Some Eminent Women of Our Times

The school at Palgrave was successful mainly through Mrs. Barbauld’s efforts; among the scholars were reckoned many men of future distinction, such as the first Lord Denman and William Taylor of Norwich. After eleven years of courageous and exhausting work, the school was given up, and Mr. Barbauld undertook the charge of a Presbyterian church at Hampstead. The husband and wife here enjoyed the friendship of Joanna Baillie and her sister, and here some of Mrs. Barbauld’s best literary work was done. But the terrible malady which had pursued her husband throughout his life continued to darken their existence. In order to be near her brother, and enjoy the protection and solace of his society, Mrs. Barbauld left Hampstead in 1802, and removed to Stoke Newington, where Dr. Aikin then lived. But Mr. Barbauld’s mania continued to increase, and after a sudden attack which he made upon his wife with a dinner knife, it became obvious that he must be put under restraint. The unhappy man put an end to his own life in 1808. After an interval, Mrs. Barbauld resumed her literary work, bringing out an edition of English Novels in 1810. In the following year she brought out a poem, which she called “1811,” very strongly tinged with the despondency which she felt regarding public affairs. She had been bred as a Whig, to hope for great things from the measures of emancipation with which that party had always been identified. Her sympathies were rather with the French Revolution than with the long-continued struggle of England against Napoleon. The poem had a tone of gloom and deep melancholy, which perhaps reflected more of the writer’s personal despondency than the circumstances justified. It is not a little curious that a passage in it is credited with having suggested Lord Macaulay’s famous prophecy that in years to come a New Zealander “will from a broken arch of Blackfriars Bridge contemplate the ruins of St. Paul’s.” The poem provoked a coarse and insulting review in the Quarterly, with which it is to be regretted that Southey’s name is now identified. Murray, the proprietor of the Review, is said to have declared that he was more ashamed of that article than of any that had ever appeared in his magazine. Mrs. Barbauld’s friends, Miss Edgeworth foremost among them, expressed their indignation and sympathy; a more ungentlemanlike, unjust, and insolent review, Miss Edgeworth said she had never read; and she wrote an inspiriting letter to her friend, concluding with the words, “Write on, shine out, and defy them.” But at nearly seventy years of age Mrs. Barbauld was to be excused if she felt that younger and stronger hands must carry on the fight. The poem referred to was not her last literary effort, but it was the last of her writings published during her lifetime. Very little, perhaps, of her work has permanent value; one poem, however, that beginning “Life! I know not what thou art,” which was written in extreme old age, will probably live as long as anything in the language. It indicates possibly what she might have done, had it not been for the tragedy of her married life. Of two lines in this poem —

Life, we’ve been long together,Through pleasant and through cloudy weather —

Wordsworth declared that, though he was not in the habit of grudging people their good things, he wished he had written those lines. Her mental powers remained clear and vigorous to the end of her long life. When she was past eighty, writing to Miss Edgeworth, she summed up, as it were, the worth of what she knew and did not know. “I find that many things I knew, I have forgotten; many things I thought I knew, I find I knew nothing about; some things I know, I have found not worth knowing, and some things I would give – oh! what would one not give to know, are beyond the reach of human ken.”

All her life through she laboured with her pen in defence of civil and religious liberty, against the iniquities of the slave trade, and for many other causes which have made life more worth living in England to-day. She died, universally honoured and respected, in 1825, aged eighty-two.

XXI

JOANNA BAILLIE

Mrs. Joanna Baillie, as she was usually called, because, though she was never married, her age and literary reputation were held to entitle her to brevet rank, was a remarkable instance of a writer rapidly rising to the highest pinnacle of fame, and then as rapidly and surely descending almost to the common level of ordinary mortals. But the Scotch woman, with the blood of heroes in her veins, showed herself worthy of her descent, both by the modesty and dignity with which she bore her fame, and by the sweetness and unassuming simplicity with which she bore the loss of it. She was descended from Sir William Wallace, and the fame of this long-past ancestor is perhaps equalled by that of another and a much nearer relative. John Hunter, the great anatomist and physiologist, the founder of the College of Surgeons, was her mother’s brother. She therefore might truly feel, not in a figurative sense, that in everything she was “sprung of earth’s first blood”; and her double connection with the best and greatest of the heroes of Scotland was probably not without its influence on the development of her mind and character.

She was born at Bothwell, near Glasgow, on the banks of the Clyde, in 1762. In a poem addressed, near the close of her life, to her sister Agnes, she recalls how they had as children —

… paddled barefoot side by side,Among the sunny shallows of the Clyde.

Her father was a minister of the Scotch Church, and afterwards a Professor of Divinity in the University of Glasgow. His death in 1778, and the establishment of his son Matthew in the medical profession in London, caused Mrs. Baillie and her daughters, Joanna and Agnes, to remove there in 1784; and in London practically the rest of the future poetess’s long life was spent. Her first work was a volume of verse published anonymously in 1790. The first of her series of dramas, called Plays on the Passions, was published in 1798. These were also published without the author’s name. They made an immediate and very widespread impression; and their author was frequently, and by the very best judges, lauded as being equal, if not superior, to Shakespeare. The idea of these dramas, and of those in the successive volumes which appeared in 1802 and 1812, was to delineate a single dominant passion, such as hatred, envy, etc.; and each of the passions thus treated was made the subject first of a tragedy, then of a comedy. The language employed is easy, dignified, and simple: and it is probable that the contrast Joanna Baillie’s dramas afforded in this respect to the dramas of the generation closing with the death of Dr. Johnson, was the reason of the great hold which they at once obtained upon the public mind. It is not easy in any other way to account for their extraordinary popularity. The time in which Joanna Baillie lived was one marked by a literary revolution, in which the formal, stilted, and didactic manner was overthrown, and poets and great writers sought to express their thoughts in simple and natural language. The leaders of this literary revolution were Wordsworth and Coleridge. In the great movement identified with their names Joanna Baillie bore a humbler, but a useful and effective part.

When Joanna Baillie’s first volume of plays appeared, there was much speculation as to their possible authorship. Samuel Rogers, the banker, poet, and critic, thought that they were written by a man. It seems to have been difficult, at the end of the last century, for the great judges in the literary world to conceive that a poem, worthy of praise, could be of female authorship. Even so late as 1841, a writer in the Quarterly Review, writing upon Joanna Baillie’s poetical works, puts the coping-stone upon the praise which he bestows upon her style and diction by saying that they are “masculine.” He says, “Let us again express our admiration of the wonderful elasticity and masculine force of mind exhibited in this vast collection of dramas;” and in another place the writer says, “The spirit breathing everywhere is a spirit of manly purity and moral uprightness.” We should say, at the present day, that there is certainly force of mind in Joanna Baillie’s dramas, but that it is feminine, not masculine in character, and that the spirit of purity which breathes through them is essentially the womanly spirit. She had particular power and skill in the delineation of female characters, especially those of an unusual degree of elevation and purity. This in itself would have sufficiently betrayed the sex of the writer now when people have had far wider opportunities of judging of the differences between men and women as authors. Thackeray could give us an Ethel Newcome and a Becky Sharp, but women were needed to give us a Dorothea, a Marion Erle, or a Shirley Keeldar. Mrs. Siddons, the great actress, was charmed by the character of Jane de Montfort in Joanna Baillie’s Tragedy on Hatred. The play called De Montfort was put upon the stage by John Kemble, the brother of Mrs. Siddons: they both appeared in it. It ran for eleven nights, but it was not successful on the stage. Joanna’s complete ignorance of what was requisite for the success of a play upon the stage foredoomed her to failure; the audience was, in the first act, let into the secret upon which the plot of the whole play turned, consequently as the drama proceeded the interest in it, instead of becoming more and more intense, gradually dwindled away, until in the fifth act it had quite evaporated. Mrs. Siddons, whose admiration for the character of Jane de Montfort has been already mentioned, is said to have remarked to the poetess, “Make me some more Jane de Montforts” – a request which does not appear to have been gratified. In all, five of Joanna Baillie’s plays were put upon the stage – two of them, called Constantine and Valeria and The Family Legend, had a considerable degree of success. The Family Legend was brought out in Edinburgh in 1809, under the special patronage of Sir Walter Scott, who wrote the prologue of the play. At a later date it was reproduced in London.

The authorship of Joanna Baillie’s first volume of plays did not long remain a secret. Sir Walter Scott was the first to make a successful guess as to the personality of the writer; and the discovery led to the formation of a warm friendship between him and Joanna, which only terminated with his life. Many of Scott’s most delightful and characteristic letters were written to her. It was perhaps Scott’s too generous appreciation of Joanna’s powers as a dramatist that led to her plays being so much overrated, as they certainly were when they first appeared. Scott compared her to Shakespeare. Miss Mitford followed suit, saying of her sister-writer, “Her tragedies have a boldness and grasp of mind, a firmness of hand, and resonance of cadence that scarcely seem within the reach of a female writer.” Byron made her an exception to his sweeping generalities concerning the female sex, saying, “Woman (save Joanna Baillie) cannot write tragedy.”

In 1825 the golden mists which had surrounded the sunrise of her literary life had melted away. Charles Lamb was too keen a critic probably to have been carried away by the stream of fashion at any time; but in the year mentioned, writing to his friend Bernard Barton, he says: “I think you told me your acquaintance with the drama was confined to Shakespeare and Miss Baillie: some read only Milton and Croly. The gap is as from an ananas to a turnip.” Lamb’s contemptuous reference measures the rapid fall from the heights of fame which Joanna Baillie endured, and endured without any failure of sweetness and dignity of character.

Joanna Baillie’s day as a poetess was of short duration: it is now chiefly as a woman that she charms and helps us. Her house at Hampstead was for many years a meeting-place for those who were most worth meeting, either for talent or goodness; her kindly and gentle influence brought out all that was best in her guests and companions. In Miss Martineau’s autobiography she has something to say about nearly all the lions and lionesses of the literary London of her day, and she singles out our poetess for special commendation. “There was Joanna Baillie,” she writes, “whose serene and gentle life was never troubled by the pains and penalties of vanity; what a charming spectacle was she! Mrs. Barbauld’s published correspondence tells of her in 1800, as a ‘young lady of Hampstead whom I visited, and who came to Mr. Barbauld’s meeting, all the while with as innocent a face as if she had never written a line.’ That was two years before I was born. When I met her about thirty years afterwards, there she was, still ‘with as innocent a face as if she had never written a line!’ And this was after an experience which would have been a bitter trial to an author with a particle of vanity. She had enjoyed a fame almost without parallel, and had outlived it. She had been told every day for years, through every possible channel, that she was second only to Shakespeare, if second; and then she had seen her works drop out of notice, so that, of the generation who grew up before her eyes, not one in a thousand had read a line of her plays; yet was her serenity never disturbed, nor her merry humour in the least dimmed” (Autobiography, vol. i. p. 385).

This serene and happy temperament accompanied Joanna throughout her long life. She went on writing till past eighty, and lived to the great age of eighty-nine. Her sister Agnes, her inseparable friend and companion, lived to be over a hundred, and preserved her faculties clearly to the end. Joanna Baillie was never ill. The day before her death she expressed a strong desire to die. She went to bed, apparently in her usual health, but was found to be in a state of coma in the morning, and she died on the afternoon of the same day, 23d February 1851.

XXII

HANNAH MORE

Miss Charlotte M. Yonge’s charming little biography of Hannah More brings strikingly before us the picture of the authoress of Cœlebs in Search of a Wife, and also depicts in a way that will not easily be forgotten, some of the more striking contrasts between the present day and the England of eighty or ninety years ago. There are some who are always inclined to say “the old is better”; but they must be very curiously constituted who can look back on the social condition of our country at the end of the last century and beginning of this, without being filled with amazement and thankfulness at the improvement that has taken place.

It is not so generally remembered as it ought to be, that the second half of Hannah More’s life was devoted to the service of the poor, especially to the spread of some measure of education and civilisation in the then almost savage districts in the neighbourhood of Cheddar, and of the Mendip Hills. Yet even so advanced an educationalist as Hannah More thought that on no account should the poor be taught to write. In a letter to Bishop Beadon, describing her system of instruction for the poor children in the parishes immediately under her care, she says: “They learn on week-days such coarse work as may fit them for servants. I allow of no writing for the poor. My object is not to make fanatics, but to train up the lower classes in habits of industry and piety.” We cannot have a more apt illustration of the fact that the advanced reformer of one generation may become, by the natural growth of society, the type of what is most exaggeratedly retrograde in the next. It would be very ungenerous and short-sighted on our part to condemn Hannah More for her narrowness of view. She belonged to a day when the farmers in the village, where she sought to establish a Sunday school, begged her to desist because “religion would be the ruin of agriculture, and had done nothing but mischief ever since it had been brought in by the monks at Glastonbury.” At another place her educational schemes were so stoutly opposed by all the leading inhabitants that it was impossible to obtain for the school the shelter of any roof, and the children were accordingly assembled to sing a few hymns under an apple-tree. They were soon, however, driven from this shelter by the fears of the owner of the tree, who said he was afraid the hymn singing was “methody,” and that “methody” had blighted an apple-tree belonging to his mother!

Even these examples of ignorance and superstition might possibly, however, be matched at the present day. More thoroughly significant of a state of things that is past and gone for ever, is the following incident. “On a Sunday,” about the year 1790, “in the midst of morning service the congregations in the Bristol churches were startled by the bell and voice of the crier, proclaiming the reward of a guinea for a poor negro girl who had run away.” The idea of property in human beings is one that is now universally abhorrent; but less than a hundred years ago the loss of such property could be cried in the midst of congregations assembled to acknowledge the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of humanity, and it was only one here and there among the worshippers who felt the blasphemy and the mockery of the proceeding.

As an illustration of the extreme hardships endured by the poor before the era of steam manufactures had set in, we learn that the difficulty in obtaining clothes was so great that at Brentford, close to London, thrifty parents bought rags by the pound, and made clothing for their children by patching the pieces together. Brushes and combs, it is added, were entirely unknown. It is no exaggeration, therefore, to say that the poorest beggar of the present day can, if he choose, be more luxuriously clad and cared for than the children of the thrifty poor a hundred years ago. The difference in morals is as great as the difference in manners and education. Hannah More heard a charity sermon, in which the preacher, a dignified ecclesiastic, propounded that “the rich and great should be extremely liberal in their charities, because they were happily exempted from the severer virtues.” This was the old Papal practice of the sale of indulgences appearing again in a Protestant dress. No wonder, if this was a type of the Gospel that was preached to the rich, that Patty, Hannah’s sister, was accustomed to say that she had good hope that the hearts of some of the “rich poor wretches” might be touched by her sister’s eloquence.

The change of manners may be illustrated by the following anecdote. Hannah More, in the height of her literary celebrity, was asked to sit next the Bishop of Chester, Dr. Porteous, at dinner, and make him talk. She pressed him to take a little wine. He replied, “I can’t drink a little, child: therefore I never touch it. Abstinence is easy to me; temperance would be difficult.”

These were days when Edmund Spenser was not considered a poet, and when Dryden and Pope were preferred to Shakespeare. Hannah, however, defended Milton’s L’Allegro, Il Penseroso, and Lycidas, against the strictures of Dr. Johnson; though they found themselves in entire agreement in depreciating Milton’s sonnets. Johnson’s simile for a sonnet was “a bead carved out of a cherry stone.” The noble and solemn music of Milton’s majestic sonnets certainly did not harmonise with Johnson’s image, and, therefore, as Milton’s sonnets were not pretty playthings, it was agreed that he could not write sonnets.

The bigotry and narrowness of religious criticism at that day may be measured by the fact, which Hannah mentions in one of her letters, that her book on Practical Piety had been attacked by the Calvinists as giving a sanction to idolatry, because she had spoken of the sun as “he.” She did not altogether escape being tarred with the same brush, if we may judge from the passage in Cœlebs, where she makes Mr. Stanley complain of Day’s Sandford and Merton, and other books which had lately been written for the young, that there was “no intimation in them of the corruption of human nature, and thus that they contradict the catechism when it speaks of being ‘born in sin, and the children of wrath.’” She could not help, it appears, taking her religion sadly, as English people are supposed to take their pleasures. There was, however, a great fund of natural gaiety and light-heartedness in her, but whether she considered this one of the results of being a child of wrath or not, she did not seem to think gaiety, any more than writing, was a thing to be encouraged in the poor. She describes a great meeting of the schools founded by herself in the Mendip Hills. This annual “Mendip feast” took the form of what we should now call a gigantic school treat. The schools established were spread over an area of twenty-eight miles, and nearly the whole population of the villages, to the number of seven or eight thousand people, attended. The children were generously regaled on substantial fare. But nothing in the form of a game or a festivity of any kind was permitted. The singing of “God save the King” “is the only pleasure in the form of a song we ever allow… The meeting,” she says again, “took its rise from religious institutions. The day passed in the exercise of duties, and closed with joy. Nothing of a gay nature was introduced…”

One cannot help thinking, on reading this, that she had only herself to thank if, in spite of all her talents and goodness, her name became a byword for severity and primness. Charles Lamb speaks in one of his early letters of “out-Hannahing Hannah More”; and she herself tells what she states is a true story, illustrating the way in which she was regarded in circles where childish merriment was not discountenanced: “A lady gave a very great children’s ball,” wrote Miss Hannah, somewhere about 1792: “at the upper end of the room, in an elevated place, was dressed out a figure to represent me, with a large rod in my hand, prepared to punish such naughty doings.”

The pity of this was that her natural disposition seems to have been sprightly and gay enough; her verses and other compositions often show a very pretty wit. If she had been as merry when she undertook her great work on the Mendips, as she was in the days when she was the friend and constant companion of Garrick, Johnson, and Horace Walpole, the general impression left by her character would have been a much more attractive one. Miss Yonge thinks that the chief reason of the austerity of her religion is to be found in the low condition of morals at the time. “There was scarcely,” she writes, “an innocent popular song in existence, simple enough,” … “and unconnected with evil, and the children and their parents were still too utterly rough and uncivilised to make it safe to relax the bonds of restraint for a moment.” We cannot think that this excuse is altogether valid: the age that had produced “John Gilpin” and “Goody Two Shoes” can hardly be said to be without one innocent popular song or story which would amuse children. The gloomy complexion given to religion by the school of which Hannah More was a member has a great deal to answer for; in some temperaments, among whom the poet Cowper may be quoted as a type, the gentle and sensitive nature was plunged into profound and morbid melancholy which wrecked the whole existence of its victim; in others, of a more energetic and rebellious character, it produced a violent reaction, not only against religion, but against all moral order, and every kind of restraint. Just as the excesses of the reign of Charles II. followed the grim and rigid piety of Puritan England, so the orgies of the Prince Regent and his boon companions followed the austere and mirth-killing religion of the early evangelicals. About the time of which we are now writing, a serious attack was made in one of the religious papers upon Jane Taylor, the joint authoress with her sister of Hymns for Infant Minds, because in one of her stories she had represented, without reprobation, a family party of young children enjoying a dance together. When people impute wickedness to actions that are in themselves innocent and harmless, they are tampering with and weakening their own moral sense, and that of all those brought within their influence. To invent sins generally ends in manufacturing sinners.

Hannah More, the youngest but one of five sisters, daughters of Jacob More, master of the school at Stapleton, near Bristol, was born about 1745. Her father belonged to a Norfolk family, several members of which had been numbered amongst Cromwell’s Ironsides. Jacob More, however, forsook the family traditions both in politics and religion. He became a churchman and a Tory; and this may have been the cause of his leaving the home of his fathers, and settling in the West Country. He here married a farmer’s daughter, of whom little is known except that she persuaded her husband to impart his classical and mathematical learning to his clever little daughter, and that by many acts of motherly sympathy she encouraged her children to use the talents with which Nature had very liberally endowed them. The five sisters, Mary, Betsy, Sally, Hannah, and Patty, were a tribe of whom any mother might have been proud. Hannah and Patty were inseparable, sharing every hope and every occupation and possession. Their taste was for literature. Sally was the wit of the family. Mary and Betsy supplied the practical, housewifely element in the quintet. As a little girl, Hannah’s two ambitions were to “live in a cottage too low for a clock, and to go to London to see bishops and booksellers!” At the age of twenty-one, Mary More set up a school on her own account in Bristol. Betsy and Sally were her assistants, and Hannah and Patty were among the first batch of pupils. Sally in after years thus described this adventurous proceeding to her friend Dr. Johnson: “We were born with more desires than guineas. As years increased our appetites the cupboard at home grew too small to gratify them; and with a bottle of water, a bed, and a blanket, we set out to seek our fortunes. We found a great house with nothing in it – and it was like to remain so – till, looking into our knowledge-boxes, we happened to find a little larning– a good thing when land is gone, or rather none, and so at last, by giving a little of this larning to those who had none, we got a good store of gold in return” (pp. 6, 7, Miss Yonge’s Hannah More).