) but wanted to devote himself to education she was happy to concur. Together, they envisaged a future in which they would both strive to secure educational reforms. They intended theirs to be a true partnership, and it was. From the moment they were married on January 8th, 1852, in the parish church at Dilston, Josephine and George Butler were that rare thing: a perfect union. As Josephine commented years later, George never had to be asked to consider her his equal because “the idea of justice to women, of equality between the sexes . . . seems to have been instinctive in him.”9

  After their wedding the Butlers went to live at 124 High Street in Oxford where George had been appointed an examiner of Schools (the final degree-examinations). Josephine’s father had made her a present of a “fine, well bred chestnut” and she and George spent many happy hours riding about the woods and meadows of the Oxfordshire countryside. Their first son was born in November. Named George, also, he was from the beginning “very knowing and old fashioned,” wrote Josephine and very like his father. “We find housekeeping hard work,” she confessed, “with small means and prices so high. I pay 22 shillings for a ton of coal.”10 Nor was this worry over money the only thing that disturbed her even though in her personal life she was utterly content. The society of Oxford was alien to her and she missed home. “This pleasant life at Oxford has its shadow side,” she wrote. “I had come from a large family circle and from free country life to a University town – a society of celibates.”11 The trouble was not that she did not like Oxford’s academic celibates but that they did not know how to treat her. Most of them were embarrassed and uncomfortable in her presence and surprised George did not send her away when the conversation turned on subjects they thought unsuitable for her ears. But George had no intention of dismissing his wife from any discussion. There she was, presiding so gracefully over the teapot and “large stacks of buttered teacakes” and there she would stay. The celibates had to accept this but it did not prevent them from being patronizing and superior about women. Josephine, although perfectly polite, found this hard to take and did not always keep silent. She defended staunchly the woman’s point of view on numerous occasions and complained to George of the prejudiced attitudes of his colleagues. George simply shrugged and said it made him feel sorry for them because they knew no better.

  The young Mrs Butler’s activities were not just confined to the teatable. The celibates were startled to see her in Duke Humphrey’s library looking up certain manuscripts to help George prepare an edition of Chaucer’s works based on fifteenth-century sources. It was not, the celibates thought, quite the thing for a woman. They were also uneasy about the trips Mrs Butler made to London to help George, who was Art critic for the Morning Chronicle, prepare a bibliography of Turner’s works, and about her support at George’s lectures for working men. But what really astounded the celibates was the stand George Butler allowed his wife to make on moral issues. When Josephine heard that a young girl was in Newgate after murdering her baby, which everyone knew had been fathered by a Balliol don who had then cast her off, she went straight to Jowett, the Master of Balliol, and asked him to confront the man in question with the iniquity of his behaviour. Jowett refused. Josephine promptly took in the girl when she had served her sentence. With George’s approval, she came as a maid to the Butler household, a constant reproach to the man who had wronged her. “Mrs Butler takes an interest in a class of sinners whom she had better have left to themselves,” commented the unrepentant Jowett.

  But Josephine did not see this girl or those like her as sinners at all. She was beginning to suspect that such girls were victims, that the common view of them as wicked hussies was quite wrong. Their plight preyed on her mind and she found that during the times when George was away her thoughts kept turning to what she could do about it. Although she now had two children – her second son, Stanley, was born in 1854 – she had a sense of aimlessness still which troubled her. “George had to be in London for some days,” she wrote soon after Stanley’s birth. “On Monday evening, feeling lonely, I went in to St. John’s Park and sat there until 9p.m.”12 While she sat she pondered on what she could do to justify her own existence and became depressed at her uselessness. The fact that the Oxford climate, so damp in winter, did not agree with her pulled her down even more and George became worried about her health. Her lungs seemed affected and he insisted she should see a London specialist who alarmed him by saying his wife should never return to Oxford. Fortunately, soon after this verdict, George was offered the post of vice-principal of Cheltenham Boys’ College. In the autumn of 1857 the Butlers moved to Cheltenham where their third son, Charles, was born.

  At Cheltenham Josephine’s health and spirits rapidly improved, to everyone’s relief, but socially she found the place no more congenial than Oxford. She had simply swapped celibates for stuffy county Tories who were censorious of her liberal sympathies and no less critical of her feminist aspirations. As an intelligent wife sharing her husband’s work she fitted in no better. But with four children instead of two – a much longed-for daughter, Eva, was born at the beginning of 1859 – she was more fulfilled in her family life and never again lonely. Then, in 1864, there occurred a tragic accident.

  One evening George and Josephine went out to dinner and on their return Eva, who was in bed, rushed onto the landing outside her room to look down into the hall and greet them. The banisters gave way and she fell onto the tiled floor. George picked her up and cradled her in his arms. Her hair “which had grown very long lately and was of a deep chestnut brown which in the sun flashed out all golden”13 hung bloodstained and tangled. They sent for a doctor and carried her to bed. She did not die for several hours but n
ever regained consciousness. Arthur Butler, George’s brother, who arrived first of the family early the next morning wrote “never did I see more crushing touching sorrow.”14 When she was an old lady Josephine finally managed to write to Stanley that Eva’s cruel death had “a horrible sting in it. She was 5½, never had a day’s illness – healthy, strong, beautiful, our only daughter – father and I just adored her, and in a moment she fell, smashed, her head broken and after hours of awful convulsions she died . . .”15 For the next twenty-five years, she added, she had never woken from sleep without a vision of Eva’s falling figure and without the sound of her head hitting the ground ringing sickeningly in her ears. Eva was buried in Leckhampton cemetery and Alexander Munro engaged to make a bust of her from some drawings.

  The Butlers tried to pick up the threads of their life again but although they managed to be outwardly composed they were both inwardly shattered. Josephine dreamed constantly of Eva running laughing through the garden calling to her – “I dreamed I had my darling in my arms, dying; that she struggled to live for my sake, lived again a moment and died.”16 What made her pain worse was that for the first time in their lives the Butlers seemed divided. They grieved separately. Josephine admitted she ignored George’s pain, that she was oblivious to his suffering and could not allow that it might equal hers. She had a terrible physical hunger for her dead child that tortured her so much that she actually went out looking for a little girl who might resemble her dead daughter. When she found an orphan whose face was similar she “took her up” and had her fostered. The child, called Polly, was only three and soon outgrew her resemblance to Eva but twelve years later Josephine was still visiting “my dear child.”17 The fact that George might be experiencing the same torment never occurred to her until she accidentally found some thoughts he had written down on scraps of paper and hidden together with every pathetic gift Eva had ever made for him – clumsily worked bookmarks, pressed flowers, drawings all tenderly laid to rest. Before she left him to go to Italy on a recuperative visit to Hatty (who had married an Italian) they were emotionally reunited.

  But the agony of Eva’s death in Cheltenham made it imperative to leave the place and in 1866 George accepted the post of principal of the Liverpool College for Boys. He worked very hard there which was excellent therapy and the boys too were happy but Josephine found that she had “many hours every day, alone, empty handed and sorrowful.”18 Unlike George she could find no way to make her pain bearable. “Most people,” she wrote, “who have gone through such an experience will understand me when I speak of the ebb and flow of sorrow.”19 Prayers helped, her sons helped, George’s understanding helped but they did not help enough. She confessed her restlessness and distress to an old Quakeress who advised her to forget her own sorrows in other people’s and directed her specifically to houses where she would find fallen girls who needed the pity and care she was lavishing on herself. Josephine went – “I became possessed with an irresistible desire to go forth and find some pain keener than my own.”20 She found it abundantly available. Beginning in the best philanthropic tradition, she began to visit the workhouse at Brownlow Hill where 4,000 prostitutes and destitute girls were housed, and very soon she had moved onto a far more inspiring crusade.

  A great many ladies of Josephine Butler’s type and class did what she did. Workhouses and prisons were quite used to visitors coming to read the Bible to their inmates, to give them small articles of food and clothing, to encourage them to pray for forgiveness. The authorities could never quite guarantee that these virtuous ladies would not be jeered at and spat on, ridiculed and derided, nor could they protect them from language and behaviour they had neither seen nor heard in their sheltered lives before. It was quite common for the visitors to burst into tears and run away horrified at such ingratitude in the face of their kindnesses. But Josephine Butler rode the storm well. Perhaps the reasons why she did so were not psychologically healthy – there was undoubtedly a masochistic element present at the beginning – but they protected her from panic or revulsion. The most interesting part of her attitude to the inmates of Brownlow House, especially to the prostitutes in the Bridewell (a gaol below ground level) was her ability to express her compassion through physical contact. The girls and women incarcerated there were not pretty specimens. They were dirty, dishevelled and very often diseased and yet Josephine Butler not only allowed herself to be touched but touched first. More than one prostitute remembered how amazed and even shocked she was when Mrs Butler took her in her arms and held her tenderly and kissed her kindly. It was enough to make even the most hardened melt, especially since Josephine was herself so beautifully and immaculately dressed and groomed. It unnerved these women to have such a figure sit down with them and try to pick oakum, as they had to, while she talked. Her talks were always religious, she wanted to lead them to God just as other visitors did, but she also asked them about their lives and how they came to be there and showed sympathy rather than self-righteousness. What seemed to fascinate her most was their resignation, their expressed belief that nothing could change. They might escape briefly from the gloomy, ill-ventilated cellar where she sat with them on the stone floor but they would be back there soon because all that waited for them outside was starvation and the same escape from it leading to the same result.

  After a year of this visiting Josephine had learned a lot. She had confirmed her own suspicions that all prostitutes were not wicked, licentious women who preyed on innocent men who were only seeking to satisfy natural urges. She had become familiar with two distinct patterns in the prostitution trade. The first was found among domestic servants who found a situation, were seduced by a master or son of the house, then turned out without a reference when their pregnancy was discovered. It was then prostitution or starvation. The second pattern was found among dressmakers or shop girls whose meagre earnings had to be subsidized when they fell below a bare maintenance level. These turned to prostitution as a temporary expedient and got out of it when and if they could. In both patterns Josephine detected men as the real villains – men, and the economic conditions of the times. She went with prostitutes released from Brownlow to the quaysides of Liverpool and saw the realities of their situation. She saw the gin shops, the alleys, the backyards where pitifully dressed emaciated girls hung about trying to sell themselves – the penny whores. It was a world as far away as it was possible to get from the popular image of the prostitute as an ease-loving, sex-loving vamp lolling back among the silks and satins of a boudoir bought with her body. But, when Josephine Butler turned to what she could do about it, none of the remedies seemed anything but piecemeal. What was the good of preaching reform if reform did not carry with it the prospect of real escape? What was the point of rehabilitating a few girls when a whole industry existed maintained by the ability of men to pay for the gratification of lust?

  At first, Josephine contented herself with doing the obvious thing – providing a home for girls released from the Bridewell of Brownlow House. She had two spare rooms so she took two girls at a time but within weeks this was so well-known that she was overwhelmed by women “swarming up from the town.” The next step was to persuade some Liverpool merchants to finance a house where girls could be cared for. “The House of Rest is a little hospital of my own I have set up,” she wrote, “for dying Magdalenes . . . It will hold thirteen.”21 The family doctor, Dr Moore, said he would give his services free. He was so affected by his patients that Josephine found she had to keep wiping his eyes behind his spectacles to keep them clear enough from tears to see to examine them. George was a less emotional support. He would conduct each girl to her room as she arrived with grave courtesy and shared the nursing with his wife. With her, he witnessed some miraculous conversions and heard heartrending stories. He also saw the gratitude and admiration aroused by Josephine. Mary Lomax, a girl who died in her arms, tried to express it in a poem: