Some Eminent Women of Our Times

The first creature upon whom the wealth of affection in Mary’s nature could be freely bestowed was, therefore, the baby brother. She spoke in after years of the curative influence on her mind of the almost maternal affection which she lavished on the boy who was, to a great extent, committed to her care. Henceforward she was no longer lonely, but had gained a companion and object in life. Her education consisted mainly in having been “tumbled early, by accident or design, into a spacious closet of good old English reading, without much selection or prohibition, and she browsed at will upon that fair and wholesome pasturage.” This was the library of Mr. Salt, a bencher of the Inner Temple, to whom her father was clerk. In 1782, when Charles was seven and Mary eighteen, he became a scholar of the Blue Coat School, where he formed a lifelong friendship with the poet Coleridge. The circumstances of the Lambs gradually narrowed. The father was superannuated, and his income was consequently reduced. The elder brother, John, held a good appointment in the South Sea House, but he was much more intent on enjoying himself and surrounding himself with luxuries than upon providing for the wants of his family. For eleven years, from the age of twenty-one to thirty-two, Mary supported herself by her needle.

The father’s mental faculties gradually gave way more and more. By the time Charles was fifteen he left school, and the care and maintenance of his family in a short time devolved mainly on him. He first obtained a clerkship in the same establishment where his brother was employed, and two years later he received a better paid appointment, with a salary of £70 a year, in the India House. Domestic troubles, however, thickened upon the family; the mother became a confirmed invalid, and in 1795 Charles was seized by an attack of the madness hereditary in the family. This affliction must have weighed terribly upon Mary, who thus saw her one prop and solace taken from her. She was left alone, with her father in his second childhood, her mother an exacting and imperious invalid, and an old Aunt Hetty, who was for ever poring over devotional books, without apparently the capacity of sharing any of the household burdens. No sooner was Charles restored to reason than a new trouble began. John met with a serious accident, and, though in his days of prosperity his family saw little or nothing of him, he now returned home to be nursed. This seems to have been the last straw that broke poor Mary down. In September 1796 the mania, with which she had been often threatened, broke out; she seized a knife from the table and stabbed her mother to the heart. The poor old father was almost unconscious of what had taken place; Aunt Hetty fainted. It was Charles who seized the knife from his sister’s grasp, but not before she had, in her frenzy, inflicted a slight wound on her father. The horror of the whole scene can be with difficulty pictured. Yet Charles, who had only lately been released from an asylum, had the power to cope with it, to maintain his calmness and courage, and above all to resolve that the terrible calamity which had overtaken them should not be allowed to enshroud the whole of his dear sister’s life in the gloom of a madhouse. He wrote to his friend Coleridge five days after the tragedy, and his letter speaks nothing but tender fortitude. “God has preserved to me my senses,” he writes. “I eat, and drink, and sleep, and have my judgment, I believe, very sound. My poor father was slightly wounded, and I am left to take care of him and of my aunt… With me ‘the former things are passed away,’ and I have something more to do than to feel.”

Severe self-mastery is perceived in every word of this letter. Lamb was evidently sensible that his own reason would totter if it were not controlled by a strong effort of will. In another letter written a week later to the same friend, the same spirit is shown; he had already formed the determination not to allow his sister to remain in a madhouse; he resolved to devote his life to her, and to give up all thought of other happiness for himself than what was consistent with his being her constant companion and guardian – “Your letter was an inestimable treasure to me. It will be a comfort to you, I know, to know that my prospects are somewhat brighter. My poor dear, dearest sister – the unhappy and unconscious instrument of the Almighty’s judgments on our house – is restored to her senses, to a dreadful sense and recollection of what has past, awful to her mind, and impressive (as it must be to the end of life), but tempered with religious resignation and the reasonings of a sound judgment, which in this early stage knows how to distinguish between a deed committed in a transient fit of frenzy and the terrible guilt of a mother’s murder. I have seen her. I found her this morning calm and serene, far, very far, from an indecent, forgetful serenity; she has a most affectionate and tender concern for what has happened. Indeed from the beginning, frightful and hopeless as her disorder seemed, I had confidence enough in her strength of mind and religious principle to look forward to a time when even she might recover tranquillity. God be praised, Coleridge, wonderful as it is to tell, I have never once been otherwise than collected and calm; even on the dreadful day, and in the midst of the terrible scene, I preserved a tranquillity which bystanders may have construed into indifference – a tranquillity not of despair. Is it folly or sin in me to say that it was a religious principle that most supported me?.. I felt I had something else to do than to regret. On that first evening, my aunt was lying insensible, to all appearance like one dying, – my father with his poor forehead plastered over from a wound he had received from a daughter dearly loved by him, who loved him no less dearly, – my mother, a dead and murdered corpse in the next room, – yet was I wonderfully supported. I closed not my eyes that night, but lay without terrors and without despair. I have lost no sleep since. I had been long used not to rest in things of sense, had endeavoured after a comprehension of mind unsatisfied with the ignorant present time; and this kept me up. I had the whole weight of the family thrown on me, for my brother, little disposed (I speak not without tenderness for him) at any time to take care of old age and infirmities, had now, with his bad leg, an exemption from such duties; and I was now left alone.” He then speaks of the kindness of various friends, and reckons up the resources of the family, resolving to spare £50 or £60 a year to keep Mary at a private asylum at Islington. “I know John will make speeches about it, but she shall not go into an hospital… If my father, and old maid-servant, and I, can’t live, and live comfortably, on £130 or £120 a year, we ought to burn by slow fires; and I almost would, that Mary might not go into an hospital. Let me not leave an unfavourable impression on your mind respecting my brother. Since this has happened, he has been very kind and brotherly, but I fear for his mind. He has taken his ease in the world, and is not fit to struggle with difficulties, nor has much accustomed himself to throw himself into their way; and I know his language is already, ‘Charles, you must take care of yourself, you must not abridge yourself of a single pleasure you have been used to,’ etc.; and in that style of talking.” Charles goes on to explain that his sister would form one of the family she had been placed with rather than a patient. “They, as the saying is, take to her extraordinarily, if it is extraordinary that people who see my sister should love her. Of all the people I ever saw in the world, my poor sister was most thoroughly devoid of the quality of selfishness. I will enlarge upon her qualities, dearest soul, in a future letter for my own comfort, for I understand her thoroughly; and if I mistake not, in the most trying situation that a human being can be found in, she will be found … uniformly great and amiable. God keep her in her present mind, to whom be thanks and praise for all His dispensations to mankind.”

The whole of the rest of Lamb’s life was a fulfilment of the loving resolutions which had sustained him in the terrible hour of his mother’s death. His love for the beautiful Alice W – n was relinquished as one of the “tender fond records” for ever blotted out by a sterner, more imperative claim of affection and duty. As soon as the old father died, Mary and Charles were reunited in one home, and her brother’s guardianship was accepted by the authorities as a sufficient guarantee that any future return of her malady should not be accompanied by danger to the lives of others. He was faithful to his self-imposed task. He himself was never again attacked by the cruel malady, but his sister to the end of her life was subject to recurring periods of insanity, which latterly isolated her from her friends for months in every year. Through their joint care and caution no fatal results again attended these attacks of mania. There is something inexpressibly touching in the fact that on their holiday excursions together, Mary invariably, with her own hands, packed a strait-waistcoat for herself. She was able to foretell, by premonitory symptoms, when she was likely to be attacked; and a friend of the Lambs has related how he had met them walking together, hand in hand, towards the asylum, both weeping bitterly.

Lamb’s strong feeling against allowing his sister to be placed in an hospital for lunatics is more than justified by the accounts given, in the Life of Lord Shaftesbury, of the frightfully barbarous treatment to which insane people were subjected in the early part of the present century. Their keepers always visited them whip in hand. They were sometimes spun round on rotatory chairs at a tremendous speed; sometimes they were chained in wells, in which the water was made to rise till it reached their chins; sometimes they were left quite alone, chained to their beds, from Saturday afternoon to Monday morning, unable to rise, and with nothing but bread and water within their reach. No wonder that Charles Lamb said he would burn by slow fires rather than let his sister be treated like this.

The strong restorative of work done and duty fulfilled enabled Charles, within little more than a year of the dreadful calamity which had darkened his life, to make his first appearance as an author. These first poems were dedicated to “the author’s best friend and sister.” He wished to fence her round, as it were, by assurances of the high value he set on her, and of the depth of his love. “I wish,” he wrote to Coleridge, “to accumulate perpetuating tokens of my affection to poor Mary.” When she was restored to his daily companionship, there was nothing in her outward manner or appearance to indicate what a terrible cloud rested on her past life. Her manners were tranquil and composed. De Quincey speaks of her as that “Madonna-like lady.” There was no appearance of settled melancholy in consequence of the fatal deed she had been led to commit, but that it left a wound which was hidden rather than healed is indicated by the words written long years after the event: “My dear mother who, though you do not know it, is always in my poor head and heart.” On another occasion, a child Mary loved asked her why she never spoke of her mother. A cry of pain was the only response. Her dependence on her brother was an ever-visible presence in both their lives. Mrs. Cowden Clarke relates: “He once said, with his peculiar mode of tenderness beneath blunt, abrupt speech, ‘You must die first, Mary.’ She nodded, with her little quiet nod and sweet smile, ‘Yes, I must die first, Charles.’” The event was contrary to the wish and expectation thus expressed. Charles preceded Mary to the grave by thirteen years; but during the greater part of that time her intellect was so clouded as to deprive her of the power of the acute suffering the loss of her brother would otherwise have caused.

The literary fame of Mary Lamb rests chiefly on her Tales from Shakespeare, and a collection of beautiful little stories for children, called Mrs. Leicester’s School. The Tales from Shakespeare were written, as so much good work has been, under the stress of poverty. Six of the great tragedies were undertaken by Charles, and fourteen other plays by Mary. The scheme was to render each play into a prose story fit for the comprehension and capacity of children; and the work was done with inimitable felicity of diction, and critical insight into the situations and characters of the world of men and women who live in Shakespeare’s dramas. There is a letter of Mary’s describing herself and Charles at work: “Charles has written Macbeth, Othello, King Lear, and has begun Hamlet. You would like to see us, as we often sit writing on one table (but not on one cushion sitting, like Hermia and Helena in the Midsummer Nights Dream); or rather, like an old literary Darby and Joan, I taking snuff, and he groaning all the while and saying he can make nothing of it, which he always says till he has finished, and then he finds out that he has made something of it” (Mrs. Gilchrist’s Life, p. 119). The Tales were written for William Godwin, whose first wife was Mary Wollstonecraft. His second wife helped him a great deal with his publishing business. She was a vulgar-minded woman, and a pet aversion of the Lambs, especially of Charles, who said, referring to her, “I will be buried with this inscription over me, ‘Here lies C. L., the woman-hater’ – I mean, that hated one woman; for the rest, God bless ’em.” The success of the Tales could not, however, be marred by the unpopularity of the publisher and his wife. The book rapidly ran through several editions, and even now a year seldom passes without the Tales from Shakespeare being presented to the public in some new form.

A portrait of Mary Lamb has been drawn by the master hand of her brother. She is the Bridget of the Essays of Elia, as all lovers of the essays well know. The humour and delicate insight into character for which the writings of Charles Lamb are so distinguished, are also characteristic of Mary, though the humour in her case is less rollicking, and never breaks out in pure high spirits, as his often does. Some of the most charming of Mary’s writings are her letters, which have been published in Mrs. Gilchrist’s Life, especially those to a young friend, named Sarah Stoddart.

This young lady had a most “business-like determination to marry”; and as she generally had more than one string to her bow, as the saying is, it is no wonder that she sometimes needed the help of an older and wiser woman than herself, to get her out of the difficulties in which she found herself. Much of Mary’s own character comes out in the advice she gives her friend. She speaks in one place of her power of valuing people for what they are, without demanding or expecting perfection. It is a “knack I know I have, of looking into people’s real character, and never expecting them to act out of it – never expecting another to do as I would in the same case.” How much practical wisdom there is in this, and what misunderstandings and heart-burnings would be saved if it were more common not to expect people to act out of their own characters! There is a funny little bit in another letter to the effect that women should not be constantly admonishing men as to the right line of thought and conduct. “I make it a point of conscience never to interfere or cross my brother in the humour he happens to be in. It always appears to me a vexatious kind of tyranny, that women have no business to exercise over men, which merely because, they having a better judgment, they have power to do. Let men alone, and at last we find they come round to the right way which we, by a kind of intuition, perceive at once. But better, far better, that we should let them often do wrong than that they should have the torment of a monitor always at their elbows.”

To begin quoting from the letters of Charles and Mary Lamb is such an enticing task that it would be easy to fill more pages than this little book contains. One more only shall be quoted from each. The most beautiful of Mary’s letters is perhaps that which she wrote to Dorothy Wordsworth, soon after the death by drowning of Wordsworth’s brother John. The beautiful poem by Wordsworth, “The Happy Warrior,” is supposed to have been written partly in reference to this brother, and partly in reference to Nelson, whose death took place the same year (1805). “I thank you,” Mary wrote, “my kind friend, for your most comfortable letter; till I saw your own handwriting I could not persuade myself that I should do well to write to you, though I have often attempted it… I wished to tell you that you would one day feel the kind of peaceful state of mind and sweet memory of the dead which you so happily describe as now almost begun; but I felt that it was improper, and most grating to the feelings of the afflicted, to say to them that the memory of their affliction would in time become a constant part, not only of their dream, but of their most wakeful sense of happiness. That you would see every object with, and through, your lost brother, and that that would at last become a real and everlasting source of comfort to you, I felt and well knew from my own experience in sorrow; but till you yourself began to feel this I didn’t dare tell you so.”

How terrible that the mind and heart which could dictate such words as these were weighed down by the lifelong burden of insanity! Before Miss Wordsworth’s reply reached her, she was again attacked, and Charles wrote in her place: “I have every reason to suppose that this illness, like all the former ones, will be but temporary; but I cannot always feel so. Meantime she is dead to me, and I miss a prop. All my strength is gone, and I am like a fool, bereft of her co-operation. I dare not think, lest I should think wrong, so used am I to look up to her in the least as in the biggest perplexity. To say all that I know of her would be more than I think anybody could believe, or even understand; and when I hope to have her well again with me, it would be sinning against her feelings to go about praising her, for I can conceal nothing that I do from her. She is older and wiser and better than I, and all my wretched imperfections I cover to myself by resolutely thinking on her goodness. She would share life and death, heaven and hell, with me. She lives but for me; and I know I have been wasting and teasing her life for five years past incessantly, with my cursed drinking and ways of going on. But even in thus upbraiding myself I am offending against her, for I know that she has clung to me for better, for worse; and if the balance has been against her hitherto it was a noble trade.”

Great, noble spirits they both were, even in their weaknesses and imperfections, showing an example of devoted unselfishness, tenderness, and generosity that many who “tithe mint and anise and cummin” might envy. Mary Lamb survived to old age, dying in May 1847, aged seventy-three. She was buried by her brother’s side in the churchyard at Edmonton.

X

AGNES ELIZABETH JONES

“Count not that man’s life short who has had time to do noble deeds.” – From Cicero.

There is something very interesting in tracing, as we are sometimes able to do, the connection of one piece of good work with another. The energy, devotion, and success of one worker stimulates the enthusiasm of others; this enthusiasm does not always show itself in carrying on or developing what has been already begun, but sometimes manifests itself in the more difficult task of breaking new ground; and thus one good work becomes the parent of another. An example of what is here referred to is to be found in the work of Mrs. Fry. To her initiative may be traced not only the kindred labours of Mary Carpenter in reformatory and industrial schools, and the still more modern efforts for the better care of neglected children by the boarding-out system, and by such societies as the Metropolitan Association for Befriending Young Servants, but to her also may indirectly be traced the success with which women have devoted themselves to the art of sick nursing, and from this again has spread or grown out the movement for extending to women a thorough medical education and training.

Mrs. Fry’s connection with the art of sick nursing came about in this way. In the first quarter of this century a young German named Fliedner was appointed pastor to the little weaving village of Kaiserswerth on the Rhine. He endeared himself to his people by his devotion to them; but the time came when he was forced to leave them. The whole village was involved in ruin because of the failure of the industry on which its inhabitants depended. The people not only could not support their pastor, but were themselves reduced to the greatest straits of actual want. He left them in order to seek in wealthier places, not maintenance for himself, but help for them. After travelling for some time in Germany, he came to England, and while here, still intent on making known the wants of Kaiserswerth, he met with Mrs. Fry, and was deeply interested in all she was doing for the benefit of prisoners. Not long after this he returned to Kaiserswerth, bearing with him the gifts he had collected to relieve the pressing wants of his people; but his mind was now full of Mrs. Fry, and of what was being done in England by and for women. He and his wife resolved to begin similar work in Germany. They began with two young women just discharged from a neighbouring prison, whose relations refused to receive them or have anything further to do with them. Soon the number of discharged prisoners increased, and the pastor and his wife felt that they must have help; a friend therefore came to join them in their work. In this way and from this small beginning grew in time a very large institution, comprising not only an organisation to enable discharged prisoners to get work and regain their character, but a home and school for orphans, a hospital for the sick, and an asylum for lunatics. The whole of the work of this institution, which occupied several houses and comprised more than 300 persons, was done by carefully-trained women, called deaconesses.

Kaiserswerth was the parent of all the other deaconesses’ institutions which now exist in almost every part of the world. The predominating spirit at Kaiserswerth, after that of religious self-devotion, to which a first place was given, was that the work of caring for the poor, the sick, and the afflicted can only be rightly undertaken after a long course of special preparation and training. It was a Protestant sisterhood; those who entered were first called novices; in time the novices became deaconesses, and the deaconesses were expected to bind themselves to remain in the institution five years. They were, however, bound by no vows, and could always leave if other duties seemed to require that they should do so. In this institution the art of sick nursing acquired a perfection at that time unknown in any other part of Europe. It was here, mainly, that Florence Nightingale received the training which enabled her to save the lives of so many of our soldiers in the Crimea, and to introduce into England a new era in the history of nursing. Here too Agnes Elizabeth Jones was trained.

Miss Nightingale’s often-repeated lesson on the subject of the necessity of long and careful training was not lost upon Agnes Jones. When she left Kaiserswerth, she knew, as Miss Nightingale said, “more than most hospital matrons know when they undertake matronship.” But she was not content with this. After working for a time with the London Bible Women’s Mission, she applied to the training-school for nurses at St. Thomas’s Hospital for another year’s training. She entered the hospital as a “Nightingale probationer.” She went through, while she was there, the whole training of a nurse. To quote Miss Nightingale again, referring to this period, “Her reports of cases were admirable as to nursing details. She was our best pupil; she went through all the work of a soldier, and she thereby fitted herself for being the best general we ever had.”

Before referring to Agnes Jones’s crowning work in reorganising the nursing staff of the Liverpool Workhouse Infirmary, it will be well to recall the story of her life. There are few incidents in it, none at all of a sensational character; but perhaps this makes the lesson to be learnt from it all the more plain and simple.