Some Eminent Women of Our Times

In 1865 she was sent by the sisterhood to Walsall, to take part in the nursing in a small cottage hospital. Towards the end of the year she received orders from the sisterhood to leave this work and take work as a nurse in a private case in the South of England. Walsall had not been trained to habits of unquestioning obedience; its inhabitants and the managers of the little hospital had already discovered Sister Dora’s fine qualities as a nurse. They resisted the order that would have deprived them of her services. While negotiations on this subject were proceeding between the Walsall people and the sisterhood at Coatham, news reached Miss Pattison from Hauxwell, to say that her father was dangerously ill and much desired to see her. She telegraphed to the sisterhood, telling them of her father’s serious illness, and asking permission to visit him. The answer, which was returned almost immediately, was a blank refusal, and she was bidden to proceed at once to Devonshire to nurse a stranger. Incredible as this may seem, it is still more incredible that the order was obeyed. Miss Pattison had not escaped the paralysis of moral sense which this cast-iron system produces; she turned her back on her home and proceeded to Devonshire. Her father died almost immediately, without ever seeing his daughter again. The shock of this event roused Sister Dora from the lethargy from which she had suffered. She was almost broken-hearted, and deeply resented the dictation to which she had been subjected. She ought to have seen, and probably did see, that the will, like all other powers of the mind and body, with which each one of us is endowed, is given to us to be used; we are responsible for its right use, and when we use it wrongly, as she did in this case (for it must have needed a very strong effort of will to resist the appeal of love and duty), it is we ourselves who must bear the punishment and endure the anguish of our fault. She did not immediately sever her connection with the sisterhood, but she began from that time to be less completely in thraldom to it. She finally quitted it in 1875, under circumstances which have not been made public. When a friend questioned her as to the cause, Sister Dora’s only reply was, “I am a woman, and not a piece of furniture.”

After her father’s death, Sister Dora returned to Walsall, and in this place practically the whole of the rest of her life was devoted to the service of the sick and of all who were desolate and oppressed. She plunged into her work with all the greater eagerness from her desire to forget herself and the many inward troubles and anxieties which oppressed her at this time. Her great desire was to become a first-rate surgical nurse. Walsall has been described by those who lived there as “one of the smokiest dens of the Black Country,” and the workers in the various factories of the locality were often frightfully injured by accidents with the machinery, or by burns and scalds. Sister Dora became marvellously skilful in what is known as “conservative surgery,” that is, the art of saving a maimed and crushed limb instead of cutting it off. A good old doctor at the hospital taught her all he knew; but she outgrew his instructions, and Miss Lonsdale gives an instance of a case in which Sister Dora saved a man’s right arm from amputation, in spite of the doctor’s strongly expressed opinion that the man would die unless his arm were taken off immediately. The arm was frightfully torn and twisted; the doctor said it must be taken off, or mortification would set in. Sister Dora said she could save the arm, and the man’s life too. The patient was appealed to, and of the two risks he chose the one offered by the Sister. The doctor did not fail, proud as he was of his pupil, to remind her that the responsibility of what he considered the patient’s certain death would be on her head. She accepted the responsibility, and devoted herself to her patient almost night and day for three weeks, with the result that the arm was saved. The doctor was the first generously to acknowledge her triumph, and he brought the rest of his medical colleagues to see what Sister Dora had done. The patient’s gratitude was unbounded; he often revisited the hospital simply to inquire for Sister Dora. He was known in the neighbourhood as “Sister’s Arm.” During an illness she had, this man used to walk every Sunday morning eleven miles to the hospital to inquire for her. He would say, “How’s Sister?” and on receiving a reply would add, “Tell her it’s her arm that rang the bell,” and walk back again. Sister Dora used to say when speaking of her period of suspense and anxiety in this case, “How I prayed over that arm!”

She was particularly skilful in her treatment of burns; sometimes she would take two poor little burnt or scalded babies to sleep in her own room. Those who have had experience in the surgical wards of hospitals know what an overpowering and sickening smell proceeds from burnt flesh. Sister Dora never seemed for a moment to think of herself or of what was disagreeable and disgusting in such cases as these. In one frightful accident in which eleven poor men were so badly burned that they resembled charred logs of wood more than human beings, nearly all the doctors and nurses became sick and faint a few minutes after they entered the ward where the sufferers lay, and were obliged to leave. Among the nurses Sister Dora alone remained at her post, and never ceased night or day for ten days to do all that human skill could suggest to alleviate the sufferings of the poor victims. Some died almost immediately, some lingered for a week or ten days; only two ultimately recovered. Her wonderful courage was shown not only in her readiness to accept responsibility, but in the way in which she was able to keep up her own spirits, and to raise the spirits of the patients through such a time of trial as this. She would laugh and joke, and tell the sick folks stories, or do anything that would help them to while away the time and bear their sufferings with fortitude and courage. She made her patients feel how much she cared for them, and that all she did for them was a pleasure, not a trouble. She used to provide them with a little bell, which she told them to ring when they wanted her. One poor man was reproached by the other patients for ringing his bell so often, especially as when Sister Dora arrived and asked him what he wanted, he not infrequently answered that he did not know. But Sister Dora never reproached him for ringing too often. “Never mind,” she would say brightly, “for I like to hear it;” and she told him that she often fancied when she was asleep that she heard his little bell, and started up in a hurry to find it was only a dream. She was so gay and bright and pleasant in her ways, giving her patients comical nicknames, and caressing and coaxing them almost as a mother would a sick child, that they regarded her with a deep love and veneration that frequently influenced them for good all the rest of their lives. Twice while she was at Walsall, there were frightful epidemics of small-pox, and on both occasions she showed extraordinary courage and devotion. She did not bear any charm against infection, and in fact generally caught anything that was to be caught in the way of infectious disease. Her courage, therefore, did not proceed from any confidence in her own immunity from danger. She deliberately counted the cost, and resolved to pay it, for the sake of carrying on her work. At the first outbreak of small-pox in Walsall there was no proper hospital accommodation for the patients; and Sister Dora nursed many of them in the overcrowded courts and alleys where they lived. She was called in to one poor man who was dying of a virulent form of the malady known as “black-pox.” He was a frightful object: all his friends and relations, except one woman, had forsaken him; when Sister Dora arrived, she found there was only one small piece of candle in the house, so she gave the woman money to go out and buy candles, and other necessaries. The temptation was too much for the poor woman, who must, after all, have been better than the patient’s other relatives and neighbours, for she had stayed with him when they had run away. But when the professional nurse arrived and gave her money, she ran away too, and Sister Dora was left quite alone with the dying man. Just as the one bit of candle flickered out, the poor man, covered as he was with the terrible disease, raised himself in bed and said, “Kiss me, Sister.” She did so, and the man sank back; she promised she would not leave him while he was alive, and his last hours were soothed by her presence. She passed hours by his side in total darkness, uncertain whether he were dead or alive; at last the gray light of early dawn came, and she was at liberty. Her promise was fulfilled; the man was dead.

At the second outbreak of small-pox at Walsall, hospital accommodation was provided for the patients; and the ambulance, a sort of omnibus fitted up to convey a patient and nurse, was frequently to be seen in the streets. Sister Dora was as strong as she was courageous; she would come to a house where a small-pox patient lay, and say she had “come for” so-and-so. Resistance and excuses were no good; she would take the patient, man or woman, in her arms as easily as she would a baby, and carry the burden down to the ambulance. Her presence cheered the whole town, and prevented the spread of that dastardly panic which sometimes comes over a place which is stricken by disease. An eye-witness described how every one in the town felt new courage at the sight of the ambulance and Sister Dora, “with her jolly face smiling out of the window.”

She spent six months at the small-pox hospital in 1875; and for a long time she was practically alone there with the patients; the doctors of course came by day, and three of her old patients constantly visited the hospital for the sake of seeing if they could do anything for her; and there were two nearly helpless old women from the workhouse, who were supposed to do part of the work; but she was absolutely alone as regards regular skilful assistance in the nursing and other work. The porter did what he could, showing his devotion by getting up early to scrub and clean for her; but he could hardly ever resist the temptation to go off “on the drink” whenever his wages were paid; on these occasions he would absent himself for four and twenty hours at a time. Once when this had happened, and Sister Dora was quite alone, a delirious patient, a tall, powerful man, flung himself out of bed in the middle of the night, and rushed to the door trying to make his escape. “She had no time for hesitation, but at once grappled with him, all covered as he was with the loathsome disease … she got him back to bed, and held him there by main force till the doctor arrived in the morning.”

One of the trials of her work was that the small-pox patients were nearly all “alive” with vermin; added to this was the horror of the all-pervading smell of pox; in a letter to a friend, Sister Dora spoke of this, and said it was impossible to get away from it. “I taste it in my tea!” For months she never had her bonnet on, or went even as far as the gate; and yet she was able to look back on the time she spent in this hospital as one that had been very much blessed to her. With her High Church feelings about Lent, she wrote cheerfully in the letter already quoted, “Is not this a glorious retreat for me in Lent? I can have no idle chatter.” In another letter, she wrote, “I am still a prisoner, surrounded by my lepers. I do feel so thankful that I came… I thank God daily for my life here.”

Endless instances might be given of her physical and moral courage; once, when she was in a third-class railway carriage with a lot of rough navvies, who were swearing and using horrible language, she boldly reproved them; they laid hands on her, one of them exclaiming, “Hold your jaw, you fool; do you want your face smashed in?” She remained quite calm, not struggling, although they were holding her down on the seat between them. When the train reached a station, they let her go, and she got out of the carriage, and one of the men begged her pardon, saying, “Shake hands, mum! you’re a good plucked one, you are; you were right, and we were wrong.” Another time in the hospital, a half-drunken man, flashily dressed, rang the bell in the night, and on the door being opened forced his way into the hall, and demanded a bed. The night nurse on duty was unable to get rid of him, and Sister Dora was summoned. The man reiterated his determination to stay all night, and Sister Dora contented herself with barring his access to the patients by standing erect on the last step of the stairs with her arms spread from the wall to the balusters. The man seated himself opposite to her, the nurse fled shrieking, and the two waited, staring at one another, each hoping the other would be the first to tire of the situation. Presently the man made a rush down the passage towards the kitchen door, but Sister Dora was too quick for him, and by the time he had reached it she was there with her arms spread across it, as on the stairs, to bar his way. She expected he would knock her down, but instead of doing so he muttered some compliment to her courage, and turned on his heel and left the place.

She had a very strong personal influence for good on the poor rough people, both men and women, for whom she worked. Her religion was one more of deeds than of words, and they saw that both in word and deed it was genuine. Many a one has dated a new start in life from the time he came under her care. Sometimes patients, waking in the night, would find her praying by their bedsides, and it touched them deeply to see how sincerely and truly she cared for them. Although she had the hearty sense of fun already alluded to, no man could ever venture on a coarse word or jest in her presence, and she inspired a good “tone” in the wards even when they were occupied by the roughest and poorest. As time went on there was hardly a slum or court in the lowest part of Walsall where she was not known, and hardly a creature in the town that did not feel he owed something to her. Although most of her time was given to healing bodily troubles, all her patients felt that she cared for something higher in them than their bodies. She joined heartily in several missions that were started with the object of reaching the lowest and most outcast; she would go quite fearlessly at midnight into the haunts of the most degraded men and women of the town, and induce them, for a while at least, to pause and consider what their lives had been given to them for. Once, we are told, when she was on her way to a patient’s house at night, she had to pass through one of the worst slums of the town. A man ran out of a notorious public-house and said, “Sister, you’re wanted; they’ve been fighting, and a man’s hurt desperate.” Even she hesitated momentarily, and the thought passed through her mind that she might be murdered. But her hesitation did not last sufficiently long to be visible; she followed the man immediately, taking comfort characteristically in the thought, “What does it matter if I am murdered?” To her astonishment, as soon as she reached the group of men, brutalised apparently almost below the level of humanity, a way was respectfully made for her, and every hat was taken off as she passed to the side of the wounded man.

But the time was approaching when the hand of death was to be laid upon this wonderful woman in the midst of all her labours. She was only about forty-four years of age, when she discovered that she was stricken by an incurable and terribly painful disease. It was a sign both of her strength and of her weakness that she insisted on keeping this fact absolutely secret. She, who had always been so strong, could not bear to acknowledge that her strength had come to an end. She, who had been so ready to give sympathy, could not bear to accept it. She went on with her work, bearing her pain silently and proudly, and admitting no one to her confidence. In order more completely to conceal her illness, she left Walsall for a time; and those who remained in charge of the hospital did not dream but that her absence was merely temporary. With the knowledge that her days on earth were numbered, she still went on studying her profession. She attended some of Professor Lister’s operations in London in order to become acquainted with his antiseptic process, and she went to the Paris Exhibition especially to study the surgical appliances shown there. Then presently she came back to Walsall, in October 1878. In November of the same year the Mayor opened a new hospital in her name; she was too ill to be present. Up to the last the townspeople could not believe that their “dear lady” was really to be taken from them, especially as her vitality was so strong that she rallied again and again, when those about her thought that the end was near at hand. She never lost her old habit of joking and making fun out of the dismal circumstances of sickness. Her arm, which became terribly swollen and helpless, she nicknamed “Sir Roger,” and she laughed at her doctors because she lived longer than they had predicted she would. She quite chuckled over the idea that she had “done the doctor again.” Her life was prolonged till 24th December 1878. The grief throughout the district when it was known that death had removed her was overpowering. The veneration and gratitude of the whole town found expression in many schemes for memorials in her honour. The working people wished most of all for a statue of their dear lady. The wish was gratified, through Miss Lonsdale’s generous aid, in the autumn of 1886. A pure white marble statue now stands in a central position of the smoky town of Walsall, commemorating the life and labours of one of the best of this generation of Englishwomen. Her work is another illustration of the text, “He that is greatest among you, shall be your servant.”

XX

MRS. BARBAULD

Anne Letitia Barbauld will probably be more remembered for what she was than for what she did. At a time when women’s education was at a very low ebb, and when for a woman to be an authoress was to single herself out for ungenerous sneers, attacks, and insinuations, Mrs. Barbauld did much to raise the social esteem in which literary women were held, and prove in her own person that a popular authoress could be a devoted wife, daughter, and sister.

Mrs. Barbauld’s father was the Rev. John Aikin, a Doctor of Divinity, much esteemed in Nonconformist circles for his learning and piety. He was for nearly thirty years the head of a well-known Nonconformist college at Warrington, round which a little knot of learned and good men gathered, who, it is said, did much to raise the tone, intellectually and morally, of English society at a time when Oxford and Cambridge were sunk in the deepest lethargy, and had comparatively no influence for good in any direction. Among the men, whose names afterwards became honourably known, who were connected with the social or educational life of the Warrington Academy, may be mentioned Dr. Priestley, Dr. Enfield, the Rev. Gilbert Wakefield, Howard the philanthropist, and Roscoe the historian. In the midst of a society tempered by such good influences as these, Anne Letitia Aikin grew from girlhood to womanhood. She and her brother, John Aikin, four years younger than herself, were the only children of their parents. She was born at Kibworth, in Leicestershire, on 20th June 1743, where her father had a school before he became the head of the Warrington Academy. Her mother is said to have come to the singular conclusion that a girl brought up in a boys’ school must either be a prude or a tomboy, and Mrs. Aikin preferred the former. Judging from a cameo portrait of Mrs. Barbauld, taken at the request of her friend Josiah Wedgwood, she certainly looks as if a good deal of her time had been spent in the enunciation of the words “prunes, prisms, and propriety.” But appearances are notoriously deceptive, and there is a nice little story of Mrs. Barbauld’s girlhood, which shows that her excellent mother did not succeed in entirely eradicating the tomboy element from her daughter’s character. When only fifteen years old, Anne had attracted the affections of a Kibworth farmer, who made a formal application to Dr. Aikin for his daughter’s hand. The Doctor, seeing his daughter in the garden, gave the suitor leave to go and try his fortunes. When she understood the nature of his errand, her embarrassment was very great, for the dilemma presented itself of having to say “No,” and yet to spare the feelings of the swain; finding no other way out of the difficulty, she ran up a tree, thus gaining the top of the garden wall, and then, by one spring, the lane on the other side, leaving her discomfited lover to admire her agility and bewail its results.

Anne was from her birth an extraordinarily precocious child. Her mother wrote of her in after years, comparing her with some less wonderful grandchildren, “I once, indeed, knew a little girl who was as eager to learn as her instructors could be to teach her, and who, at two years old, could read sentences and little stories in her wise book, roundly, without spelling, and in half a year more could read as well as most women; but I never knew such another, and I believe never shall.” Her father shared sufficiently in the prejudices of the period to refuse for a long time to impart to this gifted child any of the classical learning of which he was the master, and in which she ardently desired to share. At length she so far overcame his scruples that she became able to read Latin with facility, and gained some acquaintance with Greek. The fact that her father was a schoolmaster no doubt enabled her to enjoy many opportunities of instruction and education to which the bulk of Englishwomen at that time were complete strangers. At a time when it was thought enough education for most women if they were able to read, “and perhaps to write their names or so,” it is not surprising if schoolmasters’ daughters enjoyed an advantage in being able at least to pick up the crumbs that fell from the rich man’s table.

Anne was thirty years of age before she made her first appearance in print with a volume of verse in 1773; but she appears to have been known as a poet in her own circle of friends a few years earlier than this, as there is a letter in existence from Dr. Priestley, dated 1769, in which he asks permission to send a copy of her poem, called “Corsica,” to Boswell, who was destined to future immortality as the biographer of Dr. Johnson. Her first printed volume was highly successful, and passed through four editions almost immediately. Thus encouraged, Anne and her brother shortly afterwards printed a joint-volume, called Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose, which also attracted much attention and commendation. In Rogers’s Table Talk an anecdote is given about this volume which illustrates the amusing mistakes sometimes arising from joint authorship. The various articles in the book were not signed by their respective authors, and on one occasion Charles James Fox, meeting John Aikin at a dinner party, wished to compliment him on his book. “I particularly admire,” he said, “your essay, ‘Against Inconsistency in our Expectations.’” “That,” replied Aikin, “is my sister’s.” “I much like,” returned Fox, “your essay on Monastic Institutions.” “That” answered Aikin, “is also my sister’s.” Fox thought it best to say no more about the book.

In the same year as that of the publication of this volume of Essays, 1774, Anne Letitia Aikin became the wife of the Rev. Rochemont Barbauld, a descendant of a French Protestant family. Mr. Barbauld’s father had been chaplain to the Electress of Hesse Cassel, a daughter of George II, and the son had been intended for the Church of England. He had, however, conscientious objections to taking orders in that Church, and joined the Presbyterian body. Miss Aikin was warned before her marriage that her future husband had suffered already from an attack of insanity, but with Quixotic devotion this only seemed to her an additional reason why she should unite her life with his. Her married life, notwithstanding many good qualities on her husband’s part, was one of exceptional trial and loneliness. Mr. Barbauld was liable throughout his life to fits of insanity, which took the form of fierce and uncontrollable fury as often as not directed against his wife. They settled at Palgrave in Suffolk, and opened a boys’ school there. Mrs. Barbauld was much urged by her friend Mrs. Montague to open a school for girls, for the purpose of imparting to them, in a regular manner, various branches of science, such as did not then form an ordinary part of women’s education. Mrs. Barbauld declined the task, giving various excuses, such as her own want of proficiency in music and dancing, and other feminine accomplishments. It may, however, be not improbable that her real reason was one that could not be avowed, and was to be found in the mental condition of her husband. It must have been a sufficiently severe trial to the strongest nerves to keep a boys’ school, and to know that the head master and principal teacher was at any time liable to fits of insane fury; but this would have been even worse, it would have been a fatal objection, in a girls’ school. Poor Mrs. Barbauld set herself with pathetic resolution to make the best of the partner and the life she had chosen. She seems immediately to have assumed she would never have any children of her own, for within a year of her marriage she adopted from his birth her nephew Charles, her brother’s son. This was the little Charles from whom The Early Lessons and Hymns in Prose were written. Very few educational books for young children had then been written, and Mrs. Barbauld set herself to supply the deficiency. She discovered from practical experience the sort of books children learn best from, and the kind of paper and type that suited them best. Many of her friends in the literary world thought she was wasting her talents in such employment. Dr. Johnson is recorded in Boswell’s life to have spoken very scornfully of what she was doing, and set it all down to her having married a “little Presbyterian parson.” It appears, however, in the anecdotes of Johnson, collected by Mrs. Thrale, that though he might have spoken in this way at times, his warm heart did not fail to appreciate the devotion of Mrs. Barbauld’s talents to the humble tasks which her marriage had rendered necessary. “Mrs. Barbauld,” Mrs. Thrale wrote, “had his best praise, and deserved it; no man was more struck than Mr. Johnson with the voluntary descent from possible splendour to painful duty.” She wrote herself in her preface to The Early Lessons: “The task is humble, but not mean, for to lay the first stone of a noble building and to plant the first idea in a human mind can be no dishonour to any hand.”