Abstract
Gradually, the feminist cadre began to drift apart. The tight web of personal, reforming and journalistic threads which had linked the various sections of the community together became increasingly frayed. By the late 1840s, the original South Place Circle had all but evaporated. The deaths of the Flower sisters in 1846 and 1848 had been a sore blow and the vacuum they left was compounded both by Fox’s poor health and his absorption in parliamentary affairs as a Member of Parliament.1 Home and William Howitt demonstrated the extent to which their own commitment to British social reform was increasingly subjugated to new interests by leaving for Australia in 1852. Howitt returned in 1854, but Horne remained there for many years.2 The Ashurst circle had been devastated by the death of Eliza Ashurst during childbirth in 1850 — her powerful personality and committed feminist objectives were a tremendous loss to the early movement — and a terrific personal shock to the intimate Muswell Hill Brigade.3 However, equally disastrous for the early feminists was the disappearance of Mary Leman Grimstone from the scene. Grim-stone, always an elusive character, appears to have also died around this date.4 Her work had proved to be a well of constant inspiration to the radical reformers.
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Notes
Brenda Colloms, ‘“Tottie” Fox, Her Life and Background’, Gaskell Society Journal, Vol. V. 1991, pp. 19–20.
E. F. Richards (ed.), Mazzini’s Letters to an English Family 1844–1854 (John Lane, 1920), pp. 175–7.
Michael Roe, ‘Mary Leman Grimstone (1880–1850?). For Women’s Rights and Patriotism’, in Papers and Proceedings, Tasmanian Historical Research Association, Vol. 6, no. 1, March 1989, p. 24.
Walter Jerrold, Douglas Jerrold. Dramatist and Wit (Hodder and Stoughton, 1914), Vol. II, p. 543.
F. B. Smith, Radical Artisan. William James Linton, 1812–1897 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1973), pp. 95–8.
Carl Ray Woodring, Victorian Samplers: William and Mary Howitt (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1952), pp. 86, 138; MS letters from Mary Howitt to Eliza Meteyard, March 1847 and n.d., Houghton Library, Harvard University, fMS Eng 883.1.
MS letter from Caroline Hill to John Stuart Mill [n.d.], British Library of Political and Economic Science, Mill-Taylor Collection, Vol. II, item 291, fols. 656–7; C. E. Maurice (ed.), Life of Octavia Hill, as Told in Her Letters (Macmillan, 1913), pp. 13, 255.
Bessie Raynor Parkes, ‘Remarks’, cited in D. M. Chase Worzala, ‘The Langham Place Circle, The Beginnings of the Organized Women’s Movement in England, 1854–1870’, (PhD thesis, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1982), p. 82.
Jane Rendall, The Origins of Modern Feminism: Women in Britain, France and the United States, 1780–1860 (Chicago: Lyceum Books, 1985), p. 228.
Lee Holcombe, Wives and Property. Reform of the Married Women’s Property Law in Nineteenth Century England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1983), p. 85; Woodring, Victorian Samplers, p. 180; Jane Rendall, ‘ “A Moral Engine?” Feminism, Liberalism and the English Woman’s Journal’, in Jane Rendall (ed.), Equal or Different. Women’s Politics 1800–1914 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), p. 119.
J. O. S. Baylen and N. J. Gossman (eds), Biographical Dictionary of Modern British Radicals (Hassocks: Harvester Press, 1979), pp. 60–1, 478–9.
Philippa Levine, Victorian Feminism 1850–1900 (Hutchinson, 1987), p. 21; Rendall, Origins of Modern Feminism, p. 314.
Helen Blackburn, Women ‘s Suffrage. A Record of the Women’s Suffrage Movement in the British Isles (Williams and Norgate, 1902), p. 64; Le vine, Victorian Feminism, pp. 66, 141.
Olive Banks, Becoming a Feminist. The Social Origins of ‘First Wave’ Feminism (Brighton: Wheatsheaf, 1986), p. 133.
Alan Ruston, ‘dementia Taylor’, Transactions of the Unitarian Historical Society, Vol. XX, no. 1, April 1991, pp. 62–8; Olive Stinchcombe, ‘Elizabeth Malleson’, ibid., pp. 56–61;
Hope Malleson, Elizabeth Malleson 1828–1916, Autobiographical Notes and Letters (Printed for Private Circulation, 1926), see pp. 36–41, 45, 58, 94, in particular.
Henry Solly, These Eighty Years, or Story of an Unfinished Life (Simpkin, Marshall and Co., 1893), Vol. II, pp. 421–2;
T. Wemyss Reid, The Life and Letters and Friendships of Richard Monckton Milnes. First Lord Houghton (Cassell, 1890, second edition), Vol. II, p. 178. Houghton’s relationship with the radical unitarian community emerges passim, in the largely uncatalogued Houghton Collection, Trinity College, Cambridge; see, for example, MS letters Cullum P.911; Houghton 26/162; Houghton 22219.
Sheila R. Herstein, A Mid-Victorian Feminist, Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), p. 70.
Jane Rendall, ‘Friendship and Politics: Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon (1827–91) and Bessie Raynor Parkes (1829–1925)’, in Jane Rendall and Susan Mendus (eds), Sexuality and Subordination. Interdisciplinary Studies of Gender in the Nineteenth Century (Routledge, 1989), pp. 136–70, p. 163.
MS letter from Bessie Raynor Parkes to her mother, 16 October 1851, BRP II 3/31; Gordon S. Haight (ed)., George Eliot and John Chapman. With Chapman’s Diaries (Hamden, Conn: Archon Books, 1969, second edn), p. 88.
See Mary Lyndon Shanley, Feminism, Marriage and the Law in Victorian England, 1850–1895 (L. B. Tauris, 1989), p. 29; see also Chapter 4 above.
Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon, ‘Authorities and Precedents for Giving the Suffrage to Qualified Women’ (1867), in C. A. Lacey (ed.), Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon and the Langham Place Group (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986), pp. 118–32.
John Stores Smith, Social Aspects (John Chapman, 1850), pp. 82–3;
Anna Jameson, Characteristics of Women. Moral, Poetical and Historical (Saunders and Otley, 1858), p. 256.
Eliza Lynn, Realities. A Tale (Saunders and Otley, 1851), Vol. I, pp. 8–9; Vol. II, p. 74.
For a personification of Grimstone’s ideal heroine, see Ida in Woman ‘s Love (Saunders and Otley, 1832); Matilda M. Hays, Helen Stanley. A Tale (E. Churton, 1846), p. 244;
Eliza Meteyard, Struggles For Fame (T. C. Newby, 1845), Vol. III, p. 5.
J. F. C. Harrison, Robert Owen and the Owenites in Britain and America. The Quest for the New Moral World (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969), pp. 59–60; ‘Female Influence and Training’, NMW, Vol. V, no. 2, 3 November 1838, p. 23.
See Jeffrey Weeks, Sex. Politics and Society. The Regulation of Sexuality since 1800 (Longman, 1989), p. 68.
The Crisis occasionally published extracts from the Monthly Repository, e.g. ‘The Monthly Repository’, Vol. II, no. 22, 8 June 1833, p. 174; however, the New Moral World was even more dependent. It printed numerous articles from the Monthly Repository, as well as faithfully reporting Fox’s Finsbury lectures. See, for example, Mrs Leman Grimstone, ‘Female Education’, NMW, Vol. I, no. 17, 21 February 1835, pp. 132–5; ‘Lectures on the Morality of the Various Classes by the Rev. W. J. Fox’, NMW, Vol. II, no. 59, 12 December 1835, pp. 52–3; ‘Women in England’, NMW, Vol. IV, no. 186, 19 May 1838, p. 240.
Lucy Aikin to Dr Channing, 18 April 1838, P. H. Le Breton (ed.), Memoirs, Miscellanies, and Letters of the Late Lucy Aikin including those addressed to the Rev. Dr. Channing from 1826 to 1842 (Longman, Green, Roberts, 1864), p. 369.
Angela John, By the Sweat of Their Brow. Women Workers at Victorian Coal Mines (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984, second edn), pp. 148–9.
Margaret Hewitt, Wives and Mothers in Victorian Industry (Rockliff, 1958), p. 66.
See, for example, ‘The Winlaton Literary and Mechanics Institution’, People, Vol. I, no. 53, 1849, p. 6; ‘Weekly Record’, Howitt’s Journal, Vol. II, no. 49, 4 December 1846, p. 367; J. F. C. Harrison, Learning and Living. 1790–1960. A Study in the History of the English Adult Education Movement (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961), p. 148.
See June Purvis, Hard Lessons. The Lives and Education of Working Women in Nineteenth Century England (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989), pp. 153–6.
Shanley, Feminism, Marriage and the Law, see pp. 60, 67, 77, 159–60 especially; George Watt, The Fallen Woman in the Nineteenth Century Novel (Croom Helm, 1984), pp. 9ff; Herstein, A Mid-Victorian Feminist, p. 53.
See Martha Vicinus, Independent Women. Work and Community for Single Women. 1850–1920 (Virago, 1985), for a consideration of the application of these ideas to single women — see esp. Chapter 6 and pp. 295–7.
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© 1995 Kathryn Gleadle
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Gleadle, K. (1995). Conclusion: The Reception, Significance and Influence of the Early Feminists. In: The Early Feminists. Studies in Gender History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-26582-4_7
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