by Mary Hoban
Julia was willing to hold herself responsible in part for their divided lives, but she could never forgive his reconversion. She could never forgive him for breaking his promise to her. She could never forgive him for informing his Oxford colleagues of his decision before he had informed her. She could feel no pity for his delusional belief that his prayers would cause God to lighten her burden, or that he was trying to do all that he could for her. Nor could she bear the thought of him returning home. Lucy, she had already sent away, but Frank and the younger girls were still at school, Theodore was returning to Oxford to study, and Arthur was struggling — unable to find success in the colonies. Their lives were difficult enough, but if Tom returned to Oxford and her boarders left as a consequence, they would become unbearable. She banned him from returning to Laleham, declaring that they must henceforth live as strangers.
Julia’s intransigence made Tom even more vengeful. Indifferent to the fact that her boarding scheme now formed the major part of the family’s income, he told her that Laleham must be sold as soon as possible. It was unreasonable of Julia to take on the role of breadwinner — that was the husband’s role — and therefore the family home should be where he could get work. Although their entire circle believed Tom’s behaviour was reprehensible, Julia could do nothing to stop him, and Laleham was put on the market. Tom, isolated in London and shunned by his friends and colleagues, turned to his Catholic friends for support. Among them was Josephine Benison. Tom told her that he had given Julia abundant warning that he would reconvert at some time or other, but that her imperious will could not tolerate anything that injured her, or ran counter to her plans, or interfered with her own or her children’s advancement in the world. Josephine did not disappoint him, greeting his reconversion as good tidings of great joy.
18
A Revolutionary Wife
Eight months later, in June 1877, Julia and Tom came together for Willy’s wedding to Henrietta Wale. It was a rare moment of pleasure for Julia. She approved of Henrietta and she wanted this marriage for her son. Julia had been utterly wretched since her bitter separation from Tom. She was miserable without him, yet when he was with her, she made him miserable. I love you my darling God knows how dearly, & yet I make your life miserable as well as my own! She was full of yearning for him and wishing for reparation, but she had no sense of how they could live together, nor any illusions about its likelihood. She did not share Tom’s faith that God would find a solution.
Julia was never a robust woman, and in her despair, she had become hauntingly thin, but it was the insomnia that eventually forced her to seek medical treatment — an occasion which gave her the opportunity to take another radical step. In the wake of her refusal to live with her husband or follow his religion, she now made an appointment with a female doctor, Emily Bovell, who immediately referred Julia to another female doctor, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson. Both women were among the very first female medical practitioners in England. Julia had always turned to women for comfort and friendship, she had always believed in their competence and capacity, and she was now demonstrating her belief and her trust in these pioneers. She also felt, as did her sister-in-law Jane Forster, that it would be so much more pleasant to have a woman attend one, rather than a man. And on that first day of October in 1877, only months after her fifty-first birthday, Julia needed all the comfort and the competence that these woman could give.
Without any ambiguity, Dr Anderson diagnosed breast cancer and told Julia that if she were her mother, she would not rest until it was all removed. A mastectomy was required. Before Julia made any final decision, though, Dr Anderson wanted her to see Sir James Paget, surgeon to Queen Victoria, who had first described changes occurring on the nipple preceding breast cancer — a condition now known as Paget’s disease of the nipple. Paget agreed with Anderson’s diagnosis and her advice that the tumour be removed immediately, but Julia’s distress and unhappiness was so intense, Dr Anderson advocated delaying the surgery.
Utterly bewildered by her diagnosis and full of fear for the future, Julia turned on herself. If only she had been a better wife this would not have happened. If only she could be with Tom then all would be well. Instead, here was a diagnosis that might be a further obstacle to resuming any life with him. And she was desperately anxious about the expense that both an operation and recuperation would incur. She knew Tom had no money and no capacity to either earn or manage it. Only months earlier he had sent her a bill for wine from three years earlier and asked her if she thought it could be right. She knew, too, that if she were unable to chaperone her boarders, then her income would also dry up completely. Again, it was her thoughts around her children that decided her. What would become of them if she was gone? It firmed her resolve. She decided to proceed.
The English novelist Fanny Burney had endured the same procedure just decades before Julia. Her screaming had continued from the moment the polished knife was plunged into her breast, cutting through the flesh and veins, arteries and nerves, until it was withdrawn. Unlike Fanny, Julia was anesthetised for her mastectomy, but she did endure extensive bleeding, infection, and pain and hovered between life and death for several days. It was a state she had inhabited before, and she showed the same determination to escape it. Weeks passed before she was well enough to be moved to Gussie’s house, where her long recuperation began.
Julia’s hope that her ordeal might bring her closer to Tom was in vain. He was certainly among those who visited her while she recuperated, but it would have been better had he not. Their exchanges became more heated than ever. She raged against what her life had become, letting flow her torrent of frustration and bewilderment, blaming him for her illness. He retaliated by declaring that he had been disappointed in everything other than her beauty, accused her of being incapable of having anything but the meanest and most contemptible feelings, and wished that she had remained in Tasmania when he had returned to England. After one such exchange, she wrote to him immediately, her strength of feeling and the misery they caused one another manifested in its smudged and frantic script:
I thought my heart would break after you left me today. I am miserable when you are with me, & miserable when you are away. Why do I live? You never ought to have married a woman with my turbulent passionate nature. You do not understand it and it repels you. And much that underlies it you do not see, and I am too proud to tell you, and if I did tell you a great deal of my inmost feelings, you would only sneer at me, and tell me that you do not believe me, and I am mean and selfish, and only care for the world & its judgements. If there is a future life you will see that this estimate of me is not altogether a true one. God knows I wish for your sake, that you had married a woman with a nature more like your own. Surely you must sometimes feel pity for me, you must see that I suffer but you have persuaded yourself that I am a fit person to be ‘an inmate of St Luke’s’ wherever that may be & would fain dismiss me from your thoughts … God help me! I am miserably wretched.
Days later, she told him that she would still sooner be his wife, with all that she had suffered and still would suffer, than the wife of any other man whom she had ever seen. Surely he understood that the gulf between them was so bitter precisely because she was not indifferent to him? She began signing her letters as his insufferably miserable … loving but broken hearted wife. It was an apt description.
Julia remained with Gussie until the end of November when she was well enough to return home, and although she was delighted at being with her children again, of having Polly and the life force of her grandchildren nearby, she struggled to regain any strength. And she struggled to regain her spirits. Her vivacity and dauntlessness had sustained her through so much, and now these same traits had deserted her, leaving a grim frustration and a growing bitterness in their wake. She strained to share the excitement when Polly received the flattering request that she write for the Dictionary of Christian Biography. She became extremely agitated when Willy av
owed no belief in Christianity, fearful that he and his young wife Henrietta would suffer the same sort of trauma that she and Tom had experienced. She felt utter despair that her fractured relationship with Tom had left her with no strong arm to lean upon, no one to counsel, no one to comfort. While he chanted and fasted, persuaded that he had found the truth, they remained as wide asunder as the Poles, Tom in London trying to scratch out a living and Julia in Oxford trying to maintain her boarding scheme. The breach between them was growing instead of diminishing.
Implacable and deepening financial woes only added to Julia’s stress. As she had feared, her slow recovery was compromising her capacity to provide the level of chaperonage required, particularly for the older girls. Chaperones were sometimes required to stand all evening at a function, something Julia no longer had the strength to do. She also had no control over the money she herself was earning. The Married Women’s Property Act that would allow married women to control their own money, was still more than ten years away, and all the fees Julia made from her boarding scheme had to be placed into Tom’s bank account. She was then utterly dependent on him giving her the money she required when she required it. Inevitably, such a convoluted and humiliating arrangement caused further, and darker, disagreements and misunderstandings between them. Too often, Tom only paid the food bills and none of the other bills that she sent him. Needing more financial certainty, she asked him to pay her a fixed sum each month. He agreed in principle, but could not, he said, agree in practice until such time as he was earning money. Left with no alternative, Julia lived on credit and the hope that Tom would honour it. And with Laleham on the market, she needed to find alternative lodging for herself, her daughters, and her boarders. Life was utterly daunting.
Ironically, it was the wayward Arthur whose misdemeanours caused a breach in Julia’s standoff with Tom, giving them a focus other than themselves. A slight thaw developed in their relationship, if Julia sending Tom some apricot jam could be taken as evidence of this. Arthur’s sojourn in the colonies had entrenched his waywardness, rather than remedied it. When he returned to London in March 1877, he took up residence with his father and began borrowing more money, to add to the trail of debts he had left behind him in Tasmania.
Less than a month after Arthur’s return, and after he failed to repay his father the money he had borrowed, Tom wrote to Julia that wretched boy seems born to heap trouble on our heads and shame on his own. As I told him, he must have lied through thick & thin … Desperate to be free of him, Tom used all his contacts and that of his wider family to find Arthur work. It was a thankless task. While Tom was directing his enquiries to the Post Office and the Civil Service Commission, Arthur had his eyes set on a theatrical career or something in the Irish Constabulary or the Sultan’s irregular forces in Turkey. A dull life in the civil service was not for him, but, possibly to appease his father’s growing irritation with him, he did return to Catholicism. He was the only one among Tom’s sons to do so.
During the summer months of 1877, when Julia went to stay with friends, Tom returned to Oxford to the smaller house the family now lived in on Church Walk to be with his children. Arthur, however, continued to provoke him from near and afar with his crass behaviour, which included borrowing from Tom’s friends and failing to return the money. Tom told Julia that he was resolved that so worthless a person as he is, so incorrigible a liar, shall not stay here many days longer; he really is not fit to associate with his brothers & sisters. Matthew was also wary of Arthur, at one time asking his sister Fan whether Arthur had applied to her for help and querying whether he could be trusted. So distraught was Tom by Arthur’s life, he decided that if his son did not find work quickly then he would offer him his passage to the Cape and £50 a year for two years. Eventually, Arthur did find an occupation he thought might suit him. He joined the British army as a trooper in the cavalry and, at the beginning of 1878, he departed for South Africa with his unit, the Diamond Fields Horse.
Tom was thrilled at Arthur’s departure — what I have suffered this last month from that boy it is impossible to describe — and hoped that his son might settle at something useful at last. He was, he told Julia, also encouraged by the fact that Arthur had spontaneously taken a third-class ticket to South Dock instead of any higher class and surmised from this that Arthur might at last be learning to live within his means. He hoped, too, that at last he, Tom, might have some peace. Julia wished for the same elusive thing. Yet it was Arthur who led to fresh disagreement between them when, after receiving a letter from South Africa, Julia expressed to Tom her utter horror at Arthur’s sense of satisfaction and complacency when his troop executed a mob of wretched half-armed Kaffirs. Tom had no sympathy for her view, insisting instead that she be thankful that Arthur appeared to be gaining some character and had not yet been reported for misconduct. It was not the type of character Julia wished her son to have. In the event, her wish mattered little.
Only weeks later, Arthur was killed at Gomoperi. He was twenty-one years of age. In a letter to Julia and Tom, Arthur’s commanding officer, Colonel Charles Warren, said that although Arthur had spoken very little in his last hours, he had asked for God’s blessing on his parents and family. With nothing to guide them regarding Arthur’s religion — some of the men thought he was Catholic — a Church of England service was read over his coffin when he was buried in the cemetery at Kuruman. The colonel reassured his parents that Arthur had behaved well in his regiment, although he had not been promoted because he was considered too careless with details for a man of his education. It was not an effusive obituary.
The wider family viewed Arthur’s death as a tragic end to a stormy and restless career, but Julia felt her world had dissolved. She simply wanted to disappear and break her heart in silence. It was a moment when she and Tom, grieving over their son’s untimely death, might have found a thread to unite them, but even this tragedy seemed to divide them further. Hopelessly miserable herself, Julia believed she made everyone around her miserable and began to feel that perhaps Tom was right when he said that she had inherited much that was evil. She decided to leave Oxford, where she had been happy, and take her younger daughters to the continent, where she might be at some remove from the debacle her life had become. Her desire was never realised. When Polly became pregnant at the beginning of 1879, Julia spoke no more of leaving. Instead, she slowly picked up the threads of her life and carried on. In the end, it was Tom who went to the continent — on holiday — an act that caused yet further talk among their family and friends about his behaviour towards Julia, Matthew even going so far as to rebuke him, something he rarely did, when he asked Tom how he could have gone off to Paris while his poor wife lay ill at home?
As the shock of Arthur’s death receded, Julia’s anxiety about Theodore increased. Just weeks after Theodore had graduated from Oxford, Arthur had died, and the event so shook him that he decided to leave England in search of a new life. Julia was greatly distressed — I have already lost one son, and the parting from Theodore will be a terrible wrench — but despite her fear that she would not live to see him again, she thought that it was best for his sake. She would not say a word to stop him. Instead, she concerned herself with his need for clothes, knowing that she could always picture him in one of the suits that she had packed, even if she could not always imagine the landscape he would find himself in.
Julia had lost Arthur, then Theodore, and before the end of 1879, Willy too had left Oxford. He had been content with his wife Henrietta, his teaching, and his apparent agnosticism, but this all changed when C.P. Scott, the editor of the Manchester Guardian, perhaps the most important provincial newspaper in England, came to Oxford searching for new staff. Impressed by Willy’s wide range of interests, by his personality, possibly even by his physique — he was nearly six feet high, sinewy and broad, a thirteen-stone athlete … [whose] face was, for an Englishman’s, extraordinarily dark, with black hair — Scott invited Willy to join t
he newspaper. He accepted. Julia’s sadness at his going was countered by her pride in his appointment. Here was one son at least who was not only following his ambitions but who was also, importantly, able to care for his wife.
Throughout this period, the hopelessness of her relationship with Tom gnawed at Julia endlessly. She began to talk more openly of dying. It would, she said, be one solution to their estrangement, and, after the first shock of her death was over, Tom would be better and happier without her. There was a constant, often bitter, exploration on her part — and Tom’s — as to what drew them together and what divided them so completely. When their relationship verged on the uncivil, they drew back immediately. Sorrowful, loving, almost poetic exchanges followed angry, bitter ones. It was an endless dance that neither could cease. Her hostility always focused on his adherence to conscience — it was his God and it had taken the place of wife and children — and on their widely different natures, hers passionate and uncontrolled, his equable, quiet, and beautifully trained. His hostility towards her always focused on her refusal to be his wife in what he saw as its truest sense — doing as he determined — and on her intense resentment towards him, his religious faith, and his conscience.
Tom’s despair had also grown following Arthur’s death. Unable to obtain any stable work, he was eking out an existence, taking commissioned writing where he could find it and relying on handouts from his relatives. In his desperation, he turned to Willy, suggesting that he assist in supporting Julia — a suggestion that astounded and mortified Julia. Rather than seek Willy’s help, she would, she said, stop taking boarders and go into lodgings. Tom persisted in his plan, and weeks later, Willy and Humphry agreed to go as surety to raise £150 for Julia. Increasingly marginalised into the Catholic world, Tom missed Julia and was desperate to return to Oxford, to home. When he pleaded with her — Are you not my own wife? Are you not a part of me, and I of you? Did not marriage make us one flesh? — Julia lost all her fight. Bereft of physical strength, lonely to her core and feeling that she was neither wife nor widow, she wanted Tom back with her. She agreed to his return.