Abstract
In this chapter I consider the autobiographies of women of largely rural or provincial backgrounds, marginal incomes, or precarious health. The first section is devoted to the reminiscences of Elizabeth Oakley, a servant and farmer’s wife; Elizabeth Campbell, a servant, factory worker, and modestly published poet; and Christian Watt, a widowed fishwife who wrote her diary while institutionalized after a nervous breakdown left her unable to feed her large family. Though all of the autobiographers discussed in this chapter were religious, spiritual experiences or views provided the main impetus for the memoirs of those discussed in the second section: Jane Andrew, an invalided orphan; Barbara Farquhar, a “Labourer’s Daughter” and author of a treatise promoting Sundays as a day of rest; and A. Collier, a “Bible-Woman” who sought divine help in her struggles to cope with the sporadic hunger and physical violence she endured.
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- 1.
John Burnett, Plenty and Want: A Social History of Diet in England from 1850 to the Present-Day, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966, 47. Burnett is here citing contributors to The Hungry Forties: Life Under the Bread Tax. Descriptive Letters and Other Testimonies from Contemporary Witnesses, ed. T. Fisher Unwin, 1904. Similar conclusions are confirmed for Scotland by Ian Levitt and Christopher Smout, The State of the Scottish Working-Class in 1843, Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1979, Chap. 4.
- 2.
For an account of George Gilfillan (1813–1878), see Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 144, Nineteenth-Century British Literary Biographers, ed. Steven Serafin, Gale: Detroit, 1994, 117–26. Gilfillan was a Dundee-based minister of the United Presbyterian Church, a critic and editor (author of the 3 volume Gallery of Literary Portraits, editor of the 48 volume Library Edition of the British Poets) and writer (a semi-fictionalized autobiography, History of a Man; an epic poem, Night). For a discussion of Gilfillan’s championship of lesser-known Scottish poets, see Florence Boos, “Class and the ‘Spasmodics’: W. E. Aytoun, George Gilfillan and Alexander Smith,” special issue on the Spasmodics, eds. Jason Rudy and Charles La Porte, Victorian Poetry 42.4 (2005): 553–83. Also at http://victorianfboos.studio.uiowa.edu/file/830.
- 3.
Vincent, 14–21.
- 4.
Emma Griffin, Liberty’s Dawn , lists ten and a half as the average age of workplace entry for rural children (64); her sample includes England, however, and the labor indicated may be actual field work. She notes that many children performed services from an early age for little or no payment, and this would seem to fit the experiences of Campbell, Watt, Bathgate, and even Hamilton (who was trained to help her mother at the tambour loom)—all Scottish. Basically, the children worked for food and a pittance, commonly less than £1 a year.
- 5.
Campbell, Songs of My Pilgrimage, Edinburgh: Andrew Elliot, 1875, iii, iv. Campbell’s poetry is discussed in Florence Boos, “‘We Would Know Again the Fields …’: The Rural Poetry of Elizabeth Campbell, Jane Stevenson, and Mary Macpherson,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 17.2 (Fall 1998), 325–47.
- 6.
Gilfillan also cited a “literary gentleman” who had read the manuscript: “Her love of the beautiful and the progressive, in spite of overwhelming obstructions, may well astonish her hypercritical detractors. Such things are too wonderful for me. How her head and heart have kept so sound and strong under such tragic pressure of circumstances, is a priceless tribute to human truth” (v). Though these commendations center on Campbell’s character, they do acknowledge the intelligence which animates her writings.
- 7.
Gagnier, Subjectivities, 43.
- 8.
Campbell describes her employment as commencing at seven years and three months, an exactitude which emphasizes the importance of exile from home. For this, as mentioned, she was paid “six shillings in the half year” (xii), less than paid to Janet Bathgate (Chap. 8), another Scottish rural child from the same period forced into “service” at seven, who earned twice the amount, twelve shillings for six months’ labor. What seems notable in these cases was that as the only servant, they were expected to perform tasks above the abilities of a seven-year-old.
- 9.
As did other working-class memoirists; see Vincent, 94 ff. and Chap. 6, “The Pursuit of Books.”
- 10.
Meditations and Contemplations, 2 vols. London: John Rivington, 1779.
- 11.
Valerie Sanders, 15.
- 12.
Gagnier, 43.
- 13.
Emma Griffin , Liberty’s Dawn, 103–105. Griffin notes that wives often worked in early marriage when they had one or two children, but when more came they were forced back into the home.
- 14.
She did express her grief in her verse, particularly “The Death of Willie, My Second Son” and “The Graves of My Sons,” in Poems of My Pilgrimage.
- 15.
According to her death certificate, December 24, 1878, Campbell died of “mortification from Burn/Nervous Debility, inclusive 13 days.”
- 16.
Examples of “fairy” poems include “The Fairy King’s Wedding” and “The Man in Satin Shoon”; on nature, “The Sea” and “The Evening Star”; and on the unfortunate, “Kidnapped Slaves,” “Francis the Slave,” and “A Prison Cell.” A characteristically autobiographical poem is “My Infant Day and My Hair Grown Gray.”
Although Campbell grieved the death of her sons , less is said about her daughters; a hint of the fate of one may be provided by a stanza of the latter poem: “Alas! That ever I should have wished / Of one whom God me gave / That cypress bough or deep green yew / Had shaded their early grave” (62). Two daughters were apparently living at the time of the memoir, for she spoke of moving with them to Lochee after her husband’s death (xvii).
- 17.
Poems, Fourth Series, Arbroath: Printed for the Author, 1867, 24. Other poems on the Crimean War included “The Absent Soldier,” “A Dream,” “The Mother’s Lament,” “The Windmill of Sebastopol,” “Bill Arden,” “The Attack on the Great Redan, and the Fall of the Malkhoff,” “The Amber Cloud,” and “Spring.”
- 18.
“The Summer Night,” Poems, Arbroath: Printed for the Author, 1862, 14.
- 19.
Pascal, Design and Truth in Autobiography, London: Routledge, 1960, 14; he cites Benedetto Croce’s comment that “recollections” are possible only to poets.
- 20.
The Christian Watt Papers, edited by David Fraser, Edinburgh: Paul Harris Publishing, 1983. Watt’s account and her editor’s glosses and historical explanations filled 153 pages. The manuscript had come down to Christian Sims, daughter of her eldest son James, who wrote in her turn A Stranger on the Bars: The Memoirs of Christian Watt Marshall of Broadsea, edited by Gavin Sutherland, Banff and Buchan District Council, 1983. David Fraser (1920–2012), a British general, military historian, and memoirist, was the younger son of the 19th Lord Saltoun, a descendant of the Saltoun family who feature in Watt’s account.
- 21.
It is not entirely clear whether these were visitors or fellow inmates, but the latter seems likely, for she mentions that the medical student had failed his exams and the lawyer was alcoholic, and these are more likely details shared with another inmate.
- 22.
Like several other poor memoirists, Watt did not resent paternal violence. When his seven sons argued at the dinner table, her father “would bring his hand down with a thump, and often he would bring it down on their lug, if they did not stop. … My father stood no nonsense. Once I called him a fool in front of fishermen on Skye, what a clout he gave me! I saw millions of stars” (33). She worked briefly as a servant in London and then seasonally in the laundry at Philorth House, residence of her distant relatives the Saltoun family. At peak the Saltouns had employed a staff of twenty-nine, and Watt’s relations with her employers were cordial but distant . This contrasts with the experiences of other memoirists, who as servants were often forced into close and sometimes very unhappy domestic propinquity with demanding employers.
- 23.
For this she was paid three shillings . She resented being called “Watt,” and the need to rise to work at 5 a.m.
- 24.
Murray Fraser never married, and died in India at forty; Peter Noble married an English wife and died soon afterward in a shipwreck; Peter Sinclair died in a lumber camp in America; the Master of Lovat married at forty and Watt describes seeing his son at a train station.
- 25.
See Levitt and Smout, Chap. 4, “Farm Workers and Farm Wages,” 70–99. At the time Peter Sinclair was a laborer, an average wage for a married male laborer was about £10 a year plus £14 in various other forms of non-monetary reimbursement (72). However, in the northeast wages were at least 20% lower. His hopes that his uncle would “put him in a croft” apparently did not materialize.
- 26.
Even after James’s death, on inheriting his house at 50 Pitullie Christian transferred the lease to his Aunt Jean Breenie, to whom she felt it rightfully belonged. Clearly, two sets of inheritance traditions clashed and Christian suffered from responding to the moral claims of an older one, without receiving reciprocity.
- 27.
“Twice a ‘one’ had been added before a figure. He was cheating me twenty pounds. … A hasty retreat was made by Crookie, and Munro, the advocate, found a skipper for my boat” (103).
- 28.
Watt later acknowledged that “I should have gone to the Parish for help, but I was far too proud. It may be wrong but that was how we were brought up; and selling your possessions is degrading game” (106).
- 29.
Levitt and Smout, 22. An influential treatise on the absence of poor relief was that of W. P. Alison , Professor of Medicine at Edinburgh University, whose 1840 Observations on the Management of the Poor in Scotland is described by Levitt and Smout as “the most damning indictment of the voluntary system that had been made hitherto.” They note that the strongest criticisms in the Poor Law Commission Report of 1844 came from doctors (216).
- 30.
U.S. law at the time barred persons who had been institutionalized from entering the country.
- 31.
She records that soon after her entry, the superintendent had said to her, “‘If you are going to be under the threat of mental illness, you would be far better to come here and live a routine life in Aberdeen, where you can get help at any time. I had been certificated and must live under parole’” (120), which would seem to indicate that she would have been permitted to leave the hospital but not the area. After a depression that followed the death of her son Watt in 1881, however, she mentions that “[t]here was no hope of being discharged” (123). More than three decades later her son invited her home to Broadsea, which would seem to indicate that by then her status had changed, but she remained voluntarily at the asylum.
- 32.
Sadly, her daughter Isabella, now indigent and ill, also joined her in the asylum twice, the second time after the death of her consumptive son: “It was one of my saddest days to see my daughter admitted … to Cornhill” (135).
- 33.
(James) Keir Hardie (1856–1915), originally a coalminer, was the first chairman of the Scottish Labour Party (est. 1888), the first chairman of the Independent Labour Party (1893–1900), and the first leader of the parliamentary Labour Party (1906–1907). He strongly opposed Britain’s entry into the First World War and his health broke down soon after the outbreak of war. Robert Bontine Cunningham Graham (1852–1936), landowner, traveler, Scottish nationalist, and man of letters, helped found the Scottish Labour Party in 1888 and was elected the first president of the Scottish Nationalist Party (1928).
- 34.
Dr. Reid was also the kind physician who had asked Christian’s help and advice, improved treatment, and expanded the institution’s gardens. Before he died, his “last wish had been that I would go into the place for private patients as a reward for my life of hard work” (153).
- 35.
Bread, Knowledge and Freedom, 203.
- 36.
A Miscellany, ed. Richard Wilson, Norfolk: Norfolk Record Society, 1993, 113–47. The “Autobiography” comprises thirty-three printed pages and, since these are dense, the original could have been over one hundred midsize notebook pages.
- 37.
An Emeritus Professor at the University of East Anglia, Richard Wilson is the author of several books, including, with Alan Mackley, Creating Paradise: The Building of the English Country House, 1660–1880, London and New York: Hambledon, 2000.
- 38.
Conditions for Victorian servants are described in Frank Dawes , Not in Front of the Servants, London: Wayland, 1973 and Patricia Horn, The Rise and Fall of the Victorian Servant, London: Sutton, 2004. Dawes and Horn do not separate out their discussions of child servants, perhaps because a high proportion of servants were what would now be defined as child laborers. However, their accounts confirm that the conditions experienced by Campbell, Bathgate, Watt, and Oakley’s son John were quite typical.
- 39.
Autobiography, 149.
- 40.
Emma Griffin, Liberty’s Dawn: A People’s History of the Industrial Revolution, New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013, 188–211.
- 41.
Barbara Kanner, Women in English Social History 1800–1914, New York: Garland Pub., 1987–1990, 223.
- 42.
Nightingale, Eliza, ed. A Bible-Woman’s Story: Being the Autobiography of Mrs. Collier of Birmingham. 2nd ed. London: T. Woolmer, 1885, 36.
- 43.
She explains her views: “Though I was a member of [a] society, and could have had help, I did not make my wants known. I was resolved to make my complaint only to God. … My readers may think that my reserve and independence of spirit savoured of pride, but this was not so. … Elijah’s God was mine” (58, 60).
- 44.
Kanner, 224.
- 45.
Eliza Nightingale is vague in providing the essential facts of Collier’s death. Collier was apparently still living during the initial editing, for Nightingale speaks of her subject as “in her last days of age and feebleness” (119), and in the appendix to the second edition states that she is able to “add a chapter concerning the last years of her life” (121).
- 46.
The attached letter from Mrs. Smart speaks of having conveyed a sum of money to John Andrew in Canada, and the footnote explains that Mrs. Andrew had left £20 to each of her children. On this amount, however, Jane could only have survived a few months.
- 47.
Vincent, Bread, Knowledge, and Freedom, 8.
- 48.
The 1886 version of Pearl was published by the Religious Tract Society . In the preface to Female Education Farquhar mentions that due to “a change which has recently occurred in my social position” she believes it “not at all likely that I should soon again, if ever, address the public”; perhaps she had recently married. She did, however, “address the public” in poetic form twelve years later in her 1863 Poems.
- 49.
Pearl, 15–16.
- 50.
In an appendix which reproduces a letter she had addressed to the editor, Farquhar explains that “I am one of those who never enjoyed the advantage of attending school in early days, except for two years, or rather for one; for it was but for two years that one of my sisters and myself attended a sewing-school alternately; one of us remaining at home one week, to assist mother … and going to school next week, while the other remained at home” (20–21).
- 51.
Mary E. Mann (1848–1929) was a Norfolk novelist of rural life. Her fiction includes Tales of Victorian Norfolk, The Patten Experiment, and A Sheaf of Corn.
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Boos, F.S. (2017). The Annals of the Poor—Rural and Conversion Narratives: Elizabeth Campbell, Christian Watt, Elizabeth Oakley, Mrs. Collier, Jane Andrew, and Barbara Farquhar. In: Memoirs of Victorian Working-Class Women. Palgrave Studies in Life Writing. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-64215-4_5
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