Josephine E. Butler

My sister joined me in my visits to the sick, criminal, and outcast women of Liverpool. We visited the wards of the great hospital together. The strong sympathy of her loving nature quickly won the hearts of desolate young girls, while she greatly strengthened me in the hope that we might be able to undo some of their heavy burdens.

Among the first who came to us to our own house, to die, was a certain Marion, who seemed to us a kind of first-fruits of the harvest, in the gathering in of which we were to be allowed in after years to participate. The first time I saw her was in a crowded room. Her face attracted me: not beautiful in the common acceptation of the word, but having a power greater than beauty; eyes full of intelligence and penetration; a countenance at once thoughtful and frank, with at times a wildly seeking look, as if her whole being cried out, “Who will show us any good?” She was ill, her lungs fatally attacked. I went up to her, and with no introduction of myself said, “Will you come with me to my home and live with me? I had a daughter once.” She replied with a gasp of astonishment, grasping my hand as if she would never let it go again. I brought her home, my husband supported her upstairs, and we laid her on the couch in the pretty little spare room looking on the garden. She lived with us, an invalid, three months, and then died. It was difficult to suppress the thought, “If she had not been so destroyed, what a brightness and blessing she might have been in the world.” Untaught, unacquainted with the Scriptures till she came to us, she mastered the New Testament so thoroughly in that brief time that her acute questions and pregnant remarks were often a subject of wonder to my husband, who spent a portion of almost every evening with her in her room, conversing with and instructing her. Some of the intellectual difficulties which assail thoughtful students occurred to her. I witnessed many a severe struggle in her mind. She would often say, “I will ask Mr. Butler about it this evening.” But her questions were sometimes such as cannot be answered, except by God Himself to the individual soul. This she knew, and through many sleepless nights her murmured prayers were heard by her attendant, “preventing the night watches.” My husband said her remarks concerning the nature of a true faith sometimes strikingly resembled portions of the writings of a well-known modern philosophical thinker, which she had never read, for she had read nothing. I speak of her intellect, but her heart was yet greater. What capacities for noble love, for the deepest friendship, had been trampled under foot in that dear soul.

A well-known divine came to visit us, and hearing of our poor invalid, kindly offered to see and converse with her. My husband and I agreed that we would say nothing to our friend of Marion’s past life, for we thought that, saintly man though he was, he probably had not faith enough to do justice to her and to himself in the interview if he had this knowledge. (There are few men whose faith comes up to that measure.) When he joined us again downstairs his face was radiant, and he spoke, not of any teaching or comfort which he might have conveyed to her, but of the help and privilege it was to himself to have held communion during a short half hour with a dying saint, so young, yet so enlightened, and so near to God.

I recall the day of her death. It was a cold, snowy day in March. In the morning my husband went to see her early, before going out to his college work. She could scarcely speak, but looking earnestly at him said, as if to reward him for all his painstaking instructions, and guessing what he wished to know, “Yes, God is with me, sir; I have perfect peace.” Her long death-struggle lasting twelve hours, joined with the peace and even joy of her spirit, was very affecting. Though it was bitterly cold, she whispered, “Open the windows, for the love of God.” Her long black hair, thrust wildly back, was like the hair of a swimmer, dripping with water, so heavy were the death-dews. She became blind, and her fine intelligent eyes wandered ever, with an appealing look, to whatever part of the room she thought I was in. Towards sunset she murmured, “Oh, come quickly, Lord Jesus.” During that long day she continually moved her arms like a swimmer, as if she felt herself sinking in deep waters. Then her poor little head fell forward, a long sigh escaped her parted lips, and at last I laid her down flat on her little bed. My husband and sons returned from college, and we all stood round her for a few minutes. She had become a household friend. She looked sweet and solemn then, her head drooping to one side, and with a worn-out look on the young frail face, but a look, too, of perfect peace.

A few days before her death I telegraphed, at her request, to her father, who had had no tidings of his lost child for five years. He was an extensive farmer, well to do and honourable, living in a beautiful district in the midland counties. We were surprised, on his arrival, to see a very fine-looking country gentleman, as one would say, reminding us, in his noble height and figure and dignified presence, a little of my own father. He carried with him a valise and a handsome travelling rug. We took him to her room and retired. Their interview was best witnessed by God alone. After two hours or so I opened the door softly. He was lying on a couch at the opposite side of the room from her in a deep sleep, tired probably more by strong emotion than by his journey. She raised her finger for silence, and with the look and action of a guardian angel whispered, “Father is asleep.”

After her death her poor mother came to attend her funeral. I had filled Marion’s coffin with white camelias, banking them up all round her. With her hands crossed on her breast, and dressed as a bride for her Lord, she looked quite lovely. I found the mother alone, kneeling by the coffin in an agony of grief and of anger. She said (her body rocking backward and forward with emotion), “If that man could but see her now! Can we not send for him?” And she added, “Oh, what a difference there is in English gentlemen’s households! To think that this child should have been ruined in one and saved in another!” Yes, it might have been good for “that man” to have been forced to step down from his high social position and to look upon her then, and to have known the abyss from which she had been drawn, to the verge of which he had led her when she was but a child of fifteen.

Marion had “prophesied” to me, before she died, of hard days and a sad heart which were in store for me in contending against the evil to which she had fallen a victim. I recall her words with wonder and comfort. She would say, “When your soul quails at the sight of the evil, which will increase yet awhile, dear Mrs. Butler, think of me and take courage. God has given me to you, that you may never despair of any.”

Snow lay thickly on the ground when we laid her in her grave in the cemetery. When we came back to the house I was trying to say something comforting to the mother, when she stopped me and said, “My heart is changed about it all. The bitter anger won’t come back, I think; and what has taken it all away was the sight of Mr. Butler standing by the grave of my child, and the words he spoke. Oh, madam,” she said, “when I looked at him standing there in the snow, dressed in his linen robe as white as the snow itself, and with that look on his face when he looked up to heaven and thanked God for my daughter now among the blessed, I could hardly refrain from falling on my knees at his feet, for he seemed to me like one of the angels of God! I felt happy then, almost proud, for my child. Oh, madam, I can never tell you what it was to me to look on your husband’s face then! My heart was bursting with gratitude to God and to him.”

There were others about the same time whom we took home, who died in our own house, and were laid in graves side by side in the cemetery. Of one I have a clear remembrance, a girl of seventeen only, of some natural force of character. Her death was a prolonged hard battle with pain and with bitter memories, lightened by momentary flashes of faint hope. She struggled hard. We were called to her bedside suddenly one evening. She was dying, but with a strong effort she had raised herself to a sitting position. She drew us near to her by the appeal of her earnest eyes, and raising her right hand high with a strangely solemn gesture, and with a look full of heroic and desperate resolve, she said, “I will fight for my soul through hosts, and hosts, and hosts!” Her eyes, which seemed to be now looking far off, athwart the hosts of which she spoke, became dim, and she spoke no more. “Poor brave child!” I cried to her, “you will find on the other shore One waiting for you who has fought through all those hosts for you, who will not treat you as man has treated you.” I cannot explain what she meant. I have never been quite able to understand it; but her words dwelt with us – “through hosts, and hosts, and hosts!” She had been trampled under the feet of men as the mire in the streets, had been hustled about from prison to the streets, and from the streets to prison, an orphan, unregarded by any but the vigilant police. From the first day she came to us we noticed in her, notwithstanding, an admirable self-respect, mixed with the full realisation of her misery. And that sense of the dignity and worth of the true self in her – the immortal, inalienable self – found expression in that indomitable resolution of the dying girl: “I will fight for my soul through hosts, and hosts, and hosts!”

In the following winter my father died. On the 23rd of January, 1868, we were summoned by a telegraphic message from my sister, Mrs. Smyttan, who had lived with him during the last years of his life. But none of us saw him alive again. The end had been sudden, but very tranquil. His health was excellent to the last. On the morning of January 23rd, as he was passing from his bedroom to his study, he sat down, feeling faint, and raising his forefinger as if to enjoin silence, or intent upon a voice calling him away, he died without a struggle, and apparently without pain, in the eighty-third year of his age.

The family group which was gathered in that house of mourning was incomplete, for many were far away. One of the sisters wrote to the absent ones:

“Two days after our dear father’s death there was such a storm of wind for twenty-four hours as I scarcely remember. The house shook and heaved, and the sky was as dark as if there were an eclipse. The river roared and the windows rattled. We all cowered over the fire, and talked of him and of old days, trying to free ourselves from the sad, restless impression produced by the storm. We heard a crash, and on going upstairs found the window of the room where he lay blown in, the glass shivered about the floor, and the white sheet which had been thrown over the kingly corpse blown rudely away. There was something so irreverent about it, pitiful and weird-like; but he was not disturbed by it – he was beyond all storms, in an infinite and everlasting calm. He looked so grand, and lay in such a majestic peace. His forehead, so high and broad and smooth, his soft grey hair smoothed back. I was much struck by the powerful look of his square jaw, and the union of tenderness and strength in the whole outline of his head and face. I felt almost triumphant about him; and yet how sorrowful such moments are, even when one can look back with thankfulness. The sorrow is not for one’s own loss only; the presence of death in one so dear brings one for a moment into close relation with all the sorrows of earth. When Jesus wept at the grave of Lazarus it was not for Lazarus and his sisters only. He saw then and felt all the bereavements which would bow down the hearts of men to the end of time.”

The company of voluntary followers to the grave was a very large one, all on foot. Around the tomb, where he was laid by the side of our dear mother, there stood a large and silent gathering of children and grandchildren, friends, servants, tenants and others. As we passed along the vale of Tyne on our way back to Lipwood we were much impressed by the outward results – in the high cultivation and look of happy prosperity of the country – of a long life usefully spent. And this feeling was shared by all the dwellers there, who, equally with ourselves, could mark in all around them the impress of his mind and hand. But only those who had had the happiness of his friendship and confidence could know, with his children, how much of strength and sweetness seemed to be gone away from earth when that great heart had ceased to beat.

One of the most prominent characteristics of our family life during all these years at Liverpool was that of our common enjoyment of our summer tours. There were circumstances which made our annual excursions more than the ordinary tours of some holiday-makers. In the first place, many of my own relatives were settled in different parts of the Continent, thus giving us a personal connection with those places. In order to pay a visit to the homes of some of them it was necessary to cross the Alps, while other near relatives lived in France and Switzerland.

It sometimes happens that the ordinary English traveller knows little of the general life of the people among whom he travels, of the history of the country, its politics, its social condition and prospects. He is content to gather to himself enjoyment from the beauties of Switzerland or the Tyrol, or Italy, while knowing little of the dwellers in those beautiful lands. A wider and a richer field is open to those who care to seek and explore it. My husband was not content without making himself acquainted, to a considerable extent, with the contemporary history of the countries through which we passed. His aptitude for languages aided him in intercourse with people of different nationalities; so that our family relationships abroad, and our friendships with many public men, as well as humble dwellers in continental countries, gave to our visits there a varied interest. These vacation tours were to us like sunlit mountain tops rising from the cloud-covered plain of our laborious life at Liverpool. Moreover, the enthusiasm which he had, and which was shared by his sons, for geographical and geological research, together with our modest artistic efforts, added greatly to the interest of our travels. It was felt to be unsatisfactory to attempt to draw mountains and rocks without knowing something of their geological construction. During a visit which Mr. Ruskin paid us at Liverpool, he was turning over a portfolio of drawings done by my husband, and held in his hands for some time two or three sketches of the Aiguilles towering above the Mer de Glace, and other rocks and mountain buttresses in the neighbourhood of Chamounix. He said it gave him pleasure to look at those (he being a keen observer and student of mountain forms everywhere). “Your outlines of these peaks, Mr. Butler,” he said, “are perfectly true: they are portraits. Very few people are able or care to represent the forms so correctly. For the most part artists are more anxious to produce an effective picture, than to give precisely what they see in nature.”

Our sons inherited their father’s out-door tastes. Our summer tours were therefore a source of the keenest enjoyment to us all. We saved up our money for them, worked towards them, and looked forward to them as a real happiness.

CHAPTER V.

EDUCATION OF WOMEN

Among the subjects concerning which my husband advanced with a quicker and firmer step than that of the society around him in general, stands that of the higher education of women. It may be difficult for the present generation to realise what an amount of dogged opposition and prejudice the pioneers of this movement had to encounter only some twenty-five years ago. We have made such rapid strides in the direction of women’s education, that we almost forget that our ladies’ colleges, higher examinations, and the various honours for which women compete so gallantly with men, are but of yesterday. Miss Clough called at our house in Liverpool one day in 1867, to ascertain the state of mind of the Principal of the Liverpool College in regard to the beautiful schemes, which were even then taking shape in her fruitful brain for the benefit of her fellow-women. I think she was heartily glad to find herself in a house where not a shadow of prejudice or doubt existed, to be argued down or patiently borne with until better days. My husband even went a little further, I believe, than she did at that time, in his hopes concerning the equality to be granted in future in the matter of educational advantages for boys and girls, men and women. An active propagandist work was started soon after by James Stuart, of Trinity College, Cambridge, who made Liverpool his head-quarters during his first experiment in establishing lectures for ladies, which developed into the University Extension Scheme. It was arranged that the first course should embrace four of the most important towns of the North of England, constituting a sort of circuit. It seemed desirable that a man of experience and weight in the educational world should inaugurate this experiment by a preliminary address or lecture, given to mixed audiences, in each of these four towns. My husband undertook this task. His first address was given at Sheffield, where he was the guest of Canon Sale, who approved heartily of the movement. Without unnecessarily conjuring up spectres of opposition in order to dismiss them, he carefully framed his discourse so as to meet the prejudices of which the air, at that time, was full. It was generally imagined that a severer intellectual training than women had hitherto received would make them unwomanly, hard, unlovely, pedantic, and disinclined for domestic duties, while the dangers to physical health were dolorously prophesied by medical men and others. In concluding his inaugural address, my husband said: “A community of women, established purposely to educate girls and to train teachers, was not known in Christendom till the institution of the Ursulines by Angela dà Brescia, in 1537. So unheard of at this time was any attempt of women to organise a systematic education for their own sex, that when Françoise de Saintange undertook to found such a school at Dijon she was hooted in the streets, and her father called together four doctors learned in the laws, ‘pour s’assurer qu’instruire des femmes n’était pas un œuvre du démon.’ Even after he had given his consent, he was afraid to countenance his daughter, and Françoise, unprotected and unaided, began her first school in a garret. Twelve years afterwards she was carried in triumph through the streets, with bells ringing and flowers strewed in her path, because she had succeeded

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Fragments of Prose and Poetry, by Frederic W. H. Myers, 1904 (Longmans, Green & Co.), p. 22.