Tag: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

Principles into practice: Millicent Fawcett

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Millicent FAwcettLast month, the London Mayor Sadiq Khan announced that a statue of Millicent Fawcett by the Turner prize-winning artist Gillian Wearing will be erected on Parliament Square in 2018, in time for the celebrations marking 100 years since women first secured the right to vote. Millicent Garrett Fawcett was just nineteen when she organized the first petition for women’s suffrage in 1866, even though she was too young to sign it herself. Looking back at her life in later years, she found it hard to say at what age she decided that her life would be dedicated to the fight for women’s rights. “I cannot say I became a suffragist”, she wrote. “I always was one, from the time I was old enough to think at all about the principles of Representative Government”.

One of the principles of ‘representative government’ currently under debate is how it can adapt and become a more accurate reflection of British society. The Fawcett Society, which continues the work begun by Millicent Fawcett 150 years ago and today campaigns for gender equality and women’s rights, is currently supporting the possibility of two people sharing the job of MP, as discussed in a recent article in the Huffington Post. This would enable more parents with children, carers, and disabled people to be elected (there is a marked ‘motherhood gap’ in the Commons and there are only six disabled MPs). Job-sharing for MPs is an idea supported by a range of cross-party MPs including Caroline Lucas, Dame Margaret Hodge, Sarah Wollaston and Tom Brake, who are convinced that it would help to make parliament more plural and progressive by enabling a wider range of voices to take part in debates.

Last month I went to the House of Commons to attend a committee meeting organized by the Fawcett Society. The discussion was held on the first day after the summer recess, and the high-ceilinged lobbies and halls of Westminster echoed with the shouts and laughter of MPs and others catching up with old friends and colleagues. As I walked along the oak-panelled corridor leading to the committee room, a group of dark-suited men strode by, and it was hard not to be reminded of confident senior prefects at a boys’ boarding school.

The meeting room, with its red flock wallpaper and vivid red and green carpet, was quieter, and overlooked a rainy Thames river. The host was Heather Stewart, herself a job-sharing pioneer as Political Editor of The Guardian with Anushka Asthana. The event marked the launch of the Fawcett Society pamphlet Open House? Reflections on the Possibility and Practice of MPs Job-sharing, available as a free download here. The editors of the publication, Prof Rosie Campbell and Prof Sarah Childs (both Birkbeck) were present, and discussed how their research demonstrated how MPs job-sharing could help to address, if not entirely overcome, the existing representational deficiencies in the UK House of Commons.

Also present was Clare Phipps, whose 2015 bid to stand for the Green Party, as a job-share with Sarah Cope, was rejected by Basingstoke. They took the matter to the High Court, but were not permitted to proceed with the case because the judge felt that the decision involved “important practical repercussions which this court is not equipped to evaluate”. So the responsibility was passed back to Parliament to decide how job-sharing would be done.

The House of Commons does not adapt to change easily, and there is resistance to the idea, perhaps because of the practical issues involved (although it is notable that the majority of objectors are male). “Not long ago there was a shooting range here,” Rosie Campbell reminded us. “A crèche was only introduced in 2010.” Many cite the idea as unworkable, but as Sam Smethers, the head of the Fawcett Society, pointed out at the meeting, many MPs already have other roles such as being a minister or work in another profession outside Parliament: “Stretching one person into several roles seems to me to be more challenging in terms of their performance than dividing up that role between two people.” There is plenty of evidence that job-sharing among high positions can work, and others at the meeting shared their own positive experiences.

800px-Henry_Fawcett;_Dame_Millicent_Garrett_Fawcett_(née_Garrett)_by_Ford_Madox_Brown

Sam Smethers gave a historical example of one inspiring job-sharing couple: Millicent Fawcett and her husband Henry. Henry Fawcett was a Liberal MP as well as the Professor of Political Economy at Cambridge University. Millicent Garrett was just eighteen when they met; he was 14 years older than her and completely blind, but they had a “perfect intellectual sympathy” according to Millicent’s biographer. While she was ‘his eyes’, helping him with his work, Henry Fawcett also encouraged Millicent’s own budding writing and public speaking career as a suffragist. They worked together as a team, jointly dealing with practical matters as job-sharers do, although Ford Madox Brown gives their relationship a rather more sentimental aspect in his 1872 double portrait, seen here.

Next year Millicent Fawcett’s statue will be the first woman among the eleven men already present in Parliament Square. It’s a long-overdue recognition of her lifetime’s work dedicated to giving women a voice in the democratic process. Meanwhile, the process of enabling more diversity within Parliament itself continues. As Sam Smethers says, “Let’s move on to discussing how we can make this work.”

Ann Kennedy Smith October 2017 (all rights reserved). 

Notes: “I cannot say I became a suffragist…” in ‘Dame Millicent Garrett Fawcett’ by Janet Howarth in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; David Rubinstein, A different world for women: the life of Millicent Garrett Fawcett (1991); Elizabeth Crawford Enterprising Women: The Garretts And Their Circle (Francis Boutle Publishers, 2009); The Fawcett Society at http://www.fawcett.org.uk; Ford Madox Ford’s portrait is at the National Portrait Gallery, London.

Writing Lives: the Jebb marriage

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Richard_Claverhouse_Jebb MP, known as 'Ajax'. Vanity Fair, 1904

‘Bacchylides was of placid temper; amiably tolerant; satisfied with a modest lot; not free from some tinge of that pensive melancholy which was peculiarly Ionian’ (‘The Life of Bacchylides’, Richard Claverhouse Jebb, 1905)

In 1905 Cambridge University Press published the first English translation of poems by Bacchylides, with an introductory essay about the Greek lyric poet’s life. The author and translator, Sir Richard Claverhouse Jebb, was considered by many to be the most brilliant classical scholar of his time, and his seven-volume edition of Sophocles was widely celebrated. He was Regius Professor of Greek at Cambridge University and its Member of Parliament  (where he was nicknamed ‘Ajax’ after Sophocles’s tragic hero); he accepted a British knighthood in 1900, and was appointed to the Order of Merit in June 1905. A month later he and a group of academics sailed to South Africa with the British Association to promote its scientific and literary work. It was an exhausting and demanding lecture tour, and Richard’s health was not strong. He returned to Cambridge in October with a high fever, and died on 9 December 1905 at the age of sixty-four.

‘13 December 1905, Wednesday. Funeral. Sunshine through a veil of mist… Ah, my dearest.’ (Diary of Caroline Jebb)

Richard’s death came as a shock to his American wife Caroline Jebb, then sixty-five, but her next move was obvious: she would write her husband’s biography. In this she was following in the footsteps of two of her friends, both members of her ladies’ dining club. Louise Creighton’s two-volume biography of Mandell Creighton, published in 1904, was praised by many, including Lytton Strachey. Eleanor (Nora) Sidgwick was busy co-authoring a memoir of her husband Henry, who had died in 1900. In January 1906 Caroline set to work. Richard had done much of the preparation for her already, having compiled scrapbooks in which he pasted letters, reviews, excerpts from his speeches and newspaper cuttings about himself. All she had to do was to choose what to include.

Weighty biographies of great men were plentiful throughout the nineteenth century, and in many cases they were written by people who were close to their subjects, such as a wife, sibling, son or daughter. This presented the home-grown biographer with a paradox. The ideal biography was, it was believed, conscientious in its gathering of documents and deeply respectful in tone. It should be heavy on its subject’s achievements, and light on their personal failings. Undignified anecdotes were avoided, and most of all, the biographer’s own personality and feelings should be suppressed at all times.

‘Read no history: nothing but biography, for that is life without theory’ Disraeli, 1832

To modern readers, the apparently respectful, authoritative ‘Lives‘ that fill the library’s dustier shelves reveal, on closer inspection, interesting hidden narratives about the people who wrote them. Mandell Creighton’s biography was written partly to defend his posthumous reputation from his critics and yet, almost accidentally, his widow lets slip his shortcomings as husband and father. Although Eleanor Sidgwick seems to choose humble self-effacement in her memoir of her husband (by never directly referring to herself), her absence only reinforces the reader’s sense of her supreme self-confidence in the central role she played in their shared life and work towards women’s education in Cambridge.

From her family letters we know that Caroline Jebb was a discerning and enthusiastic reader of literary biographies, and she was influenced by Leslie Stephen, the Dictionary of National Biography’s first editor and, until his death in 1904, a friend of both Jebbs. Like Stephen, she wanted to avoid what Thomas Carlyle called a ‘Dryasdust’ approach to biography, in which the traditional biographer was at pains to present his or her subject in the most reverential light. J.A. Froude’s edition of Carlyle’s posthumous Reminiscences (1881) was criticized for being too revealing about the Carlyles’ unhappy marriage, but Caroline found it fascinating. ‘I can’t help thinking Froude must have slipped in thing or two unmarked by Carlyle for publication’, she told her sister.  ‘Would I have mended his trousers while he was off amusing himself with Lady Harriet Baring? I would not.’ She had misgivings about John Cross’s ‘not altogether attractive Life’ of his famous wife but it gave her an insight into George Eliot’s ‘enormous mental industry. To read about her work took my breath away’.

In her Life and Letters of Sir Richard Claverhouse Jebb, published in 1907, Caroline did not attempt to disguise her own authorial presence or her less than perfect marriage. She places herself in the first paragraph by adding a detail that only she could know. Describing Richard’s happy childhood in County Dublin, she depicts him as a boy who was both quick-tempered and highly sensitive. ‘A look of disapproval from his mother made him miserable: to disappoint anyone who loved him was all his life intolerable to him. “Dick sorry; forgive your Dick” was a phrase not confined to childhood.’ Instantly we have an insight into the Jebbs’ marriage: his quick temper and remorse; her amused tolerance. She suppresses information about his tendency to drink too much (which contributed to his poor health), but later in the book she  is humorous about his inability to manage money. ‘He never knew how much he had with him, or counted his change at railway stations’ she writes. ‘It filled him with a sort of disgust when less high-minded people – his wife to wit – assumed the existence of dishonesty’.

We get the impression of a real marriage with real arguments, and a man who, for all his achievements, was not always easy to live with. As Richard himself wrote in 1905, even Bacchylides suffered from ‘pensive melancholy’ sometimes, and some people might have considered Sophocles’s Ajax to be a bad loser.

Sources: Caroline Jebb, Life and Letters of Sir Richard Claverhouse Jebb (Cambridge University Press, 1907); Mary Reed Bobbitt With Dearest Love to All: The Life and Letters of Lady Jebb (London: Faber, 1960); Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

An invasion of croquet

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I was not discovering that my creed was false, but that I had never really believed it.

(Leslie Stephen, National Review, October 1903)

Long before he married and had children (including writer Virginia Woolf and artist Vanessa Bell), Sir Leslie Stephen (1832-1904) was a teaching fellow at Trinity Hall, Cambridge from 1854 until 1864. During his ten years there, he wrote a series of affectionate and sardonic essays about university life, published anonymously in 1865 in a little book called Sketches From Cambridge by A. Don.

In the first chapter, Stephen describes Trinity Hall as ‘the ideal of a college’, with its ancient cloisters and courts surrounded by tall trees, organ music drifting through the air and the sounds of high-spirited young men making their way to lectures, as they had done for centuries. Now this scholarly idyll was under threat: women were encroaching on its hallowed ground.

We have a lawn of velvet turf, hitherto devoted to the orthodox game of bowls, but threatened by an invasion of croquet, for female influence is slowly but surely invading our cloisters. Whether, like the ivy that gathers upon our ancient walls, it may ultimately be fatal to their stability, remains yet to be seen.

The University of Cambridge had been an all male, religious institution since it was founded in 1513. Students and academic Fellows lived, studied, taught and dined together as celibates in their colleges (in terms of marriage at least – prostitutes were a thriving town business, apparently). Leslie Stephen claimed that during the fourteen years he spent at Cambridge, first as a student, then a fellow, the only two women he ever spoke to were his Bedder (college cleaner) and the Master’s wife.

Leslie Stephen, ca. 1860

The young Leslie Stephen was a tall, athletic figure, a keen rower and an early member of the Alpine Club; he was celebrated for his coaching of the college boat, and once walked 50 miles from Cambridge to London on a hot summer’s day, simply to have evening dinner at his club. He became politically active in the 1860s and, unlike most of his peers, a vocal supporter of Abraham Lincoln during the American Civil War. But he was also conservative in his dread at seeing women trampling on his college’s precious velvet turf, fearing that the university wives would break up Cambridge’s exclusively male scholarly world: ‘a married fellow will, I fear, oftener think more of his wife than his college’.

He gave up his Trinity Hall chapel services in 1862 following his loss of faith. “When I ceased to accept the teachings of my youth, it was not so much a process of giving up beliefs, as of discovering that I had never really believed,” he said (Maitland, 133). He decided he could no longer stay in Cambridge, with its close ties to the Church of England, and moved to London, where he began a new career as a writer and journalist, and co-founded the Dictionary of National Biography in 1885.

After his marriage to Harriet (Minny) Thackeray in 1867, Stephen also changed his mind about women at Cambridge as dramatically he had changed it about religion. He no longer believed that married fellows would mean the end of Trinity Hall, telling his friend, the Classicist Richard Claverhouse Jebb, that he was glad that the college’s ‘idiotic rule of celibacy’ was gradually being dropped. Stephen even formed a lasting friendship with Richard’s American wife, Caroline Lane Jebb, even though one of the first things Caroline did in Cambridge was to plan her very own croquet lawn.

© Ann Kennedy Smith 2021, all rights reserved

Sources: ‘Sir Leslie Stephen (1832-1904)’ Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; F.W. Maitland, The Life and Letters of Leslie Stephen (Duckworth, 1906); Leslie Stephen Sketches From Cambridge by A. Don (MacMillan, 1865); Mary Reed Bobbitt, With Dearest Love to All: The Life and Letters of Lady Jebb (Faber, 1960)

Please reference as follows: Ann Kennedy Smith, ‘Leslie Stephen: An invasion of croquet’ (date accessed)