by Mary Hoban
Tom did not share Julia’s view of Humphry. When asked to give his approval to the match, he refused. He liked Humphry’s cleverness, always an appealing quality to Tom, but he did not like his secular outlook, nor his financial status. Humphry’s fellowship at Brasenose carried with it a stipend of approximately £600 a year, an amount Tom believed was insufficient for the young couple to live on. He only agreed to the engagement when Julia and Polly pointed out to him that this was a similar income to his own — and he had a wife and eight children to support — but he grasped the opportunity to express his views about marriage and women’s work. Polly, he said, would have to look to her housekeeping very closely as she was not naturally thrifty, and her housework would always need to take priority over her intellectual life. He warned her in the strongest words he could find, how it was her duty to postpone literature & everything else to the paramount duty of keeping a straight and unindebted household. In Tom’s mind, conscientious housekeeping, not an adequate income, was the key to staving off financial disaster.
Julia did not hold these views, nor did Polly, who kept working, despite her father’s dictum to postpone her academic work and the numerous social demands caused by her engagement. In October of 1871 her first academic piece, on the Spanish Poema del Cid, was published in Macmillan’s Magazine. And as if to demonstrate that she had found a husband who, unlike her father, believed in the importance of her work, one of the first things the young couple did was write a joint essay, A Morning in the Bodleian, which Humphry had privately printed. Polly did not share her father’s religious views, either. Although she was intellectually interested in both religion and religious history and would have loved to discuss such matters with him, she refrained, believing that they would agree too little and that Tom would in fact be shocked by her own more pragmatic religious framework. Polly had come to share her mother’s attachment to Christianity without a belief in miracles.
Julia was particularly lighthearted as 1872 dawned. Not only was Polly now safely engaged, but news had reached her that her dearest sister Gussie was coming to live in England with her husband, James Dunn. Julia had always tried, in the various places she had lived, to replicate the female companionship she had known with her sisters, and now, finally, after nearly sixteen years apart, she would have one of them close. It was a moment to savour. On her way to London to welcome Gussie personally, she went to Matthew’s house in Harrow, and walked straight into another tragedy.
Matthew’s second son, eighteen-year-old Trevenen — known as Budge — had died suddenly and swiftly. From no trace of illness at the beginning of the week, he was dead by its end. This death hit all the Arnolds — it had only been four years since the deaths of Matthew’s eldest and youngest sons — but staying as she was with the family, Julia felt it deeply. Budge had taken greatly to both Julia and Tom when they had joined Matthew’s family for a holiday, and she had the hard task of telling Tom. Weeks later, as Matthew emerged from the shock, he told Tom how kind Julia had been in those sad days. Her kindness was one of those traits that people often noted. She did nothing in halves. Like her anger, Julia’s empathy was felt.
15
Coming Adrift
When Polly married Humphry Ward in April 1872, Julia was determined that her daughter would have a lovely wedding. Financial distress would be no impediment although even a modest trousseau required some outlay and took some time to create. There was something still from her grandfather’s bequest, so throwing all caution to the wind, Julia ensured that the bride and her three bridesmaids — Lucy, Judy, and Ethel — were exquisitely robed, from the flowers in their hair to their elegantly shod feet. Only weeks after the wedding, Julia received a letter from Tom presenting her with a draconian choice. He was so agitated, he could not bring himself to speak to her directly, so wrote instead. There was no ‘Dearest Julia’ or even just ‘Dear Julia’, his usual greeting in his letters to her — unless he was furious with her. And that was exactly the case. Tom was furious with Julia. She had, he told her, brought them to the brink of financial ruin.
Quite simply, they had no money. He would need to borrow immediately, but before he did this, he wanted to come to an understanding with her. She was clever and an expert in household management — a capacity, he said, that was well-known, and could not easily be surpassed — but she was utterly incapable of keeping accounts and balancing income against expenditure. As a consequence, she must henceforth consult him over every expenditure she wished to make, because only he, as the controller of funds, knew what they could afford. If she did not consult him and they fell further into debt, he had two courses of action. He could sell the house, which would not only destroy his tutoring business as he could no longer house his students, but would also render the family homeless and bare before the world. Or he could publicly notify all the Oxford tradespeople and merchants that her credit was unacceptable unless she had a note to that effect from him. If she wished to avoid this humiliating, public indignity, she must do as he asked. If she refused, then he would declare his necessary tight control over her credit and subsequently expose her role in their financial debacle.
Julia was stunned. She had had no idea their situation was so grim. Her role had always been to calculate how a diminishing income might meet all the demands of their large family and his student boarders, but surely her domestic expenditure could not have brought them to this state, even with the added expense of the wedding. Her instinct was correct. Tom had failed to tell her that his tutoring business was in terminal decline and had been for several years. Benjamin Jowett and others in Oxford had seen the decline, but Tom had persisted in believing he earned a tolerably large income. And now, while he acknowledged that his finances were in disarray again, he refused to acknowledge the root cause. He was simply not earning enough to support his family in the manner in which they, and their circle, lived.
Tom’s brother Matthew, with far fewer children, earned more than £1600 a year. The scientist Thomas Huxley calculated that he needed at least £900 a year to survive with four children. Polly’s friend Louise Creighton reckoned £600 as the lowest income on which a young couple, with no children, could set up house, yet Tom, with eight children, was barely earning that. Still he concluded that it was Julia’s spending and her extravagance that had caused their financial ruin. William Forster, who probably knew most about their finances, had always encouraged her to help Tom by economising, but no amount of economising would help if there was insufficient income.
On the one hand, poor accounting, on the other inadequate income. Marriages come asunder under such stress. Julia, with her generous nature and her love of abundance, should have listened to their friend Collinson when he had advised her not to marry Tom. It was sage advice. Instead, she had married him and embraced the conventions that doomed so many women to frustration, to submission, to despair. When Tom himself appeared indifferent to his income, trying to balance this income against expenditure would always be a fine, if not impossible, art, but if she and Tom were to continue to live as their class dictated, then Julia would need to achieve that skill, and quickly. It was one way of addressing their increasing poverty. The other was for Tom to understand what was required to maintain a wife, eight children, and a household in comfort. Other men, such Charles Dodgson, had chosen not to marry precisely because it would have required them to find an occupation sufficiently lucrative to support a wife and family in reasonable style, but Tom had married, and it was incumbent upon him to find that occupation. Was that possible?
Disaster was once again averted when William and Jane Forster came to their rescue. Julia was grateful for their intervention, but she could not forgive or forget Tom’s threat to publicly humiliate her, and the tension between them remained intense. It only began to thaw when, in September 1873, Mrs Arnold fell ill, and within weeks was dead. Julia’s anger dissolved immediately and, as they assembled for the funeral, she felt only love and a pr
otective concern for Tom, who had shared a special connection with his mother.
Julia was anxious that this death might trigger another battle between Tom and his conscience, just as the death of his son had done in Tasmania. She had good reason to be afraid. Tom’s feelings were dark. He felt his mother’s death as a young child might, grieving for a home that in his mind had been the abode of manly compass, of the purest female worth, of reasonable liberty, of blessed harmony, a stark contrast to his own domestic hearth, so often full of friction and strain.
Julia’s own feelings towards Mrs Arnold’s death were more complex. Certainly, Tom’s mother had always felt for her, yet there had never been a natural sympathy between them. They had shared the intimacy of birth and death and together they had connived to distance Tom’s daughters from his Catholicism, but Mrs Arnold had never really understood the difficulties that Tom’s equivocating, controlling nature and his financial incompetence had caused for Julia. But Julia also knew that with Mrs Arnold’s death, a protective presence had gone, for while she had lived, Julia had believed Tom would never return to Catholicism. Her sense of foreboding increased in the months following her mother-in-law’s death as Tom’s fears about his declining business, his anxiety in the face of his inability to find a stable position, and his troubled conscience cast a dark shadow. Julia felt her worry gnaw away at her, knowing as she did that there was nothing she could do to protect herself and her children from Tom’s conscience.
In 1873, Polly, along with her two friends, Louise Creighton and Charlotte Green, established the Lectures for Women Committee in Oxford, and Polly’s house in Bradmore Road — she and Humphry had bought a house just behind Julia and Tom — became a centre of modern ideas where the daring new schemes for women were discussed. Julia’s near neighbour and friend Georgina Müller was also a part of this push to respond to the growing demand among the women residents of Oxford for more serious instruction.
The audience for the first lecture in the early spring of 1874 was so large that the original room had to be abandoned for a bigger one, and the lecture’s success and that of the following series of lectures led the women to expand their work. They formed the Association for the Education of Women, with Polly as its first secretary, and before the end of the decade this remarkable group of women had established two women’s halls in Oxford — Lady Margaret Hall and Somerville. The push for women’s higher education would never be turned back.
As part of this momentum, Oxford parents began school classes for their daughters, which culminated in the foundation of The Oxford High School for Girls in 1875, a pioneering institution in the field of girls’ education in England. In addition to enrolling her younger daughters at the school, Julia carved out her own role in this historic change. When the advance of women’s education collided with the need for women’s accommodation, she grasped the opportunity and offered accommodation to students coming to the newly established high school, to the women who had come to teach them, and to the young women wanting to attend the lectures being organised by Polly’s group. She knew if her scheme filled the void left by Tom’s disappearing student clientele, then she could not only supplement the family’s ever declining finances, but free Tom to find other, more substantive employment. For her scheme to succeed, Julia had to commit to it full time. In addition to accommodation, these young students would require chaperoning, a duty that only she, as a married woman of a good family and connections, could provide.
When Julia, full of excitement and purpose, took her proposal to Tom, he was dismissive. He was the breadwinner not her. But she ignored him, and slowly, the house began to fill with female boarders, both teachers and students. Unwittingly, and with the best of intentions, she had created another divisive thread between them.
One of Julia’s first student boarders at Laleham was Gussie’s niece, the young Violet Eardley-Wilmot, whose father Charles, the brother of Julia’s old beau, Chester, was married to Gussie’s sister-in-law, Grace Dunn. Violet recalled her days there as the happiest period of her life, in part because Julia was always so cheery & bright & kind & taking such an interest in all one’s small doings.
Violet also observed the intense pride Julia took in her children, particularly her two eldest. Polly had developed into a determined young woman, using her intellect and her energy in her own research and writing, and in her drive for women’s higher education. Willy, who had also inherited Julia’s dark eyes and black hair, had grown into a self-contained, decisive young man, unafraid to make his own choices and go his own way. He had won a scholarship to University College where he was completing his degree, and was described by one of his best friends as a very stimulating personality, with a vivid interest in knowledge generally, a lightning-like way of seeing the interesting points in things new to him, whether be it art or poetry, and with a strong sense of moral dignity and a savage hatred of brutality.
Eighteen months earlier, Willy had met and fallen in love with Henrietta Wale, the daughter of Tom’s first love, Henrietta Whately — the woman who had rejected him because of his unsteady religious sentiments. Despite the young lovers’ wish to marry quickly and the families being delighted with the connection, all parents believed that at twenty, they were far too young, and no engagement had been allowed. Mrs Arnold’s death changed that. Julia hoped that an engagement now — a turning to the future — might distract Tom from his increasingly fretful soul-searching. He was eventually convinced, and with their parents’ permission, the young couple’s engagement was announced.
Julia was even more hopeful for Tom’s state of mind when, in the New Year, Polly announced that she was pregnant. Surely becoming a grandparent would turn Tom’s thoughts outwards. It seemed to work. Julia sent her younger daughters to their Aunt Fan at Fox How so she could concentrate on caring for Polly and was with her when Dorothy was born in July 1874. With her mother so near at hand, Polly continued to write and agitate for women’s education. She even turned motherhood itself into an educational topic and wrote a leaflet entitled ‘Plain Facts on Infant Feeding’, circulating it in the slums of Oxford. It triggered Polly’s lifelong and groundbreaking campaign for better maternity care and for early childhood development.
If Polly and Willy were settled, it was not the case with Julia’s two wild boys, Theodore and Arthur, who had now both left school. As they grew older, the waywardness of Arthur and the incompetence of Theodore had assumed a darker note, their behaviour reflecting a deeper fault line in this household where the tone of the boys’ education had been determined by their father’s conscience. Ever ready to denounce the impact of Julia’s behaviour on his children, Tom had been oblivious to the impact of his own. Unlike Willy, neither Theodore nor Arthur had demonstrated any academic prowess, and although Tom had done what he could to find positions for them, they had failed to obtain any. The alternative in such circumstances remained the colonies. As the most difficult, Arthur was sent away first, and by the end of 1875 he was in New Guinea prospecting for gold. Theodore, for the moment at least, remained in London looking for work. Julia’s youngest son, Frank, located as he was among the girls, and having been spared the consequences of Tom’s see-sawing conscience, was not as yet causing any anxiety.
Only after the upheaval of Arthur’s departure had begun to subside did Julia become aware of just how fragile Tom’s allegiance to the Anglican Church was. Even the younger children had noticed his restlessness as they accompanied him to church — nudging each other when they heard him muttering Latin prayers under his breath — but habituated as they were to religious tension in the home, they kept their silence. Julia only took notice when Tom began reciting the same Latin prayers and chants in his study. She could feel the coil begin to wind in her and the anxiety surge. More of his Catholic friends began coming to Laleham and the chanting did not abate. She finally snapped when, returning early from a trip to London, she found him entertaining two priests at dinner. Needing no re
minder of what her life would be like if Tom were to embrace Catholicism again, she picked up several plates from the table and threw them to the floor. But neither broken crockery nor Julia’s anger tempered Tom’s behaviour and as the year wore on the signs grew increasingly ominous.
In September, while holidaying in France, he made a detour to Lourdes, a renowned site of Catholic pilgrimage, but still he said nothing. Even his Latin prayers appeared to become more muted, and Julia, ever hopeful that his disquiet might pass, began preparing for the first-ever performance of Dodgson’s ‘The Mad Tea-Party’. She and Tom were hosting it in their drawing room at Laleham. Judy, now thirteen, was playing the Hatter, and eleven-year-old Ethel, the March Hare.
As the New Year dawned, Tom’s outbursts about their financial position grew louder, and his temper frayed more often. Julia’s boarders were not yet stemming the financial bleeding caused by the decline in Tom’s students, and renewed calls were made to the family for assistance. As, too, were renewed attempts to find Tom stable employment. Matthew was at the forefront of these attempts, keenly aware of the impact of Tom’s declining fortunes on Julia and children. It was she who had to calculate how a diminishing income could meet all the demands of the family, and as Matthew commented, Tom had a placidity which deadened the sting of worry to him. When, early in 1875, a position as an assistant charity commissioner became vacant, various friends — among them the Archbishop of Canterbury, Charles Dodgson, and the Bishop of Exeter — lobbied for Tom and provided references. Matthew believed that if Tom got this position, he would be able to get rid of ‘the barracks’ — Matthew had always believed that Laleham was far too big and too expensive to maintain — and live in a small house on the pleasant side of London. Julia appreciated Matthew’s attempts to find Tom a secure position, but she was less appreciative of his cavalier attitude to her home. It was, after all, their only source of income until Tom found a stable position.