My Great Grandmother Read for Courage

Florence Fuller, “Inseparables” (circa 1900)

 Friday

I’m currently in Maine, where my mother, Julia and I are visiting our Maine cottage and also an old friend who turns 100 in August. Julia and I have been reading over some of the old family histories in the cottage, including the memoirs of Edwin Fulcher and Eliza Scott, the parents of my grandmother Elinor Fulcher Bates. (In other words, my great grandfather and mother on my father’s side.)

As this is a literature blog, I won’t regale you with the stories of Edwin’s encounters with Cecil Rhodes, the great imperialist, when he was an accountant in a Kimberly diamond mine. (As the keeper of the books, he saw up close a couple of Rhodes’s shady dealings as he gained monopolistic control of Kimberly’s diamond and gold mines.) Nor will I report on the many, many business failures, bouts of sickness, and deaths that Edwin and and Eliza suffered as they made their way from England to America to South Africa and back to America, ending up finally in Evanston, Illinois.

I will recount, however, how literature entered their lives, especially Eliza’s. From her memoir I have a better sense of the origins of my own love of literature, and I am also moved by how she used literature to get through tough times.

The first literary connection is one that Eliza doesn’t make but that the rest of us will. Her father, my great great grandfather Thomas Scott, was the manager of Lord Bunbury’s estate. Yes Bunbury, which is also the name of Algernon’s fictional friend in The Importance of Being Earnest.

I assume Wilde chose the name because it sounds so whimsical. Also, given that “buns” and “bum” are slang for buttocks and Algernon’s excursions into the country can be read as an account of life in the closet, “bunburying” hints at anal sex.

I don’t know if Wilde knew the actual Lord Bunbury, but in her memoir Eliza says that other significant figures visited him, including novelist Charles Kingsley:

Some distinguished peopled visited the Bunburys, whom it was Father’s privilege to meet, amongst them Lord Napier, Sir Charles Dyell, geologist, and Charles Kingsley, who usually took a walk with Father, and preached at our church if he was there over Sunday. He had a nervous twitch in one eye, which resembled a wink, and caused much amusement to the young members of the congregation. Our Vicar had been one of his curates, and had imbibed many of his broadminded views. We all enjoyed Mr. Kingsley’s books, especially Water Babies and Two Years Ago. We were too young to appreciate Hypatia and other works.

Eliza was a sickly child and so did not begin her formal education until age 12. Her recently widowed Aunt Polly, however, taught her how to read, and Eliza also picked up some knowledge from her brothers. She later drew on the protagonist of George Eliot’s Mill on the Floss to describe life at that time:

I picked up a little knowledge from helping the boys with their work. They went to a private school at Bury, being driven there by Trudgett in the mornings and walking home. They had to memorize a good deal, and were glad for me to hear them repeat their assignments. I also enjoyed working at their arithmetic problems. When, some years later I read The Mill on the Floss I saw myself in Maggie Tulliver, running wild, thinking my own thoughts imaginative and somewhat secretive, delighted when the boys would let me follow on one of their bird nest or rabbit hunting expeditions, and playing cricket. I could climb trees, walk on high walls, jump as high as any of them, and run as fast, but only for a short distance, a pain in my side always interfering with my reaching the goal.

Unfortunately, tragedy was ahead for little Eliza. Her mother was sickly and, when she was undergoing confinement following a pregnancy, she and her daughter read Susan Warner’s Wide, Wide World (1850), described by Wikipedia as “a work of sentimentalism based on the life of young Ellen Montgomery.” The plot parallels the trials that Eliza was about to undergo:

The story begins with Ellen’s happy life being disrupted by the fact that her mother is very ill and her father must take her to Europe, requiring Ellen to leave home to live with an almost-unknown aunt. Though Ellen tries to act strong for her mother’s sake, she is devastated and can find solace in nothing.

Eventually the day comes when Ellen must say goodbye to her mother and travel in the company of strangers to her aunt’s home. Unfortunately these strangers are unkind to Ellen and she tries to leave the boat on which they are traveling. An old man sees Ellen crying and tells her to trust in God. He teaches her about being a Christian, as her mother had done, and asks her if she is ready to give her heart to Jesus.

Ellen’s mother ultimately dies and so did Eliza’s. Eliza’s mother may have had a premonition that this would happen and used Wide, Wide World to prepare her daughter to be brave and not to cry during her coming ordeals:

On my 10^th birthday, Mother gave me the Wide, Wide World and as a new baby arrived a few days later, she and I read it together while she was confined to her room. We both thought Ellen cried too much, but I thought she was very wonderful. Mother did not get well and during the summer went to the seashore for awhile, Nellie coming home from boarding school to help care for the little ones.

 Both Eliza’s mother and her baby brother died so Thomas Scott hired a housekeeper, Mrs. Wyburn, to raise the children. Eliza wishes that he had married Aunt Polly but alludes to a law, annulled a few years later, forbidding a widower to marry his wife’s sister. (The law is mentioned in one of Trollope’s novels.) There was a clash between Mrs. Wyburn and Aunt Polly, and Eliza turned to books to help get her through the emotional turmoil:

Miss Wyburn’s influence upon me was not good. She took an unreasonable and entirely unwarranted dislike to Aunt Polly, and tried to set me against her. Nellie, Richard and Robert being away at school, I had no companions of my own age, excepting in vacations. I had little to do that was interesting. I read all the books I could get and amused myself with the young children, but had to spend most of the time with Miss Wyburn, for whom for diplomatic reasons I pretended to have an affection, which I did not feel. I really mistrusted and disliked her, and was becoming as deceitful as she, but Charlotte Yonge’s books, particularly The Daisy Chain and The Heir of Redcliffe, our good Vicar’s preparatory lessons before confirmation, and later Miss Drake’s influence [a teacher] helped restore me to normal thinking. Miss Yonge’s characters were human and natural, with faults which by persistent efforts, though with frequent failures, they were finally able to overcome. They lived with me and were a continual inspiration. I was also reveling in Dickens’ and George MacDonald’s books at that time.

Like Susan Warner, Charlotte Yonge was a sentimental novelist whose stories are filled with courageous, principled, and unacknowledged sacrifice. The Daisy Chain features a bookish heroine while The Heir of Redcliffe (1853), a favorite of the March sisters in Little Women, has an heir (Guy) who works secretly to pay off the debts of a profligate uncle. He unjustifiably gets the reputation of being a gambler, which keeps him from getting the heroine. Then, when he is cleared and they marry and go off to Italy on a honeymoon, he nurses his cousin Philip back to health—the man who spread the nasty rumor in the first place—but dies in the process. Philip inherits his estate but is so moved by what Guy has done that he reforms. The novel was supposedly the most popular of the age, surpassing Dickens and Thackeray.

I suspect that Yonge helped my great grandmother to see her own suffering as noble and to rise above resentment and a sense of injustice.

Eliza mentions one other work. Her father, with the three older children in boarding school, couldn’t afford to send Eliza there as well. “He seemed to think that I could acquire sufficient knowledge by reading and observation as he had done,” Eliza observes.

She therefore applied herself to memorizing poetry and at one point recited for him all eleven verses of Tennyson’s May Queen , the tenor of which you can get from the second stanza:

There’s many a black, black eye, they say, but none so bright as mine;
There’s Margaret and Mary, there’s Kate and Caroline:
But none so fair as little Alice in all the land they say,
So I’m to be Queen o’ the May, mother, I’m to be Queen o’ the May.

I can imagine Eliza reciting this to cheer him up and assure him (and herself) that she can put a bright face on things. Between Ellen Montgomery, Maggie Tulliver, and Alice the May Queen, one sees Eliza forging an identity for herself as a strong woman in the face of adversity.

I’ll report next week on how this strong identity, along with Jane Eyre, helped her leave her home to become a governess.