by Sally Denton
While a scion of Scottish nobility like John Griffiths might have fallen in love with and wed the supposed daughter of a fugitive French servant, the class lines and social conventions of the time make such a match highly improbable. The conjecture of genealogists and descendants rests on the more likely scenario that John and his distinguished family recognized Susanna as an aristocratic orphan and political refugee, if not a distant Rio cousin. All involved would have kept such a fact discreetly concealed in the still-charged atmosphere of the Napoleonic years, when escapees from the guillotine might still be prey to some settling of old scores.
The patrician Rio family dated back to the late sixteenth century in the renamed Côtes-du-Nord. Sparsely populated by nobles, priests, and peasants, the region was virtually devoid of the rising middle class. Its inhabitants were passionately loyal to the Catholic monarchy, an antirevolutionary stronghold. Entrenched Catholicism dating back to the fourth century fueled a zealotry and isolationism that kept the nobility out of touch with the object of the revolution. The area would come to symbolize some of the most ruthless reprisals and cold-blooded massacres perpetrated by the revolutionaries. “The worst excesses were committed in the provinces,” historian Christopher Hibbert writes of the bloodshed. “In several towns the guillotine was kept constantly at work and those convicted of crimes against the Revolution were slaughtered wholesale.”
The Rio family had greatly diminished by the end of the eighteenth century, and in the nineteenth century only a handful of Rio births were recorded in France. The name became so rare that it could soon be traced only to an extremely wealthy Rio clan in rural Chard, England, and to the family of Susanna Burgess’s new mother-in-law on the Isle of Skye. Genealogical records and documents relating to Susanna Burgess give her birthdate only as “about 1788” and contain no further details as to place of birth, baptism, or pedigree.
When, on May 8, 1810, Susanna gave birth to her only child, she chose an anglicized spelling for her daughter’s name— Jane instead of the French Jeanne. Eventually the name would become Jean. The Rio name, pronounced with a long i and sometimes spelled “Rioux,” would be carried forward when Jean Rio’s firstborn son would include the name in that of each of his eight children.
John and Susanna’s daughter, Jean Rio Griffiths, would be baptized in London at the St. Lawrence Jewry, an impressive structure built in the twelfth century and dedicated to the martyr who had been roasted alive on a gridiron in third-century Rome. Rebuilt in 1670 by the great English architect Sir Christopher Wren, it was adorned with gold-leaf chandeliers, Grinling Gibbons carvings, and a window commemorating its pre-Reformation preacher, the martyred St. Thomas More. The rituals performed in this imposing edifice, a flagship of the Anglican establishment, would shape and dominate the first forty years of Jean Rio’s religious and spiritual life.
Jean Rio was born near the Jewry, in the district where William the Conqueror had relocated Jews in the eleventh century, and she would grow up an only child in the neighborhood of the Jewry and in the shadow of London’s Guildhall, the center of city government since the Middle Ages and during her lifetime a massive library. Though an intellectual life was largely reserved for males in the England of her youth, Jean Rio’s prosperous parents—both highly educated—afforded her every opportunity for learning. Professors of music came to their home to teach her to play the harp and the piano. She was granted an early education and she became an avid reader at a time when girls of her class were ridiculed for intellectual-ism. “As a rule, when girls had left school they were thought to be wasting time if seen reading,” wrote one of Jean Rio’s British contemporaries. “They were allowed to spend their superfluous energy in fancy work, and ridiculous wax-flower making, without molestation; but ‘put down your book,’ and ‘don’t waste your time that way,’ were common expressions.” Perhaps owing to her parents’ Scottish ancestry, books were a valued part of Jean Rio’s life. Early on, “reading and writing became embedded in Scottish society,” according to historian Arthur Herman. In Edinburgh “there were six publishing houses in 1763, for a city with a population of only sixty thousand.” She was educated in the English classics and had the good fortune to live at a time when four of the greatest British novelists were women. The fictional spheres of Jane Austen, George Eliot, and Emily and Charlotte Brontë were representative of Jean Rio’s own rarefied world.
Unlike reading, music was considered appropriate for pubescent girls as what a nineteenth-century writer called “the least thought-inspiring” avenue to “soothe the savage breast.” Commonly, parents of this era who dissuaded their daughters from highbrow pursuits and development fostered by books thought it “no waste of time,” as one observer noted, “for them to spend two or three hours a day at the piano.” Eventually Jean Rio studied at a conservatory, though we don’t know which one. Her career as a singer and pianist then took her to concert halls in Paris, Madrid, and Milan.
Other than her emigration diary, which was written as a letter home to a close friend, as well as brief remarks in her later midwife’s notebook, no additional examples of her own writing are known to exist.
She married Henry Baker of London on September 24, 1832, in the St. Lawrence Jewry, where her mother had married her father and her paternal grandmother had married her grandfather. The twenty-two-year-old newlywed presided over a house on Lake Street near St. Paul’s Cathedral. She gave birth to her first child, Henry Walter, the following summer. Two years after the first baby, she gave birth to William George in 1835. Her third son, Charles, died as a toddler, and in 1839 she christened her fourth son Charles Edward. Elizabeth Ann was born in 1841, John Edye in 1843, Charles West in 1844, Josiah Elliott in 1846, and Jean Rio in 1848.
Child rearing was left to governesses, and the children were taught what one of them called “the pure Queen’s English” by private tutors, as Jean Rio pursued her musical career throughout Europe. A cook and butler handled domestic matters, and Jean Rio and Henry took their meals separate from the children. The family regularly attended public celebrations for Queen Victoria, and, to judge from their proximity to the royal family at these times, the Bakers were apparently among the elite of mid-nineteenth-century London society.
Henry, a prominent engineer, built a miniature steam locomotive for his children. The couple routinely read Shakespeare aloud to their children from a leather-bound volume of the complete works—a book Jean Rio would eventually carry with her to Utah, along with many others. “They were taught personal cleanliness, morals, manners, and religion in no uncertain terms,” wrote a descendant. As each child turned fourteen, he or she was invited to the family dinner table, having received training in etiquette. At that age, the sons were presented with a silver watch and chain. By that age as well, the children were expected to have mastered the common requirements in history and literature, as well as bookkeeping and higher mathematics that included algebra. Upon turning sixteen, the boys received a gold watch and, as son William George remembered the symbolic rite, were told by Jean Rio and Henry that they would now be expected to conduct themselves as proper gentlemen at all times. All the children learned horsemanship and regularly rode the bridle path in Hyde Park; it was a proficiency that would serve them well in their future lives on the American frontier.
In 1840, Jean Rio’s paternal great-uncle, William Rio MacDonald, bequeathed a substantial amount of property and cash to her. MacDonald, who had been surgeon to the king, had resided at 46 Doughty Street, one of London’s most famous Georgian avenues. At the time of MacDonald’s death, the neighborhood was at the heart of the city’s literary life; that year Charles Dickens moved with his wife into the house next door. Among the property listed in MacDonald’s will along with the Doughty Street residence were “leaseholds” in Tabernacle Walk and Rose Court. Also bequeathed to Jean Rio were a home on Chiswell Street and all its “appurtenances,” the rents and profits from numerous other properties, and an annuity for the rest of her life, all “fr
ee from the control, debts, or engagements of her husband.”
Whether the family relocated from their Lake Street home to Doughty Street is unclear, but what is obvious is that Jean Rio Baker was a very wealthy woman in her own right by 1840. As she was living at the height of comfort, however, England was experiencing the most severe depression of the century. Since losing the American War of Independence, Great Britain had been in crisis. “Its politics were stuck in permanent factionalism and gridlock,” writes Arthur Herman. “A sense of malaise had settled over its ruling class, while popular unrest, encouraged by the French Revolution, spread across the provinces.”
Throughout the 1840s, the poverty and degradation brought about by the Industrial Revolution became more and more staggering, as depicted so famously by Charles Dickens in Oliver Twist and other novels of life in Victorian England. Women and children had entered the workforce in record numbers, and most of them suffered abhorrent factory conditions and earned a pittance for a backbreaking day’s work. People of various races and cultures were flocking to London in search of employment with the railways and shipyards, the new city-dwellers living in wretched conditions. Bedraggled children toiled for fourteen hours a day in factories; squalid brothels bred disease; the slums were awash in sewage; and there was a burgeoning criminal population. The grim deaths from the Irish famine that began with the blight of the potato crop in 1845 dominated the London newspapers, and Ireland was poised for violent revolution.
At the same moment, the Church of England was in a crisis of its own, as reformers increasingly sought a separation between church and state. All the critics seemed to agree that neither the church nor the government was adequately addressing the appalling social conditions. “When the inner cities are crying out, what are the [Ecclesiastical] Commissioners doing? They bought a palace for the Bishop of Gloucester and Bristol, lots of bedrooms,” British scholar Owen Chadwick writes of the rising tide of dissent and suspicion. As the populace increasingly protested the church’s corruption—bishops were burned in effigy and crowds called for Canterbury Cathedral to be turned into stables—politicians began pushing for reform to pacify a restless nation.
The Church of England stubbornly resisted the oncoming changes, providing a wedge for the evangelicals who were transforming the European and American religious landscapes. “Its piety tended to be sober, earnest, dutiful, austere, or even prosaic in expression,” Chadwick observes of the church at that time. Meanwhile, the evangelicals “preached their way into the hearts of rich and poor, neglectful of parish boundaries, friendly with dissent.” Rejecting the staid, authoritarian dogma of the past, this faction encouraged believers to choose feeling over thinking in their path to God. “Romantic literature and art, the sense of affection and the sensibility of beauty pervading European thought, the flowering of poetry, the medievalism of the novel or of architecture,” as Chadwick describes the new arousal, posed a threat to church conservatives. The evangelicals brought poverty, corruption, and injustice to the forefront of the national dialogue as part of the New Age movement to elevate society, and advocated a Christian Socialism that predated Marxist and other socialist phenomena in politics.
For all the world’s “progress,” in the first half of the nineteenth century the sense of the precariousness and fragility of life was keen, the populace at the mercy of a physical world of microbes and human physiology still little understood. Epidemics of cholera, typhoid, and influenza decimated entire cities. What a century later would be relatively minor diseases and accidents, at least in Europe and the United States, were often lethal. Children died of afflictions as common as runny noses and diarrhea. Slight wounds turned gangrenous and fatal. Congenital deformities and genetic diseases beyond any treatment seemed the vengeance of an unpredictable God. Even for Jean Rio, a privileged woman with servants, it was a life with its share of hardship and uncertainty. Like her peers, she was raised to fear and worship God, to see religion as the only true deliverance from life’s random travails.
In this era, one’s faith was defining, and it was expressed fulsomely, without shame or embarrassment. Agnostics and atheists were rare. Charles Darwin had not yet written The Origin of Species challenging the simplistic biblical view of Creation. True believers accepted the Bible in literal terms— “felt as close to Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and a host of other characters as they did to their own friends and relatives,” according to J.R.H. Moorman—and thought the Scriptures were infallible.
Jean Rio saw the degraded condition of British life as a clear sign of the approaching end-time in biblical terms—a millennial expectancy creating a groundswell at the time. Offended by the greedy, uncaring attitude of a Church of England that defied reform, she sought a different path to spiritual salvation. Of keen intellect and compassion, hers would be a fecund mind for Mormon persuasion.
Just as the Church of England was steeped in corruption and slow to recognize its crippling social irrelevance, religion in mid-nineteenth-century America was facing its own upheavals and transformations. With the evangelical movement of the 1820s, a rousing and muscular new spirituality had swept over most of the major denominations of America. New sects and new approaches were challenging the Congregationalists, Presbyterians, and others to faith and ritual. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was one of the many fledgling and often transitory movements born in the turbulence of the moment, a moment of frontier revivals, spiritual visitations, and widespread belief in magic and the occult. Growing out of this wider impulse, the Mormon Church as envisioned by its prophet and founder was to be a cooperative theocracy responsive to the social and spiritual needs of all mankind. Above all, the new religion was rooted in the fervent notion that the “latter days” were indeed at hand.
Fueled by millennialist passions for deliverance and everlasting life, Mormonism was born in a time known as the Second Great Awakening. It was conceived by a charismatic young American farmer named Joseph Smith, who claimed to have had a vision in 1823 in which an illuminated angel named Moroni directed him to excavate some ruins near his home in Palmyra, in western New York. Smith said Moroni visited him three times and told him that God had selected him to restore the one true church in North America in preparation for the Second Coming of Christ. His first job, Smith said he was told, was to find a book inscribed on golden plates that Moroni had buried in nearby Cumorah fourteen centuries earlier. To assist Smith in translating the “reformed Egyptian” symbols on the tablets would be two crystal seer stones, the Urim and Thummim, buried with the sacred texts.
The self-proclaimed prophet said he located and unearthed these golden plates on the designated night of September 22, 1827. He was then twenty-two. He said that by using the magic stones he was able to decipher the mysterious engravings, dictating the stories contained on the leaves to assistants. By April 1829, Smith, who was illiterate, had completed a 275,000-word manuscript. This Book of Mormon, named for the ancient military figure, was said to be based upon the journal of Mormon’s son, Moroni, the last diarist of the supposedly historic events.
Full of heroes and villains, bloodshed and miracles, warriors and intrigue, rich biblical symbols and autobiographical themes, the narrative was a revised and enhanced New Testament, and it included the details of a journey to America by Christ immediately after his resurrection to visit his chosen people. The book depicted a Hebrew tribe led by a man called Lehi, who had left Jerusalem in 600 BC and sailed to the Americas with his six sons and other followers. Once there, Smith wrote, the tribe broke into two warring factions: the devout and godly under the good son, Nephi; the evil sinners under the bad seed, Laman. God was seen as blessing the Nephites and all of their descendants with white skin, while cursing the violent Lamanites with dark skin. The “white and delight-some” Nephites battled the bloodthirsty Lamanites for six hundred years, until Christ rose from the dead, turned up in North America to preach to these displaced Palestinians, and persuaded each side to abandon its barbarous ways. The
tale of the Nephites and the Lamanites explained the “Hebraic” origin of Native Americans, a popular theory of the day—that the Indians of North America were a remnant of the mythical lost tribes of Israel, and must therefore be “gathered” in anticipation of Christ’s return. “The theory that the Americans are of Jewish origin has been discussed more minutely and at greater length than any other,” writes the historian H. H. Bancroft.
Reflective of the mystical leanings of the era, the Book of Mormon was an unsophisticated view of the clash between good and evil. At the core was a belief that all churches had deviated from the true theology of Christianity—what Smith called the “Great Apostasy”—and that Smith’s divine task was to gather the remnants of Israel to a latter-day Zion and await the millennium. Central to the theology was a conviction that all male devotees were on the road to godhood, that all men could create their own worlds, and that all women, if pure and obedient to men, could be “pulled through the veil” to this kingdom as eternal companions to righteous men.