Two-Way Mirror

by Fiona Sampson

  All the same, in the first weeks after Boyd’s departure her letters to him are wildly inappropriate. Things she may formerly have said face to face in private now spill onto pages that must be read aloud to him; most probably by his wife or daughter, about whom she writes with presumptuous cattiness: ‘I never could apprehend that a person with such breadth of chest & with so little tendency to becoming thin, was of a consumptive habit.’ These rather shaming, often transparently manipulative missives are spaced out by the relatively slow responses they receive: Elizabeth evidently hasn’t understood that Boyd’s first letter after he left Worcestershire, ‘looking back with pleasure to our past intercourse’ and apologising for occasions on which he may have ‘spoken to me crossly or peevishly’, is a ‘Dear Joanna’, trying to draw a line under the addictive tangle of their relationship. In leaving Colwall for the environs of Bath, he was in every sense moving on. Now it’s Elizabeth’s turn to try, however clumsily, to wind him back in, though even she apprehends dimly that there are limits, and peppers her letters with apologies.

  Admittedly, the newsy letters Elizabeth sends Julia Martin also tend to start with apologies for tardiness, suggesting that they are ever so slightly dutiful. She also writes to Maria Commeline, an unmarried young lady whom, typically, she got to know through her classicist father, the Revd James Commeline: ‘Very amusing sensible sharp-minded people, – and as they don’t spare their pricks in making remarks on their neighbours, they are considered not altogether as good-natured as they might be.’ A third Herefordshire correspondent is Lady Margaret Cocks who, though she’s the same age as Julia Martin, is unmarried and lives with her father, Elizabeth’s old nemesis Lord Somers, at Eastnor Castle: letters to her are busy with literary fireworks and family chatter.

  She’s learning discretion, however. In mid-December she tells Julia Martin, ‘Mr Boyd arrived here three days ago, & is going to settle himself close to us. […] You may suppose how astonished I was to hear of their arrival: not having an idea of its probability.’ Which is disingenuous since she’s been pushing for precisely this for over a month. Indeed Boyd has broken a lease and must pay double rents as a result. Small wonder if, the following May, it’s with a touch of complacency that she tells Lady Margaret how she and Boyd ‘read & talk together as in old days’.

  By which time everyone seemed to be settling in to Devon life. The family have stayed on at Rafarel House. Those seaside holidays with Grandmama have taught Elizabeth to enjoy the ocean, ‘sublimest object in nature’, and in this aftermath of Romanticism, society accultures young women to handle emotion by projecting it onto the natural world. This isn’t just the literary device that, later in the century, John Ruskin will label the Pathetic Fallacy, but social convention in an increasingly unconfessional age.

  As Sidmouth’s tides enter Elizabeth’s imagination, she’ll poeticise human experience as ‘a footstep on the sand / The morning after springtide’. But the endlessly watchable seaside, ozone-scented and creating its own special light, is also a playground that entices her away from her books and out for donkey rides and fishing trips:

  I don’t know when I have been so long well as I have been lately […] in spite of our fishing and boating and getting wet three times a day. There is good trout-fishing at the Otter, & the noble river Sid […] My love of water concentrates itself in the boat.

  However, despite its perfect location facing right onto the water, the house is turning out to be too small for the numerous Barretts crowded into it. As Arabella tells Annie Boyd, ‘We are all squeezed in little rooms, two in a bed’: something Elizabeth’s amour propre has prevented her from revealing. Besides, this slice of what’s known as Fortfield Terrace stands in an exposed position, and it’s draughty. Should they stay or should they go? After a year of trying to make the house work, in September 1833 they move 200 yards inland, a sideways shift that’s the culmination of a typical period of prevarication by Papa. After all now that, as Elizabeth will put it, the family have ‘no ties to draw us or to bind us elsewhere’, Sidmouth will do as well as anywhere.

  To Lady Margaret Cocks she gives their new home a rather romantic spin:

  a pretty villa or rather cottage, with thatch and a viranda and a garden, and the viranda’s due proportion of ivy & rose trees—about a quarter of a mile from the sea. The view of the sea is rather too indistinct to please me […] but I am consoled by hearing it roaring, & by a genuine Devonshire lane with ‘hedgerow elms,’ bounding our garden.

  Contemporary prints show that Belle Vue is very much more a villa than a cottage. Unlike Fortfield Terrace, it overlooks ‘the little town & the church steeple’. But the family remain cut off from Sidmouth proper. ‘We hear that the place is extremely full, & gay; but this is of course only an on dit to us.’ The appointment of a drawing master, ‘Mr Williams’, is very welcome, but hardly compensates for continued exclusion from a social whirl which is almost within earshot. The girls feel it particularly: opportunities to meet young men and make lives of their own are narrowing. As they move into this newest home, Elizabeth is already twenty-seven, Henrietta twenty-four, and Arabella has just turned twenty.

  A year into their stay at Belle Vue, Sidmouth remains, ‘Very full: but our cottage stands away from everybody almost—and so do we.’ Yet while his daughters’ domestic lives are increasingly restricted, Papa has begun sending his sons out into the world, dispatching the third and fourth boys, Stormie and George, to study at the University of Glasgow: which unlike Oxbridge is open to Nonconformists. George will graduate in 1835 as he turns nineteen and be called to the Bar in the Inner Temple in 1838: he clearly shares some of Elizabeth’s precocious braininess. But Stormie, though older by eighteen months, simply listens in on lectures because of a severe speech impediment, which is now starting to shape his life. His destiny is a life of family service looking after the Barretts’ Caribbean estates.

  For now though, it is Bro who, as eldest son, is dispatched to Jamaica. Charged with an heir’s responsibilities he may be, but the way his father lands him with the role is characteristically disempowering. ‘Papa took him to London about a fortnight ago on supply business,’ EBB tells Lady Margaret Cocks in November 1833, ‘—and we thought of seeing them both again in a few days. But it was otherwise willed by God,—and dearest Bro sailed from Gravesend two days ago.’ Possibly this was a paternal strategy to avoid tearful scenes – or even to prevent himself from being dissuaded by them; Papa may be aware of his own weakness in decision-making. Choosing this time of year for the Atlantic crossing certainly seems like a poor decision. But Bro makes it safely to Jamaica: where he finds there’s plenty to do.

  Rumours of emancipation are in the air, but the island’s Assembly has been resisting British governmental pressure even to ameliorate the conditions enslaved people endure there. Only three Assembly members voted in support of a recent proposal to end flogging of enslaved women – a trio led by Uncle Sam, who’s been back at Cinnamon Hill since 1827. The years he served as MP for Richmond, Yorkshire empowered Sam to write in 1831 to his Whig colleague Lord Howick, Under Secretary for War and the Colonies and the prime minister’s son, about the island’s brutal conditions. But nothing changed. Less than three months after he’d sent the letter, a general strike held by ‘slaves’ on Christmas Day erupted into riots involving up to a fifth of the island’s enslaved population, which at the time totalled around 300,000. The so-called Baptist War lasted just eleven days and was brutally suppressed: around five hundred enslaved people were killed, more than half of them by quasi-judicial execution including for trivial offences. The Assembly estimated – arguably, overestimated – the damage to (largely, its members’ own) property at £1,154,589: the rioters had mostly lacked weapons, but many plantation trash houses, where the trash leaves and stems of the sugar cane are stored and dried to serve as fuel for the sugar refineries, had been set alight.

  That Cinnamon Hill was one of the few estates to escape damage is no coincidence. Since arriv
ing on the island, Uncle Sam and his wife Mary Clementina have been recognised as more moderate than their crueller neighbours. When Mary Clementina died in June 1831 she was apparently much mourned, not only back in England, but ‘by all her negroes’. The couple had brought with them the Barrett family interest in Nonconformism; from England, Elizabeth’s father decreed that the Baptist William Knibb should be allowed to minister to the people enslaved on his own Oxford and Cambridge estates. In 1830, when their lives had proved so chaotic that Knibb stopped the work, Papa intervened once more to enable him to continue.

  Such plantocracy support is key to any amelioration of the conditions it has itself created. In the 1830s, Baptist, Methodist, Moravian and Wesleyan ministers are Jamaica’s chief advocates of enslaved people’s rights. If not quite preaching liberation theology, they are ministering to enslaved, free black, and mixed-heritage congregants. Enslaved people can and do become elders in these churches, to the horror of many planters. Indeed the Baptist War got its name from the leadership of Samuel Sharpe, an enslaved Baptist deacon, as well as from the spiritual and practical support that the uprising received from Nonconformist ministers. During the eighteen months between the insurrection and Sharpe’s execution by hanging in May 1832, Nonconformist ministers were repeatedly accused by the Assembly and at the Courts Martial (in which landowners dispensed often summary justice for their losses) of inciting rebellion, and spreading false rumours that slavery had been abolished.

  Around this very time Uncle Sam started to give the people enslaved on the Cinnamon Hill and Cornwall estates every Saturday off. Unsurprisingly, he was soon being fingered by the colonial establishment. His rescue of a minister whose chapel had been burnt down by planters prompted the custos, or warden, of Trelawny to complain, ‘I highly disapprove of the conduct of Mr Moulton-Barrett; it has been stated to me, that he was seen riding out of town with a Mr. Box, who I had ordered to be taken into custody as one of the incendiary preachers.’ Nevertheless Uncle Sam persisted and when, in early 1832, Knibb was arrested and his chapel razed, joined two ministers in writing an open letter of support care of the local custos – who was his own first cousin, Richard Barrett. More: after Sam himself had been appointed custos of St Ann in June 1832 by a new-broom governor, he supported an application by a Wesleyan, John Greenwood, for licence to preach, citing the Toleration Act. The courtroom in which he was hearing the application descended into mob violence; the governor sent in troops to support Sam and to maintain order.

  So when Bro lands in Jamaica in December 1833 the island is, though no longer formally under martial law, in a restless state; and the Barrett name is deeply implicated in these upheavals. The following September, Elizabeth writes that her brother is still:

  an exile in Jamaica […] there is no use in dreaming it—he cannot be happy there—among the white savages. I would rather see him in England, employed in the very humblest of honest employments.

  That telling phrase, ‘white savages’, represents a step in her slow coming to terms with the realities of slavery. Her conscience won’t reach its public high point until 1848, when she’s married to an abolitionist and living a new life at a distance from her family and its shibboleths, amid the democratic revolutionaries of Risorgimento Italy. To get to that stage, this daughter and granddaughter of slave owners will have had to move a long way from the position she holds back in May 1833, when she writes of Parliament’s proposal to abolish slavery:

  The West Indians are irreparably ruined if the bill passes. Papa says that in the case of its passing, nobody in his senses would think of even attempting the culture of sugar […] I am almost more sorry for poor Lord Grey who is going to ruin us, than for our poor selves who are going to be ruined.

  On 28 August 1833, however, the Slavery Abolition Act does become law, its progress hastened by public disgust at revelations about the Baptist War.

  Slavery won’t be abolished in America until the 1860s, but in Britain popular opinion has been mobilising for a while. The Anti-Slavery Society was founded by William Wilberforce, Thomas Clarkson and others in 1823, when Elizabeth was seventeen. 1831, the Barretts’ last full year at Hope End, saw the publication of the first British slave narrative. Mary Prince, brought to London as a domestic, had run away after ten years, found shelter with the Moravian Church, and started working for Thomas Pringle, Secretary of the Anti-Slavery Society. He transcribed and published her The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave, Related by Herself, an excoriating testimony that sold out three editions in a year:

  How can slaves be happy when they have the halter round their neck and the whip upon their back? and are disgraced and thought no more of than beasts?—and are separated from their mothers, and husbands, and children, and sisters, just as cattle are sold and separated? […]—women that have had children exposed in the open field to shame! There is no modesty or decency shown by the owner to his slaves […]. Since I have been here I have often wondered how English people can go out into the West Indies and act in such a beastly manner. But when they go to the West Indies, they forget God and all feeling of shame […]. They tie up slaves like hogs—moor them up like cattle, and they lick them.

  Despite such raw home truths, the 1833 Act still doesn’t liberate people already enslaved. No one will actually be freed until 1838, after a five-year transition designed to ease the financial shock to the planters. The British government also announces a fund of £20 million – to compensate slavers, not the people they’ve exploited. Even when 1838 does arrive, the indentured ‘apprenticeships’ – low-paid work on inescapable contracts – to which enslaved people are moved don’t constitute genuine freedom.

  September 1833 sees Elizabeth grumbling at the same time as virtue signalling:

  Of course you know that the late bill has ruined the West Indians. That is settled. The consternation here is very great. Nevertheless I am glad, and always shall be, that the negroes are—virtually—free!

  That ‘nevertheless’ sums up the dilemma of being born a Barrett. By now twenty-seven, Elizabeth is adult and intelligent enough to recognise that her own interests are opposed to those of the people her family enslaved. Whigs and progressives, the Barretts would be natural abolitionists – but for their own plantations. Uncle Sam’s impossible solution to this paradox replaces it with another one. Trying to be a kind slave ‘owner’ is a contradiction in terms, since slavery is in its very nature a crime. As Elizabeth herself will put it a dozen years from now, when she has finally become a true abolitionist, ‘a philanthropist & liberal who advocates the slave-trade, can scarcely be thorough […]. Call it a philanthropic veneering.’ The government’s misdirected reparations compound the moral problem, ensuring that Barrett family money remains dirty; and there’s a practical problem too. The alternative to complicity is to walk away into extreme poverty. None of the Barretts display this level of self-sacrificing integrity. But then in nineteenth-century Britain – as in twenty-first – nobody does.

  It’s autumn 1835 when Bro finally arrives home from Jamaica; in 1836 second brother Sam travels out to replace him. By now the men of the family are grappling not with the ethical fault line that runs through their fortunes, but with huge, continuing financial fallout from a more intimate threat. Before Papa had even attained his majority, the property he inherited from his grandfather Edward Barrett was being contested by a cousin, ‘Handsome Sam’ Barrett, who claimed a historic misattribution of holdings. This case rumbled on, finally seeming to have been settled in 1824 by order of the Council of George IV. But when Handsome Sam died in Cheltenham that very month, his younger brother Richard, a trained lawyer, took over the estate as executor and trustee and dug up paperwork allowing a fresh attack, on similar grounds, upon Papa’s inheritance.

  This is the same Richard who as custos tried in 1832 to have Uncle Sam arrested. (He is known to the family back in England as ‘RB’: initials that will acquire quite other significance in years to come.) The case won’t be resolved
until ‘RB’ dies in 1839. As one of Elizabeth’s friends will summarise it, at Hope End Edward Barrett Moulton-Barrett was ‘a man of £15,000 a year’ until, out of the blue,

  A cousin came to him & showed him a will dated 60 years before under which he claimed £75,000. Mr Barrett, who had never heard of the claim showed the will to a lawyer who advised him to dispute it.—He did so; & after the cause had been driven from court to court it has been given against him with enormous costs & interest, so that his place in Herefordshire is sold.

  By the family’s third year in Sidmouth these costs, both financial and emotional, are accumulating exponentially. Papa, who has become profoundly depressed, disappears frequently ‘to do his London business’. On one such trip in October 1834, he falls seriously ill with ‘water on the lungs’ – in other words, pneumonia. He makes a good recovery, but it’s a scare. ‘Without him, we should indeed be orphans & desolate’, frets Elizabeth.

  Papa’s nurse in London is his late mother’s best friend and companion, Mary Trepsack – now living alone in Marylebone on the £2,000 Grandmama left her. Treppy’s mixed heritage means that she is ‘black’ by her own definition, though she doesn’t describe herself this way – reserving the term for others. Much loved – ‘She has nursed .. tossed up .. held on her knee—Papa when he was an infant’ – she personifies the family’s ambivalences about race. Treppy’s mother was enslaved, and though her white planter father, William Trepsack, gave the child his name and probably manumitted her at birth, she has achieved the decent comfort of her present life only paradoxically, through the lottery of bereavement. The death of her mother – herself of mixed heritage, in other words similarly the child of a white man – meant that Treppy escaped sharing her fate, an upbringing in slave quarters. When her father died she was rescued from his failing household to became a ward of Papa’s reprobate, domestically chaotic Uncle Samuel. It was only finally on his death when she was thirteen that Treppy arrived at Cinnamon Hill. With so much instability in her childhood it’s not surprising that she’s adaptable and compliant, complicit with the system that enslaved her mother: in 1835–36 she’s awarded £220/15/10d compensation for eleven slaves she herself ‘owns’ at the Cottage and Cinnamon Hill estates.