Two-Way Mirror

by Fiona Sampson

  Unlanded money finds itself in something of a hurry to join the action, and Ba’s father is no exception. His wealth is prodigious, but it’s been generated by international trade and is held largely offshore. The precisely calibrated English class system will be only too happy to point this out to him as an inferiority. What’s more, he was born abroad, in Jamaica. So this Herefordshire estate called Hope End is the first British property he’s owned. It came on the market last autumn and, tucked away in the heartlands of rural Britain, seems to us now a surprising choice for a merchant with an eye on the rest of the world. But after some prevarication – and hard bargaining – Ba’s father has bought nearly 500 acres, with a Big House, farm buildings and cottages, ‘to make yourself, Brother & Sister & dear Mamma happy’, as he tells her. It sounds like a fairy tale, and in a way it is; though as in any fairy tale not everything’s quite as it appears. The debt of happiness ‘dear Puss’ must repay her father will eventually come to seem outsized, even grotesque.

  But today’s four-year-old is too young to understand emotional blackmail – and too busy being excited about a forthcoming trip to the seaside. ‘My dear Grandmama, I love you very much’, she writes in mid-July. ‘We are going to the sea on Monday week, we are all very sorry you are gone away, you had better come with us to the sea, we all send you kisses.’ Impetuous and loving, this note is about as far from a duty letter as any small child could get. Its delighted recipient responds:

  This Morning post brought me a Letter very prettily written indeed for a little Girl of four Years old, so pleas’d am I, that I cou’d not let the day pass without writing a few lines, to thank my Beloved Child […] I am so proud of my Letter that it shall be put in a very careful place, till my Darling pet grows up.

  And Papa’s mother continues: ‘Ask Bro when I am to have a Letter from him, I hope he is a good Boy, & attends to his Book—He will never be a Man till he does—.’

  Which is striving, ambitious stuff, since Ba’s little brother is only three; but also a form of affection. This is a self-made family, its style noticeably modern, and nicknames are intimate currency. Three-year-old Edward, who as eldest son confusingly bears what is also his father’s and indeed his great-grandfather’s name, will be ‘Bro’ for the rest of his life. ‘Ba’ was christened Elizabeth after Grandmama, whose own nickname is ‘Bessey’. The children’s baby sister Henrietta is ‘Addles’, and the nine siblings yet to be born will include ‘Stormie’ (Charles, who was born in a storm) and ‘Daisy’, real name Alfred (perhaps from ‘Oops a daisy’?). In their parents’ generation, Papa’s sister Sarah, dead at twelve, remains forever ‘Pinkie’, while on their mother’s side unmarried Aunt Arabella is ‘Bummy’.

  It’s all mortar for the life being built at Hope End. We get a first glimpse of Ba’s new home in a letter her father sends her:

  This Morng we again went to Hope-End and compleated our tour of it, besides looking thro’ the center of the Estate and examining the Cottages; We shall go tomorrow to inspect the Timber &c—The more I see of the Property the more I like it […] There is no fruit whatever this year in the Garden, but should we be fortunate enough to be here next year no doubt we shall have abundance.

  Since at this point his little daughter is just three, of course he’s really addressing Mamma, who’ll be reading the letter aloud. Behind the rather sweet, fatherly gesture we catch sight of something else; something evasive, even controlling. Papa is not actually consulting his wife over this life-changing move.

  In fact, the splendidly if repetitively named Edward Barrett Moulton-Barrett knows perfectly well that – after almost a year first in west London and then with her mother-in-law in Surrey – his wife would prefer to go back ‘to the dear North’, where she grew up and where the couple first settled. Ba’s Mamma was born Mary Graham-Clarke in Newcastle upon Tyne in 1781, and raised, partly in the city centre and partly a couple of miles away at stately Kenton Lodge in Gosforth, the eldest child of a wealthy industrialist: John Graham-Clarke’s town house at 14 Pilgrim Street, and his many mercantile concerns including breweries, sugar refineries and a small fleet of ocean-going ships, have become city landmarks. He may share the civic pride that created the elegant Grainger Town terraces and mighty warehouses of eighteenth-century Newcastle, but his money is newer still. He has other local businesses too, including a flax mill, a colliery and a glassworks, but his international trade is built on the daily luxuries, beer and sugar, that entrepreneurs like him are now establishing at the heart of British life.

  However, on the July afternoon when Ba surveys her new home, Graham-Clarke is already seventy-three. Closer to his homesick daughter’s centre of emotional gravity are her six surviving siblings and her mother Arabella, a lively woman with artistic leanings who is two decades her husband’s junior. Besides, Graham-Clarke has little leisure for playing the family man; his hands are full becoming an industrialist. Yet he’s not entirely self-made. Part of his wealth comes from his wife’s dowry and inheritance, and in his twenties he made an equally advantageous first marriage. Only recently arrived in the city, he married a wealthy widow called Elizabeth Rutter, at a stroke acquiring her late husband’s highly successful brewing business and effectively ‘marrying-in’ to her in-laws, highly respected in Newcastle for decades. And perhaps the key legacy is one he received a quarter century ago when, at the age of fifty, plain John Graham found himself able, by dint of taking the double-barrel ‘Clarke’, to inherit from an uncle who wanted his name to continue with his money.

  Easy money: dirty money. Beyond the peaceful Herefordshire ‘Hills, vales, woods, netted in a silver mist / Farms, granges, doubled up among the hills; / and cattle grazing in the watered vales’, that sequester Ba and her parents, on the other side of the Atlantic, lies another very different set of estates. At his death eight years from now, John Graham-Clarke will have interests in at least thirteen Jamaican sugar plantations, where he holds enslaved more than six hundred men and women with their children. And these ugly figures are just a snapshot. Ba’s maternal grandfather doesn’t simply ‘own’ and exploit these people, he ‘buys’ them from slavers too. By 1810 steam-driven sugar mills have been introduced in the Caribbean, but cane remains labour intensive. It takes around 350 man-hours and over thirty bullock-pair hours to plant a single hectare, and 990 man-hours to harvest one tonne. People are worked to death on the Jamaican plantations and, in the dark arithmetic of slavers, must be replaced. It’s true that by the time Ba arrives at Hope End Britain has passed the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act (1807), but in practice the slave trade won’t be stamped out in the Caribbean until 1811.

  Nothing mitigates her grandfather’s culpability. A strategic, hard-headed ex-militiaman from East Yorkshire, Graham-Clarke was neither young nor unworldly by the time he acquired his Jamaican estates. His single visit to that island, in the early 1790s, consolidated relationships with other planter families, but produced no gesture of remission or compassion for his enslaved labour. For nineteenth-century commercial ambition is shameless. Enormous wealth is already being generated for British industrialists, even those who own no slaves and pillage no colonies, by indentured and child labour in factories, mills and mines. Unlike plantation slavery, this on-shore exploitation offers no fig leaf of invisibility to those who profit from it: conditions in local factories and mills like the ones Graham-Clarke owns are starkly visible. Yet they persist. Seamen, including his own crews, routinely brave danger, floggings and near starvation, even though the Tyne dockside, where they tie up, runs right by the city centre. In 1810 this is still small enough for rich and poor to live within sight, sound and smell of each other. Even the vertical slums around Black Gate are less than half a mile from Graham-Clarke’s Pilgrim Street home. It’s in this brutally desensitising era that businesses like his are beginning to flex global muscle.

  Since his alliance-building visit to the Caribbean, Ba’s dynamic grandfather has become a key English contact for many Jamaican plantation owne
rs. Among them are the Barretts of Cinnamon Hill. Graham-Clarke became important to this family in 1792, when paterfamilias Edward Barrett saw his daughter Elizabeth’s offspring, Sarah, Edward and Samuel, off to England for their education. The grandchildren had become his responsibility when their father, Charles Moulton, left them. Elizabeth soon followed her children to London. But there – though her boys were under the legal guardianship of James Scarlett, the brilliant Jamaican-born lawyer and family friend who would become Lord Abinger – she was in effect a woman alone, since she was accompanied only by her best friend, Mary Trepsack. A family dependent whose father was an impoverished planter and mother a slave, ‘Treppy’ will remain a central, much-loved Barrett figure right through the lives of Elizabeth Moulton’s grandchildren – as her loving nickname indicates. But she’s a woman of mixed heritage and relatively poorly off, and in the world of men she has even less power than her friend.

  By contrast, Graham-Clarke was well-placed to become de facto mentor to the wealthy Barrett boys. Edward, the elder son and so primary heir, fell into the habit of staying at Pilgrim Street. Perhaps he was already falling for the family’s eldest girl, Mary. Although four years her junior, before he even came of age he’d decided to marry her. His youth meant that the marriage needed family approval, but this presented no problem, for Barrett wealth represented a dynastic opportunity for Graham-Clarke. Indeed in some lights, Mary appears a bit like a honeytrap set for the young, fatherless heir.

  Whatever the case, Edward Barrett Moulton-Barrett soon proved himself no pushover. Realising his new father-in-law had stopped paying for sugar received from the Barrett plantations, in November 1807 he instructed Philip Scarlett, his attorney and the brother of his actual legal guardian, to refuse Graham-Clarke further shipments: ‘He has not for the last two years settled our account […] it is an unpleasant business and has given me great uneasiness but it is a duty I owe to myself […] I do not wish this to be known.’ A peculiarly intimate trust, in a man who must have been a kind of father figure to the youth, had been broken; and with it, perhaps, some vital faith in human nature. Just three months later, the twenty-two-year-old gave his County Durham landlord notice and moved his new family to the other end of England.

  I do not wish this to be known. It is possible that this delicacy means Mary has no idea why her husband moved abruptly south. But she seems to have been raised biddable. As she grows up, Ba will find her mother’s apparent submissiveness infuriating, and even in maturity she’ll give no sign of understanding that it might have been strategic; recalling only something that sounds like passive aggression – ‘A sweet, gentle nature, which the thunder a little turned from its sweetness—as when it turns milk—One of those women who never can resist,—but, in submitting & bowing on themselves, make a mark, a plait, within, .. a sign of suffering’ – and certain that no such feminine ‘sweetness’ forms part of her own character. How ironic that by the time she writes this she’ll be making similar displays of tractability herself.

  But perhaps our mothers are the people we understand least. Mary Moulton-Barrett is in fact a strong woman, physically able to bear twelve children and determined against the tide of the times to ensure the intellectual development of her eldest daughter – and indeed all her brood. Yet maybe it is a tendency to yield that causes her to appear sanguine about slavery, gossiping that ‘I rejoice to hear that Mrs T. has had a letter from James, giving an excellent account of himself, of the crops, & of his happiness in [the plantation at] Mont Serrat.’

  Is this a domestic survival technique, in an era when women face economic, and so physical, destruction if they cease to comply with their menfolk? And what if it is – can there be a sliding scale of complicity? In 1810, more than 10 per cent of wealthy Britons are profiting from slavery: money that will never return to the enslaved people who created it, but remains in the British economy into the twenty-first century. Over two centuries on, the murky waters of the Atlantic slave trade lap at all our feet, whether as deficit or profit. Even four-year-old Ba is implicated, on that sunny hilltop where we could imagine her by now sitting down. She just doesn’t know it yet.

  But she does absorb the lesson of the surrounding inequality. Half a century from now, she’ll indict the false promise of rural beauty created by exploitation:

  And cottage-gardens smelling everywhere,

  Confused with smell of orchards. ‘See,’ I said,

  […]

  ‘Who says there’s nothing for the poor and vile

  Save poverty and wickedness? Behold!’

  […]

  But we indeed who call things good and fair,

  The evil is upon us while we speak.

  In July 1810 the view from Hope End is indeed ‘good and fair’ with orchards and hop yards that will later earn a local MP the sobriquet Member for Cider. Arable yields are high. Red-flanked, white-faced Hereford cattle dot the countryside like toys. But these model landscapes tell a kind of lie. Despite a good climate and rich, loamy soil, this is a poor county. Herefordshire’s farm labourers are the majority population, and most earn less than they need to survive. Like other forms of wealth, agricultural profits flow up, not down, the social scale. Besides, the region’s remote. The shallow, seasonal River Wye, hardly even a glint from the Hope End viewpoint, can’t compete with the industrial arteries constructed during the recent ‘canal mania’. Turnpike roads are excellent for the new Post Routes but too expensive for agricultural transport, and so old drovers’ tracks still crisscross the county, their green lanes crowding with up to four hundred beasts at a time.

  But mostly it’s not drover’s cries but the tap-tapping of building works that float up to Ba’s summer vantage point. In the valley below her, an ostentatious new mansion is under construction. Work started almost as soon as the family arrived last autumn. Already, she and her lucky siblings have the run of:

  a lawn in front, with a fine sheet of water stored with fish, fed by springs, cascade etc. […] extensive gravelled walks, through a shrubbery ornamented with magnificent timber trees, thriving evergreens, shrubs and flower borders; […] a productive walled garden, clothed with choice fruit trees […] grapery &c. […] and upwards of four hundred and seventy acres of excellent grass and meadow, arable, woodland, hop ground and plantation.

  By her own account she becomes a tomboy, who:

  could run rapidly & leap high,—and […] had very strong wrists. […] She cd. climb too pretty well up trees—[…] And she liked fishing, though she did not often catch anything. And best of all, though she cared for bows & arrows, & squirts & popguns—best of all, did she like riding … galloping till the trees raced past her & the cloud were shot over her head.

  So rambunctious is she that by the time she turns eleven Grandmama worries about her modesty:

  I have sent you six slips to wear under your frocks, you are now too big to go without them […] Now My darling Child you must allow me to say I think you are too BIG to attempt fighting with BRO […] I have seen him very rude & boisterous with you & Harry He is now a big Boy fit only to associate with Boys NOT GIRLS.

  But this outdoor life is conspicuously healthier, particularly for the girls, than the conventional alternative; besides, Hope End is far enough from even the nearest cities, Hereford and Gloucester, to escape the dangerous infections bred by overcrowding or dirty water. So the death of one of the children is met with appalled dismay. When four-year-old Mary dies suddenly in March 1814, ten days after Ba’s eighth birthday, the family are stunned. Papa even lets them all make a rare, extended trip north to recover. They visit his brother, Ba’s Uncle Sam, in Yorkshire for a month, and go on to his parents-in-law in Newcastle for another three. After this period of shocked mourning the subject is closed and the family continue to thrive. But it’s the first cold draught from outside the hothouse.

  Ba is eleven when that hothouse, Hope End mansion, is completed. Family portraits from this time show a tumbling flock of children, all sporting id
entical, gender-neutral page-boy haircuts, and dressed alike in shift frocks with empire waistlines. The effect is of the freedom and benign mischief of putti; there’s even a poodle playmate called Havannah. Only Ba already has her characteristically rounded cheeks and chin, her pout, and somewhat darker hair.

  By the time she’s twelve, the expression captured by the well-known portraitist William Artaud has become meltingly sweet. It’s a good look with which to disarm critics of female precocity. Though he’s accustomed to spending time with distinguished and highly able members of the establishment, Artaud certainly falls for it. He tells a friend that Ba:

  possess[es] an extraordinary genius. She has a command of language and ideas that is quite marvellous and her versyfication is sufficiently varied and harmonious. She absorbs the learned languages as freely and as rapidly as chalk does water […]. She has all the engenuous simplicity and airy volatility of spirits of the most sprightly of her age and sex. […] She is idolized by her parents and yet such is the excellence of her disposition that I think she is not in the least danger of being spoilt.

  Perhaps the girl on the edge of puberty wears her precocity lightly because she’s used to it. With her mother’s guidance, since she was eight she has been reading big-scale texts full of ethical argument: Alexander Pope’s translation of the Iliad, Shakespeare’s Othello and The Tempest, passages from John Milton’s Paradise Lost. She was also eight when she received a ‘ten shilling note’ to reward ‘some lines on virtue’ written for her father. His delighted response addressed her as ‘Poet-Laureat of Hope-End’; she took this compliment seriously, as only a little girl who adores her Papa can, and resolved that she would be a proper Laureate, producing odes for every domestic occasion.

  Unlike most eight-year-olds though, Ba kept her resolution. She wrote a second poem to her father just three days later. The next month saw verses for her mother’s birthday and for Henrietta (‘But now you have a horrid cold, / And in a ugly night cap you are rolled’), and a sonnet celebrating the ‘recovery of little Arabella, from a dangerous illness’: