Abstract
In this chapter I introduce the memoirs of two women who attained the socially respected occupation of teacher for at least some part of their lives. Janet Bathgate, reared in rural poverty, taught herself what she needed in order to teach primary school and conduct religious classes; and Mary Smith, an intellectually inclined shoemaker’s daughter, founded a well-respected school in Carlisle. Bathgate drafted her (third-person) memoirs with marked dramatic skill, and Smith’s Autobiography was distinctive for its honesty, introspection, and stoic clarity of thought. Bathgate’s early efforts to become a lay religious teacher met with severe opposition, and Smith was forced to spend some years as the unpaid assistant to a minister and his family before opening her own establishment, but in later life both women attained gratification through authorship and, in the case of Smith, civic engagement.
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Notes
- 1.
Thompson, The Dignity of Chartism: Essays by Dorothy Thompson. London and New York: Verso, 2015, 44–45.
- 2.
A full list of Smith’s periodical publications is still needed. I am indebted to Stephen White and other staff members of the Carlisle Library for locating many of Smith’s periodical contributions on corruption, vegetarianism, war, and other topics.
- 3.
Marianne Farningham, A Working Woman’s Life: An Autobiography. London: James Clark, 1907.
- 4.
The discrepancy is probably accounted for by the time of year.
- 5.
John Young, Pictures in Prose and Verse, or, Personal Recollections of the Late Janet Hamilton, Langloan. Glasgow: John Gallie, 1877. The first edition of Aunt Janet’s Legacy was published by Mawson, Philipps and Co., Sunderland, 1892. Other editions of Aunt Janet’s Legacy and The Life Story of Aunt Janet were published by James Lewis and Co. and George Lewis and Co. George Lewis (1824–1907), the son of a James Lewis, was a well-known Selkirk printer and publisher and editor of the Selkirk Weekender and the Southern Reporter, and one of George’s sons was also George Lewis (b. 1848). Editions of Legacy were published in 1894, 1895, 1895 (3rd ed.), 1898, and according to George Lewis, there was also another posthumous edition which I have not traced. The publisher is listed variously as James Lewis, George Lewis and Co., George Lewis and Son, and Lewis. James Lewis and Co. and George Lewis and Co. both published books of local Scottish interest; James Lewis had also published George Lewis’s edition of James Hogg’s The Brownie of Bodsbeck in 1903. Behind these confusions may lie the fact that two relatives shared a printing firm with separate imprints. All available portraits of these memoirists portray their authors in old age, with the exception of the one photograph of Christian Watt as a girl (Fig. 5.4).
- 6.
Printed by the Edinburgh Religious Tract and Book Society.
- 7.
The Witness was an evangelical newspaper edited by Hugh Miller , a geologist and later a champion of the Free Church party during the Scottish Disruption of 1843. The story was reprinted in other periodicals, issued as a pamphlet, and translated into French. It appeared under the title “The Little Flower” in the Children’s Missionary Record (William Whyte and Co., Edinburgh, vol. 2, 1841).
- 8.
Lewis cites two ministers deposed for preaching “the universality of God’s love to mankind” (22). These were not universalists in the broader sense, but they do represent a widespread nineteenth-century movement to adapt orthodox doctrines of the day to emphasize love and redemption rather than punishment.
- 9.
The Nature of the Atonement is considered an important theological treatise . Though not denying the conventional doctrine that Christ’s death is a vicarious offering for sin, it sees this role as secondary to his devoted loyalty to a living family of God. I see no evidence that Campbell’s adherents would have considered themselves Broad Church—Janet herself saw one truth and one truth only—but the doctrine of universal atonement could be (and was elsewhere) interpreted to suggest the primacy of ethics over specific beliefs. This admixture of strict evangelicalism, biblical literalism, and anti-Calvinism forms its own niche in the complicated history of nineteenth-century religious views.
- 10.
Formed in 1843, this was an anti-Calvinist offshoot of Presbyterianism which was later merged into the Scottish Congregational Church in 1896.
- 11.
Francis Napier, 10th Lord Napier and 1st Baron Ettrick (1819–98), was a Scottish diplomat and colonial administrator who had served briefly as Viceroy of India in 1872. He chaired the 1883–84 Napier Commission which investigated the plight of the Highland crofters, credited with prompting governmental reforms designed to alleviate their poverty.
- 12.
Bathgate was apparently largely apolitical, though she took a great interest in missionary work to Jews , and thus like others of similar persuasion hoped that Britain would help establish a Jewish homeland in what was then Syria. An incident with rather sad implications occurred when she was visited by a Jewish pedlar. Declining to purchase, Janet “set some bread and milk before him, which seemed to give him some surprise; but he gladly partook of the humble repast.” He thanked her effusively: “No one ever say to me, ‘Jew, take bread,’ since I come to this country. The Lord bless you!” He visited her in future bi-annual trips to Selkirk, and she knitted for him a woolen cravat for the cold (150). His response offers a glimpse into the difficult life of a Jewish pedlar.
- 13.
Luke 14: 16–18, 21, 23, King James Version, “Then said [Jesus] unto him, A certain man made a great supper, and bade many: And sent his servant at supper time to say to them that were bidden, Come; for all things are now ready. And they all with one consent began to make excuse. … So that servant came, and shewed his lord these things. Then the master of the house being angry said to his servant, Go out quickly into the streets and lanes of the city, and bring in hither the poor, and the maimed, and the halt, and the blind. … Go out into the highways and hedges, and compel them to come in, that my house may be filled.”
- 14.
London: Bemrose and Sons; Carlisle: The Wordsworth Press, 75 Scotch Street. The editor does not mention his own name, but he was George Coward , a Carlisle bookseller and the publisher of her Progress, and Other Poems. Discussion of Smith may be found in Kathryn Gleadle, “Mary Smith,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, www.oxforddnb.com, and Helen Rogers, Women and the People: Authority, Authorship and the Radical Tradition in Nineteenth-Century England. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000.
- 15.
The term “Independent” was used during the English Civil War for a form of worship which advocated congregational selection of ministers and determination of doctrine, freed of any higher form of organization. Independents favored tolerance of doctrinal differences among Protestant groups. The term “Separatist” or “Independent” was used to distinguish these congregations from Presbyterianism, which, although similarly influenced by Calvinist doctrine, permitted higher-order synods or governing bodies and after 1707 had become the established church of Scotland.
- 16.
This was Henry Kirke White (1785–1806), whose Remains, with an account of his life by Robert Southey, was published in London in 1808 by Vernor, Hood, and Sharpe, and in several editions thereafter until 1913.
- 17.
William Knibb (1803–45) was a major figure in the Jamaican Anti-Slavery movement . In 1832 Knibb was deputed to travel to the UK to publicize the plight of slaves, and his testimony to Parliament is credited with helping win support for the 1833 Slavery Abolition Act. August 1, 1834 was the date set for emancipation (though various evasions permitted “apprenticeships” until 1838). Smith would thus likely have been twelve or thirteen at the time of Knibb’s speech.
- 18.
Two hymns by W. R. Percival are found in the Augustine Hymn Book: A Hymn for All Churches, compiled by David Thomas (London: F. Pitman, 1863). Percival had desired to be ordained as an Anglican minister and eventually obtained his desire in London. When in Carlisle, however, he had established a Congregational church upon Broad Church principles. Smith discusses his career pp. 231–36, and notes, “I remain very much in my spiritual beliefs as many years ago when I joined Mr. Percival’s church, save that I was then, as I have all my life been, more of a Nonconformist than he was” (237).
- 19.
Ralph Waldo Emerson. Nature, Addresses and Lectures, Boston: James Munroe, 1849, 7–9.
- 20.
Ibid, 210. Emerson’s formulation had been “Truth is always holy ….”
- 21.
Smith found in her father a model of rectitude, “whose love and tenderness I had never had reason to doubt” (71). However, one notes that the son seems to have inherited his father’s business entirely, and as the Autobiography abundantly testifies, by contrast Mary struggled for years to maintain herself at a minimum level.
- 22.
Her account is not entirely clear, but Mr. Osborn seems to have been the former minister of Cropredy , whose departure had caused Smith to weep (68). That she had been attached to him and his ideas might help explain why she patiently endured years of ill-treatment and even abuse from him and his family, returning repeatedly to help them in their misfortunes. In describing her early years in Brough and Carlisle, she uses the pronoun “we,” indicating an identification with his family.
- 23.
He published A Treatise on Logic: or an introduction to Science, London, 1848; Carlisle: I.F. Whitridge, 1849; and The Philosophy of Human Knowledge London: John Chapman, 1849.
- 24.
Smith’s employer, William Sutton , was the owner of a tanning factory and the largest employer in Scotby. Rogers describes Sutton as “a leading light in the nonconformist radical circle of the Border region to which Smith gained entry as part of the household” (254). Indeed, in the treatment of their servant the Suttons resembled the model Quaker family, the Evelyns , in The Autobiography of Rose Allen. They also encouraged her to publish, something John Osborn had never done.
- 25.
Osborn had been employed by the Baptist Home Missionary Society, who fired him after four or five years upon “hearing that he had become heterodox” (106).
- 26.
J. J. Osborn, A Treatise on Logic; or an introduction to Science, 1849.
Fictional accounts of a divinity student or minister unwilling to enter or remain in the Anglican clergy also appear in Gaskell’s North and South and The Autobiography of Rose Allen .
- 27.
Helen Rogers, Women and the People, notes his participation in the Carlisle Society for the Prevention of Capital Punishment, along with Mary Smith’s respected employer, Mr. Sutton , 276 .
- 28.
Rogers, Women and the People, 256–57.
- 29.
A. R. Davies , “Mary Smith: A Carlisle Teacher and Poetess,” Cumberland News, 1926, [a tripartite series], part 3. A writer on Cumberland topics, Davies apparently collected the recollections of several of Smith’s former students; these remark on her serious manner and love of political and social topics: “She was very fond of controversy, especially upon politics or questions of the hour, and in discussion displayed much knowledge and ability, and never descended into acrimony.”
- 30.
Ibid., part 3.
- 31.
Kathryn Gleadle, “Mary Smith,” 251. In his afterword, the editor of the Autobiography records that “She left legacies to many relatives and friends, and also to the Wesleyan Sunday School, Cropredy; the Independent Sunday School, Great Bourton; and the Unitarian Church, Carlisle” (305).
- 32.
This contained the announcement that “Shortly will be published, by the same Author, The Months and Other Poems”; unless this is a mistake, in 1868 Smith must have been contemplating a third volume. She continued to publish her poems in the Carlisle Journal from the 1860’s onwards.
- 33.
George Eliot, Middlemarch. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003, 852.
- 34.
Progress, and Other Poems; The Latter Including Poems on the Social Affections and Poems on Life and Labour, dedicated by permission to Thomas Carlyle, London and Carlisle: George Coward, 1863.
- 35.
“Woman’s Claims: Written on Reading of Viscountess Amberley’s Lecture at Stroud,” 177–78.
- 36.
Smith taught four nights a week in an evening school for factory girls (225) at the factory of James D. Carr , a biscuit manufacturer and fellow Nonconformist, and later delivered Sunday evening lectures to women in the Temperance Hall, Caldewgate, located in one of Carlisle’s poorer districts (269). The quotation is from Robert Burns ’ “The Cotter’s Saturday Night.”
- 37.
Rogers, Women and the People, 263.
- 38.
Rogers, Women and the People, fn. 61, 280, 266.
- 39.
For James Stansfield, see James Stansfield: A Victorian Champion of Sex Equality. London: Longman, 1932. Josephine Butler visited Carlisle in 1870, and The Shield reported Mrs. Hudson Scott attending (Josephine Butler and the Prostitution Campaigns: Diseases of the Body Politic. ed. Jane Jordan and Ingrid Sharp, vol. 2. London: Routledge, 2003).
- 40.
A. R. Davies, “Mary Smith: A Carlisle Teacher and Poetess,” Cumberland News, c. 1926; also Carlisle Journal, c. September 1927, cited in Rogers, 275.
- 41.
Rogers, 242.
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Boos, F.S. (2017). From Servant to Schoolmistress: Janet Bathgate and Mary Smith. 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_8
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