Good Wives

by Margaret Forster

  But Livingstone obviously did. Why his love for Mary should ever have been doubted is partly his own fault. He famously wrote to a friend that his wife-to-be was ‘a matter-of-fact lady, a little thick, black-haired girl, sturdy and all I want’.14 Not flattering, it’s true, but very much in Livingstone’s self-deprecating style. The phrase ‘all I want’ has been taken to mean ‘not up to much but she’ll have to do’, whereas if the emphasis is put on the ‘all’ it can just as well be read as ‘everything I want’ (which is how I read it). Later, he wrote to Mary that he had loved her when he married her and went on to love her even more. He grew physically more attracted to her, too, writing to her in October before they were married, ‘I wish I could embrace you’ – which, for a puritanical Scot, counted as fulsome. Curiously, pity is all Mary rates from his biographers, yet a man of Livingstone’s uncompromising principles would never have married out of pity or desperation – it simply was not in his character. Throughout his life, he had to believe passionately in every action he took before he could proceed, and marriage was no different.

  There was, after all, plenty in Mary for him to love. She was calm and quiet, kind and caring, and skilled in many of the ways Livingstone valued. She was far from being empty-headed (like the colonial ladies he despised) or from having a miserably contracted mind. On the contrary, she had a serious mind and had been trained to teach. She taught competently in the school at Kuruman and he saw how popular she was with the children. He was impressed, too, because she was bilingual, something he could never hope to become (though he found Setswana easy to learn). Mary’s response to his overtures is not known, but since pride was all to him, some kind of rapport must have existed, or he would never have risked a proposal. He had to be sure she would accept. Here again, accepted wisdom dictates that of course a fat, plain, dull girl like Mary would accept, desperate not to be left on the shelf. But before her, Mary had the example of her mother and father’s love-match and she knew the difference between a passionate commitment and a purely practical arrangement. It is insulting to them both to doubt that their marriage lacked genuine mutual attraction, or that Mary could never have refused Livingstone.

  The Moffat parents expressed themselves astonished – ‘Mr Livingstone’s marriage was to us a most unexpected event’15 – but delighted. Their daughter would stay within the mission fold and near to them. Mrs Moffat did have a few doubts about her son-in-law (as he had more than a few about her) whom she saw as headstrong and reckless, and whom she suspected would dominate her daughter perhaps to her detriment. But there was general rejoicing on the Kuruman station when on 9 January 1845 the marriage took place. No one had any doubts that, whatever else, Mary would make ‘a good wife’ – capable, biddable, supportive. And absolutely no challenge to her husband’s authority.

  II

  THE SPEED WITH which David Livingstone decided how happy he was to be married was remarkable. If the idea of having a wife had filled him with foreboding, the reality filled him with a delight he did not attempt to conceal, and, as with all converts, his desire to persuade others to do what he had once argued against was strong. He now encouraged his bachelor friends to find wives for themselves. ‘The woman’, he wrote to his friend D. G. Watt, ‘is the glory of the man. I am very contented and very happy in my connection.’1 And to Mrs Sewell, later, he was even more forthcoming, hoping that a mutual friend who was about to marry would be ‘abundantly compensated by the amount of conjugal bliss he will enjoy [unlike] the misery he endured while compelled to live the glorious life of a bachelor’.2 Bliss apart, he also relished the material comforts which having a good wife brought. He told his mother and sisters of his pleasure at having clean linen on his bed and his every domestic want catered for. His suddenly well-run household reminded him of his mother’s and made him appreciate her more in retrospect. He was glad to have his own house at last, modest though it was and built by himself during his engagement to Mary, though it was two months after his marriage before he was able to take his bride there, to Mabotsa, some 125 miles (200 km) north-east of Kuruman. The journey was in effect their honeymoon and when Mary arrived at her new home she was pleased by the sight of the lush green countryside through which streams and rivers flowed. It looked the perfect place to set up a mission station (at least in March it did). All around, it was true, was forest, home to lions and leopards, but the situation of their house itself was attractive, sitting as it did in a kind of amphitheatre of hills. The house was built of stone to waist height and then continued in mud, in the local fashion, which involved layering wet earth in stages, and the roof was thatched.

  Here Mary went about the same kind of arduous daily duties that her mother had performed and trained her in, but she also taught the African children and started classes in reading and sewing for the women. She soon realised that teaching the children at Kuruman had been far easier because the Kgatta tribe were more co-operative than the Tlhaping tribe who inhabited Mabotsa. At Mabotsa, the chief sometimes let the children come to be taught by her but often the demands of planting and herding required their presence elsewhere – learning to read and write had a very low priority. It was the same for the women. The younger women were too valuable to spare. They did the labouring, the carrying and collecting of firewood and water, the hoeing and weeding, often carrying their babies on their backs while pregnant again. There was not much demand for Mary’s services, but she persevered and her husband admired her, writing to his family with pride of how she worked even though she was soon pregnant and feeling ill. His concern for her health was real, but it was not real enough for him to give her the stability and security she needed at such a time. On the contrary, he was disillusioned with Edwards, his fellow missionary at Mabotsa, and determined to move and find another mission station on his own.

  It was the last thing Mary wanted. She had seen Mabotsa becoming another Kuruman, growing and flourishing as her parents’ station had done. She had a house there, and, more important, a garden which had taken a great deal of work, her work, to establish and was now producing cabbages, lettuce, turnips and onions. All this would be lost. She had no apparent influence on her husband – his work and his vision proved to be more important than her wishes, and he had convinced himself his work could only be done to best effect somewhere else. Leaving Mary behind, he went to scout for a new location, and when he had found one at Chonwane, north of Mabotsa, he left her frequently, to start preparing a home for them to move to once the baby was born. Almost at once Mary’s first hint of failure as a perfect wife was exposed: she hated being without her husband. She not only hated it, she could hardly endure being alone. Being solitary unnerved her. From being calm and dependable when her husband was there, she became tearful and uncertain, quite unlike her mother who, though she had dreaded her husband’s absences, had seemed to radiate confidence and never once thought of begging him to stay. But then, she had been a wife without parallel, never burdening her husband with her own fragility, never worrying him with her dependence. But Mary Livingstone was dependent, and in her dependency similar to so many wives before and since. Her husband recognised this but would not give in to her need. Instead he bought a horse, so that he could travel more quickly between Mabotsa and Chonwane. When he received a message that his wife had terrible headaches, or that she was terrified because lions had come out of the woods and surrounded the house, he galloped back to be with her, but he would not give up his new project. Mary must learn to manage. Wives had to.

  Her sister Ann’s visit helped, and might have been repeated, but Ann had a terrifying experience on her way home to Kuruman and couldn’t be expected to risk the journey again. She travelled with only a maid and two African boys to look after the oxen who pulled her wagon. When a lion attacked, at night, as they were all sitting round the campfire, there was no one to protect them. Ann, her maid and the boys leapt safely into the wagon, but all night long they heard the horrible sounds of the lion crunching the bones of an ox and
knew it could have been their own bones. Mary just had to hope that her husband would be with her for the birth, and not only for the psychological support; he would be needed to deliver his own child.

  In the event, he did deliver his son. Mary’s pregnancy lasted ten months (as all her pregnancies did), not nine, and her husband was with her to deliver Robert on their wedding anniversary. It made the bond between them stronger but also increased Mary’s dependency by adding the relationship of doctor/patient to that of husband/wife. In Victorian England, a husband was never in the bedroom while his wife went through labour and childbirth, and even husbands who were doctors would rarely deliver their own children. This was only one respect in which missionary couples differed from couples back home but it was perhaps the most significant and made missionary husbands unique in their own time. There were none of the mysteries of womanhood for them, and this in turn affected how their wives saw them. Far more than any ‘new’ man of our own day, proud to be present at his wife’s delivery, Livingstone shared in the experience. It drew them even closer.

  Once Robert was born, the rival demands of being a mother and a wife were difficult to meet. Robert was from the first a fretful child, and it did not help that almost as soon as he was born his parents moved to Chonwane. Mary arrived there to find an unfinished house in an area that looked barren. There was virtually no water – the streams had dried up, since there had been no rain since November (it was February) – and the wind swept sand and dust across the plain. There was little food available, and Livingstone had been allocated no new funds to buy supplies from the Cape. She didn’t feel well, and neither did her husband, who had excruciating toothache. There was, of course, not the faintest possibility of finding a dentist – he had to be his own dentist just as he was his own doctor. But he was unable to pull out his own tooth. He had a pair of ‘shoemaker’s nippers’ which he used for all manner of tasks, but he couldn’t get them round his own tooth and pull at the same time. Someone else would have to do it, someone who could position him to the best advantage and see what they were doing. This ‘someone’ must be his wife. He instructed her carefully: he would lie on the floor, mouth wide open, and she would kneel over him, place the ‘nippers’ securely round the offending tooth, and then haul it out. Obedient as ever, Mary did what she was told, but as soon as she started pulling her husband began to writhe in agony, roaring and knocking her hand away. But it had to be done, and so Mary set to again. When the tooth finally yielded, they were both exhausted. Childbirth, dental extractions – there was little mystery in this marriage.

  The move to Chonwane was disastrous and, to make matters worse, Mary became pregnant again in August. Her mother, arriving for a visit in September, was shocked by what she found. This was no Kuruman, but an inhospitable place where no amount of hard work could compensate for the lack of water. Her daughter was thin for the first time in her life, and worn out, looking after a constantly crying baby while trying to keep her pathetic household together. The Livingstones were grateful for the supplies she brought (though they had dreaded her visit, since she was sure to be critical). Mrs Moffat left feeling that she had made some difference even if her opinion of her son-in-law was unchanged – her admiration for his obvious commitment to missionary work was offset by her suspicion that her daughter’s health was being endangered by his recklessness and that she had neither the will nor the strength of character to challenge him.

  Indeed, Mary accepted, at that stage, everything that happened to her, and the hardest thing to accept was the knowledge that however much her husband loved their child he was putting Robert at risk. From being merely fretful, her baby, only ten months old, became ill in October, with a form of pneumonia. He survived it, but a few weeks later his father took him and the pregnant Mary off on an exploratory trip to the east of Chonwane and on their return Robert suffered a relapse, developing a fever just as the party was fording a river. Mary finally broke down and wept, sure that either her son would die from his fever or else they would all be drowned. Looking at his wife who, in spite of her pregnancy, was thin and worn, Livingstone was glad of the face-saving excuse he had to take her to Kuruman, to attend the meeting of the District Committee of the London Missionary Society. The truth was, he was almost destitute; the supplies brought by his mother-in-law had been long since used up. To be at Kuruman for a while, especially with another baby due, would be a blessing.

  It was Mary’s first visit home. She had left a mere two years before, a plump and healthy young bride, and now apart from her swollen belly, she was haggard, her face stripped of flesh, her arms and legs stick-thin: a bad advertisement for marriage. There was general shock at her appearance, and Livingstone himself ruefully reported that the African women who had known Mary since she was a child and crowded round to meet her wondered aloud if he had been feeding her at all, because she looked starved as well as ill. He had to admit he could see why they were concerned, but he resented implications that he might be the cause of her ill-health – as if he were responsible for the drought at Chonwane from which in his view all their troubles stemmed. He and Mary had been unlucky, that was all. Everything had been against them, but God was in charge and somehow all that had happened had been meant.

  At any rate, they were now at Kuruman, in safe hands and with plenty to eat. Mary benefited enormously. Writing to Mrs Sewell, Livingstone acknowledged this – ‘Our visit proved very beneficial to Mrs Livingstone. We got a daughter there too.’3 Agnes, named after his mother, was born in May and to his relief proved a much more contented baby than Robert had been. Doctor though he was, he seemed to make no connection between the nursing mother’s circumstances – her mother and sisters being able to look after her – and the baby’s contentment. As soon as he could, he left Kuruman with Mary and the two children and travelled slowly back to Chonwane, a journey of nearly 700 miles (1,125 km), reaching there at the beginning of July, only to decide to move on again. ‘Chonwane was a bad spot for a European to live in,’ he told Mrs Sewell. ‘Water very scanty and bad.’ The chief of the tribe agreed and had already found a place to which everyone could move, at Kolobeng. ‘We have of course,’ Livingstone wrote, ‘to begin again at the beginning.’4

  Of course. And a good wife had to accept this inevitability, which meant that yet again she would be condemned to live in a makeshift hut while a more substantial dwelling was built. She had had only a year of stability at Mabotsa, then another year and a half at Chonwane, and now, with a baby and a small child (often ill), she had to face moving again. Not once does her husband record her protesting, or accusing him of thinking only of himself – but then, she wouldn’t. She was obedient not so much to his wishes as to the driving force which made him want to go into parts of Africa unseen by any missionary or explorer and to bring God’s word to the inhabitants. He himself never saw any selfishness in this – he did nothing on a whim, but acted on reasons he saw as perfectly logical, dictated by conditions beyond his control. Mary, as his wife, had to share both his sense of mission and his way of seeing things, or their marriage could not flourish. For her to be a ‘good wife’ his belief had to be hers, his total commitment to what he saw as right hers too. Otherwise nothing made sense, none of the hardships she suffered could be justified. A wife had to have trust above all, and that Mary had. But perhaps she had too much. Her faith in her husband was, if not blind, then inclined to ignore what was merely stubborn about him. He reacted badly to criticism, so it would not have done much good for her to argue against his decisions – he was, as he once wrote to his parents, like a Shetland pony, obstinate and immovable at any attempt to force him to do what he did not want to do. But a different wife, one who had the insight to point out the error of his ways on occasion, and who did it calmly and with love, was what he needed. Giving credit to Mary for obedience was to give her no credit at all.

  Yet Livingstone did not dominate his wife in the unpleasant way this might suggest. Mary had been dominated by her mother
all her life, and if her mother’s correspondence is anything to go by she had never once rebelled (it was Helen who finally did so). There was something in her nature that made her accede to the demands of others without argument and, in fact, she found much more pleasure in being led by her husband than she had ever found in bowing to her mother’s wishes. She admired his strength of will and even seems to have felt that it was an honour to support him. She was far from a cipher, a woman without a mind of her own, or of limited intelligence, but unlike her own mother she found self-abnegation acceptable. She was a stoic, seeing it as her place to interpret her marriage vows literally. The price her husband paid for this ‘heroism’ (as he more than once described it) was that he had, in turn, to accept her emotional dependence. He had learned that, excellent wife though she was, Mary disintegrated emotionally if left on her own. Her devotion to him was absolute but was not always in her own, or her children’s, best interest.

  In August 1847, he left her at Chonwane and set off to Kolobeng to start work on establishing a new mission. ‘Itinerancy is good, if you have a permanent sphere, a focus’, he commented. Good for him, but not of course for his wife, left behind. He liked what he saw at Kolobeng immediately, especially the sight of the river, which reassuringly was 18 feet (5.5 m) wide. Not only was there abundant water, but also plenty of wood to build with, since the area was thick with trees, and among the trees and in the meadowland near the river were animals that could be hunted and killed for meat. He worked ferociously hard with his African helpers, digging a canal to provide irrigation and planting every variety of seed. Meanwhile, 25 miles (40 km) away, Mary struggled to keep calm, counting the weeks, fearful of what might have happened to her husband, fearful as ever that the lions she could hear roaring were coming nearer. Almost an entire lifetime in Africa had not lessened her fear of lions – on the contrary, she knew what they were capable of and how they could sense vulnerable targets. She heard them prowling round the mission, half-deserted because most of the men were with Livingstone at Kolobeng, and could hardly bear the long nights of worrying about her safety and that of her children. In the end, she sent a message to Kolobeng, describing the activity of the lions, hoping it would bring her husband racing back, as it had done once before.