Transcriber’s Note:
Words in italics are surrounded by _underscores_. Some corrections have
been made to the original text. These are listed in a second
transcriber’s note at the end of the text.
SOME EMINENT WOMEN
OF OUR TIMES
“Non aver tema, disse il mio Signore:
Fatti sicur, chè noi siamo a buon punto:
Non stringer, ma rallarga ogni vigore.”
_Purgatorio_, Canto 9, v. 46-48.
“‘I have a belief of my own, and it comforts me.’
“‘What is that?’ said Will....
“‘That by desiring what is perfectly good, even when we don’t quite know
what it is and cannot do what we would, we are part of the divine power
against evil—widening the skirts of light and making the struggle with
darkness narrower.’”—_Middlemarch_, Book iv.
SOME
EMINENT WOMEN
OF OUR TIMES
SHORT BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES
BY
MRS. HENRY FAWCETT
London
MACMILLAN AND CO.
AND NEW YORK
1889
_All rights reserved_
PREFACE
THE following short sketches of the lives of some of the eminent women
of our times were written for _The Mothers’ Companion_, and are now
republished by the kind permission of the proprietors and publishers,
Messrs. Partridge.
They were suggested by the fact that nearly all the best contributions
of women to literature have been made during the last hundred years, and
simultaneously with this remarkable development of literary activity
among women, there has been an equally remarkable activity in spheres of
work held to be peculiarly feminine. So far, therefore, from greater
freedom and better education encouraging women to neglect womanly work,
it has caused them to apply themselves to it more systematically and
more successfully. The names of Elizabeth Fry, Mary Carpenter, Sarah
Martin, Agnes Jones, Florence Nightingale, and Sister Dora are a proof
of this. I believe that we owe their achievements to the same impulse
which in another kind of excellence has given us Jane Austen, Charlotte
Brontë, and Elizabeth Browning.
The sketches were intended chiefly for working women and young people;
it was hoped it would be an encouragement to them to be reminded how
much good work had been done in various ways by women.
An apology should, perhaps, be offered to the reader for the want of
arrangement in the sequence of these sketches. As they appeared month by
month, in 1887 and 1888, the incidents of the day sometimes suggested
the subject. Thus the papers on Queen Victoria and on Queen Louisa of
Prussia were suggested by the celebration of the Jubilee in June 1887,
and by the universal grief felt for the death of Queen Louisa’s son and
grandson in 1888. As the incidents mentioned in some sketches are
sometimes referred to in those that follow, it has been thought best not
to alter the sequence in which they originally appeared. The authorities
relied on are quoted in each paper.
MILLICENT GARRETT FAWCETT.
LONDON, 1889.
CONTENTS
PAGE
1. ELIZABETH FRY 1
2. MARY CARPENTER 9
3. CAROLINE HERSCHEL 18
4. SARAH MARTIN 29
5. MARY SOMERVILLE 35
6. QUEEN VICTORIA 46
7. HARRIET MARTINEAU 57
8. FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE 69
9. MARY LAMB 79
10. AGNES ELIZABETH JONES 91
11. CHARLOTTE AND EMILY BRONTË 99
12. ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING 111
13. LADY SALE AND HER FELLOW-HOSTAGES IN AFGHANISTAN 117
14. ELIZABETH GILBERT 128
15. JANE AUSTEN 136
16. MARIA EDGEWORTH 145
17. QUEEN LOUISA OF PRUSSIA 163
18. DOROTHY WORDSWORTH 176
19. SISTER DORA 186
20. MRS. BARBAULD 198
21. JOANNA BAILLIE 205
22. HANNAH MORE 211
23. THE AMERICAN ABOLITIONISTS—PRUDENCE CRANDALL AND LUCRETIA MOTT 223
I
ELIZABETH FRY
“Humanity is erroneously considered among the commonplace virtues.
If it deserved such a place there would be less urgent need than,
alas! there is for its daily exercise among us. In its pale shape of
kindly sentiment and bland pity it is common enough, and is always
the portion of the cultivated. But humanity armed, aggressive, and
alert, never slumbering and never wearying, moving like an ancient
hero over the land to slay monsters, is the rarest of virtues.”—JOHN
MORLEY.
THE present century is one that is distinguished by the active part
women have taken in careers that were previously closed to them. Some
people would have us believe that if women write books, paint pictures,
and understand science and ancient languages, they will cease to be true
women, and cease to care for those womanly occupations and
responsibilities that have always been entrusted to them. This is an
essentially false and mistaken notion. True cultivation of the
understanding makes a sensible woman value at their real high worth all
her womanly duties, and so far from making her neglect them, causes her
to appreciate them more highly than she would otherwise have done. It
has always been held—at least, in Christian countries—that the most
womanly of women’s duties are to be found in works of mercy to those who
are desolate and miserable. To be thirsty, hungry, naked, sick, or in
prison, is to have a claim for compassion and comfort upon womanly pity
and tenderness. And we shall see, if we look back over recent years,
that never have these womanly tasks been more zealously fulfilled than
they have been in the century which has produced Elizabeth Fry, Florence
Nightingale, Josephine Butler, and Octavia Hill.
Mrs. Fry was born before the beginning of this century—in 1780—but the
great public work with which her memory will always be connected was not
begun till about 1813. She was born of the wealthy Quaker family, the
Gurneys of Norwich. Her parents were not very strict members of the sect
to which they belonged, for they allowed their children to learn music
and dancing—pursuits that were then considered very worldly even by many
who did not belong to the Society of Friends. The gentle poet, William
Cowper, speaks in one of his letters, written about the time of
Elizabeth Fry’s childhood, of love of music as a thing which tends “to
weaken and destroy the spiritual discernment.” Mr. and Mrs. Gurney,
however, seem to have been very free from such prejudices, as well as
from others which were much more universal, for their children not only
learnt music and dancing, but also—girls as well as boys—Latin and
mathematics.
Mrs. Gurney seems to have discerned that she had an especial treasure in
her little Elizabeth. She is spoken of in her mother’s journal as “my
dove-like Betsy.” The authoress of the biography of Elizabeth Fry in the
Eminent Women series, says: “Her faculty for independent investigation,
her unswerving loyalty to duty, and her fearless perseverance in works
of benevolence, were all foreshadowed” in her childhood. She had as a
young girl what appears to us now a very extraordinary dread of
enthusiasm in religion. One would think that if ever a woman needed
enthusiasm for her life’s work, Elizabeth Fry was that woman. But she
confesses in her journal, written when she was seventeen years of age,
“the greatest fear of religion” because it is generally allied with
enthusiasm. Perhaps the truth is that she had so deep a natural fount of
enthusiasm in her heart that she dreaded the work that it would impel
her to, when once it was allowed a free course. She had a very strong,
innate repugnance to anything which drew public attention upon herself,
and only the imperative sense of duty enabled her to overcome this
feeling. In her heart she said what her Master had said before her:
“Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me.”
When the sphere of public duty first revealed itself to her, she records
in her diary what it cost her to enter upon it, and writes of it as “the
humiliating path that has appeared to be opening before me.” It must be
noticed, however, that in her case, as always, the steep and difficult
path of duty becomes easier to those who do not flinch from it. In a
later passage of her diary, the public work which she had at first
called a path of humiliation she speaks of as “this great mercy.”
In the little book to which reference has just been made, we read that
the first great change in Elizabeth Gurney’s life was caused by the deep
impression made upon her by the sermons of William Savery. It is rather
strange to find the girl who had such a terror of enthusiasm, weeping
passionately while William Savery was preaching. Her sister has
described what took place. “Betsy astonished us all by the great feeling
she showed. She wept most of the way home.... What she went through in
her own mind I cannot say; but the results were most powerful and most
evident” (p. 11, _Elizabeth Fry_. By Mrs. E. R. Pitman). Her emotion was
not of the kind that passes away and leaves no trace behind. The whole
course of her life and tenor of her thoughts were changed. She became a
strict Quakeress, not, however, without some conflict with herself.
There are pleasant little touches of human nature in the facts that she
found it a trial to say “thee” and “thou,” and to give up her scarlet
riding habit. Soon after this, at the age of twenty, she became the wife
of Mr. Joseph Fry, and removed to London, where she lived in St.
Mildred’s Court, in the City. The family into which she married were
Quakers, like her own, but of a much more severe and strict kind. Her
marriage was, however, in every respect a fortunate one. Her husband
sympathised deeply with her in all her efforts for the good of others,
and encouraged her in her public work, although many in the Society of
Friends did not scruple to protest that a married woman has no duties
except to her husband and children. Her journal shows how anxiously she
guarded herself against any temptation to neglect her home duties. She
was a tender and devoted mother to her twelve children, and it was
through her knowledge of the strength of a mother’s love that she was
able to reach the hearts of many of the poor prisoners whom she
afterwards helped out of the wretchedness into which they had fallen.
Her study of the problem, how to help the poor, began in this way. A
beggar-woman with a child in her arms stopped her in the street. Mrs.
Fry, seeing that the child had whooping-cough and was dangerously ill,
offered to go with the woman to her home in order more effectually to
assist her. To Mrs. Fry’s surprise, the woman immediately tried to make
off; it was evident what she wanted was a gift of money, not any help to
the suffering child. Mrs. Fry followed her, and found that her rooms
were filled with a crowd of farmed-out children in every stage of
sickness and misery; the more pitiable the appearance of one of these
poor mites, the more useful an implement was it in the beggar’s
stock-in-trade. From this time onwards the condition of women and
children in the lowest and most degraded of the criminal classes became
the study of Mrs. Fry’s life. She had the gift of speech on any subject
which deeply moved her. From about 1809 she began to speak at the
Friends’ meeting-house. This power of speaking, as well as working,
enabled her to draw about her an active band of co-workers. When she
first began visiting the female prisoners in Newgate it is probable that
she could not have supported all that she had to go through if it had
not been for the sympathy and companionship of Anna Buxton and other
Quaker ladies whom she had roused through her power of speech, just as
she had herself been roused when a girl by the preaching of William
Savery.
The condition of the women and children in Newgate Prison, when Mrs. Fry
first began visiting them in 1813, was more horrible than anything that
can be easily imagined. Three hundred poor wretches were herded together
in two wards and two cells, with no furniture, no bedding of any kind,
and no arrangements for decency or privacy. Cursing and swearing, foul
language, and personal filthiness, made the dens in which the women were
confined equally offensive to ear, eye, nose, and sense of modesty. The
punishment of death at that time existed for 300 different offences, and
though there were many mitigations of the sentence in the case of those
who had only committed minor breaches of the law, yet the fact that
nearly all had by law incurred the penalty of death, gave an apparent
justification for herding the prisoners indiscriminately together. It
thus happened that many a poor girl who had committed a comparatively
trivial offence, became absolutely ruined in body and mind through her
contact in prison with the vilest and most degraded of women. No attempt
whatever was made to reform or discipline the prisoners, or to teach
them any trade whereby, on leaving the gaol, they might earn an honest
livelihood. Add to this that there were no female warders nor female
officers of any kind in the prison, and that the male warders were
frequently men of depraved life, and it is not difficult to see that no
element of degradation was wanting to make the female wards of Newgate
what they were often called—a hell on earth.
When Elizabeth Fry and Anna Buxton first visited this Inferno, there was
so little pretence at any kind of control over the prisoners, that the
Governor of Newgate advised the ladies to leave their watches behind
them at home. Mrs. Fry, with a wise instinct, felt that the best way of
influencing the poor, wild, rough women was to show her care for their
children. Many of the prisoners had their children with them in gaol,
and there were very few even of the worst who could not be reached by
care for their little ones. Even those who had no children were often
not without the motherly instinct, and could be roused to some measure
of self-restraint and decency for the sake of the children who were
being corrupted by their example. So Mrs. Fry’s first step towards
reforming the women took the form of starting a school for the children
in the prison. As usual in all good work of a novel kind, those who knew
nothing about it were quite sure that Mrs. Fry would have been much more
usefully employed if she had turned her energies in a different
direction. People who have never stirred a finger to lighten the misery
of mankind always know, so much better than the workers, what to do and
how to do it. They would probably tell a fireman who is entering a
burning house at the risk of his life, that he would be more usefully
employed in studying the chemical action of fire, or in pondering over
the indestructibility of matter. The popular feeling with regard to Mrs.
Fry’s work in Newgate was embodied by Thomas Hood in a ballad which is
preserved in his collected works, and serves now to show how wrong a
good and tender-hearted man may be in passing judgment on a work of the
value of which he was entirely unqualified to form an opinion. The
refrain of the poem is “Keep your school out of Newgate, Mrs. Fry”—
I like the pity in your full-brimmed eye.
I like your carriage and your silken gray,
Your dove-like habits and your silent preaching,
But I _don’t_ like your Newgatory teaching.
· · · · ·
No, I’ll be your friend, and like a friend
Point out your very worst defect. Nay, never
Start at that word! But I must ask you why
You keep your school in Newgate, Mrs. Fry.
Mrs. Fry’s philanthropy was not of a kind to be checked by a ballad, and
she went on perseveringly with her work; the school was formed, and a
prisoner, named Mary Cormor, was the first schoolmistress. A wonderful
change gradually became apparent in the demeanour, language, and
appearance of the women in prison. In 1817 an association was formed for
carrying on the work Mrs. Fry had begun. It was called “An Association
for the Improvement of the Female Prisoners in Newgate.” Its first
members were eleven Quakeresses and one clergyman’s wife. Public
attention was now alive to the importance of the work; and in the
following year a Select Committee of the House of Commons was appointed
to inquire and report upon the condition of the London prisons. Mrs. Fry
was examined before this committee. Her chief recommendations were that
the prisoners should be employed in some industry, and be paid for their
work, and that good conduct should be encouraged by rewards; she was
also most urgent that the women prisoners should be in the charge of
women warders. Her work in the prison naturally led her to consider the
condition and ultimate fate of women who were transported.
Transportation was then carried out upon a large scale, and all the
evils of the prison existed in an intensified form on board the
transport ships. The horrors of the voyage were followed by a brutal and
licentious distribution of the women on their arrival to colonists,
soldiers, and convicts, who went on board and took their choice of the
human cargo. Mrs. Fry’s efforts resulted in a check being placed on
these shameful barbarities. The women were, owing to her exertions, sent
out in charge of female warders, and they were provided with decent
accommodation on their arrival.
Like Howard, Mrs. Fry did not confine her efforts to the poor and
wretched of her own country. She visited foreign countries in order
thoroughly to study various methods of prison work and discipline. On
one occasion she found in Paris a congenial task in bringing the force
of public opinion to bear on the treatment of children in the Foundling
Hospital there. The poor babies were done up in swaddling clothes that
were only unwrapped once in twelve hours. There was no healthy screaming
in the wards, only a sound that a hearer compared to the faint and
pitiful bleating of lambs. A lady who visited the hospital said she
never made the round of the spotlessly clean white cots, without finding
at least one dead baby! Everything in the hospital was regulated by
clockwork; its outward appearance was clean and orderly in the extreme,
but the babies died like flies! The Archbishop of Paris was vastly
annoyed with Mrs. Fry for pointing out this drawback to the perfect
organisation of the institution; but when once the light was let in,
improvement followed.
There were many other classes of neglected or unfortunate people whose
circumstances were improved by Mrs. Fry’s exertions. The lonely
shepherds of Salisbury Plain were provided with a library after she had
visited the desolate region where they lived. She also organised a
lending library for coastguardsmen and for domestic servants. There was
no end to her active exertions for the good of others except that of her
life.
She died at Ramsgate in 1845, and was buried at Barking.
Her private life was not without deep sorrows and anxieties. She lost a
passionately beloved child in 1815; in 1828 her husband was unfortunate
in his business affairs. They suffered from a great diminution of
fortune, and were obliged to remove to a smaller house and adopt a less
expensive style of living. She did not pretend to any indifference she
was far from feeling under these trials; but they were powerless to turn
her from the duties which she had marked out for herself. The work which
she had undertaken for the good of others probably became, in its turn,
her own solace and support in the hour of trial and affliction. In
helping others she had unconsciously built up a strong refuge for
herself, thus giving a new illustration to the truth of the words: “He
that findeth his life shall lose it: and he that loseth his life, for my
sake, shall find it.”
II
MARY CARPENTER
“That it may please Thee ... to show Thy pity upon all prisoners and
captives.”
MARY CARPENTER was thirty-eight years old when Mrs. Fry died in 1845. We
do not hear, in reading the lives of either, that the two women ever
met, or that the elder directly stimulated the activity of the younger.
Yet the one most surely prepared the way for the other; their work was
upon the same lines, and Miss Carpenter, the Unitarian, of Bristol, was
the spiritual heir and successor of Mrs. Fry, the Quaker, of Norwich.
There is, it is true, a contrast in the manner in which the two women
approached their work in life. The aim of both was the rescue of what
Mary Carpenter called “the perishing and dangerous classes.” But while
Mrs. Fry was led, through her efforts on behalf of convicts, to
establish schools for them and their children, Mary Carpenter’s first
object was the school for neglected children, and through the knowledge
gained there she was led to form schemes for the reformation of
criminals and for a new system of prison discipline. Mrs. Fry worked
through convicts to schools; Mary Carpenter through schools to convicts.
It will not therefore be imagined that there is any want of appreciation
of Mrs. Fry when it is said that Mary Carpenter’s labours were more
effective, inasmuch as they were directed to the cause of the evil,
rather than to its results. By establishing reformatory and industrial
schools, and by obtaining, after long years of patient effort, the
sanction and support of Parliament for them, she virtually did more than
had up to that time ever been done in England, to stop the supply of
criminals. Children who were on the brink of crime, and those who had
actually fallen into criminal courses, were, through her efforts,
snatched away from their evil surroundings, and helped to become
respectable and industrious men and women. Before her time, magistrates
and judges had no choice, when a child criminal stood convicted before
them, but to sentence him to prison, whence he would probably come out
hopelessly corrupted and condemned for life to the existence of a beast
of prey. She says, in one of her letters, dated 1850: “A Bristol
magistrate told me that for twenty years he had felt quite unhappy at
going on committing these young culprits. And yet he had _done_
nothing!” The worse than uselessness of prisons for juvenile offenders
was a fact that was burnt into Mary Carpenter’s mind and heart by the
experience of her life. She was absolutely incapable of recognising the
evil and at the same time calmly acquiescing in it. Her magisterial
friend is the type of the common run of humanity, who satisfy their
consciences by saying, “Very grievous! very wrong!” and who do nothing
to remove the grievance and the wrong; she is the type of the
knights-errant of humanity, who never see a wrong without assailing it,
and endeavouring to remove the causes which produce it.
Mary Carpenter was born at Exeter in 1807, the eldest of five children,
several of whom have left their mark on the intellectual and moral
history of this century. There was all through her life a great deal of
the elder sister—one may almost say, of the mother—in Mary Carpenter. In
an early letter her mother speaks of the wonderfully tranquillising
influence of dolls on her little Mary. She never shrank from
responsibility, and she had a special capacity for protecting love—a
capacity that stood her in good stead in reclaiming the little waifs and
strays to whom she afterwards devoted herself. Her motherliness comes
out in a hundred ways in the story of her life. Her endless patience
with the truant and naughty children was such as many a real mother
might envy. She was especially proud of the title of “the old mother”
which the Indian women, whom she visited towards the close of her life,
gave her. In writing to a friend, she once said: “There is a verse in
the prophecies, ‘I have given thee children whom thou hast not borne,’
and the motherly love of my heart has been given to many who have never
known before a mother’s love.” She adopted a child in 1858 to be a
daughter to her, and writes gleefully: “Just think of me with a little
girl of _my own_! about five years old, ready-made to my hand, without
the trouble of marrying—a darling little thing, an orphan,” etc. etc.
Her friends spoke of her eager delight in buying the baby’s outfit.
It was her motherliness that made her so successful with the children in
the reformatories and industrial schools; moreover, the children
believed in her love for them. One little ragged urchin told a clergyman
that Miss Carpenter was a lady who gave away all her money for naughty
boys, and only kept enough to make herself clean and decent. On one
occasion she heard that two of her ex-pupils had “got into trouble,” and
were in prison at Winchester. She quickly found an opportunity of
visiting them, and one of them exclaimed, directly he saw her, “Oh! Miss
Carpenter, I knew you would not desert us!”
Another secret of her power, and also of her elasticity of spirit, was
her sense of humour. It was like a silver thread running through her
laborious life, saving her from dulness and despondency. In one of her
reports, which has to record the return of a runaway, she said: “He came
back resembling the prodigal in everything except his repentance!”
The motto which she especially made her own was _Dum doceo disco—While I
teach, I learn_. Her father had a school for boys in Bristol, and Mary
and her sister were educated in it. They were among the best of their
father’s pupils, one of whom, the Rev. James Martineau, has left a
record of the great impression Mary’s learning made upon him. She was
indeed very proficient in many branches of knowledge. Her education
included Latin, Greek, mathematics, and natural history; and the
exactness which her father and the nature of her studies demanded of
her, formed a most invaluable training for her after career. For many
years the acquisition of knowledge, for its own sake, was the chief joy
of her life; but a time came when it ceased to satisfy her. She was
rudely awakened from the delightful dreams of a student’s life by a
severe visitation of cholera at Bristol in 1832. From this period, and
indeed from a special day—that set apart as a fast-day in consequence of
the cholera—dates a solemn dedication of herself to the service of her
fellow-creatures. She wrote in her journal 31st March 1832, what her
resolution was, and concluded: “These things I have written to be a
witness against me, if ever I should forget what ought to be the object
of all my active exertions in life.” These solemn self-dedications are
seldom or never spoken of by those who make them. Records of them are
found sometimes in journals long after the hand that has written them is
cold. But, either written or unwritten, they are probably the rule
rather than the exception on the part of those who devote themselves to
the good of others. The world has recently learned that this was the
case with Lord Shaftesbury. There is a time when the knight-errant
consciously enrols himself a member of the noble band of warriors
against wrong and oppression, and takes upon himself his baptismal
vow—manfully to fight against sin, the world, and the devil, and to
continue Christ’s faithful soldier and servant to his life’s end.
It must be remembered that when Mary Carpenter first began to exert
herself for the benefit of neglected children, there were no reformatory
or industrial schools, except those which had been established by the
voluntary efforts of philanthropists like herself. Aided by a band of
fellow-workers and wise advisers, chief of whom were Mr. Matthew
Davenport Hill, the Recorder of Birmingham, and his daughters; Dr.
Tuckerman, of the U.S.A.; Mr. Russell Scott, of Bath; Mr. Sheriff
Watson, of Aberdeen; and Lady Byron, Mary Carpenter set to work to
establish a voluntary reformatory school at Kingswood, near Bristol. Her
principle was that by surrounding children, who would otherwise be
criminals, with all the influences of a wholesome home life, there was a
better chance than by any other course, of reclaiming these children,
and making them useful members of society. To herd children together in
large, unhomelike institutions, was always, in Mary Carpenter’s view,
undesirable; the effect on character is bad; the more perfectly such
places are managed, the more nearly do the children in them become part
of a huge machine, and the less are their faculties, as responsible
human beings, developed. Over and over again, in books, in addresses,
and by the example of the institutions which she managed herself, Mary
Carpenter reiterated the lesson that if a child is to be rescued and
reformed, he must be placed in a family; and that where it is necessary,
for the good of society, to separate children on account of their own
viciousness, or that of their parents, from their own homes, the
institutions receiving them should be based on the family ideal so far
as possible. With this end in view, the children at Kingswood were
surrounded by as many home influences as possible. Miss Carpenter at one
time thought of living there herself, but this scheme was given up, in
deference to her mother’s wishes. She was, however, a constant visitor,
and a little room, which had once been John Wesley’s study, was fitted
up as a resting-place for her. On a pane of one of the windows of this
room her predecessor had written the words, “God is here.” She taught
the children herself, and provided them with rabbits, fowls, and pigs,
the care of which she felt would exercise a humanising influence upon
them. The whole discipline of the place was directed by her; one of her
chief difficulties was to get a staff of assistants with sufficient
faith in her methods to give them an honest trial. She did not believe
in a physical force morality. “We must not attempt,” she wrote, “to
_break_ the will, but to train it to govern itself wisely; and it must
be our great aim to call out the good, which exists even in the most
degraded, and make it conquer the bad.” After a year’s work at Kingswood
in this spirit, she writes very hopefully of the improvement already
visible in the sixteen boys and thirteen girls in her charge. The boys
could be trusted to go into Bristol on messages, and even “thievish
girls” could be sent out to shops with money, which they never thought
of appropriating.
But although the success of the institution was so gratifying, it had no
legal sanction; it had consequently no power to deal with runaways, and
the great mass of juvenile delinquents were still sentenced to prisons,
from which they emerged, like the man into whom seven devils entered, in
a state far worse than their first. Mary Carpenter’s work was not only
to prove the success of her methods of dealing with young criminals,
but, secondly, to convince the Government that the established system
was a bad one, and thirdly, and most difficult of all, to get them to
legislate on the subject. A long history of her efforts to obtain
satisfactory legislation for children of the perishing and dangerous
classes is given in her life, written by her nephew, Mr. J. Estlin
Carpenter. It is enough here to say that in the House of Lords, Lord
Shaftesbury, and in the House of Commons, Sir Stafford Northcote and Mr.
Adderley (afterwards Lord Iddesleigh and Lord Norton), were her chief
supporters. Mr. Lowe (now Lord Sherbrooke) was her chief opposer.
Liberal as she was, born and bred, as well as by heart’s conviction, she
confessed with some feeling of shame, that the Tories “are best in
_this_ work.” At last, in 1854, her efforts were crowned with success,
and the Royal Assent was given to the Youthful Offenders Bill, which
authorised the establishment of reformatory schools, under the sanction
of the Home Secretary.
It is a striking proof of the change that has taken place in the sphere
and social status of women, that Mary Carpenter, in the first half of
her active life, suffered what can be called nothing less than anguish,
from any effort which demanded from herself the least departure from
absolute privacy. When she began her work of convincing the public and
Parliament of the principles which ought to govern the education of
juvenile criminals, her nephew writes that to have spoken at a
conference in the presence of gentlemen, she would have felt, at that
time (1851), as tantamount to unsexing herself. When she was called upon
to give evidence before a Select Committee of the House of Commons in
1852, her profound personal timidity made the occasion a painful ordeal
to her, which she was only enabled to support by the consciousness of
the needs of the children. Surely this excessive timidity arises from
morbid self-consciousness, rather than from true womanly modesty. Mary
Carpenter was enabled, by increasing absorption in her work, to throw it
off, and for her work’s sake she became able to speak in public with
ease and self-possession. She frequently spoke and read papers at the
Social Science Congresses, and at meetings of the British Association. A
letter from her brother Philip describes one of these occasions, at the
meeting in 1860 of the British Association at Oxford, when her subject
was, “Educational Help from the Government Grant to the Destitute and
Neglected Children of Great Britain.”
_“July ——, 1860._
“There was a great gathering of celebrities to hear her. It was in one
of the ancient schools or lecture-halls, which was crowded, evidently
not by the curious, but by those who really wanted to know what she had
to say. She stood up and read in her usual clear voice and expressive
enunciation.... It was, I suppose, the first time a woman’s voice had
read a lecture there before dignitaries of learning and the Church; but
as there was not the slightest affectation on the one hand, so on the
other hand there was neither a scorn nor an etiquettish politeness; but
they all listened to her as they would have listened to Dr. Rae about
Franklin, only with the additional feeling (expressed by the President,
Mr. Nassau Senior) that it was a matter of heart and duty, as well as
head.”
As years passed by, her work and responsibilities rapidly increased. It
is astonishing to read of the number of institutions, from ragged
schools upwards, of which she was practically the head and chief. Her
thoroughly practical and business-like methods of work, as well as her
obvious self-devotion and earnestness, ensured to her a large share of
public confidence and esteem, and although she was a Unitarian,
sectarian prejudices did not often thwart her usefulness. Two instances
to the contrary must, however, be given. In 1856 the Somersetshire
magistrates at the Quarter Sessions at Wells refused to sanction the
Girls’ Reformatory, established by Miss Carpenter at the Red Lodge,
Bristol, on account of the religious opinions of its foundress. They
appeared to have forgotten that “Pure religion and undefiled before God
and the Father is this, to visit the fatherless and widows in their
affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world.” A more deeply
and truly religious spirit than Mary Carpenter’s never existed; but that
is the last thing that sectarian rancour takes heed of. The other little
bit of persecution she met with was regarded by herself and her friends
as something between a compliment and a joke. In 1864 she wrote a book
entitled _Our Convicts_. The work was received with commendation by
jurists in France, Germany, and the United States, but the crowning
honour of all was that the Pope placed her and her books on the “Index
Expurgatorius.” After this she felt that if she had lived in earlier
times she might have aspired to the crown of martyrdom.
The extraordinary energy and vitality of Mary Carpenter never declined.
When she was over sixty years of age she made four successive visits to
India, with the double object of arousing public opinion there about the
education of women, and the condition of convicts, especially of female
convicts. At the age of sixty-six she visited America. She had long been
deeply interested in the social and political condition of the United
States, and had many warm personal friends there. Her first impulse to
reformatory work had come from an American citizen, Dr. Tuckerman; her
sympathy and help had been abundantly bestowed upon the Abolitionist
party, and she was of course deeply thankful when the Civil War in
America ended as it did in the victory of the North, and in the complete
abolition of negro slavery in the United States. Her mind remained
vigorous and susceptible to new impressions and new enthusiasms to the
last. Every movement for elevating the position of women had her
encouragement. She frequently showed her approval of the movement for
women’s suffrage by signing petitions in its favour, and was convinced
that legislation affecting both sexes would never be what it ought to be
until women as well as men had the power of voting for Members of
Parliament. In 1877, within a month of her death, she signed the
memorial to the Senate of the London University in favour of the
admission of women to medical degrees.
She passed away peacefully in her sleep, without previous illness or
decline of mental powers, in June 1877, leaving an honoured name, and a
network of institutions for the reform of young criminals, and the
prevention of crime, of which our country will for many years to come
reap the benefit.
III
CAROLINE HERSCHEL
“As when by night the glass
Of Galileo less assured observes
Imagined lands and regions in the moon.”—_Paradise Lost._
EVERY one knows the fame of Sir William Herschel, the first
distinguished astronomer of that name, the builder and designer of the
forty-foot telescope, and the discoverer of the planet, called after
George III., Georgium Sidus. Hardly less well known is the name of his
sister, Caroline Herschel, who was her brother’s constant helper for
fifty years. She was the discoverer of eight comets; she received, for
her distinguished services to science, the gold medal of the Royal
Astronomical Society, and the gold medal conferred annually by the King
of Prussia for science; she was also made an honorary member of the
Royal Astronomical Society and of the Royal Irish Academy, and received
many other public marks of appreciation of the value of her astronomical
labours. Few women have done as much as she for the promotion of
science, and few have been more genuinely humble in their estimate of
their own attainments. Nothing made her more angry than any praise which
appeared, even in the slightest degree, to detract from the reputation
of her brother; over and over again she asserted that she was nothing
more than a tool which he had taken the trouble to sharpen. One of her
favourite expressions about herself was that she only “minded the
heavens” for her brother. “I am nothing,” she wrote; “I have done
nothing: all I am, all I know, I owe to my brother. I am only a tool
which he shaped to his use—a well-trained puppy-dog would have done as
much.”
Scientific men and scientific societies did not endorse Caroline
Herschel’s extremely humble estimate of herself. In the address to the
Astronomical Society by Mr. South, on presenting the medal to Miss
Herschel in 1828, the highest praise was conferred upon her as her
brother’s fellow-worker, and as an original observer. “She it was,” said
Mr. South, “who reduced every observation, made every calculation; she
it was who arranged everything in systematic order; and she it was who
helped him (Sir W. Herschel) to obtain his imperishable name. But her
claims to our gratitude do not end here: as an original observer she
demands, and I am sure she has, our unfeigned thanks.” He then narrates
the series of her astronomical discoveries, and adds, referring to the
brother and sister: “Indeed, in looking at the joint labours of these
extraordinary personages, we scarcely know whether most to admire the
intellectual power of the brother, or the unconquerable industry of his
sister.”
The sharpest tool, or the best-trained puppy-dog in the world, could
hardly have earned such praise as this. Without endorsing what Caroline
said of herself in her generous wish to heighten the fame of her
brother, it must, however, be conceded that in a remarkable degree she
was what he made her. With an excellent, and indeed an exceptionally
powerful, natural understanding, she was ready to apply it in any
direction her brother chose. She was far from being a mere tool, but her
mind resembled a fine musical instrument upon which her brother was able
to play the lightest air or the grandest symphony, according as he
pleased. At his bidding she became, first, a prima donna, then an
astronomer; if he had so wished it, she would probably with equal
readiness and versatility have turned her attention to any other branch
of science or art. Caroline Herschel was, indeed, a fine example of what
devoted love can do to elevate the character and develop the natural
capacity of the understanding.
She was born in Hanover on the 16th March 1750, the youngest but one of
six children. Her exceptionally long life of nearly ninety-eight years
closed in January 1848. Her memory, therefore, included the earthquake
of Lisbon, the whole French Revolution, the meteor-like rise and fall of
Napoleon, and all the history of modern Europe to the eve of the
socialistic outbreak of 1848. Her family life, before she left Germany,
was of the narrowest possible kind. She had only one sister, seventeen
years older than herself; and as Sophia Herschel married early, Caroline
became the only girl in her family circle, and to the full was she kept
to those exclusively feminine pursuits and occupations which the
proprieties of Germany at that time enforced. Her mother appears to have
been enthusiastically opposed to the education of girls. Her father
wished to give her a good education, but the mother insisted that
nothing of the kind should be attempted. How she learned to read and
write we are not told in the biography written by her grand-niece, Mrs.
J. Herschel. These accomplishments were by no means common among German
women of the humbler middle class a hundred years ago. She did, however,
acquire them, in spite of her mother’s decree that two or three months’
training in the art of making household linen was all the education that
Caroline required. Her father, who was a professional musician himself,
wished to teach her music, but could only do so by stealth, or by taking
advantage of half an hour now and then, when his wife was in an
exceptionally good temper. In a letter, written when she was
eighty-eight years old, Caroline recalls these furtive hours stolen from
the serious occupations of her life, which then consisted in sewing,
“ornamental needlework, knitting, plaiting hair, and stringing beads and
bugles.” “It was my lot,” she writes, “to be the Cinderella of the
family.... I could never find time for improving myself in many things I
knew, and which, after all, proved of no use to me afterwards, except
what little I knew of music ... which my father took a pleasure in
teaching me—_N.B., when my mother was not at home. Amen._”
Very early in her life her brother William became Caroline’s idol and
hero. He was twelve years older than herself, and distinguished himself
among the group of brothers for tenderness and kindness to the little
maiden. Her eldest brother, Jacob, was a fastidious gentleman, and
Caroline’s inability to satisfy his requirements for nicety at table and
as a waitress, often earned her a whipping. But her brother William’s
gentility was of a different order. She narrates one instance, which
doubtless was a specimen of others, when “My dear brother William threw
down his knife and fork and ran to welcome and crouched down to me,
which made me forget all my grievances.” Little did William or Caroline
guess that in the kind brother soothing the little sister’s trouble, the
future astronomer was “sharpening the tool” that was hereafter to be of
such inestimable service to him.
The connection of England and Hanover under one crown caused an intimate
association between the two countries. William Herschel’s first visit to
England was as a member of the band of the regiment of which his father
was bandmaster. On this first visit to England, William expended his
little savings in buying Locke’s “Essay on the Human Understanding.”
Jacob made an equally characteristic purchase of specimens of English
tailoring art. These professional journeys to England led, in the course
of time, to William Herschel establishing himself as a music-master and
professional musician at Bath. This, however, he very early regarded
merely as a means to an end. He taught music to live, but he lived for
his astronomical studies and for the inventions and improvements in
telescopes which he afterwards introduced to the world. When Caroline
was seventeen years old, her father died, leaving his family very ill
provided for; Caroline was more closely than ever confined to the tasks
of a household drudge and to endeavouring to supply home-made luxuries
for Jacob. This went on for five years, the mother and sister slaving
night and day in order that Jacob might cut a figure in the world not
humbling to the family pride. In 1772 William Herschel unexpectedly
arrived from England, and his short visit ended in his sister Caroline
returning with him to Bath. She left, as she writes with some awe, even
after an interval of many years, “without receiving the consent of my
eldest brother to my going.”
There could not possibly be a greater contrast than that between
Caroline’s life in Hanover and her life in England. From being a
maid-of-all-work in a not very interesting family, where there was a
dull monotony in her daily routine of drudgery, she found she was to
become a public singer, an astronomer’s apprentice, and an assistant
manufacturer of scientific instruments; she was not only her brother’s
housekeeper, but his helper and coadjutor in every act of his life.
Nothing is more remarkable than the account of the life of William and
Caroline Herschel at Bath. He frequently gave from thirty-five to forty
music-lessons a week; this, with his work as director of public
concerts, kept the wolf from the door, and, needless to say, occupied
his daylight hours with tolerable completeness. The nights were given to
“minding the heavens,” or to making instruments necessary for minding
them much more efficiently than had hitherto been possible. Every room
in the house was converted into a workshop. William Herschel literally
worked on, night and day, without rest, his sister on several occasions
keeping him alive by putting bits of food into his mouth while he was
still working. Once when he was finishing a seven-foot mirror for his
telescope, he never took his hands from it for sixteen hours. The great
work of constructing the forty-foot telescope took place at Bath; and at
Bath also, while still practising the profession of a music-master,
Herschel discovered the Georgium Sidus, and was acknowledged as the
leading authority on astronomy in England.
Up to the time of Herschel’s improvements, six or eight inches used to
be considered a large size for the mirror of an astronomical telescope.
His first great telescope had a twelve-foot mirror. There is a most
exciting account in Mrs. Herschel’s Life of Caroline Herschel, of the
failure of the first casting of the mirror for the thirty-foot
reflector. The molten metal leaked from the vessel containing it and
fell on the stone floor, pieces of which flew about in all directions as
high as the ceiling. The operators fortunately escaped without serious
injury. “My poor brother fell, exhausted with heat and exertion, on a
heap of brickbats.” The disappointment must have been intense, but
nothing ever baffled these indefatigable workers, and the second casting
was a complete success.