An Unconventional Wife

by Mary Hoban

  Julia was right to be fearful about Tom’s state of mind. In his restlessness, he took precipitous action. He decided he would become a tutor in Oxford, preparing young men for entry to university. The idea had been planted in his mind a year earlier when Newman had put his name forward as a possible head for a proposed Catholic college at Oxford. Newman’s rationale was straightforward. Tom’s name and connections were good, he was a perfect gentleman in his manners and bearing towards young men and boys, and although he was not a good disciplinarian and was a liberal Catholic, he had a simple faith and spontaneous devoutness which was most edifying.

  Although plans for the college did not proceed — the Roman Church did not permit Catholics to enter English universities until the end of the nineteenth century, although some did — Tom decided to seek Newman’s agreement to his going to Oxford on half-pay to explore the idea further. He had still not told Newman that he had returned to his Anglican roots, nor had he turned his mind to how he was going to care for his family on half-pay, when he already found it so difficult to manage on full pay. He was simply desperate to leave Birmingham. As was Julia desperate that he should. She preferred him anywhere other than at the Oratory and near Newman during this fragile period of disengagement. She encouraged him to leave immediately.

  If Julia and Tom were highly unrealistic about their situation, others were not. Matthew was furious. He believed Tom had abdicated all responsibility by effectively setting up his own dismissal at the Oratory and that he lacked the drive to make the tutoring business work. It was an uncertain occupation, paid a pittance, would be a most unpleasant life, and Julia would detest it, he told Tom. He should think instead about a public appointment in the colonies. At the very least, it would provide a secure and stable income. Queensland was the obvious place to look for such an appointment because the governor of Queensland, Sir George Bowen, was an Oxford man who would know who Tom was and would be interested in him. But Matthew insisted that until the Queensland matter was resolved, Tom should stay at the Oratory. Are you absolutely demented that you want to cut adrift before that?

  And when Tom told his brother-in-law William Forster of his plans — he needed Forster to provide a further £500 loan from the family trust fund to start his tutoring business — he, too, was sceptical about Tom’s likely success in Oxford and would only agree to Tom’s request if he could show that he had a satisfactory prospect of pupils. He reiterated Matthew’s advice that he not leave the Oratory until his proposed plan was effectively in place. But Tom brushed aside this concerted opposition to his Oxford scheme, insisting that neither Matthew nor William Forster understood the tuition market as well as he did. Besides, he would be able to get on much more quickly with the book he was working on, and Julia had an extreme distaste for going to Queensland. Tom had clearly forgotten that Julia had also expressed a distaste for going to Dublin. When he was all conviction, nothing, certainly not reality, could divert him.

  Tom may not have obtained a positive endorsement for his tutoring scheme — although in his autobiography he recalled having received some encouragement to settle in Oxford — but he certainly did expect validation when it came to his change of religion. He did not receive that, either. There was none of Julia’s relief or Mrs Arnold’s ecstasy. Instead, Matthew and Forster were cool, almost embarrassed that Tom would become, once more, an encumbrance. Matthew told him curtly to keep an absolute silence on the whole subject, to everybody while the Queensland proposal was being investigated. In the meantime, he should apply as a Catholic for one of the assistant commissioner positions being established by the new Schools Commission, on the chance that they may take one Catholic for the sake of getting access to the Catholic Schools.

  Matthew had one further piece of advice for his younger brother. Do not have any more children. It was a blunt assessment of Tom’s unworldliness and his general incompetence in the art of living. When Tom failed to obtain any of the assistant commissioner positions, even Matthew’s more worldly outlook was tested. Until that moment, he said, he had not understood the extent of the antipathy towards employing Catholics in education, and he now believed that Tom’s employment prospects in England were virtually non-existent. Despite all the advantages that had accrued to him as Dr Arnold’s son, and even if he publicly renounced his Catholicism, his chances of employment were precarious precisely because he had been a Catholic. In fact, changing his religion again would only cause further scandal. If Matthew understood the precariousness of Tom’s position, Tom himself seemed incapable of doing so, and Matthew’s frustration, vented from a distance, mirrored the anxiety, the anger, and the bewilderment that Julia had lived with for years.

  On this occasion, though, even Julia did not want to face the reality that Matthew was painting, so anxious was she to remove Tom from Newman’s orbit and so convinced was she that Tom’s rejection of Catholicism would not only still all his doubt and rage, but would also solve their financial troubles. She did not want Matthew or Forster painting another future, an even grimmer one, and she encouraged Tom to go to Oxford as soon as he could. She agreed to stay in Birmingham to deflect the curious who might wonder at his absence, but even she was left speechless by his quixotic nature when she asked him how she should fend off any queries and scotch any rumours about his alleged defection from Catholicism. His unfathomable response was to do what is immediately best seems the best rule to follow under such circumstances, without paying regard to inferences which people may draw, and even without drawing any oneself.

  As Julia knew it would, the gossip began immediately on Tom’s departure and it surged when she took Willy from the Oratory School and placed him at Rugby, where the headmaster, Dr Temple, had agreed to accept him on the basis that he would now be brought up as a Protestant. Tom had equivocated — the word Protestant stuck in his throat — but agreed that if Willy himself felt no moral repugnance with it, then he would agree. Willy chose Rugby. As soon as she had settled her son at his new school, Julia journeyed to Oxford to visit Tom. It was the first time she had been to this university town and she fell in love with it. And she fell in love with Tom again. Together both spiritually and physically, their relationship was reignited and his letters to her on her return to Birmingham read as if he was courting her again. Your visit was a pleasant little gleam of light, a rent of blue sky between two great cloud banks.

  Back in Birmingham, Julia knew she would not have to dissemble for much longer. After six months, Tom was becoming entrenched in life at Oxford and his tutoring business was growing — he now had seven pupils — as Benjamin Jowett, the Master of Balliol, and the wider Arnold and Oxford networks directed pupils to him. Tom had assured her that he had definitely finished with the Oratory and that his departure from it was an immense gain. She believed she could face anything now, even Newman, who had already challenged Tom about the rumours circulating in Birmingham that he had rejected Catholicism. In a quandary — he was anxious that the Oratory might withhold his cheque, something he could ill afford — Tom told Newman that the rumours were false, although he could not guarantee that his opinions might not change in the future.

  That public change came sooner than either he or Julia had imagined when several weeks after Julia’s return to Birmingham, a notice appeared in the papers, including The Times and the Bristol Daily Post, to the effect that Tom Arnold was no longer a Roman Catholic, that he had returned to the Church of England, and that he was now living in Oxford. In this era, it was newsworthy that Tom, precisely because his name was Arnold, had effectively renounced Catholicism and returned to the religion of his famous father. Newman was stunned, particularly in the context of Tom’s recent denial, and he blamed Tom’s defection entirely on Julia.

  She was, he believed, not only responsible for Tom’s rejection, but also for his unmanageable children. She was a Xanthippe, a shrewish wife, and Tom, although a very good amiable fellow, was weak and henpecked. Newman remembered the abusive le
tter that Julia had sent him from Hobart, and he remembered all her other faults: how, when Tom was received into the church, she had thrown a brick through the church window; how she was still unmitigated when he gave Tom a professorship at Dublin; how, when they came to Birmingham, she used to nag, nag, nag Tom, till he almost lost his senses; how she preached against Catholicism to her children, and made them unmanageable; and how, despite Tom’s large salary, she took care to make him feel he had nothing, and was out at elbows, and had forced him to request a salary increase. But for all his dislike of Julia and his determination to blame her entirely, Newman did concede there may have been other factors at play in Tom’s decision — from his poor instruction in Catholicism in the first place to his sons being offered splendid berths at Rugby — but amidst the blaming game, Newman held that Tom was, if anything, a non-practising Catholic. A fine distinction, but would it be a telling one?

  Julia would have been bemused had she known that Newman held her responsible for all Tom’s actions. She knew, with deep regret, that she held no sway whatsoever over his actions or his conscience. Fortunately, not everyone reacted like Newman. Polly, now fourteen years of age, was, like her grandmother, ecstatic. She could hardly contain her excitement and wanted immediate confirmation that it was true, writing to Julia, My darling Mother, how thankful you must be!

  And Julia was deeply thankful. Now that it was public, there was no need for her and Tom to remain apart, and she could move to Oxford. As she began packing up the household and farewelling friends, she hoped this might be her last move, but if she hoped for Tom to return to Birmingham to help her, he did not. Nor did he return to farewell Newman. Tom wanted the approbation of those he esteemed, not their condemnation.

  Julia was finally ready to move to Oxford at the end of summer in 1865. She was going to live in one of England’s most beautiful towns, an ideal setting in which to renew her relationship with Tom. It was a place where he felt embraced, and where Tom was embraced, surely she, too, would be. Julie needed embracing — she was exhausted. She had borne Tom nine children, eight of whom still lived; she had travelled so far and moved so often; she had fought for her own soul and those of her children. With no cause for vehement disagreement between them, a more harmonious relationship, like that of their early years together, would surely re-emerge. It was a seductive thought.

  14

  A Landscape of Desire

  Oxford was a landscape that lodged in people’s minds, not as a vivid memory, but as an abiding presence. Its honey-coloured colleges, its church towers, its bells, and its meadows all cast an indiscriminate spell. The artist Burne-Jones had thought, as he walked around the colleges under the full moon, that it would be heaven to live and die there. The novelist Elizabeth Gaskell thought that nothing lovelier could be conceived and she would never forget its beauty. Even Mrs Arnold remembered well the enchantment that she had felt on her first visit there. And Tom, too, from the moment he returned, was once more captivated by its memories, its libraries, its stately, imperishable beauty. Enchanting as it was under sunlight and moonlight, in the winter, Oxford could be quite different. Surrounded by miles of frozen floodwater, its air was fog-laden and penetrating, and when at last the floods subsided, the meadows were strewn with rotting river weed and little dead fish, which gave out sickly effluvia in the spring sunshine. Julia was fortunate. She arrived in the summer and she fell in love with it.

  Tradition, religion, learning were inscribed onto this landscape, regardless of season. They were attributes that appealed to Tom, but would they also appeal to Julia with her love of dance and music and gaiety? Oxford was a largely provincial, clerical community where the deep division between religion and secularism, between belief and reason that had in part underscored the schism between Julia and Tom, was now being confronted. The Arnolds arrived only a decade after the University Reform Act had opened up the university to students outside the Church of England, thereby loosening the Anglican hold on Oxford. It was the beginning of what was a very gradual embrace of a more inclusive and secular structure, although another twenty years would pass before non-Anglicans could take up fellowships and university offices, and even longer before women could fully enter its hallowed halls.

  It was only five years since the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species had prompted the famous public debate in Oxford’s Natural History Museum between the Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce, and the biologist Thomas Huxley — the first time Christianity and science were ranged against each other in a public forum. One witness evoked the extraordinary impact this occasion had on its audience when she recorded how the bishop rose to assure the audience in a light scoffing tone, that

  there was nothing in the idea of evolution; rock-pigeons were what rock-pigeons had always been. Then, turning to his antagonist with a smiling insolence, he begged to know, was it through his grandfather or his grandmother that he claimed his descent from a monkey? On this Mr Huxley slowly and deliberately arose. A slight tall figure stern and pale, very quiet and very grave, he stood before us, and spoke those tremendous words — words which no one seems sure of now, nor I think, could remember just after they were spoken, for their meaning took away our breath, though it left us in no doubt as to what it was. He was not ashamed to have a monkey for his ancestor; but he would be ashamed to be connected with a man who used great gifts to obscure the truth. No one doubted his meaning and the effect was tremendous. One lady fainted and had to be carried out: I, for one, jumped out of my seat.

  And it was only five years, too, since the publication of John Parker’s Essays and Reviews, an explosive volume of seven essays on Christianity written by a collection of men who ranged on the more liberal side of the Church of England. Among these men was Benjamin Jowett, the renowned Master of Balliol College. At this point in his career, Jowett was the Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford University, and in his essay, he had pleaded for greater freedom of scholarship, arguing that the Bible should be treated like any other book and not with unnatural reverence. He was to pay for his views. The Church of England threatened all seven essayists with the ecclesiastical courts for heresy, and although such moves were eventually squashed, Jowett was hounded for some time for his beliefs. Oxford was demonstrating that nowhere was immune to the enormous social and cultural changes wrought by the industrial revolution, the growth in scientific knowledge and the extension of the franchise. Julia would meet Jowett both formally and informally over her years in Oxford, sometimes in her own home and those of her friends and sometimes at the dinner parties he held regularly at Balliol. She would come to enjoy a quiet friendship with him and in his turn, Jowett developed both a great sympathy and a great respect for her.

  When, at the end of 1865, Polly, Willy, Theodore, and Arthur all arrived from their respective boarding schools for Christmas in Oxford, the family appeared united at its core for the first time in more than ten years. Polly was ecstatic, writing to a friend that the family was happier in Oxford than we have ever been before.

  In this mood of contentment and optimism, Tom decided to build a house. He wanted a large one to lodge not only his family and servants — a cook, a housemaid, a nurse, and sometimes a manservant were the norm for families like the Arnolds — but also his pupils, so sure was he that they would increase in number. Julia had never, in her sixteen years of marriage, lived in her own home and she had come to loathe the relentless moving, the need to make new friends and say goodbye to old ones. Owning their own home might signify a halt to this. She believed, too, that Tom had finally ‘come home’ — that this was where they would be for the rest of their lives. She did not concern herself with how they would pay for it — that was Tom’s business — and instead submerged herself in the domestic realm. Four children were still in the nursery, and she had to care for Tom’s students who boarded with them and the servants. The house-building would be Tom’s project. She also knew that he was determined to build
. Nothing would deflect him from it, certainly not the question of how, in the insecure and speculative profession of tutor and scholar, he would finance this project. As with so much else, that would be a matter for the gods.

  A year after the house-building began in Oxford, Julia chose Devon for the family’s summer holidays. It was here that Polly wrote her first notable fiction. Lansdale Manor — A Children’s Story, is about fourteen-year-old Edith Lansdale, the eldest of a large, somewhat fractious family, who yearns for her father’s approval. Mrs Lansdale is an invalid full of gentle tender sympathy and love for everyone in the household, her blue eyes shine and her voice is at its sweetest for her husband. Likewise, Mr Lansdale’s manner towards his wife is full of tenderness, with an undercurrent of strong feeling. Like most first attempts at fiction, Lansdale Manor contained numerous autobiographical elements — but fiction is often distorted and exaggerated, stretched this way and that, constructed solely to meet the author’s demands. Writers, even very young ones, probe their desires as much as their reality. The Arnold family on holiday, and Julia and Tom in particular, were something other than their counterparts depicted in Lansdale Manor.

  Tom had borrowed extensively to build the house and to landscape the grounds. And he was not holding back. On its completion, Laleham — Tom named it after the village in Surrey where he had been born and where his father lay buried — was described by Jackson’s Oxford Journal as one of the largest private buildings in the city. Matthew often alluded to the forest destroyed to build it and always referred to it as the palace or the barracks. On that family holiday in Devon, Tom, preoccupied by the slow pace of the house-building and by the riddle of how he was to pay for it, was extremely bad-tempered, and when he decided to return to Oxford early to take on another pupil, Julia erupted into a passionate tirade. All restraint had dissolved in an instant.