by Mary Hoban
Tom, incensed and deeply resentful at her behaviour, left. When he reached Oxford, he sat down and wrote her a long letter in which he admitted that he had been more cantankerous than the situation warranted, but he brushed that aside and compared the burning devotion he had for her with the mere affection she had for him. Why, he asked, did she not think of his anxiety and worry, and why did she not consider the impact of her behaviour on the children?
Does it never strike you that many of our children have come to an age at which things that happen in their home remain vividly impressed in the memory, and are recalled, either with pleasure or pain, pride or shame, in after life?
Now that religion no longer separated them, a deeper, more pervasive division was finally exposed. Tom wanted Julia’s submission in all things. It was central to his definition of marriage, and of himself. Such a view of marriage and a wife’s role was not unusual and Tom was like any other man in his circle, even the most progressive of whom understood the limitations placed on women, yet believed that they must be adhered to. Mandell Creighton, interested in women’s education and one of the first to admit women to his lectures in Oxford in the 1870s, wrote to his future wife Louise that while he would always have enough to do — the practical side of life he called it — which would be out of her reach, her whole sphere would always be within his reach and knowledge, and she must take on trust many things that I do: if I am wrong, you can slowly convince me; but it will not be wise of you to lay orders on me to desist.
What was unusual, and the cause of this deep rupture between them, was not Tom’s attitude to marriage, but Julia’s. She was simply unwilling to submit to her husband. No amount of advice would change her attitude. Both Bishop Nixon and Mrs Arnold had spoken to her deliberately, and strongly, about her wifely duty to make a peaceful home and be content under Tom’s guiding spirit. She might have succumbed had Tom been a wise and humorous teacher, but from the beginning, he had tried to change her, to make her something she was not. And when he demanded that she convert to Catholicism, her antagonism towards him had turned to steel. She felt her own soul was threatened, and now, even when religion did not divide them, all she heard was a demand to mask herself, to always echo his voice. It was something she could not do.
Now in their early forties, Julia and Tom were who they were. There was no possibility of changing, only the possibility of accepting each other.
If the arguments between them had a remarkable intensity, so too did their reconciliations. By the beginning of 1867 Julia was pregnant again — her tenth pregnancy in fifteen years — but she faced this one with more equilibrium than previously. Tom’s tutoring scheme appeared to be prospering, the house-building was progressing, the children seemed settled, and there was much to occupy her in the last months before the birth. When misfortune struck, it was not Tom’s conscience that caused it, but one of his pupils, who had contracted scarlet fever. Fearful for her unborn child, Julia fled immediately to her friend Emily Tyndall in Birmingham, but it was too late. The baby died at birth. Julia was desperately ill and, for a time, near death. Somehow, she survived, but her battered body would carry no more children. She now had another date to remember alongside that of little Arthur whose body was buried on the other side of the globe.
While Julia was absent, Theodore returned home in disgrace from his school, and Polly took on the task of tutoring him. Julia was away when the family was plunged into further grief with the sudden death of Matthew’s twenty-month-old son, Basil, in January 1868. She was away, too, for the final move into Laleham, further marking the house as Tom’s project rather than a joint one.
Months later, when she finally packed up her grief and returned home to Oxford, Julia walked into a storm. Laleham had become another of Tom’s ill-fated schemes, the debt so large that it now appeared there was no alternative than to sell it. She was both devastated and mortified. Unable to extract any more money from his father’s estate and feeling he could not turn to his mother or to Matthew for assistance, Tom did as he had done so often before and sought help from his brother-in-law.
When William Forster examined Tom’s finances, it became immediately apparent that Tom was incapable of managing his tutoring business. He had not even instituted a payment system, simply content that his students pay if they could and when they could. It was inconceivable and unacceptable to Forster that Tom could be so cavalier with a wife and eight children to support, a large house under mortgage, and servants to pay. Sympathetic towards him, but determined that his brother-in-law should better manage his affairs, William Forster only agreed to organise a second mortgage on the house when a student payment system was established. The family was able to stay in Laleham.
Before the year was finished, death once again visited the Arnolds — this time taking Julia’s grandfather Anthony Fenn Kemp and another of Matthew’s sons, his eldest and Tom’s namesake, only sixteen years of age. Young Tom’s death was particularly tragic for the Arnold’s coming as it did only months after little Basil’s death. Delicate from birth, young Tom had become more so after he had fallen from a horse whilst staying at Fox How in the summer of 1868. When he became ill, no one was unduly concerned for him; he had so often been very ill and rallied again that hope was never abandoned until his last breath. Matthew grieved almost as much for his wife as for his son and for the blank it would leave in every day of her life. But even in his grief, Matthew took the opportunity to remind Tom that his namesake had a horror of debt, and was precise to a hair’s breadth in all his accounts and money transactions. Matthew was hoping, like Forster, like his mother, and like Julia, that Tom would learn from his recent crisis, that he would stay clear of debt, and that he would begin to understand, and assume, his financial responsibilities.
With the house safe, the children settled, and Tom seemingly free from distress, Julia felt content and if, at times, she heard ominous sounds coming from Tom’s study — was he chanting a Latin prayer? — she overcame her fear and moved on. She was particularly delighted when, in 1869, she was advised that her grandfather Kemp had left her a bequest. She immediately thought of buying Tom some books, but he graciously rejected her suggestion, telling her to instead invest at least £100 of it and use the rest as she pleased. He told her to go to either William Forster or John Cropper or their Birmingham friend Mr Tyndall for advice, and he assured her that she would be certain to get at least five per cent interest, which would be pleasant for her to have coming in every year without any trouble. Even such a modest windfall felt generous.
In the spaces given her amidst the domestic minutiae of her life, Julia quickly established a wide circle of friends and acquaintances, just as she had done in Dublin and again in Birmingham. Through Tom’s name, his connections and his work, she entered the social life centred upon the university. Her lively and generous nature — or as Tom described it, her distinct and charming versatility — ensured that she made friends quickly and Laleham enabled her to receive callers in comfort, hold drawing-room parties, host musical evenings and performances, and most delightful of all, have visitors to stay. Matthew had not exaggerated when he said of Julia that she was hospitality itself. This feeling of connectedness and reciprocity had always been a key part of her character and for the first time since she had left Tasmania she felt able to fully express this side of her nature.
Among the many abiding friends Julia made in Oxford was the novelist and activist Felicia Skene, who was only a few years older than her. Felicia had been born in France and, as a child, had travelled extensively in Europe, Turkey, and Greece until her family eventually settled in Oxford. When cholera broke out in Oxford in 1854, she had quickly organised a band of nurses, which brought her into contact with Florence Nightingale, and when the cholera abated, some of Felicia’s nurses went with Nightingale to the Crimea. This was the beginning of Felicia’s social work — she visited prisoners and worked with prostitutes — and in her spare moments, she w
rote novels, articles, and short stories, and edited the magazine The Churchman’s Companion. Her friendship with Julia and her many kindnesses to the Arnold children were enduring — she helped publish one of Polly’s first attempts at a short story — and Polly remembered how much Julia loved and reverenced her.
Julia also became very close friends with her neighbours Georgina and Max Müller. Georgina was among the remarkable band of women who helped galvanise university education for women in Oxford and her husband Max was an orientalist and a philologist, a fellow of All Souls College, and the first professor of comparative philology at Oxford. The Müllers’s place was considered one of the pleasantest social centres in Oxford, and Julia was often in their shaded garden during the summer or at their weekly ‘at home’ in the winter, a privilege that allowed her to be among those who first saw Graham Bell’s telephone, which was on display at the Müller house. Julia’s daughters, Lucy, Judy, and Ethel, became great friends with the Müller’s daughters, Ada, Mary, and Beatrice, the girls coming and going between the two households. Max Müller became a great favourite with them and other local children, as did another man who entered their world — the Reverend Charles Dodgson.
At the end of Julia’s first year in Oxford, Dodgson had published his book Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland under the pseudonym of Lewis Carroll. A mathematician as well as a writer, Dodgson, like Tom Arnold, was afflicted with a stammer and this formed part of his attraction for Julia and her daughters. From the moment of his initial meeting with the girls in The Parks in 1871, Dodgson became a familiar presence in the Arnold family. Ethel remembered their meeting occurring on a typical Oxford afternoon in late autumn — damp, foggy, cheerless. A number of little girls, including Ethel and Judy, were dancing along one of the paths, a staid governess bringing up the rear, when they spied a tall black clerical figure in the distance, swinging along towards them
with a characteristic briskness, almost jerkiness, of step. Spotting the opportunity for enjoyment, the children joined hands and formed a line across the path; the clerical figure, appreciating the situation, advanced at the double and charged the line with his umbrella. The line broke in confusion, and the next moment four of the little band were clinging to such portions of the black-coated figure as they could seize upon.
When Edith and Judy hung back, seized with shyness and awe at this tall, dignified gentleman in black broadcloth and white tie, Dodgson shook off the clinging, laughing children, and instead, took the hands of the two little strangers, who in no time at all, were chattering away as if they had known him all their lives.
Julia instantly warmed to this shy, stammering man, just as her daughters had done, and he quickly became a regular visitor at Laleham, spending time sketching and photographing both Judy and Ethel — it was in this period that Judy became one of his most photographed models — lending the children books, taking them for walks, and encouraging their love of dress-ups and private theatricals, an interest they had inherited from their mother, who had enjoyed doing exactly the same as a young woman in Hobart. Julia grew to love her amusing new friend, and he in return would provide great support and comfort to her and great amusement and pleasure to her daughters. On one of his many visits to the house, he entertained Julia and her daughters by inventing a game, which he would name Doublets and which became an instant craze in London when it was first published in Vanity Fair in 1879. The game involved transforming a given word into another by changing only one letter at a time to form a new word with each letter change. Years later, Ethel recalled that Dodgson was a bringer of delight and that she saw the hours spent in his dear and much loved company as oases of brightness in a somewhat grey and melancholy childhood.
For the moment, at least, Julia was satisfied as her life unfolded in this large house in Oxford, with the neighbourhood children traipsing in and out of the house and garden, and Fury the dog monitoring the many guests who came to the musical evenings and dinners she hosted at Laleham. She was also satisfied on those quiet evenings when the family gathered in the lamp-lit room, she embroidering, Polly or Lucy playing at the piano, Frank sprawled on the sofa reading a magazine, and the two younger girls puzzling over the latest word game created by their friend Mr Dodgson. Tom was usually working in his study, while, downstairs, the cook and the parlourmaid chatted quietly, sometimes irritably, about the demands of the student boarders and their unsatisfactory habits, or the latest talk that had been overheard upstairs. Even the absent boys, Willy, Theodore, and Arthur, were doing well. Arthur was finally demonstrating he could behave himself, Theodore had become more diligent at his new school, Cheltenham College, and Willy was continuing to do well at Rugby — he would go on to become the head of school — although Tom expressed a wish that Willy was not quite so silent and glum … rarely opening his lips at table to answer when he is spoken to. It was a peaceful household.
In the summer of 1867, when Polly finished her schooling and returned to Laleham, it marked the first time since they had left Tasmania that Julia and her eldest daughter were living together. They were strangers to each other as women. Having grown up in the Fox How atmosphere of her father’s family, Polly had no need to decipher what drove Tom — his scholarly gifts and his passion for learning — but she had had no real context for knowing her mother or even understanding her. This changed as they spent more time in each other’s company.
Polly, like Julia, was dark-eyed and dark-haired, though striking and elegant, rather than pretty. She had inherited her mother’s love for novels and poetry and her passion for music. She had also inherited Julia’s quick-tempered and forthright nature. Polly initially filled her days studying music under James Taylor, the future organist of New College, helping Julia with the younger children, and assisting Tom with his research work. But she was not content with this life. She wanted to be a scholar and a writer herself.
Tom did not share this ambition for her. He was happy that she should do some research or copying for him or tidy his room, or read the same books he was reading, but he believed she required no further education. Julia reacted to her daughter’s ambition quite differently. She encouraged her writing, and, through her friendship with Felicia Skene, helped Polly get her early fictional work published — but she was ambivalent about Polly’s ambition to be a scholar in the strictly gendered world of higher learning. Determined not to be deflected, Polly quickly found herself in the circle surrounding Mark Pattison, the rector of Lincoln College, and his art historian wife Francis, a fascinating couple, reputably the models for George Eliot’s Dorothea Brooke and Edward Casaubon in Middlemarch. They both encouraged her ambition to research and write, Pattison most particularly by enabling her to gain access to the Bodleian Library, an unheard-of privilege for a woman and one that remained so for decades.
On the other hand, Francis, who had already established herself as an art writer, editor, and critic of some renown, an excellent conversationalist, and a hostess, provided Polly with an exemplar of how a young woman might live and achieve distinction in her own right. Opinions varied on this dynamic, interesting woman, as one near-contemporary, the scholar and feminist Janet Hogarth Courtney, noted:
By the young she was adored; by some of the more conventional her manners were thought too free and her way of life too daring … She gave Sunday supper-parties, she wore unconventional garments, she was even said to have fencing-bouts with her men friends on Sunday mornings instead of going to chapel!
A prudent mother of a young, unmarried daughter might have been nervous of such behaviour, but Julia recognised enough of herself in Francis — her gaiety, her impatience with decorum — to feel comfortable about her daughter spending time with her. Polly may not have recognised this familiarity, but she did respond to it.
Julia wanted her daughters educated, aware that they might have to turn their education to account, but she also understood that a comfortable marriage was still the ideal for young women in Vi
ctorian England. And although neither herself, nor her sisters had demonstrated an unseemly rush into marriage — Ada had only just been married in Hobart at the age of thirty-eight — Julia was anxious to see Polly, and indeed all her children, settled, in case Tom’s conscience might once again jeopardise their futures.
With this in mind, she chaperoned Polly through the array of social requirements demanded of a young woman, guided her, drawing her out of herself, holding up a mirror to her. Julia was in her element. She sparkled. Her warmth was reactive and her vivacity, a strength. Polly finally understood something of her mother’s nature and during this hectic period of chaperoning, they developed a strong bond with each other, one that would endure to the end of Julia’s life.
When, towards the end of 1870, the tall, fair-haired Thomas Humphry Ward (known as Humphry to all his friends), a fellow and tutor at Brasenose College, began courting Polly, Julia immediately warmed to him. She liked his liveliness and she responded to his more liberal, secular views. She thought him an excellent husband for her daughter. As did her friend Felicia Skene, who, when Julia could not afford to buy Polly a ticket to the Commemoration Ball, took on her guise as fairy godmother and obtained the ticket. While Felicia’s intervention had its desired outcome — the engagement between Polly and Humphry was sealed at the ball — it did point to the financial constraint that Julia confronted while raising her children. Her grandson, Julian Huxley, recalled his mother, Judy, talking of how she and Polly had to go to parties in turn, as there was only one pair of best shoes and one evening dress for the two of them. And while this memory cannot be accurate — Judy was only ten at the time, not going to balls and certainly not fitting into the same shoes as Polly — it points to the felt experience of the family’s poverty.