by Mary Hoban
After burying Julia and writing his verse, Tom sold the furniture in Oxford and returned to Dublin with Ethel as soon as he could. When, some ten months later, he was re-elected a fellow at the Catholic University of Ireland, he no longer thought of returning to live in England. He would see his days out in Dublin, where he taught alongside poet and fellow Catholic convert Gerard Manley Hopkins — also received into the Catholic Church by John Henry Newman in Birmingham — and would number among his pupils the novelist James Joyce, who attended the University College from 1898 to 1902. Tom had another reason for staying in Ireland. Only a year after Julia’s death, he had asked Josephine Benison to marry him, and she had accepted.
Months after his proposal, Tom reluctantly told Polly of his plans:
I am afraid you will not like what I am going to tell you, but yet I think you will become reconciled to it after a time. It is that I am going to marry again, not this year, but early in next. The person, as you would probably guess, is Josephine Benison.
He was anxious that she understood that despite his wish to marry Josephine, Julia was, and remains, the wife of my youth, the wife of my manhood; and, as I have told Josephine, I shall be a mourner for her as long as I live. And, almost to emphasise this point, he described Josephine as plain, a queer honest Hibernian plainness, but one that he had grown accustomed to. Josephine was, he argued, the perfect companion for his old age and one with whom he was in complete sympathy, something that he argued a man might rationally desire, and without blame accomplish.
To further demonstrate that his second marriage was practical rather than passionate, Tom emphasised that it would not have even been necessary had either Ethel or Polly been able to look after him as he grew old, but this had proved impossible. Polly was already married, and Ethel, who had gone to live with Tom after Julia’s death, had quickly returned to Polly’s in London, unhappy with being housewife to her father and unhappy living in Dublin. And as a final demonstration of his practicality, Tom told Polly that his remarriage would not involve any financial strain on him, as Josephine had £100 a year of her own. It is a remarkable letter, as much for what it expresses as what it does not. If there are none of the romantic flourishes of Tom the suitor, there is in plain sight his views about women and their place, views that Julia had found oppressive and had reared her daughters to reject.
Polly was gracious if cool in her response to Tom’s news, and although she had expected his announcement and had nothing but sympathy and affection to give him with regard to it, she felt that to all grown-up children, a father’s second marriage must always carry with it something infinitely sad and moving. She recognised that he had many needs that his children could not supply, however much they might wish to, and she rejoiced that he would find in Miss Benison the fundamental sympathy that he wanted. His children would be grateful to her if she made his life easier and happier, as would her darling mother! — but neither you nor we can ever forget her — and if she knows, she no more than your children will begrudge you the help and tendance of one who understands and cares for you.
Polly may have been expecting Tom’s announcement, but she was startled when he married Josephine before the second anniversary of Julia’s death had passed. It was a sentiment shared by all his children. The rift of indifference was widening between father and children, and it manifested itself further when, having refused to join his children for a Christmas hosted by Lucy at Uppingham, he made the trip from Dublin to Birmingham to attend Cardinal Newman’s funeral in August 1890. No wonder, then, he felt like Ulysses returning to Ithaca when he arrived in Rugby for a commemorative service for Dr Arnold in June 1892. He believed that none of his children or grandchildren cared a rush for what he thought, and although he knew that it was in a great measure his own fault, it was, he acknowledged, a wretched situation. It struck him then how bewildered he was by the general ineffectiveness and unproductiveness of all that he had been, said, and done. But if Tom’s own family had grown inattentive or even dismissive of him, Josephine’s family liked him. They liked him for his kindness and for never allowing little things to worry him.
Tom had never been one to let big things worry him, either, although his refusal to have the last Christmas with his children before his remarriage did come to haunt him. It was the last time that all his daughters were together. Less than two years later, in 1894, Lucy Selwyn, his second daughter and mother to seven children, died suddenly from a blood clot in her brain at the age of thirty-six. She was buried beside Julia. Tom, unwell, did not attend his daughter’s funeral, but Polly, Willy, Judy, Frank, and Ethel were there, with Lucy’s husband, Carus, to bury her. Fan told Tom that his five children looked such a remarkable band of brothers & sisters. After they had buried their sister, Julia’s children covered their mother’s grave with white eucharises and chrysanthemums.
Julia had once said that if Tom remarried after her death he would perhaps realise his ideal of married life, and he did. His life with Josephine was content, if not passionate. She was noted for her charm, and he for his shyness. His days were spent researching and writing, and after dinner, he smoked his pipe while Josephine read his chosen book to him or darned his shirts and stockings. He was able to practise his religion unhindered. It was an ideal relationship for Tom — love with no loss of independence nor the burden of domestic responsibility. Josephine was a companion for his declining life — a woman with whom on all sorts of subjects — religion first of all — I am in complete sympathy. She was neither rebellious nor vehement. She did not throw stones or smash glass. She was keen to know and understand Tom’s inner world, unlike Julia, who had always been uncomfortable at what she might find there. Josephine was, quite simply, in awe of him, and hoped that he would care for her and that she would grow necessary to him.
In November 1900, following the publication of his memoir Passages in a Wandering Life — a memoir which rarely reflected on his personal life — Tom became very ill with bronchitis. Polly was called to Dublin and when she reported back to her siblings that our dear father is just fading away very peacefully and steadily, Frank, Judy, and Ethel made their way to Dublin to farewell him. Willy was too ill to travel. Tom died on 12 November 1900 just short of his seventy-seventh birthday. He was buried in Ireland — his children did not wish to make his grave in England — and a tablet to his memory was placed in Newman’s university church on St Stephen’s Green with the words Domine, Deus meus, in Te speravi. O Lord, my God, in thee have I put my hope.
Following Tom’s death, Josephine returned to charity work and to housekeeping for various members of her family. She died at Slieve Russell in 1919. She had always felt that living with Tom was a great privilege, and that life beside him was so beautiful, only those who came into close contact could realize the tenderness and unselfishness of his character.
Only weeks after Julia’s death, Polly’s novel Robert Elsmere was already on its way to making her a literary phenomenon in England. It would sell over one million copies and was published in many foreign languages, but Polly continued to regret bitterly that Julia had not lived long enough to share in the book’s success. She regretted, too, the injustice of her mother’s hard life, and although she had been unable to remedy that, she was able to bind Julia to her literary endeavours and to her success when she dedicated her next book, The History of David Grieve, published in 1892, to the dear memory of my mother. On seeing the dedication, Benjamin Jowett wrote to Polly immediately telling her how glad he was about it and saying that he hoped someone would tell Julia of it, adding that he had a great respect for her. She told me when I last saw her that you had been the best of daughters to her.
Polly continued to write popular books on significant social and religious issues and, in 1898, her most praised book, Helbeck of Bannisdale, was published. The novel, about the dilemma of passionate lovers who differ over religion, not only confronted again the deep division that had engulfed her parents’
lives, but also explored the impact of women’s lack of education and independence, and men’s need to control them, two of the more destructive threads in Julia’s life with Tom. Helbeck, a Catholic, and Laura, the daughter of a freethinking academic, fall in love, but when, despite her love for him, Laura cannot give up her own soul, cannot submit to Helbeck’s need to convert her, their relationship becomes a battle to the death. With no education, no philosophical training to counter his religious conviction, Laura suicides. Keen that her father should approve the novel, but with Julia no longer there to protect her from his anger, Polly changed various aspects of her manuscript to make the Catholicism more appealing to him.
Between writing novels and raising children, Polly continued her involvement in women’s education and expanded this interest to adult education for working men, to pre-school education, and to education for disabled children. She became the guiding spirit behind the establishment of the Passmore Edwards Settlement in Bloomsbury — which still exists today as the Mary Ward Centre — a place where working-class men and women were provided with adult education, and where planned day-care was available for their children. Her charitable work, like her novels, was born out of empathy for women’s vulnerability, particularly as mothers. Strangely, in the context of her push for education, particularly women’s education, Polly was one of the founding members of the Women’s National Anti-Suffrage League in 1908. She believed that having the vote would not change women’s lives. Only education could do that. Polly died in 1920.
Willy lived only four years beyond his father, dying in 1904. After he and Henrietta moved to Manchester in 1879 to take up his position with the Manchester Guardian, they constructed a content, childless life. Apart from his journalism, he dedicated himself to poetry (particularly Keats), art (he helped establish the Manchester School of Art), Roman history, and foreign contemporary literature. He published various essays and reviews, and his Studies of Roman Imperialism was published posthumously in 1906. His declining health — he had a painful, degenerative disease known as locomotor ataxia — forced his resignation from the Manchester Guardian in 1898, and in the following year, he and Henrietta moved to London, where they were cared for by Polly until his death in 1904. He was buried in Henrietta’s family plot at Little Shelford, near Cambridge.
Theodore remained in New Zealand, and although Julia had been forever optimistic about his chances, he never fulfilled his mother’s hopes for him. After divorcing his first wife, he remarried, and eventually bought some land at Hokianga, where he managed to survive with constant financial help from Polly.
Julia’s youngest son, Frank, fared better. At her death, he had already been elected to a position at the Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford and Julia was thankful that she had lived long enough to see this. After his marriage, in 1892, to Annie Reed Wilkinson — not Miss Valentine — he lost thousands of borrowed pounds in a calamitous business venture, before he and Annie moved to Manchester, where Willy and Henrietta lived. There, Frank practised as a doctor, and he and Annie raised their children.
Judy, like Polly, combined motherhood with a working career. She, too, was passionate about women’s education, and in 1902 she established Prior’s Field, a girls’ school in Surrey. Only six years later, she was tragically struck down by cancer. Judy and Leonard had four children, two of whom became widely known — Aldous Huxley as a novelist and philosopher, and Julian Huxley, Julia’s namesake, as a renowned scientist and the first director-general of UNESCO.
When Julia’s youngest daughter, Ethel, fled her role as housekeeper to Tom in Dublin, she returned to London where she joined the suffragette movement and forged a career as a literary critic and essayist, writing for the Manchester Guardian and The Spectator among others. She also carved out a career as a lecturer, her subjects ranging from the progress of women in Europe to the religious novel. Unlike her sisters, she neither married nor had children. She died in 1930.
Since her death, the life of Julia Sorell Arnold has been cast into a particular narrative form, shaped by the various obituaries, memoirs, and biographies written about her husband. In these, Tom has been portrayed as a cultivated scholar, a man of letters, whose gentle, principled nature, exquisite old-fashioned courtesy, high-minded devotion to what he thought right, and quixotic disinterest in getting on in the world, made him greatly loved. In this narrative, the one rash and foolhardy decision Tom Arnold made was to marry the beautiful, charming, passionate Julia Sorell. When Tom’s attempt to change her wilful nature failed, he valiantly ignored her immoderation and prejudice, just as he ignored her nagging, her financial extravagance, and her deficiencies as a housekeeper — deficiencies that inevitably forced the family into poverty — and remained utterly devoted to her until her death.
In this account of the gentle, forbearing, scholarly Tom and his wild, profligate wife, there is no glimpse of the Julia who, in the face of her own mother’s abandonment, forged close and loving relationships with her father, with her sisters and brothers, with her own children. There is no portrait of the Julia who was admired and befriended by so many, including accomplished, trailblazing women like Mary Louisa Whately and Felicia Skene, or intellectual and literary men such as Benjamin Jowett and Charles Dodgson. There is no sight of the Julia who refused to adhere to the Victorian ideal of a silent woman, of the Julia who grappled with the word ‘independence’ and who was resolute that her daughters should understand it. Nor is there any recognition of the Julia who stubbornly resisted the conventional understanding of marriage to retain control of her own soul.
Where is this Julia? Why has she remained hidden in the archive, and how many other unnamed women sit alongside her, women whose lives may have forged memorable fiction, but are deemed unworthy of biography, obscure women who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs, and whose acts of resistance have paved the way for those who follow? If their voices remain opaque, their presence elusive, it is an essential part of their struggle. And ours.
Acknowledgements
I first met and was intrigued by Julia Sorell, a woman who refused to remain silent, while I was a student in the biography program at Monash University. Thank you, Julia, for an extraordinary journey in pursuit of your story. Monash also gave me three wonderful teachers in Professor Alistair Thomson, Bill Garner, and Ruth Morgan, and the generous administrative help of Melva Renshaw.
This biography would not have been possible without the support given by the Hazel Rowley Literary Fellowship, which was established by the great biographer’s family and friends, to commemorate her life and writing. In particular I would like to thank Della Rowley, Lynn Buchanan, and Irene Tomaszewski, who have over the years provided me with much needed encouragement and advice and who led me to literary agent John Timlin, with whom every interaction has been informative and humorous.
John in turn, led me to Henry Rosenbloom’s wonderful publishing house, Scribe, where he and his Associate Publisher Marika Webb-Pullman demonstrated great bravery in agreeing to publish the life of an ordinary, unknown woman, and where each person I have encountered — Chris Black, Jadan Carroll, Allison Colpoys, Sarina Gale, Caitlin Lawless, Kevin O’Brien, and Mick Pilkington — has been engaging, knowledgeable, and supportive. I must single out the best editor a writer could possibly have in Anna Thwaites, whose intelligence, care, and laughter have made me want to write many more books for the pure pleasure of being edited by her. Thank you, Anna.
I have sought help from many people on this journey, not least among them the staff at the various institutions where documents and images were to be found, including Bethany Hamblen, Amy Boylan, and Anna Sander, who helped me access the papers of Thomas (Tom) Arnold (1823–1900) held at the Balliol College Historic Collections, University of Oxford, and I am grateful to the Master and Fellows of Balliol College for their kind permission to reproduce excerpts from these letters. While all attempts were made to contact the donor of the papers, Mrs
Janet Davies, sadly we did not succeed. I am grateful also to Tanya Kato and Sara Chetney from the Special Collections at The Claremont Colleges Library in California; to Tony Marshall and Annaliese Claydon from Tasmanian Archives and Heritage; to Jane Stewart, Jacqui Ward, and Sue Backhouse from the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery in Hobart; to Ashleigh Whatling and Bridget Arkless at the Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery in Launceston; to my friends Peter and Ruth McMullin for sending me to Joanna Gilmore, who curated the wonderful ‘Elegance in Exile’ exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra, thereby bringing me face to face with many of the characters wandering in and out of Julia’s story; to Susie Shears, Norm Turnross, and my sister Anne Hoban, at the Baillieu Library at Melbourne University, who helped find and scan some of the more esoteric documents required; and to Sharon Sutton and Gillian Whelan from the Digital Collections at The Library of Trinity College Dublin, Lucinda Walker from Historic England, Haley Drolet at Wycliffe Hall in Oxford, and Deborah Walsh and Sue Osman at the Armitt Museum and Library at Ambleside, all of whom helped locate specific images for the book.