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Marianne  Thornton

A  Domestic  Biography

Marianne Thornton, July 1873.
By George Richmond.

MARIANNE  THORNTON

 

1797-1887

 

 

A  Domestic  Biography

 

 

By

E. M. FORSTER

 

 

LONDON

EDWARD ARNOLD (PUBLISHERS) LTD.

Edward Arnold

Preface

This biography is based almost entirely upon family papers. It is only concerned with them in their domestic aspect, but scholars (both English and American) who have looked at them report that they are also interesting in other ways. I have therefore arranged that they shall be accessible after my death. They are so miscellaneous that classification has been difficult. Here is an attempt:

I. First Vellum Book. About 650 pages. The opening 434 pages are in Marianne Thornton’s handwriting. She transcribes the short autobiography of her father, Henry Thornton, also family letters down to the death of her parents in 1815. From page 435 the ‘Family Chronicle’ is continued by my aunt, Miss Laura Forster: she transcribes Marianne Thornton’s ‘Recollections’ and further letters.

II. Second Vellum Book. About 360 pages. Continuation by Laura Forster, bringing letters copied down to 1852. A few Forster Letters, copied in by myself, at the end.

III. Ten Small Volumes. Begun for me by Marianne Thornton in her old age, and continued by my mother. Largely a replica of the early part of the First Vellum Book with some additional matter.

IV. The ‘Wigan’ Book. A large bound volume in the Public Library at Wigan. Copied in by some unknown scribe for Lucy Thornton, Marianne’s sister. Contains all the matter in the early part of the First Vellum Book, together with many other letters of the period. Catalogue description: Edward Hall M.S. Coll. Wigan Public Library. M.786.

V. Small Green Book. 110 pages. Copies in an early hand of some additional early letters.

VI. Henry Thornton’s Diary. 180 pages in his handwriting. Entries from 1795 to 1814.

VII. Recollections of Miss Laura Forster. About 280 pages of typescript. Bound vellum volume. References to events from about 1830 to 1880.

VIII. Various letters, MS. brochures, diaries, notes, etc., dating from about 1750 to 1900. Originally they filled ten tin boxes, which have been reduced in the course of the years to the Sibylline number of three. None of the earlier stuff has been destroyed and there will be no further destruction.

I have many acknowledgments to make. My thanks are due in the first place to my cousin Sir Hugh Thornton and to Lady Thornton for their constant help and encouragement; also to my cousins and connections Mr John Acland-Troyte, Mrs Demarest, the Earl of Leven and Melville, Mr Ronald Southey, Mrs Ernest Sykes and Mr John Thornton (the present head of the Thornton family); also to Mr E. K. Bennett, Dr G. S. R. Kitson Clark, Mr B. W. Fagan, Mr D. M. Joslin, Lady Keynes, Professor G. R. Owst, Miss Eirene Skilbeck, Dr G. M. Trevelyan and the Directors of Messrs Williams Deacon’s Bank.

Owing to its domestic character, the biography falls naturally into the four sections of Daughter, Sister, Aunt and Great Aunt.

E. M. F.

A detailed ‘Pedigree of Thornton of Birkin’ was compiled in 1874. The subjoined diagram merely indicates a few of the characters mentioned in this biography. The names of the more important are in italics.

It will be noticed that there are going to be two Henry Thorntons, two Henrietta Synnots and two Laura Forsters. Confusion shall be avoided as far as possible.

1
Battersea Rise

These pretty little verses were addressed by Henry Thornton, M.P., to his daughter Marianne, then nine years old. They are not characteristic of him. When she was only four he had addressed her and her baby brother in a sterner strain and had warned them in a prose exhortation against the dangers of this life. When she was six he had analysed her faults, and counselled her how to correct them. His exhortations were sincere, like everything else he wrote or did, and the anxieties expressed were genuine. But the words he used—like many of the words then used—will not travel. Whereas the pretty little verses, though they have no literary merit and are a hundred and fifty years old, can still be heard by those who sit quiet. Their affectionate gaiety provides a good approach to one who was herself affectionate and gay, and who loved her father and mother, her brothers and sisters, her nephews and nieces, and, finally, at the end of her long life, her great-nephew, namely myself.

Battersea Rise, the home to which she returned that summer evening, was originally a compact brick house of the age of Queen Anne: three stories high with a front-door in the middle, which opened on to a passage running through the house to the garden door at the back. It stood at the west side of Clapham Common, then a wild and marshy tract. Henry Thornton bought it in 1792; he was a prosperous banker who was already hoping for marriage and a family. He started enlarging it and soon trebled its size. To the right and the left of the Queen Anne block he threw out additions—only two stories high, but the rooms were so lofty that the roof-line nearly attained the height of the central block. The front, which was reached by a small ‘sweep’, faced north and remained forbidding. The back became charming. There was a prospect over a great grassed garden, planted with trees, and beyond the garden were fields, cows, horses, and all the amenities of semi-countrified life. The Clapham area had become civilised, there was no longer danger from highwaymen, the merchants and politicians who were beginning to settle there could leave their families in safety when they drove the four or five miles up to Westminster, or to the City.

This was not the end of his building. Close by he built two houses of similar style and rented them to his friends. He shared his own house for four years with William Wilberforce the abolitionist—of whom there will be much to say. Then he married and filled it with children; Marianne Thornton, the subject of this memoir, was born there in 1797, Henry Sykes Thornton was born there in 1800, Lucy in 1801, Watson in 1802, Isabella (1803), Sophia (1805), Henrietta (1807), Laura (1809), Charles (1810). To them it was a perfect playground and in after years a sacred shrine. It satisfied in them that longing for a particular place, a home, which is common amongst our upper and middle classes, and some of them transmitted that longing to their descendants, who have lived on into an age where it cannot be gratified. There will never be another Battersea Rise, and the modest imitations of it which lasted into the present century and became more and more difficult to staff have also disappeared.

The heart of the house was a fine oval library. This was the most important feature of the Henry Thornton additions, and had been designed for him by his political chief, William Pitt. Several water-colour drawings of the library exist, made by the children when they had grown up; they drew well, Henrietta especially. It had an ‘Adams’ mantelpiece, over which hung the excellent Hoppner portrait of Henry, it had an ‘Adams’ ceiling, busts of Pitt and of Fox, curved bookcases at one end, and at the other end large glass doors, giving on to the garden. To the left of the fireplace was a dignified settee, upholstered in green with red pipings. It had a high back and arms, and against each arm was pressed a sausage-shaped cushion tightly stuffed. When they were children it appears in their macabre caricatures: teeth would be extracted, fits fallen into, ghosts seen in the settee, and later on Marianne was depicted there as a middle-aged lady at her sewing or knitting.

Upstairs there were thirty-four bedrooms. Also the nursery—facing north. I possess the nursery table. It is the one relic of the establishment that has come my way—an oval of dark walnut, six feet by four, resting on a central column, which rests on four strong spreading legs. The oval swivels on a hinge, which can be released by a catch, and each leg is fitted with an easily running caster. Consequently though the table looks impressive and is indeed my valued dining-table, it slides about easily and can even be coaxed along a landing and up a flight of stairs. Underneath the oval, close to the hinge, a small brass plate has been inserted by one of my aunts. ‘Bought about 1798 for the nursery, Battersea Rise, by Henry Thornton M.P.’ the inscription runs, and if this is correct the table arrived when Marianne was one year old. It was bought under Nurse Hunter’s guidance, for she would have ‘no table with nasty corners for her children to knock their heads against’. She must have sat at it, nursery maids sewn at it, children, not very naughty ones, must have played, eaten and banged. It passed to Laura Thornton my grandmother at her marriage: more playing, eating, banging, by not very naughty children, but not so many nursery maids. Now I sit at it.

The children retained happy memories of the nursery and their loved Nurse Hunter. But it was the prospect from the library into the garden that really captured their imagination. To stand in the noble bow-window with the great room behind them, to look out through the high glass door, upon the magnificent Tulip Tree, became a ritual, and almost a pretaste of heaven. Marianne was to write ‘to the day of my death I shall think nothing so lovely as the trees and the lawn at Battersea Rise’. Laura, recalling the sad days when their father was dead and their mother dying, was to write ‘She used to sit before the library windows and one day she called me and asked if it was I who had been picking branches from the willow tree. I said I had and she said “Don’t ever pick one again. I love that tree because it grows over the urn so beautifully.” And she made me come and stand before her and see how lovely it looked. And I then saw she chose that place to watch the urn.’ And later on in the century the daughter of that Laura, Laura Forster, stood in the same place as her mother, and she was to write:

The Library, Battersea Rise, looking towards the garden.

The above is to my mind the great moment in the Library-garden ritual, the passage which concentrates the diffused emotions of a hundred years. But there are other references. Marianne herself, in a letter to my mother, has evoked a moment when William Wilberforce was ravished:

And my cousin Dorothy Pym, in her Battersea Rise,^[1] has charmingly expressed the enthusiasm of a younger generation. I myself was once taken to the house as a very small boy, and I can just remember a pair of globes. I cannot remember either the Library or the Garden. The ritual has ended.

Such, so far as I can construct it, was the outward scene, for over a hundred years. Henry Thornton’s Battersea Rise did not vary. The grounds behind it were so extensive, the front opposite to Clapham Common so tight and strong that it kept out London until it fell and it fell suddenly. The estate was broken up in 1907. I have identified the area with difficulty. It is completely covered with very small two-storied houses. A couple of roads run through it, north to south, intersected by cross roads. The site was cleared at a time when development was unusually ruthless. Not one tree survives. Clapham Common survives, but so messed about, so full of roads and railings and notices and huts and facilities and infelicities, that Marianne and her mama would not recognise it for the countrified tract through which they drove down on that far-away evening. The pretty little poem, received up in London that morning, would be in the carriage with them, the coachman would wear a flaxen wig and the horses orange and purple election-ribbons. Mr Harrison the butler (sometimes called ‘Cuckoo’) would open the heavy front door, and papa himself would be within to greet his ‘daughter dear’.

2
The Parents

Her papa was of Yorkshire stock. Ancestors had been rectors of Birkin, near York, in the seventeenth century and there is a memorial to them in its church. In 1709 John her great-great-grandfather bought a fine house in Hull, now known as Wilberforce House. Then came the migration to Clapham. Robert, her great-grandfather, moved there in 1735. He was a Director of the Bank of England and a merchant in the Russian trade and it was probably he who bought land extensively at the south side of the Common. This, not Battersea Rise, is the family nucleus. The estate lay close to the present tube-station. Several family houses were built on it. The most important of them survived till 1945, but at present no Thornton memorial can be found in the area except a dilapidated ‘Orangery’, to which I will return.

Marianne’s grandfather, John (1720-1790), spent most of his life in the house above mentioned. By then the estate had been added to and it was beautifully laid out: the circuit of the grounds measured over two miles. John was, like Robert, a Director of the Bank of England and in the Russian trade. Prosperous and pious, he devoted his great wealth to the promotion of Evangelicalism: he purchased advowsons and installed suitable incumbents; he was the friend of the Rev. John Newton—I have many of his letters to Newton, and they are beautifully written though not readable otherwise; he was the friend and protector of William Cowper:

sang the poet at John’s death. He promoted the spiritual welfare of seamen, and his portrait was painted for the Royal Marine Society by Gainsborough—by a Gainsborough who was thoroughly bored. Slumped and pot-bellied, John sits. In another version of the picture he is attended by a soldier and a sailor, to each of whom he hands a copy of the Scriptures.

Henry Thornton was critical of both his parents, and his references to his father are notably unfilial and cool. He censures old John for being ‘rough, vehement and eager’, for his indifference to education, for his incorrectness of speech, for allotting too little time to secret prayer, and for being a Jack of all trades. He admits that he improved, that he gave up hunting, was not self-indulgent, walked out of the room when an improper toast was sung and spent between £2000 and £3000 on the extension of Gospel knowledge. But a dissatisfied tone persists. Of his mother (née Lucy Watson) he says less. I would like to know more. She too was both wealthy and religious. I possess a poignant fragment of her diary, in which she sees, with terrible clarity, that the time must come when it will not be known that Lucy Thornton ever lived. She stands on the brink of an oblivion which frightened her: it doesn’t frighten us now—we are used to it. In fantastic contrast to her diary is her MS. cookery book. It is a vellum-bound volume, dated 1756, and full of rich recipes in her handwriting and in the handwritings of friends and of housekeepers. The Thorntons deplored luxury but insisted on having enough to eat. Prayers before plenty. But plenty!

Marianne never knew these worthy grandparents—they died too soon. But she became well acquainted with the next generation: with her uncles Samuel and Robert, with her Aunt Jane, and above all with her own papa.

Henry (1760-1815) was the youngest son. He had been born over in the family house. He had left a journal and some reminiscences behind him, so his early career can be followed. He was critical of his home and of his Wandsworth school, but enjoyed a visit to Paris; there he saw Queen Marie Antoinette ‘in all her beauty’ and stood close to her—a strange thrill for so sedate a boy. On his return his parents insisted on his attending the English court also, for they believed in British liberties, and sent him and his brother unsuitably dressed: the poor children wore their school suits—blue clothes with blue buttons—and felt miserable. Then he attended another school, which was better, though some of the West Indian scholars were ‘very vicious’, and he returned to his parents’ house at nineteen; imperfectly educated.

Henry Thornton, M.P.
By John Hoppner. About 1814.

Thereafter he began to get upsides with life. He took himself in hand. The family aptitude for money-making developed in him, and after apprenticeship in the counting houses of a cousin and of his father he joined, at twenty-four, the banking house of Down, Thornton & Free. He also found himself religions. To the ill-regulated piety of his parents there succeeded a piety that satisfied him, and found vent in constructive charity. In 1790 he gave away over £2000; in 1793 over £6000. Parliament attracted him, because that way he might do good. He worked with his second cousin and close friend, William Wilberforce, to abolish the Slave Trade. He became Chairman of the Sierra Leone Company, first President of the Sunday School Society etc., but he was never (as is sometimes stated) Governor of the Bank of England. After an attempt to stand for Hull, he was elected member for Southwark in 1782, to be re-elected seven or eight times. He was a close friend of Hannah More and supported her educational schemes. He published An Enquiry into the Nature and Effects of the Paper Credit of Great Britain—a work which after a period of oblivion has now a high reputation among economists. (His Family Prayers were published posthumously.) He comes out as a typical Thornton, pious, benevolent, industrious, serious, wealthy, shrewd. What distinguishes him from the rest of them was his outstanding intellect. This appears not only in his important public career but in his private letters. He never pens a sentence that is clumsy or feeble, and he knows exactly what he wants to say. What a contrast is the portrait of him, by Hoppner, to his father’s portrait! Cold, intellectual, public-spirited, fastidious, and full of integrity, Henry stands, and his hand rests upon a parliamentary bill.^[2]

Such was papa. What of mama?

The portrait of Miss Mary Ann (or Marianne) Sykes of West Ella near Hull looks down on me as I write. It is by Sir George Chalmers, a Scottish baronet who was then living in Hull, it is signed by him and is dated 1777. The charming girl is in fancy dress—for what else could that high frothy white turban denote, what else that low-cut blue bodice with short sleeves? Her brown hair is cut straight across her forehead like a boy’s, ringlets behind mingling with the tassels that depend from the turban. Her expression is discreet and happy. She fondles a spaniel on a plinth, strokes its head, holds its paw, and its free paw scratches at her bodice. That’s my great-grandmother, that’s Marianne’s beloved mama. She looks seventeen, but if the date is correct she can only be twelve. That very year she wrote to her father from Lichfield:

Her parents, the Joseph Sykes, were of precisely the same social class as the Thorntons, equally pious, similarly rich, and more thoroughly Yorkshire. Her father was a merchant in the Russian trade. He had given her a sound education, and the Miss Seward mentioned above—the famous Swan of Lichfield—had been her governess and had indeed tried to be her sister-in-law. It is difficult to estimate her character for the reason that it soon resembled her husband’s. She became moon to his sun. He first met her during his unsuccessful election campaign at Hull. From his Autobiography:

In 1790, Miss Sykes went to Buxton with her brother Dan who had been unwell, and she wrote to her mother about her future husband as follows:

Six years later he makes his proposal of marriage. It is a touching letter, with its mixture of the tender and the formal, and it can be best understood by readers who tolerate an outmoded approach to love. Writing from Battersea Rise, he reminds her of her encouraging behaviour to him some time back, and explains that he received it with the greater reserve because ‘it was so clear a point in my mind that I ought not then to change my situation in life’ or ‘allow myself to entertain any immediate thoughts of a more intimate connection with you’. The reference is to his father’s last illness: which had greatly occupied him. A reference then follows to another suitor, whose attentions he had thought it not right to disturb. He can speak freely now, and he does so with delicacy and with strength.

He wrote this letter on a Saturday. Miss Sykes, who was then in London, replied to it on the Sunday. She expressed her regret at being obliged to write a letter on such a day and she declined his proposal. On Tuesday she accepted it. In the following month they were married. So sudden an end to so leisurely an acquaintance may be explained by the ill-health of her mother: they desired the happy event to take place in her lifetime. Neither bride nor bridegroom was now young: and each entered matrimony with a good understanding of the other’s character. There were no surprises. And there was no penury. The bride was amply dowered and her husband had amassed a substantial fortune. Writing to her father shortly before the wedding she says:

Marianne Sykes (Mrs Henry Thornton).
By Sir George Chalmers. 1777.

To her mother:

Marriage promised harmony and fulfilled its promise despite the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars. Fate held no major surprises for the prosperous couple: an occasional stillborn child, a disputed election, an absconding servant, Henry’s irritability and poor health—that is all that they seem to have had to face. I say ‘seem to have had’ because their letters and the Thornton papers generally have been tidied up by pious editresses. The copies on which I have often to rely may conceal omissions. That the marriage was happy cannot however be doubted. In all the letters that pass between Henry Thornton and his wife there is gratitude and quiet confidence. Sixteen years after marriage he can write to her: ‘And now before I close my Sunday’s scrawl let me tell you, my dear M, how much I think of you and associate you in all my cares temporal and spiritual, May God bless you for all your kindness to me and above all for giving me your helping hand on the way to Heaven.’ And in his private Journal: ‘Her conversation is on subjects of Importance. I think I have known no woman whose topics are better chosen and more suitably treated.’

An expected event approached. At the end of 1796 Henry writes to his father-in-law:

In February 1797 Mrs Thornton writes to Hannah More, the friend and counsellor of her husband, with whom she herself had become friends after some diffidence—and perhaps after some jealousy. She ‘cannot forbear to seize one of the last gleams of health that may be left to me to express to you once more my thanks for the warm and lively interest you have taken in my happiness. It seems to me as if there were but a faint probability that we shall meet again in this world.’ She finds ‘the very prospect of suffering and danger’ a blessing since it may rouse her mind from earthly to eternal matters, she has listened to the ‘soothing and persuasive sermons’ of the rector of Clapham, John Venn, and ‘whenever I have been assailed by gloomy fears Mr H. T. has been at hand to dispel them by sound arguments and to pray with me and for me’. The event followed and on March 10th, 1797, Marianne Thornton was born.

Henry Thornton to his father-in-law:

To Hannah More:

Such was the atmosphere, such the household, into which Marianne Thornton was born: affections, comfort, piety, integrity, intelligence, public activity, private benevolence; and transcending them all an unshaken belief in a future life where the members of the household would meet again and would recognise each other and be happy eternally. It is this belief that makes the ‘Clapham Sect’ seem remote today, even to Christians. Personal immortality today may not be denied by orthodoxy, but it is played down, it is felt to be self-centred and anti-social, it is seldom conceived as a changeless background for family life as it was at Battersea Rise. Our hopes of continuance, when we entertain them, are arguably more spiritual. Then, they were a solid possession, to be maintained by prayers, self-questionings, and good deeds, and to be confirmed finally through the mercy of God.

3
On Clapham Common

When Marianne was sixty years old and had left Battersea Rise under painful circumstances, she wrote down some recollections of her childhood. They begin as follows:

The ‘Recollections’ continue with a portrait of Nurse Hunter:

Some of Nurse Hunter’s sayings have been preserved. They now seem insufficiently quaint. ‘What’s the use of a Judge and wig when you know a man has done a thing? You should just take and hang him’ is a slogan which has become all too familiar to the twentieth century. Nor is one impressed by her advice about choosing a housemaid: ‘Well there’s but one choice: the pretty ones the men are after and the ugly ones are after the men.’ Wiser was her ‘Try and let it pass my dear’ when a quarrel was beating up in the nursery.

From the nursery we pass to the schoolroom, and to Henry Thornton’s ideas on education:

The Library, Battersea Rise, with Nurse Hunter and the assembled family.
By Henrietta Thornton. About 1825.

Here is the attitude towards ‘the Staff’:

The above reminiscences show that Battersea Rise was anything but a ‘Victorian’ establishment and that charges of narrowness and stuffiness must be brought against it with caution. It appears, rather, as a blend of feudal loyalty and eighteenth-century enlightenment, as a home where the nursery could visit the schoolroom, the schoolroom the library, and all of them the pantry without self-consciousness. For an intelligent good-tempered child life there must have been very pleasant, and in after days, with the nineteenth century cramping her, she looked back on it as golden.

Let us now advance on to Clapham Common and see what is happening there. What was later called ‘The Clapham Sect’ had come into being. Wherever she walked the child found herself surrounded by assorted Saints. It was not a closed sainthood, there were no entry tests, no esoteric hush-hush, but the members of it shared so many interests that they hung together, and lived as near to each other as they could.

Nearest in kinship were the two uncles who lived in grandeur on the great family estate at the South side of the Common—Uncle Sam and Uncle Robert. As regards each of these there was, however, a reservation.

In the case of Uncle Sam the reservation is difficult to define, for he was a pious Evangelical, he was a Banker and an M.P., he was head of the family and entitled to respect on that count, he was benevolent and he had children of the same age as the little Henry Thorntons. And there was adequate intercourse between the two families, particularly while the Samuels stayed at Clapham. But an undertone of disapproval, such as we have already noticed in Henry’s references to his father, comes into Marianne’s ‘Recollections’.

Samuel’s Diary has been preserved and been privately printed. It covers the years 1774-1838. Its tone is sober and charitable.

In the case of Uncle Robert, Marianne’s ‘Recollections’ are more explicit: and more sympathetic.

The grand breakfast referred to took place in 1808: there is a gratified notice about it in the Parish Register. But in 1810 Uncle Robert had to sell his property, in 1814 he vanished, leaving a disconsolate wife, no children and many debts.

A detailed account of this disaster is given in a letter from Mrs Thornton to a Miss Patty Smith; Miss Smith, a member of another pious banking family, became in later years a friend and correspondent of Marianne’s.

The virtuous Henry behaved well over the scandal: not one touch of smugness, only affection, concern for his brother’s health, and desire to help him. Robert lived till March 1826 and according to their brother Samuel ‘through Divine grace terminated a life of variable anxiety in peace and in comfort’. I should like to think so, and I have sometimes wondered whether he may not have founded a Thornton family in the United States. He sounds capable of it, and his wife had failed to accompany him into exile. There are two memorials of Robert on this side: firstly the exquisite greenhouse or ‘orangery’ where he entertained Queen Charlotte, an elegant classical building with seven columns and a pediment—that is to say, it was elegant until recently: it looks death and desolation now in the midst of an L.C.C. Housing Estate, and ironic is the quotation from the Georgics on it, promising summer in winter and eternal spring.

Hic ver assiduum atque alienis mensibus aestas.

The other relic is his ‘town house’, 6 Grafton Street, W.1—a sombre solid building which he occupied from 1792 to 1814; it is the only house that survives from that generation of Thorntons.

Marianne’s aunt Jane—who had married the Earl of Leven and Melville—seldom occurs in her annals. The Levens spent most of their time up in Scotland. There was a close banking connection between the two families, and further marriages were to connect them in the future.

Next to be mentioned by Marianne in the ‘Recollections’ are the Venns, the beloved family at the Rectory.

John Venn had been born in Clapham and had been given the living by the Trustees of old John Thornton. He was a founder of the Church Missionary Society. Doctrinally as well as personally he was all that Battersea Rise could desire. The church where he ministered for twenty years is the one on Clapham Common, Holy Trinity. Too ponderous to be quaint, it is now a depressing object. Bombs in a World War have not romanticised it, and rarely does the visitor try to people its heavy interior with the heavy families who once worshipped there. The power of the Church over the Thorntons was moral rather than mystic. They were indifferent to ceremony, their references to Holy Communion are temperate, and though they desired sound doctrine they were not upset by deviations from it. What did excite them was Mr Venn’s sermons. They listened to sermons with avidity, copied them out and posted them to each other. They also preached and had prayers in their own home: Henry Thornton’s Family Prayers are composed for that very purpose. Battersea Rise Library with the united family kneeling, seemed more sacred to them than any consecrated edifice. The Venns too were a family and had family prayers at the Rectory. The enduring link was here.

Also next door for a time lived the friend of friends, William Wilberforce. He and Hannah More were the two whom she took over from her parents when they died, and Wilberforce had the advantage of belonging to Clapham; he had even lived at Battersea Rise once. It is with the saintly, gay and innocent side of his character that her ‘Recollections’ deal; they ignore the cleverness and astuteness which are evident in his public life and sometimes remind us of Gandhi:

The passage continues with reminiscences which relate to a later period—and continues to be sub-acid on the topic of Mrs Wilberforce.

At the other end of the Common, near the present public house of the Plough, lived a family who were to become as famous as the Wilberforces: the Macaulays. Zachary Macaulay—friend and ally of Henry Thornton in the anti-slavery campaign and founder of the Sierra Leone colony and editor of The Christian Observer—was a familiar figure. His wife had been a protégée of Hannah More, and one of their daughters—Marianne’s lifelong friend—bore Hannah’s name. The son—the world-famous Tom—was born in 1800, and there is extant a letter in which Mrs Thornton commiserates Mrs Macaulay on the child not being a girl. Tom visited Battersea Rise as a baby and almost died there, for little Marianne gave him an appalling cold: Mrs Thornton abounds in pious consolations and sound remedies. He recovered and young Henry Sykes Thornton, then also a baby, became his great friend. The Macaulays figure constantly in correspondence, but there is no reference to them in the ‘Recollections’ beyond the following:

Near the Macaulays lived Lord Teignmouth and his family. Teignmouth (as Sir John Shore) had been Governor General of India. On his return to England he became the first president of the British and Foreign Bible Society. With him and with the alarming and able Stephen family the Clapham Circle is complete. Two things are notable about it. The first is its homogeneity. With the exception of the Macaulays, all its members were wealthy, and all of them without exception were devoted to good works, and were intellectual rather than artistic. Their earnestness and their pious phraseology make them fair game for the satirists, but neither Thackeray in The Newcomes nor Disraeli in an unfinished novel gets down to their depths. The second point about them is that though they came to be called the Clapham Sect, few of them remained long at Clapham. The Thorntons themselves continued at Battersea Rise, but most of the neighbours whom Marianne lists had moved to London or elsewhere by the time of her parents’ death. In the golden period nearly all the people she loved were around her.

Not all. There was Hannah More down in Somerset.

Since Dr M. G. Jones’ excellent book on Hannah More, it has been possible to get a clearer view of that ‘bishop in petticoats’ and to realise her warmth and charm. Marianne adored her. There is an extensive passage in the ‘Recollections’.

The ‘Recollections’ have extended beyond childhood, for Hannah More lived until 1833. Marianne made a symbol of her. Unlike Wilberforce, she never married and so she never altered. She represented continuity. It is significant that the final sentence about the Mores (‘God has indeed given them a better name than sons and daughters’) should be a quotation from Henry Thornton’s Journal. Childless herself, she became the family life that does not die with death. Her cult (to use an over-emphatic word) went on till my own time. A garden I once owned had a grass slope in it which had been made to imitate a slope at Barley Wood.

After this glance at the Clapham Circle through Marianne’s eyes, we must return to her babyhood, and must accompany her at the age of five months on a holiday to Lancing. Mrs Thornton wrote long accounts of it and of similar outings to her sister-in-law, the pious Aunt Robert, and they are well worth quoting; they show how people of sense and substance organised a summer holiday during the French wars, and they are comparable with the jauntings of Jane Austen.

On this occasion (August 1797) mother, baby and Nurse Hunter set out in an open carriage and drove along the south coast in search of a suitable house. A carriage-full of servants followed. A servant was sent forward to prospect at Worthing, failed there, but reported favourably on a house at Lancing.

The letter then reports that Battersea Rise has been lent to some people with awful nerves so that the Grant children from next door have been forbidden to come and skip on the lawn; ‘how thankful ought we to be who are free from such heavy trials’. When they return there themselves, there is trouble: their next child dies at birth, and as to ‘my dear little Marianne: I rather grieve to see how nervous she is; in part I wish to attribute it to the intense heat of the weather and in part to her ceasing to take hemlock. When anything has frightened her during the day she starts up often at night in her sleep saying out in a most piteous tone Go away, Go away.’

In 1799 there was another seaside holiday at Christchurch. The political situation was acute ‘and it was not till near 9 o’clock that I knew Mr Pitt would allow us to set off the next morning’. Hannah More joined them. There was extended bathing:

1800 brought them to Bognor Rocks where they bathed more than ever. There is an important addition to the party: the son and heir has been born and has been christened Henry Sykes Thornton:

Bognor was the last bathing holiday that Marianne had to endure. It ended disastrously, owing to the misfortunes and the tiresomenesses of the Wilberforces. They had taken a house too, in order to remain close to the Thorntons, and Mrs Wilberforce fell dangerously ill. Mrs Thornton had to send the baby back to Battersea Rise, and to settle Marianne elsewhere, and she remained organising the large-scale confusion.

In 1803—the year of the invasion-threat—mother and daughter went to visit old Mr Joseph Sykes in Yorkshire: not without adventure.

Mr Sykes had had a stroke, and looking round the old house where she had once been a child with other children, Mrs Thornton reflects that a similar desolation might one day afflict even Battersea Rise. No such forebodings visit Marianne:

Meanwhile Henry Thornton was passing through grave public anxieties. The Peace of Amiens had not held, and the second Napoleonic war had begun. He had opposed our entry to it in Parliament, partly because he loved peace, partly because he expected disaster. From his Journal:

His health was already impaired by overwork. Later in the year he went to take the waters at Bath, accompanied by his growing family. Little Lucy, a newish arrival, took the limelight. Escaping into the street, she announced to a strange lady ‘Here me in my blue coat and my new buff shoes’ and accepted an invitation to dine and sleep. Marianne, aged six, was more sedately employed: ‘She gets on fast with her writing and arithmetic and admires her master here as much as the one at Clapham,’ Mrs Thornton reports.

In a letter of 1806 she gives a pleasant picture of the two little girls.

They were bound for Buxton which had been recommended to Henry Thornton as a cure. On his arrival there he wrote Charles Grant a letter of unusual interest, for it reports one of his rare contacts with industrialism.

Were I writing not a domestic biography but a public one I should have much to say about this letter. For it neatly illustrates the weakness in the Thornton-Wilberforce outlook—the weakness that has been mercilessly exposed by the Hammonds and other critics. Marianne’s parents would have behaved very differently if they had encountered a slave gang. They would have tried both to free the gang and to discover the causes of slavery, so that it might be eliminated. By legislation in Parliament, by supervision of cargoes, by agreements with other countries and with African chiefs they would have persisted until Abolition was total. When the slavery was industrial they did nothing and had no thought of doing anything; they regarded it as something ‘natural’, to encounter it was an educational experience, and an opportunity for smug thankfulness. Misery might be alleviated at the soup-kitchen level, but to do more might make the workers unruly and even unchristian. Hence Hannah More’s tracts, recommending industry, frugality, obedience and harder and still harder work. Hence Wilberforce’s unsatisfactory record in Parliament when it came to Home Affairs—his support of the Combination Acts, his approval of the Peterloo massacre—and hence Francis Place’s description of him as ‘an ugly epitome of the devil’.

I agree with the above line of criticism. But I do not share the moral indignation that sometime accompanies it. The really bad people, it seems to me, are those who do no good anywhere and help no one either at home or abroad. There are plenty of them about, and when they are clever as well as selfish they often manage to slip through their lives unnoticed, and so escape the censure of historians.

The year of the industrial encounter is the very year in which Henry Thornton wrote the pretty little verses with which this biography starts. His daughter dear was nine years old. She was already distinct to him as one whom he could educate to be his companion. She had intelligence, high spirits, high principles. She had also her faults, and he did not cease to remind her and himself of them, and to analyse her character, and to hope that she would grow up to be less diffident with strangers and less easily bored. He analysed the other children too, but Marianne occupied most space. As soon as possible he interested her in his parliamentary career and in politics generally. Nothing, in his judgment, should remain unknown or half known, and the mysteries of the Constitution, like the economics of her home, were explained to her at an early age. His own elections were the starting point, they excited her, as they would any loyal child. From her ‘Recollections’:

She does not explain why, despite this Coriolanus-attitude, he always got in. He seems to have achieved the best of both worlds here. No one liked him outside his personal friends. Outwardly he was cold, and his integrity sometimes passed into censoriousness. Ludicrously inappropriate is another election song:

The boys would have received but a slight acknowledgment from the reserved dignified figure at the head of the table. He wanted to get away from their meaningless applause and perform his duties in Parliament—duties they were incapable of understanding.

Mrs Thornton furnishes further details about the Southwark election that left such an impression on her daughter. Parliament had been dissolved suddenly, and a discredited and discreditable candidate had presented himself. To Hannah More:

She tried to rally ‘our gentlemen’ in her husband’s cause, but first they said there was no danger and then no hope and the purity of his record had caused so much irritation that they were reluctant to canvass. Tumult continued for five days. Thornton hung in the balance as well as the glass. He got in, thanks to a ‘white collar’ vote: the clerks connected with the India Office, etc., were rallied to his support by the Grants. Through the favour of the High Sheriff she and the two children were admitted on to the hustings to hear the victorious candidate: ‘hissed and abused and threatened by the mob with all sorts of horrors, but he went on unmoved till he had distinctly made his charge heard, that Calvert had “treated” and broke the law. This scene did worry my nerves a little, but it furnished me with a useful topic for Marianne and Henry.’ The scene was further enlivened by ‘Mendoza the Jew boxer’ who kept shaking his fist at Mr T. and crying ‘No popery! no popery’, in a highly irrational way. The children became over-excited during the triumphal drive, and she could only trust they had received more good than harm from the experience.

Life at Battersea Rise was certainly never dull. Not only was there this recurrent political excitement, but streams of interesting visitors kept passing through the house. For instance, one summer a young Mohawk came to stop. He was gentle and good-looking. Mrs Thornton found him altogether delightful, and so did the children, for he was persuaded to sing and dance. The library can seldom have witnessed a stranger scene: ‘he began gracefully, by degrees his tones became louder and his actions more vehement, till at last he seemed transported with rage and fury and stabbed his foe with horrid shrieks and yells, then in an instant resumed his calmness and said the English coat was very inconvenient for that kind of amusement.’ He was ‘more than half a Christian’, and he was also half Scotch, for his mother had ‘followed our army to America and instead of returning as a widow had married one of our allies’. He had come over to settle the boundaries between the Five Nations and Canada. Besides the Mohawk there were Africans from Sierra Leone, who came with or in consequence of Zachary Macaulay; little black boys would wander over Clapham Common and be beckoned into houses by the delighted inhabitants. The great world was expanding. It brought no mystery, no feeling for poetry. But it was an increasing field for curiosity and for missionary effort.

And there were the children’s parties. ‘Our philosophic fête with the aid of a splendid plum cake went off very well,’ Mrs Thornton thought. An electrical machine played a hundred tricks, and a mechanical machine demonstrated the properties of the lever. She was never interested in science and entertained herself by a more familiar sport: she examined the characters of the audience. Young William Wilberforce, the son of their beloved friend, ‘attended to nothing, dashed at all, was often right and then triumphed playing a thousand monkey tricks the whole time, spinning cup and ball, holding a flower by the stalk by curling down his under lip, &ct.’ Lord Teignmouth’s boy ‘was generally right and blushed whether right or wrong’. Another ‘knew little, thought he knew all and was very cheerful’. Her own young Henry ‘was considerate, the subject being new to him, made two guesses and was each time right’. Tom Macaulay on the other hand was ‘terrified at electricity, fell asleep over mechanics’. And her nephew Sam Thornton (afterwards an admiral) ‘groans under all intellectual employment and amused himself with mischief’. The party ended in a puppet show, script by Mrs Hannah More, narrator Henry Thornton. And that same month (Jan. 1808) Lord Teignmouth gave a Twelfth Night party. The same company attended but the emphasis was literary. Young Wilberforce went as the Pope, Tom Macaulay as Bonaparte, Marianne as Mrs Slipslop, ‘in an old satin gown with treble ruffles, an apron and a mob of the old housekeeper’s’, Lucy as a shepherdess ‘in a green jacket with a painted trimming of flowers, a garland of ivy and holly round her hair’, and she carried a crook to which a bunch of real roses was tied. Henry was Don Quixote, Watson Sancho Panza with a wallet full of apples. All had been provided with lines by Henry Thornton and said them very well, with the exception of the Wilberforce boy who lost his head. They were welcomed by two of Lord Teignmouth’s children who sat in a bower of plants, flowers and lights at the farther end of the dining-room. The King arose with admirable grace, ‘stepped from his throne, threw away his sceptre and repeated capitally some excellent lines expressive of his abhorrence of superiority . . . Then supper and a magic lantern and at 9.0. we all came home.’

There was nothing contrary to principle in these diversions. The Thorntons were not ascetic, and though all was subordinated to duty they held that ‘this is a world in which some amusement is necessary to enable us to perform our duties’. So the children amused themselves with good conscience and their elders often forgot that enjoyment is only a means. When ill-health came, the balance shifted: remorse and repentance weighed in, and when they kept journals and examined themselves in solitude, there was also a shift. On the whole the way of life they discovered worked, and they could pursue it to the glory of their God without self-torture or torturing others. Compare Marianne’s easy if supervised childhood with the torments inflicted forty years later on Augustus Hare. Deep in the Thorntons’ character, deeper even than they suspected, was the disinclination to inflict pain.

The children also had some private diversions, more difficult to classify. I am thinking of some curious water-colour drawings. There are about thirty of them, done on both sides of rough pieces of paper. They are not reasonable or instructive or edifying, and some of them go beyond the blugginess natural to the young into a very strange country. I will catalogue a few, adding the name of the artist, where known, in brackets.

Serpent round boy. He kneels, dressed in blue. Coil round his knee, face pressed against his. Another boy in red feebly untwists tail. Background of trees [Henrietta].

Apoplexy. Victim at one end of the family-settee, with attendants. At the other end a genteel lady holds a fan [Laura].

‘The papa hanging his children’. Fine figure of a man suspending pretty child in blue, boy in trousers, child in maroon from a single rod [Henrietta].

Child eaten by lion. It stretches out its hands to its mother who stretches out hers. In the background a second lion looks on: it has the face of a man.

Boy over precipice. Alpine scene. Handsome boy. Regretful relatives [Sophia].

Gig over precipice. Father pulls, mother screams in magenta, child struggles in green. All are lost [Henrietta].

‘Bonassus’. Bull with human face and protruding tongue pursues man over a precipice [Charles].

Ogre. Terrifying. Oversized face, venerable white beard, red lips, sharp teeth, green eyes, his head is humped on his shoulders, he hugs three shrieking children, he wears a bright yellow dressing-gown spotted with red. All this could be borne, but look at his tiny scaled feet and tremble [Henrietta].

‘Laura feeding the hens with ham-sandwiches and potatoes’. Inoffensive caricature of my grandmother and her long neck, employed as stated.

‘Marianne asleep’, or ‘Industry’. Again the library settee. A thick-set wench with her feet up [Henrietta].

Marianne and her sage elder brothers took no part in this orgy. Indeed I do not think she could draw, and Lucy, who could, also held aloof. It was the work of their juniors. No one thought the collection bizarre. It passed into the possession of Henrietta the leading artist, then to her daughter, then to an aunt of mine, and so reached Freud and me. None of the children ‘went wrong’. The collection is useless as a horoscope. All it does is to suggest that there was at the time an emotional stress, perhaps induced by the Napoleonic menace; thanks to high principles the stress eased.

Napoleon certainly did hang over Battersea Rise. At any moment he might arrive, perhaps had already arrived, and he would cut down the Tulip Tree upon the lawn, Marianne said; that was why the French fleet was assembled at Boulogne. Tom Macaulay, with his truer sense of history, corrected her: Napoleon when he arrived would merely stab all the little children in their beds. Their fears bring them close to us. It is the security of the Victorian era that we find so remote. Napoleon, as it might be the Kaiser, never landed, but some years later Napoleon, as it might be Hitler, tried a second time. In the year of the Battle of Nations little Laura had a terrible fright. She had gone out before breakfast to visit a litter of puppies in the loft. There was not much light, and before she could get to their corner she saw, sticking out from under a truss of hay, a man’s leg. She rushed back to the trap-door shrieking, scrambled down the ladder and announced that ‘Bonaparty’ had come and was hiding. A search party set out, and discovered the top boot of a groom. Behind the comfort and piety and philanthropy there was always this fear. It peeps out in their parents’ letters, it lies behind the political repressions of Pitt, and behind the children’s scrawls.

On a rational level, Napoleon was coldly judged. When Mrs Thornton was displeased with some house-decorators who had ‘made us look gay and pretty, but we fear they are dishonest’, she reflects that ‘Bonaparte is a villain of a more magnificent size and surrounded with splendours but in the eye of the Almighty he is but a sinner of a still worse class’, and she buys a good map on which to study his downfall. In 1814 this seemed to have occurred. Foreign potentates visited London for the rejoicings, and she took up Marianne and some of the others to see them. Her impressions were unfavourable. To Hannah More:

The following year brought the Hundred Days, Waterloo, St Helena and the end of terror for the Tulip Tree and for England.

During the whole of this exhausting period Henry Thornton continued to educate his eldest daughter. An entry in his Journal states:

The results of so much advice might have been disastrous, for he had a strong personality, and he was so sure that he knew what was right that a female caricature of papa might have resulted. Fortunately Marianne too had a strong nature, and her gaiety and warmth transformed his teachings into something individual. As time went on he was fertile in devices for improving her. He worried endlessly about her—about whom was he not now worried? High principles had been reinforced by low health. To his wife:

The ‘animating employment’ he devised was that of amanuensis to himself. He appointed her formally in 1812. The following letter to her is surprisingly adult in tone and indicates with precision what he expects her to know and to understand:

Henry and Watson being at that date twelve and ten years of age. The transition from the atmosphere of Ovid to that of the Fairchild family is abrupt: nowhere else does Henry Thornton go so far in either direction. Marianne was all enthusiasm, and after learning some shorthand (Gurney’s Method), she entered on her secretarial duties. The following letter is an early example of them; it involves her papa and herself in some funny tangles.

Another letter, also written in 1812, to her aunt Mrs Dan Sykes, is more natural in its tone and more logical in its sequences, but no more assured in its style. It is a voluble ‘festive’ letter, like so many letters written by ladies to ladies throughout the century, and though it marks a stage in her literary development it is not worth quoting.

The sympathy between father and daughter increased rapidly. When ill and feverish he had a long rambling dream of which he wrote an account. He, and she after him, were to suffer but little from the onslaughts of the imagination, so the dream is worth preserving. It began in a mail-coach ‘driving full 80 miles an hour’, from which he dismounted to hang over the edge of a sublime precipice: thence was he transferred to a valley by a roadside where several young ladies sat, ‘the neatness of whose shoes I perfectly remember for I touched one of them’, and where a number of scattered dolls lay about, also very nice images of carved wood, and ‘a lady whose foot trod on a beautiful bird which I seized informed me that they all belonged to a Mr Philips’. Hence to the House of Commons—no, to the House of Lords—no, to the road between Parliament and his town house, where a great debate was proceeding in darkness etc., etc.

He had been taking laudanum and his dream recalls the contemporary and more agitating dreams of George Crabbe. But for him sleep opened no doors into evil or poetry. He proceeds to draw useful conclusions: ‘Happily for us when the wild faculty of the imagination is deceiving us in dreams the body does not follow that adventurous leader.’ Except for ‘a few unlucky perambulators’ who jump out of windows, all are safe. It is the waking imagination which must be mistrusted: it is a little too like the sleeping one ‘and hence more than half the kicks and cuffs and broken bones or rather the broken hearts and spirits which we must meet with in our terrestrial journey. We imagine things to be in part only as they are not. But this error in part makes a wonderful difference in the happiness of our poor minds and bodies, for they follow our waking imaginations exactly.’ He then takes the usual run through his children. Lucy is still far too imaginative, so is Watson, Marianne herself improves but gradually; only Henry ‘is escaping fast out of that foggy region’, which makes many of us ‘err long and much from the truth’.

For Marianne, as for her father, the terrestrial world became entirely tangible and behind it, equally reliable in another and a superior way, stood God. For her, as for him, imagination is dangerous because it makes us behave in an unreal way to people, which may hurt them. But she had a wider outlook than his, and more external warmth, she was fonder of fun and even loved nonsense, and she allowed considerable liberty to imagination’s henchman, fancy.

4
The Death Beds

Henry Thornton’s health did not break up until the autumn of 1814, but he had never been robust. All his life he had overworked. He suffered from headaches, irritability and sleeplessness and took laudanum and opium constantly. Tuberculosis developed. He has ‘laboured under a cough for these ten days’, he is tempted out by a bright October afternoon, the sun goes in, the feverishness returns, the doctor orders him to rub his neck with laudanum, he cannot eat but manages some sago and wine which warms him.

The full story of his death and of her mother’s death is related by Marianne in a document which might be called a Pronouncement. It is twice as long as her ‘Recollections’—over sixty pages in her close firm handwriting, stitched up into notebook form. I do not know at what date she wrote it. It came to me by the same route as the children’s drawings. The opening sentence in it is ‘It was on Thursday 17th Oct. 1814 that we were all at Brighton except my father who had gone to Town on business when on returning from a walk to Preston with my mother we found a letter from him begging we would come to London the next day as he was not well.’ After which I will paraphrase. The Pronouncement is not merely wordy: it is far removed from us in spirit. He was ill. He died. His family and his friends were with him. Why cannot his daughter leave it there—keeping the rest in her heart?

She and her mother left Brighton the next day: Mrs Thornton longed to leave immediately, but would not out of deference to her husband’s wishes, and had scarcely slept. They travelled by coach and found reassuring letters from the invalid awaiting them at each stage, and at Sutton their own carriage met them. Marianne fell asleep in it to be woken by the church clock striking 8.0 on Clapham Common: strange not to be turning into Battersea Rise, but it was in his town house in Palace Yard that her father had collapsed. Mr Harrison the butler and Sage the housekeeper were on the steps both saying ‘he is better, much better today’, and they found him on a sofa, looking much as usual.

A fortnight later all the other children arrived from Brighton, he managed to get to his Bank at Birchin Lane, and he spent a long day there going into his private affairs: he realised that he was going to die. He also got down to Battersea Rise and ‘went immediately into the garden and I walked a little way with him on the lawn. How little did I think it was the last walk he would ever take in that Garden he was so fond of, when I had so often worked with him when I was a little child amongst the trees he had planted and the flowers he had admired so much’. Parliament opened, he tried to attend, collapsed, and a graver phase began. ‘As I sat by his bedside he said to me “Don’t look grave about this, this life cannot be the smiling scene always that you have hitherto found it, but God will take care of us all’ ”. Two things worried him. One was the fate of his much-loved brother in America. When his pleasant meals were brought he would say ‘Oh if my poor brother Robert had any tender nurses or any good food . . . but he is an outcaste and a wanderer and may be dying all alone.’ He even managed to write a long letter and Robert answered it, but not satisfactorily.

His other worry was financial, he had discovered some alarming losses at the Bank during his recent researches: but realising he could do nothing he dismissed them from his mind, exerted his moral strength and read no more newspapers, or anything that was not of a religious character. To Marianne he said ‘I have something I want you to do for me—to take my place at dinner, and also to give my Chestnut Horse a little work. He has been a faithful servant to me but his present idleness will hurt his conscience—so do you take him . . . and keep him’ he added as she was leaving the room.

Their London return was not to Palace Yard but to Wilberforce’s house at 4 Kensington Gore, where he finally died ‘in a large gloomy green bedroom’. On goes her sad narrative, gently, relentlessly, as if the spirit of the age, which adored death beds, was speaking through her lips. Nothing is insincere, nothing strained or in bad taste, but on it goes, on . . . ‘Nurse, nurse, give me air’, and Nurse Hunter answers ‘Yes, sir, I will’. Little Laura tries to warm his hands and says ‘Papa, I should like to be an Angel and go with you’. Little Charles is carried in by young Henry, but his spirits were so high that he had to be taken away again. ‘Papa opened his eyes at the sound of his merry voice and said Poor little Charles and closed them again.’ Doctors, consultations, relapses, prayers, sufferings. He still dictated letters. To an acquaintance:

He died on January 16th, 1815, at the age of 50. The final scene shall be quoted in full. Slowness gathers up beauty.

The Pronouncement proceeds through the minutiae of grief and burial and then describes—in equal detail—the illness and death of her mother. I shall give no account of that or of the many other death beds which will line this processional way. They must be realised by all who would understand the full implications of Family Life, but Henry Thornton’s is a sufficient epitome of them. He was buried in the Family Vault in the Old Church, and his wife soon joined him there. His Memorial Urn in the Battersea Rise garden became her memorial too, and remained until all was destroyed.

Mrs Thornton died of grief, that is to say grief weakened her, and she developed her husband’s disease: Marianne rightly surmised that she had caught it from him. Her end was less exemplary, for she worried about money. Sometimes she thought there would be enough for the children. At other times she panicked and persuaded a Sykes aunt to leave each of them £1000. At yet other times she declared that poverty was a blessing in disguise: ‘My children will be blessed, and wealth and patronage and the sunshine of their honoured Father’s Protection and his popularity would have obstructed their path to heaven.’ She is mortified that none of them will have any further interest in the Banking House (save an annuity for herself), and that her sons are not to be partners: adding ‘I see so clearly the hand of God in this that I could not wish it otherwise’. She was also puzzled by some of her husband’s testamentary dispositions. She herself was sole executrix and guardian of the nine children, and in the event of her death her brother Dan and others whom she trusted would become executors. But who would then become guardian? A young couple of the name of Inglis had been appointed. None of the family knew these Inglises well. Were they suitable? Distracted with such problems, moving constantly between worldliness and piety, and resting in neither, the sick woman wore her life away. Only one thing remained for her in the flux: Marianne, ‘My eldest daughter is everything to me . . . with judgement beyond her years and warm affection in the bloom of youth, she devotes herself to the comfort and aid of her sorrowing mother.’ She died on October 15th, 1815, at Brighton, whither she had been removed in the hope of alleviating her malady.

Then sorrow broke out again with accumulated force. To convey it is difficult—not through lack of material but through superabundance. The bereaved and their comforters all write enormous letters, symptoms are dwelt on, dying speeches and death-moments repeated and extended, the Will of God is bowed to again and again, sorrow is so persistently exhibited as joy that both become meaningless. The twentieth-century observer has to remind himself that inside all this cocoonery of words there was love, there was pain. It was the technique of the age and of a section of the middle class; it lasted, as far as my own family were concerned, into the 1850’s. After that the technique of mourning shortens, it is now very brief and some sensible people cut out mourning altogether. With it they cut down pain, which has practical advantages, and with pain they cut down love. People today love each other from moment to moment as much as ever their ancestors did, but loyalty of soul, such as the elder Thorntons possessed, is on the decrease.

A typical ejaculation, from Hannah More:

The children had good friends and relatives in Clapham and Yorkshire, they had health and position and brains, they were not penniless and they deserve no special sympathy. But the double bereavement was staggering. They had been completely dependent on their parents and in less than a year both were gone. It seemed at first that the house would have to go too. For who was to run Battersea Rise? They—that is to say the two senior children, Marianne and Henry—had plenty to worry them and the exciting public events of the year seem to have passed unnoticed.

1
The Reign of Sir Robert

Sir Robert Inglis—as it is convenient to call him though he had not yet inherited his baronetcy—was at this time only twenty-nine, but endowed with gravity and benevolence beyond his years. It must have been these qualities that commended him to Henry Thornton, for they had nothing in common politically and little doctrinally. Sir Robert was an unbending Tory, he dreaded not only revolution but reform, and when he entered Parliament he opposed any measure that promised social betterment or menaced the supremacy of the Church of England. Weightily for twenty-five years did he represent the University of Oxford. Two engravings of him in his robes of a D.C.L. so oppressed my youth that when they came into my possession I took one of them out of its frame, tore it into small pieces, and burnt them in the kitchen range. Duplicate Sir Roberts were too much. It has taken me many years to realise that his dimensions were justified by his integrity. Here is a man of substance in every sense. He had a town house at 6, Bedford Square, which he quitted in order to take up the duties of his guardianship. And he was also heir to a property with manorial rights in Bedfordshire: Milton Bryan. When he died Milton passed to his wife, and when she died it passed to their beloved ward, Marianne Thornton.

Lady Inglis (Milady) was, and had need to be, of a different disposition—submissive, clinging, diffident. In all things she deferred to her husband’s judgment, and ‘What will Sir Robert think?’ echoes so much and so widely in the correspondence of the period that Battersea Rise begins to sound like Mansfield Park. Unlike Lady Bertram, though, Lady Inglis possessed an independent morality, and she could be distinctly severe if youths and maidens tried to sit up alone or rambled at night on the lawns. She was said to be a well-educated little women, and at home in the world, but she was certainly less intellectual than her wards and less intelligent. How she must have dreaded the high-powered Marianne! And there were only nine years between their ages.

And Sir Robert’s sisters must not be forgotten. The younger of them, Miss Louisa Inglis (‘dear old Loo’), lived far into the century, and became a general pet. She was even more submissive than Milady, a Miss Matty of a woman, frightened of her ponderous brother who treated her with the utmost respect but did not seek her company, and tending in later years to tuck herself away in Bedfordshire and repine. And finally there was, for a few years, old Sir Hugh. He seems to have been a more vital person than his son. He had spent his manhood in India as a midshipman and in other capacities, he had been secretary to the Governor of Bengal, director and then chairman of the East India Company. He returned to England at the close of the eighteenth century, inherited Milton from his first wife, and filled it with beautiful and strange objects. One of these—a Goa stone in a gold filagree case—was for a short time in my hands; it is now in the British Museum. His fine illustrated Rabelais is in the library of my cousin Ronald Southey. It was a grief to Sir Hugh that his only son was childless, he was delighted with the guardianship, said he had nine new grandchildren and began to build extra rooms at Milton. He waited on Marianne in person, and made her feel ‘a little daughter-in-law like’. He died in 1820, and in marble, and over life size, he lies in Milton Bryan church. Sir Robert lies there too, under a slab.

The Inglis irruption was ill received in Clapham circles. Little was known of the young couple who would now rule at Battersea Rise, and it was felt that the precious children and the sacred house ought to have been entrusted to some member of the family. Aunt Robert Thornton, whom her husband had deserted, was the obvious candidate—wronged Aunt Robert who thought almost everything wrong. And the children themselves were suspicious. They felt insecure, they were being put into the power of strangers whom they had but vaguely seen at their parents’ death beds. Little Laura when told to put on clean shoes and stockings for the Inglises sat on the floor crying ‘Bother the Inglises, bother the Inglises’. For which Nurse Hunter scolded her, said the Inglises were ‘very kind people’, and anyhow she would not have such a word as Bother used in her Nursery.

Sir Robert Inglis, M.P., D.C.L., F.R.S.
By George Richmond (1850?).

The estimable couple were kind, and they were considerate: that comes out in all they did. To have won the approval of Nurse Hunter was half their battle; by now she was deep in all family secrets and could have made trouble. With her collaboration they instituted a new economy which should resemble the old as much as possible. A high-minded governess, Miss Lamb, was engaged for the six younger children. Marianne, Henry, and Watson were accepted as adult. Much depended on Marianne. She instantly received her guardians into her affectionate heart. They became her friends for life—Sir Robert her counsellor as well as her friend; the Eighth Champion of Christendom she called him. The reactions of Henry and Watson have not been recorded. Watson figures little in forthcoming events. Henry figures. He was at fifteen self-contained and self-confident, he had inherited his father’s ability; much was expected from him as his father’s son, especially by Mrs Hannah More. He was devoted to his sisters, particularly to Marianne, and he must already have been hoping for the time when he would be both director of the family bank and head of the family board.

In one respect the new dynasty was more liberal than its predecessor. It admitted art and science and it regarded foreign countries as interesting in themselves rather than as fields for missionary enterprise. Sir Robert adored travel—he was the typical tireless tourist—and he was to infect Marianne with his enthusiasm. There was something of the courteous dilettante about him; he was interested in Public Records, he founded a literary Club, he was Antiquary to the Royal Academy, he encouraged young artists. One of these, George Richmond, requires particular notice. (What an excellent artist he was! When will a revival descend on him, and a monograph be written about him?) Sir Robert detected him when he was very young, encouraged his early marriage, and provided him with a sitter in William Wilberforce. The portrait brought him fame instantly: it was painted at Battersea Rise, and Wilberforce’s chair is said to have perched for the occasion upon a table. He also painted Sir Robert himself, and sketched Thorntons and Forsters innumerable, and he became a close friend of the family: ‘I began with a Thornton and I shall end with a Thornton,’ he said, and he has expressed his surprise that he could be friends with a family so inartistic. Of the illustrations in this book no fewer than five are Richmond portraits.

With the death of her father Marianne’s heroic period had ended. She was never again to be in the heart of affairs. No more parliamentary sessions or electoral struggles. No more danger to the Tulip Tree, except from rot. The past had been stormy and golden. The future was to be quieter and a little mediocre. The Inglises, though duly high-minded, had a stubborn inclination towards conformity, and she once said rather wryly, that she was the last representative of the Clapham Sect; all her brothers and sisters had followed Sir Robert elsewhere.

The most important events of her early orphanhood were her foreign visits—(to be described separately)—and the entry of her brother to the University.

Cambridge had been preferred to Oxford. It was supposed to be more in the Evangelical tradition: Wilberforce had been at John’s, Simeon at King’s, Isaac Milner at Queens’; Henry Thornton and Tom Macaulay were entered together at Trinity.

From Hannah More to Marianne (Dec. 1818):

Every care was taken of the lads’ moral welfare at Trinity, and out of thirty College washerwomen the most suitable to their character was picked by the tutor. They first shared lodgings in Jesus Lane. When they moved into College Macaulay had rooms in the Great Court between the entrance gate and the Chapel, and I believe that my great-uncle’s were near. They were both exemplary undergraduates, but Henry worked harder than Tom, with results that became evident in the Tripos.

Marianne to Hannah More (January 21st, 1822):

Fearful perhaps of having been priggish, she then becomes more so:

Henry had certainly made a good start, nor had Tom Macaulay made a bad one, for in a few years he was elected Fellow. He was already deep in literature, politics and eloquence. Henry, a steadier boy, settled down at once to the study of banking. He was a terrific worker, and it is significant that he took no part in the foreign outings then in progress. Watson was also developing satisfactorily—a dim, prim, fussy joking youth. He too went to Trinity, he read for the Church, and after taking orders spent his life away in Herefordshire. Little Charles—the baby of the family—also entered the Church in due season.

When we pass from the boys to the girls we pass into a world of whirl. Not that there was anything fast about the six Miss Thorntons, but there were six of them and to disentangle six maidens is never easy especially when the sound of their laughter has gone. Unless a letter is signed I seldom know which girl wrote it, and of four unlabelled drawings I have no idea which represents whom; sloping shoulders, long necks, delicate features, abundant chignons give no help to the earnest researcher. Here is a little first aid: Marianne—she needs no introduction. Lucy—satirical, vivid, on the edge of first-class foolery; clever with pen and pencil; later on warped by ill-health. Isabella and Sophia—both elegant and later on formidable, but not yet. Henrietta—very clever with her pencil: a most gifted domestic artist. Laura—very tall, tomboyish, shy-ish, animal-lover: probably the least intelligent of the sisterhood.

Sir Robert held dinner parties in high esteem. Interesting conversation between important persons was his main objective, but he also appreciated the presence of youth, and as the girls matured they were encouraged, nay required, to take their turns as hostesses. These entertainments would have passed into oblivion, but for the chance survival of a shabby little Dinner Book. This gives a list of the formal dinners at Battersea Rise between 1826 and 1828, and of some breakfasts offered in London over the same period. Lists of the guests are appended, and they are interesting and significant: no one of immortal fame is present but nearly everyone has a brief notice in the D.N.B. Of still greater interest are the comments of the frivolous girls. They have avenged themselves on their boredom by scrawling down scraps of conversations overheard by them.

Let us with their help attend the dinner given on November 7th, 1826. Lady Inglis sat at one end of the table, Sir Robert at the other. The company included: Mr Grey, Mrs Deacon, Mr Colquhoun, Marianne, Mr G. Eyre, Lucy, Henry, Mr Deacon, Miss Calvert, Mr Dunn, Isabella, Mr Gorham, Miss Ward, Mr Labouchere, Miss Emily Calvert. Seventeen in all, and Henrietta and Laura plus Mr and Mrs Shaw, Aunt Robert, Mr Thomason, Mrs Stephen and Mrs W. Addington come in afterwards. Twenty-five total.

Caustic comments follow, and explain why people were sometimes afraid of the Miss Thorntons.

This nonsense sparkles, almost catches fire. And it is significant that the girls admired Jane Austen. The nonsense to follow suggests rather the comedy of Peacock. It is Dec. 10th, 1827. A grave company has partaken of nourishment, including Mr Wolfe a converted Jew, Edward Irving the preacher, and the Rev. Charles Simeon, another preacher. They are concerned with the Jewish problem in some of its aspects. Scribbled round them and over them we decipher

This slight humorous anti-Semitism is characteristic. Not until the present century did the British middle classes realise what jokes about Jews can lead to. Entirely inoffensive is this encounter between two elderly gentlemen, Sir Benjamin Hobhouse and Captain Willock.

At this point several pages have been cut out of the Dinner Book. The next entry is: ‘This book has been lost for two months.’

In the dinner lists often occur the names of two Irish clergymen, the Rev. John Jebb, Bishop of Limerick, and his chaplain, the Rev. Charles Forster. They did not belong to the Clapham Circle; there is a reference to them in a letter of Hannah More’s, of 1818, when they were still in the wilds of Ireland.

The pair became popular at Battersea Rise, and in the thirties the Reverend Charles Forster broke the charmed circle of the sisterhood and became my grandfather. That is a serious matter to be elsewhere treated. In the twenties he was eager and charming and a little foolish. Lucy Thornton, that sharp-tongued chatterbox, had some fun out of him:

Inside Holy Trinity Church, Clapham Common.
By Lucy Thornton. About 1825.

This letter recalls the scribblings in the Dinner Book: perhaps Lucy was their authoress. She makes fun of the poetry of Robert Montgomery, whom Macaulay was to pillory:

Lucy was clever with her pencil too. She did a laughable yet lovely water-colour of the interior of Clapham Church. Perched high in the pulpit is a youthful preacher—Watson perhaps. Below is Anna the Schoolmistress gesticulating wildly at her charges who have escaped from her control and are fighting at the entrance to the vestry. Anna stands. The rest of the congregation sits, the backs of their heads visible over the pews. Each of them is numbered and named, and we can identify some lesser celebrities out of the Dinner Book. Here is Mr Dunn of Etherial Mould. Here is Mr Gorham the curate, who troubled Sir Robert for a pie, and subsequently troubled Church circles by the Gorham controversy.

About the same date is a charming volume labelled ‘Family Sketch Book’. Henrietta was probably the artist. She has portrayed her sisters, her brother Charles, and again and again little Harry, the gardener’s child, a pink and white and flaxen object, then in general demand. Loveliest of all is Sophia as a bridesmaid, in a delicate white net, saying ‘It will be my turn next.’ There are several sketches of Marianne—already a little mature. A back view of her: solid olive-green costume: broad lace collar: combs in hair. Another back view, with Sir James Mackintosh who has managed to turn his back on her. Sir James is saying: ‘It’s an established fact that all ladies are deficient in geometry, grammar, and justice. Do you agree with me?’ To which the spirited woman replies: ‘No. I should be deficient in the last quality if I did.’

Still more important are Henrietta’s large sketches showing all the brothers and sisters together in the Library. They are memorial sketches—the family could never have been grouped just thus—and the standing central figure is in one version William Wilberforce, and in the version here reproduced Nurse Hunter. In each case the sketch is taken looking away from the window, towards the curved apse of books. Close on the left is the great green settee, with Marianne on it, working, and worried by a spaniel: she disliked dogs. From left to right follow: Henry, Sophia, Watson, Laura (my grandmother), Nurse Hunter (standing), Isabella, Henrietta, Charles, Lucy. The composition of the picture sets Marianne apart. She, who was to outlive her brothers and most of her sisters, looks tranquilly from her corner towards the garden and works, works, a beneficent Norn. Her father’s portrait hangs above her. Her guardian is not present, but the group well symbolises his amiable reign.

At the opposite end of Clapham Common there was, it will be remembered, another large house, the home of her Uncle Sam. The relation between the two establishments was cousinly rather than intimate. The Battersea Rise party had inherited their father’s critical outlook, and nothing that Uncle and Aunt Sam did roused their enthusiasm. Slight sniffs arise, mockery crackles. It is impossible to convey these subtle alienations without quotation, and a letter from Sophia to Laura comes in conveniently. It was written in 1827. Marianne had been stopping with the Sams at Chobham, in their country house. Sophia and Henry had gone down to pick her up:

This tone is typical. And things got seriously wrong over the episode of the imbecile suitor. This gentleman (his name has not been preserved) was paying attentions to Laura. Her cousin Eliza (of the Samuel branch) warned her against him, and then encouraged him to transfer his attentions to her own daughter, for he was well off as well as weak-minded. So far so good. Battersea Rise enjoyed its malicious laugh. But Henry in his merriment went too far. He wrote someone a letter in which he said that Eliza had been well advised to settle close to a lunatic asylum, for it would be needed. Which letter fell into Eliza’s hands. She adopted a super-Christian attitude and thanked her cousin elaborately for his goodness to her in past years. If anyone else at Battersea Rise had written the letter about the asylum, she would have easily understood, she knew what the others were, but that Henry, that Henry the soul of Kindness . . . ‘Virago!’ Henry growled.

Their slight disapproval of the Sams and their indifference towards dull Aunt Robert threw ‘the Battersea Risers’ more and more into the arms of the Inglises. How excited they all were when their guardian bearded Queen Caroline! Writing to Hannah More at the time (August, 1821) Marianne says:

And when he was elected Member for Oxford University in 1829, how delighted they were, and how little did they realise that they had changed sides politically. For the election was fought on the issue of Catholic Emancipation, and their father had been in favour of it, whereas Sir Robert was against it. Peel, the sitting member, had been against it too, but had changed his opinion, and had resigned in consequence and stood for re-election. Sir Robert beat him. Wild was the enthusiasm at Battersea Rise, lengthy the letter to be despatched to Hannah More. ‘No Popery’ all the ladies cried, forgetting that No Popery was what Mendoza the Boxer had cried at Henry Thornton.

Party politics seldom induce wisdom; this letter is slightly foolish in its tone, and its prophecies were quite off the mark. Peel easily got a seat elsewhere, and he passed his Catholic Emancipation Bill later in the year.

2
The Continent

In 1816, the year after her parents’ death, Marianne was persuaded by the Inglises to go to Paris. To her biographer this comes as a delightful shock. She has been so unhappy, so overworked physically and emotionally, so voluble in describing symptoms and reactions and in replying to voluble condolences, and suddenly she is a girl again. The weight lifts, and her pen dances off as if held in another hand. Her ebullience proceeds from a rich nature. She was too big a person to be broken by a bereavement: her parents were never to be forgotten, but there’s Paris too! Napoleon is in St Helena, Louis XVIII ensures safety, and she has never been abroad.

She went with her Yorkshire uncle and aunt, the Dan Sykes, and with two young people whom they had provided for her companionship. ‘It is very true, I am going abroad’ she writes to Miss Patty Smith: ‘I thought of nothing less . . . I had been feverish and good for nothing . . . more as a medicine than a pleasure I consented, and now by talking about it and hearing everybody envy me so much, I have begun to think it will be a delightful thing. We go to Paris only.’ The letter, already rising in spirits, goes on to discuss The Antiquary and the possibility of a match between Edie Ochiltree and Meg Merrilies: ‘What a race of children we should have, we should burn all the Mendicity Reports!’

On her return she recounted her adventures to Miss Smith in a long and lively letter. Lively and loquacious. Her style has not yet matured, most of her sentences are a couple of clauses too long, and her observations lack the brilliance and precision she was able to give them in later years.

Their party crossed from Dover to Calais on May the 20th and ‘the sensation of first landing on a foreign shore was so strangely delightful that I am almost sorry it can never happen to me again’. They took five days to get to Paris, so excited were the young people, who stopped at every town and most villages, and shrieked with laughter at everything French from a ‘set out of Postboys and Horns to a dinner being carried in’. Paris reached, they were instantly admitted into aristocratic society, of a type they would scarcely have encountered in England, and Marianne also became ‘the intimate friend of all the filles-de-chambres, garçons, Frotteurs, Hôtes, Coutourières, and all the etc. etc. with which a Hotel abounds’. The Dan Sykes were quiet people, with commercial introductions, yet they attend ‘six or eight soirées of the old noblesse’ and see something of the Duchesse d’Angoulême, the daughter of Louis XVI: ‘every washerwoman can make a better curtsey than the Duchess, and every Restaurateur has more to say to his customers than the King to his Court.’ And the Duchesse de Berri ‘has not mended matters, for she seems an awkward unformed modest little thing of seventeen, whom everyone pities when they see her joined to her coarse ugly husband, whose deréglements are the open conversation of all Paris’. Marianne’s conversation is getting open too, she ‘stares in at the pretty cafés in the evening, having no reputation to lose’. And she summarises or rather expands her feelings about the French in some paragraphs which deserve quotation.

This is a striking proclamation from a girl of nineteen, who had been brought up on Clapham Common and was visiting her hereditary enemies. It is educated, mature, gracious—all that John Bull (whom she attacks by name) so often wasn’t. Gaiety and giggles, wisdom and warmth meet in it and reinforce each other. She is scribbling away to another girl without any thought of showing off, yet her remarks have a weight which men of the world might envy. She has fallen in love with the French, yet she can be shrewd about them. She can accept Duchesses and Filles de Chambre with equal ease. She can be friends with the ‘lower classes’ and expect them to be her friends. Her love for France persisted throughout her life, and when she was too old to go there herself she would finance others. Her indifference to class-barriers also persisted. She knew where she herself belonged if she thought about it, but she did not often think about it; what attracted her most was human beings, and she sailed through the nineteenth century without being suspicious of servants, shocked by social mésalliances or scared by the poor. This is unusual. Battersea Rise taught her some of it, but some of it was learnt in France. In a strictly English sense, she was a Daughter of the Revolution.

But to revert to the Patty Smith letter, pages and pages in which remain untouched by me. Some of them are concerned with sight-seeing; the party ‘worked very hard, saw all the common sights once and most of them more than once’, went to the Louvre almost daily, regretted the defacing of the Public Buildings by the restored monarchy, who were sticking up a Fleur de Lys wherever they pulled down an Eagle: ‘it is very unfortunate that it does not look nearly as imposing’. Uncle and Aunt Dan were definitely anti-Bourbon. They observe the inadequacy of Louis XVIII and are unaware of the vulgarity of Bonaparte who appears to them as he would have wished to appear. Sentimental Imperialism flowers at Malmaison:

The voyage back to England was a ‘woful passage of 40 hours, but I never believe anybody who told of “dreadful storms” and “narrow escapes”, so I do not expect you would believe me’. She finds Battersea Rise as usual: very much as usual: ‘I was half provoked with them for having done so little when I seemed to have done so much. But the quiet of this place is very nice now, and I find I can get through the day without a Cortège or a Fête.’ Finally: ‘France is a Fairy Tale kind of scene which we pied de lettre English people can neither describe nor understand.’ Land of magic and of grace; it had stopped her from thinking about the immediate past and her health is much improved. She only hopes that ‘Marianne’s letters to her kinsfolk’ will not get published in these publishing days and ‘add one to the innumerable number of stupid travels’. She signs herself to Patty ‘Ever your affectionately’, and she so signs herself to us, for we could not want a more heartening vindication of the importance of foreign travel.

Meanwhile Aunt Dan had not been idle, and had filled over a hundred pages of her Journal with her neat sloping handwriting. Aunt Dan had a tolerant trundling mind, she was well-educated and observant, but there is no vividness in her account of the tour: convents, churches, statuary, the ballet and the opera, hotel bedrooms, the uniform of the postilions, the marriage procession of the Duc de Berri all sound alike. Her chief joy in Paris was the company of her husband, her chief anxiety his health. The channel-crossing, which Marianne had dismissed so lightly, becomes however a serious affair. The sea had been calm as they left Dieppe, but when they woke next morning Dieppe was still in sight and the breeze freshening. They breakfasted pleasantly with some gentlemen on deck, after which all drew up their chairs round Mr Dan Sykes, and he read one of Dr Watts’s sermons. Before he could finish it everyone began to feel sick. ‘The storm kept increasing, the waves were dreadfully grand & at last dashed over the deck & we were advised to go below.’ There Aunt Dan passed a terrible day and a still more terrible second night, ‘every thing rolling about in the cabin, candles with the rest’. She could hear her husband and her niece ‘violently straining’ in the distance without being able to help them, and the sounds of the captain giving orders on deck, the heaving of the anchor and the rattling of chains were dreadful. ‘Sick at heart as well as Stomach I had no relief but in silent prayer.’ On the morning of the second day the Packet reached Brighton. Thereon by stages to Battersea Rise, and she ends on a happier note:

The expedition was such a success that in 1817 Marianne was off to the continent again. This time she was accompanied by the Inglises. Two lengthy letters describe their adventures. Her first, to Patty Smith, bears the postmark of Sept. 2, and is written from Boulogne-sur-Mer where she has been ‘a peaceable and settled inhabitant’ for several days. Boulogne is by no means the ‘French Wapping’ she had been led to expect, and had she not known the grandeurs of Paris she would have thought it the ‘pleasantest thing in the world’. Owing to ‘French faithlessness’ their arrangements miscarried: they had to split up and sleep in three different parts of the town, forgathering during the day in a café. And the Dover-Calais crossing had not been ‘riante’—fourteen women and children able and willing to be helpful, but all sick. However all that is over, and they are now in the second-best hotel, most comfortable, six charming bedrooms, two superb sitting-rooms, delicious food, all for the price of English lodgings.

She proceeds to some observations on Boulogne which may interest the social historian.

She then discusses what she has been reading while laid up with a cold: French Memoirs mostly: Madame de Motteville was on her list, but her preferred was ‘Mademoiselle, La Grand Mademoiselle’^[7]: ‘she is perfectly exquisite, I hope you know her, if not let me have the honour of introducing you—she is a most royal Boswell, but the worst or perhaps the best is that she is Johnson to herself. During all the last half I was afraid that I was taken in, for it seemed impossible that a woman could have written it of herself.’

And the letter continues to drift from Bathing Women to Priests ‘who have a sad idiotic look about them that one quite pities’, to Madame L’Hôte ‘who fondes into Larmes every Monday when her Bill is paid’, to a local wedding ‘a fancifully pretty sight’, and to plans. Her guardian, ‘notre cher maître’, has already left, and he orders her and his sisters to meet him in the Pays Bas, and visit the Field of Waterloo. She does not want to leave ‘this quietly amusing scene’ and she is concerned at leaving little Milady alone in Boulogne with some children. But her guardian knows what is best and she must obey.

Next day she writes to Aunt Dan. She has already got to Ath, in the Low Countries. In a short time many miles have been traversed and much has happened, and we plunge into a relatively wild scene: the nearest approach of the Clapham Sect to Low Life.

So successful was the Waterloo expedition that in 1818 Marianne was off yet again. This was too much for Hannah More, who thus disburdens herself to Zachary Macaulay:

But it was the Inglises who accompanied her. From France they went to Switzerland. And there were further Swiss visits in the twenties, in which others of the Thornton sisters took part. The entertaining water colour reproduced overleaf bears the following label:

Some of the people mentioned and some unmentioned occur in the delightful composition. The main object is Sir Robert’s family coach, drawn by four spirited horses. The young lady already on the box, looking very happy and pretty, wields a pale blue parasol. Bairr courier advances with a blue band box in one hand, a black bag in the other, and under his arm a brown wooden box bound in brass, containing the cash. Close to him is a confused crowd of passengers and well-wishers, for the coach is just leaving a Swiss hotel. Perched high on a wooden balcony is the landlady or she may be a chambermaid, and the fine Englishman standing on the ground beneath her is Sir Robert Inglis himself: amply built but of a fresh complexion: garbed in grey. He has tilted his top hat as he leans against the hotel to watch the coach fill up.

It must not do that yet, for I have only dealt with the right side of the composition. Let me attempt the left. Two postilions in blue and red uniform and plaided top boots control the four horses. One of them is in the saddle and a youth of such beauty and grace that Henrietta pinxit has paid special attention to him. Ahead of the horses is a kicking little pony with Schmidt avant-courier seated on it: he has very short legs: it is held by a stable boy who prevents it from galloping into the view. For observe Switzerland arising—not majestically but sufficiently steeply. A round grassy hill is spiralled by a road and two chaises rush furiously upward towards a village and a windmill. How I wish that I could paint a picture like that! Or indeed that anyone now alive could! It breathes the spirit of cheerful cumbrous travel and of a sure return to a well equipped home.

Swiss journeys included the Hospice of St Bernard. The Brother in charge of visitors, Chanoine Barras, became attached to Marianne. There are four letters from him to her (1821-1827) enquiring after le chevalier Inglis et les chères demoiselles, giving her news about the exploits of his dog Jupiter, the weather, etc., and enclosing on one occasion a gentian, the colours of which are still blue. His kindness and the obvious goodness of the monks made a strong impression, and there were moments when she felt her Protestantism melting.

Travelling in Switzerland.
By Henrietta Thornton. About 1825.

It is impossible to keep track of all the continental visits. They were mostly to France and the Low Countries, and were fortified by historical reading. She went to Rome, and Naples is suggested by a piece of lava into which a ten Tornesi coin of 1825 has been thrown. Once Sir Robert took young Charles to Vienna, and once he went alone to Jerusalem, and brought back my grandfather a piece of the Mount of Olives. Thanks to him his wards became mildly Europeanised, and his influence persisted into the next generation, and softened the raucousness and the contemptuousness that sometimes attend stay-at-homes.

3
The Birchin Lane Bank

Midway in this amiable decade of the twenties there was an appalling financial crisis. It exploded suddenly.

The Bank which provided most of the family fortune had had a fairly prosperous career since its establishment in 1773. It had first functioned as Marlar, Lascelles, Pell and Down. When Marianne’s father entered it in 1784 it changed its name to Down, Thornton and Free. At his death in 1815 it had passed out of Thornton control. Young Henry longed to join it, but he was only fifteen and nothing could be done.

By the time he was twenty-five the situation had altered. His claims were now considerable. He had had a successful career at Cambridge, he had served three years to learn his job, he was well thought of by his Uncle Samuel Thornton, by his Thornton cousins, by his Melville cousins, and by others connected with the profession of his choice, he had the integrity, the intelligence, the industry, the business acumen that might be expected from his father’s son. Early in 1825 he became an active partner.

The Bank had again changed its name. It was now styled Pole, Thornton, Free, Down and Scott, or, more compendiously, Pole, Thornton and Co. It was said to be yielding £40,000 a year, and was regarded as one of the most stable and most extensive Banking Houses in London. Sir Peter Pole was the leading partner; an elderly gentleman who lived in the country. The active partner was Peter Free, and it was his incompetence—according to Marianne—which had been responsible for worries and shortages at the time of her father’s death. On the surface all was now serene. Young Henry must have stepped aboard the family ship with confidence and pride, and with the expectation of a calm voyage. He never suspected that before the end of the year the ship would founder, and nearly wreck Battersea Rise too.

The letters from Marianne to Hannah More, describing the catastrophe, are the most considerable she ever wrote. Besides being vivid and documentary, they show financial insight. The causes of the disaster may have lain deeper than she or even her brother realised, but she thoroughly grasped such facts as she knew. The fruits of her early education become evident. The little girl who had been talked to by her papa about Paper Credit and had helped him to do his accounts reveals herself at twenty-eight as a woman of business.

I will print the letters in full from my own copies of them. They have already been published in a shortened form in the Three Banks Review for June, 1951.

The opening of the next letter is puzzling. The ‘worst anticipations’ had not been realised and this is admitted as the letter proceeds.

In spite of the goodwill and help offered by other Bankers, winding up the affairs of Pole, Thornton & Co. was not easy. In the meantime Henry Thornton was asked to join the banking house of Williams & Co.

It will be noticed that Sir Robert Inglis scarcely comes into the exciting story. It is the triumph of youth. Henry Sykes Thornton, at the age of twenty-five, stands forth as the Head of the Family, surrounded by his rejoicing and adoring sisters. It was a great moment, the greatest in their combined lives. He must have felt that he was master at last in the House of his Father, and that though the girls might be technically Inglis wards they would look to him and take their orders from him in future. At the moment of his triumph perhaps was born to him the wish, the hope, that none of them would ever marry. And perhaps from this moment his nose—the prominent rather predatory nose that turns portraits of him into caricatures—began to assert itself at the expense of his softer features.

A cheerful letter from Lucy to Marianne shows him and his partners happily enthroned at Birchin Lane, and dispensing hospitality to their womenfolk.

The Bank that underwent these vicissitudes still flourishes on its original site: Williams Deacon’s Bank Limited, 20 Birchin Lane, E.C.3.

4
May Meetings and William Wilberforce

Another aspect of the decade now requires examination.

Like her parents, Marianne was but little concerned with ritual or dogma. ‘I was brought up not to think H. and L. Church of very great importance, and for the life of me I can’t now dwell much on it’ she wrote in later years, and she spent no time in worrying what the clergyman wore or didn’t wear or what stood upon the Communion Table. When the Tractarian Movement developed she was puzzled by its antics and blind to its colourfulness. What she cared for was the Christian Life, rooted in the family and flowering in action, and she desired to see that life growing all over the world. The example of Christ was present in her prayers, but for practical purposes there was a convenient exemplar in her parents; they had been good Christians and she had known them well. She would be as like them as she could. She did not imitate them idolatrously: the world was moving and she with it, and she abandoned their elaborate examinations of self and of others, and adopted a lighter psychological touch.

They had left twin comforters behind them in the persons of William Wilberforce and Hannah More. From 1815 to 1833, when they both died, she had these two precious relicts to guide her spiritually. The guidance was implicit: no letters have survived which ask for their advice, and she sometimes did things which they disapproved. It was their continual presence that helped her. She could always think ‘There they still are’. Hannah More had to be written to—she was getting too old to come up from Somersetshire and had to be kept in touch with the religious gossip of the capital. Wilberforce had to be watched and followed and adored and if possible tended; he was all over the place—fragile, whimsical, inspired—and would wear himself to death. The ‘May Meetings’ (‘notre Sainte Semaine’)—so important to her during the early twenties of the century—were dominated by him even when he was too unwell to attend.

These meetings were held every spring in Exeter Hall, in the Freemasons Hall, in the Offices of the Hibernian Society, etc. They originated in the British and Foreign Bible Society which had been founded back in 1804, and annually presented a report. To the Bible Society were added other organisations, all of them founded by or supported by members of the Clapham Sect: such as the Church Missionary Society, the Anti-Slavery League, the African Society, the Society for the Conversion of the Jews. Pious people, many of whom were also lively and intelligent, came up for the meetings from all over England, followed the reports and discussions, took part in the voting and contributed to the collections. For some, the Week also acquired the aspect of a Dramatic Festival: they loved the crowds, the scenes on the platform and in the audience. Hannah More herself had written plays in her day, and must have enjoyed Marianne’s vivid reports on the proceedings.

Let us begin with the C.M.S. meeting of 1820. ‘Every year the meetings increase in seriousness and talent’, the girl remarks; also such a crowd, exceeding she should think ‘the crush room of an opera in spight of tickets and barriers’, Grants and Noels and Babingtons and multitudes of the excellent of the earth around her, Mr Wilberforce perched on a chair with Lord Calthorpe, the Bishop of Gloucester clinging to Lord Jocelyn on another, Sir Robert Inglis and Mr Cunningham sharing a third. The report was however ‘very long’, and Zachary Macaulay did not think it very judicious; he sat on some steps.

After the report had been read a Mr Harrington who had spent many years in India warned the audience not to expect too much success there; upon which up leapt Mr Wilberforce to counteract him crying ‘We know nothing of despondency here, we proceed as the word of God directs us, we must, we can, we will, we ought, we shall prosper.’ There was wild enthusiasm, indeed the whole meeting took the form of a personal tribute to the great abolitionist. Bishop Jebb of Limerick spoke—he was increasingly drawn into Clapham concerns—also Lords Calthorpe and Jocelyn, and a wild Irishman ‘too light but very entertaining’, and a gentlemanly speaker who ‘seemed almost too much elevated to be able to say much’. Finally Admiral Lord Gambier, G.C.B., rose to close the proceedings, and he is one of her chief comic characters:

In the 1822 Week ‘many good May faces’ were to be seen at the C.M.S. Would that some spirit of the air could have wafted Mrs Hannah More to them on his wings! And there was a ‘beautiful story’ in the Report of a slave ship landed again in Africa, and the reunion of relatives and friends who thought they were parted for ever: ‘Oh Massa! my brother—my sister—my wife—my countryman . . .’, and Mr Wilberforce, improving on this, built such a picture of the Celestial City where reunion shall be general and eternal that the audience was tranced and could not return to the world. They were recalled by Mr Fowell Buxton’s ‘rattling peal of thunder’: he reminded subscribers that they gave ‘at the utmost two and forty shillings a year amongst a hundred thousand heathens. The end of this reasoning appeared to be that one half of us should leave our bonnets and pelisses on the plate and the other half go out as Missionaries. However it took the taste of the Meeting’. Pious, but as always observant, she went on to a Soirée at Lady Teignmouth’s, ‘called by the prophane All Saints Day’. Later in the week she attended ‘the Jews on the Friday, where as usual the bit is wanted more than the spur. I really think Lewis Way will go mad’. She could not stand or understand emotionalism. But she enjoyed the singing by converted Jewish children of ‘Unto us a Son is born’. And she intended to go to the ‘African’: otherwise ‘I don’t think I shall leave our sweet roses and nightingales, which are now delicious’.

After that the tempo increases. It was at the 1824 meeting that Tom Macaulay leapt into fame. It was convened by the Anti-Slavery Society, whose President, the Duke of Gloucester, was in the chair, and the platform was full of notables. The occasion was of national importance. A Methodist missionary in Demarara, a Mr Smith, had been wrongfully accused of causing disaffection among the negroes, he had been convicted of sedition by a court-martial, and he had died in prison of ill-treatment. Wilberforce had raised the disgraceful case in the House of Commons, where no one had attempted to justify the trial, but it had been argued that Mr Smith would have fared even worse if he had been tried by a jury of planters. The argument is disquietingly modern. One can hear it being employed today wherever racial liberty is in retreat. Young Macaulay made hay of it, with a pitch-fork already substantial, and, not averse to the arts of rhetoric, he referred to Mr Smith’s widow, who was present, and brought the house down by his pathos:

Throughout Tom Macaulay’s speech, exclamations of ‘capital’ and ‘wonderful’ had proceeded from Wilberforce, and when it was over he addressed himself with his usual felicity to Zachary Macaulay, ‘who may be called away like Philip before the battle is won, but he has left an Alexander who will triumph’. The whole meeting was profoundly moved; the ageing heroes who had fought the long war for Abolition saw their labours crowned and conserved by the boy who had been bred among them, and as for poor Mrs Smith—if any thing could console her for the loss of a husband it must be this.

The friendship of the Thorntons with their brilliant contemporary endured, but did not mature. He moved into bigger, busier circles. The following letter shows him getting a bit above himself.

She remained intimate with two of the Macaulay girls, Fanny and Hannah (afterwards Lady Trevelyan); and through the Trevelyans a family friendship has persisted, much to my own advantage.

Of the May Meetings of 1825 she has much to say. The Movement was now moving into troubled waters, Wilberforce was too frail to attend, and the news of his abstention flung the Anti-Slavery Society into hysterical grief. Uncle Dan Sykes wept so much that he had to leave the platform and hide behind it, stern Mr Stephen collapsed, young William Wilberforce when invited to say a few words on behalf of his father, burst into tears. The old man was however well enough to call down at Battersea Rise and to derive pensive pleasure from the haunts of his youth.

Up in London pandemonium developed. The meetings had become fashionable and were attended by persons who were trying to advertise themselves. Edward Irving the preacher talked constantly. And there were religious polemics. There was trouble over the Apocrypha. And foolish Protestants would attack the Catholics, and the Catholics went for them hammer and tongs, and in came all the griefs of Ireland. Marianne was distressed but entertained, and gives a gay account of the trials of Lord Gambier in the Hibernian Hall: there had been rows other years but never as noisy as this.

He allowed the meeting to run on unchecked, and some imprudent Protestant clergy to become abusive; ‘if he does not stop this we shall have a breeze’ remarked Marianne to the Dean of Salisbury, and how right she was. A buzz from the back, and a little man screamed that he ‘would be heard’, upon which the walls nearly came down, most of the audience bellowing ‘Chair, chair’ but a few shouted ‘Fair play, let the Catholic have his turn, let Ireland be heard’. Amidst loud encouragement Lord Gambier managed to get his motion passed, but was then so ill advised as to call upon a Mr Pope to address the company.

Mr Pope was followed by Edward Irving, who shook his staff at both parties, scolded them right and left, and was so violent and incoherent that nobody had any idea what he was saying; ‘after this most parties seemed to think the meeting had better be dissolved, and so it was’. But it was not the end of Irving. At another meeting of the season he managed to involve Lord Gambier in play-acting on the platform. Irving had been intoxicated by praise (‘brother beloved in the Lord’) and by indiscriminate head shaking, and ended his rambling speech by declaring that silver and gold had he none, not a farthing belonged to him, but he would present the Society with a treasure given him by his brother—his watch.

The excitement over the admiral’s epigram was terrific, the collection-plates were full of the rings and brooches of ‘silly women’ (it is interesting to find the expression in such early use), Irving’s watch was put up for auction and redeemed at a tremendous price. ‘The genius of Merry Andrewism’ pervaded most of the week, she thought. And as for ‘The Jews on the Friday’ they surpassed themselves. They were the climax. Mr Lewis Way ‘ranted and raved’. Mr Cunningham disputed with Sir Thomas Baring, and then apologised and told the audience that Sir Thomas was so good-natured that he was called in India good-natured Tom. Mr Lewis Way then rose again holding a manuscript in his hand. He had intended to publish it, but the Bishop of Lichfield had so taken the gall out of his heart, that instead of publishing it he meant to tear it, ‘and so on the platform he tore it leaf from leaf and stamped and danced upon it’. Lord Gambier was dazed. Then Irving functioned, and the meeting was closed by a famous Calvinist, Mr Macneil. He said ‘he hoped everyone would go home and forget all that had passed, for it has not pleased the Lord to vouchsafe to any of his servants to speak that which was suitable on that day’. Sir Robert Inglis agreed with Mr Macneil, and vowed it was ‘the last exposé of the kind he would ever witness’. Sir Thomas Acland said ‘Man will be a charlatan to the end of time’. Marianne trusted he would lose it in eternity: the scene had been ‘very amusing to we good people who do not go to plays but seriously speaking it is sad to see such tricks played before high Heaven’. There were further May Meetings but the Jews on that Friday were the last that she records. She, or her advisers, had been shocked.

But she had not done with Edward Irving. That strange personality fascinated her. She had to admit his charm and originality and sporadic sincerity. Later on (1832), when he had founded the Irvingite Church, she went to one of its services and reported to Miss Louisa Inglis on the disquieting phenomenon of the Tongues.

The letter then takes an unexpected turn, and Harriet Melville—her pleasant cousin whom we met at lunch at the bank—comes painfully into the picture.

Operation for cancer without an anaesthetic? It sounds like it. The surgical sufferings of those days are unthinkable. Shortly after the above letter was written Harriet Melville died.

To revert to the subject of meetings. ‘A very nice meeting for Baby Schools’ falls into a pleasanter category and reminds us of her constant interest in infant education. Under the influence of her parents and of Hannah More, she had tried to teach poor children while she herself was only a child, she had gone into primitive schools of the early century and helped. It was her duty and it was also a pleasure. She had never been afraid of the poor, and she had too much faith in human nature to foresee that education might be a hindrance to happiness.

was her unalterable belief.

This particular meeting was what is called an ‘important one’, and was expected by its organisers to usher in the millennium. Statesmen, men of business, of money, and of war were all in conclave, trying to make ‘the lives of these little animalculae a little happier’. Wilberforce was there, speaking about babies exquisitely. Irving was of course there; in the course of his eloquence he turned to Lord Brougham and said ‘Except you become as a little child you shall in no wise enter into the Kingdom of Heaven’ which caused that dubious statesman to draw back his chair and look uncomfortable. The meeting was amusing, it was even impressive, but Marianne’s thoughts strayed from it to the children themselves: how were they going to benefit when these important persons had dispersed? What in particular about the ‘under fives’? And her letter ends with a touching reference—more touching than she realises—to her own ‘babyising’ in Clapham parish, to the two ‘settlements’ she and her sisters have organised, to the ‘mattress at one corner’ where the very little ones rest in the middle of the day while the bigger ones sing them to sleep, to the ‘self-supporting school’, where sixty babies at 2d. a head a week paid the mistress’s salary, to the school-treat where a little boy broke his arm, ‘but he had better keep on at school’ said his mother: ‘if he stays at home he may break the other one’. It was to realities and simplicities like these that her mind reverted; she enjoyed meeting eminent people, she accepted the structure of society, but she concentrated on the individual Clapham babies whom she hoped to help.

To Hannah More, July 24th, 1824:

She kept in touch with Wilberforce behind the scenes, and has described visits which she paid him in his retirement. The date of her first visit is not recorded: about 1820. He is at Tonbridge: i.e., Tunbridge Wells.

She and Wilberforce proceeded to deplore ‘this Apocrypha business in the Bible Society’. It was one of the many controversies which disturbed and enlivened the May Meetings, and the facts about it are not easy to convey. In its simplest form it concerned the insertion (or the omission) of the Apocrypha in Bibles issued by societies on the continent which were affiliated to the parent Society in London. But one must go further than that. It linked on to a regrettable case known as the ‘Strasburg Preface’, when the Strasburg committee had tacked an introduction of their own on to a Bible for which the London committee had paid, and had thus laid themselves open to charges of Popery, Infidelity, and Rationalism. Might not similar charges be brought or be more readily brought if the Apocrypha was included? Some thought so, others thought not. No one came to a conclusion more sensible than Marianne’s:

She goes on to suggest—and not humorously—that ‘all ladies should side with the gentlemen among whom they live’: this would reduce public controversy, which is seldom vital, and avoid domestic controversy, and she is relieved that all the gentlemen she knows (except Zachary Macaulay) are on the same side over the Apocrypha; i.e., put the Apocrypha in.

Presently the Wilberforces made their move to Highwood and to ‘a state more faintly resembling repose’, though in 1826 she found the traditional confusion there—many dinner-bells ringing but no dinner, dissenting ministers ringing the door bell because they heard the dinner bells, the house a collection of rabbit hutches containing two married sons and their families, the blind secretary and his family, the deaf butler and his, and the secretary who could see could not find a book which was required or even feel that it was his duty to find it. In the fields attached to the property the eldest son was trying to become a dairy farmer: ‘I wish William would keep company with his father instead of his cows. It would be quite as profitable and much more agreeable.’

To her sister Henrietta (1828):

In a passage of her ‘Recollections’ which refers to this period, she comments on the family with some bitterness: she had never liked Mrs Wilberforce, and perhaps she was jealous of her:

And how right she proved about the cows. ‘You have heard of Mr Wilberforce’s losses through William’s cowkeeping’, she remarks in 1831, ‘and that he is obliged to leave Highwood. He is behaving beautifully on it they all say, as one might be so certain he would. He comes to us with his train next week’. He died two years later. In 1835 his son Robert began to write his life, aided by his son Samuel.

‘Dull Robert’ and ‘Soapy Sam’ (as he was called when he became Bishop of Oxford) would no doubt do their best, and she tries not to blame them:

She has refused to help the sons with any reminiscence for ‘those rapid turns in conversation which seemed so exquisite would evaporate if they were written down! Only Boswell has preserved them—perhaps because he places the whole picture before us instead of an insulated sentence . . . Have you looked at Coleridge’ Table Talks? How wretchedly he reads! . . . Robert Hall’s “on dits” are equally poor.’ But will not Patty Smith look through her own papers and contribute something? ‘I should feel then as if I had thrown my stone upon the heap that will be his monument.’

Her beloved Hannah More was threatened by a similar fate. She too had had to leave her home in old age—the reason in her case being dishonest servants. She too was menaced by one of those Lives that might be called Deaths.

She had lost her two best friends, and she felt they would also be lost to posterity through incompetent recording and stupid bowdlerising. Anyone who has known and loved a public figure privately will understand her feeling of helplessness.

5
The Marriages

1833 brought changes even more important than the deaths of William Wilberforce and Hannah More. The marrying started.

It started with the strange affair between my grandfather and my grandmother. He had long frequented the house and been universally liked, and when Bishop Jebb’s health declined they both quitted Ireland and settled at Wandsworth to be near their good friends. All went well until he wanted to marry Laura. There was instantly terrible trouble. Henry was shattered at the prospect of a change in the domestic economy; moreover as a man of substance he disapproved of this particular match; Mr Forster might be pious and personable, but he was poor. Money must marry money, as it had always done hitherto. He put every obstacle in their way, subjected them to interference, curtailed their correspondence, and managed to persuade himself that Mr Forster was persecuting his sister and snubbed him as follows:

This brought down upon him a counter rebuke from the Bishop, which it is a pleasure to quote.

The Rev. Charles Forster.
By George Richmond. 1833.

Meanwhile the Thornton sisters—that is to say Henrietta, Isabella and Sophia: Marianne and Lucy took no part—formed themselves into a committee and wrote constantly to their future brother-in-law, informing him of Laura’s state of mind and of his own prospects, warning him, encouraging him, giving him cause for caution or hope, transmitting messages provided they thought the messages suitable. He replied as constantly to them, he enjoyed their palpitating missives, and an atmosphere of transferred amorousness sprang up which I find inelegant. When Laura was away from them all on a visit, she found it possible to communicate directly with her lover, but her sisters and her brother and the Bishop and Nurse Hunter and the Inglises had between them got her so confused that what she wrote cannot have given him much comfort. She tells him she adores Battersea Rise and unless he gives her time the wrench at parting will be unbearable. ‘I know full well that I love this home too much. I fear that I idolise it, and I doubt not that infinite Wisdom has for this reason ordered that I should not spend the rest of my life in it.’ After this backhander she assures him that he has done all a man could towards convincing her that she might be happy elsewhere. It is a snubby letter, and the irreverent outsider may wonder why he did not defeat the intentions of Infinite Wisdom by breaking off the engagement. However lovers have warmth and tendernesses which do not go into words and are often the contrary of words, and the two were assuredly in love.

When the reluctant Henry consented, settlements were drawn up by him with foresight. My grandfather only possessed £1000, though he had reasonable expectations of a legacy from the Bishop. Henry compelled him to insure his life for £5000, the annual payments on which were made out of my grandmother’s income of £300 a year.

They were married on August 31st, 1833, in the church on Clapham Common and Henry was married at the same time and in the same place, as will be presently related. Most of the family were present at the double event; not Charles Thornton who was on holiday abroad and did not choose to return. He wrote Laura a significant letter:

After the ceremony Laura and her husband went off to live with the Bishop, who had had a paralytic stroke and required nursing. What a honeymoon! He died later in the year, and was buried in the Thornton Family Vault at the other Clapham church—St Paul’s. Amongst the bearers were the three Thornton brothers—Henry, Watson and Charles—and Sir Robert Inglis. Whether the Bishop deserved posthumous honour is doubtful, for he left a most disappointing will: he bequeathed my grandfather a pair of knee-buckles, and they were the very pair that my grandfather had previously given to him. Laura burst into laughter at the news and the more she looked at her brother’s face the more she laughed. The buckles lie beside me as I sit chronicling the disaster—an unobtrusive pair in a wooden case. They are said to be of gold but do not look it, and to have been worn by the Duke of York but do not show it. With them came one hundred volumes from the Bishop’s library.^[11]

Laura Thornton (Mrs Charles Forster).
By George Richmond. 1833.

The dismay of the prudent and honourable Thorntons may be imagined. This is what came of quitting the family circle and marrying an Irishman! Poor Laura already on the rocks! The Bishop had never paid his chaplain one penny of salary throughout his years of service: they were soulmates with a single purse, and it might have been supposed that the equivalent of the salary would have been bequeathed. But the Bishop’s mind did not work that way. Nor indeed did my grandfather’s. He felt not the slightest rancour for the shabby way he had been treated and was sure that things would turn out all right. They did, more or less. His friend the Archbishop of Canterbury (Howley) appointed him to Ash, a living in Kent worth £150 a year, and there one of his earliest problems was the insertion of a full-length statue of his friend into the parish church. The churchwardens objected—what was a Bishop of Limerick to them?—but my grandfather had an iron will and carried all before him. It was not until thirty years later, when he was rector elsewhere, that the statue, which was of plaster, came to roost. The then incumbent of Ash wanted to remove it, to make room for the organ. This threw my grandfather into a sacred fury. He appealed to the Archbishop of Canterbury, high heavens rang, and he would not be appeased by the offer of the statue to his present church. ‘They are all combined against me’ he cried. Marianne pointed out that his only real enemy was the Rector of Ash, which caused him to thunder ‘You are right, Marianne, he is alone in his iniquity.’ The statue finally found a resting place in the Crystal Palace, and there an irreverent nephew encountered it and flung up his cap with cries of ‘Cheers for the Blessed Bishop’.

The new living was at Stisted in Essex (£900 a year) and there my grandparents spent the rest of their lives. They produced ten children: John Jebb (called after the Bishop), Charley, Henry, Laura (who did much to preserve the Thornton tradition), Doanie, Ella, Edith, Eddie (my father), Arthur, and Willie. There too my grandfather produced ten books: a Life of Bishop Jebb, the Letters of Bishop Jebb, a Historical Geography of Arabia, Discourses on Scripture History, Mohammedanism Unveiled, One Primaeval Language, The Three Heavenly Witnesses, Six Preacher Sermons, a Commentary on the Epistle to the Hebrews and another on the Rosetta Stone which remains in manuscript. The Forsters were naturally not well off. Marianne became their chief financial supporter and Laura’s confidante. The sisters wrote to each other continually during the next thirty years: babies, illnesses, church repairs, illnesses, babies, parcels, when can you all come, when shall I come. The Forsters came often to Battersea Rise and Laura adored it, but my grandfather never went down there as well as he had in his bachelorhood, and as the years passed he became less charming and more excitable.

To return to Henry. The same day that Laura married, and in the same church, he was united to Harriet Dealtry, the rector’s eldest daughter.

Dr Dealtry, a mathematician of distinction, had succeeded the beloved John Venn at Clapham in 1813. It was he who had prayed by the death bed of Henry Thornton the elder, and he was much esteemed for his piety and sound doctrine, his parish work, his activity at May Meetings and School Feasts, and he and his wife frequently figure in Sir Robert’s Dinner Lists. But he does not occur in Marianne’s ‘Recollections’ and the references to him in her letters are incidental. It does not seem as if the two families were intimate. Harriet Dealtry’s arrival brought intimacy of a sort, and for seven years she and her sisters-in-law lived under the same roof. But here again references are infrequent—until indeed Harriet became ill, when there is affectionate concern. She was a gentle friendly creature, ill suited to be mistress of a large household, she bore her husband two daughters and a son, and having fulfilled her duties to that extent she died—died in a little upstairs dressing room which was always associated with her quiet sojourn. Henry bore her decease phlegmatically; it was observed that he interrupted his usual routine as little as possible. His marriage may also have been phlegmatic, he may have taken her to wife because he felt that the charmed circle of his youth had been broken by the defection of Laura.

The three children certainly brought changes, and pleasant ones. Marianne and Isabella enjoyed being aunts, Nurse Hunter, still in action, welcomed the arrival of a new generation in her nursery.

Another consequence of Henry’s marriage had been the withdrawal of the Inglises. It was thought that they might have stayed on if pressed, but he made no attempt to press them and they moved off to their Milton Bryan estate and to their Bedford Square house. They had reigned at Battersea Rise for twenty years. If the rule of her parents had been Marianne’s golden age, the Inglises represented the silver age for her. The Age of Iron had not yet revealed its contours.

Sophia was the next to go. She married in 1834. Hers was the grand match, for her husband, John Melville, had the prospect of a title. Later in the century he became Earl of Leven and Melville, and Aunt Sophy, whom I can just remember, died every inch a countess. He had further qualification. He was well off, and had been a staunch friend to Henry in the great financial crisis. He was one of the young partners who had given the pleasant luncheon party at Birchin Lane. Who could have been more suitable! Yet Henry resented Sophia’s marriage far more than Laura’s. I have never found out why. Perhaps he disliked the consanguinity: John and Sophia were first cousins. Perhaps he disliked the cousinship between Sophia and John’s first wife, Harriet, who had been one of the Samuel Thorntons. Perhaps—and this is the official version—he was so fond of his sisters that he was always upset when they quitted his roof. He certainly made it difficult for Sophia to return to it. So preposterous was his behaviour that he alienated her.

Henrietta was the next to go. Her choice was Richard Synnot, the son of an Irish Knight. Henry was grumpy as usual, and Marianne thus expressed herself to Patty Smith:

They married in 1836, and judging by a water colour Henrietta made of Richard, he retained all his beauty. But his health deteriorated and five years later he died. Shortly before that event Marianne visited them, and took part in an ominous discussion on the subject of the guardianship of the two children. Their Uncle Henry—the obvious person—was rejected by the Synnots as unsuitable. The dying man thought that Henry would just do, that he had improved, that there was just sufficient agreement in religious outlook, but Henrietta, her baby-girl in her lap, cried ‘No! Think of this poor little thing in a love affair, how he will use her!!’

So, as regards Henrietta also, Henry proved inadequate. There was no open break, and she rented a small house at Clapham so that her children might enjoy Battersea Rise. The boy, Inglis, took his first name from Sir Robert Inglis, his godfather. The girl was called Henrietta after her mother. They were charming and unusual children, and much will be heard of them in the future.

After Henrietta, Charles. In 1837—in orders himself—he married a Miss Harrison whose brother was a clergyman. All was appropriate here, but in less than two years he and his wife both died.

Watson married Miss Frances Webb in 1842.

That almost concludes the marriages. The library of Henrietta’s picture has been rapidly depopulated.

Why did Marianne herself not marry? In all the letters and documents I have examined there is not one hint of an affair, not the shadow of a name. When her parents died she was young, good-looking, good-natured, amusing, intelligent and practical, she enjoyed the company of men and frequented suitable society, she had some money, and she was under no obligation to stay at home, for her brothers and sisters were in the competent hands of the Inglises. One would have expected her to find a husband during the next ten years, or at any rate after her brother’s marriage, but she passes into spinsterhood without regret. She was certainly in love with the house, like them all, and she was devoted to Henry, particularly since the Bank crisis which he had allowed her to share with him, and she was deeply devoted to Wilberforce, her father’s friend. Here is acceptable explanation of the sublimated type. Still I’m puzzled and my frustration would amuse her, for she did not approve of inquisitiveness, and enjoyed thwarting it.

After the death of Henry’s wife in 1840, life went on quietly. The widower drove up in his gig every morning to the Bank, wearing his stove-pipe hat, returned in the evening tired, and disinclined for company. He adored his children, and his sisters did what they could to make the house comfortable for him. Marianne was technically in charge, but she had a rival in the authoritative Isabella. (Lucy died in 1844.) Isabella annexed Harti the elder girl and the little son, as the more important infants; Marianne adopted the frail Emmy. A mild schism arose which was observed by the sharp eyes of another little girl, the younger Laura Forster, and recorded in later years by her pleasant pen. Copying Marianne (Laura was rather a copy-cat), she too wrote her ‘Recollections’ and the comedy of the two rival aunts has been preserved. They used the Lawn as a drawing-room when the weather was fine and held their respective courts there: carpet and table and sofa and easy chairs were placed under the shade of the tulip-tree. Further off was a chestnut tree and a hammock. Next door were the Trevelyans who came clambering over the wall as the Macaulays had before them. Early morning was Aunt Marianne’s hour: at 7.30 all the children converged on her large and sunny bedroom, over the library, and there she spun them stories about ‘a wonderful and wicked Mother Bell on the spur of the moment’, and if she showed a tendency to go to sleep they punched her. Mother Bell stole children, robbed churches, went down coal mines and among gipsies and to the holds of ships and grew so exhausting to her creator that she had to be killed.

When the children descended to morning prayers there were other pleasures. For Henry Thornton (contrary to one’s expectations) was most enlightened on the subject of fire. Before prayers began he would burn a lump of sugar for each child with a red-hot poker, burn it exactly as much as the child directed and no more, and leave it to cool while devotions proceeded. If the child fidgeted during prayers it was supposed not to get its sugar. He would also sit upon a burning newspaper—an accomplishment he retained till the end of his life:

The vision of that substantial extinguisher descending cheers me, the sun comes into the library again, the trees wave freshly on the lawn, tiny cousins collide and jump . . .

Battersea Rise from the garden.
By Lucy Thornton. About 1825.

Then there was a Christmas party, recalling the Philosophic Fête given nearly half a century earlier. Though this time it was an Artistic Fête. Mr Richmond came and arranged Tableaux. Isabella had organised a Tub and a Tree and threw cold water on the Tableaux, said they would bore the children and suggested acting instead. Acting! the sinful word sent Marianne flying over the wall to consult Lady Trevelyan, who was duly horrified. Acting was prevented and Tableaux went forward—Red Ridinghood with and without the Wolf, the Little Princes in the Tower, etc. An upstairs door was taken off its hinges by clever Mr Richmond and Mr Severne, a dining-room picture-frame nailed over the aperture, black gauze stretched over it, 18 wax candles and 3 lamps fixed behind, ‘and blue calico beyond all for the sky’. The audience filed past the entrance—over a hundred of them. ‘Some of the children screamed and some of them sobbed, but they would have looked at it all night.’ Marianne had ‘never supposed Tableaux would be so lovely’. I remember thinking them lovely half a century later, in my own childhood. What trouble must have been expended in draping and posing the loveliness! And how irrevocably it disappeared.

This pleasant show was soon followed by another: by the marriage of Isabella Thornton to Archdeacon Harrison. ‘And were you ever so amused, and were you ever so pleased. Ben and Bella at last!’ The Archdeacon was a dear little man with a squint who had been hanging around for some time, but no one was sure whether he would come to the point or whether Isabella would accept any one so small. All the day he had been particularly uproarious, had mimicked a Canon singing, had ventured on giving an opinion, which he was not prone to do, and at night when Marianne’s hair was being brushed and her feet were already in hot water for bed the news arrived and she had to go down. Nurse Hunter was called down too. ‘What, for our precious Miss Isabella, Oh thank God what a blessing,’ she cried. ‘Why its just what we’ve all been longing for, he’s got a beautiful bit of money, and he’s a kind master, and Miss Isabella she’ll have children of her own and how happy she’ll be.’ Henry said ‘Yes Nurse, if I could but take four years off her age and add four inches to his height there would be nothing further to be done.—What does that matter he’s got plenty to keep her . . .’

Isabella exulted. At the age of forty-five she was leaving a dubious and divided empire to queen it in The Precincts, Canterbury. In a rather skittish letter she exposed her joy to Laura:

I was taken to visit Aunt Isabella once when she was a very old lady. She had outlived the Archdeacon and had left Canterbury, and was living in the Bedford Square house the Inglises left her. She had never ‘taken me on’—there was still this partitioning of nephews and nieces amongst the aunts, and I ‘belonged’ to Marianne. So the visit was a formal one. I remember the elegant room and the fire between the extending fire-screens and my mother saying afterwards that all had gone well.

Isabella’s marriage was followed by a melancholy event—the death of beloved Nurse Hunter. Earlier in this biography I undertook not to describe illness and death at any length, and I have kept my promise in the cases of Marianne’s mother, William Wilberforce, Hannah More, Bishop Jebb, Harriet Melville, Charles Thornton, Mrs Charles Thornton, Richard Synnot, Harriet Thornton and Lucy Thornton. In the case of Nurse Hunter I shall break my promise, and quote what Marianne has to say. She has more to say than we may care to hear, but Nurse’s case is special and her relation to her employers interesting. Only now do we learn that she had a son or that she was married, for presumably she was married. Hitherto she has appeared as a sexless emanation of Battersea Rise with no existence outside it.

The letter describing her collapse was written to Henrietta Synnot, immediately after it occurred. It runs to eighteen pages. Similar letters went to Sophia, Laura and Miss Louisa Inglis. Henry more briefly informed Watson, Sir Robert, and Mr Harrison the Butler. It is addressed from Regency House, Brighton, where they had taken lodgings for a holiday.

I have after all cut several pages out of the above, and there may even be further pages of it, for it ends without signature. The energy expended in writing it is amazing, and she was writing letters of similar diffuseness throughout her life.

With Nurse’s death, the last of the ancient pillars falls, the house garnishes itself ominously for change, and Marianne’s sisterhood nears its final chapter. 1815-1852 has been a long period and a rich one, and as I look back on it I see many odds and ends that I have omitted. For instance I have never described the visit she and Lady Inglis paid to the exiled Queen of Hayti: the queen and her daughters all so black and in such deep mourning that it was difficult to distinguish anyone from anything, but Mlle Améthyste spoke excellent French. I have never described how she stumbled upon Olney and upon Cowper’s barber, who burst into tears because her grandfather, John Thornton, had preserved him from starvation in the winter of 1782; or how, proceeding from Olney to Weston Underwood, she wandered about and read the poet’s letters until she felt he was with her. Or the mad dog on Clapham Common that bit a Thornton—though perhaps it was not really mad. Or her attempt—finally successful—at planting a Miss Martin’s book Three Years’ Residence in Italy on a publisher. Nor have I quoted—where could I have worked them in?—fascinating scraps such as: ‘Mr Arkwright has left Mrs Eden £14,000. The moment Mr Eden heard it he rushed to town and bought her a little brougham with the ugliest horse in England for £150.’

She is so lively and so sociable that one is in danger of becoming desultory about her, and losing the main stream of her domestic life. I will return to it in a moment. Before I do so, there are two episodes which merit special mention. They are the Guildhall Banquet and the Hereford Tea. They took place in the same year—1842.

The Banquet will not detain us long. She went to it with the Macaulays. Her reactions were mainly frivolous, though she was overwhelmed by the artificial lighting.

The company were inferior to the decorations:

The Hereford Tea letter once had much family prestige. It was read aloud to me as a boy and I was told that it was the amusingest letter Marianne ever wrote. I would not advance that claim for it. It suffers from volubility, like much of her earlier writing. Later on her style strengthened. Still it manages to give a picture of a society which was new to her and would have remained unknown to us. It plunges us for a day into the company of lower-middle-class youths in Hereford. Where else could we take such a plunge?

She was staying with the Venns there, having come on to them from her brother Watson’s. They were the son and the daughter of the former rector of Clapham. John Venn had taken orders like his father, had become vicar of St. Peter’s, Hereford, and was a great success there, as the letter will evince. He had worked for and with the townspeople, and, by founding the Hereford Society for aiding the Industrious, had enabled the poor to get their corn ground cheaply, to rent allotments, to buy coal at 6d. a cwt. He had warmth and charm and personality, and, though now quite bald, had been very good-looking in his youth. His sister Emilia kept house for him. She was a talkative and tirelessly amusing spinster, also popular: we have met her in passing at Battersea Rise. The pair had managed to combine their peculiarly virulent evangelicalism with jollification and joy; this Tea was their annual apotheosis.

From Marianne to Louisa Inglis and to her sister Henrietta, who are together at Milton:

To return to the main stream.

I have said scarcely anything yet about Stisted. Marianne was constantly staying at the Rectory. Both Isabella and Sophia were generous over money matters, but it was she who worked for the Forsters with her hands and tried to tidy up the confusion into which they were sinking. Sometimes she is ashamed of her ‘single blessedness’ when she thinks of ‘poor dear Laura 20 times iller than I am rushing about after her 10 children and her groaning husband and crying maids and low-sperritted governesses’. At other times she can do nothing but laugh.

It was a strange establishment. My Forster grandparents died long before I was born, and—perhaps because I never knew them—I find them unsympathetic. Immersed in the country, and deprived of the Bishop’s companionship, the Reverend Charles soon degenerated into a Hebrew Prophet who has nothing to prophesy about. He denounced, he exhorted, he pardoned. His sermon on the Fall of Paris was impressive rather than appropriate, and on other occasions he preached on the Errors of the Pelagians and on the Sinfulness of Hurrying from One Dissipation to Another. He was attentive to his flock, he alleviated suffering, and for this, and for the combating of Dissent and Popery, he had the full support of the Squire. Stisted was remote and rural. Parson and Squire ruled unchallenged, tenants who did not vote Tory were turned out, no policeman was ever seen, and my grandfather got a Sunday delivery of letters stopped. The official communication from the Post Office acceding to his request has been preserved; it is signed ‘Anthony Trollope’, and reminds us that we are by now not a thousand miles from Barsetshire.

He performed his duties conscientiously, but he had plenty of spare time, which he spent up in his study writing his books. They are worthless. He was not in touch with such Oriental scholarship as existed and his method was to accumulate such scraps of erudition as fitted in with his convictions, and to commend them forcefully. When, in his later life, breaths of the broader theology touched him he went nearly frantic: his pencil annotations on the margins of Essays and Reviews must be read to be believed. My grandmother was a very different character. She had a reputation amongst her sisters for unconventionality, but it was unconventionality of the helter-skelter type that flaps about in bonnet strings, puts babies to sleep in the bath, and forgets where they are. Her mind was completely conventional. Her letters are as long as Marianne’s and as unforced, but naturalness is not enough, and they are seldom worth reading. Poor woman; it is surprising that she had a mind at all, for most of her life was spent in bearing children, nursing them, and burying them. Seven out of the ten died. The rectory was—and still is—an attractive house. It stands on the higher ground, overlooking the valley of the Blackwater. Lower down is the Hall, its grounds now derelict. It is a gentle Tennysonian scene, entirely of the nineteenth century, for thanks to my grandfather’s zeal the church has been mercilessly restored. His family vault can be found in the churchyard, surrounded by a rusty railing, and a list of young names can still be deciphered on the covering-slab. Otherwise

To reach this questionable paradise, Marianne had to take a train to Braintree, where she was met for the eight-mile drive by an excited waggonette-load of children. The letter I have chosen for quotation was written by her in 1843. On arriving at the rectory she found Laura recovering from the birth of her sixth child, and expecting at any moment a visit from Mr Jebb (the Bishop’s nephew) and his wife.

The letter ends with the attempts of Miss Maber to act as Missis and Hostess in Laura’s absence—attempts which Marianne thwarts, ‘and I think she has seen through me’.

The children were happy enough in this country chaos and Laura the younger has written rose-coloured accounts of it in her ‘Recollections’. Since babies are in the air I shall permit myself to quote a Pre-Raphaelite passage describing the goffering of the baby’s caps.

On one occasion there was a Forster-Thornton reunion at Cambridge—that academic stronghold of evangelicalism. It was the Parliamentary Election of July 1847. Henry and Watson came up to record their university votes. Henry brought his two daughters, also Marianne, and he invited the Forsters from Stisted to be his guests. As parents of large families will, they brought an uninvited boy with them, and the party of eight had some difficulty in cramming itself into the Bull. All went well. My grandfather did not get too frantic when people differed from him politically, Henry was not too much irritated by my grandfather, and Marianne reports to Miss Louisa Inglis in the highest spirits.

By the late forties the Forster boys had began to go to school at the Charterhouse. It was then in its original quarters, only a few miles from Clapham, so they sometimes spent a weekend with their aunt. Marianne wrote Laura a nice rollicking report on young Charley who is ‘ten years older all at once, something so manly and bold and decided about him’. A dialogue is contrived: Marianne asks, Charley answers, and much pleasure must have been given at the rectory. Everything capital at school, strong tea like mama’s, excellent puddings and Tarts, no need to spend money on grub and tuck, but 10/- for the library such a capital library, papa would like it, yes Sunday books here, and they are some of the nicest, the monitors know which they are, and would not let us have any other on Sunday. Graver matters are then approached. Marianne: ‘Amongst so many I should fear there must be a good many bad boys.’ Charley: ‘Oh yes there are some very bad little fellows—I heard of one very shocking thing, that 2 boys made an agreement to smoke and drink?’—‘Where? At School?’—‘Oh no it would be impossible there, but as they went home at the holidays they settled it—but they were found out.’ ‘Don’t you ever hear bad words?’—‘Oh they wouldn’t like me to hear them for fear I should tell the monitors, but the new fellows do sometimes till they have been thrashed for it.’—‘Don’t the big boys sometimes teach the little ones bad words?’—‘Oh no they darent, you don’t know old Saunders, he’d flog a boy oh how he would flog them if he found it out, and through these monitors you see almost everything is found out.’ Etc.

The boys were always welcome at Battersea Rise. On one occasion the pious and silent J. J. was the innocent cause of much trouble. It was a children’s Christmas party and ‘I had already told Laura that I really could not promise there might not be a little dancing’ she tells Miss Inglis. J. J. was allowed by his father to come, but arrived accompanied by a prohibition against dancing—or rather by something far more tiresome than a prohibition: by a request that the matter should be discussed in full conclave, children as well as adults being present, and the sinfulness or non-sinfulness of dancing determined accordingly.

The more Marianne thinks about dancing the less harmful it seems; moreover Tom Macaulay has reminded her that when Lord Teignmouth gave the Twelfth Night Party in their childhood^[13] ‘Aunt Robert danced with old Mr Luttrell’, and if Aunt Robert who thought nearly everything wrong had danced, how could it be wrong? Besides—what was one to do when the children wanted it so much?

How it ended I do not know, but they certainly danced.

She was excellent with boys, and maintained that nice balance between equality and inequality which is so necessary for grown-ups who would stand well with them. She was excellent with girls also—not one of the spinsters who concentrate on a single sex. She enjoyed youth, and never forgot that she and her brothers and sisters had once all been young.

By the middle of the century she possessed about twenty nephews and nieces. It was for them that she was to compose her ‘Recollections’, and in the August of 1851 she took her first consignment of them abroad. Travel was part of the family tradition: her father had stood close to Marie Antoinette, she had gone to France after the fall of Napoleon and now it was the turn of the younger generation.

Sir Robert and Lady Inglis should have led the expedition, but got no further than Boulogne, because a stone had been thrown through the window of the train and injured Lady Inglis’ eye. Marianne went on with Henrietta and four children—the two Synnots, and J. J. and Laura Forster the younger. Amiens was their first stop: in the Cathedral was a military band, an immense and frightful golden statue of the Virgin, and a dressed-up lamb which made everyone laugh. ‘I was glad the children were there’ she tells Sir Robert, ‘for they could not have had a better display both of the splendour and the absurdity of the Roman Catholic religion.’ An old French woman who was kissing a relic of John the Baptist was asked by the party who he was: ‘je ne saurais vous dire Madame, mais je crois il était un des pères de l’église’ was her reply. Night brought further excitement, for a house close to the hotel caught fire, pails of water were passed, hundreds of soldiers rushed by screaming, and little Inglis Synnot dressed in a sheet harangued the French from the balcony in his personal French. ‘It was such a curious sight, I am glad if it were to be that I saw it.’

Paris was reached next day. A hotel in the Rue St Honoré provided vast apartments but no hot water and only pie dishes to wash in. Pleasure persisted, and they sat till 9.0 in the Tuileries Gardens, the two sisters moralising on the changes that had happened since last they were there, ‘and the children chasing each other like butterflies’. Next day they went to St Denis and saw its tombs under the guidance of an old Bourbonist who hoped that Louis Napoleon (then President) would soon be sent packing. The church was ‘as good as pages of French history for the children, and the liberté and égalité which meets them at every turn is a proof, as we told Inglis, of the necessity of some rule and order amongst boys and men’. Moreover the French were discovered, or rather rediscovered, to be untruthful, and not to mind being found out. Still the food was delicious, good dinners, ices and coffee, beignets de pêches, interesting and amusing sights everywhere. All her old love rushes back. ‘I am much struck with Paris and I suppose I had forgotten what an interesting city it is. It is not the fine buildings, though the Place de la Concorde which is new is splendid, but the picturesque air of the old houses and the incessant variety in their forms and in the shadows that slant across the high roofs, make the mere driving through the streets a pleasure to me.’ And although their visit was so short she had the energy to shift from their gloomy hotel into the very hotel where she had been with the Dan Sykes in 1816, she got the very same room and slept in the same bed and established the continuity she longed for. The past of thirty-five years ago had been linked to the present, and the present would be linked to the future through the four children on whose account the outing had been devised.

To conclude this period, I must refer to her philanthropic activities—the full development of which comes later. Since Isabella’s marriage she was the only sister living at Battersea Rise. Nurse Hunter was no more, and much as she loved her widowed brother and her nieces, she was beginning to find certain aspects of the old home unsatisfactory. She looked outside it more—helped people, was interested in them, enjoyed herself with them and through them—and perhaps it is at this time that the seeds of interference (that besetting Thorntonian fault) were sown. The seeds germinated slowly and they never produced a Upas Tree.

I will paraphrase a typical letter of the period: to Lady Inglis in 1851.

It is largely occupied with the problem of Mrs Elwes. Lady Ellis, a very good woman with a Wesleyan twang, kept an authorised establishment for the mentally unsound, and maintained that one of her inmates, Mrs Elwes, was perfectly fit to be at large. Marianne herself was not so sanguine: still she had given Lady Ellis an ‘enormous load of documents’ on the case, together with much advice: Mr Barnard, concerned with lunatics, was to be avoided; Lady Parke was to be written to and consulted whether Mrs Elwes should write to the Chancellor. Could Sir Robert Inglis help? Could, as Lady Ellis hoped, a lady and gentleman be found who would take Mrs Elwes for three months to Italy on payment of their expenses, together with a good courier and a confidential maid? ‘I would almost answer for it—as far as I can answer for anything in this world—that she would return completely recovered’ had been Lady Ellis’ opinion.

The subject of Lady Ellis and Mrs Elwes then disappears into the darkness with Carlylean completeness though without Carlylean crackle, and the letter goes on to the subject of Willingale. This was simpler. Willingale, an excellent woman with an imperfect character, had been successfully placed as housekeeper to the Governor of the new Prison on Brixton Common: £30 a year, all found, and no untruths told about her; ‘I advised her not to send anyone to me as I must tell all I knew, and though I did not think the worse of her other people would.’

Willingale follows Lady Ellis and Mrs Elwes into oblivion, and now we spend ‘a very pleasant day at the Crystal Palace’ with the Venns, the Richmonds and my grandfather. All is animation. The Venns wanted to take everything back from the Exhibition to their parishioners at Hereford: ‘the hollow bricks first of course, and the dancing balls in the fountain would amuse very old people more than a cat and be less trouble, and the jumping bed would be good for heavy young sleepers, and bonnets made of strings should be wonderfully cool for Sierra Leone.’ While George Richmond ‘was in an ecstasy of delight at the beautiful lights and shadows, and at the graceful forms of so many objects, was worth more than a guinea an hour guide for pointing out beauties and said he should not sleep for a week’. The letter then discusses the chance of visiting the Exhibition at its ‘final close’. Special tickets would be required: once more could Sir Robert Inglis help?

In the midst of her activities my grandfather would moan and groan to her about his own. To Miss Louisa Inglis:

Thus cheerfully, thus usefully, did she fill up her time. I have however mentioned that Battersea Rise was becoming less satisfactory, and this statement must now be expanded.

6
Deceased Wife’s Sister

The generation to which Marianne belonged had now completed half a century without undergoing any special stress. There had been the ordinary stresses of illness and death, and there had been the Bank crisis which nearly ruined them. But the illnesses had been treated with affection and competence, the deaths signified no eternal separation, and as for poverty—had it come it would have found them cheerful, united and resourceful. One would have supposed that Fate could have no special trick in store for such a family. Yet a fantastic mishap was awaiting them, a contretemps which they could only regard as tragic, and it was consequently a tragedy.

After the death of Henry’s wife, Harriet, her younger sister Emily Dealtry (sometimes nicknamed Di) continued to frequent the house, and it was natural that she should do so for she helped to look after her nephew and her nieces, and Marianne or Isabella was there to chaperon her. She was willing to come, for her own home life was not comfortable since Dr Dealtry had died. Sometimes another sister came with her—Ba, a lively lass who made apple-pie beds and got smacked. The house became more cheerful, and Henry, who had always liked young people, found it pleasant to return to girlish chatter after a day’s work at the Bank. Only gradually did his sisters realise that Miss Dealtry was there permanently and that gossip had started. They did not know what to do. Passion and intrigue were no part of their tradition. Marianne behaved civilly to the girl indoors and did not answer her back when she was cheeky, which she now tended to be, but refused to accompany her into society. Isabella took a stronger line and refused to see her anywhere. On the rare occasions she came to Battersea Rise she announced her arrival beforehand and Emily had to hide. The situation became very awkward. The Dealtrys disliked it too, and mutterings were heard from Emily’s brother. Then the scandal exploded. Henry announced that he intended to marry Emily although she was his deceased wife’s sister, that he was going to get the Law altered in Parliament, and that until it was altered he and she would live abroad.

Much occurred that has not been recorded. The first news I can find is in a letter from Marianne to Patty Smith. It is probably written in 1850.

What a lovely letter! Marianne is a sincere Christian with high moral principles, she has suffered from Miss Dealtry personally. Yet she can write ‘not a sin but a shame’, and ‘should the law be altered probably the next generation will wonder at our scruples’. We do wonder at them, but we wonder much more at the greatness of her character and the goodness of her heart. The rest of her family were ready to be hostile but she, with the most to bear, pardons and hopes to endure. I will quote the next paragraph of the letter—not because it is relevant but because it is not relevant: she turns at once from her domestic tragedy to her charitable schemes.

Henry Sykes Thornton.
About 1860.

The Bill to which she refers is the Marriage Bill of 1850, the second reading of which was introduced on Feb. 7th, by Mr Wortly, the Member for Bute. It sought to modify the Marriage Act of 1835, under which marriage with a Deceased Wife’s Sister carried civil as well as canonical disability. Henry Thornton spent vast sums in trying to get the 1850 Bill passed. Bitter must it have been to him to realise that Sir Robert Inglis was its leading opponent. Sir Robert, it is true, opposed every thing except science and art: he was against the Jews, the Catholics, the Dissenters, and now he denounced the Deceased Wife’s Sister Bill as ‘an alteration of the Law of the Land, an alteration of the Law of the Church, and an alteration if man could make it, of the Law of God’. He also asserted that it was against ‘the unanimous feeling of one sex in this country’, blandly ignoring the feelings of poor Miss Dealtry. The debates were solemn rather than acrimonious in tone: members quoted Latin to each other, even Greek, and the meaning of Leviticus xviii, verse 18, was deeply pondered. Some feared the Bill would break up the Home by transforming ‘beneficent aunts into hostile and partial stepmothers’. Others quoted petitions from clergymen who implored that the Bill might be passed, since many of their parishioners had already married their sisters-in-law, under the belief that this was the best thing for the children—and of course it was the best thing for the children. Such an argument did not convince the Bishops in the House of Lords who denounced thunderously: indeed the Lords were far more passionate than the Commons, as sometimes happens when the subject is sexual.

Far milder, much more tentative, were the painful proceedings at Battersea Rise. With what delicacy does Marianne open her mind to her brother.

Her next letter to him must be later, when his plans were shaping. It too breaks a silence. Although they were both of them still at Battersea Rise it is addressed to him up at the Bank.

Another lovely letter, and its reference to Miss Dealtry most courteous. Yet it irritated him—he found it too skilful perhaps—and he answers sharply:

The rest of the family now became active and combined against Henry and tried to weaken the bonds of affection that connected him with Marianne. Letters flew, and on May 12th the Rev. Charles Forster addressed a truly deplorable one to his wife. He was returning by train to his Essex rectory, and had purchased his 2nd class ticket at Liverpool Street Station when he was ‘touched’, and ‘ ’twas my Lord of Rochester’:

While in London my grandfather had seen Sir Robert Inglis and others, and they too were confident of victory. Parliament regarded the Bill with ‘abhorrence’: they all used the word ‘abhorrence’ and in Sir Robert’s opinion it was the only word that expressed the truth. The danger had been the sluggishness of the ‘right side’, who had slept and snored whilst evil got to a head, but they were awake now and as for Wortly the introducer, he was ‘a mere tool as much as is a child’ in the unscrupulous hands of Henry Thornton.

The letter then reverts to my Lord of Rochester, now in saintly mood.

My grandfather was notably courageous: thirty years before, as a young clergyman in Ireland, he had thrown himself ‘like a levin-bolt into our churchyard’ to prevent bloodshed between two rival gangs. But he does not appear to have admonished his formidable brother-in-law at Battersea Rise. He did however appeal to the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Henry Thornton had already got into touch with the Archbishop and this led to a good deal of confusion. For the Archbishop replied to each of them in prudent terms and each interpreted the reply in accordance with his own wishes. The confusion is reflected in the following letter from Marianne to Laura; I print it with its abbreviations—they indicate her agitation and haste. (The Mrs Whitmore of the opening sentence was a connection of the Dealtrys who was also a friend of the Thorntons and in agreement with their attitude, and consequently useful as a go-between.)

The rest of the letter is lost. With its flurried style and its spinsterish anxiety for something to be shown to someone so that it may be shown on to someone else, it is not typical of Marianne. As a rule she is detached and even amusing. As in the following letter to Sophia:

And she expounds her position to Sophia in long leisurely sentences, and explains why she has decided not to break off relations with their brother, whatever happens.

The above agitations and alarums are nearly all of the year 1850. The next year, that of the Great Exhibition, involved her in pleasanter matters and her letters contain no reference to the impending disaster. She could put her troubles aside to enjoy herself because she shared her enjoyment with others.

The crisis came in 1852: the Ides of March, it could be called.

The first letter to be quoted is an unexpected one: from Tom Macaulay to his sister. Tom, already a statesman and soon to be a Peer, bounces back into Clapham circles with vehemence, and concerns himself for a moment with the problems of his old friend.

Marianne to Laura:

On March 4th she writes to Mrs Wedgwood from Henrietta Synnot’s house at Clapham: she has taken refuge there from the turmoil of Battersea Rise:

About the same date she asks Miss Louisa Inglis’ advice over ‘taking things away as Isabella proposes’: there is at least a week’s work before she can clear out. She feels that she can legitimately remove the contents of her own room, Lucy’s bed, Mr Bowdler’s marble-topped table, and the little Library stools, which she and the elder Miss Inglis once worked, but she is anxious to avoid any appearance of pillaging in Henry’s absence.

From Sibylla Grant to Marianne:

From Marianne, back at Battersea Rise, to Henry, the day before his departure.

The following day Henry Sykes Thornton and Emily Dealtry left their native land. One would have expected to have no details of their departure, but by a fortunate chance a couple of first-class gossips were stationed at Dover. They were Mrs Georgiana Raikes, who had married into another branch of the family, and Georgiana’s mother. They got wind of the event and Georgiana actually witnessed it. With her father at her heels, she hurried down to the harbour and was just in time. The following letter of hers (to a cousin) has an earthiness—or should one say a saltiness?—about it which is a welcome relief after so much high-mindedness, fair-mindedness, discrimination and recrimination. Here is exactly what we want, namely an ordinary woman on the gape.

On the same date, Georgiana’s mother wrote off to Isabella Harrison, repeating her daughter’s account of the departure, and adding ‘E. D. thinks Dover such a pretty place. I only hope they will not come and live here—we shall leave if they do. I shall be so glad if they fix upon Hamburg as a Residence instead of Boulogne—I think there are so many undesirable Families resident at Boulogne whom they may get acquainted with.’

The Ides of March are now past. It is surprising that so many letters should have survived from them. And there will be more letters to come: the whole of 1852 pullulates with correspondence. The biographer feels inclined to pause at this moment, as the Channel Packet carries away Emily in her Polka towards the uncertainties of the continent, and to survey, one hundred years later, the general scene.

Battersea Rise had been abandoned. That is the point that most horrified the family. Servants had been left in charge, and though no one would be more loyal than Mr Harrison the butler or more shocked by the course of events, he was no substitute for the Master, the Inheritor, who had betrayed his trust. It was the loss of Battersea Rise that distressed them most and exacerbated their genuine moral distress. They had been accustomed to return to it and to show it to their children, or at any rate to think of it as functioning. Now they were excluded for ever—unless they bent the knee to immorality, which was unthinkable. Their outlook wavered; they did not know whether they wished Henry to return at once or after an interval or never. They did not know whether they wished the house to be sold and to vanish off the spiritual face of the earth, or to stand as it was, an empty and dishonoured shell. I understand many of their feelings: it has so happened that I have been deprived of a house myself. They will not be understood by the present generation.

Round the deserted shrine were grouped the dispossessed. Marianne, the worst sufferer, prepared to make herself a new home at the other end of the Common. Henrietta already had a small house at Clapham and Sophia a huge one a few miles away at Roehampton. Further still, in The Precincts, Canterbury, dwelt Isabella. Laura in her congested rectory felt anything her husband felt, and Watson in his Hereford rectory was presumably indignant too. In Bedfordshire brooded the Inglises. Sir Robert Inglis, in the House of Commons, had already expressed his mature disapproval of such unions, and no doubt he resented the loss of an establishment where he and his womenfolk had once reigned with benignity.

In cataloguing those families most affected I must not omit the Dealtries. Since Dr Dealtry’s death they had continued to live at Clapham, and according to the Thorntons had gradually insinuated themselves into Battersea Rise with the intention of possessing it. Whether this is so I have no idea, I have no evidence. They certainly welcomed the alliance—the genial departure from Dover proves that—and may have taken, as many decent people did, a more critical view of the Law. But they too must have been puzzled when they looked into the future. Whatever was going to happen?

And what was going to happen to Henry’s children, particularly to Harti and Emmy? Marianne was just shifting from the position of sister to that of aunt, and she regarded her little nieces with passionate concern, she longed to protect them and she overestimated their troubles, and sometimes turned ‘Di’ into a heartless stepmother. She could bear the loss of Battersea Rise, she could tolerate the distasteful marriage, but the children, oh the poor exiled children! Oh their pet guinea-pigs and rabbits! Henry had actually ordered them to be killed! ‘Does it not shew that there is not a vestige left of the kind and over-indulgent father of other days?’ She rescued Emmy’s favourite doe together with three babies which had been born to it since the child’s departure to France, and she discovered that ten guinea-pigs had not been killed but had been sold by the gardeners for 1/6 to a man from whom she managed to retrieve them at 8d. each. ‘It was too bad to part with them for they belonged to poor Edmund Stainforth who was blown up in the Amazon.’

Behind all these emotional problems lay a practical one: the Bank. Henry was not prepared to renounce his beloved profession, and his partners’ refusal to allow him more than six months’ absence from England impressed him greatly. He might wander over the European continent and even buy a house there, but he would have to come back now and then to the Bank, and his wife would want to come too.

The fugitives had escaped but the complications in England increased. Only four days later a Mr Thomas Jackson took up his pen in Oxford and addressed the following ineptitudes to Marianne.

More serious than Mr Jackson was the problem of the Infant School Treat. Henry insisted that it should take place at Battersea Rise in his absence, but Marianne declined to be present. What then should the Vicar of Battersea and his wife do? They wanted the children to have the usual fun, and they did not ‘take the same view some may of the marriage question’, but they felt unable to attend themselves and they were anxious not to offend the powerful Miss Thornton. Mrs Whitmore, that good friend to all parties, counselled them to go ahead. Their letters show how fluid public opinion was on the subject of the Deceased Wife’s Sister, and how many people, perhaps most people, were trying to remain neutral and to behave as if nothing unusual had happened.

And now came an ignoble squabble over furniture, such as often happens when two people part keeping house. Marianne had to start her new establishment, and it may be that she exceeded the permission given her by Henry before his departure. Nothing however can excuse him for writing to her as follows:

In consequence of this insulting letter she took further counsel with Mrs Whitmore, who managed to convey to the Dealtry faction that she ‘did not think Henry could have married into any other family where a little bed furniture would be grudged to a sister who had lived so many years with him’. She advised Marianne to take whatever she thought herself entitled to, but to make a complete list, down to the smallest item, and to send it to Henry and Emily without a single word. No doubt the exiled pair were in a state of suspicion and irritability, and had worked themselves into a panic lest Battersea Rise was being rifled in their absence. Mrs Whitmore also suspected them of cupidity, and had been confirmed in her suspicions by her Bible which she opened by chance on the Sunday after their departure, and lit upon at Eccles. v. 13.

Behind the contest over furniture lay the graver problem of the investments. Marianne’s sisters held that she had been shabbily treated in the share out and had been compelled to sell out securities disadvantageously. She was certainly less well off; she had lost the amenities and facilities of Battersea Rise and was obliged to run her own establishment and engage servants for it. An air of cheerful poverty pervades her letters for the next twenty years. But she was an excellent woman of business, she had the gift of attracting money as well as the habit of generosity, and she had plenty of money to spend on herself and to give away, right up to the end of her life.

Did her brother treat her badly? Yes. She was his favourite sister, and the only one of his family who stuck to him. He ought to have been gentler with her and more tolerant—he who was in such need of tolerance himself. All that can be said in his favour is that he was irritable and anxious: irritable with his relatives because they disapproved of the marriage and disliked the new wife, and anxious about the future. He had spent large sums in trying to get the Bill through Parliament, he had weakened his position in his Bank, and displeased his partners, he had left his paternal home to wander over the unknown continent, and in the midst of all this strangeness and newness he was proposing to found a second family. How could such a family be financed? Every penny must be diverted to the purpose. No doubt he would have worried less if his only son had shown signs of shaping satisfactorily. But the boy (then aged 12) was already aggressive and unstable and had been arrested for fishing by the French police, and in later years he caused graver anxiety. Henry could look for no help from his son nor from his poor little daughters, snivelling their hearts out for the paddocks and ponies of Battersea Rise. To the moralist, so much discomfort will seem appropriate. To the amoralist it will offer yet another example of the cruelty and stupidity of the English Law in matters of sex.

I do not know where the marriage of Henry Sykes Thornton and Emily Dealtry was solemnised: possibly in Denmark. The Thorntons continued to deny her the style of wife and insolently referred to her as E. D. She returned in the summer to England on what they called an ‘experimental trip’, in order to see how many people could call on her, and ‘had the face to come on Clapham Common last Friday’, writes Henrietta, ‘and to call at Battersea Rise: but Harrison won’t receive her and made Mr Abbott open the door’. With her were the two little girls. She soon whisked them back to Boulogne—Harti carrying a cage full of birds to comfort her, and Emmy a cage full of guinea-pigs, who had survived in sufficient quantity. All rejoiced at the shortness of Emily’s stay: it looked as if she had been sufficiently snubbed by decent people, and would never return.

In one’s indignation at the way in which she was treated, one is inclined to elevate her to a heroine. She will scarcely fill that role. She was a diffident pleasure-loving woman of the clinging type, shrewd where her own interests were concerned, but devoid of conversation and wit and indifferent to public affairs. The charge that she alienated Henry’s money as well as his affections is probably true; she had to look after herself, no one else would. She appears to have been nice to his children. Presently she had children of her own, and her duty of feathering her nest increased. She may be summed up as an ordinary woman who married into an unusual family in an unusual way. Further to sum her up: she made her husband happy. I never met her, though dates would have allowed it; and my great-uncle died when I was a baby.

During that odious year Marianne underwent further trial. She had been promised that her nieces should come and stay with her in the autumn, and in July Emmy had written her a charming sprawling letter about it, beginning ‘My dearest Mony’; Mony or Monie was the name by which her nieces and nephews began to call her. ‘There was a circus at Strasbourg but it was too low for us and so we didn’t go. I shall be so glad when I get on Puss dear Puss back again. I quite long for a ride. I am getting on with my stool for you so very fast. Scarcely 2 months now and you’ll see my sweet face at Clapham again.’

The promised day arrived.

From her new home on Clapham Common she thus describes it to Mrs Wedgwood:

Anyone who has waited in vain for a beloved person will understand what she felt. A wound has been inflicted which no subsequent reunion quite heals. The insecurity against which we all struggle has taken charge of us for a moment—for the moment that is eternity. The moment passes, and perhaps the beloved face is seen after all and the form embraced, but the watcher has become aware of the grave.

One of the most remarkable of the letters of censure is from Isabella. Writing from The Precincts, Canterbury, on April 20th, she states her attitude to Hannah Macaulay ‘in a few words’ and succeeds in doing so in eight pages:

The danger of the house being sold now became acute. Why should Henry and Emily settle in a country where Isabella, Sophia, Henrietta, the Forsters and the Inglises were organising hostilities against them? Rumours of a sale presently reached Herefordshire, and yet another relative, Mrs Watson Thornton, wife to the Prebendary, gives tongue.

And the family continued to dance on hot bricks, letting the old home, selling it, forbidding it to be let or sold, and only uniting in the advice they offered to Marianne. She was the weak link, and the fact that she had been the greatest sufferer only made her the greatest danger. Through her affection for her brother and her nieces she might recognise E. D. and all would be lost. My grandfather prescribed her duty for her as follows:

Looking back at her conduct during that crucial period, I am overwhelmed with admiration. She behaved like a statesman—a woman-statesman. She temporised. She would push nothing to a conclusion even in her mind. She was affectionate without weakness and moral without asperity. In the end, the good fortune of Elizabeth I rather than the ill fortune of Catherine de’ Medici awaited her, and she saved something from the wreck. Much was lost. But her sisters lost everything. When the storm cleared, and Henry and Emily settled back into Battersea Rise, as of course they did, he often called on her in her new abode and occasionally she went to see him. Seven years later she could write: ‘I am sure he fancies he is not only doing right himself but that he is trying to help others to do so. To pass that Bill has become with him a “furore”—it is almost what the abolition was to us, but unhappily he has a personal interest in the matter.’ And seventeen years later she could sit peacefully for an hour with him in their old beloved garden, while ‘Di’ chattered harmless nothings to Emmy in the distance.

A poem entitled The Tulip Tree shall close this sorry chapter of our family chronicle. It was by Charley Forster, the precocious schoolboy at the Charterhouse, where he contributed so frequently under the initials C. T. F. to the Carthusian that he became known as Cackle Too Fast. The Battersea Rise Tulip Tree, which Napoleon had coveted, had lost some of its limbs after Henry’s second marriage, and Cackle Too Fast hastened to point the moral and widen the breach.

Henry was right in thinking that it was only a question of time before his Marriage Bill became law. But the time was not in his lifetime. Not until 1907, long after he and Emily were dead, was their position regularised. The 1907 Act made such marriages as theirs valid, and valid retrospectively. I can remember the indignation of Orthodoxy when it was passed. A man is permitted to marry his deceased wife’s sister today, and the particular situation which brought so much unhappiness to my family cannot recur. A woman is still impeded in marrying her deceased husband’s brother.

Some of their children:

1
East Side

After the crash, after Marianne left Battersea Rise, her address became Number One, The Sweep, The Pavement, Clapham Common. It was a graceless address and ‘East Side’ was generally substituted. The Pavement was a convex curve of houses into which was nicked the concave of The Sweep. Both of them survive, but all the houses are new.

No one managed to love The Sweep. The three houses in it formed a single block; Miss Thornton on the left, Dr Spitta in the middle, the Williamses on the right. The Williamses attracted no attention except when their drains smelt, but with Dr Spitta there flickered faint suburban warfare. He wanted a better semi-circle of grass in front, and suggested that the trees should be lopped; Miss Thornton would not have the trees lopped, she liked trees. He wanted the three houses painted alike, which would have conveyed the impression of a single residence with his surgery door in the centre; Miss Thornton did not mind how shabby anything looked, and her nephew drew a line of paint in the night from top to bottom to remind Dr Spitta of his limitations. It was not much of a place to live in for thirty-five years, or to die in; still it served; it had a sideway squint of the Common and the Cock Pond and the Church, and she liked to fancy it was ‘within sound of the Battersea Rise Dinner Bell’, half a mile away. The original Thornton estate was close, with cousins still living on it, and behind her was the amusing growth of Clapham. Modernity never frightened her. When she was asked to sign a protest against the introduction of horse-drawn trams, her comment was ‘Not if I know’d it’, and she wished she was well enough to use the things herself.

To Patty Smith, soon after moving in:

I will postpone further details of this house until I come to my own recollections of it. From the first it was an asylum for nephews and nieces. Chief in importance were the two Synnots, who demand immediate notice.

She had only been settled in a few months when her sister Henrietta fell ill (‘I electric-telegraphed all my sisters who were around me in a few hours with their husbands’), died (May 1853) and there she was saddled with two orphans. Inglis was ‘a spirited boy of sixteen, and I feel like a fly on the back of an Arab Courser when I look at him—However like an Arabian he is gentle and affectionate, and I trust I may get on well’. Henrietta was thirteen.

Inglis and Henrietta Synnot.
By George Richmond. About 1848.

Anyone who could describe Inglis Synnot in such words was likely to get on with him. He had a fire and a strangeness unusual in Thorntons, he was a rare creature who has already appeared to us at Amiens, haranguing the French in his French, and it was he who drew the line of paint down The Sweep. Besides loving adventure, he was interested in science. He wanted to know how the world was made and why it worked. The Thorntons had never cared to know that; they had confined themselves to being good and doing good, and to being generally intelligent. With the arrival of the Synnot boy a window bangs open. He did not live to be an old man or to make a success of his profession as a marine engineer. But once seen he was never forgotten. His Aunt Monie adored him. He was the proto-nephew, his successors were substitutes.

The health of the two children—particularly little Henrietta’s—was her first care, and three months after their mother’s death she took them off to the Isle of Wight bathing, boating, riding, and as a crowning excitement there was the Spithead Review. This, according to contemporary newspapers, ‘presented a spectacle of oceanic grandeur. The power of steam renders these fearful batteries moveable at pleasure’ and much is said about the wonders of machinery and the presence of the Queen. Marianne describes it from her own point of view and with more poetry than usual; with a touch indeed of the magic of Thomas Hardy. Her large party decided on the expedition at the last minute—no conveyance except Butcher’s Cart, Donkey Cart, one Donkey. Mr Harrison, the butler from dear Battersea Rise, had been lent to them or had lent himself (it is not clear how he was available); but Mr Harrison proved more hindrance than help, for he wanted to pack 14 knives, forks, plates, glasses, wanted to know where the knives were to be cleaned on the top of the Downs and ‘looked as if we proposed to dine on cold missionary’ when the utensils were drastically reduced.

The party went to The Precincts, Canterbury, to stay with Isabella and her Ben. A different atmosphere succeeds. Popery is suddenly the trouble. Miss Stanley, sister to the Dean, is around all the time, and has got hold of the children, and ‘if she isn’t an R.C. she certainly ought to be one’. The Forster children—‘they are safe enough but in Henrietta’s sensitive morbid state I think there is much that w^d be very attractive to her in Romanism. I told her that she should go to the Cathedral as often as she wished but I should always go with her’. The child confessed that she had been there twice with Miss Stanley, but hadn’t prayed, had only listened to the music. ‘I quite hope no harm will come of it.’ Isabella and the Archdeacon adored pottering in and out of the Cathedral; it stood at the other side of their lawn, a huge booming toy with which they could not play too much. ‘Love me, Love my Cathedral.’ Marianne, whose deepest religious experience was family prayers, felt no sympathy. Even while she was writing her letter the bells started and caused her to exclaim ‘And now here comes the Cathedral again, certainly I wonder how anybody gets anything done when their day is cut up so.’

The Isle of Wight visit had lasting consequences for young Synnot, for he found the girl of his heart there. He stayed on with a tutor at Brighstone, a romantic and secluded village at the south of the island: ‘nothing can equal the loveliness of the place, the bluest of seas seen through such festoons of roses and thickets of myrtles as one only believed lived in Italy.’ There he became acquainted with two ladies who took care of children from India, and with their charges, particularly with a Miss Mary Preston. He went on to Oxford (Christ Church) and then to Canada. Whence at the age of 22 he despatched a gay and gallant letter to his favourite aunt.

How tame were the Niagara Falls when I saw them, and how tamed in comparison myself! I saw them from the Canada side, as my cousin did, but it is now all mussed up with a rose-garden, and walks under the cataract are impossible or discouraged. The orderly waters of the river curve like a glass roller and turn into fluff. One watches them do it without wanting to know how it is done. Further down, where the river bends and makes a grim pool under precipices, the scene gets more exciting and nearer to the past.

He did not buy his land near Lake Michigan, but returned to England and married his Mary Preston: as Maimie she was to be my own beloved, and she was also to become the centre of a small Thornton storm. The quaint couple never had a home; she trailed about after him to Dover or Plymouth or Holland or wherever his work called him.

Here are some extracts from his aunt’s letters to him. The first two mingle gossip with the American Civil War.

Later in the same year:

The subject matter is unimportant, but isn’t her style improving? Isn’t there from the sixties onwards, a terseness and brightness which were lacking in the long leisurely epistles from Battersea Rise? The loss of a home may mean a gain. She certainly gained much from the friendliness of a lively young man.

But he was ready enough to laugh at her behind her back. He writes to one of the Forster girls:

And the letter becomes progressively untypical with ‘It’s a nice book the Boys Own Book. It tells one how to put a mouse under an air-pump when it will expire in great agonies.’ Later on he describes how he has made a snob feel uncomfortable at Lord Leven’s. There was an element of the brash joker in this charmer.

When he died his little widow gravitated to lodgings in Clapham. It was believed that she was too feckless to look after herself, and that she should remain for the rest of her life under the supervision of her sister-in-law and of Miss Thornton.

And now I ought to describe the sister-in-law. I shrink from the task. Henrietta Synnot the younger is much the hardest pebble on the family beach. How was it that someone so gifted, so warm-hearted and unselfish and intelligent and witty could go through life causing little but discomfort to herself and to others? There must have been some early frustration, which a trained psychologist would analyse. She had a hateful temper: that is my inexpert conclusion. She could sulk, she could flare and thunder, she could be icily dignified, and then she could display goodness and imaginative kindness of the highest order. To those who did not know her changeableness the benignity in her was adorable: to those who knew it only inspired anxiety, for it might leave the adorer with a dart through the back. She was always taking people up and dropping them. There was a time when she would see no one but Caroline Stephen, Leslie Stephen’s sister, and would do nothing but play chess with her. There was another time when she would see no one but Hesba Stretton, authoress of Jessica s First Prayer. She was devoted to animals. In this, as in other things, she differed from her aunt, who took dogs, cats, horses in her stride and reserved her emotions for her own species.

Henrietta was so young when her mother died that it was natural she should go to stay with her aunt; to both it seemed the perfect arrangement, and she ended by becoming resident niece at ‘The Sweep’. Miss Thornton and Miss Synnot. The phrase acquired the prestige of a combine. In some ways she was an appropriate companion, for she flung herself into her aunt’s benevolent and educational schemes, and when Milton Bryan became Thornton property she enjoyed staying there and supervising the village. Life in the house at East Side suited her less. So much went on there that she could not control. Cousins came or wouldn’t come, stayed too long, left too soon, tired Monie when she should not have been tired, her sister-in-law might do something foolish, and Battersea Rise was always close, a permanent irritant. Nor did my own tiny form, when it came upon the scene, bring appeasement. My brief encounters with her shall be described in due course. I saw her last during the present century, at Milton Bryan, where as Lady of the Manor she ended her unquiet life. ‘Requiescat in pace’ comes to one’s lips, but she may not have wanted peace.

It is a change from these two enigmatic Synnots to the ten Forsters, who were as good as bread and gave no trouble except when they were ill. I have already mentioned Monie’s visits to Stisted and theirs to Battersea Rise; now that she had a house of her own they came endlessly; the fifties, sixties, seventies, even the eighties, are aflitter with the friendly swarm; the boys with their angelic rather weak faces, the girls with their genuine loveliness. She was a tower of strength for them all. Her conduct over Doanie Forster’s illness is characteristic. The lad was at the Charterhouse. In 1855 he collapsed, and his condition was only revealed by the good sense and loquacity of his brother Charley. Charley sneaked to their aunt, she descended, had the invalid removed to Clapham, and entered into a correspondence with the master responsible which left him little quarter.

Doanie never recovered. His death two years later was the occasion for dramatic grief. Long accounts of his symptoms and of his dying homilies were compiled and circulated. One notebook runs into 40 pages: its pietism makes painful reading, for one cannot catch in it the remotest glimpse of a real boy. Painful too, though aesthetically successful, is a George Richmond drawing: ‘The Forsters mourning for Doanie’. My grandparents are shown grouped at the foot of a cross, he looking upward in prayer, she with a child sleeping exhausted in her arms, and another kneeling beside her. Doanie also has a death-mask medallion in Stisted church. He was the first of his generation to die and the last of any generation to receive protracted obsequies. The threnody which began over the elder Henry Thornton in 1815 ends at last.

Eddie Forster, my father, became Marianne’s favourite nephew after Inglis Synnot’s death. Youngest but two of his family, he shared their happy insanitary life at Stisted Rectory, followed his brothers to the Charter House, and followed some of them to Cambridge (Trinity). He did fairly well there, read classics, and won a Greek Testament prize: Macaulay’s Works in eight volumes, full calf. When he came down, he took up architecture. He encountered opposition here from his father, who required him to become either a clergyman or a lawyer; these were the only tolerable professions—the army was brutal, the civil service ungentlemanly, India unthinkable. Architecture was finally conceded, and he became a pupil at Mr Blomfield’s office (afterwards Sir Arthur Blomfield). There had previously been another pupil there: by name Thomas Hardy.

It is one of Life’s Little Ironies that I should have got to know Mr Hardy and stayed with him at Max Gate, and should have never known my father, seven years his junior. My father then went abroad, and my treasured relics of him are the architectural sketches he made of churches in France and Italy. He developed a charming niggling pencil; the further up a spire a detail is, the more clearly it shows, and he was also clever at putting in birds to give height. Objects on the ground, particularly human ones, are failures. Whatever the merit of the sketches, they certainly stimulate one to visit the church portrayed, and I have never paid such a visit without disappointment—the church has been neither as gigantic nor as delicate as I hoped.

As an architect he was promising, despite his retarded start and his rather unpractical character, and the only house by him I know has great distinction externally. He was beginning to get work through the family connections—a restoration here, a row of cottages there. Aunt Sophy gave him a little job at Roehampton, which caused Henrietta Synnot typically to remark to my mother: ‘What a thing it is to have a fool for an aunt!’ My mother rushed trembling with rage to my father; he said ‘Why didn’t you reply “And a knave for a husband”?’ He was quick at the uptake, amusing, sarcastic, could always make old Monie laugh, and he had integrity and unselfishness. How these qualities combined to make him a real person I do not know. He has always remained remote to me. I have never seen myself in him, and the letters from him and the photographs of him have not helped.

It is the Synnots and Forsters who meant most to their aunt—they, and of course her beloved Emmy, who had married a Sykes cousin at Weymouth. Watson’s children and Sophia’s children do not come into the picture so much. Watson lived away in Hereford, and it was not until he and his wife died that their daughter, the well-liked Marion, frequented Clapham. Sophia lived close by but in aristocratic amplitude: it was more natural that Monie should visit Roehampton House than Sophia The Sweep. Sophia, now Countess of Leven and Melville, entertained, she even handled royalty, and Marianne gives us a glimpse of the Victorian court:

The entertainments at Roehampton were not always a success, and in one of the gayest letters she ever wrote a semi-disaster is recorded.

Sophia had always been a stickler for propriety, she was an innate conservative, seldom read a book, and could make such remarks as ‘It’s very presumptuous not to believe what you are told’, which earned her the ridicule of the rising generation. The temper of her mind was simple and serious; when she became friendly with a Sikh Maharajah she enquired from my grandfather whether the Sikhs were Nazarites. He replied that the Afghans certainly were—he had proved it—and the Sikhs lived so close that they might well be too. At the same time she was intelligent, forceful, witty, and could write most entertaining letters. There is one to Marianne which begins with the wedding of Princess Alice as seen through the eyes of the Sikh Maharajah (Duleep Singh), and ends with the misfortunes of a Lady Ruth at a cattle show. Lady Ruth had sat in too hot sun but would not move because she was surrounded by French Royalty and English dukes, then she cried ‘I’m going to be ill, take me home’, met more dukes on the way which revived her, and was deposited in the corner of a cowshed with the Duke of Atholl on a milking stool and Jenny the dairy maid. Aunt Sophy’s gown was completely spoiled (‘dirty straw and wet grass close between 2 cows’), and Jenny had nothing but milk to wash it with. ‘From the remarks of the crowd close behind us I am sure they thought us all mad.’ A letter like this makes us realise the consistency of the Thornton outlook, and by a happy chance Roehampton allowed the outlook to be directed upon high society. Nowhere else shall we meet a Lady Ruth.

Although so generous to her family, Aunt Monie could be firm on occasion, and a nephew-in-law who tried to touch her for £500 gets a very dusty answer. He had asked for the loan of the money to help him over one of his many temporary difficulties—this time over a farm—and she replied that she would lend it him ‘if it could be proved to her that he was living within his income’. If he was not living within his income he would start living on her £500, she would never see it again, and this—with ten Forsters to provide for—she could not tolerate. A further turn of the screw follows. He would have to prove that he was living within his income ‘to some better judge than you or I of such matters’, i.e. to some partner in Williams Deacon’s Bank, whom she nominated. She then reminds him that he was in debt when he married, that all his debts were paid, that he instantly got into debt again, and she rallies him mercilessly over his optimism in connection with his farm.

She fears that her letter will make him and his wife angry, and she apologises for not sparing him as his wife does. She signs herself ‘Ever yours affectionately’. The nephew-in-law in question was of unusual size. ‘He would make two ordinary men’ someone said, to which she replied ‘But what very ordinary men they would be.’ She had no patience with persistent insolvency, and very little with amateur farming.

Her family and its connections were so numerous by the latter half of the century, and on the whole so satisfactory, that she had little room for outside friends. The most notable addition was the Wedgwood-Darwin one. Her old friend Fanny Mackintosh married Hensleigh Wedgwood, and had thus become sister-in-law to the great Charles Darwin himself. There had been and were to be other alliances between Wedgwoods and Darwins, and the two families combined into a clan as distinctive as the Thornton clan and publicly much more distinguished. Like the Thorntons, they were provincial and non-aristocratic. The Wedgwoods came from the Potteries, the Darwins from Lichfield. Like the Thorntons, they were high-minded, generous, reliable, and prone to self-complacency and to valetudinarianism, and they formulated their clannishness rather more aggressively: after all they had more to talk about, especially after the publication of The Origin of Species. Marianne’s affection for Mrs Hensleigh Wedgwood was extended to her three cultivated daughters, Snow, Hope and Effie. As for Darwinism, she usually made fun of it, becoming hostile when compelled to be serious. I do not think that Charles Darwin ever came to see her, or that she made the pilgrimage to Down.

Another addition to her circle—a bizarre one—was James Knowles. This remarkable man had started as a Clapham architect and builder. He had little education, but possessed a restless and many-sided mind, a natural flair for anything and anyone who was interesting, and a passion for organised controversy.

At the age of nineteen he founded The Clapham Magazine. It expired after three issues. Then the Great Exhibition of 1851 startled him into sociology and science and philosophy, and while on holiday in the Isle of Wight he managed to secure Tennyson. From that moment his pace quickened. He built the bard a house, persuaded him to change his publishers, helped him to found the Metaphysical Society, and became its secretary. ‘When we first planned it Knowles did not know a concept from a hippopotamus’ writes Tennyson. ‘Before we had talked of it for a month he could chatter metaphysics with the best of us.’ He became editor of the Contemporary, quarrelled with it and founded in 1877 the famous Nineteenth Century. This is his great, his deserved, claim to fame. Before he died, he was the friend of Royalty and the recipient of a Knighthood, and the Queen of Holland had called him ‘Le quatrième pouvoir de L’État Britannique’.^[14]

It is natural that Knowles’ roving eye should have fallen on Miss Marianne Thornton. She was interesting in herself, and she was the representative of an important local tradition. He sought her acquaintance in the early seventies, much as he had sought Tennyson’s, and called on her, and talked to her eagerly about modern movements and anxieties: it was the age of serious worries and deep thoughts. She listened with appreciation and a little amusement. She was much wiser than her pleasant pushful visitor, and this no doubt he knew and it was partly why he called. When he tried to make her flesh creep over the state of the world, he failed: she who had thought Napoleon would cut down the Tulip Tree at Battersea Rise—she was not going to be worried by trifles. Rather later (1882) she writes:

There is a glimpse of one of her intellectual dinner parties with Knowles in the middle of it—it occurs in a letter of 1875 written by (Miss) Laura Forster to Miss Darwin:

He also advised the company how to stop the architect Waterhouse from pulling down the old hall and court of Pembroke College, Cambridge. Here he failed, and the horrors Waterhouse perpetrated remain unto today.

Marianne’s real link with him was one which with all his flair he could not have anticipated: she and Miss Synnot became attached to his little daughters. Beattie and Milly Knowles figure affectionately in her latter days. She felt that they were lonely in their smart journalistic home at Queen Anne’s Lodge, she interested herself in their education, she sent them presents when they were ill.

Another acquaintance—a slight one—was Florence Nightingale, who, she declared, went to the Crimea because she was tired of picking up her mother’s spectacles. In 1873, still worried about her mother, Miss Nightingale writes about servants: ‘We have found a maid for my mother, but have you such a thing as an upper housemaid perhaps from dear Lady Inglis’ household?’ She goes on to describe her own household, smaller than her mother’s and, she thinks, very easy: no housekeeper and no man servant to be sure, but ‘a man comes in to do the work. Forgive my worrying you and believe me yours very sincerely.’ I have another letter from her somewhere, and a more characteristic one: about nursing.

Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford and finally of Winchester, must also be listed. He was the only son of her old friend, with whom she kept in touch, and though her allusions to him are irreverent she was fond of him and she did not forget how his piety had soothed the last hours of Nurse Hunter. They shared a common dislike of Disraeli (‘Yes, Lothair is all you say’ the Bishop writes), and she would have been on his side in his controversy with Huxley. He died—thrown from his horse—on a visit to the Farrers at Abinger.

Finally there are the lame dogs—indoor and outdoor—ex-governesses, indigent gentlewomen, etc. Suzanne Gobert serves as an example. She appears from France in the late fifties and is petted and trained with indifferent results. She grows up sulky, unhelpful, does not keep up her French, her one pedagogic asset. Wrestling with a chest of drawers, Suzanne is heard to say ‘Ce n’est pas locké, c’est seulement stuck’. Beyond her are the more definite objects of charity—Miss Synnot’s errand boys, for instance.

Throughout these decades Marianne kept tolerable health, gradually becoming less mobile. In the fifties and sixties she was still rushing everywhere, then her activities declined until her longest expedition was from Clapham to Milton, then even that became tiring, even Sophy at Roehampton, even Henry across the Common were an effort, and by the time my recollections of her start she was wheeled about the room in a chair. When old people become immobile criticism of them is stimulated, and we are reaching a period when she will be widely discussed behind her back.

The intelligent young women of the new generation—and it is they who did most of the discussing—do not compare gracefully with their predecessors. They are captious, unsure of themselves, interminable on the subject of their ailments, and such Darwinism as they imbibed is of the nature of secret drinking. Early in the seventies a group of these semi-spinsters formed and cohered for about twenty years—Laura Forster, Henrietta Synnot, Marion Southey, and athwart them some Wedgwoods and Darwins. Many letters have been preserved from Laura Forster to Charles Darwin’s eldest daughter, her lifelong friend; Miss Darwin became Mrs Litchfield and she is the immortal ‘Aunt Etta’ of Gwen Raverat’s Period Piece. Miss Forster never married. Released from Stisted by her parents’ death, she followed the Thornton pattern of intellectual and philanthropic activity, but she could be censorious of her elders, and is constantly taking them up and dusting them before she replaces them, with a word of commendation, on their shelf. In her later life she changed—became gentler, wiser, greater.

Darwinism was of course anathema at the Rectory, but my grandfather had become so remote from events that he had not realised its full enormity. It was otherwise at Clapham, where Marianne, as sharp as a needle, read what she wanted in the way she wanted to read it.

Miss Forster to Miss Darwin (April 8th, 1871):

Another letter begins in gay conspiratorial tone; Miss Darwin, safe in scientific Down, has proposed a show-down in evangelical Clapham.

She has here indicated a weak point in the family outfit: its indifference to experiment—exemplified at the Philosophic Fête at Battersea Rise in 1808—and its refusal to accept the results of experiments if they are unpleasing. She herself agrees it is ‘against one’s taste to come from furry animals, tidal or otherwise’, but she could bear it for the sake of the general grandeur of the scheme. While remaining a devout Christian she believes ‘it is of practical use to get a just estimate of one’s place in creation’, and she has been helped to do this by Mr Darwin’s books, particularly by the Descent of Man, ‘I suppose your Father is not likely to moderate his demand for time by allowing sudden changes or jumps of any kind?’

It is a thoughtful letter, and shows a profound difference of outlook between the generations. There were also differences of temperament, and these receive copious and petulant expression. Miss Forster, like her Synnot cousins before her, had been offered a home at East Side. She wisely refused; a short visit was more than enough, in fact it was too much:

Two years later, when she had a cottage of her own, and her aunt had inherited Milton, she writes in the same strain, and indicates further cracks in the family fabric:

The rest of the correspondence between the two young women deals with other family matters. Laura criticises her Aunt Sophy’s children for their appalling lack of intellectual interests, but has to admit that they are good-tempered, well-mannered and kind, and that this is something. She criticises and excuses her cousin Emmy Sykes on the same grounds. She criticises the three Wedgwood sisters for being too introspective. She criticises her youngest brother for his interest in sport, and particularly in racing, a vice which she presently defines as ‘rowing in an 8’. Miss Darwin agrees: one of her own brothers once rowed in an 8, and has regretted it ever since. Miss Forster sends on Miss Darwin’s warning against 8s to Master Forster. Master Forster takes no notice of the warning, does what he likes all his life, is athletic, amusing, vindictive, selfish, idle; models himself, he alleged, on Inglis Synnot; makes a breakaway from the family pattern.

Since the younger generation have started sniffing at old Monie, let us hear what she says about them. Not that she ever criticises her nieces—it had become a sacred duty to keep the family peace, even to the extent of ignoring quarrels. But she does let herself go on the subject of their erudite friend Snow Wedgwood.

Stylistically there’s no doubt as to which generation wins.

Snow (Julia) was an intellectual heavyweight who became a contributor on ethical topics to the Spectator, where her writings were said to be indistinguishable from those of Hutton, its editor. She also wrote The Message of Israel and The Moral Ideal. Here we touch my own literary career, for I assisted her in the revised edition of the last-named work (1907). She was an old lady then, and most pleasant to devil for. Indeed most of that group matured when they had passed middle age.

2
Educational

The family chatter with which the previous chapter has abounded gives but an imperfect picture of Marianne’s daily life. For now comes the main period of her educational activity. The facts relating to it are not easy to come by. I do not know what schools she started and financed, or partially financed, or how often she taught in them or what she taught. Her business correspondence, unlike her private correspondence, is exiguous. A school for Tradesmen’s Daughters, in Acre Square—‘my Middlings’ she called them—is the most definite of her institutions; the girls attending it paid. And there is also mention of a school for Raggeds and of another for 2/8s—which may mean for infants between the ages of two and eight. After the passing of the Elementary Education Act of 1870 the scene so far clears as to reveal her coping with a new type of human being, namely the School Inspector. But the schools remain obscure.

Her educational tradition derived from Hannah More and from her parents. As soon as she had learnt anything, indeed almost as soon as she could talk and walk, she was taken to any handy school and encouraged to impart her knowledge to the less fortunate. The early nineteenth century scene was of an educational simplicity that we cannot imagine. The carriage stops, the pious occupants get out and teach, and drive on. We have come across her ‘baby settlements’ (p. 135), and Anna her schoolmistress (p. 85). To the end of her life she felt herself entitled to make informal inspection of elementary schools, and some of her relatives retained the feeling into the present century.

There were two motives for her zeal over education. First and foremost was her dislike of ignorance and her eighteenth-century faith in reason. If children knew more, they would grow up happier, healthier, and more helpful. And by ‘knowing more’ she meant fuller knowledge of the way in which to get the best out of their lives. They must therefore—and now we approach her second motive—be educated according to their station. Like Hannah More, she assumed that the existing structure of society was satisfactory and would continue, and since the section of it to which she belonged required servants and governesses, she was anxious that education should produce servants and governesses of good quality. If this second motive is accented, she can be shown as craftily defending her own class, and as breeding up servitors for it. The accent (I believe) should be on the first motive.

To begin with the governesses—where we shall not find her at her most charitable. She knew a great deal about the unfortunate creatures, for there had been a long series of them at Battersea Rise, and a shorter cheaper series at Stisted. Anxious to transmit her experiences, she now composes a jobation of over 4000 words in which she addresses an imaginary specimen of the tribe and advises it how to behave. It is an amusing, clever and discreditable piece of writing. The employer has too much the whip-hand in it, and flicks too knowingly at the sore places. When she was advising an actual living governess (my own mother will be a case in point) she could be charming, sympathetic and subtly on an equality. When she generalises she becomes hard and superior.

The jobation is undated. Fifties or sixties? Some of the MS. must have been lost, for it starts in midstream:

And so on. Marianne’s remedy being that the governess, when her teaching is over, should follow her little charges into the garden or playroom, and take an intelligent interest in their affairs, instead of an unintelligent interest in her own. A severe remedy: and throughout the jobation it is always assumed that it is the employee who is to blame, whereas the impertinent servants, unreasonable mamas and naughty children could not be any better than they are. She is further charged with not taking care of her health—to the grave detriment of her utility.

And the attempt of a governess to make herself interesting by ‘being different’ from the rest of the household, and by manufacturing peculiarities, is shrewdly analysed, and severely reprimanded.

When she stops nagging the governess about the conduct of her private life, and considers her as a disciplinarian, she has some valuable things to say.

One wonders for whom this pessimistic and acute treatise was intended. Was it to be printed? Was it to be circulated amongst prospective applicants? It must have filled middle-class girls with despair, and inclined them towards any profession except teaching. But for most of them no other profession existed.

Turning from governesses to schoolmistresses and pupil teachers, we find the same anxiety that they shall be sensibly trained, and the anxiety finds more agreeable expression. Back in the fifties she writes to Miss Louisa Inglis about an institution called Whitelands which might provide a suitable under-mistress for the little village school at Milton. As a rule she is suspicious of institutions, but Whitelands is an exception:

It does; but it must be observed that the two motives above mentioned are again at work: the desire to educate the poor combines, in varying degrees, with the desire for a good supply of servants. Significantly it is the education of girls that most concerned her. Boys, though she liked them—well they could emigrate, they could plough, they could rise in life, they were less requisite domestically. She conceived of society as an agglomeration of homes and of helpers in the home. She had little perception of the industrialism that was rapidly engulfing both girls and boys, and it was only at Hereford during the visit to John and Emilia Venn, that the existence of a shop-assistant class became vivid to her.

As for the school children, they figure most when there is a school treat; we seldom meet them at their lessons. When the Synnot boy and girl were young themselves (1855) a rollicking Christmas party took place, described by their aunt with gusto. Henrietta had returned from her Aunt Isabella’s a little bilious as usual, but was well enough to go to the School, where the festivities were held.

Fifteen years later there was another school festivity, which deserves special mention:

On one occasion the school children do come to the front and take political action. It is during a No Popery scare in the fifties. There had been a Catholic settlement in Clapham, described by Cardinal Wiseman as a ‘Little Paradise of cheerfulness, comfort and respectability’, but otherwise described by Miss Thornton. I do not share her rabid anti-Catholicism any more than her mild anti-Semitism, but I am writing her biography not my own, and what she says is ‘On opening a cottage door I can instantly tell whether the inhabitants are Cats or Protestants, and very odd it is that this should be. I never could discover the connection between dirt and popery. And I cannot take Catholic children into the Schools for their thieving propensities.’ She does not however take the Papist threat seriously when she thinks ‘to what shifts Pio Nono has been reduced of late’; a reaction is probable ‘and the fear will soon be that we will recede into Puritanism’.

She then turns to her School girls:

This leads her to discuss the conversion to Catholicism of Henry Wilberforce, a son of her old friend, who had previously been a clergyman in the Church of England; nothing could have surprised her more:

Marianne Thornton’s handwriting,
May 1885.

It is curious to compare her reaction with a similar reaction today, when we may observe one able person after another embracing dogmatism and sneering at reason. She felt (as some of us do) the ground slipping beneath her, and it is to her credit that she could still say ‘the thirst for flames is one that grows with what it looks upon’ and could still keep her feet upon the uneasy path of religious tolerance. Would that her Pastorals to her Middlings had been preserved! They would have been amusing and shrewd and something more.

Henrietta Synnot took a prominent part in all these educational activities. It was a strong link between the two women. The difficult creature never showed her difficult side to her social inferiors, she was charming to mistresses and pupils, she ran a ‘Popular Book Club’ at Acre Square which included a personal delivery service at cottages. She could comfort the superannuated. When Marianne was not well enough to entertain old Annie Chambers, Henrietta ‘promised to do her thoroughly and so she did, for A. C. did nothing but praise her when she came in to me, but the old are easily flattered by the attentions of the young’. Her energy was endless. Once she tried to own a school of her own and would have put down £500. Moreover she had a rollicking sense of the ridiculous and could bring back ludicrous tales of what was going on in the world of education.

sang the children, making angles with their fingers. Or:

Or Henrietta herself sang:

In later years, as her ascendancy increased, she involved her aunt in some unwise schemes. Sensible Laura Forster came across one when she was staying at Clapham in 1875, and unburdened herself on the subject to her Darwinian confidante:

Whether the six workhouse girls arrived, who controlled them, and where the Home was I do not know, but the letter shows that aunt and niece had something new to face, namely Officialdom with its rules, regulations, prohibitions and distinctions, and—it must be added—with its superior expert knowledge. The aspect of Officialdom that most concerned them was School Inspection. It gradually developed and became more intense after the passing of the 1870 Education Act and they were constantly involved in it for the next fifteen years.

Marianne behaved very well, considering that she was an independent lady who had become accustomed to getting her own way. She managed to consider each Inspector on his merits; and to give praise wherever it was due.

Two letters to my mother (March 1878) describe a grimmer visitation: ‘We had our first inspection, that in the 3 r’s yesterday, and atrociously the childⁿ seemed to me to do—but I gave our Spectre pigeon pie for lunch, and hope for a good report. Hernaman comes tomorrow to see about our——’ The next word is illegible; unfortunately: for it might have thrown light on the organisation of the school. On the following day Hernaman arrived.

It was in connection with the New Code that she went into authorship, and appeared for the only time of her life in print. To her biographer the event is an important one and must be described carefully.

She contributed to a series of reading-booklets for children, the precise title of the series being ‘The School Manager’s Series of Reading Books adapted to the requirements of the New Code’. Before I discuss the extent and the character of her contribution, there is a letter of hers to be quoted (May 1869) which refers to the origin of the project.

‘Allister’ is Canon Alexander Grant, recently Inspector of Schools, and editor designate of the proposed series: he was connected with the Grants she had known and loved at Battersea Rise. Strahan the bookseller was the publisher of the Contemporary, with which Knowles was still connected. ‘Enty’, so snooty about Strahan, is Henrietta Synnot.

The ‘Reading Books’ consist of an Introductory Primer and six ‘Standards’, designed to cover the corresponding classes of an Elementary School. All seven booklets were published separately in 1874 by Messrs Lockwood & Co., 7 Stationers’ Hall Court. There is a short preface by Canon Grant, whose share was limited to revision and suggestion; the items for reading are chosen or written by various authors ‘who have had opportunities possessed by very few people of gaining an intimate knowledge of the character and capacities of those for whom they write’. In the loose atmosphere of the nursery I used to be told that ‘Aunt Monie wrote the Reading Books’. She did not. The series is a hotchpotch. It opens with the words ‘ba be bi bo bu by’. I do not believe that she wrote these, or the poems by Coleridge and Campbell, or the sections on Geology and Astronomy, or the Historical and Geographical sections, or the heavy mawkish stories. It is only in the dramatic pieces that I detect her. I could swear they are hers. Even in the Introductory Primer her voice is recognisable, though it is speaking to tiny tots:

The lady is Lady Inglis, hit by a stone at Boulogne in 1851, the Long Pond is on Clapham Common, and the humanist attitude, the appeal to thought, the quiet repartee, are Marianne’s own.

She found boys like Will and Tom irresistible. ‘Silence in the pig market, let the old sow speak first!’ shouted a nephew as he rushed into her crowded drawing-room. When she rebuked him, ‘What did I tell you. I knew the old sow’d speak first,’ said he, and she collapsed.

By the time the Fourth Standard is reached, tiresomeness has taken an intellectual turn. Shades of the prison house begin to close around the growing scholar, and we have two tense dialogues between Mary Saunders, a pupil teacher, and the rebellious Sophy Williams, aged twelve.

The Inspector

The Day after the Examination

Poor Sophy’s problem afflicts others in our educational system including University dons: it is the old problem of the Letter that kills but seduces, because being a letter it can be easily memorised. Marianne believed in the spirit, the pursuit of which must be continuous and may be tiring. Another dialogue, ‘The Candidate for a Pupil Teachership’, inculcates the same lesson. In form, and sometimes in sentiments, she was indebted to Hannah More, but she had a lighter touch, and sketched rather than underlined her religious and moral conclusions.

The longest and liveliest of the dialogues is ‘On Emigration’. It handles a subject that had always interested her. Its tone is mischievous and indeed irresponsible: we assist at the baiting of a simple countrywoman, a Mrs Jones, by her son, her husband, her daughter and her doctor, who want her to take part in a family migration to Australia. Gallantly does she resist, alleging snakes and savages, and even making capital out of a kangaroo. ‘Ah those machines I suppose they have got out there too’ she cries, when her son has compared a kangeroo’s pouch to a perambulator, ‘I never saw but one, and hate the lazy servants that won’t be at the trouble of carrying the precious children, but shove them around like bad fish.’ (One hears in passing the voice of Nurse Hunter.) Mrs Jones abuses scholarship, which puts such ideas into her son’s head, and machinery, which those who invented it will be punished for—also how’s she to get the cows drove that distance—think of the keep—and all the shell fish and rubbish to eat.—And anyhow she will not leave Mrs Smith—they have hung their clothes on week days on the same lines—not that she ever sees Mrs Smith now, who has been taken away to a place hard to get at seemingly, and called Yorkshire.

This last remark was unsound, for Mrs Smith and her husband are also known to be discontented with agricultural conditions in England and might be persuaded to join the emigration to Australia. Mrs Jones then yields, but with conditions:

This is pleasant comedy, but does not the writer of it reveal a divided purpose? She wants at the same time to poke fun at the working classes, and to encourage them to read. Perhaps they were more easily gulled eighty years ago than they would be today.

I do not think that the Series was much used, though the Press was favourable. ‘Simple without being at all Silly’ said the Athenaeum. ‘Impossible to speak too highly’—John Bull. The Spectator found (which I do not) ‘a skilful gradation of lessons and a judicious choice of extracts’, and the Literary World exclaimed ‘If books like these do not make the young folk eager to read we know not what will.’ Today, neither the Library of the Ministry of Education nor the original publishers^[15] can find any trace of the little venture and the only copies I have seen are my own. Aunt Monie has had the seven booklets bound into two volumes and has inscribed both volumes to my mother for my use, and dated them 1883. I also have an MS. dialogue in her handwriting; not a remarkable one—Mama starts to explain the facts of life to Mary and Charlie and naturally does not get far—but it provides stylistic evidence of her authorship in the Series.

3
Milton Bryan

Milton Bryan or Bryant in Bedfordshire has flickered on the edge of Marianne’s life ever since 1815. In 1873 it moves to the centre and faintly illumines her declining years.

Let me recapitulate Milton’s mild History. Sir Hugh Inglis had inherited it through his first wife, Sir Robert had inherited it from Sir Hugh, had failed to found a dynasty there, had left it to ‘Milady’ for her lifetime, and, after her, to Marianne. His interests lying in London and in foreign travel, he had used the house as a dumping ground for his womenfolk. His sister, the tenuous and timid Miss Loo, spent much time there, so did his wife, and they were constantly visited by various Thornton sisters. Thus the house acquired a character it never lost—that of a resort for ageing ladies, who pottered about the garden and the little village, and drove through the quiet lanes. As time went on, Sir Robert made additions to his will, and arranged that after Marianne’s death the property should go to his god-son Inglis Synnot, and, when he died, to Henrietta Synnot. Sir Robert died in 1855, Milady in 1873, and Marianne plus Henrietta now entered into possession. They knew the house inside out already, so it was possession without thrills. Marianne’s age was now seventy-six, her niece’s thirty-three. ‘It is possible’ said the lawyer at one stage, ‘er—is it possible that Miss Synnot may some day—er—contract some more intimate relationship?’ It was thought unlikely, and consequently Inglis Synnot’s little widow got inserted into the sequence of inheritance. She was appalled: ‘If I ever own Milton, whatever shall I do?’ she gasped. ‘Oh how I do hope Henrietta will live for ever!’ The lawyer finally extricated her, and what happened to the estate after Henrietta’s death I do not know. I think it now belongs to the Duke of Bedford.

The Manor House of Milton is a pleasant countrified gabled building, looking south over a garden and sloping fields. Much timber. It backs on to the churchyard and the village. The site is huddled and unimpressive. The great park of Woburn Abbey is close and Milton is ducally dominated. Sir Robert did however become Sheriff of Bedfordshire, and was benevolent locally, and he did his duty by education. He supported two schools: an elementary one and another for boys. He inspected them when he was in residence, and in the elementary one he allowed no corporal punishment. Mrs Brittan the mistress might at the most impose a Fool’s Cap for inattention or a red-cloth tongue for talking, and even then Sir Robert would say ‘I feel sure, Mrs Brittan, this little girl is very sorry for having been naughty, so I hope you will obleege me by forgiving her.’ Joseph Paxton, first the gardener and then the friend of the Duke of Devonshire and the creator of the Crystal Palace, had been at the school and Sir Robert had given him a prize, which he is said to have cherished. Jane Burrows, the Forsters’ nurse, had also been at the school. Jane Burrows’ mother kept the village shop, mother had once kept the Red Lion, now mother keeps the village shop, there is a dell in the garden, there is a Temple of Vesta in the garden, Leighton Buzzard Station is almost eight miles off. . . . The slow rustic stream trickles, sometimes thickening into commitments. Little snags abounded. Concerned at what her aunt might be letting herself in for, Miss Laura Forster wrote Miss Darwin another of her competent letters:

The introduction of an extra old lady into Milton did not solve its problems or abate its heritage of ‘paupers and pensioners’. Mrs Havart’s Indian children damaged the furniture and before long she departed for Bournemouth ‘with her cow and her horse and her ass and all that is hers, and that’s nearly everything’. An attempt at a seasonal let to a hunting man fell through because Henrietta’s invalid horses occupied too much of the stables. An attempt to make a change in estate-management nearly led to a lawsuit with a neighbour. There was a flare-up with the rector because Aunt Monie’s groom left before the Church Militant prayer in order to fetch her pony: ‘he is in an irritable state, the church is so thin and the chapel so full, but I can’t help that.’ There was extravagance inside the house, there was theft, there was scandal when an upper housemaid was seduced by a churl of low degree. But if the function of Milton was to provide an old lady with a summer resort for a few years, it certainly succeeded. She got more pleasure than worry, and she could afford the wastage, for Milady had left her a substantial legacy. The following letter, headed ‘Sunday, Milton, pouring!!!’, defiantly states her case.

Two other letters of the time, though not written at Milton, strike the same lively note. In the first she is visited by the Director of a Hospital:

Thanking a sporting nephew for fish:

Consequent on this summer arrangement, Milton generally appears in the documents through a haze of hot weather, flies, squashy fruit, wasps. My mother, who could also wield a lively pen, has described a sultry workhouse-treat in the garden:

This dominating figure, always changing her plans, moves through Milton like a lost spirit. She ordered one of the invalid horses to be killed, went to Clapham to escape the execution, had a reaction, telegraphed countermanding and became hysterical in case she was too late. The telegram arrived in time, the invalid’s life was saved and its troubles intensified. Aunt Monie bore her restlessness with patience and dignity, she was never a grumbler or a regretter, and she was further helped by one of her defects: her refusal to allow that she ever made a mistake. To most onlookers the joint life with Henrietta represented a bad blunder. To her it was something upon which she had decided and in consequence nobody’s business. Her niece’s bad temper certainly was a serious problem. Every now and then that clever tongue said something wounding and gave offence to relatives or friends. Here the best the old lady could do was to prevaricate and confuse the evidence; it was called ‘Monie’s deceitfulness’ at the time, but deserves a more charitable title.

With this brief reference to Milton I close the period assigned to her aunthood. It may have been noticed that as her life proceeds it is becoming less distinguished socially. She had been born amongst public figures of eminence, and after her father’s death there was anyhow Sir Robert Inglis, a reputable second-rater, and there was the prestige of an established household. With the withdrawal of Sir Robert and with the loss of Battersea Rise, she tended to consort with people who were from the worldly point of view less important. She was intimate with the Levens but only as a sister: she would never have dreamt of climbing into the aristocracy with their help. And she resisted the kindly efforts of Mr James Knowles to push her up his own flight of stairs. All this (I’d say) is part of her fineness: she kept to people she liked and to work she could do. But it makes her biography decreasingly imposing, and I must warn the reader that in its final section she will consort with still smaller fry—including myself, who was almost too small to be fried.

1
My Arrival

I was born at my parents’ house, 6 Melcombe Place, Dorset Square, London, on January 1st, 1879. Two months later I was taken down to Clapham to be christened, Miss Henrietta Synnot standing as my godmother. I had already been registered as Henry Morgan Forster, and that was to be my name. The party walked over from Aunt Monie’s to the church on the Common. On the way the old verger asked my father what the baby was to be called, and he, distrait, gave his own name, Edward Morgan. This the verger wrote down upon a piece of paper. My maternal grandmother held me at the font. When the clergyman asked her what I was to be called she became afraid of the sound of her voice in a sacred edifice, and indicated the piece of paper. My mother, in a distant pew, heard the announcement with horror. I had been registered one way and christened another. What on earth was to happen! It turned out after agitated research that the christening had it, so Edward I am. Aunt Monie’s reaction was characteristic. She had never liked the name Morgan, it was not a Thornton name, it was a Forster import, and to the end of her life she declared that I had been given it by mistake.

My mother, Alice Clara Whichelo (‘Lily’), was the third child and the eldest daughter of Henry Mayle Whichelo and Louisa Graham. She did not belong to Thornton circles, and the story of her entrance into them is interesting. My grandfather was a drawing-master. He had the delicacy and the inclinations, of a creative artist, and his brother, born to easier circumstances, painted pleasing pictures of the Claude-Turner type. He himself had to teach in Stockwell Grammar School and other institutions of the Clapham neighbourhood. By all accounts he was a delightful character—unselfish, considerate, sensitive, handsome, cheerful, and alive to scenic and architectural beauty—and the pretty verses he addressed to his children recall those which Henry Thornton had once addressed to little Marianne. I never had the luck to know him. In 1866 he suddenly died (one now surmises appendicitis), leaving my grandmother with no money and with ten children.

My grandmother was a lovely lively woman, most amusing and witty, fond of pleasure, generous and improvident, and by no means inclined to regard trials as blessings; it may have been possible to do this at Battersea Rise, but she had too many trials and too little room. She was always popular and her friends helped through the disasters as well as they could, but they were not influential or wealthy. She had to take lodgers, Germans, whom she undercharged, and to employ a sorry series of maids-of-all-work, whom she scolded and spoiled. The children had to earn their living almost in their childhood, the boys as clerks, the girls as governesses. It seems terrible as one writes it down, cushioned by the Welfare State, and Dickensian catastrophes did occur. But there were good looks about and good taste and good spirits, and it may be that these qualities form as sound a defence against Fate as a solid education and a considered morality. Anyhow the Whichelos muddled through. They had no enthusiasm for work, they were devoid of public spirit, and they were averse to piety and quick to detect the falsity sometimes accompanying it. ‘I told her I hadn’t much religion but what I had belonged to my own religion’ was the typical remark of an aunt. Typical too was an uncle who filled up his census-form with a mapping pen, in the hope that he would be unreadable; typical another who grumbled ‘I can’t be in two places at once bar I were a bird’. How I adored my grandmother!—we played for hours together. In later life I became high-minded and critical, but we remained friends, and it is with her—with them—that my heart lies.

Amongst those who tried to help her in her trouble was her doctor, Mr Tayloe. He was also Miss Thornton’s doctor. He was furthermore Henry Thornton’s doctor at Battersea Rise and Marianne was able through him to send messages to that lost paradise and to get news in return; absolutely trustworthy, Mr Tayloe did much to soften the alienation between her brother and herself, and his death after thirty years’ attendance on her was deeply mourned. In 1867 this good man took my mother to call at East Side. Perhaps he wanted to give the child an outing, perhaps he hoped to get her a job, and he certainly knew how fond Miss Thornton and Miss Synnot were of young people. The visit was a success. Both ladies were delighted with her and she for her part was fascinated by them, thought them so kind, so amusing; indeed she talked so much at home about Miss Synnot that my grandmother prophetically cried ‘I’m sick of Miss Synnot already’.

‘Lily’ was then twelve years old—small, lovely to look at, with a delicate complexion, and full of gaiety and charm. In this she resembled the rest of her family, but she had one quality which some of them lacked: a sense of responsibility. As the eldest daughter she had had to mind the little ones, and there is a pathetic photograph of her with six of them around her at Margate, on a long day’s outing for which she had been insufficiently financed. Perhaps this had matured her; certainly her integrity and independence persisted and prevented her now from being carried off her feet by her wonderful new friends.

As early as 1869 Marianne took this new protégée to Weymouth to stay in the leisured society of Emmy and Major Sykes. She writes to Miss Laura Forster:

My mother was delighted with Weymouth, though bewildered to find that her elegant hostess had never heard of an apple-pudding, here was indeed a new world! Marianne’s letter sounds patronising, still it is a responsible letter: she never took up people to please herself, spoiled them and dropped them. She took them up to please herself to be sure, but also to help them. As soon as she was assured of my mother’s deserts, she began to consider how they could be utilised. The child would have to be a governess—nothing else lay open for her—so let her be an efficient one, and the first step towards that was extra tuition. The school chosen was one kept by a Mademoiselle Collinet at Brighton and was not altogether successful, but my mother enjoyed herself, picked up some French, acquired social assurance and made friends, and in the holidays there was the expanding circle of the Thorntons. Everyone liked her, she was helpful and happy, and when the time came to start her off as a governess there was no difficulty in finding her a place. Her first pupil was a daughter of James Knowles; then she was with Marion Southey, and became lasting friends with her; she was then with Mrs Farrer (Effie Wedgwood) at Abinger Hall near Dorking: here again friendship survived. This engagement was more ambitious than its predecessors. She was to be in charge of the little step-sons for two years, but before she had been there long, she and my father fell in love, became engaged, and married.

My grandmother’s delight may be imagined. More surprising and very charming is the delight of Marianne. Eddie was her favourite nephew, Lily her trusted protégée, so what could be better? She cared not for a ‘good’ marriage but for a marriage of true minds. The rest of the Thornton circle followed her powerful lead, and their conduct was decent and cordial, though there must have been reservations. In a letter which has escaped the family censorship some of these got expressed. It is from Mrs Farrer to Miss Laura Forster, and is dated Nov. 7th, 1876, from the Farrers’ town house:

Aunt Monie extended her graciousness to all my mother’s family. She liked them, as did most people. She was charming to my grandmother, who adored her, invited up the various brothers and sisters, and tried to help them, and they often required help. Through her connections she sometimes got them more satisfactory jobs, and in some cases they kept them. In all this she comes out as a great lady who has a good heart.

Unfortunately another side of her began to develop—the tendency to interfere—and from it proceeds what is tiresome and unacceptable in her old age. Thorntons always had known best—it was part of their moral integrity—and as the circle of her activities narrowed Aunt Monie knew best better than ever. Once an idea was lodged in her head, she would support it with ability and duplicity. The desire to be right can become a poison which corrupts the integrity out of which it sprang. Melancholy to relate, in a few years my mother was saying ‘Monie is a very wicked woman’, and ‘Well well—I hope in the next world there will be a compartment labelled “Thornton” and that it won’t be anywhere near me.’

Typical of her interference is the enlightened but nagging letter which she wrote my mother when she was expecting her first child (December 1877). My mother was not enlightened. She had never had a child before, and she did not want to talk about it, and if she did want to talk about it she had her own mother and her sisters. On to her the following avalanche descended:

‘Majority’ is a slip of the pen. Aunt Monie corrects it to ‘minority’ and proceeds. She prefaces her new subject with ‘Mind you needn’t take any notice of all I have said so far. I shall think you very nice and good tempered if you are not affronted with me, but yet I couldn’t help saying it’:

Then she changes the subject again, tells of a wedding where there are to be 18 bridesmaids and an extra long train to keep them at a distance, tells of the misery of Mr Knowles who has just discovered that his children know nothing, absolutely nothing, signs herself ‘ever yours affectionately’ and concludes ‘I shall look in The Times for the announcement of the Bassinette being wanted’.

The bassinette never was wanted: the child died at birth. But this was the sort of letter that exasperated the unfortunate women who had married into the Thornton clan, and made them feel hunted and cornered. It was not exactly a patronising letter, it was not snobbish, it was open-handed and warm-hearted and amusing, but it left the victim no outlet and it was written without the slightest consciousness that it was appalling. No wonder Lily grumbled to Maimie and Maimie to Lily, and Lucy, a third immigrant, referred to herself as ‘and me a poor young bride’. My mother’s insubordination did not go down ill with Aunt Monie, who never minded being opposed as long as she got her own way. She liked spirit, while counselling moderation: ‘Long before you are half as old as I am, my dear child, you will see that nobody hardly is as black or as white as they seem. There are more greys and browns than you imagine, and the more people will see that, the more influence they will have on everybody about them—the more hotly they take things up the less people care what they think.’

To turn to a more harmonious topic, next year my father and mother went to Paris—I don’t know where they had been for their honeymoon. Streatfeild [sic], a friend of my father’s, went too. Paris always inspired and softened Aunt Monie and the thought of a new generation going there and particularly of my mother going there for the first time filled her with sweetness and light. Of course she subsidised them. She writes to ‘My dear Eddie’ informing him that she has placed £30 to his account—£25 should be enough for their proposed week, and the extra £5 is ‘on condition of its being spent on Lily being drawn about in any conveyance she chuses, but by Jengo I won’t have her walk. It would be a bad investment having her laid up in a Paris hotel and no Lady companion except Streatfeild who is very nearly one I own, but not quite.’ If the £30 isn’t enough, Eddie is to let her know: ‘its only discounting your own money and at very short interest’.

To my mother she writes soon after their departure, and reports a further donation of £10 from Aunt Sophy for shopping purposes, ‘but if it takes the form of staying a few days longer Aunt Sophy wont mind’. Continuing:

Then her mind switches back to 1816 when she first felt Paris’ healing civilising power.

My mother lived for those required sixty-three years more, but I doubt whether in 1941, she looked back to her first visit to Paris with vividness or love. Remembrance of the ‘Happy Memories’ type is an art which the Thorntons had cultivated. She never acquired it, moreover Paris was then under the heel of Hitler, and neither she nor I expected to see it again.

There is a big packet of letters from Aunt Monie to my mother in 1878. At the turn of the year I was born, to be christened as related. The family seem to have been pleased, though ominous rumbling began to be audible inside my godmother. My father was getting on in his profession, he had acquired a beautiful and acceptable wife, a son and heir, a pleasant town house. Then he developed the disease which had carried off so many of his brothers and sisters, and within four years of his marriage he was dead.

Aunt Monie recognised the ominous symptoms all too well. My mother did not. She was accustomed to young people remaining alive, and although she dutifully carried out instructions, she could not take her husband’s illness seriously. This laid her open to criticism, and also made the end harder for her, when it came. He died at Bournemouth (October 1880). The shock was terrible. Apart from her grief, she felt that her life had ended before it had begun. At twenty-five she was left with a small baby, and without any support except what was extended to her by her husband’s relatives.

It was at this time that she made the great friendship of her life, and how she would have survived without it I do not know. It was with Inglis Synnot’s widow. They had of course met when my mother entered the Thornton circle, but ‘Maimie’ was then still vague and immature, and a hanger-on of her husband’s relatives, to be loved, but to be laughed at, and ordered about. My mother’s disaster drew them together, and she developed the spiritual delicacy and strength that distinguished her later years. She had always been devoted to my father, and had come down to Bournemouth to stand by in his final illness. She stayed on to help my mother to extricate herself from the great furnished house she had taken, and went into lodgings with her for a time. She wrote to her: ‘We don’t like to think that time can ever soften our grief—but mercifully it does or we couldn’t live. By my own past agony I can feel for you, who are now going through the same, but I am thankful to say my life is not empty as I feared it might be. I have so many to love.’ The only reason that the women did not set up house together permanently was that Maimie (they agreed) was too devoted to the baby and would spoil it.

Aunt Monie’s sympathy was more philosophically expressed, and I doubt whether it brought much comfort. She had had too many losses to be startled by death, and, generally speaking, old people are disinclined to lavish emotion for fear of upsetting themselves. She thanks my mother for all the happiness she brought my father, and especially for her cheerfulness through his months of ‘languor and sickness’, and she rejoices that my birthday had been happy, and that I should never know of the additional happiness I had missed. All is graciously and affectionately put. But it makes one realise how little mourners can enter into each other’s minds. To the older woman Eddie Forster’s death was an extra step in a long descent, to the young one it was an abyss. They had no common ground in their grief, and whereas my mother was dazed and wanted to slink away, Aunt Monie was already fertile with plans.

They centred round me. I succeeded my father as the favourite nephew, just as he had succeeded Inglis Synnot. I received the deplorable nickname of The Important One, and when my mother showed signs of despondency she was reminded that she had me to live for. My comfort, my talents, my toys and my health fill innumerable letters. As soon as we got back from Bournemouth, she was importuned to bring me to stay at Clapham or Milton, and this went on for the remaining six years. Too much affection in a world that contains too little is ironical: ‘ordina questo amor . . .’ comes to my mind as I read the plan-crowded correspondence. Sometimes my mother behaved like a saint, sometimes not—that is to say she behaved as any other decent person would. On one occasion she became so exasperated that she burst out to Maimie in dramatic form. She was trying to clear out of Melcombe Place and find a house in the country. She was desperately busy, still she brought the baby to Aunt Monie’s for a few days, only to find that she could not remove it.

The real problem at Clapham, as I have already hinted, was the growing hostility of Henrietta Synnot. My mother never discovered what caused it—they had started such friends. It was perceptible before my father’s death. It got worse yearly, and by 1887 the situation was so tense that the two women were not on speaking terms. Messages would arrive through the maids: ‘Miss Synnot’s coming down to the drawing-room, mum,’ which meant that we had to clear out of it, and once my lesson books were thrown like infected objects into the passage. She incited Aunt Monie to sell all the family silver, and when my mother looked disconsolate said ‘Let’s hope Morgan won’t inherit that vulgar craze.’ The explosion came when she complained of my mother to Aunt Monie: hitherto the poor old lady had managed to pretend that her nieces still loved one another. ‘Oh then Dick’s anger boiled and I was Dick’ writes my mother to Laura Forster, ‘and I fired such a letter as will I hope make her hair stand on end.’ A draft of this letter has been preserved: ‘Now that you have thought well to enlighten Monie as to the true state of affairs between us, and have by so doing worried her very much there is no longer any reason why I should remain silent . . .’ etc. Dick’s anger had certainly boiled, and Henrietta ceased to talk in what was called ‘her fat military voice’ for quite a little time.

To end on a gentler and more appropriate note, I will quote two letters that passed between ‘Lily’ and her benefactress. I don’t know their dates.

Aunt Monie replies:

2
The Death of Henry Sykes Thornton

The above squabbles and softenings become ephemeral when they are set against the immense length of Marianne Thornton’s life. Born in 1797!—it is incredible, it begins to assume the proportions of infinity, and Henry Sykes Thornton had been born in 1800. Their companionship had endured; thanks to her wisdom he had continued to come and see her and she had sometimes gone to see him. The visits on both sides must have been brief and are seldom mentioned, but she happens to describe, to my mother, the last time she saw him at East Side.

There was a subsequent meeting in Battersea Rise when she was carried upstairs to the room where he was confined. He died in 1881, worth £330,085. Battersea Rise was left to his daughters by his first wife, Emmy and Harti. They could not afford to live in it, and would have found it inconvenient to live in, so they proposed to let it to his widow at a rent of £800 a year. Marianne was unreasonably upset. She cherished the illusion that at the death of her brother the sacred house would be released from its bondage and return to the true succession. She writes about it (to Emmy Sykes) with unusual bitterness:

She was ill at the time with the malady of her declining years and the doctor had been dosing her heavily. This may explain her lack of restraint. She was indignant that Emily had inherited a large fortune, and even more indignant that by the terms of the Will the heavy succession duty on it was to be paid out of the Estate. Since the Marriage Bill of 1850 had never become law Emily’s legacy would be chargeable at 10% instead of the usual 1%, and this would mulct the Estate to the amount of £17,000: ‘all thrown down the drain’. She talked and wrote unwisely and wildly, and her supporters did the same. Suddenly she became scared by the possibility of a libel action, counselled caution, and calmed down. What her brother’s death meant to her, how much passed out of her with him, we cannot know. It must have recalled her further and further into the past, and made recent events dim.

Henry Sykes Thornton in his gig.
About 1860. From a photograph.

Soon after his death she wrote as follows to one of the partners of the Bank: the letter is still preserved there together with its accompanying photograph:

Only one letter of sympathy to her has been preserved: from quaint little Archdeacon Harrison:

The same disastrous winter she suffered another loss. It was not an intimate loss, but it meant the disappearance of another figure from the friendly past: Mrs George Richmond, whose elaborate funeral caused her to reflect on her own end, and to express her revised views on the subject of mourning.

Throughout all these sorrows and partings her handwriting—so often an index of decay—remained firm. The letter reproduced facing page 230 illustrates this.

3
My Recollections

The time has come for me to put down a few recollections of the house on East Side. Family life was led on the first floor. Aunt Monie had a bedroom at the back, and she would sit on the edge of her low bed of a morning and entertain me to breakfast. Her déshabillé was dainty—(‘My dear, an old woman’s bad enough, but a dirty old woman——!’); clean dressing-gown, pretty cape, cap with a pale blue ribbon—and in the kindest way she would invite me to share her egg, dipping a bread-and-butter finger into its yolk and popping it into my expectant mouth. I enjoyed this for a time but alas for too short a time. I was growing at the rate of a month a day, she was static in her eighties, and she could not realise that eggy-peggy-leggy-jeggy would soon stale and might even nauseate. I behaved fairly well, thanks to my mother’s admonitions. She would urge me to be nice before I went in, and she has recorded my attempts to get into intellectual touch with Aunt Monie, and my dejected expression when I realised I had failed. Anyhow I minded eggy-peggy less than my corkscrew curls. I had to wear these for the old lady’s pleasure, and must have been almost the last of the moppets thus to be tormented. A pupil of Mr Richmond’s made a repellent drawing of the curls and of me in their midst.

The bedroom communicated with the big front drawing-room which looked over a corner of Clapham Common. There were two wheeled chairs: one of them had great wheels on each side, and when she was strong enough she propelled herself in it, and she had ‘lazy-tongs’ which darted out and nibbled ineffectively at objects she had dropped on the floor. Once I came on her all alone in her chair shouting ‘Nurse, nurse’, and I slunk away frightened. I often wondered what was wrong with her. The room was covered with a brussels carpet, in whose corner a cat made messes, and it had a fireplace in front of which an enigmatic figure occasionally stood: ‘Enty’ (Henrietta Synnot) robed in a gown of plum-coloured silk with buttons all down it from the throat to the floor. I did not realise that Enty hated us, and was only there because she had had publicly proclaimed she should not be. I merely found her unresponsive. Once she gave me a Bible, whereupon my mother sobbed with rage. I learnt afterwards that when Enty disliked people she gave them a Hymn Book, and when she detested them a Prayer Book. So a Bible was the limit of limits. She also had a habit of sweeping out of the room uttering barbed words which were too incomprehensible to wound, ‘A tortuous path is always futile. Good baa’ was a classic farewell.

Upstairs was the Important One’s peculiar realm—a darkling region, often overshadowed by Christmas. I would lie awake in excitement and be unable to enjoy the stocking when dawn broke. And I remember a healthier excitement—discovering up there at the age of four that I was able to read to myself. From that moment I never looked back. Printed words spread around me. No one taught me to read and no one managed to teach me to write. Pothooks and hangers remained unattainable. It was the nice picture-books in the Clapham upstairs that started me off towards freedom. ‘Tiresome to be interrupted in my reading when the light is so good’ I would priggishly say. ‘Can’t you tell the people I am busy reading, Havell? ‘I soon got on to the Swiss Family Robinson and loved it because the boys in it were happy, whereas Robinson Crusoe was always worrying over savages.

On the ground floor were the servants—a friendly enough company, and a numerous one, for Lady Inglis’ legacy was still operating. Sarah Cook, Sarah Housemaid, White-Faced Emma, Mrs Ing etc.—I had tea with them and was usually popular, but when I cried ‘Mrs Ing’s a cat’ she laid down the saucer from which she had been lapping and Sarah Cook looked very grave indeed. The most important figure of all—Nurse Havell—did not consort with us. She ate alone and worked alone. She was the power behind the wheeled chair and for all I know a beneficent one, but the letters of the period are full of anxious references to her; Havell has said this, that . . . Havell has told Monie when she had no right to that . . . has been playing fast and loose. She was certainly hand in glove with Henrietta Synnot, who has put up a tablet to her in the church at Milton.

Not much happened during these visits, which appear in retrospect as dun-coloured. I was not unhappy, I did not protest, but I caught the prevalent atmosphere, and realised without being told that I was in the power of a failing old woman, who wanted to be kind but she was old and each visit she was older. How old was she? Born in the reign of George the Fourth, my mother thought. ‘More likely Edward the Fourth’ cried I. Occasionally cousins were encountered—Brian Southey my senior whom I admired, and nasty Blowdie Wags who blew a whistle in my ear. I screamed, I screamed. News of this outrage spread through the Thornton clan, and Blowdie was widely condemned. My mother was furious with him for upsetting her darling but also annoyed with me for being a cry-baby. This horrid boy got me altogether on the hop, pointed his finger at me whenever we met, and was the first to demonstrate to me that I was a coward. Then there were some protective girl cousins, Ethel and Mabel Forster, whose pink dresses and kind offices won approval. But as I have already said once, not much happened at Clapham, and I could say this again. I seemed never to see the sun there: ‘The room gets lighter or darker, but the sun never throws his rays in as he does at home.’ Thus I sighed to my mother.

The truth is that she and I had fallen in love with our Hertfordshire home and did not want to leave it. It certainly was a lovable little house, and still is, though it now stands just outside a twentieth-century hub and almost within sound of a twentieth-century hum. The garden, the overhanging wych-elm, the sloping meadow, the great view to the west, the cliff of fir trees to the north, the adjacent farm through the high tangled hedge of wild roses were all utilised by me in Howards End, and the interior is in the novel too. The actual inmates were my mother, myself, two maids, two or more cats, an occasional dog; outside were a pony and trap with a garden boy to look after them. From the time I entered the house at the age of four and nearly fell from its top to its bottom through a hole ascribed to the mice, I took it to my heart and hoped, as Marianne had of Battersea Rise, that I should live and die there. We were out of it in ten years. The impressions received there remained and still glow—not always distinguishably, always inextinguishably—and have given me a slant upon society and history. It is a middle-class slant, atavistic, derived from the Thorntons, and it has been corrected by contact with friends who have never had a home in the Thornton sense, and do not want one.

Aunt Monie had urged my mother to take the house (provided it was on gravel), so she had no grounds for complaint, and it had seemed to her quite proper that a beautiful young widow should bury herself in the wilds for the sake of a supposedly delicate son. All the same, there was this nagging desire to see us—me particularly. Her thirst for youth had become cannibalistic. My mother’s letters fall into three classes—those in which she undertook to go to Clapham, those in which she excused herself from going, and those in which she fed the old lady with amusing bits of news about the Important One, in the hope of keeping her quiet. She was rather cynical—she held that it was as Morgan’s mother that she mattered, and she could be proudly silent on the subject of Whichelo affairs. She was not very cynical—she was fond of naughty tiresome Monie, and grateful to her, and liked pleasing her.

Out of the endless trifles she now dished up I will select a few on the subject of Pink-Faced Emma. I might have chosen the Sailor-dollar sequence of letters, but it lacks variety. Pink-Faced Emma was our housemaid, and she was so called to distinguish her from Aunt Monie’s White-Faced Emma.

Emma arrives:

My mother, pony and self in Hertfordshire.
About 1885.

Emma’s folly:

Emma’s further folly:

Emma under instruction:

Emma under examination:

Emma leaves. My cleverness and rudeness were more than she could stand. The break came gathering primroses. I sneered at her for picking them with short stalks, she jeered at me for picking so few. I hit at her basket and upset it, she hit at mine. I hit her, she hit me and tore my little coat. ‘But I had to hit Master Morgan, ma’am, he hit me,’ she explained mildly. I was sorry when she left and rather ashamed, for I knew it was my fault. She was such a suitable companion, and our chant of

still sometimes rings in my ears.

Aunt Monie loved all this nonsense and the way my mother put it, and before long there was little in our simple life that she did not know and upon which she did not advise. Occasionally she discussed the defects of my character. I was not a bad child, but I had been noticed too much by grown-ups, and I could be hysterical, pretentious and detestable. On this occasion I must have gone well over the edge:

Or she meditates on my financial future:

Part of the trouble was that there were too few children in our lovely retreat. At the Park gate dwelt Baby Plum Bun or Sizzle, of inferior lineage and age, and through the rose hedge was Frankie Franklin of the farm. I admired Frankie when he attached himself to the wheel which turned the hay-cutter, and whirled round upon it Ixion-like, but did not get to know him well until later years: he only died in 1949 and I have actually spoken to five generations of that honoured family. Down in the rectory were nine daughters, to whom was presently added a future Lord Chancellor. And there were a few more children in the village, but we did not visit widely, for the pony backed when he thought we were going too far, and ran the trap into a hedge.

I depended a good deal for company upon the garden boys. With one of them, William (Mr Taylor), I am still in touch and he remembers, as I do, how he led me on the pony into the wilds of Botany Bay. But it is Ansell whom I remember best. This was a snub-nosed pallid even-tempered youth who came to us shortly before Aunt Monie died. He was reliable but not too reliable; ‘ ’e done it isself’ was his explanation when the puppy was patterned in tar. My mother in her kindness let Ansell off every Wednesday afternoon so that he could play with me. We mostly played on a straw-rick which Mr Franklin abandoned to our fury. More kindness. We slid and we shouted. Ansell hid and left his billycock as a decoy. Not finding him I jumped on it and stove it in, and this did ruffle him. Once we built a hut between the rick and the hedge: ‘ ’ow ’ot it is in ’eer, I’ve got the ’eerdache already’ said he. We stored apples there, and could not think what ate them.

Nor was his education neglected. I neglected no one’s education. Each week, as we walked round the edges of the fields, I recounted to him what last I had read of the Swiss Family Robinson, and he retold it to me fairly well, except that he would call Fritz Frizz. Arithmetic defeated him. He never could state how many chickens his mother had, however much he waved his arms, and ‘Ansell and the Chickens’ survived as a family saying long after we left Hertfordshire. For me he has survived in other ways. He was the good sweet side of the odious Blowdie Wags, and probably did more than anyone towards armouring me against life. That is why I bring him in. He faded when a professional armourer was introduced in the person of a snobbish Irish tutor who prepared me for a preparatory school which was to prepare me for a public school which was to prepare me for the world, and who supposed he had obliterated the world of Emma and Ansell for ever.

4
The Aylward Incident

This idyllic life had not been such an idyll for the grown-ups, and I must now refer to a rattling row, which, all unbeknownst to the Important One, had been raging over his head. It is in its small way comparable to the row at the time of Henry Thornton’s second marriage, though it did not involve important people or public issues, nor had it tragic consequences.

Since Inglis Synnot’s death, Maimie had passed most of her time at Clapham and a little of it in the Isle of Wight, with her sisters. Her brother had entered the Church and had become a curate at Salisbury. In 1883 she went to stay with him there, and—being passionately attached to music—she became acquainted with an elderly citizen, a Mr Aylward, who shared her tastes. I think he gave her violin lessons. Mr Aylward fell in love with her—though if I interpret him rightly ‘fell in adoration’ would be the better phrase—and he made her an offer of marriage. I know too little of this early phase of the affair. Of its later phase I know too much and I must have torn up dozens, nay hundreds of letters from Aunt Monie, Aunt Laura, my mother, the Miss Wilsons, the Miss Prestons . . . up and down, round and round.

Maimie hesitated. Her love for Inglis never waned, and to the end of her life she could not speak of him without a delighted laugh in her voice. Mr Aylward was different, was non-comparable. He told her she could make him happy, he might be right, and she did not at once send him packing.

Then the panic began. And certainly her suitor was a tall order. Not only was he old, he was unwieldy and unappetising, he was a widower with a large grown-up family, he called his home ’Olmleigh, and worst of all worsts he was in trade. The Thorntons had been in trade too, but in the eighteenth century, and they had never stood behind a counter. No more, it turned out, had Mr Aylward, but he was openly connected with Aylward and Spinney, the music shop on the Canal, in whose windows flutes and ocharoons and comic songs could be daily discerned. He was also a highly trained musician, who came of a family of organists distinguished since the early eighteenth century, and he was a close friend of Hubert Parry.^[18] That was beyond their ken. They only saw the enormity of the mésalliance, and their panic increased when Maimie fell ill. She was upset by her own uncertainty and by the clamour of the Thorntons, with Aunt Monie at their head. She collapsed with neuralgia and neurosis, and had delusions; she was received for treatment in the house of a doctor at Bournemouth, and one of my early memories of her is in a darkened room. To Aunt Monie all was now clear; a wicked old man was forcing a wealthy invalid to marry him in order to get her money. She called in the family lawyer and put the case in his hands.

In a draft letter headed ‘To Mary but must be shortened’ she addresses her nephew’s widow with a mixture of personal affection and dynastic blackmail:

She wrote almost daily to my mother, as Maimie’s closest friend, and poured out her hopes and fears and plans and second thoughts. Henrietta was laid up ‘partly with a cold partly with downright misery’. Mr Richmond had racked his mind for a parallel, and had found it in a lady of title who had married a gardener. ‘Enquiries and condolences’ kept coming in. Laura had begged Mr Aylward’s name might never be mentioned to her. Too much music may have been to blame, and Aunt Monie is sorry to hear that a violin has been seen in the sick room. And then she changed her tone and wrote charmingly and sincerely about the invalid’s sweetness and goodness and of her willingness to consider whether her mind might not indeed be impaired.

My mother took up a line of her own, and it was an excellent one. Like everyone else, she deplored the attachment and hoped it would come to nothing. But she went to see Mr Aylward, which no one else had deigned to do, and she found a bewildered and honourable old man, who had fallen in love with a woman much younger than himself and had received some encouragement and who—having been twice Mayor of Salisbury—found it difficult to regard himself as an adventurer. She came away convinced of his integrity and devotion. If Maimie really wanted to marry him, she must; it was a mistake, but her mistake; nothing to do with her in-laws. Her support won her Mr Aylward’s disproportionate gratitude. He wrote her a sweet letter of thanks. In after years he said to her ‘My dear lady, they all thought I wanted to marry Mary because of her money, but my dear lady she has no money.’

After this crucial interview she wrote in strong terms to Aunt Monie and urged her to call off the lawyers at once—they were making a sorry mess and were considering offering Mr Aylward a bribe. She assured her that he would not worry any member of the family by calling—it was the last thing he was likely to do. She begged her to prevent Laura, who was ill, from going down to see Maimie in Bournemouth, and making the pair of them iller. Her general line was ‘do nothing and perhaps nothing will happen’. Thereafter the situation eased. Maimie got better, thanks to the skill of her doctor, she became able to make decisions, and though her decision was marriage it was accepted with tolerable resignation by the Thorntons. They were too fond of her to organise a boycott. She and Mr Aylward were married in London in the summer of 1884, my mother being almost the only person present. When my mother got back home that night she wrote to Maimie:

I was then only five, and all I knew of the upheaval was that Maimie’s name was not Mrs Synnot as I thought, no it was Mrs Aylward. Presently a Mr Aylward stood in my presence. I disapproved, and told Maimie that he was a nasty fat waddling old thing. She took it well, indeed she was helpless with laughter. When they paid us a visit in Hertfordshire things went better. He and I had been schooled by our respective womenfolk and we met in a spirit of determined amity. Mr Aylward invited me to stay at ’Olmleigh. I replied ‘Fank you, I shall be pleased to come’ and shook hands at arm’s length in case he poked me facetiously in the stomach. Holmleigh proved to be a tall sun-drenched house balanced high above Salisbury. I loved it. I never loved Mr Aylward, but he enters into happy memories. I can see my mother and Maimie rattling at the Erard—it is Spohr’s String Quartet as a piano duet—and when they start the slow movement too fast, as they always did, I can hear the old man’s sonorous magisterial voice saying: ‘Adagio, madame, Mary, adagio . . .’ It was a rumble in the grand manner. He has a further claim on my gratitude for becoming, by his first wife, the great-grandfather of my friend Joe Ackerly. There were no children to the second marriage. On its own lines it was a thorough success. He continued to worship the ground she trod on, she never called him anything but Mr Aylward. Her brother had felt obliged to resign his Salisbury curacy when the scandal started, and neither the Close nor the County could call on her or go beyond bowing at bazaars, because she was Trade. So she was rather isolated. But she had plenty to do making her husband comfortable and helping people in Holmleigh and outside it, and enjoying the ravishing sounds and sights she found in the world—yes and the tastes, and the smell of flowers. Of the world to come, on which she set equal store, she would say ‘Won’t it be exciting, won’t it be fascinating to know, and I have an idea that one or two who expect to be very highly placed may have some surprises.’ It is tempting to run on about Maimie. She was so rare and is now so lost. Let me anyhow quote ‘It is a dreadful thing to say, but I do prefer people who are untruthful through sympathy to those who are truthful through hardness.’ And let me pop in ‘Cultivate Snow Wedgwood, for you may be entertaining an angel in the dark’.

Aunt Monie cannot be blamed for her foolish conduct over the Aylward incident. The facts as she heard them were disquieting, and she was confronted with a section of society of which Thorntons knew nothing. And her age was now eighty-seven. She had however come to enjoy interfering for interference’s sake, and I cannot help contrasting her conduct with what it might have been in earner years, and with what it had been at the time of her brother’s second marriage.

5
The End

I will end her biography by transcribing all the letters—nine in all—that she wrote to me. They show her at her best. They are an extraordinary series to have been addressed by a woman in her late eighties to a child under eight. I keep on hoping more will turn up. I cannot remember receiving them, and was probably crawling on the carpet or rushing around while my elders read them aloud and implored me to listen. The first was written when I was eighteen months old and staying with my aunt. It is characteristically introduced by a present.

The next is a postcard of October 12th, 1881. By that date my father had died. It is addressed from the Cock Pond, and the text is:

In the next we have moved to the country.

The next letter has historical importance. Beginning with the usual gift, it modulates into reminiscences, and describes—I understand accurately—a scene which occurred at the opening of Parliament in the year 1804.

Dull letter? I wish I could get many like it or write any like it! What a treasure to be thrown into the lap of an inattentive child! What a sequence—hyacinth-bulbs, copy-book, mad King! How much has died with her which, properly evoked, might have lived!

Now comes a comedy.

The next three letters are dated

The following is directed to ‘Morgan Forster Esq. Upstairs’, with an unused lilac penny stamp on the envelope. She was downstairs and had sent it aloft to greet me on my birthday.

She did not live to see the other year. But I had another letter from her in the summer, on the occasion of Queen Victoria’s Jubilee. Following the lead of my mother and other respectable citizens I was violently anti-Jubilee. There was much more freedom of speech about Royalty at the close of the nineteenth century than there is today. Many people—people who were not at all revolutionary—refused to contribute pennies towards a present for the Queen. When invited to do so my mother publicly protested; and my grandmother and I planned to spend the day together in strict seclusion. ‘Where will they find it?’ Aunt Monie remarked. She rebuked my attitude and recommended deference, though I do not find her arguments for monarchy very sound.

My republicanism was but feebly rooted, and I can still remember my cowardly behaviour at Hatfield House. Queen Victoria was driving to visit Lord Salisbury on that year of her Jubilee, and together with other children I sat on a wall to see her pass. Our legs hung outside. The policeman made us hang them inside, for reasons of propriety. I boiled with rage and I determined that I would not take off my sailor hat and wave it, nor would I cheer. At the critical moment, though, I thought the policeman was looking at me, and before I knew what I was doing my hat was off, and my lungs were squeaking. I remember, too, consenting to witness the great Jubilee procession in London, and no doubt after it my mother took me on to Clapham. But no details of that survive, nor of our last visit, which was in September—only three weeks before the ‘dear old Aunt Monie’ who had chosen so to love me died.

I can remember the arrival of the news. I knew that she was ill, and one gloomy afternoon I was walking with my mother towards our home across a corner of the park. Tall woodland (it still stands) was to the left, to the right was rough grassland. I asked her how Aunt Monie was, and she replied, in the strained tones then thought appropriate to the subject of death, ‘She is better.’—‘Is she well?’ I asked. ‘She is’ came the solemn answer, and I burst into tears. They were composite tears. I had not really loved Aunt Monie—she was too old, and the masses of presents she had given me had not found their way to my tiny heart. I cried because crying was easy and because my mother might like it, and because the subject was death. Of later years I have loved Aunt Monie better—best of all now when I have been trying to trace the unfoldings of her good life.

A week before she died she wrote an extraordinary letter to Emily Thornton. She asked for some milk. No biographer could have foretold such a request, no novelist before Proust could have invented it. After thirty-five years’ alienation she asks for some milk. Her letter has not been preserved nor has Emily’s reply. Both must have been courteous, for on October 31st Marianne writes a second letter:

The letter is confused but has a strangeness about it which cannot be explained by confusion. Emily replied:

These two letters survive in copies. The copyist (Marion Southey perhaps) remarks: ‘Don’t you think there is something regal in the way Mony holds out the olive branch to Di? the wording too is not like hers generally. Or do you take it as an admission that the estrangement was her doing?’

The latter explanation is the likelier of the two. But it is more probable still that Marianne was writing not to a person but to a place. The milk was a sacrament. She knew she was dying and before it happened she wished to be in physical touch with Battersea Rise.

After some comfortable days and nights her end came—November 5th, 1887. She left a paper of wishes behind her in which she said:

She was buried at Milton Bryan by her friend Lord Alwyn Compton, then Bishop of Ely, and I once came across a letter (I cannot now locate it) describing the funeral and the fantastical grief of Henrietta Synnot. I have hunted in the tangled churchyard of Milton for her grave but have failed to find it. She made a will which was of the greatest importance to me, though I did not know it at the time. She died worth about £20,000. She bequeathed Milton and the East Side house to Henrietta, together with some money, there were legacies to Laura Forster, to my mother, etc., and to me she left £8000. The interest was to be devoted to my education and when I was twenty-five I was to receive the capital. This £8000 has been the financial salvation of my life. Thanks to it, I was able to go to Cambridge—impossible otherwise, for I failed to win scholarships. After Cambridge I was able to travel for a couple of years, and travelling inclined me to write. After my first visit to India and after the first world war the value of the £8000 began to diminish, and later on it practically vanished. But by then my writings had begun to sell, and I have been able to live on them instead. Whether—in so stormy an age as ours—this is a reputable sequence I do not know. Still less do I know how the sequence and all sequences will end, with the storms increasing. But I am thankful so far, and thankful to Marianne Thornton; for she and no one else made my career as a writer possible, and her love, in a most tangible sense, followed me beyond the grave.

Index

TRANSCRIBER NOTES

Misspelled words and printer errors have been corrected. Where multiple spellings occur, majority use has been employed.

Punctuation has been maintained except where obvious printer errors occur.

Some illustrations were moved to facilitate page layout.

[The end of Marianne Thornton (1797-1887)—A Domestic Biography, by E. M. Forster.]