Opening…

Preface

There are several reasons why it has seemed worth while to write the life of Sophia Jex-Blake at some length.

1. She was one of the people who really do live. In the present day a woman is fitted into her profession almost as a man is. Sixty years ago a highly dowered girl was faced by a great venture, a great quest. The life before her was an uncharted sea. She had to find her self, to find her way, to find her work. In many respects youth was incomparably the most interesting period of a life history.

2. S. J.-B. has left behind her (as probably no woman of equal power has done) the record of this quest. She was a born chronicler: almost in her babyhood she struggled laboriously to get on to paper her doings and dreams; and she was truthful to a fault. We have here the kind of thing that is constantly “idealised” in present day fiction,—have it in actual contemporary record,—with the added interest that here the story begins in an old-world conservative medium, and passes through the life of the modern educated working girl into the history of a great movement, of which the chronicler was indeed magna pars. The reader will see how more and more as the years went on S. J.-B.’s motto became “Not me, but us,” till one is tempted to say that she was the movement, that she stood, as it were, for women.

3. That, so to speak, was her “job”; but she never grew one-sided; never forgot the man’s point of view. No woman ever took a saner and wider view of human affairs.

4. In spite of the heavy strain thrown by conflicting outlook and ideals on the relation between parents and child, the reader will see in the following pages how that relationship was preserved. This is perhaps the most remarkable thing in the whole history, and it is full of significance and helpful suggestion for us all in these critical days.

5. And lastly, it proved impossible to write the life in any other way. When S. J.-B. was a young woman, Samuel Laurence was asked by her parents to make a crayon drawing of her. After some hours’ work, he threw down his pencil. “I must get you in oils or not at all,” he said.

Those words have often been in the mind of the author of this book.

CHAPTER XVI GOING HOME 202 Visit of Dr. Sewall to England—Rapprochement between S. J.-B. and her father—Dr. Elizabeth and Dr. Emily Blackwell found Medical College for Women in New York—S. J.-B. starts house- keeping and medical study there—Illness of her father—Return to England.

PART II

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I. DRIFTING 213

Life at Brighton—Perplexities as to future education.

CHAPTER II AT THE GATES OF THE CITADEL 218 Correspondence with Mrs. Butler, Professor Sidgwick and others as to possibility of University training—Goes to Edinburgh—Canvasses professors.

CHAPTER III SUCCESS? 232 Support of Scotsman—Formal application to Dean of Medical Faculty—Consent (a) of Medical Faculty, (b) of Senatus, to receive S. J.-B. as a student.

CHAPTER IV A CHECK 242 S. J.-B.’s run of popularity—Difficulties of situation—Decision of Senatus vetoed by University Court.

CHAPTER V OPENING OF EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY TO WOMEN 253 S. J.-B. reinforced by Mrs. Thorne and Miss Pechey—Dr. King Chambers tries—and fails—to get women admitted to St. Mary’s Hospital—Edinburgh University Court agrees to admit women to separate classes.

CHAPTER VI THE HOPE SCHOLARSHIP 262 More lady students—Cives Academiae Edinensis— Difficulty of getting teachers—Miss Pechey deprived of Hope Scholarship—Newspaper support and opposition—Differences among professors.

CHAPTER VII PRACTICAL DIFFICULTIES 276 Science classes—Efforts to get anatomical teaching—Correspondence in the Lancet.

CHAPTER VIII THE RIOT AT SURGEONS’ HALL 285 Women begin study of anatomy—Apply for admission to Royal Infirmary—Opposition and support—The riot—Defence of women students by “Irish Brigade” and other friendly students—Great newspaper controversy—Annual Meeting of Royal Infirmary—Crowded audience—Removal to St. Giles’ Church—S. J.-B. speaks—The first woman since Jenny Geddes to speak in that place—Professor Christison’s protest and S. J.-B.’s retort— Hubbub—“Fighting with beasts at Ephesus”— Formation of “National Association.”

CHAPTER IX THE ACTION FOR LIBEL 306 Dr. Christison’s assistant brings action for libel against S. J.-B.—Her brother’s support—She speaks at suffrage meeting in London—Makes acquaintance of Rt. Hon. James Stansfeld—The action for libel—Damages one farthing, but heavy costs—Criticisms of the verdict.

CHAPTER X SOME FRIENDSHIPS AND HOLIDAYS 320 £1000 raised by public subscription to defray costs of action—S. J.-B. takes holiday in Paris— Commune—Visit of Dr. Lucy Sewall to England.

CHAPTER XI THE QUESTION OF PROFESSIONAL EXAMINATION 330 Continued practical difficulty in getting teaching and as to professional examination—Counsel’s opinion taken by both sides—Friendly professors and others—Women refused entrance to first professional examination, but in response to lawyer’s letter are admitted and pass—Move and countermove.

CHAPTER XII THE ROYAL INFIRMARY 340 Marriage of several of the lady students— Continuance of struggle in Edinburgh together with enquiries as to chances elsewhere—Sympathy of Professor Sidgwick and Mr. James Stuart—Rev. Dr. Guthrie—Infirmary Annual Meeting again— Success of the Women’s party—“Ring out the old!”—Question of legality of votes of firms— Litigation—Success—S. J.-B. a public character.

CHAPTER XIII THE ACTION AGAINST THE SENATUS 352 Impasse—Friends and well-wishers advise appeal to Court of Law—University Court suggests that lady matriculated students should give up right to graduation and be content with certificates of proficiency—S. J.-B. and others bring Action of Declarator against Senatus to define position—Much searching of archives for evidence—Senatus decides to defend action, but six professors dissent.

CHAPTER XIV THE LORD ORDINARY’S JUDGMENT 362 S. J.-B. lectures in London on the whole situation—Lord Shaftesbury in chair—Difference with Mrs. Butler—S. J.-B. publishes Medical Women—Lord Ordinary decides substantially in favour of women students—Widespread congratulations.

CHAPTER XV PAYING THE PRICE 377 Many claims, medical, legal, journalistic, etc., on S. J.-B.—Gift of £1000 from Mr. Walter Thomson—S. J.-B. is rejected in first professional examination—Newspaper interest and enquiries—Sympathy.

CHAPTER XVI END OF THE BATTLE IN EDINBURGH 388 Interest of Rt. Hon. James Stansfeld—Introduces S. J.-B. to some of his colleagues in the Cabinet— S. J.-B. works hard and successfully for first election of women on Edinburgh School Board— University appeals against Lord Ordinary’s decision—Persevering efforts of all the women students to get on with their education somehow and somewhere—St. Andrews—Durham—Ireland— Edinburgh Court of Session (thirteen judges) decides by narrow majority in favour of University—The judgment of the Lord Justice Clerk.

CHAPTER XVII THE QUESTION IN PARLIAMENT 398 Increasing public and newspaper interest and criticism—Mrs. Anderson writes to Times, strongly advising women to study abroad and practise without registration—S. J.-B. replies— University censured in press—Apologia of Principal and S. J.-B.’s reply—Sir David Wedderburn’s notice of Bill to reduce vote to Scottish Universities by amount of salaries of Edinburgh professors withdrawn on hearing of Lord Ordinary’s judgment—S. J.-B. again interviews Home Secretary and members of Cabinet—Things looking well when Gladstone dissolves Parliament and appeals to country!—S. J.-B. interviews Mr. Russell Gurney and others— At Mr. Cowper Temple’s request she and her solicitor draft “A Bill to remove doubts as to the power of Scottish Universities”—She is summoned to London to discuss matter—Bill introduced and sixty-five petitions at once presented in its favour—Fails to get through—In debate on motion the two members for Edinburgh (Town and Gown) join issue.

CHAPTER XVIII THE LONDON SCHOOL OF MEDICINE FOR WOMEN 415 Discussion in Parliament calls all latent opposition into play—S. J.-B.’s failure to pass examination used as weapon against the women—She questions justice of rejection—A great mistake— Reproaches—By advice of Dr. Anstie and Mr. Norton she founds the London School of Medicine for Women—Miss Irby’s visit to it.

CHAPTER XIX THE RUSSELL GURNEY ENABLING ACT 423 Difference between S. J.-B. and Mrs. Anderson, who nevertheless joins Council of School—Mr. Cowper Temple brings forward his Bill again, and, after defeat, brings forward a “Foreign Degrees Bill,” which is also defeated—Lord Sandon on behalf of Government admits importance of question—Mr. Simon suggests that women should qualify by means of examination in Midwifery only, as was then possible—This agreed to after legal enquiries, and the women students send in their names, but examiners resign—S. J.-B.’s longing to break away and do rough hospital work in Bosnia—Deputation to President of Privy Council— “Foreign Degrees Bill” again defeated, but Government intimate to Mr. Russell Gurney that he should bring in an “Enabling Bill”—Though late in session this passes and becomes law—Miss Pechey and Miss Shove induce Irish College to avail itself of ability conferred by new Act— The Woman Hater.

CHAPTER XX AT LAST 436 S. J.-B. and Miss Pechey study and graduate at Berne, and obtain Licence of Irish College.

CHAPTER XXI THE ROYAL FREE HOSPITAL 441 Hospital training still refused to the women coming on—Mr. Stansfeld introduces S. J.-B. to Chairman of Royal Free Hospital, whom he has already interested in the matter—R.F.H. opened to women—Opening of London University to women— In organisation of London School for Women, S. J.-B. is set aside—Mrs. Thorne becomes Hon. Secretary—persona grata—Retrospect.

PART III

CHAPTER I EARLY DAYS IN PRACTICE 455 Special difficulties of women doctors in general and of S. J.-B. in particular—Opens Dispensary— Assistance of distinguished Edinburgh doctors— Early success—Letters to colleagues and friends— Views on Suffrage and on life in general.

CHAPTER II LAST ILLNESS OF MRS. JEX-BLAKE 470 S. J.-B. called south for last time—Unavailing efforts—Death of Mrs. Jex-Blake.

CHAPTER III PATIENTS AND FRIENDS 476 S. J.-B. removes to Bruntsfield Lodge—Letters to old friends—Interest in education of girls—Views on problems and mysteries of life—Paying and non-paying guests—Beginnings of Edinburgh Hospital for Women and Children—Her love of poetry—Her books.

CHAPTER IV PUBLIC LIFE 490 Interest in all public questions relating to women—Too masterful and uncompromising in working with others—Publishes The Care of Infants—Her coöperation much in demand in parliamentary business—Assists Edinburgh lecturers in their efforts to obtain charter— Efforts fail, but examinations of Conjoint Colleges thrown open to women—Re-publication of Medical Women—The Englishwoman’s Year Book— Health Lecture to Women—Founding of Edinburgh School of Medicine for Women—Its difficulties— Opposition.

CHAPTER V RE-OPENING OF EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY TO WOMEN 502 S. J.-B. writes article for Nineteenth Century— Views on marriage, etc.—Her Hindu students— Appointed a lecturer on Midwifery in the Extra- Mural School—Death of Dr. Lucy Sewall—S. J.-B.’s renewed efforts to gain admission for women to St. Andrews—Final appeal to her own Alma Mater “to decide a question which has been under consideration for twenty-five years”—Success— Congratulations from members of “National Association”—S. J.-B.’s characteristics as doctor and as citizen.

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VI. DRIVING TOURS. ANIMAL FRIENDS 513

CHAPTER VII THE SABBATICAL YEAR 523 Search for a suitable house—Send-off from friends in Edinburgh—Windydene—Life in retirement—Fruit- growing—Dairy—Friends—Books—Winters abroad— Interest in public affairs—Distrust of Germany— Suffrage—Death of Professor Masson—S. J.-B.’s religious attitude—Health—Last illness.

APPENDICES

A. Pedigree of the Jex-Blake family. Origin of 543 compound surname

B. “Words for the Way.”—No. 2. Rest 544

C. Conclusions from “A Visit to American Schools and 548 Colleges”

D. The Edinburgh Extra-Mural School 551

E. Letter to the Times in reply to Mrs. Garrett 552 Anderson

F. Letter to the Times in reply to the Principal of 555 Edinburgh University

G. Permanent Memorials of S. J.-B. 563

INDEX 565

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

SOPHIA JEX-BLAKE Frontispiece From a painting by Samuel Laurence

THOMAS JEX-BLAKE To face p. 70 From a drawing in chalks by Henry T. Wells, R.A.

MARIA EMILY JEX-BLAKE ” 384 From a drawing in chalks by Henry T. Wells, R.A.

SOPHIA JEX-BLAKE ” 484

PART I

Our great interest in biography is due to the desire to see that the “child is father to the man”; in other words, to see how, from boyhood to manhood and from manhood to old age, through all change of circumstances and all widening of intellectual and practical interests, we can detect the same unique, individual nature, and link each new expression of it in speech and action with that which preceded it.

EDWARD CAIRD.

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I. CHILDHOOD

Sophia Jex-Blake was born on the 21st January, 1840. “How happy I was with my Baby this time two and twenty years ago!” writes Mrs. Jex-Blake on the 21st January, 1862, and, if she had greater cause than some mothers for the plaintive note that one seems to hear through the words, she was the first to rejoice in her great compensations.

Certainly no baby ever had a warmer welcome into the world. At the time of her birth, her father, Mr. Thomas Jex-Blake, a proctor of Doctors’ Commons, was living the life of a retired gentleman with his wife at 3 Croft Place, Hastings. Both parents, though no longer young, and in some ways older than their years, were devotedly fond of children, and a number of disappointments had shadowed their married life. In January, 1840, their son, Thomas William, was eight years of age, and their daughter, Caroline, a staid little maiden of six. The home was crying out for a real baby, and all were prepared to treat the newcomer as a little queen.

And most royally did the little queen step into the position lying at her feet. There was no doubt at all that she meant to live. She was vital to the finger-tips, a thoroughly wholesome little animal, with a pair of great luminous eyes, too mature for a baby, though they retained the child look for three score years and ten.

The Baby came of an excellent stock.[1] On both sides she was descended from well-known Norfolk families, whose lineage will be found in Burke’s Landed Gentry. Her father was the son of William Jex-Blake of Swanton Abbots, and her mother the daughter of Thomas Cubitt of Honing Hall. It sounds old-world and picturesque, like Trollope’s novels or a landscape by Constable.

Footnote 1:

Appendix A.

On the other hand, the Baby—as in later years she never tired of saying— “came in with the penny post.” New ideas were surging up on every side. When one thinks of her parentage, her heredity, and the tendencies of the world outside, one can scarcely imagine a more varied lot of elements from which to build up a life. Of the fairies who came to her christening, some brought great gifts, and some great opportunities, and, when the cradle was full, one can almost hear them say,—“What now, little girl, will you make of that?”

Of all the gifts we know well which she considered the greatest. “No child ever had better parents than I!” “How I wish you had known my Mother!” Such words were constantly on her lips. Throughout life, when she was making holiday, she loved to go back to old Hastings, to point out to some intimate friend the house where she was born, the church—St. Clement’s—where she was baptised; to wander about the old castle, and note the very rocks which had afforded the most delightful scrambling- ground when she was a child. There was a special point in some country walk associated with the picture of her Father bending his tall figure to hold her hand, while he talked to her of “the terrible things people were doing in France.”

“No one ever had a happier childhood than I.”

In many ways she was extraordinarily fortunate in her parents. One cannot go through the long series of carefully preserved letters written to their youngest child without feeling tempted to say that better people never lived. Absolutely upright in all their dealings, devoted and unselfish in their affection, single-heartedly religious, regarding themselves strictly as stewards of the wealth Providence had bestowed on them, they really were the fine flower of old Evangelical Anglicanism. One seldom sees a husband and wife so entirely of one mind as to what are the things that matter. And if the Mother—Maria Emily Cubitt—was the one to bring to the union the keen wit, the happy humour, which her children inherited and loved to recall, her husband was the first to acknowledge and rejoice in her gifts. He was her proud lover to the day of his death. Family tradition made it a matter of course that they should have a luxurious home, and that all the appointments of their life should be good, but the note of self-denial was always telling resolutely and unobtrusively. It was her younger daughter’s boast in later years that Mrs. Jex-Blake “would have made a splendid poor man’s wife;” and the vulgar criticism was significant of their whole attitude towards life, that “the Jex-Blake’s carriage was as fine as any in the place, but there was always a poor person in it”.

What made this attitude all the finer was the fact that neither husband nor wife was ever tempted to undervalue social distinctions. It was noblesse oblige always,—the noblesse of family as much as the noblesse of Christ.

Surely better people never lived, and yet, as human standards go, the world which they built around them was scarcely a spacious world. “I have learnt far more from my children than they ever learned from me,” Mrs. Jex-Blake used to say with characteristic generosity in her old age, and hers was one of the minds that grow and develop up to the last: but in some ways the Evangelicalism of her middle life—even with the advantage of her most gracious representation of its tenets—was a cramping thing. While Caroline and Sophia were still in the nursery, their parents had resolved, from the best of motives, to deny them the social advantages which their mother had enjoyed before them. Dancing and theatre-going were wrong; novels were mainly trash; Punch was “vulgar”. “Christ’s kingdom” was the one thing worth considering— Christ’s kingdom as represented by the popular preachers of the day. “The mission field” was the great object of enthusiasm. After reading much contemporary correspondence one is tempted to say that the making of pen-wipers and book-markers for missionary bazaars was the work fitly to be expected of a Christian gentleman’s daughter.

From her cradle the elder sister seems to have accepted this view of life. Her fine and massive intellect bowed to the limitations imposed upon it. Her strong character asserted itself in many ways, but never so as to give her parents the proverbial “hour’s anxiety”.

And, for better or worse, into this atmosphere Sophia Jex-Blake was born. One can scarcely wonder that she came as a little queen. “Brother” was already at school, his foot on the first step of a brilliant career; “Sweet Carrie” was all that loving parents expected her to be; the new thing came as a complete surprise. The freshness, the wilfulness, the naughtiness of her were as the wine of life to these staid, law-abiding people. It took their breath away sometimes, but it was all on so small a scale, and were not all the forces of religion in reserve to check any undue waywardness as soon as she was old enough to understand?

The earliest samples of her handwriting are two letters addressed to her brother,—undated, but written laboriously in “half-text” between double lines. The quotation and punctuation marks are added by another hand.

“DEAR BROTHER, Your note was much ‘amiss,’ But as you sent sixpence, I pardon the offence, And kindly send you this. S. L. J. B.”

and again:

“DEAR BROTHER,

I must say I think you very impertinent, however I condescend to write to you. If you write a word more nonsense your head shall be off. I am your humble servant grand mogul.”

“Entirely her own composition” is the postscript added in her father’s handwriting.

No doubt they spoilt her, and she must still have been very young when her audacity and wilfulness began to cause her parents real anxiety. In January, 1847, her Mother writes:

“DEAR SOPHY,

I am very pleased with your marker, I think it nicely done for you. I wish you many happy returns of your birthday—now you are seven years old I hope you will pray for the Holy Spirit to keep you from sin, from disobedience, and from violence of temper. I send you as a text for your birthday 16 Proverbs 32, and I trust you will try hard to act upon it.... I hope you take all the care you can of dear Papa— he says you are very good. Brother sends love.

I am your affectionate Mother, MARIA EMILY JEX-BLAKE.”

A day or two later she writes again:

“I am very glad to hear you had such a happy birthday—how kind in Mary to give you that nice tea-pot. I hope you remember to thank God for giving you so many kind friends. Be sure to take all the care you can of dear Papa, and if he takes you for a walk do not let him talk.

I miss Papa’s nice explaining God’s word every morning at prayers, you must tell me what it has been about.

We like Brighton and I think I am stronger, but we shall be very glad to be home again. I hope Mary takes care about the poor people’s broth and the puddings for the sick children. I long to see all my poor friends again, but I trust some one visits them and that they do not miss me. Papa must go and read with Mrs. P. when he is able and with Mrs. C.... Ask Mr. Macleane to bring you back with him in his pocket, when he returns on Monday. Show him how quiet you can be.”

It is clear the teaching of religion had already begun, if indeed there was ever a time when it had not,—the teaching of such genuine heartfelt religion!—under symbols that never were suited to the mind of a sensitive child. So it is not surprising that she was not always the Grand Mogul, poor little soul! The next papers that survive are in a totally different vein. They are written when she was seven or eight years old, and the handwriting, though far from beautiful, is much better formed.

“DEAR MRS. BLAKE,

I wish you would be so kind as to come and see me every night in Bed-ford-shire at least tonight on Sunday Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday and next Sunday after tomorrow. I require an answer to this note (letter) even if you do come tonight. There are now so many railroads that you can get to Bedfordshire in one minute. Please send ‘Madam Mary’ with this and then come up.

GRANDAFLORER.”

The true inwardness of this request appears in a private paper probably of an earlier date, folded up and labelled on the outside, “A Prayer to be Said After an unhappy Night.”

“Oh Lord I beseech Thee take away my fears of a night, for Thou alone knowest what miseries I this night have suffered. O Lord, I beseech Thee this day enable me to behave as I ought. O Lord, I beseech Thee to make me a Christain child ... take away my doubts and fears....”

In the next letter—endorsed by her Mother, “7th May, 1848”—she says,

“I whant to tell you that I feel so much less fear of a night....

“I will never say again (as I fear I often have) that God does not hear my prayer or that I do not derive comfort from it.... Please (for you say please wins everything) do not show this to anybody not even to dear Papa.

S. L. B.”[2]

Footnote 2:

The paragraphs and brackets are the writer’s own.

Clearly the child at this time was learning to read and write. Of any formal teaching no record has been kept, but, if anything of the kind existed, it can have made no great demand on her brain power, which began at this time to find expression in a somewhat unusual way.

In common with most children, she dreamed dreams, but her dreams were not the random visions of an hour. They were singularly coherent and consecutive, aiming at nothing less than the construction of an ideal state ruled by a “despotic emperor” in some wonderful islands lying in an unknown sea. She was unable to throw the creations of her brain into anything like literary form, but numberless papers have been preserved, varying from large official-looking blue foolscap sheets giving the “constitution” of the state, down to tiny scraps about the minutest detail connected with it.

There are many maps of the islands, of which the largest, Sackermena, gave its name to the group; and these are supplemented by numberless poems in which she strove to give expression to the feelings her Utopia aroused in her mind. Poetry never came easy to her, dearly as she loved it.

She begins gallantly many times: (We all know the experience.)

“See how pretily the sunbeams dance Upon the fair waves of Speed-the-lance See the Waters of Gold!”

and again,

“See Lord Grandaflora brave Fighting his country and life to save....”

and again,

“See how gently Mordisca rules O’er Sackermena and her pooles....”

or is it “fooles”?—The writing is very bad.

On the whole the most delightful stanza is the one that was probably the first,

“Sweet Sackermena and her isles See how many yards and miles It takes to go round Sackermena!”

No, poetry never came easy to her.

When she tackles the constitution of the state, however, her work is on a totally different level. She gives us the officers, “Military, Civil, and Judicial,” the standing army, standing navy, Men of War and frigates, and vessels “in rest, ready to be raised.” From this we go on to Prisons, Castles, Laws, Parliament, Guards, etc. The population varies greatly in different schemes. In one, by a stroke of genius, all innocent of that terrible Woman Question in which she was to play so prominent a part, she says:—Men, 7,000,000; Women, 5,000,000. Truly an ideal state!

There are many codes of laws, drawn up to meet one contingency after another. The following are picked out almost at random:

“The Despotic Emperor has authority that none may dispute and none may appear in his presence without his gracious permission save his sons and Lord Field Marshall, also the chief general the high Admiral the high Treasurer, high Chancellor, Secretary of state and the Chief Justice.”

“Succession to the Crown. It is at the option of the Reigning Despotic Emperor to name his successor but if he dies without making any choice it descends to the eldest son but if he has no son the crown is placed on the head of the eldest daughter unless 12 strong reasons can be urged to the contrary and accepted by Parliament. If he has no offspring it does not descend to the next relation but it is in the power of the parliament to give it to whoever it pleases.”

“Robery shall always be punished by the culprits restoring fourfold or if utterly unable to pay this as many days imprisonment as there are shillings in the forfeit.”

“Intentional murder and personal injury shall be punished by injuries precisely similar.”

“If any man conceals the persons mentioned in the preceding laws he is punished half as much as the offender.”

“That every English or Scotchman that is travelling with a passport shall be supplied with provisions cost free. And every Frenchman shall have things for half and every Dutchman quarter price. Any one infringing this law is liable to be forced into the army with the possibility of advancement or to be imprisoned for two years.”

“No judge shall ever condemn a man to death without the knowledge of Lord Trican. An infringement of this law shall be visited by confiscation of all his estates except (if he have it) 250 to his wife and 300 to each of his children; besides his being degraded from office and receiving 30 stripes in the public square of St. Anhola.”

“All disobedience to officers shall be punished by flogging. 1st offence 20 strokes, 2nd. 34, 3rd. 40, 4th. imprisonment 4 months, 5th. 14 months, 6th. Death.”

“If any sentinel be found asleep in the camp he shall be shot with blank cartridges and imprised 15 months. The second offence he shall be shot really.”

“Spirits or strong drink not being allowed in either army or navy any person having any shall be shot with blank cartridges and the second offence he shall receive 20 strokes and 1 months imprisonment, 3rd. 32 strokes and 4 months imprisonment. 4th. Death.”

“In time of war when the standing army is not sufficient to resist the enemy’s forces 350 soldiers and 4 captains and 10 lieutenants shall be sent to raise the ready militia to the amount required; if this is not enough every man above 20 and under 80 compose the Possiblees which is raised in great danger, but 2,500,000 must be left (all able bodied men) to take care of the kingdom.”

In many respects this state was a primitive one. When certain announcements were to be made, “a large bell is rung which is heard to the distance of 23 miles,” or “an enormous bonfire is made in the palace gardens of Mt. Gilbow [!] which is perhaps seen to a greater distance.”

This is fine:

“The Despotic Emperor is the grand Law-giver General Judge Sage Physician and in short the Father of his vast dominions.”

In spite of the mass of prosaic detail as to dress, provisions, etc., there is sometimes a hint of the supernatural about the whole thing. The dotted lines between the islands in one of the maps indicate “invisible bridges”, and in a request to “VICTORIA and PRINCE ALBERT” that a governor may be sent from England to “controll the foreigners who wilfully destroy the peace and comfort of this happy and well-governed realm,” we are told that “if this wish is complied with, the Most Gracious Despotic Emperor, PHRAMPTON OMAIL GRANDIFLORA,[3] will stand the friend of your kingdoms on earth and admit 20 of your subjects to his unearthly Kingdom.”

Footnote 3:

Note the similarity of the name to her signature on p. 5. Many a little girl has loved to imagine herself a fairy princess. It would be interesting to know whether any other ever dreamed of being a “Despotic Emperor.”

A great impetus to the whole conception may possibly have been given by a tour which the child was fortunate enough to make with her parents and sister to Warwickshire and thence to Scotland in June, 1850, a tour of which further particulars will be found in the next chapter. In the course of her very conscientiously kept diary, she says, “We read the Lady of the Lake aloud,” and she herself is reading “Ivanhoe, one of the Waverley novels.”

There is no proof, however, that any part of her Utopia was sketched after this tour, and a great part of it was certainly written before.

On the whole, perhaps, the most remarkable thing in connection with “Sackermena and her Isles” is the staying power shown by the writer in developing her idea, and her determination to get everything down on paper. In this more than in anything else the child was father of the man.

S. J.-B. was a born chronicler.

As regards Sackermena, the idea certainly afforded no lack of scope and variety. What with drawing maps, writing poetry, framing laws, adding up the totals of her army and reserves, devising for the soldiery “A dark red long coat with silver falcons, and thick leather buskins studden with iron,” and many another guise equally picturesque,—she certainly did not suffer from monotony in her self-chosen occupation. And the above examples by no means exhaust its possibilities. On a stray slip of paper we come upon a formal complaint from a “justice,” who, “passing in disguise through Pe,” was supplied with a loaf deficient in weight; and a tiny booklet (laboriously stitched together by the writer’s hot little hands) has the following title page:

THE SACKERMENEE’S POCKET BOOK

----------

_Containing many Little Accounts of their Customs_

----------

PUBLISHED BY S. L. BLAKE & CO. Hastings 1848

Jan. 1850

The two dates seem to indicate that Sackermena flourished for perhaps two years; but the Pocket Book itself was not a hardy plant. The big foolscap sheets were clearly more stimulating to the imagination.

The thing is child’s work throughout. From first to last it bears no trace of grown-up criticism; nor is there then or afterwards any note by her parents, teachers or friends, referring in even the most distant way to the faerie region in which the little girl must have spent so much of her time.

Another thing strikes one incidentally—considering the atmosphere in which the child was brought up—as rather curious. There is no mention of clergy at Sackermena, nor of any form of church. We are not even told that nothing of the kind existed.

Note again that the Despotic Emperor was the grand Lawgiver, General, Judge, Sage, Physician, and, in short, the Father, of his vast dominions.

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II. SCHOOL LIFE

“You often say how happy you were as a child,” an intimate friend remarked once to Dr. Jex-Blake, “but you never talk of your school life. I expect you were a terrible pickle?”

“Specs so,” was the laconic response, and the subject dropped.

There is no getting round the fact that she was a terrible pickle. If we bear in mind what the state of girls’ education was in those days we shall see that it could scarcely have been otherwise. If she could have gone to a boys’ school and enjoyed its boisterous give and take, the little “despotic emperor” would soon have found her level. One loves to think how happy she would have been in the modern Girls’ High School: if she had but found the education of women in the condition in which she left it, the difference in her whole future would have been very great, but women of the present day would not owe her the debt they owe her now. “The breaker is gone up before them.”

As things were, she had, in a sense, got the upper hand of her parents before she went to school at all. She was simply overflowing with energy and vitality, and they found themselves, while she was little more than a child, confronted with a personality which ran right athwart their preconceived notions and theories of life. They had not the right weapons with which to meet the outbursts of her volcanic temperament, and it must always be borne in mind that “when she was good, she was very very good,” immeasurably more attractive than the average child.

The one effort of her teachers, of course, was to repress her, to induce her to be “ladylike,” and, most unfortunately of all, to make every childish act of disobedience, every outburst of passion, the text for a homily on the necessity of “coming to Jesus.” One cannot read the long series of letters referred to above without wondering how it came about that the germ of religion in the child’s heart was not worn away altogether; and indeed its survival only becomes comprehensible when one bears in mind the genuine goodness of many of those who watched over her, and also the “unknown quantity,”—that elusive unsearchable factor that is present in every human equation.

The earliest references to her education are two letters from her first governess, Miss B., to Mrs. Jex-Blake, of which the first is dated November 24th, 1848:

“Sophy is a dear child, shewing daily advancement in her studies, and often delighting me by a rectitude of principle emanating, I trust ‘from the Father of lights’. A little native wildness (and that gradually softening down) together with the want of promptitude in setting about her duties, are the chief obstacles that could be picked out from a much longer list of things most prized by an earnest teacher. I have often thought of your wish that she should learn the Latin grammar, and quite agree with your view of its probable advantage; but I am afraid of breaking down in the long and short syllables.... For the next few months it appears to me nothing will be lost by our present system, in which I find parsing to be generally a subject of interest.

I trust the time is not very distant when your little girl will successfully strive to be both a help and comfort to her parents.”

The second letter is nearly two months later:

“Your kind letter with its agreeable suggestion reached me too late for a reply by return of post. It would have given me a feeling deeper than pleasure to continue the instruction of your very promising child, but I have already engaged with one daily pupil and have a half prospect of another, in addition to which God’s high dispensation seems to allot to my keeping, as soon as He graciously gives me the means, the eldest of four children belonging to my Brother.... With our best love to Sophy, I am, dear Mrs. Blake,

Yours in the Lord, MARY B.”

The first arrangement having fallen through, Sophy was sent with her sister to Belmont, a school kept by Mrs. and Miss Teed. The following letter seems to have been written on the day they set out:

“29th January [1849].

DEAR LITTLE SO,

I hope you had a comfortable journey; I fear the cold wind must have increased your cold. Now, dearest child, you must be always going to Jesus for grace to overcome self-will and the desire to be conspicuous. Strive to be a gentle child, in reality esteeming others better than yourself. You cannot learn anything to any purpose till you are obedient and have some self-command. Try to be a comfort to dearest Carry, she has her trials, depend upon it,—do you be obedient to her and thoughtful of her comfort, without making a fuss about it. Carry likes kindness quietly done. Do not give needless trouble to Miss Towers or anyone. Try to deserve Dearest Mrs. Teed’s good opinion. Jesus will be sure to help you whenever you ask Him. I forward a note that arrived from Aunt Taylor. Papa sends best love.

I am your affectionate Mother, MARIA EMILY JEX-BLAKE.”

Mrs. Jex-Blake’s health never was robust, and at this time it was causing her husband and intimate friends some uneasiness.

“Do you know, darling Sophy,” she writes on March 27th, “it is sometimes quite a trial to me to write one letter to each of you, and I should hardly do it, did I not know how ‘nice it is’ (as you say) to hear from home at school. I so much like you to send me the heads of Mr. Parker’s and of Mr. Taylor’s sermons. The one on 23 Jer. 29 must have been very beautiful.... Papa has just come in and says thank dear little So for her letter and tell her I am particularly pleased with the clear way in which she sent me the heads of the sermon.... I send you a few of our violets.”

And again,

“Be much in prayer, my sweet one, for grace to be obedient and gentle. Hope whispers great things for our next meeting if God grants us one.

I am comforting myself with the hope that you are waging constant war against self-will and disobedience. You can hardly believe how happy you will be when through God’s help upon your earnest endeavours, you can obey at once and give up your own way. I send my darling child a text which I wish her to learn and pray for grace to live up to. It is 1 Peter v. 5. I wish you to learn it perfectly and make it part of your daily prayers. Tell me when you write that you have done so. Bear it in mind all day long, and try hard, very hard, to live up to it. I often fancy you all at morning prayers and wish I could be there.[4] God gives you great privileges, dear child, that you may live to Him.”

Footnote 4:

She would probably not have elected to be there on the morning when some imp induced Sophy to tip over a bench on to the row of girls kneeling in front of her.

All the letters are in this vein, and all were read by the recipient many times and carefully preserved.

In June, 1849, she went with her parents, brother and sister to spend a long holiday in the Lake District, and one is glad to think of her as being much in the open air, collecting plants and stones, “shooting a good deal with bow and arrows,” riding on the coach, and being allowed to drive for a few minutes herself.[5]

Footnote 5:

She used to say that her intimate familiarity with the details of harnessing and all stable matters was due to the fact that when they were spending a holiday in the country her father allowed them to have a pony and trap on condition that, with the exception of actual grooming, the children managed it entirely themselves.

Her holiday diary is as well written and as dull as that of the average adult, and one is almost startled when one comes upon such entries as “Played at horses and pretended I was driving the mail”; and again, “A very wet day. I had a very nice game with Papa and Carry, and another with Carry in the afternoon and afterwards another alone with Papa very nice indeed and I enjoyed it very much.”

On the other hand there was no lack of church-going, and the texts are always carefully noted down:

“July 29th Sunday. Went to Keswick church in the morning and the text was James 4. 8. Brother went to church at Thornthwaite. Papa, Brother and Carry walked off to the Vale of St. John’s, but there was no sermon—only prayers. Went to Keswick church in the afternoon and the clergyman took his text from Ps. 119, 96.”

“Aug. 5th. Mama was very ill and I stopped at home both in the morning and afternoon with her. Papa, Brother and Carry went to Brougham-hall to church but there was no service. They went again in the afternoon to Brougham-hall—no sermon. I went in the evening to Penrith church and the text was Luke 16. 8.”

She never seems to have drawn a blank, poor little soul!

A previous entry is even more characteristic of the world she lived in:

“July 23rd.... Had a walk with Papa and Carry in the afternoon, and afterwards bought tracts (for 6d.) with Carry.”

“24th. A rather wet morning. Went out with Papa and gave away some tracts.”

Yet her Father was an excellent playfellow and at this time her most indulgent critic. In the spring of 1850 he writes—“It is a real pleasure to me to hear from you, and I hear such pleasing accounts of you from others that I am very glad”; but it must be admitted that this note of congratulation is rare.

There is an amusing little joint note from her parents, probably of an earlier date:

“DEAR SOPHY,

I send you the 1s. and I hope the yellow paper. I do not know what you want of paste-board, therefore I fear I cannot send it. I send the gingerbreads, and hope to do so on the 11th again. Your affectionate Mother.”

Then follows in pencil:

“Dear child, I have got all the things for you and leave them with 2 pounds of gingerbread. I think you want more than one shilling for your purpose so I enclose 2s. for you.

Your affect. Papa, T. J.-B.”

But it must not be supposed that her parents were ever otherwise than of one mind concerning her. Like all well-constituted husbands, Mr. Jex- Blake was quite prepared on occasion to demolish the child who made his wife uncomfortable. And it must be confessed that little Sophy had rather a knack of making people “uncomfortable.” She was so keen about everything: she staked her equanimity so often on things which it might have been wiser to regard as trifles, that those about her learned to live in a state of some anxiety, never knowing when the eruption might come.

The remedy for it all is painfully obvious as we read. More scope, more physical exercise, more fresh air; but, as already pointed out, the girls’ schools of those days provided none of these things; and, when the child came to her dearly loved home, the Mother’s excessive fragility made it necessary that her daughter should live the life of a grown up person.[6] The most devoted mutual love could not devise a régime suited to both. The lovely ailing Mother could not stand noise and excitement. Sophy was often riotous, excitable, “rough” yet always very loving with it all. On one occasion when walking demurely along the pavement in a queue of well-behaved girls, she caught sight of her father, and, without a moment’s hesitation, deserted the ranks, and took a flying leap on to his back!

Footnote 6:

“I must tell you my experience,” writes Mrs. Jex-Blake to Dr. Lucy Sewall a quarter of a century later, “not my own practice, it was not the fashion of my day (and having lost my three eldest I was very anxious and fidgetty):—Where children are trusted and have a good deal of independence, and their tempers not fretted about little things, they grow up more open, confiding and trustworthy.”

No wonder that a contemporary friend of the family describes him as saying very often, “My dear Sophy! My dear child!” in tones of absolute bewilderment.

In the summer of 1850 Sophy made the tour referred to in the preceding chapter, and a liberal education it must have been. In April Mrs. Jex- Blake had written,

“I hardly allow myself to look forward to the treat of going to Scotland; it seems almost too much pleasure,—and we shall be sure to find people who love Jesus and love the Bible there and that will add so very greatly to our pleasure.... Papa thanks you for your letter, he is surprised and pleased to learn that you are in Reduction.... Use daily as a prayer the substance of 1 Peter v. 5.”

“18th June. Left Belmont at 20 minutes to 10 with Miss Teed, and met Papa and Mama at the Euston, and went to Rugby to pick up Brother.” So Sophy’s own diary begins, and an excellent conscientious piece of work it is. They visited Leamington, Warwick, Kenilworth: thence to Edinburgh, Stirling, Glasgow and the Lochs, Callander and the Trossachs, stopping at York on the way south.

A pretty piece of doggerel shows the happy relations between Father and daughter at this period. It is scribbled in pencil on the back of a hotel-keeper’s note. The Father begins in his scholarly handwriting:

“My little child, You’re very wild, Could you be still, And yet not ill, Then, little So, This I do know, You’d be a blessing, Worth possessing.”

Whereupon Sophy comes hobbling on:

“My dear Father, I had rather You’d believe me, And relieve me, When I say, As I may, That I’ll be good, As I should.”

Of course it is she who recommences the game:

“My dear Papa, Aha, Aha, Send me a letter, Then you can better Tell when we go, Off to Tarbet Oh! And all your wishes, With many kisses.”

And the scholarly handwriting closes the page:

“I kiss you! Why if I do I kiss a wild, And teasing child. But this short note, Papa has wrote To say at ten, We start again. Henceforth you should Be very good.”

In autumn the two sisters returned to Mrs. Teed’s school, and things resumed their chequered course. I am told by a schoolfellow of Sophy’s, who had an excellent influence over her at that time, that Mrs. Teed managed the little girl extremely well: and in any case she remained at Belmont for two years, when Mrs. Jex-Blake removed her—evidently to the child’s regret—on the curious ground that she was being “extinguished.” The truth is that the younger pupils were rationed according to age, and, as Sophy was physically as well as mentally in advance of her contemporaries, she was reduced to eating raw acorns to appease her hunger. But Mrs. Jex-Blake was not aware of that detail till long after.

In the meantime, the former teacher, Miss B., had settled at Ramsgate with the pupils already referred to, and Sophy was sent back to her. A more devoted and conscientious teacher one can scarcely imagine, but the arrangement was in some ways a very unfortunate one. At home—and probably also to some extent at Mrs. Teed’s—the religious atmosphere was tempered by a sense of humour as regards the ordinary affairs of life; but of this quality worthy Miss B. seems to have possessed no trace. Henceforth the child lived in a religious forcing house. One hopes that at times she escaped to Sweet Sackermena and her Isles, but the moral atmosphere at Ramsgate was not conducive to such pagan wanderings. Her brain was pronounced excitable, and she was to have but little head employment, but she was taken to church several times a week, and encouraged—or instructed—to write out the sermons to send home to her parents. Here is an example of her work: (Miss B.’s trifling corrections are omitted.)

“Mr. Dunbrain. John iii. 3.* April 2. 1851.

We live in days of deep interest,—the common topics of men are thrown aside and everyone seems to be utterly absorbed in religious controversies. The torpor which had overspread the church has entirely dissolved, and now all around we hear nothing but the perpetual strife jar and clamour of religious disputes. It is a storm and a strong one too, but many think it precedes the blessed peace and quiet of the Millennium. Like every storm it did not come all at once, but it has been long in gathering; it began with what men call trifles and rose gradually, gathering strength as it rose, etc., etc.

Those marked * are Wednesday evening lectures.”

We are left to guess whether she wrote out the lecture after supper the night it was delivered, or lay awake “remembering it” till next morning.

Memory altogether was a faculty assiduously cultivated. It was the custom for the family to gather round the fire on Sunday evenings, and for one after the other to repeat a sacred poem. When they had been separated for a time, special interest attached to the items each had added in the interval to his, or her, repertory. No doubt the custom began with the learning of hymns, but they seem for the most part to have been good hymns, and round this nucleus there gathered an extraordinarily varied collection,—fine passages from Isaiah and the Psalms, poems by Trench, Dean Alford, Longfellow, Wordsworth and many more. It was said of the younger daughter in her later life that, if she had been shipwrecked on a desert island with nothing but pens and paper in addition to the actual means of livelihood, she could gradually have provided a priceless library from memory alone.

A few of her letters at this time have been preserved.

[1851].

“DEAR DADDY,

A most extraordinary thing happened this morning; the crew of a Portuguese ship put up in the masthead figures representing Pontius Pilate and Judas and exactly as 10 struck on the pier clock they thumped them down into the sea! Now was not this Popish trash? A respectable English jolly tar told Miss B. all about it and added how happy we were to be taught better; now I think that’s a right good English spirit. The first grand steamer has just come in. I have a very bad cold and have not been out. Miss B. brought me some licorice for my cough and I am to have treacle posset tonight so I could not possibly be taken more care of and no doubt it will be quite well before 30th. You musn’t think Miss B. had anything to do with my talking about tractarianism, indeed afterwards she forbade it,—it was all my fault. I’m writing a history of our family entitled ‘History of the illustrious family of Blakes from 70 B.C. to 1080 A.D.’ Dear Daddy how I do love you, if I could ‘climb those knees and kiss that face’ I’d be happy enough, indeed I’m very happy here but home sweet home is better than anything else. S. B.

Do send me a large seal of your crest.”

Her Mother, however, is always her main confidant.

“I’m in a scrape just now Mama,” she writes on April 5th, 1851, “I long to be at Home, home sweet home there’s no place like home, no person like Mummy and no kiss like Mummy’s cuddle and no knees like Papa’s and no player at Prisoner and Judge Selling or any other game in the world like Papa, no one that can put me in a good humour like Daddy and Mummy! Oh! nothing like what everything is at home anywhere else, in all Europe Asia Africa and America no place is like home, sweet sweet home.... Love to dear Papa and yourself 3000000 kisses. I always kiss the envelope. Please write very soon. I am your affectionate and I hope dutiful Sophy.”

We know how fervently the Mother “hoped” the same!

The child seems to have spent the first weeks of May in her beloved home, and the following letter from Miss B. gives us a graphic sketch of her return to school:

“MY DEAR MRS. BLAKE,

Dearest Sophy has laid her letter before me, and such a burden of grief I can scarcely bear to send—but you will look at my view of the picture likewise. The tears shed in writing that were very nearly all we have had; for soon after parting from her Papa the heavy clouds passed away, and, when established in the fly I was glad to hear, ‘Well, I am not quite so sorry as I expected to be,’ and then ‘Mummy says the air of Ramsgate will almost make amends for the parting.’ We got home and found dinner ready, but dear Sophy could only take a little rhubarb.... At tea she seemed surprised at being able to express herself as ‘hungry,’ though the appetite was soon satisfied, and she is now sitting reading in the garden, which she says is ‘delicious’. Dear Mrs. Blake do not think I will tax her head with anything beyond beneficial employment. It will be my study to get rid of that thin look which I could scarcely have attributed to so short a change (!). I ought to tell you that Sophy meant to say that she felt better when she got into Ramsgate than for some time, but grief swallowed up all other news.”

A week or two later her Father asks her in a rash moment if she can tell him “Why it is wrong to oppose Papal Aggression?” adding, “If you can’t, I will tell you.” The question was a mere conundrum, but she takes it very seriously:

“DEAR FATHER,

I am very very sorry to hear that dearest Mother is so unwell (or I should say ill). I send her a marker as I have not many flowers that will press well.[7] Please tell her that she must not give it away to anyone. I am quite enchanted at Boy’s getting two poetry prizes; it is charming.

Well, about the question, ‘Why it is wrong to oppose the Papal Aggression?’ I really don’t see how it can be wrong and must think it quite right. I can’t see how it can be wrong for any zealous servant of God to oppose with all his might that which dishonours God and his word, which (when the Bible says ‘none can come unto the Father but by Me’) says that we must come by the Virgin and the saints etc. People might say ‘We must not oppose it for it is God’s will’ they might also say that ‘temptation was put before the Jews and that was God’s will’ but they were told to put the accursed thing far from them and destroy it utterly and I think the Papal Aggression is put in our way to try us and see if we will oppose it unto death. But of course you know more about it than I, so please tell me why it is wrong to oppose it.”

Footnote 7:

She had her own little garden at Ramsgate.

One can imagine that her Father was almost ashamed to confess that the question was only a joke.

“Now for a word about the ‘bowing,’” he says in another letter. “It is of no importance in itself, and therefore I never tell my children or servants either to bow or not to bow; but particular circumstances may render it important, and if good and kind Miss B. thinks that at Christ Church, you may honour God rather by doing as she and others who are with her do, than by being singular on this point, I not only wish you to obey her, but to do it with a willing and ready mind, cheerfully, as a plain matter of duty. Which it is. It is for her to judge, and for you to do, gladly, what she tells you.”

Miss B. had the greatest admiration for her pupil’s gifts, and in particular she considered her a budding poetess. These are some of the effusions of the period:

“Oh Mother! thou that broughtest me forth My sins gainst thee none, none can tell For these alone I ought in sooth To be e’en now in lowest hell. But oh! my God still spares me on To be a comfort to thy years God grant I may e’er the sun goes down Seal thee this promise with my tears. Ne’er ne’er again what [e’er] betide, (In Jesu’s strength alone I trust) I’ll vex my mother, who did guide My years of infancy now past.”

Another time after expatiating on her Mother’s virtues and unmerited affection, she goes on to inform her that there is One—

“Whose love surpasseth thine as far As Sol excels the falling star. My Mother ONE request I make That thou wouldst pray for Jesu’s sake That he would break this heart of stone And mould it like my Saviour’s own.”

Was it all mere humbug and “patter”? The question can best be answered by quoting the following letter to her Father. It is written impulsively in pencil on scraps of paper,—the questions and answers being on different slips. The wording of the questions has sometimes been altered and corrected, so presumably she drafted them herself. The little sheaf has been thrust “anyhow” into an envelope (addressed to Mrs. T. Jex- Blake) which bears postmark “Ramsgate, Ap. 21. 1851,” and Mrs. Jex-Blake has quaintly endorsed it “very nice.”

“MY DEAREST FATHER,

I fear you are very uneasy about me for I have indeed manifested no visible proof of a new and clean heart, but I think much of my soul too much for me to speak even to you of it. But I cannot talk so whenever anyone tries to talk to me of it I always turn it into jest but I must write (I cannot speak) to you about it so I have written some questions down and endeavoured to answer them as before God. So do believe each word.

S. B.

1. If you died this instant what would become of you? And could you face death unflinchingly?

I know not what would become of me but I fear I should go to eternal torments. And do not think I could face death unflinchingly for this reason.

2. What would be your first emotion when you found yourself in the presence of the Judge of quick and dead?

Fear I think but yet I think that I should claim Jesus’ promises to lost sinners.

3. If Christ came this night and asked you ‘Lovest thou me’ what would be your answer?

Yes Lord although I am very wicked and cold and dull yet I could say without hesitation I do love thee very much I often feel my heart warm towards thee and something tells me that one day I shall love thee far better than I do now.

4. Could you before God say truly ‘I strive to live as I hope to die’?

No I fear I could not although sometimes I do try to do things to please Jesus.

5. Do you really in your heart know your religion to be a mere form or do you really feel its life-giving influence on your heart?

I know I often say far more than I really believe, I even have been tempted so far as to doubt in my heart the existence of a Diety but yet I have had a few bright moments in which I could sincerely say Yes I know it I know that Christ is mine and I am his but a deep gloom is generally over my spirit.

6. Do you in your heart believe yourself to be a new creature?

I know not but I fear not although at times I have been fully convinced that I am God’s child.

7. Do you earnestly desire to be such?

Most earnestly whenever anything touches that chord in my heart and sometimes I could weep bitterly but generally I feel awfully indifferent as to my soul.

8. Do you think you have ever known what true prayer is?

Most certainly and have sometimes obtained very gracious answers.

9. Where will you be 200 years hence?

In heaven I humbly hope and trust for I think the Lord has begun a good work in me.”

Gallant honest heart!

Is there a single word in the whole confession that the most devoted parent would have wished different?

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

III. SCHOOL LIFE—Continued

“I think the Lord has begun a good work in me.” Is there in the words a—very human and pardonable—suggestion of St. Augustine’s “Timebam enim ne me cito exaudires”? In any case, though doubtless the good work went on, it cannot be denied that the tares flourished abundantly with the wheat.

It happened most unfortunately at this time that the child’s physical health fell into a very unsatisfactory state: we hear of great digestive trouble and functional weakness of the joints. Modern hygiene would probably have made short work of both complaints. As things were, the weakness was “tinkered at,” and the child was encouraged to live the life of an invalid. We are startled to learn incidentally that she is going out in a bath chair!

Good Miss B. took her up to town to see a consultant, and sent the parents long detailed reports on the child’s health. We are not surprised to come upon the following under date July, 1851:

“You must not suppose, dear Mrs. Blake, that I overlook the self that you have rightly so much at heart. I see it too well, and it is commented on to Sophy so frequently that I sometimes check myself, ... but the punishment that I might inflict on another I hold back in Sophy’s case, not only from my own knowledge of her character, but because Mr. S. cautioned me if possible never to disturb the even tenor of her brain.... Her case is peculiar and such must be the ends to meet it: they will require patience and may be long in showing fruit, but we will not despair.”

The next vacation seems to have been disastrous. The child had grown more indolent and self-centred, and no doubt the parents were unable to deny her the sweetmeats which she loved and which the supposed weakness of her joints made it impossible for her to “work off” as healthy children should. Moreover, few houses are large enough to contain two chronic invalids.

“I received your letter,” writes Mrs. Jex-Blake when the child is gone, “and very glad we were to hear of your safe arrival,—but, my own child, I could have cried over your words. They were nice and affectionate, but the very opposite of your acts.... Either my child means what she writes or she does not. Your conduct completely contradicts your assertions. More sad and foolish behaviour than yours it is difficult to imagine. You behaved so ill that I doubt if I could have borne it another day without being laid on a bed of sickness, and I might never have recovered. Your ever being with us again for three weeks at a time is quite out of the question till you have the good sense to understand (as other children of your age do) that to be happy and comfortable and to enable me in my weak state to have you at all, you must be good. When you seem really to feel how ill you have behaved, we will some time hence have you home for a week, and if I find you keep your word (which you do not now) we will have you home very often; and Papa says that he shall then think that he can never do enough to make you very very happy; but you now destroy your happiness and my health, and the medical men will not allow us to be together. Think of your great folly and sin, my dear child. Pray to God for grace, and He will give it to you for His dear Son’s sake....

When you have read this letter, I wish you to tear it up.”

As ill luck would have it, this most unusually severe indictment found the poor little culprit seriously ill in bed. Her penitent reply is not forthcoming, but five days later, her Mother writes again:

“MY OWN DARLING CHILD,

I trust this will find you much better; if you want me to be happy you must make all possible haste to get well, and write to tell me you are well.... I quite believe, my darling, that you are sorry, and will, in God’s strength, take pains that the same shall never happen again. I do particularly wish you to tear up my last letter at once.”

She didn’t tear it up: she never could tear up “Mummy’s letters.” She tied the two together with a piece of red wool, and slipped in with them a Sunday School “ticket” bearing the words, “Children, obey your parents in the Lord; for this is right.”

By the same post as the second of these letters her Father writes:

“MY DARLING CHILD,

We have been so grieved to hear of your illness, and do hope that before you receive this, you will be much better. It will please you to know that dear Mummy is much better for the quiet and Norfolk air. Everybody is so kind and trying to get her quite strong, and they all enquire so kindly after little Sophy, whom they call ‘little Sophy’ still, everybody saying what a very sweet and darling child you were six years ago; and I do trust that, when you see them next, they will find you a more darling child, and more loveable than ever. God grant it be so, dearest, for I want you to be very happy.”

The next letter from Miss B. that has been preserved is dated September, 1851, and is addressed to Mr. Jex-Blake. “I ought not to express sorrow at the sudden removal of your child, hoping and believing that it is ‘ordered by the Lord.’ She bears away with her my affectionate love and prayerful interest.”

No record has been kept of the precise steps that led to the “sudden removal.”

For the next two years the child went to a boarding-school in Brighton, where her parents had now gone to reside, and there are, therefore, practically no letters of the period. Two of her schoolfellows, however, have been good enough to contribute their impressions of her. For better and for worse, they call up a very vivid picture. Miss Lucy Portal writes:

“Being the junior of Sophy, as we always called her, she and I were not much in touch, though I never forgot her, for she had a strong personality, and was so clever—in fact, far above our school-mistress in natural intelligence, and she made a lasting impression on those with whom she associated. Whenever I heard her name in after life the vision of a young capable girl who asked questions that bewildered her governess rose before me.

One day when we were walking on the ‘Downs’ with [an assistant governess] in the rear, Sophy saw a large stone by the wayside and seated herself on it. ‘What do you mean by this?’ said the governess. ‘I am tired and must rest,’ replied Sophy. ‘Get up at once,’ said Miss ——; ‘Do you suppose we are all going to wait your pleasure in this way?’ ‘Impossible to do what is beyond one’s capacity,’ was the rejoinder, and threats had no effect. At last Miss —— lost her temper and said ‘Sophy, distinctly understand that if you do not get up, I shall leave you here, and send a policeman to fetch you.’ ‘Ah,’ said Sophy, ‘that is a kind thought. I am sure he would prove of great assistance to me. But could you manage to procure two policemen, for I don’t believe one would be able to carry me, and two might do so.’ I need not say that the battle of words was soon over after that.”

Knowing as one does how anomalous was the position of an assistant teacher in those days, one can but admit that the child must often have inflicted far greater suffering and anxiety than she had the least idea of.

On the other hand, Mrs. Gover, widow of the late Canon Gover of Worcester, writes:

“Sophie set us a good example at school, and I shall always think of her as one of the most truthful girls I have ever known, the only girl I ever knew who would not allow her drawings to be touched up by her master. I had a very great respect for her high character.”

But nothing can show more clearly the futility of the educational methods of that day than the following letter from the headmistress herself:

“June, 1852.

DEAREST SOPHY,

I cannot tell you with what a feeling of anguish I heard the door close after you on Saturday when you departed, and I had not kissed or blessed you.... I saw you afterwards in the street, tho’ I was unseen by you, and I could not stop you, my dear child, lest the past should be renewed. On my return I saw your present of fruit, it was not as gratifying to me as the scrap of paper, which contained my Sophy’s acknowledgement of her fault.[8] Yet I thank you for the kind thought, as I hope you know me too well to suppose that any little gift can bribe me to forgive;—without that scrap, my Sophy, I should have turned away from receiving your fruit. The same afternoon at a friend’s house I read a portion of your favourite Scott, and could not but think of you while I read the account of the ‘evil and good’ trying for Mastery in Harold the Dauntless’ heart, remember his first act of forbearance was noted as a step towards heaven. Beloved child! do I beseech you remember the duty of a child, be gentle and tender to your dear Parents, then the Lord will love you, and some day the Lion will give place to the Lamb in your bosom. Dear Mary Bayly’s has turned to whooping-cough. I hope yours is better. Until I find where to send her, I cannot leave home. God’s will be done.”

Footnote 8:

Her brother had called at the school, immaculately dressed, and had behaved to the schoolmistress so charmingly that poor Sophy felt herself quite left out in the cold, and had doubtless responded with positive rudeness. What sort of visit was this from a beloved brother?

For a year and a half Sophy remained under this lady’s care, and then one or two equally unsuccessful experiments were made. Meanwhile Mrs. Jex-Blake remained so ailing that it was not possible for her to have the child at home for the long vacation, and a “dear kind” lady invites the refractory young person to visit her for part of the time. Mr. Jex- Blake writes to inform Sophy of the fact, and adds, “Now have we not in this great cause of thankfulness to our kind God and Father who never forgets us?” This was perhaps asking a little too much of the homesick child.

The truth is that the parents at this time were not growing younger (as many parents do), and certainly they were growing more staid and set in their ways. It was becoming increasingly difficult to them to adapt themselves to this riotous child. “Avoid excitement which is your great enemy,” writes her Father, unaware perhaps that his own weakness was a tendency to be rather too fussy and precise. With hearts full of love they were demanding of her a standard of excellence which for her was wholly artificial, and in the half-hearted, or at least intermittent, effort to attain it, she fell in the breach. And parents and child were not the only factors in the difficult problem of home life. So long as Sophy could by any stretch of charity be reckoned a child, it was comparatively easy for her brother and sister to put up with her volcanic ways. But from a schoolgirl one expects some conformity to recognized standards, and Sophy’s elder sister had been such a pattern in this respect that the contrast was necessarily acute.

“I really don’t think you would enjoy [a visit from] Carry much at school even if we could spare her,” Mrs. Jex-Blake writes in reply to an eager request for this privilege. “You would be tempted to be odd and excitable, and then Carry would be vexed and all would be uncomfortable” and no one who knew the elder sister can doubt that such demonstrations of affection would probably have “vexed” her more than most. On the other hand “Brother” was now a young man, and if his main desire for the child was that she should grow up like the sisters of other men, he only shared the attitude common at that time to the overwhelming majority of his sex. One can see that his younger sister must have tried him a good deal. The idea that she was plain and even ugly had been firmly impressed upon her: the exhibition of vanity in matters of dress had been discouraged on every ground: and it was natural to her boyish temperament to be careless of such things. When, in addition to these shortcomings, she added a propensity for making people “uncomfortable,” one can quite understand that her brother did not feel specially proud of her, and the strength of her character probably made it difficult for him to influence her through the passionate affection and admiration she had cherished for him all through her childhood. In any case the relation between them became somewhat strained, and it is not surprising if she sometimes attributed the strictures of her parents to his influence and representations.

It is delightful to record that, in spite of countless differences of opinion and much plain speaking on both sides, a fine loyal camaraderie existed between the sisters throughout life.

I don’t know whether it ever occurred to the child to compare her brother’s education with her own. If she had done so, the reflection might well have made her bitter. In athletics as in the schools he was bearing off laurels at every turn, while she was being curbed and thwarted to meet the requirements of pious and half-educated schoolmistresses. From the best of motives her parents refused for her the outlet for the “excitability” they constantly deprecated; in other words they simply sat on the safety valve. In the summer of 1854 she begged—probably not for the first time—to be allowed to have riding lessons. The father replied

“I like to do anything in reason to please my own child, but you are so very excitable and have at present so lamentably little self- command that I should fear riding for you very much. It would do you no good and might be injurious to you in many ways. When will you prove to me that my hopes and expectations of you are not in vain?... You don’t know how the hearing you censured goes to my heart, and the not being able to place the most unbounded confidence in you is very trying to me and the dear Mother,—doubly so to her in her weak state.”

Of course it is easy now to see that he was wrong as regards the riding. Apart altogether from the physical exercise involved, the discipline of it would have been excellent. Big emergencies always braced her. She never lost her temper with a horse, nor her presence of mind in an accident.

Meanwhile the series of loving reproachful letters goes steadily on.

“Do you think, darling,” her Father writes, “that by divine grace you are less self-willed day by day? How earnestly do I desire to see you a loving happy child. Everybody seems to deprecate your presence as that which will spread discomfort all around.... God bless you and help you and give you His Holy Spirit to guide you continually.”

“Everybody” was an overstatement. At no time was the child without her own little circle of admiring friends. A schoolfellow with whom she remained on terms of intimate friendship throughout life says,—“At our house she was always good and happy, and a very welcome guest. My father thought very highly of her.”

A fortnight later Mrs. Jex-Blake writes:

“I rejoice at the nice accounts I have of you from school, and I hope (against experience) that you will when we see you again, be a pleasant child, the comfort you might so easily be to me.”

“Day and night,” her Father writes, “you are on my heart. You know how I love you. Why will you thus be your own enemy?”

The faith and perseverance of the parents is astounding: not less so the fact that at bottom the affection and filial piety of the child never flagged.

One has to remind oneself constantly—what the daughter never forgot, though small trace of it appears in the letters of this period—that Mrs. Jex-Blake had a keen sense of humour. When she and Sophy were together, they had many a good joke in common. It was when the mesmerism of the child’s presence was removed that the sense of responsibility asserted itself in full force. It is impossible to read the long series of letters without being profoundly convinced,—1. That the parents were devotedly attached to their youngest child (“Sophy was the favourite,” was the elder sister’s deliberate comment some sixty years later). 2. That their affection was returned with an intensity of which few children are capable. 3. That the warning that she was injuring her Mother’s health and must therefore be kept away from her dearly-loved home did not provide a motive strong enough to make the child run in harness like other people. The inference is that no motive would have been strong enough.

Did she ever really make an honest effort? One comes upon many impassioned scraps of prayer for grace to resist temptation. “Oh, that when a word irritates me I may remember how often I have said more unkind things and been forgiven.” “Oh, Lord, punish me, reduce me to submission in any way Thou seest fit, but oh, let me not alone, abandon me not despite my wickedness.” And, although these prayers are apt to run into conventional exaggerated language, it is impossible to doubt their sincerity. Her tiny booklets and papers were always kept with the strictest secrecy, and it is all but certain that no eye but her own ever saw them before her death.

Here is an isolated scrap of diary, recording probably a time of special effort.

“Feb. 26th, 1854. Oh, keep Thou my foot when I go up into Thy house of prayer. O how difficult it is to fix the mind for even that short time! Miss X. will treat me unlike any other human being, but that is no reason for transgressing the commandment of my God. She says she does not like to hear me name the name of Christ for I do not depart from iniquity, she thinks I had better not hold conversations on sacred subjects.

A complaint having been made of rudeness from one of the girls, Miss X. said it was just like one of Sophy’s tricks, heaven knows with what ground. All these things have aggravated me, and I fear I have sadly given way to temper and pride, not remembering Him who bare the contradiction of sinners against Himself though He never offended in word or deed. If sometimes unjustly spoken to, how often have I escaped my desert and how few are the faults the strictest find compared with an all-seeing God. Oh, for the charity that beareth all things....

27th Monday. I must expect trials this day, humiliating to my pride and trying to my temper....

Nothing special, though I gave way sadly at different times and again sinned in sending a letter to Mama [? Maria].

28th. Again, more and more against light, got sweets. Miss X. in her prayer speaks at poor Agnes who is just come. She prays that all may be kind to her, remembering the Fatherless and Widow are His special care, etc. How could she harrow up poor Agnes’ feelings so! The poor child was weeping under the infliction.... And in the prayer she announced her intention of expelling anyone who would make the others unhappy. O I could have knocked her down, and after prayers she really spoke kindly to me about beginning March afresh and any other time I could almost have promised to try. As it was I could not kiss her even. Oh how much I think of that which might and probably did proceed from a pure motive, and do not consider my unkindness often which I know does not do so.

March 1. Whole holiday. Gave way to passion to A. and B. tho’ perhaps they were provoking I should better have striven to retain my temper. Alas from my feelings since it seems as if it were the letting in of water. O preserve me from being so awfully passionate as I was. Overbearing and ordering in the afternoon. Oh for the Charity which ‘is kind’ which ‘is not puffed up’ ‘seeketh not her own’ and above all which ‘is not easily provoked’.”

She had no lack of self-control in other ways: why should she have failed so conspicuously in this? When all due weight is given to the reasons already assigned one is still forced to the conclusion that there was something elemental in her nature over which she not only had little control, but of which she was to a great extent unconscious. As a mere child she expresses her thankfulness in a letter to her Mother that she is less “irritable,” and at rare intervals all through life she would speak to intimate friends of the intolerable way in which the blood rushed to her head at times, making it all but impossible for her to weigh her words. But from first to last she was far less conscious of the moral aspect of the defect than one would have expected anyone of her sane judgment and essential humility to be. The severe self-analysis of the above extracts are on the whole exceptional. From childhood on, the thought that she had failed those she loved or had caused them anxiety and suffering, in a way that she understood, was a source of almost intolerable pain and compunction; but she seems to have rarely and inadequately realized the extent of the suffering she inflicted by her wilful ways and passionate temper.

“And yet there was always something loveable with it all,” a childhood’s friend reiterates. “She came bounding into a room, bringing with her an atmosphere of gaiety and glee that is indescribable.”

Nor are we as regards the judgments of contemporaries confined to the possibly idealized picture of later years. Fortunately for the accuracy of the picture, Sophy seems about this time to have originated in the school a practice of character-writing, in which the critics were encouraged to be absolutely frank. This is what she brought upon herself:

“Sophy is very affectionate and has more good in her than people think, she is truthful and can be trusted. She has an immense amount of self-conceit, self-sufficiency and pride. She will not be led by anything but affection, or a desire to make much of herself, and make herself well thought of. She has great talents and is very clever. She wishes to be thought an out-of-the-way character and is so. She lacks gentleness of feeling and manner.”

“Sophy is certainly excessively clever but unfortunately knows it, and makes a point of showing it off upon every possible occasion. She is truthfulness itself and can really be trusted. Very passionate but very penitent afterwards. Affectionate.”

“Clever, passionate, affectionate. Many bad habits but tries (lately at least) to get the better of them. Might be made a great deal of. Rather too fond of her own opinion. I think true.”

It is rather staggering to find how much wiser the young folks were in those days than were their elders!

Again Sophy propounds the question whether A. or E. is “the greater pet.” The discussion goes on in writing, and finally the originator ends it by saying:

“At any rate A. is the only friend I have got, and I don’t want to lose her.”

To which D. responds:

“You are wise, but she is not the only friend you might have.”

And Sophy all too proud:

“There are only one or two others I could have as a friend.”

And finally M.:

“As to your friends, I quite agree with D. I think you might have had many. I know you might have had me long ere this, had you tried.”

Of another schoolfellow under discussion Sophy explains that she finds the young lady personally “aggravating,” and adds:

“But I think she is very ingenuous, and would own to a thing, even to a little one, which is a great thing considering her pride.

That is what I do admire so ardently.

SOPHY.”

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

IV. SCHOOL LIFE—Concluded

It will surprise no one who has read the extracts from Sophy’s diary on page 32 to learn that, at the end of the summer term, Miss X. announced her inability to keep her any longer in the school. The culprit evidently declined to manifest any proper sense of sin or even of humiliation; and the distress of her parents may be imagined. They recognized no other standard by which to judge her than the standard by which poor Sophy had so egregiously failed.

In any case their kindness never faltered: they could not face having the child at home, and for some months they did not even see her; but some “kind ladies” were found to take charge of her until she could be put temporarily in the care of her old schoolmistress, Mrs. Teed.

Very soon a reassuring report came to relieve the anxious parents. On July 10th, 1854, Mrs. Jex-Blake writes:

“I delight to think that my dear child is availing herself of this great opportunity of redeeming her character. The past is so sad, so disappointing, and the thinking of it is so sure to make me ill, that I endeavour with my utmost power to forget it. I will not dwell upon it, but look forward to a bright future when my own dear child ... will see that determination and self-willedness can only cause misery and discomfort to herself, and wellnigh shorten, certainly embitter my old age.

I do feel greatly comforted by Mrs. Teed’s giving a favourable account of you. She would like you to be less idle. Why do not you write out some papers about your natural philosophy subjects and zoology?”

“Well, darling,” her Father writes (July 17th), “I was very glad to get your letter, though I should like you to write more wisely. I don’t at all mind your writing about ‘unkind lectures’ for I know I never am and cannot be unkind to my own child; but I do earnestly wish that you saw (as others do) how exceedingly foolish your conduct has been, and that by nothing but a complete change can you ever be comfortable.”

Meanwhile arrangements were being made for the child to go to another school, and one is thankful to record that it was at least a great improvement on its predecessors. On July 21st, 1854, Mr. Jex-Blake writes:

“We have had a letter from Mrs. H. this morning, and it is now settled that G.W. you go to her the beginning of next month and Mrs. T. will take you and kindly give you the benefit of her introduction. You will go under the most advantageous circumstances possible, and it will be solely and entirely your own fault, my darling child, if everybody about you does not love you.”

A month later he writes again:

“MY SWEET CHILD,

I have just read your letter to the dear Mother.... Your letter gives me great pleasure, it is so sensible, and the tone throughout so like that of a dear dear child, who will never knowingly again give a minute’s pain to the very best of Mothers, that I felt I could not be happy without writing to my darling at once to tell her how I look forward to her being a real comfort to dearest Mummy, and a constant ‘sunbeam’ to me.... I believe the happy feeling of confidence she has about you now is doing more for her than all the doctors in the world.”

A fortnight later he paid the child a visit, to which she refers in the following letter:

“11th Sept. 1854.

DARLING FATHER,

You know what immense pleasure I had on Friday. I often think of it even now it is past, I feel so glad to have seen you; but Daddy I am so sorry about the boat. I cannot forget it and I am very sorry,— will you forgive me?

Do come down tomorrow just to say goodbye. You know you can come down by the omnibus you took on Friday and just sit for an hour or so and then go back. You can be back by luncheon time or nearly and it would be such a pleasure. I cannot get an answer to this by letter but hope to secure one by ocular demonstration. I saw Miss B. and gave your message, but I fear unless you do as I hope you will that its fulfilment will be rather distant. We could just go in the Crescent Gardens or even sit still together in the drawing-room for one hour (just one) and it would be so enjoyable. I have so many things yet to say. You know we had so much walking and eating and shopping to get through on Friday that I was not able to tell you half the things I had to say.

If you have arranged for me to come home in 3 weeks time I will try to reconcile myself to not seeing you if it is really impossible or very inconvenient in joyful hope, but in that case I shall hope for a nice long letter (but even then I should not be sorry to see your darling face for an hour or so) on Wednesday. If not (but I hope no ‘not’ will be in the question) I think you will yourself think that considering that I have not seen you since about Jan. 26th, except for 3½ hours and should not see you till Christmas that really one hour would not be lost on your youngest little one. I am hourly experiencing the comfort of your last visit (I am now writing with some of the paper and a pen of your gift) and your face was like a sunbeam in the way. I want to feel your rough cheek once more, though I hope your Missis won’t let you come so unshaven and unshorn as you did last time. I did delight in your beautiful flowers which are even now on the chimney-piece—one flower I prized above all the rest—I could almost fancy Mother picked it—a little tiny bit of jasmine (I don’t know if that’s spelt right). It is so nice. Will you remember to bring some stamps tomorrow.

Darling Father I am so anxious to see you again. About 11½ I shall be on the tiptoe of hope. You won’t disappoint Sody? You didn’t say it was impossible to come, and if it is possible you will. Do bring a few more flowers please. Those stones of Cousin Jane’s were lovely. Oh, I was so delighted with them.

Hoping very very soon to see you, I need not write a very long letter but please give my best love to my darling darling Mother.

I am just taxing my small brain to make up a story of a martyrdom in Pagan Rome,—a sort of martyrdom at least; it is meant to be very affecting, but I don’t know if it is. I will show it you tomorrow I hope.

Best best love, SOPHY.

If you have got leave for me to come home it will be so much more if you come by yourself to tell me, and if not, if not it will certainly need all your presence to comfort me.”

Among other little gifts, on the occasion of this visit, her Father had given her a tiny note book, which she utilises at once as a diary:

“Went to sleep with a sore throat ... and a bit of mignonette on my bosom. Darling Mother, how I treasure her flowers.

15th. Knew all my lessons better to-day, and kept my place as 2nd.... Had a note from Carry. Hurrah, people don’t know how nice it is to get a note at school. Done all my algebra for Mr. R. It strikes me we can do those problems in Kavanagh by equations.”

The joy of this discovery! “Problems” became her passion: she begged friends to send her some to solve, and took a mischievous pleasure in sending them herself occasionally to those who had not been so fortunate as to find the master-key of the “unknown quantity.” Sister Carry writes:

“Many thanks for your letters and numerous sums; I think the latter are rather overwhelming to me. I think I ought to have a little more instruction when you come, so please don’t send me any more at present.”

The diary continues:

“Did Cousin Jane’s equation and am very glad I have got such a sensible cousin. Made one to send her, and then couldn’t answer it myself.”

As cricket, tennis and hockey were unheard of in the girls’ school of those days, and as the child was not allowed to ride or to dance, it is scarcely surprising to learn that she was again troubled with weakness of the joints. Mrs. H. took her to one “Professor Georgii” and the school doctor met them at his house. The patient’s account of the interview is interesting in view of later developments:

“Then he went into another room which was rather dark. Dr. L. said, ‘I suppose I may come too. I am the physician,’ and G. said, ‘I suppose so’!”

The two men examined her spine—the headmistress, of course, being present—

“and after about ten minutes I was allowed to dress with the 2 men staring at me. I think they might have let us retire....

The room for exercises is hung all round with prints of skeletons and flayed human beings, tho’ for a mercy they were covered with sort of curtains and only partially visible.”

She was condemned to an hour’s remedial exercises every day for six weeks, and as it took double that time to make the pilgrimage to and from the “Professor’s” house, three fatiguing hours were taken out of her working day.

And all for want of a few games in due season.

The “sheer stuff of life” was proving educative enough at this time, for Mrs. Jex-Blake and Sister Carry were both alarmingly ill, the latter with some contagious fever, the nature of which is not specified. It is touching to see the Father’s letters to his schoolgirl daughter: the handwriting has all at once become shaky and feeble, like that of an old man.

“I write in the dear Mother’s room,” he says in November, 1854, “in which and in sweet Carry’s I pass the greater part of the day. They have both been very ill, but I think I may say that now both are beginning to mend.... From the beginning of their illnesses they have never been able to see each other.... Oh, my darling child, I must not conceal from you the danger the best of Mothers has been in. God give you to value her more than ever, and keep you from ever, by disobedience of any kind, hurting her feelings and giving her pain.”

Two days later he writes again in answer to her eager enquiries,

“If, darling, I can buy anything with your money that I think Mummy or Carry will be pleased with, be sure I will.”

And again, three weeks later,

“My dear child,—Your letters give me great pleasure, but, great though it be, I will most willingly give it up to dearest Mother and Sister when they are well enough to read and write letters.”

On Dec. 5th, 1854, his mind is sufficiently at ease to write a truly delightful letter, though the handwriting is still shaky:

“First and most substantially (if not principally) the “plum pudding” plan. It is really a capital one—‘The Crimea Army Fund’ or some such title it bears, and subscriptions are pouring in to it from high and low—donations of hundreds of pounds down to sixpences. It does not in any way interfere with the sending out of what you rightly enough consider are things of still greater importance; and which (much later than it ought to have been) the government and the public are now despatching to the poor sufferers. The intention is to send out vessel after vessel as quickly as possible, not only with materials for plum puddings and brown stout, but to help our poor soldiers, officers and privates, to get through the great hardships and privations of their severe winter campaign, as far as that can be managed. Warm extra clothing, flannel shirts and waistcoats, stockings, gloves, leather of various kinds, needles and thread, tea, tobacco, sugar, preserved and potted meats, raisins, sugar, wine, porter and a hundred other things in large quantities—enormous quantities—for at least 40 or 50,000 men.

Noblemen are sending deer from their parks, and game to be potted and preserved and sent over, and some have offered their yachts to convey the good things; and tradespeople have come forward to give liberally from the stocks in their shops and warehouses. So I shall enclose 1s. and think you cannot do better than give it as your mite in the good cause. There are as you say ‘such hosts of things to subscribe to,’ and I am very thankful for the privilege God gives me of being able to help. It is one of the greatest luxuries we can enjoy, depend upon it, my own darling.... There is no literally ‘war news,’ this week, but there have been terrible disasters among the combined fleets in the Black Sea. A most furious storm there the middle of last month has sadly damaged many of the ships, and destroyed several—one went down laden with the intended winter store (in many articles) for our whole army,—forty thousand specially warm great coats, and numerous other things in proportion, which cannot be replaced instanter, and it is feared that very great suffering by thousands for some weeks must be the consequence. The loss of that one vessel and cargo is estimated at £1,000,000. But, worse than all the money loss, many hundred people perished in that and other vessels. Your cousin Robert, whom I don’t know that you ever saw even, embarks to-morrow for the Crimea. He is a young lieutenant in the 18th foot.

I think if we keep of the same mind, we can manage a backgammon board when you come home, cups and all; only, as I am an old hand at it— having played, I should think almost half-a-century ago—you will expect, please, to be soundly beaten if we engage together. I have read ‘Patronage’—about the same period, perhaps, as when we played that game of backgammon, but I do think novels in general are very so- so things, and some so wondrous foolish that it is worse than waste of time to read them....

There was a good deal at Worthing[9] that was very pleasant, my sweet Sophy, and I can recollect it with satisfaction. If there was anything otherwise, it never even crosses my mind, I assure you; and do you get rid of all thoughts of it too. I have not the smallest doubt that, by God’s blessing, you will be a great ‘comfort’ to me. I have said so a thousand times, and you won’t prove Daddy a false prophet I know. I have nothing to ‘forgive’ my own child—nothing whatever, darling. You have had childish faults enough, I daresay, but they were ‘the faults of a child’ certainly, and I could not remember a single one of them.

I won’t get a sore throat if I can help it, even for the sake of Sody’s black-currant jam; but, if I do catch one, I know I may have a whole jar if I want it, and I shall not perhaps like it the less that you made it. Love from all. I will not forget to come for you on the 23rd., my precious child. God keep you and bless you very much.

Your affect. Father, T. JEX-BLAKE.”

Footnote 9:

There is no other reference to the visit to Worthing.

At last, on December 13th, comes a letter from her Mother:

“DARLING SO,

I feel very thankful to be once more able to enjoy a letter from, and to write to you. I look forward with great pleasure to Saturday week, but pray try to be quiet in your joy when I meet you, because I am still weak and soon upset, and people will be very vexed with you if I am the worse. Above all I could wish that you did not get into trouble, and say and do what you should not, because it agitates me to hear of it. If you, my own darling child, could but once realise how trying you are by your impetuosity and restlessness, and (must I still say?) roughness, even when you are not put out, you would try very hard to conquer any outbreaking into extra roughness.

And, indeed, dear So, God has bestowed upon you much wherewith you might be agreeable, and help others, if you would but avail yourself of it.”

Meanwhile the scrap of a diary goes on:

“Dec. 16th.... Got a letter from my precious sister. She says she is nearly well, but she is so careless of self I half mistrust her account, especially as I am told by Mummy and Tom she is very thin and pale. She speaks of a chance of her being shaved. I hope to goodness she won’t, the darling....

Thinking of darling Dad’s birthday tomorrow. I hope I shall wake early and be first to wish him joy.... His last day to be 64! In his 66th year tomorrow. The darling. Sody hopes she’ll make him so happy yet. This day week, heigh ho! I must try and persuade Daddy to let me stay over Sunday. It will be but one lesson lost and two days gained and one a Sunday....

17th. Dear Dad’s birthday. Woke up once I think, in the dark, and again before it was light to wish him many happy returns.”

The wishing must have been volcanic in its intensity to judge by what follows:

“While dressing, Kate, who had not got up, woke up to ask if it was not his birthday, she had been dreaming it was, and that he in consequence was playing a duet on the piano with her, but would play the bass first, not together with her.... Mrs. H. ill, not up all day. No Mangnall.... I must have walked 6 miles at least. Wonderful for me. Had a dispute about extempore sermons, I saying it meant without written help, Mlle and Sarah saying people might have notes and yet be extempore. Mlle as politely and sapiently as usual called me nobody. She has neither sense nor temper to dispute. It is foolish to entangle myself with her. My dear Dad’s birthday nearly over.

18th.... [Mrs. H.] promised I should nurse her when I came back, and I did, and after dinner played chess and backgammon with Mrs. H. and Conny. Mrs. H. lent me Woodstock to read. Nice, but not equal to some of Scott’s.

Turned out some of my letters from my pocket. Hope I have not turned out any I want of Carry’s, but they are safe in my glazed box.

21st. At Georgii’s had a fuss with Conny in the dressing-room because I was complaining of having only a week and asked her if she would think a week enough with her Mother. She said no, but her Mother was better than mine. I was silly enough to be offended, and gave her two good slaps on her shoulders which were convenient, as I was doing her frock, and then we had a regular squabble.... I said it was very ungenerous. I should not have said it if she had been my guest far away from her friends, and I don’t believe I should, though my conscience smote me about Mary Bayley.”

This reference to Mary Bayley is interesting, as Sophy had been at no less than three schools since the days of their companionship. The persistent recollection of some trifling unkindness is a typical instance of the compunction she suffered when she hurt anyone in a way she understood.

“Got such a jolly letter from Mummy as if she had half got back her mischief. Two bits of French, too, we are getting on. She certainly deserves a ‘satisfaisant’.”

When the Christmas holidays came on, Sophy’s course of exercises from the “Professor” was not nearly over, and a week’s interruption was the utmost that could be allowed. The holidays were long enough, however, to allow of another week at home towards the end of January. Her birthday fell in this second week, and suggestion was made that the two sisters should have a party and a “Christmas” tree. The correspondence about this little event is interesting as showing something of the conditions in which Sophy would be expected to settle down when her schooldays finally came to an end. The preparations contrast curiously with what young folk now-a-days, even in a much humbler walk of life, consider necessary on these occasions.

“13 Sussex Square, 10th Jan.

DARLING SO,

I am so much better for the quiet I have had the last week that I think I may authorize you to ask Mrs. H. to advance you 4, or, if needful, 5 shillings to spend in little things for a Christmas tree. I am very anxious to have it if possible, and I think it entirely depends on the self-command you can exert over yourself; if you and Carry will go about it quietly, and you yield at once if I say I do not wish to add to our numbers, or if I object on any other point....

One thing I must tell you that I cannot have a great many, neither do I wish unnecessary expense,[10] when the daily calls from societies where funds are failing and souls perishing for want are so numerous.”

Footnote 10:

From their earliest years the children were drilled in the virtue of economy. The references to the altering and letting-down of frocks, the calculation of pence for ribbon or frill, the careful computation of the length of time a pair of boots might be expected to last,—all these form instructive reading when one bears in mind the social position of the family and the large sums of money which the parents habitually gave away.

Sister Carry writes with characteristic calm and reasonableness:

“13 Sussex Square, January 11th.

DEAR SOPHY,

I suppose probabilities are now in favour of the Christmas tree. I don’t think it need do Mummy much harm, supposing affairs are conducted with very unusual prudence and quietness. We shall defer buying any ready-made-sweetmeat-ornaments (this is an 8-syllabled compound word) until you come home, and then I think Mummy will quite like that we should get them without her presence. I also think it will be very desirable (if possible) that we should dress up the tree without troubling her much; but I don’t know exactly how far we should be up to it. However, I think the most important points of all are that a certain friend of ours should endeavour to live in, and diffuse around her, a certain atmosphere of peace and calmness; and that the tree should be quite ready in very good time, so that there should be no bustle or worry about it towards the last.... I mean to try to provide (with pecuniary assistance from Mummy) some supply of purses, penwipers and markers for the tree; I think a couple of cut markers such as you gave Daddy the other day, on broad ribbon, would be very good; of course I mean them to be made by you. I suppose I shall probably have a letter from you tomorrow or Saturday; I consider I ought to have had one. With best love, I am, dear Sophy,

Your very affectionate sister, C. A. JEX-BLAKE.”

Presumably the little festival took place in due course, but there is no further reference to it among the papers. The strain of loving parental homilies continues.

“Bear in mind that all our powers and faculties are perverted by the fall, but my child cannot be rid of her responsibility; if you say you cannot pray,—that is at once a subject for prayer. Down on your knees and tell God so.”

“I exceedingly like a letter from you, and bustle down a little earlier on Tuesday morning that I may have time to enjoy it before breakfast.... Cousins Kate and Elinor Jex-Blake say they do not at all delight in Mathematics, they are sorry to say.”

“We are very sorry to disappoint you, but indeed we cannot sanction your going to see the ‘Wizard of the North.’ I do hope and believe you will submit cheerfully to give up what it would make me very sleepless and unhappy to have you go to. Now get a victory and believe the disappointment all for the best.”

“Though I am most decidedly better, it arises, I think, from perfect quiet, the least change or bustle brings on spasm or headache, or both. Carry had Punch, and thought you sent it. I don’t like it, I think it a vulgar paper, and don’t wish it sent. I don’t at all object to the ‘Illustrated News’ occasionally.”

Apparently Sophy declined to sit down under this condemnation of her beloved Punch, for a fortnight later Mrs. Jex-Blake writes: “I will return both the Punches in the hamper. The last was capital.”

* * * * *

In May, 1855, a family holiday in Wales was proposed, and, as usual, the question was raised whether Sophy could be allowed to be of the party. There is no suggestion in all the correspondence that her Father ever wished to be rid of her company except on the ground of his wife’s health. On May 23rd Mrs. Jex-Blake writes:

“Daddy and I have a strong wish that you should see Wales, and it is truly painful to deny you such a pleasure and advantage but you see, dear, I can’t help my health, and the being so easily upset and made ill by worry. Indeed I am grieved to find you can fully understand this, for you say your head aches if you get excited; but, darling, strive to go on with your different duties and don’t get excited.... Now, sweetest, assure me that you will try to be controlled by me, and try to fall into our habits, not always restless and having some grand scheme of your own that must be carried out.... I do not ask you to promise, but if next week you feel you can, looking to God, assure me you will to the utmost try to be a comfort and not break out in these violent excitements, which not only upset me at the time but haunt and disturb me at night,... we are wonderfully anxious to give you the pleasure, but meanwhile don’t be excited at school about it.

Shall we not be happy at Bettws-y-Coed if darling So is with us and we all consider each other’s comfort?”

The microscopic school diary had for five months been non-existent; the imperious demand of this glorious anticipation called a fresh volume into being.

“Thursday, May 24th [1855.] My answer was to come about Wales. When I got my letter I prayed God to help me to bear it, for I was nearly sure it would be a refusal, and I was quite prepared for it and determined to keep my promise not to worry about it. I put my letter in my pocket and ran away from them all. Then I burst it open and read, ‘Daddy and I have such a strong wish you should see Wales, and it is truly painful to deny you such a pleasure.’ There, thought I, but I had expected it and didn’t feel so dreadfully disappointed. Then I read on and oh, I found it was not so, that I should go. Oh, I got so excited and half began to cry. Then came Mummy’s caution not to be excited, but it was impossible. Dropped down there and thanked God. Oh, then I trust He has granted my prayer. Glory to God in the highest. Oh, I was so thankful.

25th.... Got a letter from Tom. How kind of him to write, it really was, and he has got a first bachelor’s degree. G. told me he saw his name in the paper.

Had a great shortness and pain in taking long breaths. G. said there was some irregularity in the heart, I believe. Laurie came in afternoon and said my heart was wrong again. Left me some medicine.

28th. Mrs. H. told me to lie down and sleep if I felt tired, but I am much better.... K. seized on ‘Prince and Peasant’ and M. on ‘Anecdotes of Animals’ the 2 books Miss Smith had left me. I was very cross, I had nothing to do. I seized on Anecdotes after Prayers to take up. M. was in high dudgeon, as if it was her right. But I carried it off. But upstairs I thought it was not right. ‘In honour preferring one another.’ So I took it her. But it was a hard struggle.... I am glad I got that little victory.

Miss C. came to G.‘s for the last time. I was so sorry and so were most folks. She gave me a little parcel, or at least put it in my pocket on condition I should not open it till I got home. I thought it was some mischief but took it. It was such a lovely gold pencil case, ‘from a schoolgirl.’ Dear girl, it was very kind of her.

30th. Very difficult geometry problem. I doubt if I can do it. Mortimer was home, and told us some very good stories of —— the nurse of his ward. Mrs. H. said in the evening she would like to be nurse there (!) She said how should I get on who so hate injustice, and I said I thought such open acknowledged injustice was not the hardest to bear. This brought down an awful storm of wonder, reasoning, etc., till at length I got off to bed so tired.

June 1st. A little fracas with Mlle at G.’s. Little Henriquez is here. It is strange to be with a Jew and a R. Catholic so closely. Con rather worrying, and I not rather cross. Oh, dear, ‘Charity never faileth.’ ‘The ornament of a meek and quiet spirit, which is in the sight of God of great price.’

Laurie came and left me some more medicine.

4th. Miss Teed’s birthday. Many happy returns to her. Wonder if Carry remembers.... I want so to know Minnie’s exact birthday.

know it is near....

Went in the gardens. K. and S. persecuted me with grass and I can’t run after them. When I caught S. and when we were indoors I gave it her rather roughly. She was very cross and would not have any of [my] jam at tea, she never will when she is cross with me. Got a sore throat.

5th. Throat very fairly bad, and very ‘cheval’ as M. would say. Apropos it’s her birthday....

Just before prayers I was in the cupboard and someone shut the door nearly on me. I threw it open again and half upset the great slate. We had been rather uproarious all afternoon as M’s sisters had been here and said holidays did begin on 18th. When I came out of the cupboard I managed to tread on M’s toes, and Mlle packed me off to bed. I said ‘All right,’ shook hands with her, kissed S. and went off. Mlle wasn’t very angry nor I very sorry and so we were all very comfable. Seized on K. for a kiss as she came up and she seemed forbidden to speak to me. However we had a nice hug and she wasn’t very horrified.

6th. Found a handbill on my dressing-table from Mrs. H. ‘for Sophy’ called Telling Jesus.”

This entry closes the school diary.

* * * * *

She seems to have remained at the Notting Hill school till Easter, 1856, and to have carried away with her the warm good will and genuine—if sorely tried—respect of her headmistress, Mrs. H., with whom she kept up a correspondence for some time. For another year and a half she seems to have attended some school at Brighton within reach of her home, but study here was discouraged, and she became the patient of another doctor—or quack?—who prescribed a course of rubbing.

“Under the new regulation of no study,” writes Mrs. H., “I suppose you have plenty and to spare of the dolce far niente. I smiled at the ‘few lessons,’ and wondered in what occupation you might possibly spend your 24 hours.... Be assured, dear Sophy, that so much trifling and frivolity is culpable in the sight of Heaven. It is an unworthy waste of God’s gifts, and you are capable of something so much better!”

That life, even now, was not all “trifling and frivolity” is obvious from the following letter, which was written a few weeks later:

“Monday, Sept. 8th. 1856.

MY OWN DARLING MOTHER,

This subject of confirmation has come up again, and I really must say I am positively shocked at the way it is settled and talked about. It is ‘How old are you?’ ‘Does your Papa wish you to be confirmed?’ and never, ‘Are you fit to be?’ or ‘Do you really wish it?’ It is just as if it were a history lecture to be attended. I really think it is wicked. Miss H. took it for granted that I should be and stuck down my name. I said, ‘No thank you, Miss H.,’ to her great indignation. I assured her you wished me to do exactly as I liked on such a subject, which she did not choose to believe at all.

But I really do wish it, Mother. I think it would help me, and I long to take the Lord’s Supper with you. Will you let me be confirmed from home?—that is, spend the actual day of confirmation at home, so that I may think of something besides how I am dressed and how good or bad an examination I passed, on the day I take those solemn promises on myself. Mother, dear, I seem less able to speak to you than anyone, but I do feel very much about it. It is just,—‘I have gone astray like a lost sheep, seek Thy servant, for I do not forget Thy commandments,’ I do hope. No, I can’t write what I mean or anything else. Just write me one line by return of post. Mr. E. is certainly not the minister I should have chosen, nor Miss H.’s the place I should have preferred, but I don’t think that ought to stand in the way, for it is not in respect to them I stand.

I think I should have preferred waiting another year, but I don’t think I can quite expect God’s blessing on His child while I defer owning myself such.

Oh, Mother, Mother, how I wish you were here, but it seems as if He had expressly left me to myself each time confirmation has been spoken of. I do not think you will refuse either the permission I ask, or your blessing on the step I take,—unless it would be too great an excitement for you,—though it need not be, for you need not go with me....

Well, darling, just tell me what you mean and think. But pray, pray, don’t show any of this to anyone....

God bless and keep my darling Mother.

Farewell, precious.

Your own child, SOPHY.”

“I like the idea of your being confirmed very much,” her Father had written some months before. “God’s blessing be with you. Look to Him and be happy.”

Sophy’s first schoolmistress, Mrs. Teed, took a different view of the matter:

“10th Oct. 1856.

DEAREST SOPHY,

Your dear Mother tells me you are soon to be confirmed. When I read her letter I thought to myself,—Confirmed!—in what?—in following your own foolish ways? There needs no confirmation in that....

You told me in a letter written to me on my last birthday that you hoped you were one of Christ’s little ones. O dear Sophy, you know better.... I do not say do not deceive yourself, but I say never seek to deceive others,” and so on.

Those who have read with some sympathy the preceding pages may well be inclined to doubt whether Sophy was “seeking to deceive others,” or rather, perhaps, whether deception with her did not more readily take the form of concealing the depth and reality of her religious life. Christ’s lambs have not all been precisely of the type good Mrs. Teed had in mind. The real difficulty, however, is to fit the child into the categories of the pious people among whom she lived, or indeed, into any category at all. For better or for worse, she belonged to another plane of being.

If one were compelled to adopt the system of classification current in those days, one could but fall back with thankfulness on the remembrance of that “hasty image” of the Good Shepherd in the Catacombs,

“And, on his shoulders, not a lamb, a kid.”

In any case the stormy chequered school career had now come to a close. “I can’t fancy you, Sophy, with long frocks,” an old school-friend writes, “taller than Hetty, a regular grown-up young lady. Are you transformed yet? Do let me see you first like your own old dear self!”

“Your own old dear self!” One almost weeps to think of all the unnecessary friction and waste of energy in those school days. Those of us who have been teachers know how often the troublesome pupil proves to be the pick of the basket,—the keen student and the loyal co-worker: and perhaps more than one headmistress who reads these pages will wish that she had been privileged to have the training of Sophia Jex-Blake. Many admirable women prayed and wept over her in those days, struggled to make her all they thought she ought to be; and, if their perseverance and devotion seemed to be inadequately rewarded, this was due to no fault of theirs. They were what the Society of that day demanded, what Society made them. They were wanting only in what just chanced to be almost the one thing needful,—the modern spirit. Rather behind their own day, their lot was to be the trainers of a girl, who—unconsciously to herself—was far in advance of her own day,—a girl who would have appreciated to the utmost the free boyish education of our High Schools for girls, and who—had it been her good fortune to have lived under such auspices—might have written a somewhat different page in the book of life.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

V. LIFE AT HOME

It is with a definite sense of relief that one takes up the thread of S. J.-B.’s life after she leaves school. She is still, it is true, a problem and a perplexity to many, and sometimes to those who loved her best: but at least she appeals now to a wider tribunal: her qualities get a chance to tell, even if they do not precisely conform to the pattern laboriously cut out by an early Victorian schoolmistress.

Her health, unhappily, still left a good deal to be desired. The doctors had much to say of the irritability of her brain. The stethoscope was supposed, too, to reveal something wrong with her heart, but this must have been functional, as no trace of it was discoverable in after life. Riding, fortunately was now allowed, and she entered into the enjoyment of it with characteristic intensity; but beyond this, in the early days of her—comparative—freedom, she certainly took no pains to improve her physique. The enterprising young women of those days had still so much to learn! It seldom occurred to them to balance their physical expenditure with their receipts.

Meanwhile it is not to be supposed that her parents had gained greater control over her than when she was a child: they remained quite uncompromising in the matter of dancing, theatre-going, and other “worldly” amusements, but they were unsuccessful in making her conform to the ordinary, wholesome, old-fashioned routine of English family life. Naturally her self-will in this respect annoyed both parents very much, and Mrs. Jex-Blake must often have been sorely put to it to restrain her own impatience and to preserve any semblance of peace.

To her credit be it said that she rose to a difficult situation in a manner that makes praise an impertinence. One is glad to gather from the records that her physical health was now on a firmer basis than formerly, but that was only one element in the case. Always a deeply religious woman, she seems to have stepped now into the full freedom of her faith,—faith, not only in God, but in the essential goodness and uprightness of her wayward child. She seems to have realized fully for the first time that the stormy ways which tried her so sorely were not a mere matter of whim and wilfulness, but that they arose from a definite strain in her daughter,—a strain that caused no small suffering to the owner of that nature,—a strain possibly fundamental in character, certainly far too deeply imbedded to be easily eradicated. And, having realized this, the Mother set herself, not as before to criticise the evil, but to foster and rejoice in the good, to make life as easy as might be, to reduce friction to a minimum, and, above all, to surround her daughter with a real glow and radiance of sympathy.

How sorely tried that sympathy must often have been, we can partly understand when we compare the old-world fragrance of the Mother’s personality with all that is suggested to us now by the name of Sophia Jex-Blake. “When I was young,” the Mother used to say, “it was not a question of whether we should marry, but simply of whom we should marry.” And to her lot fell a daughter who rarely thought of marriage at all, whose brain was teeming with all sorts of unfettered boyish ambitions, who made it clear to everyone whom it might concern that she meant to live her own life,—to “make good the faculties of herself” in the way that pleased her best.

And yet there was something in all this audacious, spontaneous life that found an answering chord in the Mother’s heart. She was not a phlegmatic conventional person by nature herself. She too, perhaps, long before, had beaten eager wings against the bars. In any case from this time on the friendship between the two was a sacred thing, never flagging, comparable with the most beautiful friendships in history.

Fortunately we have S. J.-B.’s own account of those first days at home:

“1857. Dec. 17th. Thursday. Came home for good. For good? Who can tell? Oh, what would I give to look forward ten, aye five, short years, and see what I shall be. Just 18; half my life at school. Then 28. Dr. Moore says,—and there seems a strange prophecy in his words,— that I shall be something, something good if not great, but not in the way I hope;[11] that ‘on a ruin of broken columns and shattered Grecian capitols, shall be laid the foundation of a temple of God.’ There’s something comes home to my heart in those shattered columns,—

‘The dearest idol I have known, Whate’er that idol be, Help me to tear it from Thy throne, And worship only Thee.’

Oh, that I had the strength, the faith, to pray so honestly,—but God help me! I have prayed little enough lately. I seem in such a torpor, such a prostration of mind, body, and, I fear, soul. I hope there is much physical in this.

That beautiful hymn,—‘What peaceful hours I once enjoyed!’ Once. So it is, and now. Never mind; I think God must have some mercy, some hope, to me when He has given and preserved to me my darling, my angel Mother. She seems a pledge of hope.

Well, shall I be a great authoress as my day and night dreams prompt me to hope?... Shall I ever be a happy wife and mother? Shall I ere ten years, or half ten years have passed, be dust?... I sometimes think so. (June 1st. 1869. At any rate never thought of being a sawbones.)

Dec. 25th. How awfully sentimental my first entries do look!... Daddy says he is sorry I have anything that ‘wants a lock.’ Hm, how very well he understands me and my wants! Never mind; dear old man, he is very loving and kind if not brilliant. Oh, Mother, Mother, what should I do without you?... Just said how earnestly I hoped never to see one dear to me die, that I may die first. ‘Oh, don’t think of self at all, Sophy,’ she said, ‘Just see what good you can do.’ Right.

31st. Writing now in my own dear room, darling Mother, how every article in it speaks of her love! They have gone to a New Year’s Eve prayer meeting at St. Mark’s School,—uncommonly slow, I should think. I do think however ‘good’ I became,—or rather I wonder whether I ever could like such very slow spiritualities. Still there’s Bishop Wilberforce and his ‘scaffolding.’ Don’t cry ‘spirit’ and take away ‘means,’—remove the scaffolding because its work is not accomplished.”

Footnote 11:

“Dec. 20th, 1859. Strange truth this: How already that hope has changed!”

For some time she had been writing a story based on her own school life at Mrs. Teed’s,—a story that was never finished. It is very well written of course, but diffuse, and interesting chiefly for its autobiographical touches. She is intensely loyal to both school and schoolmistress, and one feels on reading her descriptions a fresh sense of regret that it should have been necessary to take her away from an atmosphere that seems in many ways to have suited her so well.

One episode is definitely autobiographical, and it is of more than passing interest. The small schoolchildren in the story, playing at “shop,” have helped themselves to a quantity of “jewels” in the shape of scraps of coloured quartz, etc., from a grotto in the garden. The theft being discovered, the heroine is called up first, and, in great fear and trembling, owns to having taken one of the fragments. Questioned as to a second, and fearing to add to her condemnation, she falters, “I don’t know.” Due punishment follows (banishment to bed and enforced reading of the chapter about Eli’s sons), then a public scene in hall and forgiveness. Now comes the point of the episode:

“But still there was one leaden weight on me,—the story I had told [Mrs. Teed] the day before. It seemed as though the forgiveness was not thorough, nor of full value while part of the offence was concealed. How easy it would have been I now saw to confess the whole offence at once, how difficult now! Remembrance, however, of the sorrow of the day before, and some innate love of truth, as I hope, urged me on, and when, after prayers [Mrs. Teed] passed away through the door at the extreme end of the schoolroom, I ran to meet her at the foot of the great staircase which she must ascend to her private rooms, and said hurriedly, ‘Mothy, I think I did not tell you quite the truth yesterday. I said I did not know who picked out the bit of yellow quartz. I think I did know I did.’

‘Thank God, my child,’ she said gently but solemnly, ‘that you have told me the truth now. It is better than a thousand pieces of quartz.’...

Reward enough I certainly had at the time in my lightened heart from that moment, but the effort I had made seemed hardly to merit such rich recompense as it received some time after when I heard that Mothy had said that she would believe everything told her by [S. J.-B.] as if she had seen it herself.

Oh, how proud and happy was I at that moment, and the desire fully to merit testimony so inexpressibly sweet to me had, I verily believe, far more effect on the truthfulness of all my after life than any suffering or punishment could have had; and it in great measure saved me from sinking utterly in after time into that slough of deceit into which almost all schoolgirls do fall at one time or another in more difficult circumstances and in the midst of a lower tone than that of Hertford House. And,—though many will deem, and perhaps rightly, the distinction of little worth,—though often in those after days, under less noble rule, guilty of equivocation, I do not think I ever from that day told a lie.”

We return to the diary:

“1858. Jan. 7th.... I must begin to write again if I don’t mean to lose the knack ... and so ought to go on with Hertford House or write something.... I want partly to write for the money,—now why, I wonder? Honestly, why? I have plenty of everything. In a handsome if not luxurious home, 6 servants all much at my orders, lots of rides, a most loving Mother, tender father, almost every wish gratified, £30 a year clear, and lots of presents, almost at will,—why I should write for money unless I am avaricious or spendthrift I don’t exactly know. Partly for the pride of earning it,—of knowing myself as well able to earn my bread as my inferiors. Surely, though, I ought least of all in my list of comforts—blessing, should I say?—to omit my most happy, most snug nutshell of a room, with its handsome furniture, cosy fire, and thoroughly comfortable arrangements. How truly loving my most precious pearl of a Mother has been to me in this especially....

I have conceived a rather wild idea of writing to Miss M. for counsel and sympathy.... But how get a letter to her? And, if I did, would she think it a bore? I think not. Send the letter to her publishers? Sure not to be opened? Then what to say if I do write? What do I want? Don’t exactly know.

Well, leave it.

Now for the more important at least more solemn part of todays journal. And I must make this some use. Just heard a sermon from Mr. Vaughan on ‘Truth,’—Gehazi being the scape-goat of warning. He spoke strongly of allowing ourselves to say more on religious subjects than we feel, calling it a dangerous deception and leading to worse. But does that include speaking a word—earnest and sincere at least—about the souls of others, tho’ our own may not be safe? Often at school I have felt driven to speak very solemnly to girls about their souls when I feel I am not worthy to say a word, for mine is perhaps as lost as theirs,—and often and often have risen in my throat,—‘Lest when I have preached to others I myself become a castaway.’ Yet if I am,—oh, fearful word, I can hardly write it,—if lost (oh, God, save me!) can it, would it not console, if consolation were possible,—to know I had warned others from the pit into which I fell. And I hope I may have done some little good.... And how happy I have felt—and better in myself too,—if I have even for a moment led some to think of Jesus else forgotten....

Dearest Mrs. Teed is dead. ‘Blessed are the dead that die in the Lord.’ ‘Let me die the death of the righteous, and let my last end be like his!’...

Dear Carry! At a moment like this I can’t help thinking ‘The righteous is more excellent than his neighbour.’ Oh, how far, far more excellent than I am and yet I have sometimes almost despised her because perhaps she has less intellectual power, for I do believe God has given me some genius,—surely there is no pride in saying so, remembering His grace, who gave thee all.

Jan. 8th. Feel very much as if I had been sentimentalizing last night. I wish I could keep in one frame of mind.

Jan. 10th. Sunday. Just been reading the ch. on ‘Happy and Unhappy Women’ in ‘Woman’s Thoughts.’ The Authoress speaks strongly about a sort of repining and melancholy, and about neglected health and almost voluntary sickness,—i.e. voluntary in not taking proper remedies and safe-guards,—and I cannot but feel much she says is not more than truth.

She urges action, usefulness.

Now I cannot but consider whether it does not become me to attend to her hints, or rather to her arguments. Well I am not. Over mental exertion may have had, and I believe has had, very bad effects, still whether by my own fault directly or indirectly I don’t make matters worse, is another question. And certainly my Father and Mother are getting wretchedly anxious about me ... perhaps, unless I make an effort, I may find life ebbing ere half its purposes are accomplished....

At all events efforts are mine, though results are God’s. Yet tho’ I try to draw brilliant pictures of the future, and to persuade myself life is sweet, I can’t but feel that, if I were once assured of peace with God, I could be well content, nay grateful, to escape the waves of this troublesome world, and flee away and be at rest. Rest! Surely it is hardly natural at my age to be longing for it so....[12] But coward! take God’s benefits and flee His service, His battle? It should be our’s ‘to act and to suffer, to do and to pray.’ No, it cannot be right to flee rather than to overcome.

Footnote 12:

This longing for rest was something deeper than the ordinary sentimentality of adolescence. She always said that by nature she was lazy, and the saying was not devoid of truth.

Well, to return. If I am, and ought, to preserve my health, how? Suppose I make some kind of plan for the day, not rigid but suggestive.

Rise, breakfast with the rest of the world. 8½.

Have for walk till 11.

Then either some master or work for myself,—writing, painting, etc., till dinner. 1.

Afternoon will be sure to be taken up with driving. Come in about 4. Then read till tea. After tea write, or read out downstairs. And go to bed with the rest of the world.

That would be rather more rational than my present programme:

Rise and breakfast at 11 or later. Dawdle till dinner.

Drive. Read till tea. Read or write till 2 or 3 a.m. Well, that does sound bad....

* * * * *

Mother and I were talking about my marrying,—the chances pro and con. I said I did not fancy I should ever marry, for I thought I should require too many qualities to meet in the man I could think of as my husband, for it to be likely that I should ever meet such a paragon who could be willing to marry me.

Let me see; the indispensables are I think:—A perfect gentleman, a sincere Christian, a liberal-minded broad-churchman; a lofty intellect to which it would be a pride to bow, a firm will which it would be a pleasure to submit to and concur in; a nice-looking fellow,—for I could not be happy with one whose face I could not love and admire in beauty of expression if not of form, and one whose means combined with mine would lift us above genteel poverty at least....

* * * * *

Had another squabble with Carry because she told me my own Hertford House, which I was looking over, was not fit for Sunday. She does meddle awfully. Still, she’s a precious sight better than I am.... Bother her slow blood! She’ll drive me mad, she and Daddy between them. Never mind, I have got my jewel of a Mother, bless her!

24th. Sunday. Talking in the evening about an old woman in Carry’s district who came from the Barrack Ground, Hastings. And that put it strong into my head how I wanted to go there. I had on Saturday evening written a letter to Amelia about the treat, and then I thought how nice it would be to go and give the treat myself.

30th. Saturday. Seven years today since I last saw old Hastings. Isn’t it strange to return that day seven years! Pouring wet day. Rather afraid of being disappointed in Hastings, I do love it so. But I seemed so to have gone over and over every part in my dreams that I could not be disappointed. I know it all so well.... After dinner went to call on the Andrews. I thought I would go incog. and see if they remembered me. Amelia opened the door. ‘I think the Miss Andrews live here?’ ‘Yes, ma’am.’ ‘Are you not connected with the Infant School?’ ‘Yes, ma’am.’ I asked if I might come and see the children. She assented quite soberly. I couldn’t stand it, jumped at her, and pinned her to the wall for a kiss. She knew me in a moment, seized my hands and dragged me in in wild delight....

Then I went to No. 3 [Croft Place] and when Mrs. L. said she did not know me, I said, ‘I wonder if the house does, for I was born in it.’ Then she knew me instantly.”

All this gives a vivid picture of the warm heart and riotous spirits that endeared her to her friends, but there are not wanting indications of the mysterious depression and forebodings—the dread of something worse than death—that are part of the heritage of gifted youth.

“26th. Friday. I am afraid I don’t care near so much for—as I did,—am I changeable or is she changed? or is my standard altered?... I read once of a person whose physical condition was such that he could not love one person intensely for long,—not many years if thrown much together.... I sometimes fear I am similarly constituted. For even those nearest and dearest I have experienced those fluctuations.... It is like a frightful trance to know that I cannot keep a warm deep love equal; and yet in a manner the real undercurrent of love flows on even in these estrangements,—I cannot in myself cease to love one who has ever been the object of that wild adoring love, though in my outer mind and heart this tormenting, fiendlike malady makes me hate and shrink from them while its fearful influence reigns. God grant there is no touch of insanity in it; no words can tell how I dread and deprecate it. There is a loathsome horrible fear in my mind of its coming ever and anon. My ..., my beautiful, whom I used to think mysteriously close to my soul, it has come on her. Oh, God pity me! I fear I shall go wild. Every action, every word of her’s seems to anger me unreasonably,—I feel the fiend on me and yet the wild resistless love will not quite be swept away, and comes back in floods of passing tenderness for a moment. And I can’t tell her, make her understand, and she will lose her love for me and—oh, dear I am very miserable. God grant in pity it may never fall on my Mother! I have a horrible dread of it. I could not live without her love,—my love for her. And I feel such wild maddening love now, as if I knew it would soon be out of my power to love her.”

This, of course, is morbid, and yet here again one is forced to say that her depression is neither feigned nor wholly without reason. Many people have experienced in some degree the elemental fitfulness which she describes, and she probably understood it better than most. And yet how many can testify to her fundamental and self-sacrificing constancy! But there is no doubt that at this period she was living far too self- absorbed a life,—dreaming too much, thinking too much of herself. It was time for something to happen, and fortunately something did happen. Two breezy wholesome girl cousins—half Irish, half Norfolk—came to Sussex Square on a visit. They were the daughters of Ferrier Jex-Blake, S. J.- B.’s uncle, but it chanced that she had never met them before. She was out dining with friends when they arrived.

“When I did come home, I went to take off my things, then to the drawing-room, kissed them coolly enough, said, ‘How d’ye do, cousins?’ and sat down to rattle. Tried hard to shock them with all sorts of nonsense, and then carried them to see my room, and made them some coffee. They, Elinor and Sarah, knew nothing of me, and did not much admire me, I guess, that night.”

By degrees, however, a very warm friendship sprang up.

“Oh, dear, those two girls!” she writes a fortnight later. “What a flood of happiness they have brought into the house. And made me behave a little too. Sarah makes me attend to my hair. Oh, dear, home is a different place since they have been here. I am so happy. All my gloom and troubles swept off like cobwebs.”

When they are gone, she writes pages of analysis of their characters, and very able analysis it is. This is how it concludes:

“I feel as if I mean to love Ellie most, and Sarah forces me to love her most. I love Ellie most in my mind, and Sarah most in my heart. Sarah clings to me so, leans on me. Ellie walks upright beside me, a companion, a guide, and gives me a hand. There certainly is something of the angel about Ellie, with much of the woman. You don’t connect the idea of angel with Sarah.

Sarah will do almost anything for me. I do not think she has refused me one thing since she loved me. She rode with me when no one on earth could get her to mount a horse; she went in a boat with me, though she never will enter one. Oh, she is so good, so loving to me. I wish I had her always.

And I am going to them at Dunham, my darlings.”

When it became known that she was going on a visit to Great Dunham, a number of Norfolk relatives on both sides of the house asked her to visit them also, and the result was that for the next two months she had quite a gay time,—beginning with her Mother’s elder sister, Mrs. Taylor, and going from her to the Ferrier Jex-Blakes, the Evans, the Blake Humfreys, the Cubitts and others. As a rule—not without exceptions—she captivated her girl cousins, proved very attractive to her uncles and elderly male cousins, and contrived to rub along with her aunts. “I never appreciated my old Daddy till now,” she writes on one occasion, “I really believe, as Mummy says, he never said an un-nice thing in his life, or approached a coarse or ungentlemanly joke. He is certainly a beau-ideal gentleman, ‘Chevalier sans reproche.’”

Of one family she says, “Not very quiet and not specially dutiful. Rather reminds me of us, only they are more good-tempered over it.”

“Uncle Evans amused me exceedingly at lunch yesterday, giving his opinion in quite energetic style, and as if he had studied the subject, that not only I should marry, which I said I shouldn’t, but very soon.... Heaven knows who it could be.... I never saw the man I would have.”

At Wroxham she made the acquaintance of a cousin, Robert Blake-Humfrey, who was deeply interested in questions of pedigree, heraldry, etc., and he found in the creator of Sackermena an apt pupil.

“Hurrah! Going in for a good morning’s work at the pedigree. 9¼.

Near one! well, well! I certainly have had pedigree to my heart’s content. Been hard at work for 3½ hours till my back aches and I am properly tired. Never mind, I have learned a good deal and secured a good deal. It is very kind of Robert to trust me with his valuable pedigrees, so beautifully emblazoned.”

Mr. Blake-Humfrey was good enough to consider that he too derived benefit from the lessons. “Your observant eyes,” he writes when she is gone, “have done good service in sundry ways towards the correction of errors, which may atone in some measure for the mischief they are well- calculated to cause in other ways.”

On May 28th she visited her Mother’s old home, Honing Hall, and made the acquaintance of an elderly uncle who was something of a character.

“He offered lunch, and then took us up to see the rooms. All shutters up, and had to be re-opened and re-shut. In an upstairs sitting-room I unluckily wanted to see a Family Bible, and said, ‘Is that the Family Bible with the names, etc.?’ ‘Yes, it is. You leave it alone—unless you want to see it.’ I persisted I did and he took it down. Then out came Burke’s Gentry and alia.... I thought I should have been eaten up the way he roared at me. I asked if he hadn’t a pedigree, and he almost roared again, wanting to know what I could want better than Burke. I might have told him there were no shields, no intermarriages, etc., but I held my peace, he really frightened me. I got him to show me my dear old Mother’s room as a girl, and kissed the bed and furniture. Thought of her as a girl there, her fun and her troubles, her courting-days perhaps and the letters and thought and hopes that room had witnessed. My precious darling Mother!”

In July she returned to Brighton, “much better and better-tempered” as she expresses it, for the outing. Richer, too, she was, in her whole outlook on life, and particularly in the knowledge of her girl-cousins, Elinor and Sarah Jex-Blake, and Mary Evans, with all of whom the friendship was to prove a lasting one.

A month later, to Sophy’s great joy, Cousin Ellie accompanied the Sussex Square party on a holiday visit to Wales.

Primary education at Bettws-y-Coed was at a low ebb in those days, the village school being in the hands of a cobbler whose acquirements were not great, and whose idea of discipline was primitive in the extreme. Caroline and Sophy Jex-Blake became deeply interested in the children and gradually fell into the habit of taking a class in reading, arithmetic, geography, etc. It was an arrangement that gave great satisfaction to all concerned, and one into which Sophy entered with whole-hearted enthusiasm. One is not surprised to gather from the letters of the period that she awakened a feeling deeper than interest in one of the professional men with whom she was brought in contact, but the diary makes no reference to the fact, and she may not even have been aware of it.

“To me and to others as far as I can judge,” writes Cousin Ellie about this date, “she is the warmest-hearted person ever I came across.”

And six months later, reviewing the events of an eventful year, S. J.-B. writes:

“But among the events of the old year, first and chief, my becoming friends with my darlings, my stars, and getting acquainted with the Evans and all the Norfolk folks.”

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VI. LIFE AT QUEEN’S COLLEGE

Meanwhile, in the world outside, the feminist movement was beginning to make itself felt,—if one may describe by so inadequate a name an uprising which is due perhaps as much to the men as to the women who have taken part in it. As regards the whole movement S. J.-B. was living as completely in a backwater as was possible to a girl of her position and natural gifts; but sooner or later a current from the main river was bound to come in even to her little creek.

In the spring of 1858 she had made the acquaintance of Miss Benson, sister of the Archbishop. “Henry and Ada Benson came,” is the brief record in her diary. “Pleasant, jolly girl, Ada.” The wanderings of that pleasant summer hindered the development of the friendship for the moment, but the thread was happily taken up again in the autumn.

“Yesterday went with Ada to the Swedish minstrels. Very strange and beautiful.... After concert went for a drive in the pony-chaise. Just beyond the battery a carriage and pair drove into us. Coachman got down and was very civil. Everyone said it was no fault of mine; he was trying to cut in between two. I was not the least frightened.

Speaking to Ada on Thursday night revived the idea of Queen’s College. Her sister there. Wrote Friday for prospectus. Tried to speak to Daddy last night. He very impracticable, I after a while very undutiful. At last I went into hysterics[13] which frightened him dreadfully, poor old man. I shall certainly go, I think. Michaelmas term begins 4th prox. I should very much like a year’s or even less, good work, and a few certificates.

Very good last night Ada Benson’s story of the Bishop of —— ‘Opposed as I am to the Catholic faith, opposed, as I say I am to the Catholic faith...’ on which a priest from the body of the meeting, —‘Which faith except..., etc.’”

Footnote 13:

It was an interesting and typical stage in the development of women when a girl found it necessary to “go into hysterics” in order to convince her father of her right to an education.

How she always did delight in a good story! The most strenuous passages of the diary are interspersed with pages of jokes, riddles, anagrams, bon-mots, some very good, some as she herself admits on reflection, very indifferent. She used to say that a sense of humour had been her salvation,—that, but for that, she never could have got through the many struggles of her life.

And one is glad to think how often that sense of humour must have come to relieve the intensity of that first conscious struggle for freedom, when she herself felt that in venturing forward she was renouncing a good deal,—that the life before her was an uncharted sea.

“Worst thing about Queen’s College is—no Sarah till Christmas,” she writes. “M. brought me an invite to write for the Sunday School Quarterly. Sat up till 2 a.m. Friday to write story on 18th after Trinity. I wonder if I shall succeed, and, if so, how compatible with Queen’s?

Sept. 25th. All settled for Queen’s. Mrs. Williams writes very kindly.... Having rather hard work with Redknap, five lessons a week. Must try for 2nd class in Mathematics, and, if I can, for more.

Absurd panic at Dunham lest I should be a ‘governess’! Awful phantom!”

It is difficult for girl students of the present day to imagine all that was meant by the opening of Queen’s College in 1858. The plan of establishing a college for women had been much discussed by Alfred Tennyson, Charles Kingsley, and others; and the work had been warmly taken up by Frederick Denison Maurice, E. H. Plumptre (afterwards Dean of Wells) and R. C. Trench (afterwards Archbishop of Dublin), all three of whom were represented on the teaching staff.[14] We may imagine what it meant for S. J.-B. to pass from the hands of the average schoolmistress of that day to teachers such as these.

Footnote 14:

See Mrs. Alec Tweedie’s interesting record of “The First College for Women.”

On the 5th October she settled down to work, and three days later she writes:

“Very delicious it is to be here. ‘Oh, if there be an Elysium on earth, it is this, it is this!’ I am inclined to say. I am as happy as a queen. Work and independence! What can be more charming? Really perfection. So delicious in the present, what will it be to look back upon?”

She was “fay” that night, as they say in Scotland: it was scarcely lucky to be so happy. She little guessed, poor child, “what it would be to look back upon” her life at Queen’s. Much happiness she got from that life, no doubt,—a rich harvest of education, contact with interesting temperaments and able minds, friendships that were only broken by death. But there are some people endowed for better or worse, with the gift of taking what seem to be the side-issues of life far too intensely, of living half-a-dozen lives in addition to the one they have definitely chosen, of wringing out of an average human lot an amount of joy, of experience and of suffering that to their companions would seem simply incredible. And S. J.-B. was essentially one of these. Incidentally in the course of the day’s work she would develop fresh interests, make unusual friendships, perhaps even incur resentments that might well have demanded her whole strength and energy; and all these threads had to be carried on in addition to the recognized work of her life.

That the recognized work was in itself no sinecure may be gathered from her report for the Michaelmas term. She has “good,” sometimes “very good” reports in all her seven classes,—four of them being signed by F. D. Maurice, E. H. Plumptre and R. C. Trench. The classes were arithmetic, geometry and algebra, English language and composition, French, history, natural philosophy and astronomy, theology, and church history.

She was popular with her fellow-students, and particularly so with Miss Agnes Wodehouse (afterwards Mrs. Williams) whom she greatly admired, and of whom she made, incidentally, as profound a study as she did of her Euclid and history. “How few ladies there are!” she concludes. “Agnes Wodehouse is thorough. So is my Mother. Few else.” And again in this connection, “I believe I love women too much ever to love a man. Yet who can tell? Well, S. J.-B., don’t get sentimental, for patience’ sake.”

Unfortunately she was not so appreciative of one of the younger women who was more or less in authority over her. The new student meant no harm, but she took playful liberties, and no doubt, as formerly at school, amused the other girls by her wit and audacity. After a good deal of sparring and chaffing, things came to an impasse, and it was judged better by all concerned that S. J.-B. should seek a home for herself elsewhere. This was not an easy matter in those days when hostels and homes of residence for women students were unknown; and so, to the other work of her life, was added the toil of tramping about in search of suitable quarters.

She made a number of unfortunate ventures, sampling experiences familiar enough to the middle-class bachelor woman of the present day, though somewhat staggering to the well-bred mid-Victorian girl. The bankrupt householder, the drunken landlady, the undesirable male lodger, “and other fauna,” formed part of the things that had to be taken—and were taken most pluckily—in the day’s work. If S. J.-B. was instrumental in bringing ill-fortune on herself—as was not infrequently the case—she never sat down and howled,—she never even thought of giving in: she simply put her shoulder to the wheel and went on with what she had been doing. And so it was now, under very difficult conditions, for, once and again, hopes were raised, hopes were dashed, and the weary struggle began afresh,—with many bad headaches and occasional sore throats to complicate matters.

“Quite an experience of troubles,” writes Mrs. Jex-Blake, “as much as if you had lived many years. I think no one could have acted more wisely than you have done”: and again, “I wish I were near, yet I don’t think I could be a real help: it is not in my way.” And the same might have been said by many other friends. Greater drawbacks were involved then than now in leaving one’s own social groove.

“You have behaved very sensibly through the whole trial, which has not been a light one,” says her Father.

In her diary she writes,—

“Mummy says it is (my boarding-house troubles, she means) quite an experience of life. Truly not in these alone. Many, I believe, never live as much, and through as much, as I have done already, in the whole course of life.”

Fortunately there was one house at least where she could always take refuge, and never failed to find herself a welcome guest,—the house of Mr. Cordery at Hampstead. Her brother had married one of the daughters, Miss Henrietta Cordery, in June 1857, but the friendship was of much longer standing than that, and it would be difficult to exaggerate the comfort and support she derived from it throughout life. With Mr. James Cordery and his sisters Emma and Bertha (now Mrs. S. R. Gardiner) in particular she remained in intimate association, and always managed—even after years of separation—to take up the threads again without a break. She was always at her best in that Hampstead home, full of gaiety and joie de vivre—never afraid to be her real audacious young self.

Immediately after the extract from the diary given above, she goes on light-heartedly:

“I am so thoroughly happy in this way of life, hardly any other could suit me as well. So independent, yet so busy, so comfortable, yet not luxurious. Plenty, yet no superfluity. It is certainly very kind of the dear ‘old folks’ to let me have it so, and very wise. I should never, at least at present, have settled at home. I should have been ever longing for independence and work, and now I have all I want and may yet do good. Having, as Maurice would say, found my centre, other things will, I trust, grow up around it. I trust most fervently I may yet be a real comfort to my precious Mother and dear kind Father. As last year I computed my ‘worldly estate,’ as quaint old Pepys, whose diary I am reading, would say; I do it again. I have now for dress and private money £40 per year. Henceforth I shall have tutor’s money as well. From my Father I have, I think, as well as I can calculate, about £50 a term for all expenses, besides all paid when at home, as well as travelling expenses with them or anywhere (except while at College) and riding, etc. So in actual money I have about £200 a year and in money’s worth another £100. Therefore I conclude about £300 a year to be about the happy medium of wealth for a single woman. Dear generous old Father! Few would, I think, give so much in so good a way to their children. I believe as regards happiness and satisfaction never was money better, if never more kindly, spent. I must try to pay back the ‘labour of love,’ and ‘requite my parents,’ dear, dear old things! Bless them both.

I really believe as regards money I am honestly quite contented. I wish for no more. And as this is, they say, a somewhat remarkable fact, I specially note it down. Yet it sounds ludicrously tempting to reply to myself, Contented! Shame on you if you were not, I think. Yet for actual pocket money, I am horribly pinched just now,—only 9s. 9d. till next quarter,—nearly four weeks hence.”

The reference to “tutor’s money” is interesting. She had not been two months at College when she was asked to take the post of mathematical tutor. The suggestion gave her great pleasure, and she broached the subject to her parents when she next went home. Though startled, they were on the whole pleased at the honour done her, but things assumed a different aspect when her father realized the conditions on which the tutorship was to be held.

The correspondence seems well worth quoting in extenso:

“Jan. 28th.

DEAREST, I have only this moment heard that you contemplate being paid for the tutorship. It would be quite beneath you, darling, and I cannot consent to it. Take the post as one of honour and usefulness, and I shall be glad, and you will be no loser, be quite sure. But to be paid for the work would be to alter the thing completely, and would lower you sadly in the eyes of almost everybody. Do not think about it, dearest, and you will rejoice greatly by and bye with all who love you best.”

A few days later he writes again:

“MY DEAR SOPHY,—and you are very dear to me—you have been much in my thoughts, and I have been grieved to know that you have had so much real harass, and were so tried before you settled down in your present peaceful domicile. Now all is well, I trust, and you in peace and comfort, so, remembering the Appellant from Philip drunk to Philip sober, make the application, giving me the benefit of it, and bear with me, my own child, whilst I briefly tell you what I think and hope. I heartily admire your readiness to turn your talents to good account, and employ them in a way so clearly beneficial to others, but believe me that if you take money payment, you will make a sad mistake, debase your standing, and place yourself in a position that people in general, including many relations and friends, will never as long as you live understand otherwise than as greatly to your discredit. You would be considered mean and illiberal,—tho’ I am sure you are neither the one or the other—accepting wages that belong to a class beneath you in social rank, and which (it would be said) you had no right, under any circumstances, to appropriate to yourself....”

The reply to this came by return of post:

“Feb. 3rd ’59.

MY OWN DARLING DADDY,

I got your kind old letter this morning, for which, thanks....

Well, as to this Tutorship. I have thought about it, and about all the accompanying circumstances. If you will listen, I will try to tell you what I think. I believe I am particularly suited for teaching, my taste, and I fancy my talent, lies that way. I generally succeed pretty well in making my pupils understand what I understand myself and so far I suppose that proves my capability. Well, there are so many who make teaching their profession, who do not love it, and are not fond of it or fit for it, that I think anything that can be done to raise the standard of teaching and teachers, must be good. Well, this would be effectually done if everyone who loved the business (and was therefore necessarily to a degree fit for it) undertook it, and no others. I think this very College is doing much to raise the standard, and I fancy they are particularly anxious—the authorities, I mean—to get teachers of a somewhat superior rank in society (as generally considered). Well, justly or not, I am, I believe, supposed to be of rather higher class than the generality of teachers, and therefore specially eligible. I suppose I certainly have considerable talent for Mathematics, if for anything. It is the one thing I know best and love best. Then—when the Mathematical Tutorship is vacant,—surely I am right enough to be anxious to obtain it. I was thought capable, and chosen.

Now remember, Father dear, I am not here taking the place from anyone else, though if I were doing so, being myself the best fitted, I do not think my conscience need be troubled,—but this Tutorship has stood vacant for some months from sheer want of anyone capable to fill it.

Well, the terms of the agreement are—do this work, and receive this payment,—the payment contingent entirely on the work. The conditions are, if the Tutor has four pupils, forming a college class, she receives 5s. an hour. It is right and natural I think, I certainly do work equivalent to the payment, and have fairly earned it. Why should I not take it? You as a man, did your work and received your payment, and no one thought it any degradation, but a fair exchange. Why should the difference of my sex alter the laws of right and honour? Tom is doing on a large scale what I do on a small one,—I cannot recognize any fundamental difference in the matter. I cannot say ‘I do not want this money, I have no use for it,’ for in truth, tho’ having an ample and generous allowance, I should have plenty of use for it. Then there is the honest, and I believe, perfectly justifiable pride of earning. Did you not feel this when you received your first salary? Why should I be deprived of it? Then again you offer to give me the money if I refuse to take it from the College. But this would be a wholly false position, to get credit for generosity in refusing what I yet receive. I could not do this. In that case I must say to the Dean, not ‘I am willing to work without payment,’ but ‘My Father prefers that I should receive payment from him, not from the College,’ and I think the Dean would think us both ridiculous, or at least foolish.

If I wrote a book I should receive payment for that, and I presume even you would not object: why then now?

For mental work done in the school the reward was a prize which cost money, you thought this honourable,—why should the reward of labour at College, being money, be dishonourable?

Hitherto I have had a class of only 3, and therefore I have not been officially entitled to this salary. The Dean wished to make some arrangement for my payment last term, but I said at once,—‘The money is not of much consequence to me—I had rather, not having the official number, teach them as a friend and ex-officially,’ and so I have done. Here I think I was right, I could afford to teach them gratis, and I did so. The Dean was gratified, the pupils obliged, and I was satisfied. So it was last term. But if this term I get the official number, I do not see any reason except pride for declining the payment. My pupils would pay the College all the same, why should not the College pay me? I really do not see that I am doing anything either mean or dishonourable, and I hardly think you can think so either. I am sure the College authorities do not. I do not think the Dean would think the better of me for declining the money, which I should be glad to receive, on account of a scruple of pride. Do you honestly, Father, think any lady lowered by the mere act of receiving money? Did you think the less of Mrs. Teed because you paid her? Would you have thought better of her for refusing payment? I am sure you would not. You are too much of a gentleman to attach importance to money.

Of course the question of right or wrong, honour or dishonour, is the point. This once settled, people’s opinion is worth nothing. I should be glad that my friends had the sense to see clearly and rightly in the matter, if they have not, I regret it for their own sakes,—not for mine.

Of course I am speaking of indifferent people,—not of you or my Mother. I care very much that you should think me right.

But even taking this lower view—of opinion—I do not believe that many for whom I have any regard or esteem, would ultimately think the worse of me for accepting well-earned wages. If I took the post, and, even without accepting a salary, neglected my duty, or did it not to the utmost of my power, I should be far more contemptible.

Mary Jane Evans, I know, for one, and she is one of the proudest families of our relations, thinks me right. Miss Wodehouse, whose family is older and better than mine, not only says I am right, but showed she agreed with my opinion by her actions. She sees no meanness in earning, but in those that think it mean. When accepting Maurice’s school, she said to him, most nobly, I think, ‘If you think it better that I should work as a paid mistress, I will take any salary you please; if not, I am willing to do the work freely and for nothing.’ I think this more noble-minded than any proud refusal of money could have been.

Well, darling Father, I have written you a very long letter, but I wished to tell you honestly all I thought, and I trust you don’t think my epistle too long....

Your loving child, SOPHY.”

“4th Feb. 1859.

DEAREST SOPHY,

Your letter has given me unmixed pleasure....

About the tutorship, you write very ably, but your logic and illustrations are not sound, as I hope to show you. I am sure you are fit for, as you are fond of, teaching, and the desire to raise the standard both of teaching and teachers is good, but your receiving or not receiving wages for the work, can neither help or hinder the matter. I agree to all you say in favour of working,—it is very honourable, very right, and worthy of all praise, but what I object to is your taking money for it. It is beneath you, and you will be far happier to decline it, and let it flow into its proper channels, to fructify widely and do real good.

The question is, as you say, one of right and wrong. In my deliberate judgment it is wrong, in your position to receive pay for what you do, to say nothing of the extent to which it would damage you. The cases you cite, darling, are not to the point. I will take each of them in the order you put them and then judge for yourself. I never received a salary of any kind in my life. I was of a liberal profession—a particularly honourable branch of it—and (chiefly) lived by it. This was ‘right’ beyond all doubt. T. W. is doing the same sort of thing. He feels bound as a man, with ability to do so, to support his wife and family, and his position is a high one, which can only be filled by a first-class man of character, and yielding him nearer two than one thousand a year. The third case—Mrs. Teed’s—like the others has no analogy whatever to my dear Sophy’s—Mrs. Teed had no means. She went out in early life as a governess to earn an honourable livelihood. She did earn it well and her talents, by God’s blessing, led to her after success, enabling her to lay by something to support herself and sister in their later years.

How entirely different is my darling’s case. You want for nothing, and know that (humanly speaking) you will want for nothing. If you married tomorrow to my liking—and I don’t believe you would ever marry otherwise—I should give you a good fortune. What temptation is there for your doing that which, at best, will be misunderstood to your prejudice? I should say at all events wait a bit till you are a little older, and can form a riper judgment. My feeling is strong that you being a paid teacher would certainly damage you, in what precise degree nobody can say. Do the work—it is a good work and I rejoice in it, but don’t put a penny into your purse for doing it. Let the gold go in some other direction. This will give you a greater and more lasting satisfaction than you could derive from any money payment.

Your loving Father, T. JEX-BLAKE.”

“Feb. 5th ’59.

DEAR DADDY,

Thanks for your letter. I do not know whether all my reasoning was logical,—probably not—but I do not think that your arguments respecting the relative position of (at least) Tom and myself, are much better than ‘distinctions without differences.’ Refine it away as you may, Tom’s position and mine are considerably analogous, though very unequal. As far as I can trace the foundation of your asserted difference it is first his being a ‘man,’ which difference, as I said before, I cannot recognize as radical,—secondly, that his position can only be filled by ‘a first-class man,’—and I think, allowing, of course, for very great disparity of knowledge, acquirements and requirements, the comparison holds, for it is not easy, as has been proved by the length of time the office has been vacant, to fill this Tutorship properly. I should say it is the one the College finds hardest to fill, and therefore it is (in its degree) as creditable a thing to hold as the mastership.

Then I cannot think that you mean to urge the superior lucrativeness of his post as any argument, for the principle must be identical in receiving one penny or ‘nearer two than one thousand a year.’ Then I cannot say that I want for nothing,—I do want the money, and am quite satisfied to earn it, quite knowing that my allowance is enough. I do not really see that I am in any degree wrong, if I am it is unconsciously and honestly.

Well, I don’t think it is of much use to argue any more—I have told you honestly what I think.... Thank you anyhow for listening to me patiently and answering me. I do not like to vex you after all this— you have been and are very good to me. You ask me to wait a little while and consider. I have considered well, and I do not believe any further thought would alter my opinion. However I will promise you for this term only (not ceding the principle) not to take any fees, but if they come (which I do not yet know) to return them as a free gift to the College. If at the end of this term I still hold my opinion, I trust you not to oppose my determination again. Remember and understand, Daddy, I do promise this simply and only because you wish it, and not because in the least degree my mind is one whit altered on the point. I trust you to meet me half way, and not be in any degree grieved if I resume my intention next term.

Goodbye darling, Ever your loving child, SOPHY.”

“Saturday night. Feb. 5th 1859.

DEAREST,

... Tom’s being a man makes all the difference, he has just taken the plain path of duty. I am very pleased with the spirit in which you write, darling, but I must be sincere, which I should not be if I told you that I had the shadow of a doubt that you ought not to be a paid teacher....

Ever, dearest, Your affect. Father, T. JEX-BLAKE.”

So closes this delightful correspondence. It was not to be supposed that she should have no regrets. In her diary she says:

“Feb. 13th.... Like a fool I have consented to give up the fees for this term only—though I am miserably poor. I am sorry. It was foolish. It only defers the struggle.”

The Norfolk cousins were not a little impressed by the new life S. J.-B. was making for herself, though it was not to be expected that they should all take so enlightened a view of it as Miss Evans did.

“You seem,” writes Cousin Ellie, “to be spending rather a jolly time of it, but still it seems to me rather queer that a lot of girls should walk about London when and where they please. I don’t think you would come to any harm, but I am sure there are many that would.”

And Sarah with whom “one does not connect the idea of angel,”

“What glorious fun a girl might have if inclined, but you are as steady as a rock. No fear of my dear old man doing anything giddy. My dearest treasure, Goodnight.”

We gather from subsequent correspondence that the frivolity of this letter brought down a very severe reprimand from its recipient.

Elinor was the first to pay a visit to the unknown world, and she writes a long account of it to the eager Sarah:

“When I first saw her that evening, I thought she did not look so well, but since then I think the contrary—She is much thinner, but in such good spirits, and so happy. I think she quite likes everyone to know that she has been made mathematical tutor, for it is considered a great honour.”

S. J.-B. would fain have seen more of these delightful cousins, but their father held strict views as to the conditions under which well- born girls might visit London.

“As to Ellie and Sarah,” writes Mrs. Jex-Blake in one of the severe moods that had become so rare, “instead of being hurt they do not accede to all you ask, you might well be proud of their warm love. You have taken yourself out of your natural position, and you cannot understand the need for their conforming to the proprieties their Father so naturally and properly expects. Good-looking girls do not needlessly go about London without chaperons. Happily for them, their Father’s wish is sufficient to guide them. There is a respect and duty to the position, however weak and inferior you may judge a Parent to be.[15] Well, darling, God bless and comfort you.”

Footnote 15:

The reference is not to S. J.-B.’s own parents.

Yet, judged by present-day standards, S. J.-B. would not have been considered deficient in the spirit of compromise. Her letters to her Father on the subject of tutor’s fees is evidence enough on that score, and those letters are in no way at variance with her whole attitude.

“A triumph as to life!” she records in her diary. “Last Monday told Mummy of my not going to the Opera without telling her, but proclaimed my intention in the future. No interdiction. So I talked a little about it to make all my ground sure, and coming back on Tuesday found them going to Macbeth, Friday, and yesterday told Mummy as a matter of course. She acquiesced if not consented, and was glad we had so nice a party and hoped I shall not go often, so entirely removing all interdiction....

Well, as to the Theatre! I believe I must confess myself disappointed. Charles Kean as Macbeth did not satisfy me. Mrs. C. Kean very good (I suppose) as Lady Macbeth. Yet not real, as Shakespeare surely should be. After the murder of Duncan was perhaps the grandest, most awful, most real.... The scene where Macduff learns his loss more real than most. The fighting at the end ludicrous.... I thought there would be decent fencing.”

A few months later she went (with Miss Wodehouse) to a ritualistic church, and was moved to hot indignation.

“How can this man wear a priestly robe in the Church, and subscribe to her 6th and 20th most scriptural articles? Well, indeed, might we pray for the state of the Church Militant, when within her walls are such teachers.

Yet was I right in not staying the sacrament because this sermon so stirred my indignation? ‘The unworthiness of ministers hinders not the effect of the Sacrament.’ Perhaps I was wrong. Yet I could not have stayed in a peaceful or holy mind.

To the law and to the testimony! How precious is such unanswerable decree!—so final a court of appeal!”

A note is inserted in the margin,—(“This May 1859. Sic transit! Feb. 11, 1865!”).

Meanwhile her certificate examination was drawing near, and mathematics absorbed most of her thoughts. On July 1st she writes:

“Certificate examination nearly 4 hours. Out of 23 problems did 20½. So I trust I am pretty safe. I did get rather frightened as the time drew on, but really have worked hard and I trust won. Sent a telegram, ‘Success’ to Mother, though the declaration is not yet made.

July 28th. My certificate won triumphantly and marked, ‘with great credit’.”

Of course she was working too hard.

“I have a great deal of work in College,” she confesses some time later. I take 8 classes,—English Literature, English History, Mental and Moral Philosophy, Theology, Church History, Algebra, Geometry, and German Conversation; and have 7 pupils. I am afraid it is too much altogether.”

And what about the ordinary traditional preoccupations and vanities of a young girl’s life in the midst of these manifold interests and claims?— what about thoughts of dress, of personal appearance, of love and marriage? Well, obviously there was little room left for any of these. S. J.-B. was under the impression that she cared a good deal about dress, and she would not have been flattered if anyone had expressed a different opinion. As a matter of fact she never had time to give the subject much more than a passing thought, and the poor little remnant of an allowance that remained when more pressing claims and numerous little charities had been met, was barely sufficient to pay for the work of an ordinary seamstress. The adaptable coat and skirt, and the endless variety of cheap ready-made dress had not then come to the aid of the educated working-girl, and S. J.-B. did not realize the difficulty of the problem she had to tackle.

“I should like to see your muslin at 3s. 6d. before I got one,” writes honest Ellie. “You know you are the last person in the world I should copy in dress, or who I would trust to get one for me, for it is the only thing almost you know nothing about, and you have very peculiar, and, I think, generally bad taste.”

The letter may have been written in a moment of irritation about something else, or indeed about this very subject of dress, for young folks are sensitive as to the appearance of their valued friends; but it certainly contained more than a germ of truth. Fortunately youth and a radiant personality cover a multitude of shortcomings in this respect, and contemporary correspondence often points to the extent to which the Almighty had “favoured” S. J.-B. “in person as well as in mind.” In this connection there is an interesting letter of this period from an old schoolfellow, the daughter of a former schoolmistress. After a graphic account of a lecture by Thackeray, at which the writer had the good fortune to be present, she says:

“In face Thackeray is the image of—whom, do you think? Guess. Someone you know,—of yourself. Yes, indeed, of you, Sophy Blake. Mama and I were both struck, almost startled, by the resemblance.”

It happened by a curious coincidence some years later that Laurence was taking S. J.-B.’s portrait not very long after he had taken Thackeray’s, and he expressed himself as greatly struck by the similarity of the lines in the two faces. S. J.-B.’s magnificent, speaking brown eyes, however, were hers alone. “If they were taken out and laid on a plate,” said a forcible young friend, “they would still be beautiful!”

As regards love and marriage, one can only say that, for a girl in the middle of the last century she thought of them surprisingly little. She speaks occasionally of her own marriage as if it were as much a matter of course as her coming of age, and, after enjoying some pleasant boy- and-girl intercourse with an unknown “H.” at the house of her cousins, she describes him as “the sort of man I may probably marry in the end.” Visiting a newly-married girl cousin, she frankly admits the charm of the comradeship, for indeed, as a friend said of her (with more truth than elegance of diction) a few years later than the point we have reached: “You have taken on you a hard, hard vocation from your youngest days,—and yet it is scarcely so hard for anyone in the world to stand alone.”

In any case S. J.-B. went straight on her course, like many of the finest girls of our own day, without giving any thought to cross currents that might alter the course of her life. And indeed her daily life was absorbing enough. It is scarcely surprising if, among her many interests, her religious life was somewhat smothered for the time, or that, at least she thought so.

“Mrs. Thornton called my doing what I had done ‘noble’. Yes, if for His sake, but, alas, much more—altogether—for my own. Yet my loving the work is no disqualification for doing it for Him. I trust I do do good a little. Surely honest intellectual help is something, if of lower class.... I have thought—I cannot take more work, Sunday School, etc., but what I do is good in its degree; if done in His name, surely He will accept it.”

More and more, as she looked back on her own school life from the vantage-ground of a year at Queen’s College, she felt how much the education of girls might be improved. On the last night of the year she writes:

“In this year my idea of work in the cause of education has developed itself into that of a resident College of the Holy Trinity. Heaven knows if ever to be carried out. If good,—yes, doubtless,—if not, God will raise up better. Little ‘religious’ as I fear I am, I do feel this thoroughly....

‘And may the New Year cherish All the hopes that now are bright.’

Such a happy loving Goodnight to and from Daddy and Mummy. Very happy I am tonight.

‘And once more ere thou perish, Old Year, Good night! Good night!’”

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