[Illustration: _From a photograph by H.S. Mendelssohn, 27, Cathcart
Road, South Kensington, London._ ANNIE BESANT. 1885]
ANNIE BESANT
AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Illustrated
LONDON
SECOND EDITION
PREFACE.
It is a difficult thing to tell the story of a life, and yet more
difficult when that life is one's own. At the best, the telling has a
savour of vanity, and the only excuse for the proceeding is that the
life, being an average one, reflects many others, and in troublous
times like ours may give the experience of many rather than of one.
And so the autobiographer does his work because he thinks that, at the
cost of some unpleasantness to himself, he may throw light on some of
the typical problems that are vexing the souls of his contemporaries,
and perchance may stretch out a helping hand to some brother who is
struggling in the darkness, and so bring him cheer when despair has
him in its grip. Since all of us, men and women of this restless and
eager generation--surrounded by forces we dimly see but cannot as yet
understand, discontented with old ideas and half afraid of new, greedy
for the material results of the knowledge brought us by Science but
looking askance at her agnosticism as regards the soul, fearful of
superstition but still more fearful of atheism, turning from the husks
of outgrown creeds but filled with desperate hunger for spiritual
ideals--since all of us have the same anxieties, the same griefs, the
same yearning hopes, the same passionate desire for knowledge, it may
well be that the story of one may help all, and that the tale of one
should that went out alone into the darkness and on the other side
found light, that struggled through the Storm and on the other side
found Peace, may bring some ray of light and of peace into the
darkness and the storm of other lives.
ANNIE BESANT.
THE THEOSOPHICAL SOCIETY,
17 & 19, AVENUE ROAD, REGENT'S PARK, LONDON.
_August_, 1893.
CONTENTS.
CHAP.
I. "OUT OF THE EVERYWHERE INTO THE HERE"
II. EARLY CHILDHOOD
III. GIRLHOOD
IV. MARRIAGE
V. THE STORM OF DOUBT
VI. CHARLES BRADLAUGH
VII. ATHEISM AS I KNEW AND TAUGHT IT
VIII. AT WORK
IX. THE KNOWLTON PAMPHLET
X. AT WAR ALL ROUND
XI. MR. BRADLAUGH'S STRUGGLE
XII. STILL FIGHTING
XIII. SOCIALISM
XIV. THROUGH STORM TO PEACE
LIST OF BOOKS QUOTED
INDEX
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
ANNIE BESANT, 1885 _Frontispiece_
HOROSCOPE OF ANNIE BESANT _Page_ 12
ANNIE BESANT, 1869 _Facing page_ 86
THOMAS SCOTT _Facing page_ 112
CHARLES BRADLAUGH, M.P. _Facing page_ 212
CHARLES BRADLAUGH AND HENRY LABOUCHERE _Facing page_ 254
NORWICH BRANCH OF THE SOCIALIST LEAGUE _Facing page_ 314
STRIKE COMMITTEE OF THE MATCHMAKERS' UNION _Facing page_ 336
MEMBERS OF THE MATCHMAKERS' UNION _Facing page_ 338
CHAPTER I.
"OUT OF THE EVERYWHERE INTO THE HERE."
On October 1, 1847, I am credibly informed, my baby eyes opened to the
light(?) of a London afternoon at 5.39.
A friendly astrologer has drawn for me the following chart, showing the
position of the planets at this, to me fateful, moment; but I know
nothing of astrology, so feel no wiser as I gaze upon my horoscope.
Keeping in view the way in which sun, moon, and planets influence the
physical condition of the earth, there is nothing incongruous with the
orderly course of nature in the view that they also influence the
physical bodies of men, these being part of the physical earth, and
largely moulded by its conditions. Any one who knows the
characteristics ascribed to those who are born under the several signs
of the Zodiac, may very easily pick out the different types among his
own acquaintances, and he may then get them to go to some astrologer
and find out under what signs they were severally born. He will very
quickly discover that two men of completely opposed types are not born
under the same sign, and the invariability of the concurrence will
convince him that law, and not chance, is at work. We are born into
earthly life under certain conditions, just as we were physically
affected by them pre-natally, and these will have their bearing on our
subsequent physical evolution. At the most, astrology, as it is now
practised, can only calculate the interaction between these physical
conditions at any given moment, and the conditions brought to them by a
given person whose general constitution and natal condition are known.
It cannot say what the person will do, nor what will happen to him, but
only what will be the physical district, so to speak, in which he will
find himself, and the impulses that will play upon him from external
nature and from his own body. Even on those matters modern astrology is
not quite reliable--judging from the many blunders made--or else its
professors are very badly instructed; but that there is a real science
of astrology I have no doubt, and there are some men who are past
masters in it.
[Illustration: Horoscope of Annie Besant.]
It has always been somewhat of a grievance to me that I was born in
London, "within the sound of Bow Bells," when three-quarters of my
blood and all my heart are Irish. My dear mother was of purest Irish
descent, and my father was Irish on his mother's side, though belonging
to the Devonshire Woods on his father's. The Woods were yeomen of the
sturdy English type, farming their own land in honest, independent
fashion. Of late years they seem to have developed more in the
direction of brains, from the time, in fact, that Matthew Wood became
Mayor of London town, fought Queen Caroline's battles against her most
religious and gracious royal husband, aided the Duke of Kent with no
niggard hand, and received a baronetcy for his services from the Duke
of Kent's royal daughter. Since then they have given England a Lord
Chancellor in the person of the gentle-hearted and pure-living Lord
Hatherley, while others have distinguished themselves in various ways
in the service of their country. But I feel playfully inclined to
grudge the English blood they put into my father's veins, with his
Irish mother, his Galway birth, and his Trinity College, Dublin,
education. For the Irish tongue is musical in my ear, and the Irish
nature dear to my heart. Only in Ireland is it that if you stop to ask
a worn-out ragged woman the way to some old monument, she will say:
"Sure, then, my darlin', it's just up the hill and round the corner,
and then any one will tell you the way. And it's there you'll see the
place where the blessed Saint Patrick set his foot, and his blessing be
on yer." Old women as poor as she in other nations would never be as
bright and as friendly and as garrulous. And where, out of Ireland,
will you see a whole town crowd into a station to say good-bye to half
a dozen emigrants, till the platform is a heaving mass of men and
women, struggling, climbing over each other for a last kiss, crying,
keening, laughing, all in a breath, till all the air is throbbing and
there's a lump in your throat and tears in your eyes as the train
steams out? Where, out of Ireland, will you be bumping along the
streets on an outside car, beside a taciturn Jarvey, who, on suddenly
discovering that you are shadowed by "Castle" spies, becomes
loquaciously friendly, and points out everything that he thinks will
interest you? Blessings on the quick tongues and warm hearts, on the
people so easy to lead, so hard to drive. And blessings on the ancient
land once inhabited by mighty men of wisdom, that in later times became
the Island of Saints, and shall once again be the Island of Sages, when
the Wheel turns round.
My maternal grandfather was a typical Irishman, much admired by me and
somewhat feared also, in the childish days. He belonged to a decayed
Irish family, the Maurices, and in a gay youth, with a beautiful wife
as light-hearted as himself, he had merrily run through what remained
to him in the way of fortune. In his old age, with abundant snow-white
hair, he still showed the hot Irish blood on the lightest provocation,
stormily angry for a moment and easily appeased. My mother was the
second daughter in a large family, in a family that grew more numerous
as pounds grew fewer, and she was adopted by a maiden aunt, a quaint
memory of whom came through my mother's childhood into mine, and had
its moulding effect on both our characters. This maiden aunt was, as
are most Irish folk of decayed families, very proud of her family tree
with its roots in the inevitable "kings." Her particular kings were the
"seven kings of France"--the "Milesian kings"--and the tree grew up a
parchment, in all its impressive majesty, over the mantelpiece of their
descendant's modest drawing-room. This heraldic monster was regarded
with deep respect by child Emily, a respect in no wise deserved, I
venture to suppose, by the disreputable royalties of whom she was a
fortunately distant twig. Chased out of France, doubtless for cause
shown, they had come over the sea to Ireland, and there continued their
reckless plundering lives. But so strangely turns the wheel of time
that these ill-doing and barbarous scamps became a kind of moral
thermometer in the home of the gentle Irish lady in the early half of
the present century. For my mother has told me that when she had
committed some act of childish naughtiness, her aunt would say, looking
gravely over her spectacles at the small culprit, "Emily, your conduct
is unworthy of the descendant of the seven kings of France." And Emily,
with her sweet grey Irish eyes and her curling masses of raven black
hair, would cry in penitent shame over her unworthiness, with some
vague idea that those royal, and to her very real, ancestors would
despise her small, sweet, rosebud self, so wholly unworthy of their
disreputable majesties.
Thus those shadowy forms influenced her in childhood, and exercised
over her a power that made her shrink from aught that was unworthy,
petty or mean. To her the lightest breath of dishonour was to be
avoided at any cost of pain, and she wrought into me, her only
daughter, that same proud and passionate horror at any taint of shame
or merited disgrace. To the world always a brave front was to be kept,
and a stainless reputation, for suffering might be borne but dishonour
never. A gentlewoman might starve, but she must not run in debt; she
might break her heart, but it must be with a smile on her face. I have
often thought that the training in this reticence and pride of honour
was a strange preparation for my stormy, public, much attacked and
slandered life; and certain it is that this inwrought shrinking from
all criticism that touched personal purity and personal honour added a
keenness of suffering to the fronting of public odium that none can
appreciate who has not been trained in some similar school of dignified
self-respect. And yet perhaps there was another result from it that in
value outweighed the added pain: it was the stubbornly resistant
feeling that rose and inwardly asserted its own purity in face of
foulest lie, and turning scornful face against the foe, too proud
either to justify itself or to defend, said to itself in its own heart,
when condemnation was loudest: "I am not what you think me, and your
verdict does not change my own self. You cannot make me vile whatever
you think of me, and I will never, in my own eyes, be that which you
deem me to be now." And the very pride became a shield against
degradation, for, however lost my public reputation, I could never bear
to become sullied in my own sight--and that is a thing not without its
use to a woman cut off, as I was at one time, from home, and friends,
and Society. So peace to the maiden aunt's ashes, and to those of her
absurd kings, for I owe them something after all. And I keep grateful
memory of that unknown grand-aunt, for what she did in training my dear
mother, the tenderest, sweetest, proudest, purest of women. It is well
to be able to look back to a mother who served as ideal of all that was
noblest and dearest during childhood and girlhood, whose face made the
beauty of home, and whose love was both sun and shield. No other
experience in life could quite make up for missing the perfect tie
between mother and child--a tie that in our case never relaxed and
never weakened. Though her grief at my change of faith and consequent
social ostracism did much to hasten her death-hour, it never brought a
cloud between our hearts; though her pleading was the hardest of all to
face in later days, and brought the bitterest agony, it made no gulf
between us, it cast no chill upon our mutual love. And I look back at
her to-day with the same loving gratitude as ever encircled her to me
in her earthly life. I have never met a woman more selflessly devoted
to those she loved, more passionately contemptuous of all that was mean
or base, more keenly sensitive on every question of honour, more iron
in will, more sweet in tenderness, than the mother who made my girlhood
sunny as dreamland, who guarded me, until my marriage, from every touch
of pain that she could ward off or bear for me, who suffered more in
every trouble that touched me in later life than I did myself, and who
died in the little house I had taken for our new home in Norwood, worn
out, ere old age touched her, by sorrow, poverty, and pain, in May,
1874.
My earliest personal recollections are of a house and garden that we
lived in when I was three and four years of age, situated in Grove
Road, St. John's Wood. I can remember my mother hovering round the
dinner-table to see that all was bright for the home-coming husband; my
brother--two years older than myself--and I watching "for papa"; the
loving welcome, the game of romps that always preceded the dinner of
the elder folks. I can remember on the 1st of October, 1851, jumping up
in my little cot, and shouting out triumphantly: "Papa! mamma! I am
four years old!" and the grave demand of my brother, conscious of
superior age, at dinner-time: "May not Annie have a knife to-day, as
she is four years old?"
It was a sore grievance during that same year, 1851, that I was not
judged old enough to go to the Great Exhibition, and I have a faint
memory of my brother consolingly bringing me home one of those folding
pictured strips that are sold in the streets, on which were imaged
glories that I longed only the more to see. Far-away, dusky, trivial
memories, these. What a pity it is that a baby cannot notice, cannot
observe, cannot remember, and so throw light on the fashion of the
dawning of the external world on the human consciousness. If only we
could remember how things looked when they were first imaged on the
retinae; what we felt when first we became conscious of the outer world;
what the feeling was as faces of father and mother grew out of the
surrounding chaos and became familiar things, greeted with a smile,
lost with a cry; if only memory would not become a mist when in later
years we strive to throw our glances backward into the darkness of our
infancy, what lessons we might learn to help our stumbling psychology,
how many questions might be solved whose answers we are groping for in
the West in vain.
The next scene that stands out clearly against the background of the
past is that of my father's death-bed. The events which led to his
death I know from my dear mother. He had never lost his fondness for
the profession for which he had been trained, and having many medical
friends, he would now and then accompany them on their hospital rounds,
or share with them the labours of the dissecting-room. It chanced that
during the dissection of the body of a person who had died of rapid
consumption, my father cut his finger against the edge of the
breast-bone. The cut did not heal easily, and the finger became swollen
and inflamed. "I would have that finger off, Wood, if I were you," said
one of the surgeons, a day or two afterwards, on seeing the state of
the wound. But the others laughed at the suggestion, and my father, at
first inclined to submit to the amputation, was persuaded to "leave
Nature alone."
About the middle of August, 1852, he got wet through, riding on the top
of an omnibus, and the wetting resulted in a severe cold, which
"settled on his chest." One of the most eminent doctors of the day, as
able as he was rough in manner, was called to see him. He examined him
carefully, sounded his lungs, and left the room followed by my mother.
"Well?" she asked, scarcely anxious as to the answer, save as it might
worry her husband to be kept idly at home. "You must keep up his
spirits," was the thoughtless answer. "He is in a galloping
consumption; you will not have him with you six weeks longer." The wife
staggered back, and fell like a stone on the floor. But love triumphed
over agony, and half an hour later she was again at her husband's side,
never to leave it again for ten minutes at a time, night or day, till
he was lying with closed eyes asleep in death.
I was lifted on to the bed to "say good-bye to dear papa" on the day
before his death, and I remember being frightened at his eyes which
looked so large, and his voice which sounded so strange, as he made me
promise always to be "a very good girl to darling mamma, as papa was
going right away." I remember insisting that "papa should kiss Cherry,"
a doll given me on my birthday, three days before, by his direction,
and being removed, crying and struggling, from the room. He died on the
following day, October 5th, and I do not think that my elder brother
and I--who were staying at our maternal grandfather's--went to the
house again until the day of the funeral. With the death, my mother
broke down, and when all was over they carried her senseless from the
room. I remember hearing afterwards how, when she recovered her senses,
she passionately insisted on being left alone, and locked herself into
her room for the night; and how on the following morning her mother, at
last persuading her to open the door, started back at the face she saw
with the cry: "Good God, Emily! your hair is white!" It was even so;
her hair, black, glossy and abundant, which, contrasting with her large
grey eyes, had made her face so strangely attractive, had turned grey
in that night of agony, and to me my mother's face is ever framed in
exquisite silver bands of hair as white as the driven unsullied snow.
I have heard that the love between my father and mother was a very
beautiful thing, and it most certainly stamped her character for life.
He was keenly intellectual and splendidly educated; a mathematician and
a good classical scholar, thoroughly master of French, German, Italian,
Spanish, and Portuguese, with a smattering of Hebrew and Gaelic, the
treasures of ancient and of modern literature were his daily household
delight. Nothing pleased him so well as to sit with his wife, reading
aloud to her while she worked; now translating from some foreign poet,
now rolling forth melodiously the exquisite cadences of "Queen Mab."
Student of philosophy as he was, he was deeply and steadily sceptical;
and a very religious relative has told me that he often drove her from
the room by his light, playful mockery of the tenets of the Christian
faith. His mother and sister were strict Roman Catholics, and near the
end forced a priest into his room, but the priest was promptly ejected
by the wrath of the dying man, and by the almost fierce resolve of the
wife that no messenger of the creed he detested should trouble her
darling at the last.
Deeply read in philosophy, he had outgrown the orthodox beliefs of his
day, and his wife, who loved him too much to criticise, was wont to
reconcile her own piety and his scepticism by holding that "women ought
to be religious," while men had a right to read everything and think as
they would, provided that they were upright and honourable in their
lives. But the result of his liberal and unorthodox thought was to
insensibly modify and partially rationalise her own beliefs, and she
put on one side as errors the doctrines of eternal punishment, the
vicarious atonement, the infallibility of the Bible, the equality of
the Son with the Father in the Trinity, and other orthodox beliefs, and
rejoiced in her later years in the writings of such men as Jowett,
Colenso, and Stanley. The last named, indeed, was her ideal Christian
gentleman, suave, polished, broad-minded, devout in a stately way. The
baldness of a typical Evangelical service outraged her taste as much as
the crudity of Evangelical dogmas outraged her intellect; she liked to
feel herself a Christian in a dignified and artistic manner, and to be
surrounded by solemn music and splendid architecture when she "attended
Divine service." Familiarity with celestial personages was detestable
to her, and she did her duty of saluting them in a courtly and reverent
fashion. Westminster Abbey was her favourite church, with its dim light
and shadowy distances; there in a carven stall, with choristers
chanting in solemn rhythm, with the many-coloured glories of the
painted windows repeating themselves on upspringing arch and clustering
pillars, with the rich harmonies of the pealing organ throbbing up
against screen and monument, with the ashes of the mighty dead around,
and all the stately memories of the past inwrought into the very
masonry, there Religion appeared to her to be intellectually dignified
and emotionally satisfactory.
To me, who took my religion in strenuous fashion, this dainty and
well-bred piety seemed perilously like Laodicean lukewarmness, while
my headlong vigour of conviction and practice often jarred on her as
alien from the delicate balance and absence of extremes that should
characterise the gentlewoman. She was of the old _régime_; I of the
stuff from which fanatics are made: and I have often thought, in
looking back, that she must have had on her lips many a time unspoken
a phrase that dropped from them when she lay a-dying: "My little one,
you have never made me sad or sorry except for your own sake; you have
always been too religious." And then she murmured to herself: "Yes,
it has been darling Annie's only fault; she has always been too
religious." Methinks that, as the world judges, the dying voice spake
truly, and the dying eyes saw with a real insight. For though I was
then kneeling beside her bed, heretic and outcast, the heart of me was
religious in its very fervour of repudiation of a religion, and in its
rebellious uprising against dogmas that crushed the reason and did not
satisfy the soul. I went out into the darkness alone, not because
religion was too good for me, but because it was not good enough; it
was too meagre, too commonplace, too little exacting, too bound up
with earthly interests, too calculating in its accommodations to
social conventionalities. The Roman Catholic Church, had it captured
me, as it nearly did, would have sent me on some mission of danger and
sacrifice and utilised me as a martyr; the Church established by law
transformed me into an unbeliever and an antagonist.
For as a child I was mystical and imaginative religious to the very
finger-tips, and with a certain faculty for seeing visions and
dreaming dreams. This faculty is not uncommon with the Keltic races,
and makes them seem "superstitious" to more solidly-built peoples.
Thus, on the day of my father's funeral, my mother sat with vacant
eyes and fixed pallid face--the picture comes back to me yet, it so
impressed my childish imagination--following the funeral service,
stage after stage, and suddenly, with the words, "It is all over!"
fell back fainting. She said afterwards that she had followed the
hearse, had attended the service, had walked behind the coffin to the
grave. Certain it is that a few weeks later she determined to go to
the Kensal Green Cemetery, where the body of her husband had been
laid, and went thither with a relative; he failed to find the grave,
and while another of the party went in search of an official to
identify the spot, my mother said, "If you will take me to the chapel
where the first part of the service was read, I will find the grave."
The idea seemed to her friend, of course, to be absurd; but he would
not cross the newly-made widow, so took her to the chapel. She looked
round, left the chapel door, and followed the path along which the
corpse had been borne till she reached the grave, where she was
quietly standing when the caretaker arrived to point it out. The grave
is at some distance from the chapel, and is not on one of the main
roads; it had nothing on it to mark it, save the wooden peg with the
number, and this would be no help to identification at a distance
since all the graves are thus marked, and at a little way off these
pegs are not visible. How she found the grave remained a mystery in
the family, as no one believed her straightforward story that she had
been present at the funeral. With my present knowledge the matter is
simple enough, for I now know that the consciousness can leave the
body, take part in events going on at a distance, and, returning,
impress on the physical brain what it has experienced. The very fact
that she asked to be taken to the chapel is significant, showing that
she was picking up a memory of a previous going from that spot to the
grave; she could only find the grave if she started from _the place
from which she had started before_. Another proof of this
ultra-physical capacity was given a few months later, when her infant
son, who had been pining himself ill for "papa," was lying one night
in her arms. On the next morning she said to her sister: "Alf is going
to die." The child had no definite disease, but was wasting away, and
it was argued to her that the returning spring would restore the
health lost during the winter. "No," was her answer. "He was lying
asleep in my arms last night, and William" (her husband) "came to me
and said that he wanted Alf with him, but that I might keep the other
two." In vain she was assured that she had been dreaming, that it was
quite natural that she should dream about her husband, and that her
anxiety for the child had given the dream its shape. Nothing would
persuade her that she had not seen her husband, or that the
information he had given her was not true. So it was no matter of
surprise to her when in the following March her arms were empty, and a
waxen form lay lifeless in the baby's cot.
My brother and I were allowed to see him just before he was placed in
his coffin; I can see him still, so white and beautiful, with a black
spot in the middle of the fair, waxen forehead, and I remember the
deadly cold which startled me when I was told to kiss my little
brother. It was the first time that I had touched Death. That black
spot made a curious impression on me, and long afterwards, asking what
had caused it, I was told that at the moment after his death my mother
had passionately kissed the baby brow. Pathetic thought, that the
mother's kiss of farewell should have been marked by the first sign of
corruption on the child's face!
I do not mention these stories because they are in any fashion
remarkable or out of the way, but only to show that the sensitiveness
to impressions other than physical ones, that was a marked feature in
my own childhood, was present also in the family to which I belonged.
For the physical nature is inherited from parents, and sensitiveness
to psychic impressions is a property of the physical body; in our
family, as in so many Irish ones, belief in "ghosts" of all
descriptions was general, and my mother has told me of the banshee
that she had heard wailing when the death-hour of one of the family
was near. To me in my childhood, elves and fairies of all sorts were
very real things, and my dolls were as really children as I was myself
a child. Punch and Judy were living entities, and the tragedy in which
they bore part cost me many an agony of tears; to this day I can
remember running away when I heard the squawk of the coming Punch, and
burying my head in the pillows that I might shut out the sound of the
blows and the cry of the ill-used baby. All the objects about me were
to me alive, the flowers that I kissed as much as the kitten I petted,
and I used to have a splendid time "making believe" and living out all
sorts of lovely stories among my treasured and so-called inanimate
playthings. But there was a more serious side to this dreamful fancy
when it joined hands with religion.