by Mary Hoban
If Julia thought the gossip might wane after the governor’s death, it did not. In September 1848, she was again the subject of rumours, when Andrew Clarke, the governor’s private secretary, claimed that Julia had told him she wished to marry Annie Baxter’s brother, William Hadden. It did not matter that William immediately denied it, despite thinking Julia was very fascinating and attractive … and more, still the rumours swirled. Julia herself had no thought for romance. She and her family were all in mourning for her grandfather, the former governor, who had died in London. And her two younger brothers were enmeshed in their own crisis which had caused an uproar in Hobart society.
Seventeen-year-old Percy had been expelled from his school, Christ College in Hobart, for allegedly stabbing a fellow student, as had his fourteen-year-old brother, William, who had run away rather than face a public caning for defending him. Julia’s father may have been meek in the face of his wife’s determination to leave Hobart a decade earlier, but when his children’s reputations were at stake, he was a lion in their defence. Just as he had demanded redress from the governor regarding the gossip surrounding Julia, he now took on the headmaster of Christ College, defending Percy against the alleged charge, questioning the harsh treatment that both boys had faced, and demanding that they be received back into the school. They were.
None of this induced a lull in the gossip about Julia. As soon as one rumour died, another sprang up. When it became clear she was not engaged to Hadden, nor ever would be, she was then allegedly tied to a Mr Elliott, giving rise to bets about its eventual outcome. When Elliott left for Adelaide, arguments raged as to whether he was in despair or relieved to go. But Julia was becoming increasingly weary of this constant unpleasant gossip. Only months later, in April 1849, she was reportedly engaged in another flirtation, this time with Captain Charles FitzRoy, aide-de-camp and son of the governor of New South Wales, who was visiting Van Diemen’s Land. No longer bewildered, but certainly angered at the incessant noise around her, she decided to demonstrate her contempt for the gossips of Van Diemen’s Land. Before leaving Hobart to stay with friends, she threw them a morsel, declaring that she was taking herself off to the country to rusticate as a punishment for having gone on with FitzRoy in the way she had. The gossip became even more frenzied.
This fixation on marriage was not something peculiar to Julia’s circle. It was a universal preoccupation, one which drove the narrative of women’s lives, determining with whom, where and how they would spend the rest of their lives. Julia’s father loathed it. He had built a close connection with his children from the moment they had returned to him in Hobart, a closeness witnessed by the ever-observant Annie, who said of him that he was led in the most extraordinarily unselfish manner, wherever his daughters chose to take him! He thought the marriage market trivial and nonsensical, and the mothers of marriageable daughters utterly predatory. He was unwilling to push Julia into marriage and he was also concerned that she might marry simply because the society around her expected it of her. But he need not have worried. Julia knew the world wanted her to marry and would drive her to it, but she also knew about her mother’s folly in marrying too soon. She knew about deception. And she knew, too, that her position was an enviable one and there was no strong imperative to change it.
She lived in comfort at the apex of her society. She was loved and supported by her father. She had the affection and company of her younger sisters and brothers. Occupying, as she did, her mother’s place in her father’s household, she had the independence and privileges of a married woman. At the same time, as a young and beautiful woman of marriageable age, she had the attention and devotion of every man who entered her circle. Why would she marry and surrender all her privileges for a possible life of uncertainty and regret? For Julia, it would require an unusual man to convince her to do so. Such a man arrived in Hobart at the beginning of 1850.
4
An Unusual Man
Tom Arnold’s arrival in Hobart was always going to generate excitement. He had a famous name, he had a remarkably handsome face, and he stuttered. Even in this small, isolated community, the name Arnold was known, some might say revered. Tom’s father, Dr Thomas Arnold, was the revolutionary headmaster of Rugby School, renowned empire-wide for the changes he had brought to English education. He was known, too, for his part in the drawn-out and fierce religious debates that dominated Oxford and English intellectual life from the 1830s. When his son Tom arrived in Hobart in 1850, Dr Arnold had been dead for only eight years, but such was his fame, a biography had already been published. Young Tom was dark, tall, and slim, with a fine, aesthetic face. It was the face of a dreamer, a word that also described his character. His stutter — or his hesitation, as he called it — had been with him since he was a child. It gave him a diffidence, a gentleness, that appealed greatly to those who met him.
Tom Arnold had arrived in Hobart to take up the newly created post of inspector of schools for Van Diemen’s Land. He had been teaching in New Zealand when he met Governor Denison’s secretary, Andrew Clarke, who on his return told Denison about the meeting. The governor was only too delighted to offer the position to the son of Dr Arnold of Rugby, no doubt hoping that some of the older man’s glory might shine in Van Diemen’s Land. It was not the first time that his father’s name had opened doors for Tom, nor would it be the last. He was conscious of this, telling his mother that his father’s name was not only a source of proud and gentle memories, but actually and literally better and more profitable than houses and land. With a salary of £400 plus travelling expenses, Tom had accepted Denison’s offer immediately and made his way to Hobart.
When Julia entered Mrs Poynter’s drawing room that evening in February 1850, she had no idea that something momentous was about to happen. Dancing had already begun and noticing a seat on the sofa next to Andrew Clarke, she made her way to it. Dressed in black — she was still in mourning for her grandfather — and wearing a single white camellia in her black hair, she passed the watchful row of matrons and chaperones ranged along the wall talking convict servants and ailing children. When Tom Arnold entered the room shortly afterwards, he was immediately struck by Julia’s singularly refined and animated face. Clarke, noting Tom’s interest, introduced him to Julia. For much of the evening, they talked and danced — to Julia’s distinct advantage as she danced beautifully — oblivious to all the pretensions, the rivalries, the jealousies ebbing back and forth around them. It was clear to that row of matrons, and to all the young marriageable women in the room, that Julia Sorell had made another conquest. Tom Arnold only had eyes for her, so incensing one young woman that she declared she would never dance with him again for, instead of looking towards her, his eyes were always following Julia Sorell.
This was a match that no one could have predicted, least of all the two most concerned. Julia was all animation and emotion, a woman with a gift for happiness, her eyes full of fire, open to life, seizing upon every variety of thought, feeling or pursuit which life had to offer her, and trying it to the end. She loved society, dances, theatres, and parties. And her exuberance extended beyond people — it embraced the world around her. She loved colour, flowers, gardens, animals too. A bundle of loves and hates: a force, not an organism. When she came up against something she did not understand or something that instinctively repelled her, she accepted her aversion and did not seek to comprehend it.
Tom Arnold was none of these things. He was all inner life, by temperament a scholar, a spiritual wanderer, a man who was often silent, and who stammered when he spoke. And when Tom came up against something he did not understand, when he found mystery, he sought enlightenment and could never be content until he believed he had achieved this. Julia and he were polar opposites.
Born on 30 November 1823, Tom Arnold was three years older than Julia. He had been raised in a stable home, the third child of nine. It was a formidable family: his older brother, Matthew, would become a poet, critic, and essa
yist; his older sister, Jane, a German scholar; while a younger brother, William, would become an educationalist and a writer. The Arnold family moved to Rugby in Warwickshire in August 1828 when Dr Arnold became headmaster of Rugby School. Here he began his radical school reforms — introducing mathematics, modern languages, history, and pastoral care — that would make his name. The school grew rapidly under his regime, but, not content with his educational work at Rugby, Arnold increasingly engaged in the dominant public debates of the nineteenth century — that of religion in particular — preaching his notion of the national ideal, an Anglican theocracy where church and state were indistinguishable.
This immediately drew him into direct conflict with John Henry Newman, an Anglican priest and Oxford intellectual, who, as a leader of the Tractarian movement, wished to reassert the Church of England’s Catholic heritage, in both theology and practice. The theoretical differences between the two men turned more personal when Newman ostensibly queried whether Arnold was in fact a Christian and Arnold denounced Newman as a fanatic. Arnold and Newman came to represent opposing sides in the drawn-out religious divisions that so dominated Oxford and other parts of English life. In an era when the shade of one’s religion mattered deeply, men were revered or reviled for their religious opinions and practices.
After Arnold’s death, Newman gained even more notoriety when he converted to Catholicism and was ordained a Catholic priest in 1845, the most famous and influential of Victorian English converts, but not the only one. Others included Henry Manning, later Archbishop of Westminster and eventually a cardinal, Robert and Henry Wilberforce — their brother Samuel would become an influential Anglican bishop — and the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. Invariably, conflict followed such moves and often families were torn apart, including Newman’s own. Such was the impact of conversion that it inspired even novelists, including Elizabeth Gaskell and Dr Arnold’s own granddaughter, Mrs Humphry Ward.
In Julia’s house, Dr Arnold was revered, not Newman.
While Dr Arnold was forging his name in education and defending the broad church, he and his wife were also rearing their large family. Tom was regarded as a delicate child having survived a near-fatal liver disease at the age of four. Whether because of this or his stammer, he was singled out by his father for special attention. In 1832, when he and some of his younger siblings were recovering from the measles, Tom asked his father to write him, in verse or prose, something to be his very own. His father responded by writing him a verse, part of which reads, Now from thy little Bed thy Smile, How sweet it gleams when I draw nigh … Thy Father’s Love, thou know’st it tru.
When Tom’s stammer continued to trouble both him and his father — Dr Arnold was a loving father, yes, but according to his son Matthew, he was also zealous, beneficent, and firm — a special tutor was employed to help Tom overcome it. It was a fruitless mission. In 1839, while Tom was bowing to Queen Adelaide on her visit to Rugby School, content in his stable, regulated world, controlled and dominated by his father, Julia was watching her own father’s figure retreat as she sailed from Hobart with her mother into an unknown, tumultuous future.
If Rugby played a part in moulding Tom’s character, so, too, did the Arnold’s holiday house, Fox How, in the Lake District. Dr Arnold had taken a strong liking to the area when he visited the poet William Wordsworth and decided to build a house there, on a twenty-acre site suggested by Wordsworth. Julia delighted in Tom’s stories of his life at Fox How, of the sailing and rowing, of the picnics and fishing, and of how on those wet days when the family was forced to remain inside this house overgrown with roses, they would produce the Fox How Magazine, a combination of word and image that described their holiday life.
Unsurprisingly, Julia concluded that Tom’s upbringing was joyful in comparison to her own, but she might have hesitated in drawing this conclusion had she known that in 1831, on the occasion of his eighth birthday, Tom had written, I think that the eight years I have now lived will be the happiest of my life. It was a remarkable sentiment for a child so young, but Tom was always inclined to both the romantic and the dramatic gesture. This characteristic was noticed by his father when, in 1841 on a holiday in France with his children Matthew, Jane, and Tom, he noticed Tom walking up and down on the balcony singing into the night. Romance and idealism would prove a quixotic combination in Tom’s life and many of his later decisions confirmed the acuity of Dr Arnold’s observation.
A year later, while Julia was being reunited with her father in Hobart, Tom, now a student at Oxford University, was burying his. Dr Arnold had been in Oxford to deliver a lecture when he died suddenly from a heart attack. Tom was by his side. It was a deeply confronting death for the sensitive nineteen-year-old, and in an attempt to recover from the shock, he accompanied two of his sisters, Mary and Susanna, on a visit to their father’s old friend Richard Whately, the Archbishop of Dublin. While he was there, Tom fell deeply in love with Whately’s daughter Henrietta.
Although Tom’s years at University College in Oxford appeared on the surface to be happy ones — he was popular, clever, a natural student — he wrote some time later to his sister that these were the unhappiest years of his life. It may have been that, for all its physical beauty, the atmosphere of Oxford was poisonous. In 1842 it was a closed Anglican community. On matriculation and again upon taking their degrees, undergraduates had to subscribe to the Thirty-nine Articles and otherwise testify their loyalty to the established order of things, without much thought perhaps, but in very good faith nevertheless. The religious dissension that had divided Oxford since the early 1830s, the divisions that had pitted Dr Arnold against Newman, erupted again while Tom was there.
William Ward, a fellow of Balliol, was accused of expressing ultra-Catholic sentiments in his book The Ideal of a Christian Church, and the University of Oxford was invited to censure the book and strip Ward of his degrees. On a day of pouring rain, a vast assembly crowded into the Sheldonian Theatre to hear Ward defend his position. Amidst cries for and against, the verdict was solemnly announced against him. Tom was in the thick of the drama, tramping up and down in Broad Street waiting for the verdict, and when Ward left the theatre, Tom saw him slip face down into the mud, his papers and pamphlets scattered in all directions. It was a physical humiliation for the poor man, a dramatic and vivid symbol of the consequences that pertained to anyone who sailed too close to Catholicism.
In this context, Tom, his brother Matthew, and many others in their circle, rejected established religion altogether, and turned instead to writers like Goethe, George Sand, Emerson, and Carlyle, each of whom explored materialism and individuality. Although they were attracted by the same writers, Tom and his brother read them very differently. Matthew, the extrovert, the rebel, the one who delighted to shock, developed a robust and sceptical attitude towards religion and read these writers with a sense of optimism, seeing in them a civilising influence. Tom, quieter, more inward, more emotional, sank into a form of existential depression as he sought something, anything, that might fill the void left by religion. His attraction to Goethe’s young Werther — an appealing, generous, imaginative character, unfit to cope with life — was in part self-identification, but it was also an idealism that filled the void he so strongly felt. By the time Tom had finished his degree in 1846, both Ward and Newman had converted to Catholicism, and Tom had lost his faith completely.
Despite graduating with a first-class degree, the now faithless Tom could not become a fellow at University College where, as was the case in all Oxford colleges, fellows were expected to become clergymen and upon their marriage would move immediately out of college to take up parish life. Instead, Tom moved to London to study law at Lincoln’s Inn. When he realised the law was not for him, his mother used her connections and his father’s name to secure him a position in the Colonial Office. While Tom found this more congenial, he was increasingly depressed by his loss of religion and by a London full of squalor and pove
rty. Unlike Julia, whose life had been lived against a backdrop of clinking chains, marching feet, and the silent struggle of hanged and murdered bodies, Tom was, for the first time in his life, living away from the manicured serenity of Rugby and Oxford. Yearning for meaning and contentment in his life, he began helping the poor, and he asked Henrietta Whately to marry him.
She rejected him immediately. Religious doubts, she said, made him an unacceptable husband to her and an unacceptable son-in-law to Archbishop Whately. Tom was thrown into complete misery. His had lost Henrietta, he was distressed by English oppressions and English orthodoxies, and his benefactor in the public service, Lord Carlisle, considered him remarkably inefficient. Tom decided to flee England and try his hand at farming in New Zealand, a place that had been a part of his mental landscape since his father had bought 200 acres there in 1840. Tom now imbued it with freedom and beauty. It would be his salvation from despair, a place where a man might mold his life afresh.
Having made his decision, and despite his family’s opposition, Tom now looked upon his New Zealand scheme as inevitable. Nothing would deflect him. His mother knew this tendency of his to see everything as black or white, to prefer dismantling rather than reforming. His siblings too knew this characteristic. They called it his stubbornness, but for Tom, changing his mind was akin to tampering with his conscience, and he would always choose his conscience over all else.