by Mary Hoban
When Julia and Tom travelled together for his work, they would stay with her large network of friends and family. Chief among them were Thomas and Catherine Reibey, who lived on the beautiful estate of Entally, near Launceston. Julia grew particularly close to Catherine and would turn to her when in distress, while Tom felt an affinity with Thomas, who had, like himself, been educated at Oxford. On his return to the colony, Reibey had become the rector of Holy Trinity Church in Launceston. They stayed, too, with various members of the Bisdee family — Julia had gone to school at Ellinthorp with James Bisdee’s wife — and, always when they could, they stayed with her old friend Captain Chalmers and his family. Here Julia felt at peace, and in the Captain’s large garden she and Tom played like children, the bright sunshine and the fragrant air of the bush elating her spirits and enveloping her and Tom.
When she was left on her own in the cottage at New Town, her sister Gussie would stay with her. They were particularly close, temperament as much as age drawing them together. Gussie, too, was a belle and shared Julia’s flirtatious style and vivacious embrace of life — those same character traits that Tom was so wary of. Deeply in love he may have been, but he was relentless in his expectation that Julia change those aspects of her nature he did not approve of. During their engagement he had outlined the behaviour he expected from her, and now that she was his wife he was no less forthcoming about his expectations, one of which was obedience. Tom had learned from his own father that the man was the master of all that took place in his home. But unlike Tom’s mother, Julia had never been gentle or yielding. Nor had she ever learned obedience.
Financial pressures arose early in Julia’s marriage. Tom had disregarded all advice from his family and friends that he should wait until he was in a better financial position to marry. Instead, he had forged ahead and was from that moment
always hampered with a heavy debt, the foundation of which was laid when we married, by my furnishing my house — the sodden ass that I was — on credit, and which the bad times which followed (bad for public officers, I mean, who could not dig for gold, and had nothing to sell) so far from permitting me to pay off, rather added to.
Julia had no understanding of what marriage to a poor man might entail. Her father was not wealthy, but his income as a civil servant had enabled him to sustain his household and rear five children in comfort. She assumed that her life with Tom would be similar. He held an excellent position, was on a good salary, and was destined for an honourable career in the civil service. Nor did she have any experience of running a household where her decisions were queried or criticised. Her father had been content with her management of his house, and she expected her husband would be also. She was wrong. Their first disagreement over money surfaced shortly after their marriage.
In Julia’s era, married women were not recognised in law as having a separate legal identity, only the husband had legal status and only the husband could control financial matters. It was his duty to provide his wife with money for all the household expenditure and her own needs, unless he agreed that credit should be used, in which case he paid the bills either when they came due or, more often, when he saw fit. Wives could not make contracts or incur debts without their husbands’ approval. Julia, unused to seeking her father’s approval for her purchases and completely unaware of Tom’s precarious financial position, did not think to seek his permission to use credit. When the bills arrived his anger and harsh words — How dared you Madam — poured over her, and they would remain with her all her life. She recoiled at the searing intensity of Tom’s rage, but when her fright and anger at his outburst abated she determined to continue to manage the household as she always had. There was no other way.
With his characteristic burnishing of reality, Tom, too, was only too happy to put this confrontation behind him and not to concern himself with their debts. It enabled him to paint a very rosy picture for Collinson when he next wrote to him, and although he acknowledged that his old friend’s advice to wait and save some money before marrying had clearly been wise, he told him that his debts were diminishing rather than increasing, and he was happy regardless, for he and Julia understood each other perfectly. Julia could not know then that Tom’s inclination to borrow and her own sense of abundance and reliance on credit would become an enduring narrative in their marriage. Such knowledge only ever comes slowly, inexorably, and most often too late.
Despite the tension that simmered underneath the surface, marriage seemed to suit Julia perfectly, so much so that Annie Baxter noted that she looked remarkably well at the Government House Ball. Within months of her marriage, Julia was pregnant, and she and Tom began planning as much as they could for this momentous change in their lives. Tom’s preparation was relatively simple — he moved out of his study and into the dining room to make room for a nursery — but Julia found these months more fraught and difficult than most women in her condition. She was surrounded by friends and aunts, but with no mother to support her, her husband often away from her, and her sisters less experienced than she, she had to face, and then squash, her fears about the baby’s welfare, her fears about her own capacity to be a mother, and, most terrifying of all, her fears about her own mortality. When Julia was facing childbirth the mean maternal mortality rate in England was estimated to be 4.6 in 1000. (Today that rate is calculated at being 0.1 in 1000.) Tom, too, was anxious, but he placed his faith in the gods — whoever they might be — and they did not let him down. On 11 June 1851, earlier than was expected, Julia gave birth. She survived the ordeal, as did her black-haired, brown-eyed daughter. Named Mary Augusta after Tom’s mother and Julia’s sister, the baby soon came to be known as ‘Polly’.
If Julia expected the birth of their daughter to bind her more closely to Tom, she was mistaken. On the contrary it caused another fierce and divisive confrontation between them. Julia wanted Polly christened. Tom refused to give his consent. Julia was deeply shocked. She knew that Tom was sceptical about religion, but she did not understand that his scepticism not only denied Original Sin and its obliteration through the ceremony of baptism, but all religion. Why, then, had he married her in a church in a religious ceremony?
For Julia, religion was a framework, a set of rituals that she, along with most Victorians, adhered to — Sunday services, christenings, marriages, and funerals — rather like responsible citizens in a democracy today who vote in elections, pay tax, know the main issues of the day, and occasionally, if beliefs are disturbed, march in protest, but unless ‘true believers’, are unlikely to join a political party, stand for election, or volunteer for a substantive role in the polis. She had been reared in a Protestant ‘scriptural’ atmosphere and had been partly drawn to Tom because of his father’s role in defending Anglicanism against encroaching Romanism in Oxford. Since their marriage, she had continued to observe the Anglican rituals despite Tom’s own loss of faith.
Julia was not simply shocked at Tom’s attitude, she was also very frightened by it. She may not have been deeply religious, but she did know that having an unchristened child beckoned divine retribution and threatened an eternity of fire for the child. She would not give in to Tom. This fierce confrontation over Polly’s christening was her first real exposure to Tom’s stubborn adherence to his beliefs and to his understanding of her role as a wife. Essentially, her beliefs were immaterial. He was master of the house, and she must do as he said. For three months, the battle raged between them — so much so that Julia began to believe Tom unstable — before he eventually surrendered, moved not by Julia’s pleas or her fears, but by Thomas Reibey’s intervention. This intense struggle, focused on belief and authority, became another thread woven into their marriage.
As the churning anxiety about her daughter’s soul slowly dissipated, Julia began to delight in her new role as mother, even as her life changed dramatically, shaping itself to the needs of her child. She now only accompanied Tom on his inspectorate trips if she was able to stay
with her closer friends, and she no longer rode, frightened of what might happen to her child if an accident occurred. She was learning that marriage and motherhood brought their own forms of containment, and nothing had prepared her — she was on a trajectory into the unknown.
Tom, too, had changed, following the birth of Polly. He began to voice a desire to return to England, in part prompted by his hatred for the prevailing transportation system, which he believed was putrid. He hated seeing the red flag flying at the signal staff, showing that another ship with convicts was arriving, and he decried its pervasive effects on the colony. He did not want his child polluted by it. He wasn’t alone.
An intense campaign against transportation was underway among the colonists, a campaign that he wholly supported, as did Julia’s father, grandfather Kemp, her uncles, and many more in their circle. Tom claimed that Julia shared his desire to leave Van Diemen’s Land, despite the fact that she was pregnant again, despite her own very unhappy memories of her time in Europe, and despite her unwillingness to leave her close-knit family and wide circle of friends, particularly given her condition. But when Tom believed something, he expected that others would share his view, certainly his wife, and he asked his friends and family in England to keep an eye out for employment for him. When Julia gave birth to their second child, a son in September 1852 — they named him William after her father and grandfather — Tom’s desire to leave Van Diemen’s Land grew stronger.
With no money or a position in England to return to, Tom needed to find an alternative route home, so he proposed that the colonial government send him to England to examine potential candidates as teachers for the colony. Julia thought it unlikely that Tom’s proposal would be accepted — she was always more realistic than he was — but she sensed his growing unease and encouraged him nonetheless. When the government rejected the proposal, she could not know that it would prove to be a pivotal moment in her marriage. Had Tom returned to England at this time, her life may have taken a quite different course. As it was, when news arrived later that year that transportation would finally cease, there was celebration in the Arnold household and Tom’s determination to leave Van Diemen’s Land abated.
Shortly after Willy’s birth, and despite all his protestations to his friend Collinson that his finances were improving, Tom told Julia he could no longer afford the rent on their New Town house and they would need to move. Before they were forced to seek assistance from either her father or grandfather, Governor Denison offered Tom the former Normal School, a substantial stone house, at a reduced rent. It was situated on a spacious block of land, about half a mile from their current cottage, and Julia saw its potential immediately. She was an adept gardener and planted an orchard and grew vegetables on a scale that allowed her to sell the surplus. She also persuaded Tom to buy a cow, which supplied the family with butter and milk. It would not be the last time that her practical endeavours would ease their financial problems.
Julia was happy in this new house, with its bounteous garden, and with her cow. Years later, in the first of her novels — she called it Milly and Olly, code names for her brother Willy and herself — Polly used memories from her childhood to sketch her parents at this time, more particularly, her mother:
Milly and Olly loved their father, and whenever he put his brown face inside the nursery door, two pairs of little feet went running to meet him, and two pairs of little hands pulled him eagerly into the room. But they saw him very seldom; whereas their mother was always with them, teaching them their lessons, playing with them in the garden, telling them stories, mending their frocks, tucking them up in their snug little beds at night, sometimes praising them, sometimes scolding them; always loving and looking after them. Milly and Olly honestly believed theirs was the best mother in the whole world. Nobody else could find out such nice plays, or tell such wonderful stories, or dress dolls half so well.
Tom too appeared content. He was relishing his work, and having just read Joseph Kay’s The Social Condition and Education of the People, he was infused with a messianic drive that absorbed, for the moment, his innate intellectual and spiritual restlessness. He no longer thought of leaving the colony.
But the idyll could not last. Tragedy struck on 19 May 1854, when Julia gave birth to their third child, another son. He was critically ill, and at Julia’s insistence — Tom did not resist this time — the clergyman was called and the child was christened Arthur Penrose, after Tom’s great friends Arthur Clough and Arthur Stanley. Not long after, his little body stopped breathing. Julia was heartbroken. In this era, when the death of a child was commonplace, women were expected to recover from the trauma in silence. They were expected to forget. But Julia could not, no more than the writer Elizabeth Gaskell, who wrote a sonnet to her dead baby, ‘On Visiting the Grave of My Stillborn Little Girl’, or Hannah Macdonald, the mother-in-law of the pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones and the grandmother of Rudyard Kipling, who, although she made no outward show of it, observed the anniversaries of the deaths of her three children every year. Silence, yes. Forgetting, no.
After she had buried her baby, Julia’s health remained poor and her spirits, usually so ebullient, were low enough for both her father and Tom to express concern. Ever so slowly, she did what her nature demanded. She turned out to the world, hiding her grief in a growing frenzy of social activity. She went to more functions and events than she had done for years, the chatter, the sympathy, and the compliments all working to restore her confidence and her spirits. Her father was foremost among those encouraging her, noting, as did many others, that despite children and domestic vexations, she was still the unquestionable ‘Reine du bal’ whenever she made her appearance.
Little Arthur’s death took its toll on Tom too, driving him to once more reassess his life. Essentially an intellectual man, without what his brother Matthew called a still considerate mind, Tom turned inwards, reflecting deeply and interminably about his son’s death. His agonised soul-searching led him to a dramatic resolution. He would return to his Anglican roots, to the religion of his father. Tom would never avow that in mending the broken ties with his father, he hoped to remain connected to his own dead son. Instead, he claimed that he had led Julia astray through his agnosticism and that by returning to religion he could redeem her. Julia did not feel she needed redemption — she did after all attend Sunday services, and she had fought to have their children christened — but she was so delighted with Tom’s return to Christianity, she did not challenge his rationale.
Even at their most divided, Julia and Tom had always shared an intense physical relationship, and it was not long before Julia was pregnant again. Despite little Arthur’s death, she was relatively content throughout this pregnancy, knowing that her next child, whether dead or alive, would at least be christened with no resistance from Tom. She was right. When she gave birth to another son on the 12 April 1855, he was christened, without any arguments, Theodore, after Theodore Walrond, another of Tom’s inner circle of friends at Rugby and Oxford. Less than three months later, Julia would sit down at her desk and write,
I love you dearest Tom most deeply, and in separating from you I shall strike my own death blow, but as things are now it must be so.
7
An Impossible Choice
When Julia wrote those words, she was no longer in the frenzy of fear and fury that had drummed constantly in her since Tom had declared, without any warning or any discussion, that he had decided to become a Roman Catholic. She was in a quiet, sombre mood, exhausted by the futile struggle to comprehend how her life had been transformed in that moment.
When Tom first told her of his decision, she had reacted with a torrent of hate and despair. His words had immediately transported her back to Brussels, a girl abandoned by her mother, in the dark misery of that school where the corridors smelled of incense and sin. He could not possibly mean what he said. He knew nothing about the vileness of Catholics and the ab
surd things they believed in. He could not possibly ask her to live beside something she detested, something her very being revolted against. He would change into something she did not know or recognise. How could she ever trust him again? She would never have married him if he had been a Roman Catholic. Did he not think of her at all in this decision? Did he simply assume that as his wife she would dutifully follow him in his change of religion? He was no better than her mother in his deceit. He could not become a Catholic. She would leave him immediately. He needed to reconsider. He must talk to her father. He must talk to the Reibeys. He must write to his mother. The torrent eventually stopped. Nothing she said moved him.
Julia had been married to Tom for five years, and during that time she had experienced his stubborn adherence to what he thought was proper, what he believed was his role and what was hers, but this was the first time she had experienced his remarkable capacity for a complete volte-face — from no religion when she met him to a sudden adoption of Catholicism. She did not know, and certainly did not understand, that whatever philosophy or faith he adopted had to be followed to its extreme. And for her, there was nothing more extreme than Roman Catholicism. How could her husband have come to this conclusion? Even in his agnostic phase, he had displayed the deep-felt prejudices of his class and caste against Catholics, advising her not to take a Roman Catholic as a servant unless very strongly recommended — altogether you cannot be too careful — and scorning his friend and Oxford contemporary Gifford Palgrave, who had converted, thinking it absurd and Palgrave a goose, believing that if Palgrave fell in with a pious Brahmin, who has still more of the ‘religious life’ than his Jesuit friends, I suppose he will take to Siva and Vieshnoo.