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MISS JEWSBURYíS LETTERS

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PRINTED BY
SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE
LONDON

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SELECTIONS FROM THE LETTERS

OF

GERALDINE ENDSOR JEWSBURY

TO

JANE WELSH CARLYLE

EDITED BY

MRS. ALEXANDER IRELAND

AUTHOR OF "THE LIFE OF JANE WELSH CARLYLE"

PREFACED BY
A MONOGRAPH ON MISS JEWSBURY, BY THE EDITOR

LONDON
LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO.
AND NEW YORK: 15 EAST 16^th STREET
1892

All rights reserved

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INTRODUCTION

Geraldine Endsor Jewsbury was born at Measham, in Derbyshire, in the year 1812. Her father, Thomas Jewsbury, left Derbyshire, where business had not prospered well with him, about 1818, and settled in Manchester as a merchant, uniting with this business the duties of agent to the West of England Insurance Company. The family was rather large, the means rather narrow. One infant was born after the removal from Derbyshire. This was Sydney, who afterwards went to sea. The oldest of the family was Maria, afterwards Mrs. Fletcher, and she was nearly nineteen years of age when the heavy cares of the orphaned family devolved upon her. The latest born, Sydney, was but a month old at the time; Geraldine, about six years of age; and there were three other sons - Henry, Tom, and Frank. It was not until 1832 that Geraldine - the bright, fairy-like girl - was placed in the position which her sister vacated on her marriage with Mr. Fletcher; and in 1840, when Mr. Thomas Jewsbury died, and the household was broken up, Geraldine became housekeeper to her brother Frank, remaining with him until his marriage, which took place in 1853.

There was always a strong bond between the brother and sister - one that neither marriage, nor separation, nor death could alter. There had been a terrible shock to Geraldine's affections in the death of Mrs. Fletcher, her dear and only sister, who had acted a mother's part to her, and who had died in India when the sensitive Geraldine was only in her twenty-first year. So there was all the more love for Frank, and he had it! Geraldine's nature was rich in affection, sparkling with light, rapid in forming conclusions, which were not always of the wisest. Intellectually [Page viii]  she was a man, but the heart within her was as womanly as ever daughter of Eve could boast. This combination of keen intellect and truly feminine heart - this being, defenceless and tender on the one hand, and strong enough to cleave the very rocks on the other - could never, in truth, grow old, never become hardened by the world's coarse realities. She was generous to a fault, and noble-hearted, yet mentally searching and sounding depths which it were happier for the average woman to leave unsounded.

It was in 1841 that Miss Jewsbury first met the Carlyles, when the 'sage of Chelsea' pronounced her to be 'one of the most interesting young women he had seen for years - clear, delicate sense and courage looking out of her small sylph-like figure.'

He could not know how intently he was to be regarded, in time, by the 'clear, delicate sense' which animated that small frame, nor could he then be aware of the links of iron that were forged on the instant between the hearts of the two women - the sparkling, sometimes stern, Jane Welsh Carlyle, and the brilliant, but ever tender, Geraldine Jewsbury. Nor could he know how the one was to uphold the other and turn to her, nor how the two were to exchange letters that were almost love-letters through the long years that were to come. He knew not of the passionate thirst that was unsatisfied in these two fiery natures, nor how each would, at times, look to the other for a straw to hold on to in the tempest of Life. For Miss Jewsbury had cast off ancient anchors, and was drifting wildly about in search of some safe mooring, and Mrs. Carlyle had long tossed on a dark and stormy sea, and knew not peace. A friendship of nearly half a century ended - or, shall I say, only fully began - with Mrs. Carlyle's death. Miss Jewsbury stood by the narrow bed in St. George's Hospital where the friend of her heart lay, struck down by death. On that very night [Page ix]  they were to have met in bright and congenial society. 'The book was closed, when she had read but a page.' It was in 1854 that Miss Jewsbury removed to Chelsea, to be near her friend, and the letters show that the two were never apart in spirit. When Mrs. Carlyle died, in April, 1866, it was to Geraldine Jewsbury that the stricken man turned for sympathy. She, amongst all women, he felt, could and would give it. And though he characterised some of her dear remembrances of her lost friend as 'apocryphal,' he well knew that the love that had bound the two women together was one in which he had been unable to share, by reason of the lesser quantity of lovableness in himself, or its superabundance in them, or his faulty and mistaken estimate of many things - all silent when the stern lips of Jane Welsh Carlyle had closed in majestic repose upon the secrets of a woman's heart.

Miss Jewsbury had most fascinating conversational powers, a fine sense of humour, the most winning of manners, and a generous heart, which often led her straight on until, metaphorically, she dashed her head against a wall. Her sojourn with her brother Frank, before his marriage, was marked by the most delicious little parties, where literary men, and women too, felt at ease in the genial warmth, and, as Carlyle says, 'The burden was rolled from every heart.' But, with all these charming qualities, Miss Jewsbury was distinctly a literary woman, and did much hard work. Amongst her friends was W. E. Forster, with whom she visited Paris during the revolutionary excitement in May, 1848. She was a favourite with Sydney, Lady Morgan, with the late Lady Llanover, with Vicountess Combermere, and with many women of literary and artistic taste, who revelled in her bright presence. It was at her suggestion that Lady Martin (Helen Faucit) published her 'Female Characters of Shakespeare,' for which all students are so [Page x]  grateful. She assisted Lady Morgan in the arrangement of her 'Memoirs,' which, later on - namely, in 1868 - were edited and published by William Hepworth Dixon.

But this original nature of hers could not for ever find satisfaction in 'arranging' other people's brain-products. Her own brain teemed with half-formed plots and novels. In 1845 she published her first novel, 'Zoe, the History of Two Lives,' and gave a presentment of Mirabeau as a lover of her heroine. The work was immature in parts, startling and unique here and there. In 1848 came the publication of 'The Half-Sisters,' which Miss Jewsbury wanted to dedicate to Jane Welsh Carlyle. The readers of Carlyle literature will remember how this wish on her part was received. Her next tale was written for the Manchester Examiner and Times in 1851, and afterwards appeared in book-form. It was called 'Marian Withers,' and dealt ably with much that bears on life in the Lancashire manufacturing districts. There are crudities in the book, strange 'solutions of continuity,' but much that goes to the heart, and much promise of greater things. Her next novel (a little disappointing), dated 1855, was 'Constance Herbert,' and the following year saw the publication of a truly well-told tale, 'The Sorrows of Gentility,' which may be read and re-read with advantage. Her last novel was 'Right or Wrong,' published in 1859. This list, however, does not nearly represent the extent of her literary labours. She had done other work; had brought out two stories for children: 'The History of an Adopted Child' in 1852, and 'Angelo, or the Pine Forest in the Alps' in 1855; many contributions she had sent to Mr. S. C. Hall's 'Juvenile Budget'; and, what was more significant, she had come into relations with the editor of 'Household Words.' The following letter, of which the original has been in my hands, will [Page xi]  show in what very high esteem Miss Jewsbury stood with Charles Dickens: -

Copy of Letter from Charles Dickens to Miss Jewsbury.

'Devonshire Terrace, London: Feb. 1850.

'Dear Miss Jewsbury, - I make no apology for addressing you thus, for I am a reader of yours, and I hope I have that knowledge of you which may justify a frank approach.

'I don't know whether you know that I am about to commence, at the end of next month, a new, cheap, weekly literary journal, intended to displace some of the offensive matter in that form now afloat. Be this as it may, I am steadily and actively engaged in such a design, and if I could induce you to write any papers or short stories for it I should, I sincerely assure you, set great store by your help, and be much gratified in having it.

'I purpose publishing none of the writers' names - neither my own nor any others - in the periodical itself, but to give to these parents, in such a case as yours, the power of reclaiming their own children, after a certain time, if they should desire to do so. The payment, of course, is prompt and good. In no respect, I trust, would you have to regret forming the connection, and in all respects I should be truly earnest in my desire to make it most agreeable to you.

'If I were to write a whole book on the subject I hardly know that I could do more than impress you with a sense of my being in want of your aid, because I estimate its value highly. I have a kind of confidence that I cannot mean to do that so steadfastly without doing it somehow, even in this short note. Therefore I leave it here.

'Believe me, faithfully yours,

'Charles Dickens.

'Miss Jewsbury.'

[Page xii] 

It was little to be wondered at that these two quick and ardent natures understood each other; but the tribute here paid by Dickens to Miss Jewsbury as a writer stands quite apart from the fascination of her womanly nature, which shed a 'glamour' over men and women alike, and bore with it a sort of enchanted atmosphere - not valuable to the caterer for a weekly journal, though delightful in social life. Miss Jewsbury had an ambition - it was to become a journalist, to move in the world of letters as a man, a good comrade, 'one of the craft.' Except in the case of her close friendship with Jane Welsh Carlyle, the tie of friendship with women did not fetter her, whilst the easy triumph of having a man always in love with her - or, more correctly speaking, several men at a time - did not fill up the wants of a nature which had wings and wished to fly. But she was heavily handicapped in the race. For, added to the fact that she was a woman and not a man - a fact by no means to be overlooked, since woman cannot have, and almost ought not to have, what sportsmen call the 'staying' qualities - she was of a most delicately-balanced nervous constitution, and entirely unfitted to do her 'tale of bricks' in the ordinary 'hack'-fashion of the work so regularly and automatically done by male workers. Her slender frame, vibrating with every breeze that blew, was absolutely incapable of the drudgery demanded of a professional literary woman the moment she pretends to enter the lists on an equal footing with man. All her bright abilities failed her at times. And no wonder! As a well-known writer has said, 'what is woman, regarded as a literary worker? Simply an inferior animal, educated by an inferior animal. And what is man? He is a superior being, educated by a superior being. So how can they ever be equal on that particular line?' The theory meets with a constant and crushing contradiction in exceptional cases; [Page xiii]  but so much of it is true, that a woman, though she may in certain circumstances understand better, go more rapidly to work, achieve faster, in mental labour of a high order than can her fellow man, is yet liable to collapses, eclipses, failures of power, sad to behold, unfitting her for the steady strain of ever-recurring work, which to the average man is the very 'breath of his nostrils,' and which holds him up while his gentler companion must sink by the wayside, overpowered by some nervous trouble or other complication, which reminds her that, after all, she is a woman. Journalism is rather a stern occupation; its demands are of the character of the celebrated 'laws of the Medes and Persians,' and their fulfilment is wholly incompatible with a migraine or a 'day off,' unless officially permitted. Yet did this delicate woman for many years contribute constantly to the 'Athenæum' - reviewing in its pages, and wielding her strong and subtle pen in various directions, independently of her own books. So she worked, she loved, and cast a colour of rose over other and sadder lives; she wept, and dried her tears, and she arose again, to work and love once more - and what further fulfilment of a woman's true calling can be looked for in one for whom the closer, more real calling - that of wife and mother - seemed out of reach? The strong sympathy Miss Jewsbury had with her brother Frank was touching in its undisguised reality. While he was yet unmarried that bright home at Greenheys, Manchester, attracted many shining spirits - many who could shine there, and not elsewhere. Many an overladen heart laid down its 'carking care' on that genial threshold, and, later on, when Miss Jewsbury had left Manchester and gone to reside in London - near that friend of her heart, Jane Welsh Carlyle - she would still come to visit Frank, and the brother and sister seemed, even [Page xiv]  to the outer world, to forget the years and the circumstances which had placed their lots in different counties. Geraldine Jewsbury had a pretty and harmless pleasure in shocking the feelings of 'Mrs. Grundy,' and when her married brother, who was somewhat precise in his expressions and modes of thinking, met her on neutral ground - dining, perhaps, in the house of some common friend - the lively lady would deliberately give rein to her sparkling wit in remarks addressed either directly to her brother, and calculated to make his hair stand on end, or with a graceful naïveté make them audibly to her hostess, for the benefit of the whole company, and display the most impenetrable unconsciousness of what she had done!

Here was a nature with which Mrs. Carlyle, endowed by heredity with a decided strain of 'Bohemianism,' could sympathise keenly enough. The small conventionalities and meaningless proprieties of daily life were as nothing in the eyes of these two. They could laugh together, they could utter to each other the scathing judgments on men and things which neither really felt; but, what is more, they could weep together, quarrel like lovers, make peace like lovers, despair together when all was dark to both, smile when the smallest ray of sun shone on either and show each to the other the wounds which each was too proud to show to the world - those terrible hurts which a woman instinctively hides, and most anxiously from those of her own sex. Each was isolated in many ways, and the stronger one suffered more, needed more, and received more, was less able to bear sympathy, while more utterly incapable of admitting pity - that cruel would-be healer of wounds. Jane Welsh Carlyle, in a fragment of a journal kept by her, under date of March 26, 1856, says:-

'To-day it has blown knives and files - a cold, rasping, savage day excruciating for sick nerves. Dear Geraldine, [Page xv]  as though she could contend with the very elements on my behalf, brought me a bunch of violets, and a bouquet of the loveliest, most fragrant flowers. Talking with her all I have done, or could do. Have mercy upon me, O Lord, for I am weak. ... O Lord, heal me! ...'

The significant expression, 'Talking with her all I have done, or could do,' tells the tale of that dear friendship. The strangely-assorted friends could minister each to the heart-pain of the other, and on that day it may fairly be concluded that talking with Mrs. Carlyle was probably all Miss Jewsbury had done or could do!

So the matter lies in a nutshell. They could not help each other very much, in some senses, but in the highest sense of all they undoubtedly did succour each other. It was the stronger who leaned on the weaker, as we so often see in life. Mrs. Carlyle had iron and steel where Miss Jewsbury had softer substances, yet it was on Geraldine Jewsbury that the reserved woman poured some of her agony, some of her rare joy; and the attachment was no one-sided affair, if, indeed, that which deserves the name of attachment ever is so!

There are some beautiful plants which cannot grow unless trained en espalier, and such was the nature of Miss Jewsbury. Her strength lay largely in her weakness, and vice-versâ. That it should have been a woman who gave the needed support was a mere accident of fate, life, Providence - what you will!

But this was the fact, and without the feminine sympathy of Geraldine Jewsbury it may be doubted if the brave, brilliant, unhappy Mrs. Carlyle would have held on to her cross, would have stilled the beating of those restless wings which always beat against the bars, would have survived the awful moment, which comes at times to the strong, not so often to the weak - I mean the moment in which the [Page xvi]  spirit seems to ask the question of itself, 'Shall I go on or not? 'The answer to this query is by no means to be found in encyclopædias, philosophy, or reason. It must come in a heart-to-heart communion of some kind, and to Mrs. Carlyle it certainly did come in the warm, faithful, undying love of Miss Jewsbury.

There is a certain armour which proud natures are apt to rivet on themselves, from some motive or other, and which, once assumed, becomes difficult, almost impossible, to lay down, though under it a human heart may all the while be panting for relief. The struggle may or may not be apparent, but it is a desperate matter when there is felt to be no possibility of laying aside the iron links. The longed-for relaxation Mrs. Carlyle found in Miss Jewsbury, in whose intimate presence she could be herself. It was, in some sense, as though the Tragic Muse rested her head on the fairy-like bosom of an 'Ariel,' but this 'Ariel' had also depths of her own.

And the two were comforted!

It was in 1866, after Mrs. Carlyle's death, that Miss Jewsbury removed to Sevenoaks, Kent. Life had lost one of its greatest charms for her. A violent shock had been given to those mysterious links which bind men and women to life. The short time spent by that bedside in St. George's Hospital had shorn away much of what remained of the buoyancy of her keen and ardent spirit. The colour had faded from the everlasting rose, and though Miss Jewsbury still wrote at times, still retained the honouring friendship of such men as Carlyle, J. A. Froude, Huxley, and a host of other men and women who loved her, she began that slow process of ceasing to live which is one penalty brilliant natures have to pay, at times, for the superabundance of vitality granted them at an earlier period. She must have longed 'for the touch of a vanished [Page xvii]  hand, and the sound of a voice that is still.' But she said little on the subject.

Quietly she succumbed to a disease now believed by those most skilled in medical diagnosis to trace its first start very frequently to mental causes - I mean cancer. Thus smitten, she removed to a private hospital in Burwood Place, Edgware Road, London, and there went through her martyrdom - a hard, almost cruel, ending to a life with such sunny proclivities.

But care and kindness never deserted her; and among her last acts was one of loyalty, for, propped up on her bed of pain, she manfully destroyed, day by day, all the letters from Mrs. Carlyle which were in her possession, having promised that she would do so. Death stopped the process, and the dying hand left one letter, which I printed in my 'Life of Mrs. Carlyle.' In Shakespeare's words, 'The rest is silence.'

But the beloved friend had not destroyed the letters of Miss Jewsbury. She probably meant to do so, some day. She felt, perhaps, that it was hard to destroy so much love and warmth, and she had no warning given her. Hers was a summons of the sudden kind, which leaves no time for the carrying out of fixed determinations. So the letters survived, and the 'other side' can only be filled in by the heart.

During Miss Jewsbury's last illness she often asked me to tell her the little speeches of my children, any little thing about them. And I wrote, receiving and expecting no reply, in the vain hope that these innocent trivialities might beguile her of an hour of her painful change from Life to Death. For she knew the children, and had always a heart for young things. I never knew if these small chronicles of mine did her any good. I knew she had brave and noble spirits about her, who watched her last struggle [Page xviii]  with pain, and could alleviate where I could not. It was on September 23, 1880, that she folded the bright wings so sadly weighted with mortal conflict, closed her once dancing eyes, and slept in peace.

She was sixty-eight years of age at the time of her death, and was buried in Brompton Cemetery, in Lady Morgan's vault. A fitting epitaph for her would have been, 'Qui multum amavit,' for truly she loved much and well.

It is Dickens who says, 'What the poor are to the poor, only God knows.'

I would say, 'What a woman is to a woman, only a woman knows.'

And with these words I close my imperfect record of a woman whom I, too, loved, and whose letters tell what she was to one of the most remarkable women the world has known - or, rather, has not known.

ANNIE E. IRELAND.

September, 1892.