An Unconventional Wife

by Mary Hoban

  Ten years earlier, Matthew Arnold had visited Birmingham and had been very impressed, describing it as, next to Liverpool the finest of the manufacturing towns. It was not a view widely shared. The artist Edward Burne-Jones, who grew up there in the 1840s, remembered the ramshackle slums, the crude and ugly townscape caused by too rapid industrial development, and the badly nourished inhabitants. Blackguard, button-making, blundering, beastly, brutal, bellowing, blustering, bearish, boiler-bursting, beggarly, black Birmm, its brashness driving him to despair. It seemed not much had changed since fifty years earlier when the poet Robert Southey had been

  dizzied with the hammering of presses, the clatter of engines, and the whirling of wheels, his head aching with the multiplicity of infernal noises, his eyes burning with the light of infernal fires, and his stomach sickened by the filth which fills the whole atmosphere and penetrates every where, spotting and staining every thing, and getting into the pores and nostrils.

  Abraham Lincoln’s consul, Elihu Burritt, thought it black by night and red by day, and even Julia’s own sons complained of never seeing the sun because of the coal smoke.

  By the time Julia arrived, extensive poverty, widespread employment of underage children, and overcrowded and slum-like conditions co-existed with an expanding suburban area peopled by the prospering middle classes, public lighting, sewerage, a library, a museum, and an art gallery. It had the air of a vigorous, enterprising, tumultuous, noxious place, focused on the future, not on the past. Julia was immediately captivated by it, exhilarated by the sheer mass and complexity of the industry that took place in the thousands of small workshops, which seemed to match her own animated, vivacious nature.

  She liked her neighbourhood. She liked the Botanical Gardens at the end of her street. Edgbaston was the most desirable suburb in Birmingham and their neighbours included many of the city’s notable families, such as the Cadburys, the Chamberlains, and the Kenricks. She liked, too, Birmingham’s reputation for openness. This was the place that had seen men such as James Watt, Josiah Wedgwood, Erasmus Darwin, and Joseph Priestley meet to discuss social and scientific subjects, and it had shaped Joseph Chamberlain, the social reformer and politician. And she liked, above all, the city’s religious diversity. Unlike Dublin, it was not dominated by Catholics — here they constituted no more than one per cent of the population — and Julia was drawn to the style and substance of the nonconformist approach to religion and to ministers like George Dawson, who regarded fixed creeds as productive of mischief and who believed that religion should be judged by its effects on practical conduct.

  For all that she liked Birmingham, Julia did face problems adjusting to life in her new home. Prominent among these was her proximity to Newman. His presence was material and constant, and she felt suffocated by it. She was not only living alongside him, but her husband was employed by him, her sons were being educated by him, and, because of his influence on Tom, her daughters were banished. She hated Tom’s adoration of him, which she thought blinded him to the fact that he was being exploited in his teaching position at the Oratory. Julia believed £400 a year is as little as the master of such a school ought to receive. Her antipathy towards Newman was so strong — she would cross the road rather than meet him — and her distrust of his influence on her children was so intense that even they would shrink from him in childish resentment, understanding him to be the cause of their family misfortunes. It was a sentiment shared by her mother-in-law. When Willy performed well in his first examination at the Oratory School, Julia had written to Tom expressing her gladness and adding,

  although I must confess the thought of our son being examined by Dr Newman carried a pang to my heart. Your mother I found felt it in the same way; she said (when I read out to her that part of your letter) with her eyes full of tears oh! to think of his grandson dearest Tom’s son being examined by Dr Newman so you see my own dear husband other people feel these things as well as me.

  But Birmingham was large enough to contain both Julia and Newman, and with the name Arnold, she and Tom were quickly welcomed into its social and cultural life. One of their first friends was Sebastian Evans, the manager of the art department at a glassworks company near Birmingham. His window design for the International Exhibition held in London in 1862 was the reason Julia and Tom visited the exhibition. A Cambridge graduate, Evans was a friend of Matthew Arnold, and he and his wife, Elizabeth, introduced Tom and Julia to their wide circle of friends, including the novelist William Makepeace Thackeray, the scientists Charles Darwin and Thomas Huxley, and the artists Edward Burne-Jones and John Ruskin.

  As was her custom, Julia quickly developed strong friendships with the women in this circle. Two in particular, Charlotte Kekewich and Emily Tyndall, both near neighbours, responded immediately to her warmth and gaiety, and became enduring friends, Charlotte even naming one of her daughters after Julia, and Emily providing a refuge for her on various occasions in the future. They were both there when Julia gave birth to her eighth child in December 1862. Julia’s third daughter was christened Julia, but was immediately dubbed Judy to avoid any confusion with her mother.

  Aside from Newman, Julia’s major difficulty in Birmingham was constant illness. If she herself was not ill, then it was one of the children or Tom. Despite having promoted it to her as a suitable place to live, when he succumbed to a severe attack of lumbago only eighteen months after his arrival even Tom was no longer able to ignore the harsh, cold wind that brought sooty smoke and acid vapours. He began referring to it as that Dismal City, an apt description when first little Frank became very ill with erysipelas, a bacterial infection, and then he himself relapsed, this time with a severe case of scarlet fever. Julia acted immediately and decisively. She sent all the children, with their nurse and one of the servants, to Fox How, she sent another servant to the hospital to be treated, and she took on the task of nursing Tom herself.

  During that long and bitter winter of 1863 she was often up before dawn to light the kitchen fire, to meet all the household calls of the day, and to nurse Tom, whose condition deteriorated when he had a sharp but transitory attack of the same rheumatic fever that he had previously suffered in Hobart more than ten years before. Her Christmas was utterly forlorn, but matters only worsened in the New Year when she received a notice from the Oratory informing her that because of the scarlet fever, Tom could not return to teaching for several months. Consequently, £50 would be deducted from his salary to pay for a substitute teacher. It was a devastating financial blow to a family already under stress. The three boys — Willy, Theodore, and Arthur — were also barred from returning to the school as they were likely carriers of the scarlet fever infection. Julia was utterly dismayed that the Oratory would treat them in this cavalier manner, but Tom was furious and threatened to resign, an unusually aggressive response from this shy, diffident man, and one that so surprised Newman, he reinstated his full salary and agreed to the boys returning to school.

  Tom, in particular, was relieved. His peace was being increasingly disturbed — not by Julia — but by the boys. They were becoming difficult. A year earlier, when he had expressed concerns about his sons’ behaviour to Matthew, his brother had advised gentleness and patience. Neither had had the desired effect. During Tom’s illness, eight-year-old Theodore and seven-year-old Arthur had misbehaved badly while staying with their grandmother at Fox How. To Julia’s dismay, Tom’s solution was that they should board at the Oratory rather than live at home. Tom was a scholar who yearned for peace in order to pursue his own exploration of matters spiritual and intellectual. The material world was always a puzzle to him, and he often found his wife and his children unsettling. Boarding school would remove at least one of these puzzles, but instead of improving, the boys’ behaviour only worsened.

  In March, Theodore was sent home from the Oratory. Only days later, Arthur broke his leg above the knee, and he, too, was sent home. Arthur’s banishment was temporary, but Theodo
re’s was not. Newman categorically refused to have him back at the school, believing his behaviour would not improve. Routine boyish pranks would not have drawn such a draconian response from Newman, particularly given his regard for Tom and his desire to have him as a teacher in his school. It was something more offensive. Theodore, who had reached the age to take first communion, had begun to rebel in his own childish, stubborn way against his father’s religion.

  Children observe, they imitate, they react. Willy and Theodore, and now Arthur, talked on their way to and from school. They knew the reason Polly was sent away from home and only returned for holidays. They knew why Lucy had gone to live with their aunt at Dingle Bank. They observed their sisters reciting different prayers. They heard their parents argue and they saw their mother cross the road rather than meet Newman. These differences were not philosophical. They were material, at the core of life in the nursery and in the household. Unlike his younger brothers, Willy was well-behaved and making excellent progress at the Oratory, yet he, too, determined to give up Catholicism as soon as he could. Theodore had formed the same determination, but, being of a more rebellious nature, was unwilling to wait. When Newman expelled him, Tom had to find another school for him, and quickly. His choice was revealing.

  Allesley Hall was a boarding school near Coventry, some 40 kilometres from Birmingham. The principal was Thomas Wyles, who had established the school in 1848 and had developed what was perceived as a progressive curriculum. He believed that incessant failure often produced a stolid ignorance, a kind of mental paralysis, and claimed that when he dealt with such cases, he had seen intelligence rekindled. Tom was hoping a similar miracle might happen with his sons — he had decided to enrol Arthur there as well. More revealing was the fact that Thomas Wyles was an advocate for unsectarian education, believing that it promoted more intelligent, religious, and happy people. But when the Arnold boys arrived at Allesley Hall, even this advanced educator found them difficult, particularly the madcap Arthur, whom he declared a perfect dare-devil. Arthur was building a reputation for restlessness and mischief, and his behaviour would become more rather than less bewildering as he grew older.

  Polly, too, had grown increasingly miserable at her school at Shifnal, and Julia decided that while Tom was enrolling Theodore and Arthur into their new school, she would go looking for another school for her daughter. She found one at Clifton, but when she sought Tom’s agreement to move Polly, he refused, arguing that it was too expensive. Julia did not give up. She sought the support of Mrs Arnold, who told Tom she would assist with the fees on condition that she should choose the school. But Tom declined his mother’s offer, unwilling to be dictated to by either his wife or his mother. Mrs Arnold reacted uncharacteristically to Tom’s rebuff. Instead of retreating from this marital disagreement, she entered the fray, reminding him that while he could choose how his sons would be educated, he should defer to his wife in matters that affected their daughters. Polly was sent to Clifton. The change wrought its desired effect, and Polly loved her new school.

  It was a small victory for Julia who was now able to turn her attention to Tom. She knew he was struggling both mentally and spiritually. It manifested itself in his increasingly fragile temper, which even he acknowledged was not often what it ought to be. But the vehemence of his outbursts, even after the children were more settled, was new and disturbing, and Julia could only hope, as did Matthew and others in their circle, that Tom would find another position quickly, and they could escape from what had become an intolerable environment. Matters worsened when Julia contracted measles, an alarming diagnosis at any time, but even more so for a pregnant woman, which Julia was once more. She fled in terror to Mary Hiley at Woodhouse, where she knew she would be carefully nursed, but while she was there, Tom’s unhappiness, his increasing difficulties with the Oratory, and his growing religious doubts began to manifest themselves more openly.

  13

  Returning to the Fold

  Julia did not know it, but while she was recovering her strength at Woodhouse, events were unfolding in Italy that would have a direct impact on her life. At first, these events played out as reports from a distance always do — they were read about, thought upon, and then put aside. But slowly through the year they coalesced with her family’s constant battle with illness, with Tom’s feelings of resentment at his treatment at the Oratory, and with his constant, tortured desire for a belief that would unite head with heart, and body with spirit. The struggle for Italian unification, the discord surrounding papal authority, and the continuing fallout from the infamous Mortara case all fed into a growing coolness on Tom’s part towards the Catholic Church. Possibly not even conscious of his own trajectory, he began slowly moving away from the Oratory, yearning all the while for a new landscape. And when Tom was in doubt, he was in great distress.

  As a liberal Catholic, he was directly opposed to those in the Catholic Church who believed that the authority of Rome, the Pope, was unquestionable in all matters, ecclesiastical and temporal, an issue that was, in the face of the secular demands for Italian unification, dividing Catholic from Catholic. If he was looking for signs to confirm his growing disenchantment with Catholicism, Tom found them everywhere. Pope Pius IX’s Encyclical in 1864 had branded modern religious and political trends as secular attacks on the church, a position Tom disagreed with, and, instead of soothing Tom’s growing despair, Newman only fed it when he rejected Tom’s decision to award a book by Ignaz von Döllinger as a prize to one of his students. Tom interpreted this as a sign of religious oppression at the Oratory, as von Döllinger, a German priest and theologian, was one of the loudest voices within the church against a more substantial definition of Papal Infallibility and against the temporal sovereignty of the Pope.

  During this critical period, Newman was utterly absorbed in writing his now renowned Apologia pro Vita Sua, a detailed history of his religious opinions and how they had developed. Unwilling to interrupt his mentor, Tom did not discuss his growing doubts with him. Had he done so, events may have played out differently, but when the Apologia was published, and Tom thought he might approach him, Newman was equally as busy responding to the acclaim his work brought. Its richness, its eloquence, and the power of life and spirit it conveyed, demonstrated Newman’s intellectual breadth and his charisma. It explained why Tom and so many others — Edward Burne-Jones had said that he would have gone wherever Newman had told him to go — were so drawn to him. It also explained why Julia feared him so much.

  Julia had never been able to talk civilly to Tom about his religion, so it was inevitable that instead of turning to her for comfort, he turned to their Irish friend and his fellow convert Josephine Benison, hoping that her unwavering faith might strengthen his. It did not, and when Julia, recovered, returned to Birmingham from Woodhouse, she knew that a fundamental shift had taken place in Tom, a knowledge born of the insight of long habit, so much more reliable than love. She had witnessed his decision to send the boys to a non-Catholic school and she had watched his dissatisfaction with the Oratory grow, but even she was startled that it was something as prosaic as a pay dispute that caused the final rift with Newman and Catholicism.

  Tom had discovered that his equivalent at Rugby received a remuneration in the vicinity of £1600 per annum as opposed to his own package of £400, accommodation and his sons’ tuition. With Julia’s wholehearted support, he felt perfectly justified in applying for a pay increase. Newman’s response to the application was a quick and unambiguous No! Tom’s reaction was equally definitive. He told Newman that he would have to end his connection with the school and would give due notice. Newman naturally assumed this was a resignation from the Oratory and told Tom that it would take effect from April 1865.

  Tom wasted no more time agonising. He decided to return to his Anglican roots. His mother’s response was ecstatic: My own precious Tom. If you knew how your mother’s heart is full of joy too big to be expressed. Julia’s
response was more complex. She felt not only an emotional release, but also a physical one — a letting go. Her step became lighter, and she began to imagine a different future. Now that this profound rift with Tom had dissolved, there could be no further cause for bitter argument. Her daughters could return home, and her sons would no longer be raised in an alien culture. But she had no time to relish this new unity with Tom. Her baby was due, and she left for Fox How to await the birth. She was confident that this physical separation could not dampen the newfound intimacy they both felt. She was again his own dearest darling love and nothing could possibly come between them again.

  A few weeks later, just before Christmas 1864, Julia gave birth to her ninth child and fourth daughter, Ethel Margaret, but this latest birth and the events leading up to it, took an immense toll on her. She was very fragile and she wanted only to be with Tom. She knew he would be overwhelmed by what he had done, and she was fearful that he might be drawn back into Catholicism. She was also desperately worried about their immediate future. Their house was attached to his employment with the Oratory, his contract was about to be terminated, and he had not found an alternative position. And she wanted to escape Fox How. She had always found its sober atmosphere alienating and she was finding her relationship with Polly, now fourteen years old and with her at Fox How, increasingly fractious. She simply longed to be with Tom again, and told him,

  you are worth your whole family put together, in my eyes at all events…Do not think me ill-natured or that there had been anything in the slightest degree disagreeable, but I must unburden myself to you or I should explode.

  Explode. One simple word conveying the toll extracted in balancing her need to speak against the dictum to be silent.