Two-Way Mirror

by Fiona Sampson

  This diary entry is one of the first times she mentions a separation between the ‘thoughts of my heart’ and ‘the thoughts of my head’. What she does next – of course – is to share the insight with Boyd.

  Three weeks later, ‘On opening my drawer I saw the ms of Thoughts versus Words, & a Thought struck me that I wd. address & send it to Mr Boyd.’ The piece is full of confident humour and her years of study:

  Philosophical Thought [is] a personnage of retired habits and eccentric disposition […] a silly report was once spread about his children the Ideas having had the use of their eyesight from the moment of their entrance into the world. […] Poetical Thought […] is still a great dresser, & flirts away most vigorously with the Words. […] Philosophical Thought & Poetical Thought used to be good friends—but […] from the beginning there have been temporary coldnesses between them,—and they had one serious quarrel about Plato.

  The philosophical in-jokes are executed with such lightness of touch that it would be easy to miss how watertight these allusions are: Plato banned poetry from his ideal Republic, characterising it as both emotive and imitative; in the same work he produced his famous image of the cave, in which we sit seeing only the shadows of things, not the things themselves. And miss them Boyd does. Four days later he sends back a message, via his wife, saying he ‘likes the talent, and nothing else, of my “Thoughts”.’

  The trouble with a ‘mentor’ whose mind is second rate, and who has complicated motives to prevent you thriving, is that their failures constitute such poor advice: Elizabeth’s essay will appear in the prestigious pages of The Athenaeum. But not for another five years. Meanwhile, its author falls into a depression:

  I feel bitterly— as I have felt—for some time at least. […] Well! It is better far better that I should go away; better in everyway, & perhaps for everybody. Better for me, I dare say.

  Which reminds us just how adolescent Elizabeth’s preoccupation with Boyd is in tone. Still, it’s keeping real worries at bay. A dispute over Papa’s inheritance is placing the family under gathering financial pressure: the rumour is that they may even have to leave Hope End. Such a dramatic change is still for now unthinkable. Yet it would at least free Elizabeth from her impasse. For these first struggles to release herself from Boyd’s emotional double bind are doomed to fail: she’s fighting against herself.

  In fact it is Boyd who will leave the district first, three months before the Barretts’ departure, in May 1832. Yet within seven months he has brought his family to live near Elizabeth once again, and it will take her a further year and a half, until May 1834, finally to shed him. Meanwhile, the traction these two lost souls have on each other and on the people around them is astonishing. ‘Empty minded, & without real sensibility—which extends to the tastes as well as the feelings—frivolous and flippant. What a woman to be Mr Boyd’s wife!’ Elizabeth tells herself in July 1831, at a time when she’s inappropriately pressuring Boyd not to move somewhere more lively for his wife’s and daughter’s sake. Little love or sisterhood is lost between the future feminist role model and the powerless females of the Boyd household. ‘How very very very unkindly [Annie] has behaved to me! I cannot bear to think of it […] What is my sin? Having been anxious, & appeared anxious for Mr. Boyd to remain near me.’ Well: indeed. Annie is Boyd’s daughter, after all. Worse, she’s one of the competitors Boyd is happy to play off against Elizabeth: ‘Some talking of [Annie’s] coldness to me—attributed by Mr Boyd, to jealousy [of a friend]—No love—no jealousy! Some talking of Annie abstractedly […]—& my opinion of her manners.’

  Something of what Annie Boyd feels about this paternal betrayal will be revealed after her mother’s death, when she picks a Catholic to marry. Boyd is virulently and publicly anti-Catholic, and author of the fundamentalist Protestant The Fathers not Papists. In these circles, though, his prejudice is one of the more normal aspects of his behaviour. The Barretts are anti-Catholic too. If anything, they’ve shifted from the Established Church in the ‘opposite’ direction, towards Nonconformism. On Sunday mornings they attend the Anglican parish church, and on Sunday evenings the Nonconformist chapel at the park ‘Gate’, ‘Driving to church—driving back again—driving to chapel—driving back again—& prayers three times at home besides!’ as Elizabeth records.

  They’re very much in step with their times. Since its split from the Anglican Church at the end of the eighteenth century, Methodism has been developing rapidly not only in Britain but in North America and in British colonies including Jamaica, where it has become associated with the abolitionist movement. Nonconformism will continue to grow at a tremendous rate throughout Elizabeth’s lifetime. Membership of the Church of England remains an essential social passport – it’s a condition for matriculation at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, for example – but Methodism’s attractions for someone like Elizabeth include the movement’s very active engagement with ‘the Word’ through Bible study, inspiring sermons – to ‘make me glow’ as Elizabeth puts it – and its flourishing hymn-writing. Papa regularly rides ten miles or more through the orchard country of north-west Gloucestershire to Bible meetings in Newent or Redmarley D’Abitot. His eldest daughter reads ‘every day, seven chapters of Scripture’, although sometimes she finds ‘my heart & mind are not affected by this exercise as they should be’. All the same, years from now Nonconformism will be one of the things that she and her future husband have in common.

  Despite this deepening religious radicalism, convention shapes Barrett family life. After all, Edward Barrett Moulton-Barrett was elected High Sheriff of Herefordshire in 1814. So now Aunt Bummy asks Elizabeth not to discuss the family’s gathering financial troubles with Mr Boyd. For behind the scenes Papa has been dealing with financial (and consequently social) near catastrophe. As Elizabeth will discover, only money’s intrinsically conservative tendency to stick with the status quo has so far saved him from having humiliatingly to uproot the family from Hope End.

  And this threat of a move isn’t the only trauma playing itself out beyond the narrow focus of her attention. One of the main reasons her life at twenty-six is over-determined by two middle-aged men – her father, and Boyd, the man who has masqueraded as a mentor for the last five years – is that she lacks a mother’s advice, attention and love. In particular, Mamma might have helped correct the latter’s destructive embroilment with her eldest child. But she has been gone for four years. The Elizabeth that Boyd has been toying with has been prey to chaotic wishful thinking and the acting out of an enormous grief.

  When Mary Moulton-Barrett died in autumn 1828, she had been unwell for months. But her death still came as a profound shock to the family. She’d never fully recovered from the birth of her twelfth child, Octavius, in 1824, and when her own mother died in November 1827 she was overwhelmed by grief. In the following months, everyone put her worsening symptoms down to mourning. Finally, in May 1828, Dr Carden was sent for. He diagnosed rheumatoid arthritis, but was encouraging; later, he supported a decision to send the patient to Cheltenham. So on 30 September Mamma set out with Bummy and Henrietta for the spa town. Next day she was well enough to send home a reassuring note because ‘my beloved Ba’s tearful eyes as I parted with her yesterday have hung somewhat heavily on my heart’. The trio were staying ‘not in the Square, therefore not quite so gay as our fancy pictured’, she reported, but in charming and comfortable premises at 14 Montpellier Terrace.

  Her death a week later, on 7 October, was so unexpected that even her husband wasn’t at her bedside. He received the news in London the next morning – and was overwhelmed. The jumbled letter of prayer and incoherent grief he dashed off to Elizabeth in the moments before setting out for Cheltenham reveals a raw and genuine loss. For Edward Barrett Moulton-Barrett, Mary’s death foreclosed what had after all been a genuine love match, and marked the end of any sense that things always turn out right.

  As for Elizabeth: so long reliant on words, she now found them useless. She couldn�
��t cry either. ‘I dare say God will touch my heart & make me cry soon, & then I shall be even better than I am now—better able to read & to think’, she wrote to Henrietta in Cheltenham, a couple of days after the news broke. But she revealed in the same letter that she was already resuming her bookish habits. At first glance this seems healthy: routine structures days suddenly emptied of meaning; and thinking prevents feeling. But it’s also the reaction of someone trying desperately to hold on to what she knows about herself in the face of almost overwhelming pressure to fall apart. Everyone around her felt that Elizabeth, the sibling closest to their parents, and whom they perceived as the frailest among them, was in deep trouble. Bro was especially alarmed when her inability to express her feelings continued – and continued.

  As Bummy, Henrietta and Papa picked up the pieces in Montpellier Terrace, Elizabeth simply shut down. ‘She read […] every letter from Cheltenham […] without its producing the slightest effect upon her.’ Partly, she may have been repeating the coping mechanism learnt at eight when her sister Mary had died. But it seems to have been already in place even then:

  I remember [in] infancy being told by a servant […] “that I was cold and unfeeling and that every one thought so whatever they might say”—I heard this declaration with great pretended calmness—tho my head perfectly seemed to swim […] No! I could not preserve buoyant spirits when the bitterness of death was at my heart! I was young very young then to govern myself—but I […] gloried in that self command, but […] when I was left alone […] with my pillow […] tears gushed wildly forth!

  And now, aged twenty-two, her pattern had been confirmed. Though she’s going to experience much loss in the years to come, grief will nearly always silence her.

  The twenty-six-year-old who faces the possibility of having to leave Hope End has already suffered two close family bereavements, and willed herself back from grave illness. But by a similar effort of will Elizabeth is also gradually turning herself into a major poet. For her, words represent not death but life.

  [Third Frame]

  If stories can be portraits, we also read portraits as stories. That’s true even of the famous dead. In the much-copied lost mural by Hans Holbein the Younger, King Henry VIII’s barrel chest and square jaw suggest to me nothing so much as a hard-drinking bully. Despite the famous smile, Mahatma Gandhi’s gaze remains as steely as his spectacle frames in photographs Henri Cartier-Bresson took on the last day of his life, while I understand his body language as a public statement about the attributes of nonviolent leadership.

  I mean that I read off from these portraits directly, as if from life. For, more than work in any other genre, portraits seem to disavow that they have been made. They ask us to be naïve literalists, to believe them; it’s as if they want to exempt themselves from the rules of the art game. Usually we view work made in different genres – oil, miniature, fresco With Kneeling Patron, press photo, lightning sketch – in different ways: whether pouring raptly over vitrines or standing awestruck among the draughts in a thirteenth-century cloister. But portraits tend to cluster under the name of the sitter instead: despite the fact that their real subject isn’t perhaps a person so much as an encounter between two people, the artist and her subject.

  Of course, that encounter is no longer ‘live’ within the image. The portrait itself has broken up the reciprocity of the meeting between artist and sitter, portraitist and subject: leaving the subject’s face, but not the artist’s, visible; and the artist’s experience, but not the subject’s, in view. Only in a self-portrait do both sides of this encounter still seem present. Perhaps that’s because the self experienced and the self experiencing are both there together in the face we see. Rembrandt van Rijn’s self-portraits, for example. The way they bring us into the presence of a compassionate, searching and earthy self – one who appears ‘dug out of humanity’, as Elizabeth puts it.

  Book Four: How to manage change

  In upright consciousness of place and time.

  Do we become different people in different places? Opinionated as ever, Elizabeth sums up Sidmouth within four days of her arrival:

  The town is small & not superfluously clean; but of course the respectable houses are not a part of the town. Our’s is one which the Grand Duchess Helena had,—not at all grand, but extremely comfortable, & cheerful, with […] pleasant green hills & trees behind. […] You may suppose what a southern climate this is, when I tell you that myrtles & verbena three or four feet high, & hydrangeas are in flower in the gardens.

  It’s August 1832, and the calamity everyone’s been dreading has finally occurred. Papa has been forced to sell Hope End, and the family to leave their idyll there for good. Once it’s done, though, the move will feel almost inevitable. And perhaps there’s a kind of relief after months of anxiety. As it turns out, Elizabeth’s time in the Devon town will be one of the most ‘comfortable, and cheerful’ of her life, as she learns to adapt and change – and to enjoy doing so.

  Over the last year at Hope End, her father has scoped out possible new addresses at Eastbourne, Brighton, and the Isle of Wight: all south-coast resorts rather than the fashionable centres that are closer to home, like Cheltenham or Bath. Perhaps he can’t face meeting people he knows in his new, reduced circumstances. He has certainly been increasingly reclusive since the sale became a reality: it ‘has made Papa shrink from society of any kind, lately. He would not even attend the religious societies in Ledbury, which he was […] so interested in supporting.’ In 1808–09 it had taken him a year to find the Herefordshire property that has defined him, and he did so alone, leaving his wife to await his decision. Now it’s the turn of his adult children to wait powerlessly for their lives to be redefined, as he again searches alone.

  At last, bounced into action by the completed mansion sale, he takes Rafarel House, part of a smart regency terrace at the western end of Sid-mouth seafront. ‘The drawing room’s four windows all look to the sea’, which is ‘about a hundred & fifty yards’ away; right next door is Fort Field, where local gentlemen play cricket. Perhaps this is what helps decide him: after all, he has eight sons living at home, three of whom are by now young adults with time hanging heavy on their hands. Besides, cricket is something he and his boys do together. Learnt in childhood – maybe even in his earliest years in Jamaica – it’s one of few remaining constants in his vertiginously changing life. Indeed, on the family’s ‘very last evening’ at Hope End, they go out into the grounds for a game.

  It’s painful to picture that final match among the valley’s lengthening shadows. Henrietta has a sketch from the schoolroom window which shows woods massed on the hillside, behind a game in progress on the grass, and a church spire pricking the skyline like an eye-catcher. But this final game is also an improvised ceremony of farewell. The late August evening must feel like the end of summer in every way; when dusk falls shortly after seven there isn’t even a moon to light the lawns.

  Edward Barrett Moulton-Barrett has become a reflective, even a brooding man, secretive and deeply religious, certainly capable of seeing this as the end of his own life’s ‘summer’. He’s forty-seven: no great age – and plenty young enough to play cricket – but old enough to experience a midlife crisis as everything seems to crumble around him. In the last three years he has lost the two women he depended on most in the world, the death of his wife followed a couple of years later by that of his mother, who had for so long been effectively his only parent. On top of this, his fortune has dwindled. Papa is still a very wealthy man. But he’s been forced to sell the magnum opus which, like all builders of mansions, he must have imagined passing down through future generations. Perhaps it had even helped him picture, with an echo of the old Barrett imposter syndrome, eventual ennoblement and entry into the heart of the British Establishment. He loves Hope End so much that, when he dies, he’ll turn out never to have relinquished the estate woodlands. In short, he sees himself as ‘a broken down man’. To rebuild elsewhere – starting in the
skimpy seaside terrace that he’s rented for just one month – would require tremendous willpower; never his strong point. And while it’s hard for us to feel sympathy for someone who continues to profit from slavery, for the man himself a strongly religious sense of obligation ratchets up the stress of feeling responsible for supporting a large number of family and servants.

  The family leave Hope End in two parties. Papa, Bro and seventh son Septimus, or Sette, stay on till the house has been completely packed up. For the main group, a palindromic departure date of 23/8/1832 has been set: perhaps a superstitious choice? Setting out, they pass through the streets of Ledbury and on through familiar countryside. ‘I cannot dwell upon the pain of that first hour of our journey—but […b]efore the first day’s journey was at an end, we felt inexpressibly relieved—relieved from the restlessness & anxiety which have so long oppressed us’, Elizabeth admits to Julia Martin, a friend who lives at Old Colwall, the next estate to Hope End.

  Grief, yes; but is there humiliation too? Julia, an Anglican vicar’s daughter from the Irish Midlands, married into local gentry when Elizabeth was a susceptible thirteen. Along with Daniel McSwiney and Hugh Stuart Boyd, she’s among the noticeable number of Irish acquaintances in Elizabeth’s tiny social circle; one of those subtle indicators of the Barretts’ level on the complex barometer of the English class system. But it’s only now that real friendship develops between the women, touched into life by Julia’s kindness in writing straight away to Elizabeth in Sidmouth. While they were actually neighbours, the awkward age gap of fourteen years combined with Elizabeth’s intellectual snobbery to make the younger woman prefer the company of Mrs Martin’s glamorously well-travelled husband James. Throughout her early twenties Elizabeth has displayed an embarrassing tendency to admire and befriend men rather than women. Over the last five years, Mr Boyd has fulfilled her need for a confidant, often in the nastiest ways, but she’s beginning to feel the need for female friendships; and they are an art she must learn. At home too, though Bro and Sam are now back from school, the siblings’ activities are increasingly segregated by gender, and her sisters Henrietta and Arabella have become her closest companions.