emma_in_dream

And more 19th Century Gossip

I have just finished a biography of Mrs Humphrey Ward, the author of *Robert Elsemere*, and her achievements are vast but puzzling.

On the plus side, she helped set up the first women’s college at Oxford and suggested naming it Somerville after the great mathematician. She was very good at working committees.

Also, she (sort of accidentally) set up a massive network of kindergartens, day care centres and schools for children with special needs in London.

She was a sort of atheist – believed that Jesus was an actual person but rejected the supernatural and miraculous elements and wrote several excellent intellectual novels on this theme. One of her daughters married into the Huxley family because apparently atheistic families were just that few on the ground in the 19th century.

At the same time, she was a prominent anti-suffragette who opposed women getting the vote. She spearheaded the anti-suffragette movement, arguing that most women were put off by the violent actions of the extremist suffragettes, did not want the vote and were content to influence events from behind the scenes. She got her son into Parliament so he could argue this in person. BTW: the suffragettes loathed him and every time he spoke on the issue they sent him postcards saying ‘Mother will be proud’.

I find this kind of argument hard to fathom. It’s not like anyone was *forcing* her to vote. They were just proposing that it become an option for others. It reminds me of the opponents of gay marriage. It’s not like it will be compulsory, which is the only way it could possibly affect the validity of anyone else’s marriage.

As an aside, my first (terrible) boyfriend’s (terrible) mother had exactly this kind of doublethink. She was the chair of Women Against Women Priests* and her argument was essentially that women could always do what she had done, which was to marry a priest and then run the social aspects of the church in an ostentatiously modest way and to make endless comments about what ‘my husband, the Minister’ thought.

So, Mrs Humphrey Ward, a very clever woman who believed that she could influence people without the vote. Which in her case was probably true, given that she was sufficiently respected as an author that former President Roosevelt requested that she write puff pieces designed to bring America into the war. The British High Command agreed and she was given special tours of munitions factories, war ships, troop ships and even taken to France to review the conditions as she produced pro-war propaganda for Britain.


Perhaps it was this combination of extremely conservative views and the popularity of her writing which peeved the modernists so much. Eg. HG Wells and Elizabeth von Arnim responded to an article of her deploring modern sexual morality by making love on top of the newspaper and afterwards burning it.




· Pronounced WARP, not a good acronym. Also, the losers, so nyeeeeer.

I was spurred to read this by a cracky AU set in the 1860s where John Watson was a cleric and Sherlock Holmes the lord of the manor. Holmes converted Watson to atheism (and homosexuality), leading to much angst as Watson had to break up with his fiancé and leave his profession. Crazy but incredibly enjoyable, it was *All We Ought To Ask* by achray.

Anyway, the author basically took the plot from Mrs Humphrey Ward’s *Robert Elsmere*. I’d heard of Mrs Humphrey Ward, of course. Viriginia Woolf wrote cruel things about her(1) and Nancy Mitford spoke of her books as a staple of her childhood.(2)

I was surprised to discover that there was a famous, Victorian novel about converting to atheism. One thinks in such stereotypes. *Robert Elsmere* was a runaway best seller, earning her 4000 pounds in the first year. This is about the same as a million today and does not include any money from American print runs because there were no trans-Atlantic copyright agreements at the time. It was widely read and discussed. *The Times* called it “a clever attack upon revealed religion”. Gladstone’s own copy contains extensive notations with his rebuttals of the arguments for atheism.

The basic plot is that a young clergyman, Robert, marries Catherine, an austere and puritanical Christian. They first bond over the death bed of a consumptive girl who has given birth to a bastard. He takes up a country living where they do much good for the poor. The squire of the area is a notorious atheist, but Robert finds himself strangely attracted to him and to his arguments. Eventually he is lead astray and begins to doubt the literal reality of the Bible and the literal incarnation of Christ. He comes to see Christ as a historical man who did good.

Riven with self-loathing, he quits his ministry and takes his long-suffering wife and child to a London slum where they do good works for the poor and set up a kind of a fellowship church based on following the teachings of the historical Jesus. Then he dies of what he first thinks is ‘clergyman’s throat’ but is really one of those vague Victorian illnesses – consumption? cancer? something fatal anyway. His good works live on after him.

There are various sub-plots, including one where Catherine’s younger, frivolous sister Rose is attracted to an outright cynic and atheist but realises he is not the right sort even though he does appreciate her violin playing. Most of the novel, though, is a sympathetic exploration of a person’s religious doubts. Catherine is probably presented as superior in that her devotion is unthinking and all-encompassing but she is also puritanical and narrow minded. Robert does at least have the merit of trying to do good even though he falls into the error of over-reliance on reason.

It’s a chunky novel, of the classic three volume Victorian style. Mrs Humphrey Ward continued writing in this style until 1920, though her work gradually went out of favour. Also, she went against the current of the time by becoming increasingly more anti-women’s rights. She helped found the Women’s National Anti-Suffrage Movement, as she thought that women would lose their moral authority if they gained the vote. (Incidentally, I long to psycho-analyse a woman who earned much more money than her husband but who erased her own existence enough to call herself by both his first and last names. Her real name was Mary Augusta Ward, nee Arnold. Also, I find it fascinating that she loved learning but accepted that she could only access the great libraries of Oxford by marrying a don. To live in this state of cognitive dissonance seems to me ito be impressive.)

Her exploration of the conversion to atheism was probably influenced by her father’s conversion to Catholicism in her childhood. Her mother was so enraged by this that she lobbed a brick through the cathedral window on the day of his baptism. Her father, who seemed to be a bit of a wishy washy wobbler, later converted back to Anglicanism which allowed him to take up a chair at Oxford. No doubt discussions of religion were part of her upbringing as she was part of the Arnold clan. Her grandfather was Dr Thomas Arnold of Rugby who was prominent in the Broad Church Anglican revival movement(4) and her uncle Matthew Hughes was a notable Victorian poet.

By the way, she lived in Tasmania for five years in her childhood. Australians are usually so good at claiming people as our own who really aren’t – Errol Flynn, Mel Gibson, Phar Lap, the pavlova – but in this instance there is an utter silence.

1, “Mrs Ward is dead; poor Mrs Humphry Ward; and it appears that she was merely a woman of straw after all – shovelled into the ground and already forgotten.”
2, Can't find my copy of *Love in a Cold Climate* but I recall Fanny finding the books in the spare bedrooms at Polly's mansion.
3, Yes, there really was such an organisation. My first boyfriend's mother (with whom I had little in common) was a founding member of Women against the Ordination of Women. WAOW.
4, A. C. Benson once observed of Arnold that, "A man who could burst into tears at his own dinner-table on hearing a comparison made between St. Paul and St. John to the detriment of the latter, and beg that the subject might never be mentioned again in his presence, could never have been an easy companion."