A History of Britain, Volume 3 (26 page)

The place where the ideal of a family partnership came closest to realization was Osborne House. It was there, as at Balmoral in Aberdeenshire at the other end of the island, that the day would be divided into a governing morning and a family afternoon. And it was there that Victoria made the all-important symbolic gesture of providing Albert with his own desk, placed beside hers, so that incoming ministers would see the two of them, side by side, and get the message that this was indeed the Saxe-Coburg-Gotha monarchy. Albert had bought the 1000-acre estate on the Isle of Wight in 1845, on the advice of Peel, as a retreat for the queen; a resort where the cares of state could be balanced by the pleasures of family life. The prince claimed that the pine woods gently sloping down to the bay reminded him of the coast near Naples (as well
as
the forests near his birthplace at Rosenau), an impression made only a little less improbable by the brightly painted Italianate house with its yellow and white towers and formal gardens and fountains, whose every detail he either designed or supervised. By the time Albert had finished with the house it had cost a cool £200,000, an immense fortune by the standards of the mid-19th century; the ‘retreat’ had become, in effect, an alternative place of government, with ministers and dispatch boxes, to the queen’s chagrin, constantly arriving. But the working routine of Osborne (and Balmoral) did indeed work: a walk before breakfast; newspapers with or after breakfast, followed by spirited discussion; the queen inspecting papers that Albert had already screened and prepared (in his capacity as private secretary) for her signature;
joint
meetings, if necessary, with ministers. And after luncheon, further informal discussion of the implications of the morning’s business.

But afternoons were also the time when the family romance could be most fully indulged with picnics, fishing trips and pony rides. In Scotland there would be deer stalking; heavily unannounced ‘visits’ to local crofters; reels and flings in the evening, with the queen got up in the freshly invented Balmoral red and grey tartan. In both places Albert set his mind to all kinds of Improving Projects, which would provide, at the same time, physical exercise, moral instruction and even a little harmless play for the children. The
pièce de résistance
was the Swiss Cottage at Osborne, with its own kitchen garden, built in the park by the prince acting as foreman to his four eldest children – Vicky, Bertie, Affie and Alice – who provided the labour. It featured furniture and even working cooking stoves, all scaled down to child size, so that they could play house.

The idea was that the royal children should inherit from their parents the idyll of the happy family. (Predictably the boys, and most notoriously Bertie, the Prince of Wales, who felt most put upon by their father, spurned the role as soon as they were of an age to escape.) But although she never stopped believing she had been uniquely blessed in her husband and (between tantrums) confiding professions of her love to her diary, Victoria was also capable of statements of startling disenchantment, especially when her daughters were contemplating their own dynastic marriages. Marriages were all very nice, she let it be known, assuming they were
happy
marriages. But many were anything but happy, and then a heaven could indeed turn into a hell. Single people were, she thought, much better off than partners who were doomed to inflict unrelenting daily misery on each other. Moreover, the chances of happiness were much slimmer than poor naïve girls, groomed for the altar, were made to believe by their ambitious parents. Keenly feeling the burdens of
continuous
childbirth, she declared, ‘All marriage is a lottery, the happiness is always an exchange – though it may be a poor one. Still, the poor woman is bodily and morally the husband’s slave – that always sticks in my throat.’

Victoria, of course, was no feminist, but at times like this she certainly sounded like one. The chances are that she knew about a number of notorious court cases highlighting the plight of unhappily married wives. The best known had been that of Lord Melbourne’s intimate friend Caroline Norton, whose brutal husband, George, had then deserted her, denying her custody or even access to their children and leaving her without any means of support. The reason was that, as Blackstone had laid down (and therefore Victoria and Albert, both assiduous Blackstone students, knew), ‘by marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law, that is the very being or existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated … into that of the husband under whose wing, protection and cover she performs anything’. In practice, this meant that, until reforms in the last quarter of the century, married women were incapable of owning property or of being party to any kind of contract, much less suing for divorce. It meant that Elizabeth Gaskell, for example, was not entitled to any of the earnings from her own novels, but had to satisfy herself with an allowance from her husband. Vindictively, George Norton had used his conjugal power to prevent Caroline from receiving any income after they were separated. The publicity given to the case had resulted in an act of parliament in 1839 that gave abandoned mothers custody of children under seven – but not thereafter.

Since Victoria was always inclined to give Lord M the benefit of the doubt, it is likely that she accepted his insistence, when Norton named him as co-respondent in the divorce, that his relationship with Caroline had been perfectly above board; so she would have been able to see Caroline as a victim, and her battle for custody and support as heroic as it genuinely was. But, 20 years on, could the queen conceivably have been reading the
Englishwoman’s Journal
, published by the Victoria Press from 1860, which contained articles forcefully arguing the right of married women to their own property and, exactly like the queen, routinely compared bad marriages either to a lottery or to slavery? Perhaps Victoria had noticed or read Barbara Leigh Smith’s
Brief Summary in Plain Language of the Most Important Laws Concerning Women
(1854), and even sympathized with its mission of educating young women in what to expect from marriage.

The possibility of Victoria’s familiarity with early feminist writing is not quite as staggering as it might seem. The founder of the Victoria Press (which employed women compositors) was the remarkable Emily
Faithfull,
of whom the queen thought well enough to appoint her as her own Printer and Publisher in Ordinary in 1862 – not a position she would have given to someone who had incurred her disapproval. As a friend and colleague of Barbara Leigh Smith, Faithfull was a member of the Langham Place Circle – writers, social activists and critics who, at 19 Langham Place, just off London’s Regent Street, spurred by Jessie Boucherett’s Society for Promoting the Employment of Women, had established a register (in fact an employment agency) for women seeking work as teachers and governesses. The aim was to extend the list to the enormous category of domestic service, as had been done in Bristol. There, a similar office sent out inspectors to ensure that places of employment were physically and morally sound, and that working conditions and pay were decent. The Langham Place Circle’s office included a reading room where women could peruse newspapers (including the
Englishwoman’s Journal
) while they were looking at job opportunities, sign petitions for the campaign for married women’s property, and read essays by Barbara Leigh Smith, Isa Craig and Bessie Rayner Parkes, editor of the
Englishwoman’s Review
from 1858. These writers argued for the importance of women’s work, and believed that it should extend to watchmaking, journalism, medicine, prison and workhouse inspection and custodial work, the arts and, of course, teaching in schools and colleges set up for girls.

These women were, admittedly, an exceptional, but middle-class vanguard. They had little in common with the Edinburgh Maidservants’ Union, which in 1825 had had the temerity to threaten a strike. On the contrary, they depended on the 1.3 million women domestic servants to give them the freedom to agitate. Barbara Leigh Smith was a cousin of Florence Nightingale and the illegitimate daughter of the Radical Unitarian MP for Norwich, Benjamin Smith, who had deliberately refused to marry her mother, and who had settled an annual income on his golden-haired daughter precisely so that she might lead an independent life. But the 26,000 signatures that she and her colleagues secured for a petition to urge a Married Women’s Property Bill on parliament in 1855 is evidence enough that the Langhamites were neither tiny in number nor insignificant. Among those who actively joined the cause were some of the best-known and most widely read and admired of all Victorian women writers – Elizabeth Gaskell, of course; but also Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Mary Ann Evans a.k.a. George Eliot, Harriet Martineau and Harriet Taylor. It is ironic that Taylor’s part in the Victorian battle for women’s rights (itself undeservedly less well known than the later militant suffragettes) is often best remembered as the recruitment of her husband, John Stuart Mill, the ‘saint of rationalism’ and the greatest pillar of
mid-Victorian
liberalism, to the feminist cause. Mill himself was at pains, especially in his
Autobiography
(1873), to insist that it was Taylor who had educated him in the outrageous anomalies of women’s position in marriage, in the labour force and in political society; who had been his true partner in works like
Principles of Political Economy
(1848), where the absence of women as a subject for the discussions of social science was first explicitly addressed; and that the work for which he would be best remembered,
On Liberty
(1859), formally dedicated to his wife, was the result of their joint authorship.

Some of the urgency and passion that Mill (whose prose, as he endearingly knew, seldom smoulders with either) evinces here was due precisely to his dismay at Harriet’s part in all this, being reduced to that of Supporting Wife. The ideal helpmeet as sketched in John Ruskin’s
Sesame and Lilies
(1865) was permitted to cultivate only the kind of knowledge already acquired by her husband, and was expected to act as permanently indentured proof-reader, inkwell-filler and – when the reviews came in – up-cheerer. That, insisted Mill, had not been the case with him and Harriet at all. Theirs had been a meeting of minds long before a mating of bodies. Mill may have been stronger in the technical science of ideas, especially economic theories, but Taylor had understood and passed on two sorts of knowledge in which he was decidedly the weaker party – grand metaphysical ideas as well as practical human applications (the spiritual and the social). All that he, Mill, was left with was the ‘intermediate’ realm, which in his
Autobiography
he implied, disingenuously, any old pedant could master as best he could. The psychological subtext of this elaborately formal apologia was in fact powerful, even sensational. For what John Stuart Mill really meant was that when he had met Harriet, he found someone who emancipated
him
– from thralldom to his father.

It was 1830; he was 24. She was a year younger, married, with three children to John Taylor, a City trader in medical drugs, whose Scottish family was well known to the originally Scottish Mills. Harriet had already published poems, book reviews and essays. Mill was working as a clerk in the Examiners’ Office of the East India Company, drafting dispatches to be sent out to the company’s legal and fiscal councillors. His father, who also worked for the Company, had found him the job. But then James Mill had done everything he possibly could to make John Stuart, the eldest of nine children, in his own image. Mill senior had committed himself, as thoroughly as he knew how, to furthering the utilitarian creed of his friend and mentor Jeremy Bentham, which was to increase the ‘greatest happiness of the greatest number’ of mankind. Beginning
with
the presumption that man was a bundle of sense-receptors, responding to either pleasure or pain, the enlightened legislator would aim to maximize the former and minimize the latter. For the first time the ills, material and moral, that plagued humanity were to be systematically and scientifically analysed: their magnitude measured, the causes diagnosed and the remedies prescribed. A report would be issued and recommendations made for legislation; a salaried inspectorate would be recruited to see to its execution and enforcement. Hitherto, empires had been run by power. The British Empire would be run by knowledge. James Mill had become a candidate for the position in the Examiners’ Office after publishing an immense, not to say unreadably exhaustive,
The History of British India
(1817).

John Stuart Mill was just 11 when his father’s
magnum opus
was laid before the world. But his training to be one of the propagators of felicity had begun much earlier. Since a child’s mind was a sheet of smooth, soft wax, perfectly empty but perfectly receptive, the impress of instruction could not be made too early. Three was just about the right age, James decided, to begin teaching his son Greek. Initiation was Aesop’s
Fables
(in the original), swiftly followed by Plato, Herodotus (all of it) and Xenophon. Arithmetic was a lot less fun, but by eight there was always Latin, Nathaniel Hooke’s
The Roman History from the Building of Rome to the Commonwealth
(1738–71) and John Millar’s
An Historical View of the English Government from the Settlement of the Saxons to the Accession of the House of Stewart
(1787) for light relief. The Mills lived in the favourite suburb of radical Improvers and feminists, Dr Price’s Stoke Newington Green. And it was while striding around the Green and on longer walks into what was still countryside that Mill senior drilled his 10-year-old in differential calculus, Roman agrarian laws and the analysis of Greek rhetoric. When his father was appointed to his post with the East India Company, it was John Stuart’s turn to teach his younger siblings. In his spare time between reading the proofs of his father’s
The History of British India
and being put through political economy and logic, he managed to smuggle in a little literature – mostly Shakespeare. At 14 he was allowed a trip to the Château Pompignon near Toulouse; but when he returned, his father’s relentlessly intensive instruction continued.