by Mary Hoban
Mrs Whately wrote religious and travel texts, and her daughters were among those intriguing Victorian women who defied the boundaries of their lives and set out to fulfil themselves in unexpected ways. Only two years older than Julia, Mary Louisa Whately was, according to her sister, an impulsive, hot-tempered, and generous woman — characteristics that Julia warmed to immediately. Educated at home by her parents, and only recently returned to Dublin from her first visit to Cairo, Mary Louisa was assisting her father in his educational programs and other philanthropic works. In 1860, when her mother and younger sister both died tragically in quick succession, Mary Louisa would return to Egypt, where she established schools for Muslim girls — she later did the same for boys — and then a medical mission. She lived mostly in Egypt and in addition to writing an autobiography of sorts, she also wrote fiction for the Religious Tract Society. Her sister Elizabeth Jane had a similar trajectory, although her evangelising work was based mainly in Madrid. Elizabeth wrote biographies of both Martin Luther and her father and also wrote fiction, much of it anti-Catholic in tone. Julia may have been closer in nature to Mary Louisa, but it was in Elizabeth Jane that she found a spiritual ally in Dublin. Another sister Henrietta, Tom’s first love, had married in 1848 and was living in England.
Julia also formed a close relationship with the Benison family from County Cavan in the north of the country. James Benison was a Protestant Anglo-Irish landowner who had married a Catholic woman, but was bringing up all his children, sons and daughters, as Protestants. In this he was defied, however, by his oldest and youngest daughters, Josephine and Emily, who, in 1853 when Josephine was twenty-two years of age, converted to Catholicism. Five years later, in 1858, the Benisons arrived in Dublin with their daughters Tomasina and a very ill Emily. Looking for lodgings in Rathmines, they were immediately attracted to the Arnolds’ large house in Leinster Street, and to Julia’s gregarious nature. Emily thought Julia, such a nice person, but far from worldly wise, an observation borne out when Julia blithely told Mrs Benison that her husband was a Catholic Professor at Dr Newman’s university, information that caused Mr Benison to continue searching for accommodation elsewhere. However, when the Benisons could find no other satisfactory lodgings, Mr Benison put aside his prejudices and returned to the Arnolds where the family took lodgings for £5 per month.
Julia was deeply touched by their plight when she discovered that Emily had been diagnosed with consumption and was dying. She paid every attention to them, ensuring that special treats were given to the patient to entice her to eat a little — today, cook has told me Mrs Arnold ordered her to have a nice little rice pudding at Emily’s dinner hour — and giving her books to amuse her. Despite the tragic circumstances of her sister’s illness and death — Emily died in June 1858 — Tomasina enjoyed the days she spent with Julia and was intrigued by the way in which the religious divide affected the household. The cook had told her that, initially, when Catholics came to dine with Tom, Julia would not join them, but that slowly she had come to like Catholics, although she could not abide converts. Julia was growing so tolerant of the Catholic society around her, the Benisons believed she would eventually be won over, but she was no closer to accepting Tom’s conversion. She continued to see this as a deep betrayal of her, but she might have gained some comfort had she known that her aversion to converts was something she shared with Dr Arnold himself, who had thought Roman Catholics a fair enemy, but converts a treacherous one.
When Josephine Benison, Emily’s older sister, arrived in Dublin to spend some time with her, she, like Tomasina, was immediately drawn to Julia, only five years her senior. But Josephine was also strongly drawn to Tom, and Tomasina’s sketch of him revealed his attractiveness as a thinker, a philosopher, a dreamer, devoid of any practical trait:
There was an obstreperous lock here that Mr Arnold came down to fix but failed in the attempt and afterwards sat with us for a good while. He is very quiet and gentlemanly but has a hesitation in speaking partly from nervousness. I think it is a great disadvantage.
After Emily died, the Benisons returned to County Cavan, but they did not forget Julia’s compassion and friendship in those dark days in Dublin, every few months sending country produce to the Arnold house.
The relentless pressure of child-bearing continued, and each pregnancy was more fraught than the last. When Julia gave birth to her sixth child and her second daughter, Lucy, in July 1858, she was so ill Tom was forced to take her to his sister Mary Hiley at Woodhouse. There she slowly regained her strength — being with Mary suited her more than being with Mrs Arnold or any other member of Tom’s family, and with its beautiful avenue of lime trees, on the edge of Charnwood Forest near Loughborough, Woodhouse was an ideal place to retreat to in times of illness and unhappiness. While she was recuperating, she and Tom wrote to each other often. Their letters expose the love they had for each other pitted against their division over religion, a constant refrain, sometimes spoken about in anger, at other times in frustration, bitterness, or bewilderment.
On Tom’s part, his desire for Julia was often repressed because of her resentment and hatred of his religion. He felt he could not speak freely to her — she would call it cant, he said — and without friends with whom he could discuss his ideas, he was like a tree exposed to the sea blast, one side of my nature which ought to be most expansive fresh and vigorous, is withered crushed and shrivelled up for want of sympathy. Her lack of sympathy and encouragement meant he no longer knew what he felt, what he thought, or what he wished for, causing him to question whether he even loved her. It was a cry of anguish from a clearly bewildered and distraught man who, having delivered his agony up to her and blamed her for it, then pleaded with her that she not let it pain her. But it did.
Julia was full of remorse and self-reproach at the way she behaved towards him — she understood the fault line of their relationship — but she too struggled both within the context of her marriage and in Ireland. She found it, she said,
very hard to think of your going through life without finding the sympathy from your wife which if you were not married you might find from friends; to me also this has been and is I am afraid likely to be a bitter trial, you know dearest that you can no more enter into my feelings and wishes with regard to Protestantism than I can into yours with regard to Catholicism. Still it must surely be a comfort to you to feel that you are living in a country where you can sympathize on Religious matters at all events with the majority of the peoples now in Ireland. I feel that I have no sympathy with the religion of the people and very little with the Church of England as it is there. The sense of loneliness, of intense longing for sympathy is sometimes almost more than I can bear & this often makes me when in my heart I love you most dearly behave towards you as if I had no love for you, but this you know is not the case. Surely it will not always be so there is much in which our natures can sympathize.
Julia’s reflections were also a cry for help. She was, she believed, one of those unhappy people whom God had abandoned and it was an awful thing to despair about one’s future. If only Tom were less reserved, more open, then she might feel he cared for her more. She yearned to be back with him and she longed for him to pet her, their sexual appetite for each other having remained constant.
On her return to Dublin, Julia was determined to modify her behaviour towards Tom, to be more gentle and sympathetic towards him and his Catholicism, but it did not happen. Instead she continued to lash out at him and his religion.
Like most women of her class, Julia lived a busy life, a messy mosaic of children, friends, servants, pets — the children had a pet dog, Fury — morning calls, letter-writing, even jam-making and baking, but always, in the background, was the relentless pressure of child-bearing and an ever-increasing financial strain. By the time she gave birth to her seventh child, another son, Francis (known in the family as Frank), in May 1860, the family had moved to a smaller, cheaper house in Kingstown in Dubl
in’s port area.
Like Rathmines, it too had poor sanitary arrangements and no proper water supply, but it did have the advantage of the sea. Julia loved taking the children to the pier, there to watch the boats and listen to the seagulls, and, in the winter when they could not walk, she could hear from the house storms lashing against the seawall. The smell and sounds of the sea brought her solace in her exile, as did the arrival of the yearly box full of gifts from her Tasmanian family, but nothing, not even her innate optimism, could blind her to their increasingly impoverished life. Julia knew that Tom’s meagre salary had forced the move to Kingstown, but even she was dismayed at just how precarious their situation had become.
The Catholic University, which occupied an imposing eighteenth-century mansion on the south side of St Stephen’s Green, was small and struggling, and Tom had been desperately trying to supplement his income: tutoring private pupils, writing reviews and essays for various journals which paid, writing a textbook — his A Manual of English Literature, Historical and Critical, published in 1862 became an enduring, standard textbook — and doing intermittent examining work for the Civil Service Commission, which was work his old friend Arthur Clough had found for him, and which paid well.
Julia, too, was doing all she could to supplement Tom’s income by caring for the lodgers and student boarders living with them. And both their families were assisting them, particularly Jane and William Forster and, after her marriage, Julia’s sister Gussie and her husband James Dunn, the managing director of the Commercial Bank in Hobart. But it was not enough.
Tom borrowed money from Clough and then, when that ran out, tried to sell his father’s land in New Zealand. This came to a standstill — the land could only be sold at his mother’s death — so he asked his brother Matthew, and his friends in England, to keep an eye out for possible positions that might suit him. He was, he said, living on starvation pitch.
Conscious of Tom’s financial incompetence and despite knowing it would be ignored, members of his family continued to proffer advice. Mrs Arnold expressed herself most eloquently, and often, on the fact that his income and expenditure needed to meet. She did not mince her words, telling him that his circumstances were not exceptional, that living without debt was practised every day by numerous families who, like Tom, were bringing up and educating children. Quite simply, he had to adjust his expenditure to his income, and if he did not, he would always be in trouble, always more or less dependent. She also stressed the need for unanimity between him and Julia if the necessary self-denial and good management was to be achieved. Matthew was also critical of Tom’s incapacity to live within his means, and although he knew that Tom was unable to face reality and adapt to it, he had also come to the conclusion that Julia was equally financially unrealistic. He advised them to live in lodgings rather than a house as that would at the very least spare them the expense of both servants and furnishings, items which swallowed up small incomes.
Julia thought it utterly provoking that Matthew, with £1600 a year and fewer children, should preach to them about living more carefully, but her position was difficult. She was completely dependent upon Tom to provide her with the money she required for all the household and her own expenses. Even if she had money of her own, as a married woman, she could not control it. And Tom would not cede her any control over their affairs. It was, he said, his duty, and his alone, as the head of the household, to manage their finances, just as it was his duty to determine their religion. The result was a constant cry from Julia. It was there like a moaning wind that intermittently gusted into a roar. On one occasion when he was visiting England, she pleaded with him:
You must send me some more money as I have none left and the servants’ board the wages and the washing runs away with a good deal besides which I have been buying both bread and butter and some meat. Sarah McCabe came down yesterday bringing with her a pair of splendid ducks for which I am to pay 2 shillings 4 fowls for which I am to pay 10d a piece 2 dozen of fresh eggs at 9 pence a dozen 2 lbs of butter at a shilling a lb and 12 quarts of gooseberries at three half-pence a quart. I shall have to pay for these on Tuesday so I wish you would send me a cheque. You will I am afraid think that I am writing a good deal about money but I really cannot help it.
With little or no cash in hand, Julia purchased on account or credit, a pattern of payment that she had begun surreptitiously in Hobart, and which she now continued in Dublin. Tom inveighed against it, but he provided no alternative, and although Julia could find no protection from his fury at what he called her ‘extravagance’, she had not yet reached the point of wishing that she and her children were in their graves. That was the desperate conclusion reached by one of her contemporaries, Mrs Karl Marx, who was struggling with her husband’s financial insecurity. Marx was, like Tom, juggling accumulated debt and insufficient income and constantly appealing to others to support him. There was one singular difference, though. Marx was aware of the suffering this caused his wife and could not blame her for feeling as she did, for as he acknowledged, the humiliations, tortures and horrors that have to be gotten though in this situation are in fact indescribable. Tom would not acknowledge the same to Julia.
At the end of 1860, while she was still nursing Frank, Julia received a letter from her brother Percy informing her of her father’s sudden death in Hobart. Having always held onto the hope of seeing him again, she was almost maddened by the thought that she would never look upon his dear face again in this world. She and her father had shared a particular closeness, forged in part by her assumption of her mother’s role, and her father had felt her absence with a sharp poignancy when she had left Hobart four years earlier. Even Gussie had remarked upon it, saying how much he missed Julia and her children particularly of a Sunday when instead of going out to see you as he used to do he sits by the fire reading & we can’t get him out for a walk which I am sure would do him good. Reading Percy’s letter, Julia felt her exile deeply, believing she would never be happy again and only wanting to be with her younger brothers and sisters to share her grief with them.
Although Percy’s description of her father’s last hours was heart-rending, Julia was able to derive some comfort from knowing that Ada had been with him when he died. And she felt consoled, too, by the way in which the Hobart community had revealed the enormous respect and love they felt for him. All the Public Offices and many of Hobart’s shops had closed for his funeral, and the Roman Catholic bishop had asked his family for permission to toll the bell for the death of one so esteemed.
Julia’s own vulnerability at this time was subsumed by her distress for Ada, who had neither husband nor children to comfort her, and who was now without a home, the grim prospect facing many unmarried daughters when their fathers died. William Sorell had died intestate and so his estate was to be divided among all his children, which meant the house had to be sold. With no means to establish her own home and with little or no opportunity to become independent, Ada was completely beholden to her family. She, at least, was among the fortunate, for Gussie and James insisted she live with them, a prospect that delighted her. William Sorell’s estate was not a large one, and Julia was left about £170. That, and a lock of his hair.
Leaving Tom to look after the children, Julia went to England, in the hope that it might distance herself from her grief. As a way of further diverting her, Tom wrote her long reports about the Yelverton case, which was enthralling the whole of Dublin, and Tom in particular. Clearly, he imagined that Julia might find some comfort in its riveting exposition of the religious intolerance between Protestants and Catholics. Theresa Longworth, an English Catholic, and the Hon. William Charles Yelverton, later 4th Viscount Avonmore, an Irish Protestant, had been lovers since their meeting in 1852. They had neither married nor lived together, as Charles had promised his family he would not marry a Catholic, and Theresa would not live with Charles without a Catholic marriage ceremony. Eventually, Charles reneged on his promise to
his family, and he and Theresa were married secretly by a Catholic priest in August 1857, although, as the law stood, any marriage between a Catholic and a Protestant performed by a Catholic priest was considered null and void. One year later, Theresa had suffered a miscarriage, and Charles had met Emily Forbes. When Theresa refused Charles’s plea that she give up her status as his wife and emigrate to New Zealand, he proceeded with his plan to marry Emily in Edinburgh, prompting Theresa to sue him for maintenance in Dublin.
In one of his letters Tom told Julia that
Nothing is talked of here but the Yelverton trial, such interest and excitement did not exist even, I was told by a gentlemen yesterday, at the State trial of O’Connell. The gentleman is an unprincipled rip, and the lady an artful schemer, who, I confess I think, (at least unless his evidence is a tissue of lies) has over-reached herself and been ruined in the endeavour to hook him. They are both very clever people, and that makes the trial all the more interesting. The popular sympathy on her part is unbounded; crowds assemble every morning round the Gresham to cheer her as she goes down to court; and Yelverton was one day hooted out of Jude’s; yet I doubt if, in the present state of the law, the Judge will not be obliged to direct the jury to find for the defendant.