Journeys in Vanished Worlds
Hi, I’m Joanna Hodgkin and also Joanna Hines. Hines is fiction and Hodgkin is non fiction which is where my focus mostly is these days. My two non fiction books, Amateurs in Eden and Tell Me Who I Am (with Alex and Marcus Lewis) will soon have a page each. Two works in progress, Quakers in Love and A Good(ish) Man in Burma already have a page of their own, recent posts shown below. Why two books in progress? Good question.
Amateurs in Eden started me on non fiction. But there were questions left unanswered when the book was finished. The principle one concerned the mysterious relative who left her all his money on his deathbed, thus funding some of the Durrells’ years in Paris and Corfu. Who was he and why did he do something so arbitrary – and cruel to his wife and children?
I’d been interested in Harold Fielding Hall for a long time. His story seemed to mirror that of a distant relative on my father’s side, Thomas Hodgkin, the medical pioneer, and his decades long love for his cousin, Sarah Godlee Rickman. I thought the stories would work well together: both concerned people of complex and interesting faith, mysterious women who needed to step out from the shadows, love affairs that ended in tragedy. Many thousands of words later, I realised that each one stood alone and needed its own book. Each one revealed fascinating pockets of experience that have been too little explored.
While I was wrestling with the avalanche of material thrown up by these explorations, a more experienced writer of non fiction told me that only 5-10% of what I was learning would make it into the final edit. The short blogs on these pages are mostly bits of the 90% that didn’t make the final cut, or reflections on some aspects of the two books. Only one post (for Amateurs) is an extract.
There are still questions – see ‘Missing, One Daughter’, and ‘Last Rites, Lasting Wrongs’ – always I am haunted by the certainty that no matter how much I’ve found, that crucial letter, image, diary entry is out there somewhere, just waiting to be discovered.
So do get in touch, with queries, answers, comments using the contact form.
My latest posts
Home page
March 30, 2023Advice for invaders: when planning to take over a sovereign state, it’s a good idea to frame it as a ‘rescue mission’. At the height of the imperial era, the British knew this well.
By 1885, when they were getting ready to take over Upper Burma, a narrative was in place that provided a large enough fig leaf to justify what was in reality naked aggression. The Rangoon merchants in the south of Burma, which was already under British control, wanted free access to the teak forests and mines of the secret kingdom of Upper Burma, and there were fears that the French might step in first if the British delayed.
The cover story was simple: King Thibaw was a ‘gin soaked tyrant’ straight out of the Arabian Nights and his ‘harridan queen’ was even worse. Every Burman ‘lived in the utmost abhorrence and terror’ (J George Scott). The young royals’ nadir of depravity was the massacre that took place soon after he came to the throne in 1878. As the 41st of the 48 sons of King Mindon, Thibaw’s legitimacy was far from certain: about 70 his rivals, male and female, were slaughtered in a night of utter savagery.
Nearly 70 years later that cover story was still in place: ECV Foucar (They Reigned in Mandalay, 1946.) relished the gory details of Thibaw’s reign – ‘as bloodsmeared a page as any in the history of the human race, not excluding the troubled story of our own century.’ (Had he forgotten the massacre at Amritsar in 1919?) ‘The madness of the House of Alompra was at its height. It was almost as if Thibaw and his Queen Supayalat, who was also his step-sister, had come to realise that they were doomed, and with this foreknowledge entered upon a wild orgy of unbridled licence and bloodshed … (his dots)’ And much more of the same.
In fairness to Foucar, he admitted he had given his imagination free rein in writing this account. Whatever the errors of those staid Brits who ran the country after 1885 they paled into insignficance next to Thibaw and his ghastly bride.
And so it continues. The Kipling Society website offers the following on the last king of Burma: ‘the nonentity Theebaw, a shallow-brained alcoholic youth, dominated by his ignorant, greedy and vicious wife Soopaya-Lat, already his evil genius and soon to be a byword’. This vicious couple had 80 members of the royal family slaughtered though ‘to avoid the shedding of royal blood, these were clubbed or strangled, and thrown dead and alive into a trench which was then covered over and trampled by elephants. Theebaw and his court were surprised and resentful at the horror this aroused abroad, in the day of the electric telegraph.’
The legend has become fact. Until very recently, everyone was agreed in their condemnation.
Not quite everyone. Right from the first, Harold Fielding Hall was sceptical. He was exactly the same age as Thibaw – both born in 1859 – and he had been working in the teak forests of Upper Burma before the annexation. He heard the rumours. But he had his doubts: ‘As I got to know the people I became sure that these tales could not be true.’
He returned to Upper Burma the following year, this time as the lowliest of the low in the Indian civil Service, a position so low it did not even have an English name: for those first years he was a ‘myook’. Most myooks were Burmese natives.
In the first two or three years after the annexation, he got to know the ordinary Burmese in a way that would soon be impossible. He kept trying to find out the truth about King Thibaw, Queen Supayalat and the night of the massacre. Eventually his persistance was rewarded. A young woman who had been an attendant to Queen Supayalat gradually told him all she could remember about her years in the famed palace of Mandalay. His conversations with Ma Thein Me gave Harold enough information to know what to ask those who remembered the night of the massacre.
It was a frequent topic of conversation among his companions while he was a lowly myook. ‘I have heard it spoken of many a time in the villages when work was over and cigars were lit in the warm dusk.’ The massacre was terrible, a violation of every Buddhist principle, but it prevented a struggle in which many thousands would have died. Ma Thein Me said, ‘Have English queens never killed their rivals, or English kings allowed their wives to be executed?’
The consensus among the Burmese, and serious historians now, is that the massacre was ordered by the last of King Mindon’s four principle queens: Sinpyumashin (Supayalat’s mother). When King Thibaw heard of the slaughter, he wept.
As for that ‘gin-soaked’ accusation, there’s no evidence for it at all. Ma Thein Me said he only once tried alcohol, soon after coming to the throne. ‘One evening he was led away by some of his pages and drank some beer, and disgraced himself. But he only did it once, and he was dreadfully ashamed of himself that all the teaching of his days in the monastery were broken so quickly’. In all the long years of his exile there is no mention that he touched even beer.
Harold never claims that Thibaw was a model king. How could he have been? He had been living in a monastery when he was catapulted onto the throne while still a teenager. A swift transition from dutiful obedience and study to great wealth and the trappings of power was disastrous. The picture that Ma Thein Me paints is of two young monarchs, much in love, who didn’t have the first idea how to rule, who never left the palace and were often badly advised.
And the cruelty charge? Rivals to the queen might disappear suddenly and the maids of honour often had ‘frights’ but ‘when the danger was past, we quickly forgot about it’. This was not the British way. After the annexation, the imperial grip established a vast and complex machinery of ‘justice’ – a machinery that for the most part baffled the Burmese.
‘Perhaps he was a bad king,’ said Ma Thein Me, ‘but he was our own king, and we understood his ways, while those of the English Government are to us as strange as the ways of the gods, for no one can tell what they will do next, or why.’
Even so, the mud so merrily spattered over the last king, seems likely to stick for a while longer.
[...]
Read more...
March 14, 2023The day Harold Fielding Hall died was not short on drama. Just hours before drawing his final breath, he wrote, or dictated, a new will which left everything to the four year old daughter of his cousin. His wife and children were to receive nothing.
It’s a bit of a cliché in fiction, the deathbed altered will – I used it myself in my first psychological thriller, Dora’s Room – useful in a book, but horribly cruel in real life. His daughter Margaret was ten, his son just nine. Neither of them ever understood the reason for his decision, but the rejection hurt for the rest of their lives.
Harold died on 5th May 1917 at the Bell Inn, Brooke, a hamlet on the northern edge of the New Forest. It’s a tranquil place now, and must have been even more sleepy then, the horror of the First World War and the recent turmoil in Russia for the most part far away. Its main claim to fame was its golf course, one of the oldest in the country, which had recently been extended to 18 holes. A photograph taken at about this time shows a solid, brick building which stands at the junction of three roads, with window boxes on the first floor, trimmed hedges and a sign advertising a tea garden at the back.
The main building remains little changed on the outside, though new buildings have been added to the side and the interior is much altered.
His will was clear, brief and uncompromising: once funeral expenses and debts have been paid, all the residue is to be placed ‘in trust for Nancy the daughter of my cousin … for her own use and benefit absolutely … ’ There’s no mention of his wife Evelyn or of their children. Harold and Evelyn were not divorced – she would never have countenanced that – but she had taken the children to live with her mother and sister a few years before, when it became impossible for them to continue living together as a family.
The will was witnessed by two people. One was H B Lawford, a solicitor whose address is given as 12 New Court Carey Street, London WC. Herbert Bowring Lawford had been born in 1864, so was five years younger than Harold. He was educated at Marlborough and at Trinity College Oxford. In 1915 he was listed in the London City Directory as a parliamentary agent with Sharpe, Prichard and co, 12 New Court. Like his father, he was a member of the Company of Drapers. Unlike Harold, who was almost entirely self taught and had begun his career in the colonial civil service at such a lowly level it had a Burmese name – myôok. For Harold, having such an eminent and established solicitor to draw up his new will was a sign of the progress he’d made in his life.
The second witness was ‘A E Tyrell, Grosvenor House Southampton (Nurse)’. Grosvenor House in Southampton had recently been established as ‘a nursing home and private nurses’ institution’ by Julia Mocatta. It’s possible that Harold had been a patient there, as his health had been poor for many years. Or that he had been staying at the Bell Inn for some time and when his health deteriorated, a nurse was sent for.
Harold’s final will is unusual for another reason: he names ‘The Public Trustee’ as sole executor. The Public Trustee was to ‘sell call in collect and convert into money my said estate and effects in such a manner as he shall think fit’ and to invest the residue, after all necessary expenses had been met, ‘in trust’ for his cousin’s daughter.
The Public Trustee had been established in 1906, to provide for people who had difficulty finding a friend or relative to be executor. Generally the Public Trustee was appointed when the deceased had no known relatives. Harold had plenty, including a sister and Nancy’s father, his cousin, Thomas Myers.
So why did a man well-provided with friends and relatives hand responsibility to the public trustee? Did he know that his friends and close relatives would disapprove of what he was doing so much they would refuse to act as executor? Or did he simply hope to spare them the controversy that was sure to follow?
His death certificate is even more unusual. The cause of death is given as 1) Capillary Bronchitis and 2) Pulmonary Oedema, certified by Syer B White MB. That, and the fact that he is said to be a male of independent means are about the only sections that were correct in the original.
The date was wrong: 4th May was written down – which was clearly impossible as his will was dated the following day. His age was given as 65 years; amended to ‘about 57’. His name was given as Harold Fielding Hall, but, the note beside in the margin stated it should have read ‘Harold Fielding Patrick Hall otherwise Harold Fielding-Hall’.
All these corrections were made by ‘William Holloway Registrar’ who had drawn up the original document. His note reads, ‘corrected on 11th August 1917 by me W Holloway Registrar on production of Statutory Declarations made by Herbert Bowring Lawford and Amy Edith Tyrell’.
Someone familiar with these kind of records declared Harold’s to be the most amended death certificate she had ever seen.
All of which points to a degree of rush and confusion surrounding his death. It’s possible that in this third year of the war the Registrar was no longer competent, all the able younger men having been called up. It may be that when she learned what had happened Harold’s wife was threatening to contest the will, which given that it was dated the day after his apparent death, would indeed have been suspicious. It may be that the eminent HB Lawford, having witnessed the will, raced off to catch the last train back to London leaving the nurse to stay with the dying man and deal with the form filling that followed, and that she was over-hasty and got into a muddle.
The details of that final day are both vivid and obscure. Trying to unravel them is critical to understanding much that went before. It’s a work in progress – and slow progress, at that. [...]
Read more...
March 10, 2023In July 1905 a remarkable short story appeared in Temple Bar Magazine. Its author, Harold Fielding Hall, was well known for his book on Burmese society and religion, The Soul of a People, which was on the way to achieving almost cult status among Edwardian readers. It’s still in print – and still worth reading – more than 100 years later. He’s remembered now as the most sympathetic of the European observers of the Burmese.
He wrote several short stories, but ‘His Daughter’ is by far the most memorable. It concerns a middle-aged, former colonial civil servant, who goes in search of his illegitimate, mixed race daughter. The topic would have been challenging enough for his bourgeois readership, but the timing of its appearance is extraordinary.
In July, the month it was published, Harold Fielding Hall came back to England on the SS Staffordshire from Rangoon; he was planning to marry Margaret Evelyn Smith. He had served for twenty years as a colonial civil officer in Burma. Given the timing, publishing an account of a man’s desperate search for his missing child was not exactly tactful. What did she make of it? Did he persuade her, by changing the dates around, that it was something he’d heard from a colleague, nothing at all to do with him? ‘His Daughter’ was fiction, for sure, but she must have known that his fiction was almost always a way to deal with things that were troubling him. Like an abandoned daughter.
All his life he fulminated against society’s hypocrisy around what he called ‘the flesh and the devil’, and advocated a more generous and realistic attitude to sexual arrangements. In the last years of his life he was still jotting down notes that reflected his obsession such as, ‘Almost all fathers adore their illegitimate children. If they abandon them it is because of the shame society attaches to it. If there was no shame the children would have a father and a name’.
‘His Daughter’, the most vivid and heartfelt of all his stories, is surely based his own story.
It begins with an evocative description of a bleak winter evening in London. ‘It rained a fine thin rain that floated in the air like mist. It hung upon the houses and closed in each street with dreary indistinctness, the lamps made red halos round them and dwindled in the distance to dim stars. The horses slipped on thee greasy roadway and those in the rank stood beneath their waterproofs with drooped heads.’
A man called simply Masterton turns with relief into the warmth of his club. ‘There was a feeling of ease, of comfort, of asylum that soothed him after the homeless desolation of the streets.’ The first friend he approaches is on his way to take ‘my girls’ to the theatre. Another who might have made up a rubber – four players were needed for a game of whist – is probably kept at home by his wife on account of the weather. ‘We aren’t all free men like you, Masterton,’ the friend says cheerfully. A young man he meets on the stairs and tries to persuade to stay with an offer of ‘fizz’ apologises, but he has just got engaged and is off to meet his fiancee. ‘Don’t wait talking to a stupid old man like me,’ Masterton tells him. ‘Run off, my boy. I am very glad. Good luck.’
Masterton finds two friends dining there and the three men talk over their meal ‘in the large room hung with pictures of soldiers and administrators famous in the East in their day’. The world they have left behind. ‘All the talk, all the names, all the stories were of the East where they had lived. Of the great city in which they had dined, of their own country, of Europe, there was never a word. It seemed as if they had ceased to live, and were only memories.’
One by one his companions leave him, but Masterton remains. ‘His rooms were near by, but of what use to go there? If one has to sit and smoke it is less lonely to do so by the fire in the club than in furnished chambers.’ Gloomily he imagines what the future might hold, how he might die with only a doctor and a nurse to keep him company, how news of his death might be received by his friends in the East, ‘Poor old Masterton! Not so old, either, only forty-eight!’ (In 1905 Harold Fielding Hall was 46.)
‘And out of the fire rose memories of that other life where he had work, had friends, had an interest. Then he had a future. Now he had only a past.’
When he was working in the East he had mocked the men who married out there. It was no place for a wife, and most young wives left swiftly so married couples lived apart for years. But at least they had children. As Masterton reflects, ‘That was what man lived for, to have children – a daughter!’
At this thought, Masterton comes to a decision. He leaves the club, telling the porter he is going away, and doesn’t know when he will return. The scene now shifts abruptly to a town in Burma. Fielding Hall is unsparing as he describes Masterton’s response to the town he used to know so well. ‘The palms, the bamboo clumps, the thatched cottages, the brown people. He knew them all. At one time they had all spoken to him in a tongue he knew. Now they spoke no more. He even wondered if he did not hate them.’
He enters a convent; the Mother Superior and another nun receive him coolly. He has come about a girl who was given into their care, but the Mother Superior says she cannot give out information to just anyone. ‘I am her father,’ he tells her. Her response: She ‘bowed in cold acquiescence.’ All these years he has supported the girl, who goes by the name of Miss Jane Grey, anonymously, through a firm of solicitors. Now he wants to take her with him to England. He explains, ‘I have lived all my life out here, and there in England – it is lonely. My daughter will be someone to keep me company – even though her mother was Burmese.’
The nuns are surprised. He has come too late. The girl was eight when she came to the convent, but she had left three years before, when she was seventeen. For a while she had worked as a teacher. But at eighteen she married. A Burman. One final barb. The nun says:
‘She never knew who her father was. You are late coming for her.’
‘Too late,’ says Masterton.
‘She often dreamed of her father,’ said the other sister. ‘She was my favourite. Poor little Jane.’
Masterton leaves with the name of his daughter’s husband, a clerk in a government office, and after several false attempts he finds someone who can direct him to her home. He goes down a lane which is bordered by hedges of oleander and hibiscus. On either side are neat houses in gardens gay with tropic flowers. Outside one house, ‘in the dust of the road were two naked babies who laughed and rolled’.
‘But when they saw Masterton they ceased. They stared, and with a sudden puckering of little mouths they burst into a cry, and rising to their legs they staggered towards the gate. Warned by the cry, a woman came out of the house. She seemed like any other Burmese woman, somewhat untidy, bright, self-confident. Running to her babies she caught them in her arms. And as Masterton stood and watched he heard her soothing them and talking.
‘ “ Tut, tut! Don’t cry. See, the ugly foreigner will go. Let’s hide.” And with a laugh Masterton’s daughter ran away from him with his grandchildren.
‘He turned away. As he went there came upon him a despair, a loathing of himself, his life, of all about him. The setting glow in the sky, the great stars, the dusty streets, the houses, the people, the smells and sounds filled him with disgust. They were not his. He had given his life to them and he hated them. And the children hooted at him as he went.’
‘His Daughter’ has a raw honesty unmatched in any of his other fiction. The evocation of the desperate loneliness of the man who has spent all his life in a distant culture and who, as his career draws to a close, returns ‘home’ only to discover that he belongs nowhere. The anguish of glimpsing his daughter, and the longed-for grandchildren – ‘that was what man lived for, to have children’ – only to find that he is now ‘the ugly foreigner’ and the gulf dividing them can never be bridged.
In 1905 Harold Fielding Hall must have thought he had escaped Masterton’s fate by marrying Margaret Evelyn. Perhaps his circumstances appeared so different that he was able to persuade his wife there was no resonance with his experience. They returned to Burma together. They had two children. He was at the peak of his career, both as a civil servant, and as a writer.
The marriage was not a success. He died estranged from wife and children – his English children.
And what of his Burmese family?
That is what I’ve been trying to discover.
[...]
Read more...
March 6, 2023A few days ago a friend sent me a photograph of a small watercolour, painted almost 200 years ago. He wrote ‘I have been given a floral watercolour miniature from my aunt Rachel’s house on which she noted on the back that it was painted by Sarah Rickman in 1830. Would this Sarah have featured in your research, do you think?’
Yes! She didn’t just feature in my research: she was its star.
Sarah Godlee Rickman (1798-1866) and her cousin Dr Thomas Hodgkin (same dates, he was the medical pioneer who identified the leukaemia that bears his name) were close as children and considered marriage in their youth. But at that time Quakers forbad marriage between first cousins though it was common enough in the rest of society: Queen Victoria, Charles Darwin – no one murmured when they married their first cousins. But they weren’t Quakers. When her husband died, five years after she painted this water anemone, Thomas who had stayed single spent two years trying to get the Society of Friends to fall into step with the rest of society. They ignored him. He and Sarah had to give up their hopes of making a life together.
All her life, in tragedy and delight, Sarah was a maker.
She did brilliant silhouettes – the Wellcome library bought a whole album of them without knowing who had done them – all with her distinctive ‘SR’ signature These examples show her portrait of William Miller, the well-known engraver, who was two years older than her, and his sister Elizabeth, two years younger, who became the third wife of Thomas Rickman the architect. They date from one of her long visits to Edinburgh. The Millers were delighted by the addition of such a bubbly and sociable young woman to the small coterie of Quakers north of the border.
Her leatherwork was so professional that recipients of her gifts complained people assumed they had been purchased – nothing amateurish about anything she did. When she and her sisters ran a little school in Lewes, she made a leaving gift for each girl, gifts that were treasured for decades – and which maybe survive still.
In 1824, back home with her family in the Bear Yard in Lewes, she began a ‘Family Journal’ full of gossip and news and reflection, laughter and tears, a document in which a whole family and their circle dance across the pages. When I read it first, they became so familiar, as if they had just left the room, that it was hard to believe she’d been writing nearly 200 years ago.
And she painted. I’d seen sketches she did as preparation for silhouettes, but this is the first botanical painting of hers I’ve found.
One of the many singular things about Sarah is how much of her survives. She was neither rich nor famous, but her legacy has been treasured by her family and others through the generations. An anonymous friend put together a handwritten account of her ‘Life and Writings’. Nicholas Godlee, great grandson of one of her brothers gathered as many of her letters and papers as he could – and generously let me work through them all when I was writing about the lifelong devotion between Thomas Hodgkin and her. Nicholas’s interest in her had first been sparked when he inherited a small table she had made. Cabinet making and sculpture were all activities she plunged into with zest.
Perhaps this is her secret. In spite of the many difficulties in her life, she embraced each day with honesty and gusto. Friendship, literature, family, creativity – she enhanced the lives of all who knew her – ‘the sun of our system’, as a sister described her – funny, warm-hearted, waspish and kind. Her personality somehow survives in the objects she made. Like this little painting of the water anemone. Hardly a great work of art, but the creation of a woman whose life was itself a work of art.
And it sets me wondering. How much else that she made or wrote still survives, scattered and still treasured? Nicholas had two volumes of her Family Journal, from January 1824 to December 1828, but there are references in her letters to later volumes. It was passed around her family who insisted she carry on. Have all the later volumes been destroyed, or are they still treasured, still surviving? [...]
Read more...
February 26, 2023November 27th 2022: an unlikely gathering took place in Lordship Rec, a park in Tottenham, North London, organised by the wonderful group of people who are Tottenham Clouds.
About thirty people had joined to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the birth of a quiet man who left a mighty legacy: Luke Howard. He was a pharmacist, which at the beginning of the nineteenth century meant someone who worked in the field of chemical experimentation, not just doling out medicines – though he did that as well. But his passion, from childhood, was observing the weather. Most especially, clouds.
His paper, On The Modification Of Clouds, was read out to a small scientific group one evening in 1802 – as a member of the Askesian Society, he had to produce a paper or pay a fine.
Amazingly, the impact of that paper resonates still. The names he chose, Cumulus, Cirrus, Stratus and Nimbus are still the basis of cloud naming. He is recognised as the father of meteorology. He was also the only Englishman that Goethe called ‘Master’ – but that’s a digression.
On the day we gathered, the sky was dense with those endless dense white-grey clouds that seem to blot out everything. In his words:
I relish his scolarly description of a skyscape which is basically a huge mash up of every kind of cloud there is cumulus, cirrus, stratus with nimbus thrown in just in case. There was a lot of pluviam about to effundens that afternoon, but the six of us in the photograph were more intrigued by totting up the greats: if Luke Howard is my great x 3 grandfather, and your great x 4 grandfather, what kind of cousin are we?
Distant, is the only answer to that.
I wasn’t there because Luke Howard is my many greats grandfather – genes too diluted to claim any honour – but because he is a man I have come to know well. In the story I’ve been researching of Thomas Hodgkin (1798-1866) and his decades-long love for his cousin Sarah Godlee (1798-1866 also) Luke Howard plays a more than walk-on part. He was a luminous figure in the Quaker firmament of the early nineteenth century, but he was also a neighbour and mentor to Thomas and his brother John when they were boys. Thomas’s brother John married Luke Howard’s daughter, Elizabeth. Their stories were interwoven all through.
Elizabeth’s correspondence with her deeply unhappy younger sister Rachel gave me my first window into the world of those Quaker women born at the turn of the century. Elizabeth was someone with a gift for happiness, as her less fortunate sister knew. Elizabeth’s death at the age of 33 was one of those tragedies whose consequences ripple out beyond her own circle for decades to come.
The best known image of Luke Howard shows an alert man with a far seeing gaze, appropriate for someone who spent so much of his life looking up at the sky. When he was sitting for his portrait at ‘Glovers’, Elizabeth reported :
‘It is undoubtedly now a very good likeness, but taken, we must allow, in a moment of animation which is not our dear father’s usual mood. Fancy him just roused up by some remark which takes his attention and pleases him and saying “Now, Robert, what is that? Let me hear that again?” and thou wilt have it just.’
Elizabeth used the old-fashioned ‘thee’ and ‘thou’, as did all Quakers at that time. Plain speech was important to them. But the note of asperity – ‘animation is not our dear father’s usual mood’ – speaks volumes.
My favourite image of him, however, was sketched by Elizabeth’s eldest son, Eliot. He was seven when she died. The following summer he and his siblings went to stay with their grandparents, Luke and his wife Mariabella, at their home in Ackworth, Yorkshire. Now in semi retirement, Luke Howard was devoting his energy equally to meteorology and farming, and the children enjoyed the animals and activity. Eliot wrote – in French; they were a family that expected a lot of their children – to his father still in London recording his delight in being allowed to chop down a small tree. Note the very clearly marked wedge where the axe must fall. And is that his jacket lying on the ground behind him? Eliot continued to decorate his letters with cartoons all his life.
Presumably the two little girls on the left are his younger sisters, and the woman with them either their governess or their aunt. Is the second person with the stick behind their grandfather his old coachman? Luke Howard wears a top hat to observe the chopping of the tree. Maybe he was already moving away from the traditional Quaker dress for men. He was on the verge of leaving Quakers in the upheaval which was tearing the movement apart – the Beaconite controversy. Whatever tensions and unhappiness surrounded the family – and Eliot’s little brother Thomas is conspicuously absent, most probably in trouble for quarrelling – Eliot looks to be enjoying his moment of action. [...]
Read more...
February 24, 2023When young Thomas Rickman boarded the London to Liverpool coach on a dark December morning 1807, he faced an instant dilemma. What words should he use? Did he greet his fellow travellers as ‘you’? Or ‘thee’ and ‘thou’?
His allegiance to the Society of Friends dictated the latter. But the temptation to use the pronoun everyone else regarded as normal was almost overwhelming. When settling in for a long journey, the inside travellers were always quick to assess the company they’d be keeping during the long day ahead. Coach travel was made or marred by one’s companions. Thomas’s clothes already marked him out as an oddity: the wide-brimmed hat, breeches and antiquated coat that Quakers still wore in the early nineteenth century – did he have to compound his outsider status by the way he spoke?
His concern is surprising for two reasons. Firstly, he was not technically even a member of the Society of Friends: he had been disowned three years before because of his marriage to his first cousin Lucy, a woman he’d loved from boyhood. First cousin marriage was common in nineteenth century England – Charles Darwin and Queen Victoria both married first cousins and no one batted an eyelid. But Quakers followed their own rules, and Thomas and Lucy had faced fierce opposition from family and friends. Still, disownment did not mean the kind of never-darken-my-doors-again severance the word implies. They continued to attend meeting and to be supported by the same family and friends who had earlier discouraged their marriage.
But in December 1807 Thomas and Lucy’s hopes for a life together had been torpedoed. His corn factor business had failed and as a bankrupt he had no way to support his wife. Three days earlier he’d seen her leave on the Lewes coach to go back to her parents. That evening he had written in his journal ‘Sat down very solitary to my Dinner my tears flowed oh Lucy how has thou felt this Day many feelings rushed on me’ – (Punctuation was never Thomas’s thing.)
With his life in freefall, one might assume he was too stressed to bother about the opinion of his fellow travellers on the Liverpool coach. Not so. On arrival in Liverpool he noted with relief, ‘To bed early with some Gratitude for the support experienced thro’ the Day and having been favour’d to keep the plain Language thro’ the Journey and while here’.
To be a Quaker in the early nineteenth century was to be ‘other’. The early years of bitter persecution had long gone, imprisonment and even death were no longer the price to be paid for membership of ‘our society’. Now Quakers had to endure a less obvious and often underestimated trial: embarrassment. To wear odd clothes, to refuse to take your hat off (men), to insist of odd quirks of speech – all this marked you down as seriously weird. And young Quakers had the same longing to fit in with their peers as anyone else. Some years later, Thomas Rickman’s nephew Burwood Godlee, always regarded as the epitome of the conformist Lewes Quaker, wrote to his brother who was starting a new career as a barrister in London encouraging him to stick to the Quaker ways, however hard that might be. He admitted that ‘the peculiarities of Quakerism’ had been a ‘scene of contest my whole life from a boy’. Even for Burwood, who never ventured far beyond the safe world of his tight knit Lewes circle, the temptation to avoid social embarrassment was ever present.
I sympathise. In this ‘post-religious’ age, to admit to being part of a Christian community is to invite scorn, bafflement, derision or – perhaps worst of all – pity. You’re religious? Really? After Darwin and Dawkins, after the endless scandals of abuse and persecution? When large chunks of the Christian hierarchy appear to be obsessed with what people do with their sexual organs? and now even undoing all the progress that’s been made in terms of equality and generosity towards all people? You really identify with all of that?
By a twist of history, to be Quaker is to escape much of the contempt. I attend an Anglican church but I only have to mention my roots in the Society of Friends, to trigger instant relief: ‘Oh yes, Quakers. I have a lot of respect for them’.
Whenever I mention the embarrassments of religion to fellow worshippers there is immediate recognition. Lots of people take care to distinguish between being religious and being spiritual. Latter ok, former suspect. Same with prayer. Tell people you are meditating for half an hour every morning and they accept it easily. Tell them you’re praying and most look away, embarrassed in their turn, as if you’d admitted to something one really doesn’t speak about in polite – or ‘cool’ – society.
Which is why, I suppose, the embarrassments of religion are so seldom discussed. Because they are … well, embarrassing. So what is the solution? Talking about it is a start. Beyond that, for me anyway, it’s a work in progress.
And what of Thomas and his Lucy? A week after his arrival in Liverpool, he noted in his diary that he had been seized with anxiety and ‘in a fear of something happening to my Lucy’. Her health had been precarious since childhood and any kind of stress was liable to precipitate an attack of erysipelas. She had been unwell for several days and died in her sleep on the night of 13th December 1807, having finished a letter to her husband ‘believe me as ever, most tenderly thine,’ before turning in for the night.
Thomas’s journal is a blank for a week after he got the news, and for several days it was barely coherent.
Alone and practically destitute in Liverpool, he got through his grief by tireless walking whenever he had the chance, and often during his lonely walks he paused to sketch the churches in the area. In time, his study of church architecture led to the publication of An Attempt to Discriminate the Styles of English Architecture from the Conquest to the Reformation in 1817. He divided medieval architecture into Norman, Early English, Decorated and Perpendicular, a system of classification that has been used ever since. He’s remembered now as one of the leading Gothic architects of the day.
He gradually drifted away from the Society of Friends and became an Anglican, though he remained close to his Quaker cousins. Who continued, as I do now, to sometimes struggle with the embarrassments of religion.
This article first appeared in The Friend, 2023
[...]
Read more...