Mary Russell Mitford; the tragedy of a blue stocking

Front matter

OF

W. J. ROBERTS.

BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME OFTHE

Preface

NO figure in the gallery of Early Victorian writers presents a character so charming or so tenderly pathetic as that of Mary Russell Mitford. Added to these characteristics is the fact that her life was, in reality, a tragedy brought about by her blind devotion and self-sacrifice to an object which we are forced to regard as altogether unworthy.

Miss Mitford's name is not a familiar one to this generation and it is with the desire to alter this that the following pages have been written. It would be impossible, within the compass of a book of this size, to show forth Miss Mitford's life in its entirety : what we have done has been to select from the records of her life and work such incidents and such friendships as seemed to us to portray her most faithfully. Whether we have succeeded must be left to the reader to judge.

In the compilation of the book many sources of information have been drawn upon and the author desires to acknowledge his indebtedness to all who have so kindly helped him in his labours. Chief among these has been Lady

6 PREFACE

Russell of Swallowfield, who, in addition to supplying much material, has made the author still further indebted by her acceptance of the dedication of the book. Miss Rose G. Kingsley has also to be thanked for copies of letters written by Miss Mitford to her father, Charles Kingsley, who lies buried at Eversley, in the neighbourhood with which the book deals largely.

To Miss Josephine M. H. Fairless, Messrs. G. A. Poynder, W. Smith, T. Rowland Kent, H. T. Pugh, J. J. Cooper, J.P., and Alderman J. W. Martin (all of Reading) the author's best thanks are tendered, as also to the Rev. J. Henry Taylor, of Canterbury (Miss Mitford's " Little Henry "), the Rev. Alexander A. Headley, Rector of New Alresford, Mr. Bertram Dobell, the well-known bibliophile of London, Mr. W. H. Greenhough, Chief Librarian to the Borough of Reading, and W. H. Hudson, Esq. — the last named for his very kind loan of the pencil sketch of Miss Mitford which figures in this book.

W. J. ROBERTS.

London, 1913.

Contents

CHAP. p^OE

I Early Days in Alresford . . .11 II Lyme Regis and Tragedy's Shadow . 28

III Reading and School Days at Chelsea . 85

Chapter I Early Days In Alresford

WITHIN the stained but, happily, wellpreserved registers of the Church of St. John the Baptist, New Alresford, Hampshire, is an entry which runs thus : —

George Midford of this parish, Batchelor, and Mary Russell of the same. Spinster. Married in this Church by Licence this Seventeenth day of October in the Year One Thousand Seven Hundred and Eighty - five by me, Will BuUer,^ Rector.

This Marriage was ( George Midford,

Mary Russell.

solemnized between us In the presence of

It is a prosaic enough entry and yet, as we shall endeavour to prove, it marked the beginning of a tragedy composed of the profligacy and wicked extravagance of one of its signa-

1 Then also Dean of Exeter and, subsequently, Bishop of that Diocese.

u tories, of the foolish, docile acquiescence of the other, and of the equally foolish and docile, but incomprehensible, infatuation for the profligate one which Mary Russell Mitford, the child of this union, made the guiding principle of her life.

George Midford — or Mitford, as he subsequently spelt his name — was the son of Francis Midford, Esq., of Hexham (descended from the ancient house of Midford,! of Midford Castle, near Morpeth), and of his wife Jane, formerly Miss Jane Graham, of Old Wall in Westmoreland, related to the Grahams of Netherby.

He was born at Hexham, November 15, 1760, received his early education at Newcastle School, studied for the profession of medicine at the University of Edinburgh, and was for three years a house pupil of the celebrated John Hunter, in London.

At the conclusion of his studies young Midford, or Mitford as we shall henceforth speak of him, went on a visit to a relaltive — ^Dr. Ogle, then Dean of Winchester — through whom he obtained an introduction to Miss Mary Russell, then living alone in the adjacent town of Alresford.

Mary Russell was an heiress — ten years the senior of George Mitford, being then in her thirtysixth year — and just recovering from a recent bereavement in the death of her mother.

^ Derived from the situation of the Castle keep, which lies between the fords of the river Wansbeck, Northumberland.

She was the daughter of Dr. Richard Russell, a lineal descendant of the ducal family of Bedford, Vicar of Overton and Rector of Ash — parishes adjoining each other and near to Whitchurch in Hampshire — who, as a widower, married Miss Dickers, the daughter of a Hampshire gentleman of considerable property, in the year 1745.

Childless by his first wife, the offspring of this second marriage was a son and two daughters.

Of these the son and elder daughter died in childhood, leaving Mary, who was born June 7, 1750, the sole heiress to the property of her parents.

, Dr. RusseU eventually resigned the Vicarage of Overton, but continued both his ministrations and residence at Ash, where he died in 1783, aged eighty-eight years.

At his death his widow and daughter — the latter then thirty-three years of age — ^removed to a pleasant and commodious house in the Broad Street of that old-world and peaceful township of Alresford, a town the houses of which, save the inns, bear no distinguishing name and number, the staid and sober Ufe of whose inhabitants was only" relieved by the mild excitements of marketday or by the noisy passage of the mail-coach as, with clatter of hoof-beats and blast of horn, it rattled gaily through, on its passage from London to Winchester or vice versa.

Mrs. Russell only survived her husband for a little more than two years and died on March 8, 1785, leaving her daughter with a fortune of £28,000 in cash, in addition to house and land property. In the admirable introduction to The Life and Letters of Mary Russell Mitford (published 1870, and contributed by the Editor, the Rev. A. G. L'Estrange) we have a penportrait of Mary Russell at this period of her life which, in the absence of any other form of portraiture, we cannot do better than quote.

" In addition to these attractions [her inheritance] she had been carefully educated by her father ; and to the ordinary accomplishments of gentlewomen in those days had united no slight acquaintance with the authors of Greece and Rome. She was kind-hearted, of mild and ladylike manners, of imperturbable temper, home-loving, and abounding in conversation, which flowed easily, in a soft and pleasant voice, from the sources of a full mind. Her figure was good, slight, active, and about the middle height ; but the plainness of the face — ^the prominent eyes and teeth — the very bad complexion — was scarcely redeemed by the kind and cheerful expression which animated her countenance."

To this excessively plain but undoubtedly charming and accomplished woman was the young surgeon introduced, " being easily persuaded by friends more worldly wise than he to address himself to a lady who, although ten years his senior, had every recommendation that heart could desire — except beauty."

She certainly had every recommendation that the heart of George Mitford could desire, for " though a very brief career of dissipation had reduced his pecuniary resources to the lowest ebb, he was not only recklessly extravagant, but addicted to high play."

A few months later they were married.

" She, full of confiding love, refused every settlement beyond two hundred a year pinmoney, out of his own property, on which he insisted " — words written by Mary Russell Mitford, many years after, and which would contradict our statement of her father's pecuniary embarrassment, were they not discounted by the words of the Rev. William Harness, who, writing on the matter to a friend, says : "I hear that when Mitford was engaged to his wife she had a set of shirts made for him, lest it should be said that ' she had married a man without a shirt to his back ! ' Of course the story is not true ; but it expressed what folk thought of his deplorable poverty and the impossibility of his making that settlement on her, for which my father was trustee, out of funds of his own, as Miss Mitford suggests."

And so they were married, the bride being given away by her trustee. Dr. John Harness, then living at Wickham, some few miles south gf Abesford,

Had the confiding wife misgivings, we wonder ? Or was it the excitement natural to such a momentous event in her Ufe that caused the little hand to be so tremulous as it signed the nervous characters, Mary Russell, beneath the bold hand of her lord and master, on that eventful October 17, 1785 ?

Henceforth, had she but known, she would have need of all the comfort she might wring from those fatalistic words, " Che Sara, Sara," the motto of the Bedfords, whose ancestry she took such pride in claiming.

It had already been decided that Alresford should witness the commencement at least of the surgeon's professional career, and seeing that the house in Broad Street was commodious and, what was more to the point, well-furnished, there was no need to make a fresh home, and it was there they set up housekeeping together.

That the young man had good intentions is fairly evident, for he continued his studies and, in the course of a year or so, took his degree in medicine which permitted him to practise as a physician.

Thirteen months later a son was born to them, but did not survive. In the Baptismal Register of New Alresford Church is the entry : —

" Francis Russell, son of George and Mary Midford, was privately baptized on the

12th, but died on the 23rd of November, 1786."

It is important that this entry should be placed on record, for while, in after years, Miss Mitford speaks of herself as the only survivor of three children, two sons having died in infancy, it has been stated in print that " Mary Russell Mitford was their only child," On the other hand, although careful search has been made, no record of the baptism or burial of a third child has been discovered in the Alresford registers, and we can only assume, therefore, that this child must have died at birth and on a date subsequent to that of his sister.

Sufficient for us, however, is the entry in these same registers : —

" Mary Russell, daughter of George and Mary Midford, baptized February 29, 1788 "—

the child having been born on December 16, 1787. Of these early days we have, fortunately, a picture left by the child herself. " A pleasant home, in truth, it was," she writes. " A large house in a little town of the north of Hampshire — a town, so small, that but for an ancient market, very slenderly attended, nobody would have dreamt of caUing it anything but a village.^

^ Many years afterwards, when appointed to the See of Winchester, the late Bishop Thorold alluded to it as one of a number of Town- Villages which he said he found so peculiarly distinctive a feature of Hampshire.

The breakfast room, where I first possessed myself of my beloved ballads, was a lofty and spacious apartment, literally lined with books, which, with its Turkey carpet, its glowing fire, its sofas, and its easy chairs, seemed, what indeed it was, a very nest of English comfort. The windows opened on a large old-fashioned garden, full of old-fashioned flowers, stocks, roses, honeysuckles and pinks ; and that again led into a grassy orchard, abounding with fruit-trees. What a playground was that orchard ! and what playfellows were mine ! Nancy [her maid], with her trim prettiness, my own dear father, handsomest and cheerfuUest of men, and the great Newfoundland dog, Coe, who used to lie down at my feet, as if to invite me to mount him, and then to prance off with his burthen, as if he enjoyed the fun as much as we did. Most undoubtedly I was a spoilt child. When I recollect certain passages of my thrice-happy early life, I cannot have the slightest doubt about the matter, although it contradicts all foregone conclusions, all nursery and schoolroom morality, to say so. But facts are stubborn things. Spoilt I was. Everybody spoilt me — most of all the person whose power in that way was greatest : the dear papa himself. Not content with spoiling me indoors, he spoilt me out. How well I remember his carrying me round the orchard on his shoulder, holding fast my little three-year-old feet, whilst the little h^-nds hung on to his pig-tail, which J called my bridle (those were days of pig-tails), hung so fast, and tugged so heartily, that sometimes the ribbon would come off between my fingers, and send his hair floating and the powder flying down his back. That climax of mischief was the crowning joy of all. I can hear our shouts of laughter now."

A pretty picture this, and one to which, as she wrote of it, the tired old woman looked back as on one of the few oases in a life which, despite certain successes, was nothing short of a desert of weariness and of struggle with poverty.

But apart from this boisterous love of play, the little girl early developed a passion for reading, fostered and encouraged, no doubt, by that " grave home-loving mother," who " never in her life read any book but devotion," in whose room, indeed, it was matter for astonished comment to find the works of Spenser.

At the age of three, little Mary showed a remarkable precocity of intellect, and even before she had reached that early age her father was accustomed to perch her on the breakfast-table to exhibit her one accomplishment to admiring guests, " who admired all the more, because, a small puny child, looking far younger than I really was, nicely dressed, as only children generally are, and gifted with an affluence of curls, I might have passed for the twin sister of my own great doU."

On such occasions she would be given one or other of the Whig newspapers of the day — ^the Courier or Morning Chronicle — and, to the de- Ught of her father and the wonder of the guests, would prattle forth the high-seasoned political pronouncements with which those journals were filled.

Following this display there was, of course, reward ; not with sweetmeats, however, " too plentiful in my case to be very greatly cared for," but by the reading of the " Children in the Wood " by mother from Percy's Reliques, " and I looked for my favourite ballad after every performance, just as the piping bullfinch that hung in the window looked for his lump of sugar after going through ' God save the King.' The two cases were exactly parallel."

But one day " the dear mamma " was absent and could not administer the customary reward, with the result that papa had to read the " Children in the Wood," though not before he had searched the shelves to find the, to him, unfamiliar volumes. Following which search and labour he was easily constrained by the petted child to hand over the book to Nancy, that she might read extracts whenever called upon. And when Nancy, as was inevitable, waxed weary of the " Children in the Wood," she gradually took to reading other of the ballads ; " and as from three years old I grew to be four or five, I learned to read them myself, and the book became the delight of my childhood, as it is now the solace of my age."

Mary Russell Mitford at the age of three.

(From a Miniature.)

With a child so apt it is not surprising that we find no record of a governess or tutor during these early years — ^that is, so far as general education was concerned ; but there was one item of special education which the fond papa did insist upon, an insistence which was the cause of much grief to and some disobedience from the spoilt girl.

" How my father, who certainly never knew the tune of ' God save the King ' from that of the other national air, ' Rule, Britannia,' came to take into his head so strong a fancy to make me an accomplished musician I could never rightly understand, but that such a fancy did possess him I found to my sorrow ! From the day I was five years old, he stuck me up to the piano, and, although teacher after teacher had discovered that I had neither ear, nor taste, nor application, he continued, fully bent upon my learning it."

Nevertheless, she did not learn it and, as we shall see later, this fixed idea of her father's gave place to another equally futile.

Chief of her playmates at this time was William Harness, the son of her mother's trustee. He would be brought over from Wickham in the morning, and after a day of romps, be taken back in his father's carriage late in the afternoon. Although two years the junior of Mary, William was her constant and boon companion, and remained to be her friend and counsellor through life, although his counsels were, at times, very wilfully disregarded.

Mutually genial of temperament, they sympathized with each other's tastes and pursuits, particularly as these related to Literature and the Drama. On one point only did they disagree, and its subject was " dear papa." By a sort of intuition the boy must have, even in those early days, come to regard the handsome, bluff, genial, loud-voiced surgeon with something akin to suspicion, a suspicion which was maintained and fully justified in the years to come.

Chapter II Lyme Regis And Tragedy's Shadow

THE picture, given us by Miss Mitford herself, of those early days in the Hampshire home, is one from the contemplation of which we are loth to drag ourselves.

Again and again in her Recollections we note how the memory was drawn upon to conjure up some pleasant scene from the past. Of the town itself her vision is of "a picturesque coimtry church with yews and lindens on one side, and beyond, a down as smooth as velvet, dotted with rich islands of coppice, hazel, woodbine, hawthorn and holly reaching up into the young oaks, and overhanging flowery patches of primroses, wood-sorrel, wild hyacinths, and wild strawberries. On the side opposite the church in a hollow fringed with alders and bulrushes, gleamed the bright clear lakelet, radiant with swans and water-lilies, which the simple townsfolk were content to call the Great Pond."

Fortunately for us the hand of Time has touched this old town gently. It is true the picturesque coimtry church has, by sheer force

a* of decay begotten of a hoary antiquity, given place to one not less picturesque on the old site ; but the peaceful aspect of the streets and inns remains, together with that commodious house in the Broad Street which, excepting one slight internal alteration, differs in nothing from the house which Miss Mitford knew in her childhood, the place of her birth.

With steep-pitched roof and painted front, its old dormer-windows look out with a certain grave dignity befitting the windows of a house which enshrines such a tender memory, on the town " through whose streets streamed Cavaliers and Roundheads after the battle of Cheriton," on the downs where, a full hundred and twenty years ago, the little mistress was wont fearlessly to ride on her father's favourite blood-mare, seated on a specially-contrived pad and enclosed so fondly by that same father's strong and loving arm.

Specially privileged and greatly esteeming the privilege, we have wandered through the rooms of this house ; seen the breakfast-room round which were ranged the books of Grandpa Russell's hbrary ; seen the curiously contrived sash-window — the like of which we have never seen in any house before or since — fashioned so cunningly that its entire height sUdes upward into a recess quite out of sight ; stepped through the opening thus made on to the flagged pathway leading by quaint outbuildings and stable

LYME REGIS 25

to the garden and orchard beyond, where, as we have already noted, took place those dashing rides on a human mount, with a powdered, beribboned pigtail in lieu of reins.

Small wonder is it that we looked on these things with something akin to reverence, and certainly with pity in our heart as we recalled how shamefully those idyllic days were to end.

With a strong preference for country sports and occupations, with a gay and careless temper which all the professional etiquette of the world could never tame into the staid gravity proper to a doctor of medicine, and with that insidious canker, the love of gambling, slowly devouring any manhness he may have possessed. Dr. Mitford gradually frittered away the whole of his wife's fortune, save a matter of £3,500 in the funds, which, being in the hands of trustees, was beyond his reach. Generous to a degree, and with a blind confidence and belief in her husband's affection, Mrs. Mitford would not permit any part of her property to be settled on herself, and was therefore, to some extent, to blame for the catastrophe which followed.

Thus, in a few short years of married life — at the most nine — we find this professional man forced to seU furniture and portions of his library in order to meet current expenses and ease the clamours of his creditors ; forced, indeed, from very shame, to quit the self-contained and therefore intolerant town where bitter tongues were wagging and scornful fingers pointing, and to take up a residence in a distant seaside town, where, if he ever hoped to retrench and reform, and had he but given the matter a moment's consideration, he was scarcely likely to achieve his object.

It was to Lyme Regis they went — ^this unduly optimistic, noisy, sportsman-practitioner, with his uncomplaining still trustful wife and their six-year-old daughter, wide-eyed and wondering why this sudden flight. The true import of this removal was not to be hidden from this remarkably intuitive child. " In that old, historical town," she writes in one of her reminiscent moods, " that old town so finely placed on the very line where Dorsetshire and Devonshire meet, I spent the eventful year when the careless happiness of childhood vanished, and the troubles of the world first dimly dawned upon my heart — ^felt in its effects rather than known — felt in its chiUing gloom, as we feel the shadow of a cloud that passes over the sun on an April day." Strangely-sad words these, expressing the thoughts of a child at an age when, not strong enough to help and too young to be confided in, it can do nothing but mark the change, questioning the mother's furtive tear while, rendered more sensitive by reason of its own impotence, it shudders in the cold atmosphere of vague yet ill-concealed suspicion and mistrust.

Yet, mark the improvidence of this unstable

LYME REGIS 27

man ; the house he took in Lyme Regis was, " as commonly happens to people whose fortunes are declining, far more splendid than that we had inhabited, indeed the very best in the town."

The house still stands with its " great extent of frontage, terminating by large gates surmounted by spread eagles," It is now known as " The Retreat," and is in the Broad Street of Lyme, proudly pointed to by the inhabitants as the house once rented by the great Lord Chatham for the benefit of his son's — William Pitt's — health, and, twenty years later, by the Mitford family.

Lyme Regis is the embodiment of much that is interesting, historically and politically, but particularly to us by reason of its literary associations. Of " The Retreat " we have, fortunately, a description written by Miss Mitford herself.

" An old stone porch, with benches on either side, projected from the centre, covered as was the whole front of the house, with tall, spreading, wide-leaved myrtle, abounding in blossom, with moss-roses, jessamine, and passion-flowers. Behind the building, extended round a paved quadrangle, was the drawing-room, a splendid apartment, looking upon a little lawn surrounded by choice evergreens, the bay, the cedar and the arbutus, and terminated by an old-fashioned greenhouse and a filbert-tree walk. In the steep dechvity of the central garden was a grotto, over-arching a cool, sparkling spring, whilst the slopes on either side were carpeted with strawberries and dotted with fruit trees. One drooping medlar, beneath whose branches I have often hidden, I remember well."

This great house, with its large and lofty rooms, its noble oaken staircases, its marble hall, long galleries and corridors, was scarcely the house which a man anxious to mark time in an unpretentious fashion was likely to choose. Nor, had he stopped for one moment to consider, would he have chosen Lyme Regis as a retreat, for it was then practically at the height of its fashionable prosperity, with its gay Assembly Rooms, the resort of those on whom Bath and Brighthelmstone were beginning to pall, and who were henceforth to divide their patronage between this Dorsetshire rendezvous and that other, just awakened, resort still further westward round the coast and destined, in the slow course of a century, to become the imperiously aristocratic Torquay.

No, indeed ! this was no move the wisdom of which was calculated to inspire in the breast of Harness, the trustee, any restoration of confidence, for those long galleries and corridors were, quite naturally, " echoing from morning to night with gay visitors, cousins from the North, and the ever-shifting company of the watering-place."

It was a strange place wherein a laughter-loving child should be sad. " Yet sad I was," she says.

TRAGEDY'S SHADOW 29

" Nobody told me, but I felt, I knew, I had an interior conviction, for which I could not have accounted, that, in the midst of all this natural beauty and apparent happiness, in spite of the company, in spite of the gaiety, something was wrong. It was such a foreshowing as makes the quicksilver in the barometer sink whilst the weather is still bright and clear."

How pitiful it all seems ! how strangely pathetic when, side by side with that description of the insistent shadow, we set the written indictment of him who was the cause of all the trouble — apathetic because, though an indictment, it is done so gently and breathes the very spirit of forgiveness.

" Then ... he attempted to increase his resources by the aid of cards, (he was, unluckily, one of the finest whist-players in England), or by that other terrible gambling, which assumes so many forms, and bears so many names, but which even when called by its milder term of Speculation, is that terrible thing gambling still ; whatever might be the manner of the loss — or whether, as afterwards happened, his own largehearted hospitality and too-confiding temper were alone to blame — for the detail was never known to me, nor do I think it was known to my mother ; he did not tell and we could not ask. How often, in after-life, has that sanguine spirit, which clung to him to his last hour, made me tremble and shiver."

Herein, perhaps, we may divine the reason for the otherwise incomprehensible move from Airesford, where the cost of living would be cheap ^ as compared with the high prices obtaining at fashionable Lyme ! Nevertheless, although the influence of the brooding shadow was insistent, these days at Lyme Regis were not without their excitement and pleasures.

" One incident that occurred there — a frightful danger — a providential escape — I shall never forget," says Miss Mitford in her Recollections.

A ball at the Rooms was about to take place, and a party of sixteen or more persons dressed for it had assembled in the Mitford dining-room for dessert, when suddenly the heavy plaster ornamentation of the ceiling crashed down in large masses upon the folk seated beneath. Fortunately the only damage was to the flowers and feathers of the ladies, the crystal and china, and the fruits and wines of the dessert, together with a few scratches on the bald head of a venerable clergyman.

" I, myself," she continues, " caught instantly in my father's arms, by whose side I was standing, had scarcely even time to be frightened, although

1 The only two entries in the rate-books of Alresford, relating to payments made by " George Mitford — Surgeon," are, under an assessment at 9d. in the pound, made in 1787 — 7s. ; and, under an assessment at 4|d. in the pound, made in 1790— S«,

TRAGEDY'S SHADOW 81

after the danger was over, our fair visitors of course began to scream."

But it was in the planning and carrying out of excursions in the neighbourhood that Dr. Mitford showed to greater advantage, giving full play to those characteristics which, as opposed to his general selfishness, endeared him then and always to children. Hand in hand with his little daughter, vivacious and inquiring, the two would sally forth in quest of glittering spars and ores, of curious shells and seaweeds and of the fossils which abounded in the Bay, the collection to be finally carried home and laid out in a certain dark panelled chamber which, after the bookroom, was the most favoured spot in all the house to the little girl.