by Edward Short
Interestingly enough, South Street had another resident (at No. 15) when Miss Bowles and Lady Georgiana were working together to relieve the sufferings of the London poor: Catherine Walters (1839–1920), otherwise known as Skittles, who was the last of the great Victorian courtesans, the friend and confidante of Gladstone, Lord Hartington and Edward, Prince of Wales. It is tempting to imagine what this lively woman would have made of the Tamworth Reading Room, the utilitarian library which Sir Robert Peel proposed in order to wean the British public off religion and offer them instead the edifying substitutes of education and knowledge, especially since the library also proposed something else, which, as Newman observed, “is not a little curious …” While “all ‘virtuous women’ may be members of the Library … a very emphatic silence is maintained about women not virtuous. What does this mean? Does it mean to exclude them, while bad men are admitted? Is this accident, or design, sinister and insidious, against a portion of the community?” If, as Sir Robert maintained, the point of the library was “to make its members virtuous … to ‘exalt the moral dignity of their nature’ … to provide ‘charms and temptations’ to allure them from sensuality and riot,” why should he exclude unvirtuous women? After all, “To whom but to the vicious ought Sir Robert to discourse about ‘opportunities,’ and ‘access,’ and ‘moral improvement’ … ?” Indeed, “who else would prove a fitter experiment, and a more glorious triumph, of scientific influences? And yet he shuts out all but the well-educated and virtuous. Alas, that bigotry should have left the mark of its hoof on the great ‘fundamental principle of the Tamworth Institution’!”39 In Newman’s witty skewering of Peel’s empty moralism, Skittles would have seen the hypocrisy of an entire society held up to righteous derision.
In order to understand the work that Lady Georgiana, Miss Bowles and so many other Catholic converts did to alleviate the miseries of the London poor (Lady Georgiana, for example, at great personal expense, established the Sisters of Saint Vincent de Paul in England), it is necessary to grasp what an entirely different species the poor appeared to their better-off contemporaries. When Henry James was living in Piccadilly in the 1870s, he encountered the poor during Easter week. “From Good Friday to Easter Monday, inclusive, they were very much en evidence,” he wrote, “and it was an excellent occasion for getting an impression of the British populace. Gentility had retired to the background, and in the West End all the blinds were lowered; the streets were void of carriages, and well-dressed pedestrians were rare; but the ‘masses’ were all abroad and making the most of their holiday, and I strolled about and watched them at their gambols.” After giving it as his opinion that the English upper classes were, on the whole, the handsomest and the best-dressed people in Europe, the aesthete in James turned his attention to the poor and found that, “They are as ill-dressed as their betters are well-dressed, and their garments have that sooty-looking surface which has nothing in common with some of the more romantic forms of poverty. It is the hard prose of misery—an ugly and hopeless imitation of respectable attire. This is especially noticeable in the battered and bedraggled bonnets of the women, which look as if their husbands had stamped on them in hobnailed boots, as a hint of what is in store for their wearers. Then it is not too much to say that two-thirds of the London faces, among the ‘masses,’ bear in some degree or other the traces of alcoholic action. The proportion of flushed, empurpled, eruptive countenances is very striking; and the ugliness of the sight is not diminished by the fact that many of the faces thus disfigured were evidently meant to please. A very large allowance is to be made, too, for the people who bear the distinctive stamp of that physical and mental degradation which comes from the slums and purlieus of this dusky Babylon—the pallid, stunted, misbegotten, and in every way miserable figures. These people swarm in every London crowd, and I know of none in any other place that suggest an equal degree of misery.” Later, in December, James recalled a scene which seemed to sum up the condition of the poor when the city “was livid with sleet and fog, and against this dismal background was offered me the vision of a horrible old woman in a smoky bonnet, lying prone in a puddle of whisky! She seemed to assume a kind of symbolic significance …”40
Newman was deeply appreciative of the works of mercy that Miss Bowles and her titled friends performed on behalf of the London poor and in one letter he sent her money with rather precise instructions: “I inclose a post office order for £5. If you think Miss S. ought to have £2, be so good as to ask her to accept it, according to her letter. As to the rest, I wish it to go in a special kind of charity, viz in the instrumenta, as I may call them, and operative methods, of your own good works – that is, not in meat and drink, and physic, or clothing of the needy, but (if you will not be angry with me) in your charitable cabs, charitable umbrellas, charitable boots, and all the wear and tear of a charitable person who without such wear and tear cannot do her charity.”41 The records Miss Bowles and Lady Georgiana Fullerton left of the charitable work they performed among the poor are scrappy but if one consults Mayhew it seems likely that they were not met with total hostility.42 As one former costermonger told Mayhew, “I’m satisfied if the costermongers had to profess themselves of some religion tomorrow, they would become Roman Catholics, every one of them. This is the reason: London costers live very often in the same courts and streets as the Irish and if the Irish are sick, be sure there comes to them the priest, the Sisters of Charity—they are good women—and some other ladies. Many a man not a Catholic, has rotted and died without any good person near him. Why, I lived in Lambeth, and there wasn’t one coster in one hundred, I’m satisfied, knew so much as the rector’s name …”43
Despite her charitable work, Miss Bowles also found time to become an accomplished author. She was a frequent contributor to The Month and wrote a well-received biography of St. Jane de Chantal and a novel, In the Camargne (1873), which is set in the region in France where St. Mary Magdalene is thought to be buried. Apropos the novel, the reviewer in The Month remarked: “Of course there is a love story, in which an English painter with a hollow heart wins the love of a ‘daughter of the soil,’ and nearly breaks it by his desertion … We think the authoress is a little hard upon men in general, but that we imagine to be one of the newly-acquired ‘rights of women’ …”44 About the helpful comments that Newman made on the book, Miss Bowles later wrote, “It has always seemed to me that the minute pains taken in criticizing that small book was one of the greatest of his many extraordinary acts of kindness.”45 On Newman’s seventieth birthday, as a token of her affection, Miss Bowles sent him a bottle of Chartreuse, which would have amused Saki, who observed in Reginald (1904): “People may say what they like about the decay of Christianity; the religious system that produced green Chartreuse can never really die.”46
Friendly with Lord Acton, Cardinal Wiseman, George Ward, Father Henry Coleridge, S.J. and Bishop Ullathorne, Miss Bowles often relayed to Newman the gossip of Catholic London, even though it often annoyed him, especially the bits about himself. “When will you learn to know me as I am,” he wrote to W.G. Ward in 1863, “and not in the haze of London rumours and gossip?”47 When the Ultramontanes were agitating for an unlimited definition of papal infallibility, Miss Bowles, like many English Catholics, feared the worst and kept Newman abreast of what their fellow Catholics felt about the impending definition. In 1867, Newman sought to put the growing controversy in some perspective. “It is because you are out of health, that you have these nervous feelings about the future of the Church,” he told her. “Exert a little faith – God will provide – there is a Power in it stronger than Popes, Councils and Theologians – and that is the Divine Promise, which controls against their will and intention every human authority.”48 In September 1869, Miss Bowles traveled to Birmingham to discuss the matter with Newman in person, telling him that if the papal extremists got their way, she could not be sure what her response might be. When Newman reminded her that “God cannot leave His Church,” Miss Bowles per
tly replied, “No, but I may cease to believe in it as His Church—I may leave it.” “You will not,” Newman replied: “We all must go through that gate of obedience, simply as obedience. And mind, if the dogma is declared, you will find that it will not make the slightest difference to you.”49 To Lady Simeon, he was equally insistent on a point that some still attempt to dispute. “I say with Cardinal Bellarmine whether the Pope be infallible or not in any pronouncement, anyhow he is to be obeyed. No good can come from disobedience, his facts and his warnings may be all wrong; his deliberations may have been biassed – he may have been misled, imperiousness and craft, tyranny and cruelty, may be patent on the conduct of his advisers and instruments, but when he speaks formally and authoritatively he speaks as our Lord would have him speak, and all those imperfections and sins of individuals are overruled for that result which our Lord intends (just as the acts of the wicked and of enemies to the Church are overruled) and therefore the Pope’s word stands, and a blessing goes with obedience to it, and no blessing with disobedience.”50
In 1875, Newman sent Miss Bowles a copy of his Letter to the Duke of Norfolk, in which he exposed the groundlessness of Gladstone’s charges against the loyalty of English Catholics. After reading it through, Miss Bowles was pleased to see how it clarified the doctrine of infallibility for English Protestants. For herself, she freely admitted to “the burthen dragging down her love and loyalty,” which the threats of the Ultramontanes only aggravated, “but your dear noble fearless Letter has unloosed it and thrown it over for ever.”51 She also assured Newman that “Whole bodies of Catholics of old traditions have rejoiced at your Letter – I mean such as the various families of Eystons and their relations who for centuries have given priests and martyrs and sufferers to the Church.”52
Newman confided in Miss Bowles not only because he trusted her but because she was forthright: she spoke her mind. He was similarly appreciative of the rebarbative George Ward, the Ultramontane editor of the Dublin Review, “for his own absolute straightforwardness.”53 In one instance Miss Bowles gave him some particularly blunt advice. “You act too perfectly, as if dealing with Angels. Then, if others do not act as Angels … you are deeply wounded and grieved—suffering with intense sensitiveness not only the fault but the surprise.” One can credit what Bishop Ullathorne’s biographer once said of Newman—that, given the often unfair opposition he faced, “he must needs have been not merely uncommonly thick-skinned, but even rhinoceros-hided”—without entirely discounting Miss Bowles’s point.54 Her friend was often heedless of the guile of others. And yet Newman himself put the matter in a different light altogether, which showed how indifferent he was, like Geraldine’s “true spouse of Christ,” to “the popular voice of praise or blame.”
As to defending myself, you may make yourself quite sure I never will, unless it is a simple duty. Such is a charge against my religious faith – such against my veracity – such any charge in which the cause of religion is involved. But, did I go out and battle commonly, I should lose my time, my peace, my strength, and only show a detestable sensitiveness. I consider that Time is the great remedy and Avenger of all wrongs, as far as this world goes. If only we are patient, God works for us – He works for those who do not work for themselves. Of course an inward brooding over injuries is not patience, but a recollecting with a view to the future is prudence.55
If Miss Bowles felt free to speak her mind in her letters to Newman about aspects of the Church that annoyed her, Newman did not hesitate to do the same in his letters to her. Perhaps the best example of this is from a letter he sent to her in 1863, when he was still under a cloud in Rome for composing that deeply misunderstood article “On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine,” which appeared in the Rambler in 1859. “This country is under Propaganda,” he wrote to Miss Bowles, “and Propaganda is too shallow to have the wish to use such as me. It is rather afraid of such. If I know myself, no one can have been more loyal to the Holy See than I am. I love the Pope personally into the bargain. But Propaganda is a quasi-military power, extraordinary, for missionary countries, rough and ready. It does not understand an intellectual movement. It likes quick results – scalps from beaten foes by the hundred.”56
In 1876, Miss decided to come to Newman’s aid and take Mrs. Wooten’s place as Dame of the Oratory School, which must have been a trial for a woman who had lived so independently in London for so many years. Before she made her offer, Newman tried to warn her off: “It must be recollected that whoever comes will have to rough it at first, that is, she will be confronted with 50 or 60 new faces of boys of various ages …”57 Then, again, there was something else that Newman felt his faithful friend should consider. “If I understand you, you would not dream of so great a change in your life except for me, and you seem almost to wonder that I do not (as you think) see this. But I do, and take it very seriously, and am led to fear that no blessing will come upon me, if I thus wantonly misuse your feelings towards me.” Still, Miss Bowles was undaunted and after she took the post, she stayed on for five years, though she lacked Mrs. Wooten’s maternal warmth. Many of the Old Boys remembered her as a strict, forbidding figure.58 When she retired in 1881, Newman sent her off in style in his own carriage accompanied by Father Neville. Later, when Miss Bowles became hard up, Newman wrote a letter on her behalf to the Secretary of the Royal Literary Fund in his wonderfully elegant hand: “Cardinal Newman presents his compliments to Mr. Blewitt … and begs to say that he believes the circumstances of her case as stated by her, to be quite exact, and that after a brave struggle for more than 20 years to supply the fortune which without imprudence she had lost, she is now obliged to have recourse to the aid of friends.”59 Since she would live for another 25 years, Emily’s old age was pinched. Nonetheless, she must have been pleased that her grant to the Royal Literary Fund—which eventually made her a grant of ₤30—was supported not only by Newman but by Hallam Tennyson, the poet’s son.
In 1867, when the Pall Mall Gazette declared that the “actual Roman system” was “attractive only to women and to men of inferior intelligence and education,” the paper was giving voice to a common British prejudice.60 Yet Newman would have seen a kernel of truth in this, for Catholics were poorly educated, and the reason, as far as he could see, was plain: “There are those who wish Catholic women, not nuns, to have no higher pursuit than that of dress, and Catholic youths to be shielded from no sin so carefully as from intellectual curiosity.”61 Hence, the campaign, led by Cardinal Manning, to dissuade Catholic youths from going to Oxford or Cambridge. Nevertheless, with the passage of time, Newman saw that the Church’s own internal divisions on mixed education were merely a part of a much deeper problem. In January 1873, he wrote to Canon Walker, “As to the prospects of the world, I agree with you they are very bad. It looks as if a great and almost fiery trial of souls, especially as regards faith, is destined for the next generation. I look at our poor boys here with anxiety and compassion, feeling what sophistries and temptations of the intellect and social perplexities may be in store for them in middle life. Will not the same fanaticism which resolves to have all the primary schools throughout the country in its hands, agitate for some means of exerting a control and introducing a teaching of its own into all the higher schools, some twenty years hence? Religion is in process of exclusion from the education of high and low, and what will be the issue of this tyranny?”62
Miss Bowles was certainly not one of those Catholics who imagined Catholic women should concern themselves only with dress, nor did three of her close friends, all converts. The Duchess Dowager of Norfolk, after the loss of her husband “never laid aside her widow’s weeds” and Lady Georgiana Fullerton never “put off her mourning for her son.”63 Of Lady Georgiana, Bessie Belloc wrote: “In her younger days she must inevitably have been accustomed to the finest dresses ever made or worn, living, as she did, in the house of an ambassador of the first rank. She now never wore any costume but the black dress and shawl and plain cap, wh
ich might have suggested austerity but for the bright, merry eyes,” which were “infinitely touching to those who knew the agony she had passed through.”64 In this, neither Lady Georgiana nor the Duchess of Norfolk could have said with William Allingham
No funeral gloom, my dears, when I am gone
Corpse-gazing, tears, black raiment, graveyard grimness …
Yet for Miss Bowles, on the matter of dress, a third friend was even more remarkable. “Lady Lothian alone, with her admirable regard for her family of daughters and a married son, set her own wishes aside, and resumed the dress befitting her rank and the society in which she moved, with the dignity of one equally indifferent to velvets and jewels or shabby crepe and bombazine.”65 To be indifferent to good clothes when wearing “shabby crepe and bombazine” was one thing but to be indifferent to it when set out in the dress befitting a marchioness was quite another. At a time when the inspired couturier Charles Worth (1825–1895) was making dresses of brilliantly colored taffeta and gossamer tulle for a clientele that included Empress Eugénie of France, the queen of Sweden, and Pauline, Princess von Metternich, such indifference was indeed heroic.66 No one could accuse the Marchioness of Lothian of being sybaritic.