by Mary Hoban
Tom was delighted and grateful — I feel as if my heart was breaking. God bless you my darling — but his gratitude did not deter him from setting out conditions for his return. She was not to worry herself about the places he thought fit to go to, or the meetings or religious services he might desire to attend. She was not to make things unpleasant for any Catholic acquaintance, priest or layman, who might call at the house wishing to see him. And she was not to destroy, under any circumstances whatever, any of his books or papers. Julia agreed. He did make one concession. If Julia did not feel equal to the prospect of living with him, then he would move into less expensive lodgings in Oxford and live in the most careful manner possible.
No one, other than Julia, was convinced that Tom’s return to Oxford would be good for her. Polly, who had seen the effects of her father’s presence and his anger on her mother, warned Julia that she ran a dangerous risk to her health if she and Tom were to see much of each other. Benjamin Jowett, who regarded Julia with great affection and was angered by Tom’s behaviour towards her, was gravely concerned at the impact his return might have on her. Intent on discouraging Tom, he refused to help him find pupils to coach. Tom immediately blamed Julia for Jowett’s action, sure she was setting people against him. Incensed that Tom should blame her for the judgement of their friends, and smarting from his censure, Julia retaliated by blaming him for her breast cancer. If he had not broken his promise to her, if he had remained as a candidate for the chair, if he had continued to live with her in Oxford, she would not have breast cancer. There was no homecoming.
Her body a barometer for her inner turmoil — she described her state as being much worse than that of a widow — Julia began suffering once more from insomnia and constant pain. She had been forced to let out all her dresses because of the swelling under her left arm and she could no longer lie on her left side. She again consulted Dr Anderson, who told her that further surgery was necessary, but concerned at her underlying fragility, Anderson decided to consult several prominent doctors before proceeding. Dr Lister, a pioneer of antiseptic surgery, thought the surgery should proceed, but Dr Paget was against it on the basis that Julia’s heart was weak, and she lacked sufficient vitality to survive it. In the end, Julia decided to undergo the surgery. She had been buoyed by Lister’s generosity regarding his fee, but strangely it was Tom’s optimism — she could not, he said, be snuffed out like a flickering candle — that convinced her to go ahead. The operation took place at the end of March in 1880. It was another harsh ordeal — she was burned during the procedure — and although barely conscious for some time afterwards, she survived, and another long recuperation began.
During these difficult, exhausting weeks, Julia considered her position once again. She eventually decided that Tom’s return to Oxford would threaten not only her capacity to earn an income through her boarding scheme, which was continuing in the smaller Church Walk house, but would also threaten her daughters’ opportunities — Lucy was now twenty-one years old, Judy seventeen, and Ethel fifteen. It would also, importantly, undermine the independence that she had slowly and painstakingly gained in his absence.
After various attempts to convince Tom to allow her to keep the not-inconsiderable earnings from her boarding scheme, Julia had finally got him to agree — at that time, with eight pupils and a teacher, she was earning over £500 a year. She was now concerned that if Tom came back to Oxford, this arrangement would cease. Tom was furious when she expressed this worry, and his reaction to her anxiety was scathing. The picture that she drew of him — of his forcing her to work hard and screwing almost all that she earned from her — made him, he said, appear as a monster of rapacity. It was so grotesque and so unlike the truth that it would be laughable, were it not serious. He could only assume that people were again setting her against him. Nevertheless he did promise that if he came home to live, and she preferred to keep her earnings, then he would accede to it without an instant’s demur. But Julia had lost faith in Tom’s promises.
And she had every reason to. Once established in Oxford, he immediately broke his promise to pay her the full fees from her boarding scheme, and his aggressive behaviour towards her, particularly regarding her accounting, did not change. Despite Julia’s further surgery, and despite her increasing fragility, Tom appeared unable to grasp the seriousness of her illness. Polly, who understood Julia to be dying, was appalled, and, although she adopted a restrained, thoughtful tone, she nonetheless lectured her father on his behaviour as a husband. She told him that Julia’s accounting was quite plain and straightforward, and considering her health and loss of spirit and hope for the ordinary matters of life, it was hardly surprising that not every penny could be exactly accounted for. Polly then reprimanded her father for not keeping the financial agreement that he had made with Julia. It meant she did not know from one month to the next what she had to live on. It was an impossible way for her to live, it utterly exasperated her, and it made her deeply resentful. It was not the first time, nor would it be the last, that Polly intervened on behalf of her mother, but caught as she was between warring parents, she was always keen to mollify her father after she rebuked him.
Still, Tom did not dampen his demands on Julia. He continued to insist that she close her boarding scheme, move to a still smaller house, and undertake the most careful scrutiny of every item & branch of the expenditure. And if it was impossible for her, in her condition, to undertake this, then their daughter Judy should take over the management of the household. Tom was sure Judy would take an interest in it and do it well, but Julia refused to countenance the idea. She was determined that her daughter would not do housework, but instead continue her education. Judy had just been accepted into one of the first intakes of Somerville Hall, the institution that Polly had worked so hard to establish.
Tom did not give up. He turned to Polly, sure that she would agree with him, but Polly’s response was as unequivocal as Julia’s, although more carefully expressed. Explaining to him some of the finer points of housekeeping, she said that, as cooks were not machines, it was highly unlikely they would take orders from a young and inexperienced girl of 17, and it would take months of training before Judy could be any judge of quantities or prices, especially as she had notoriously no aptitude for the kind of work.
It should have been enough to stop Tom’s campaign to close the house in Oxford, but it was not. As the summer light spread its charm over Oxford, his position became darker and more precarious — he likened it to facing an utter smash — and his anger grew with Julia’s obstinate determination to remain in Oxford and her refusal to allow Judy to assume the role of housekeeper. So desperate was Tom that Julia close the house, he suggested to his sister Fan that she ask Julia and her younger daughters to live with her at Fox How. Julia was incensed. How dare Tom shunt her off to live with his sister. In response, Tom couldn’t understand why she had let so simple a matter disturb her so much, when Fan, with little money, but a large house, had offered to help in the only way she could.
Nor could he understand Julia’s anger when he suggested that she sell a portion of the furniture. The furniture. So prosaic, but to Julia, a powerful symbol of a diminishing life. As ill-health and poverty increasingly confined her to the house in Oxford, she was living more and more vicariously, torment of a special kind for someone of her vivacious and expansive nature. She refused to sell the furniture.
Julia’s intransigence drove Tom to present her with what he called a simple choice — she could she be a revolutionary wife or a Christian one — and in his succinct summary of what each meant, it was abundantly clear which wife Tom would accept:
A wife with revolutionary ideas is one who does not consider herself in duty bound to honour her husband, nor to lead her children to honour him, nor to submit to be guided by him, in all cases where conscience and the law of God do not oblige her to opposition. A wife with Christian ideas holds exactly the opposite view in all these matters
… There cannot be two rulers in one house. But this says nothing against its being alike the duty and the wisdom of the husband to consult with his wife on all important matters, and act in them so far as possible with her full consent & cooperation.
In a dramatic assertion of independence and a startling rejection of convention, Julia told Tom she would be a revolutionary wife. She would not go where Tom took her. She would not believe what he believed. She would not do as he asked.
Tom lashed out at her with a flurry of insult and condemnation. Putting her own comfort and convenience ahead of him did not accord with his understanding of marriage, where the first duty of a wife, after her duty to God, was to be united in heart and will to her husband, and conform herself to his reasonable determination. She was breaking the vow to obey her husband that she had made when they married. She was infected by the atmosphere of a debased civilisation and the grovelling notions of a society which is fast losing all belief in God and duty. She had unwittingly become a disciple of free thought, with the corrupting breath of the modern world upon her, and he condemned the sham enlightenment which sees in the ‘higher education of women’ the culmination and the reward of human effort.
When stridence did not work, Tom reverted to emotional pleading and charm — he had always used charm — wooing her in a manner reminiscent of a young man rather than a married man nearing sixty years of age and living in a state of estrangement from his wife. His landscape, he told her, was dominated by his great love for her, and although he may not have given her money or rank, he did love her most dearly and had never loved any woman but her. She had been beautiful enough in her prime to justify a war of Troy, or the venture of an empire. Had she been as pliable and as plastic as he had hoped, she would not have been what God and nature had made her. She would not have been the sweet, wilful, passionate, original, ambitious Julia whom he had married, but something much more tractable, which might have had charms of its own, but not her charms. She was always, in spite of jars and irritations, the delight of his soul, the glory of his life. Time crept when he was away from her and galloped when he was with her, and he pleaded that she not cast him aside, for although her children loved her as children ought, they could never love her as he did.
Julia steadfastly refused to enter into this discourse of love. Actions spoke to her, not words. She had a different definition of love — one that was enmeshed in parental responsibility and domestic routine. It was a love that bought his trousers, expressed concern for his health, encouraged him to eat fresh fish on Fridays, and sent him newspapers and cakes. It was a love that could no longer live alongside him.
19
Disintegration
While these shifts in Julia’s marriage were unfolding, the fortunes of her sister and her daughter were coming into sharper focus. Disaster had struck Gussie when her husband, James Dunn, lost his fortune. There was considerable concern that if the Dunns remained in London, James would either go out of his mind or kill himself — voluntarily or involuntarily … It was a great blow for Julia, who had come to rely on Gussie’s presence in London, but ironically the Dunns’ very lack of money prevented their return to Tasmania, and to Julia’s great relief, Gussie and her family remained — although now in straitened circumstances.
In 1881 Humphry Ward accepted a position at The Times which meant that Polly and their three children would be moving permanently to London to be with him. Polly’s future, too, was looking brighter. In November 1880, Macmillan accepted, for the princely sum of £60, the children’s story that she had written the previous summer. It was a story that was dear to Julia, for, in framing the narrative of Milly and Olly — a play on Polly and Willy’s names — Polly had intermingled parts of her own childhood in Tasmania with those of her children.
Just prior to her departure for London, Polly became enmeshed in her own Oxford battle when John Wordsworth, a contemporary of Humphry’s, and afterwards Bishop of Salisbury, was announced as the 1881 Bampton Lecturer. It was a highly sought-after honour, and Polly was incensed that it had gone to someone whom she believed was on no higher a footing than Humphry, but she put aside her envy and attended Wordsworth’s lecture on the present unsettlement in religion, with dramatic results. In an echo of Julia’s behaviour twenty-five years earlier when she had gathered her basket of stones and marched to the church where Tom was being received into the Catholic religion, Polly, furious at Wordsworth declaring that holders of unorthodox views were definitely guilty of sin — among whom she counted thinkers like Benjamin Jowett and her own uncle Matthew Arnold — raced home and wrote a response.
She titled it Unbelief and Sin: A Protest, printed it as a pamphlet, and put it up in the window of the Slatter and Rose bookshop in High Street. When it was pointed out to the bookseller that the brochure bore no printer’s inscription and was therefore illegal, he was forced to withdraw it and return the unsold bundle to its author. Polly laughed and submitted, and then sent her response privately to various friends. She had clearly inherited Julia’s impetuousness and her need to be heard. But, unlike Julia, she did not have the heartache of a divided marriage nor an economically stressed household.
Julia and Tom continued to live apart, but a fragile peace prevailed between them until the end of 1881, when Tom finally obtained a position as professor of English literature at the Catholic University of Ireland in Dublin. Cardinal Newman — he had been made a cardinal in 1879 — had nominated him. It was sufficient incentive for Tom to reignite his campaign for Julia to join him.
Initially conciliatory, he declared his respect for her tenacity of purpose, and devoted fidelity to her children’s interests, as she conceived them, and reminded her that if he was not always just to her in words, he would always be so in his heart. He then turned to the core of their division. They might love to a great extent the same things — children, friends, animals, festivities, all that makes up the brilliancy and beauty of life — but he loved them all with a reference to something conceived to be higher than they, a reference that she repudiated and rejected. Despite this, she could never call herself homeless while he was alive, for wherever and whatever your husband was — worthless as he may be, and undeserving of any one’s affection — there at any rate, while he lived, would be a home for her, always open to her, hers by right and through his undying affection for her. On this basis, she should close her boarding scheme immediately, leave Oxford, and accompany him to Dublin. That, or allow their lives to become more separate. The choice was hers to make.
Julia made her choice. She refused his invitation. When, in April 1882, his position was confirmed, and he again insisted that she join him, she not only refused, but she also poured scorn on the idea. Her life, she told him, was in Oxford. It was her home. She had many friends there. She would not leave it. He had forgone the opportunity of a secure position that would have enabled him to live with her and his family, and had instead put them and any ambition he might have had aside for his conscience. He could now live with his conscience.
If Julia was repelled by Tom’s permanent move to Dublin, other members of his family were relieved. Matthew was delighted, as it was Tom’s first really solid post since he had left Hobart, and William and Jane Forster, too, were pleased, as it meant they would see more of him, although it was pleasure short-lived. Forster had been appointed chief secretary for Ireland in 1880, but before the end of April 1882, he would resign, and he and Jane would return to London.
When Forster had arrived in Ireland to take up his position, Charles Parnell was the accepted leader of the Irish nationalist movement, intent on galvanising support and funds for land reform in Ireland. The urge for reform erupted regularly into violence in the countryside and Forster was caught between a desire to remedy the grievances of the tenant farmers and a determination to quell the violence. When the 1881 Land Bill was passed and the violence did not cease, Parnell was arrested. Forster resigned his position as chief secretar
y following Parnell’s release from prison at the end of March in 1882. In a violent finale to Forster’s time in Ireland, Forster’s replacement, Lord Frederick Cavendish, along with his under-secretary, Thomas Henry Burke, was murdered in Phoenix Park in Dublin on the day Cavendish took up his new position.
When the Forsters returned to London, Julia knew that Tom would be relentless in his pursuit of her, and she was right. His loneliness in Dublin only hardened his attitude towards her, a wife who, against her husband’s wishes, lived in Oxford, while he lived in Dublin. He became even more vehement in his demand that she and Ethel join him, and Julia was forced to rebuff him in what she hoped would be a definitive declaration:
Once for all I will not leave England & go to live in Ireland. I should loathe it, if things were not as they are, but as things are I will not do it. You have pleased yourself & as you have made your bed so you must lie on it, but while I live I will never know one of your R. C. friends. Your whole life is outside mine & this is of yr own making. Ask Ethel if she would like to give up her life in England for what you could offer her in Dublin! No, whether we have to leave this house in September or not her home will be with me & I shall do what I think is best for her … If I were 10 years younger and in a good state of health it is questionable whether under all the circumstances I should consider myself in any way bound to follow you to Ireland, but as things are I belong to my children and they to me & I shall live amongst them.