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Family, Fame and London Society

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Book cover Mrs Humphry Ward and Greenian Philosophy

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Abstract

During the thirteen years Mary Ward lived in Oxford as a member of the famous Arnold family, she built a reputation as a talented scholar of Christian theology and Spanish. The skills and social contacts she developed through her studies in the Bodleian Library and the guidance she received from some of the most eminent Oxford scholars, such as T. H. Green, J. R. Green, Mark Pattinson, Mandell Creighton and Walter Pater proved indispensable when she and Humphry moved to London in 1881 to further Humphry’s subsequent career as a journalist for The Times. London society opened up a whole new set of social contacts and opportunities for Mary. I use this chapter to explore the alternative strategies she had to employ to expand her reputation and career as a novelist, which enabled her to put Green’s philosophical theories into practice, as part of the social reform movement in Bloomsbury. I consider how Mary negotiated cultural representations of men and women’s roles within the Victorian family and society to gain a place among some of the most famous people of her generation; exemplifying the belief in ‘improvement’ that Green discussed in Prolegomena to ethics, as the requirement of the individual to make the best of themselves in order to contribute towards the common good.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Ibid., Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation, with a Preface by Bernard Bosanquet, §190.

  2. 2.

    John Tosh, A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1999), pp. 195–197.

  3. 3.

    Ibid., p. 1.

  4. 4.

    Ruskin, Sesame and Lilies; John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women (1869).

  5. 5.

    Kate Millett, “The Debate Over Women: Ruskin V Mill,” in Suffer and Be Still: Women in the Victorian Age, ed. Martha Vicinus (London: Meuthen, 1980); Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile (London: Everyman, 1993). The final chapter of Rousseau’s Emile focuses on ‘Sophie’ as the perfect complement to Emile and her education and purpose is entirely conceived to prepare her to be the moral supportive role to Emile, whose education is discussed in the previous four chapters of his book.

  6. 6.

    Ruskin, Sesame and Lilies, p. 119.

  7. 7.

    Millett, “The Debate Over Women: Ruskin V Mill,” p. 121.

  8. 8.

    Barbara Caine, Victorian Feminists (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 38.

  9. 9.

    Green, Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation, with a Preface by Bernard Bosanquet, §233, §239.

  10. 10.

    Ibid., §237.

  11. 11.

    Ward, A Writer’s Recollections, pp. 119–120.

  12. 12.

    Sutherland, Mrs Humphry Ward: Eminent Victorian Pre-Eminent Edwardian, pp. 51–53.

  13. 13.

    Covert, A Victorian Marriage: Mandell and Louise Creighton, p. 65.

  14. 14.

    Sutherland, Mrs Humphry Ward: Eminent Victorian Pre-Eminent Edwardian, p. 58.

  15. 15.

    Vera Brittain, The Women at Oxford: A Fragment of History (London, Toronto, Wellington, and Sydney: George Harrop, 1960), p. 42.

  16. 16.

    Brasenose College was among the last of the Colleges to allow their Fellows to marry and this affected their income.

  17. 17.

    Sutherland, Mrs Humphry Ward: Eminent Victorian Pre-Eminent Edwardian, p. 87.

  18. 18.

    Ibid., p. 85.

  19. 19.

    Humphry’s sister, Agnes Ward, became the principle of Maria Grey College in London between 1876 and 1892. Ibid., p. 44.

  20. 20.

    Trevelyan, The Life of Mrs Humphry Ward, pp. 126–127; Sutherland, Mrs Humphry Ward: Eminent Victorian Pre-Eminent Edwardian, p. 85.

  21. 21.

    Trevelyan, The Life of Mrs Humphry Ward, p. 126.

  22. 22.

    Ibid. Marcella is discussed within the rhetoric of Maternalism in Seth Koven, Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004).

  23. 23.

    Sutherland, Mrs Humphry Ward: Eminent Victorian Pre-Eminent Edwardian, p. 176.

  24. 24.

    Andrew Porter, “The Universities’ Mission to Central Africa: Anglo-Catholicim and the Twentieth Century,” in Missions, Nationalism, and the End of Empire, ed. Brian Stanley and Alaine M. Low (Michigan and Cambridge: Erdman, 2003). This was part of the Universities’ Christian Mission to Africa.

  25. 25.

    Gertrude Ward, Letters from East Africa 1895–1897 (London: Universities Missions to Central Africa, 1899). This work is dedicated to D. M. W. Although it has not been possible to confirm the identity of all recipients of the letters, the contents and initials used strongly support the argument that Dorothy Ward (D.M.W) Janet Ward (J.P.W), Agnes Ward (A.J.W.), Mary Ward (M.A.W.) and Humphry Ward (T.H.W) were among the recipients. The others include Ethel Ramones (E.R.) (an author and wife of George Ramones).

  26. 26.

    Janet Penrose Trevelyan, Two Stories (Longmans, Green, 1954), p. 28; The Life of Mrs Humphry Ward, p. 118.

  27. 27.

    Evening Play Centres for Children, Prefatory note, p. xxi. There is some confusion over Miss Taubman’s first name, as she is later referred to by Janet as Miss Eleanor Taubman and also in Koven, “Borderlands: Women, Voluntary Action, and Child Welfare in Britain, 1840 to 1914.”

  28. 28.

    Trevelyan, Two Stories, p. 143.

  29. 29.

    Ibid.

  30. 30.

    Sutherland, Mrs Humphry Ward: Eminent Victorian Pre-Eminent Edwardian, p. 376. No further record of what became of Lizzie Smith, or Gertrude Taubman has been traced.

  31. 31.

    Trevelyan, The Life of Mrs Humphry Ward.

  32. 32.

    University College London, Library Services, Special Collections (Ward Papers), Dorothy Ward’s Diary, dated 1890, MS.Add.202/39. Ethel Arnold (1864–1930) was the youngest of Mary’s siblings.

  33. 33.

    Ibid., Dorothy Ward’s Diary, dated 1898, MS.Add.202/40.

  34. 34.

    Ibid., Dorothy Ward’s Diary, dated 1908, MS.Add.202/44.

  35. 35.

    Ibid., Dorothy Ward’s Diary, dated 1910, MS.Add.202/46.

  36. 36.

    Stefan Collini, Public Moralist: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain 1850–1930 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), pp. 13–17. For information on The Athenaeum Club (on pp. 241–247) and the role of clubs, see John Timbs, Club Life of London: With Anecdotes of the Clubs, Coffee-Houses and Taverns of the Metropolis During the 17th, 18th and 19th Centuries (Richard Bentley, 1866), http://www.gutenberg.org/files/41146/41146-h/41146-h.htm#Page_241.

  37. 37.

    Sutherland, Mrs Humphry Ward: Eminent Victorian Pre-Eminent Edwardian, p. 371.

  38. 38.

    Trevelyan, The Life of Mrs Humphry Ward, p. 187. For information on the Eighteenth-century French Salon culture see, for example, Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (London: Cornell University Press, 1994); Joan B. Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988).

  39. 39.

    Ward, A Writer’s Recollections, Chapter 10; Thomas Humphry Ward, ed. The English Poets. Selections, with Critical Introductions by Various Writers, and a General Introduction by Matthew Arnold, 4 vols. (London and Oxford, 1880–1918).

  40. 40.

    Ward, A Writer’s Recollections, p. 206; Amiel’s Journal, the Journal Intime of Henri-Frédéric Amiel (London: Macmillan, 1885). (Henceforth Amiel’s Journal) Mary’s account of this is somewhat embellished, as she had already decided to take on the translation before she had obtained the necessary permissions. Sutherland, Mrs Humphry Ward: Eminent Victorian Pre-Eminent Edwardian, p. 98.

  41. 41.

    Colby, The Singular Anomaly: Women Novelists of the Nineteenth Century, pp. 133–134.

  42. 42.

    Ward, Amiel’s Journal, the Journal Intime of Henri-Frédéric Amiel; Walter Pater, “Amiel’s Journal Intime,” Review, The Manchester Guardian (1886), http://www.fullbooks.com/Essays-From-The-Guardian-.html; Peterson, Victorian Heretic: Mrs Humphry Ward’s Robert Elsmere, p. 90.

  43. 43.

    Sutherland, Mrs Humphry Ward: Eminent Victorian Pre-Eminent Edwardian, p. 100.

  44. 44.

    Anonymous, “Mrs Ward’s Novel, Amiel’s Journal, the Journal Intime of Henri-Frédéric Amiel,” Review, The Morning Post, no. 3 (1886), http://find.galegroup.com.

  45. 45.

    Sutherland, “A Girl in the Bodleian: Mary Ward’s Room of Her Own,” p. 173.

  46. 46.

    Ward, A Writer’s Recollections, p. 189.

  47. 47.

    For an examination of women’s domestic, educational and professional spaces as writers, see Julia Swindells, Victorian Writing & Working Women (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985).

  48. 48.

    Tosh, A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England, p. 62.

  49. 49.

    Walters, Mrs Humphry Ward: Her Work and Influence, p. 202.

  50. 50.

    Ibid., p. 26.

  51. 51.

    Ibid., pp. 63–64.

  52. 52.

    Ibid., p. 43.

  53. 53.

    A. O. Bell, ed. The Diary of Virginia Woolf, 1915–1919, 5 vols., vol. 1 (London: The Hogarth Press, 1977), pp. 299–300.

  54. 54.

    This image was originally published in Max Beerbohm, The Poet’s Corner (London: Heinemann, 1904).

  55. 55.

    Peterson, Victorian Heretic: Mrs Humphry Ward’s Robert Elsmere, p. 3.

  56. 56.

    Gosse, “Mrs Humphry Ward,” pp. 203–206.

  57. 57.

    John Lucas, “The Comic Gall of X. J. Kennedy,” The Dark Horse, no. 22 (Summer 2008), http://www.gerrycambridge.com/pubpdf/johnlucaskennedy.pdf. This is a review of X. J. Kennedy’s book In A Prominent Bar in Secaucus: New and Selected Poems, 1955–2007.

  58. 58.

    Colby, The Singular Anomaly: Women Novelists of the Nineteenth Century, p. 113. Matthew Arnold had published his last new poetry when Mary was a young child. This point is made in Jones, Mrs Humphry Ward, p. 58.

  59. 59.

    Patmore, The Angel in the House.

  60. 60.

    Carol Christ, “Victorian Masculinity and the Angel of the House,” in A Widening Sphere: Changing Roles of Victorian Women, ed. Martha Vicinus (London: Methuen, 1980), p. 146.

  61. 61.

    Sutherland, Mrs Humphry Ward: Eminent Victorian Pre-Eminent Edwardian, p. 56.

  62. 62.

    Ibid., p. 43.

  63. 63.

    Ibid., p. 89.

  64. 64.

    Tosh, A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England, p. 4.

  65. 65.

    Ibid., p. 196.

  66. 66.

    University College London (UCL), Library Services, Special Collections (Ward Papers), Dorothy Mary Ward’s diary dated 1955, MS.Add.202/103.

  67. 67.

    Ibid., Dorothy Mary Ward’s diary dated 1940, MS.Add.202/89.

  68. 68.

    Ward, A Writer’s Recollections, p. 143.

  69. 69.

    Sutherland, Mrs Humphry Ward: Eminent Victorian Pre-Eminent Edwardian, p. 88.

  70. 70.

    Ibid., p. 85.

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  1. Centre for History of Women’s Education, University of Winchester, Winchester, UK

    Helen Loader

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Loader, H. (2019). Family, Fame and London Society. In: Mrs Humphry Ward and Greenian Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14109-7_6

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