by Gillian Gill
By 1865, the Thackeray sisters between them were able, for eighteen hundred pounds, to buy 16 Onslow Gardens, a pleasant home in Kensington, hire a staff of five and a private carriage service, start a series of intimate little dinner parties, pay visits to their many friends in England such as Adelaide Sartoris and Julia Cameron, and travel abroad in style. Living prudently (and Minny was good at keeping her sister’s spendthrift tendencies in check), they could envisage living the rest of their lives in modest affluence bordering on luxury, lives very different from—for example—that of their friend Caroline Stephen. She lived in shabby gentility with her widowed mother and, in recent years, her bachelor younger brother, Leslie.
Leslie Stephen was destined to become Virginia Woolf’s father when he was fifty years old. He was largely responsible for her education. And, as we shall see in Chapter 10, the final seven years of his life were an experience of torture for both Virginia and her sister Vanessa. To understand the familial world in which Virginia Woolf came to maturity, it is illuminating to take a brief look at the world of all-boy schools and all-male colleges in which Leslie Stephen was formed as a father to girls.
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Around the turn of the nineteenth century, the families of both of Leslie Stephen’s parents had been active members of the influential evangelical movement to abolish slavery in the British Empire known as the Clapham Saints. The Stephen family was famously frugal and high-minded, committed to a patriarchal family life founded on biblical precedent. When Leslie and his older brother, Fitzjames, were children, the undisputed head of the family was their father, a dedicated, overworked, frustrated, disregarded, and deeply neurotic top official at the Colonial Office; his uncertain temper and deep gloom kept his family in thrall. As a child, Leslie Stephen was sickly and anxious, his mother’s pet, a boy with a taste for mathematics that promised well, and a talent for drawing that no one encouraged but that would come down to his daughter Vanessa and to her descendants. Leslie was sensitive and loved poetry, but poetry and drawing were not what a Victorian father wanted to see in his son, and, fearing that Leslie was in danger of becoming effeminate, James Stephen sent both Leslie and Fitzjames to Eton as day boys.
Although the headmaster of Eton had assured their father they would be well treated, the Stephen brothers were relentlessly tormented by both the poor scholarship boys and the wealthy boarders. In the biography he wrote of his brother, Leslie says that he survived Eton mainly because “Fitzy” was a large, strong youth who learned to fight back and hit hard. Finally, James Stephen realized that Eton was proving more boxing ring than study hall, and he allowed his two sons to withdraw from school and study with private tutors for the entrance examinations, called “Little Go,” for Cambridge University.
As undergraduates at Trinity College, Cambridge, Fitzy was content to “go out for the poll,” that is, take the common examination and then head off to London to train as a barrister, but Leslie opted to compete in the mathematical Tripos. This set of examinations was designed as a marathon plus a high-hurdle course to identify and list the top students, called “Wranglers.” It was divided into “bookwork”—during which, as fast as quill would go, the candidates regurgitated random sections of the huge mass of material they had learned by heart—and “problems,” which were designed to take more time to solve than any student less brilliant than the young John Maynard Keynes would need. Part I of the Tripos lasted for three days, at which point there was a break for the examiners to fail, or “plow,” the poorest students. Those men left standing did another five days of testing, forty-four and one-half hours in all. The Stephen family feared that Leslie was too weak and nervy to withstand the extreme stress of the mathematical Tripos, but he proved them wrong. In a very strong field, he placed 20th out of 143 and secured an ecclesiastical fellowship at Trinity Hall, a Cambridge college not to be confused with Trinity. Stephen was required to take holy orders in the Church of England, put his signature to a statement subscribing to the church’s Thirty-nine Articles, officiate at services at the college chapel, and serve as a spiritual guide to the young men.
As a fellow at Trinity Hall, Leslie Stephen was happier than ever before in his life as he had plenty of time to devote to his favorite new activity—coaching the college rowing crews. Leslie had pulled an oar as an undergraduate without ever being part of a winning eight, but he proved a very good coach. A tall man with long legs and excellent wind, he loved to run along the towpath with a bullhorn, urging his crew on, and in the company of enthusiastic, hearty, unintellectual men some three or more years his junior, he bloomed. Throughout his life, Stephen would find companionship and respect mostly with men younger than himself, disciples not colleagues, men willing to learn from him and submit to his dictates in the way a crew obeys a coach.
But Cambridge undergraduates were “up” for only three eight-week terms a year, so Leslie Stephen had lots of time on his hands during the vacations, especially the “long vac,” the four months from June to October. Having no interest in mathematics per se, he began to read voraciously in English philosophy—Hobbes, Locke, Bentham, Mill—though not the German philosophers, like Kant and Hegel, whom he considered effete and decadent. The more he read, the more the strict Puritan faith of his Clapham Saint family fell away from him. He was forced to realize that he did not believe in God and to see that his hours conducting evensong, giving funeral elegies for students who died in manly competition, and counseling young men were hypocrisy, a mockery of basic moral values as propounded by John Stuart Mill. Like George Eliot, Leslie Stephen came to proudly embrace a severe secular code of ethics that did not rely on divine sanction and expected no heavenly reward for good deeds.
In good conscience, he felt impelled to inform his college and, worse still, his father that he had ceased to be an observing Christian. Faced with the death of God and the end of the collegial life in which, for the first time, he had been seen as a strong man and a leader, Leslie Stephen fell into the first of the mental breakdowns to which men in his family were subject. After clinging to Cambridge college life for two more years, Leslie moved in with his mother and his sister, Milly, in Bayswater, an unfashionable part of London.
Seeing his younger brother depressed and at a loss, the energetic Fitzy, now a successful barrister and journalist, encouraged Leslie to “write for the periodicals” and introduced him to editors. On philosophy, politics, literature—whatever subject the ex-mathematician Leslie Stephen could mug up, it didn’t really matter—he could write an essay and, with Fitzy’s network, could find a journal willing and eager to publish it—as long as he did not expect to earn a living wage. Eager to discover whether the fiercely pro-Southern English press was telling the truth about the American Civil War, in 1863 Stephen paid a long visit to the United States. There he found three prominent Yankee intellectuals—Charles Eliot Norton, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and James Russell Lowell—who were kindred spirits and would become his friends for life.
But it was his discovery of mountaineering that really saved Leslie Stephen from the dark depression occasioned by his crisis of faith and the loss of his Cambridge nest. He spent as much time as he could in Switzerland, first as a member of a group, later as a leader and publicist for the English gentleman’s latest craze—scrambling up high icy peaks in the wake of the local guides. In the opinion of many of his climbing companions, Leslie Stephen did not climb for the views or indeed for the fellowship, since he walked in resolute silence. Climbing was a contest between him and the mountain and one that he could, with great effort, win, each time he went up. Knowing himself to be strong, tough, and agile, Leslie gained the confidence to believe that he could conquer difficulties of all kinds, perhaps even find the courage to court and propose to a woman.
For despite what he himself had, quite literally, preached to the young men of Trinity Hall, Leslie Stephen discovered that his personal needs could not be satisfied by virile friendships, arduous study, forty-mile tramps, and summer randonné
es. Other Englishmen of Stephen’s class, as his biographer Noel Annan briefly acknowledges, found sexual partners among the climbers and guides in the mountain huts, but Leslie Stephen seized upon marriage as the solution to his sexual and social problems. Though without religious faith, he retained the uneasy conscience of his abolitionist Clapham Saint forebears, and reportedly—for we are speaking here of the apostle of biographical bowdlerization—he resisted the sexual opportunities that the London of his day offered even to poor men like himself. When, in 1867, he began, awkwardly, hesitantly, looking around for a suitable woman to marry and bear his children, his family and friends quickly mobilized to help him find a wife.
In his rather painful excursions into Pattledom, where he felt himself an insignificant outsider, Leslie Stephen’s eye had lighted upon Mrs. Prinsep’s dazzling teenage niece Julia Jackson. Many years later, as a mournful old man, Leslie Stephen could still devote three packed, ecstatic pages to evoking the “absolutely faultless” beauty of the young woman who would, in the end, become his wife. Once, he tells us, sitting in a skiff on the river Thames, he happened to look up at a bridge and catch sight of Julia Jackson silhouetted against the sky, and experienced a never-to-be-forgotten rapture. But, ever the rational, fact-oriented, depressive materialist, Leslie Stephen realized that, though he looked up at Miss Jackson from afar as if at a holy vision, she barely saw him even when he was standing right next to her. And in fact, on the night when he happened to see Julia on the bridge, Stephen was expertly feathering his oars to impress two other young ladies—the Misses Thackeray.
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Stephen had long known the Thackeray sisters by sight, but then, all of a sudden, a mere acquaintance was becoming a friendship, and perhaps something more. Leslie would return from the city to find Miss Anne Thackeray and her sister, Minny, taking tea at his mother’s house and chatting with his sister, Milly. He found them both excellent company and models of their sex, but his eyes passed quickly over Anne—ebullient, brilliant, lovable, but plain of face and inclined to dominate the conversation, especially when it came to the book business. Miss Minny Thackeray was different. She was perhaps, Stephen thought, as a recent connoisseur of female beauty, a trifle yellowed round the edges, but pretty, feminine, and charming. She listened well, was adept at sending buttered teacakes in the direction of hungry men, and talked modestly of managing the household while dearest Anne went forth and conquered the world of letters. Anny, declared Minny proudly, was a genius just like their father.
Leslie saw in Minny a woman who could be counted upon to grace his hearth, manage his household, welcome his friends, and defer to his superiority as man and mind. Leslie also wanted children, and from the expert way Minny managed the two little daughters of Edward Thackeray, he could see that she had the makings of an admirable mother. For her part, Minny Thackeray quickly seized upon Leslie Stephen as the husband her happiness required, a man who could be shaped and molded, a man who would do.
Harriet “Minny” Thackeray’s modesty, her domesticity, her love of family and loyalty to friends were much praised in her lifetime and celebrated by her husband many years after her death in the so-called Mausoleum Book. Those qualities were all quite real. They were also part of a role that she played, which was calculated to appeal to a naive prospective suitor like Leslie Stephen. As recent historians have documented, Minny was perhaps not as brilliant and talented as her older sister, but neither was she a second Isabella Gethin Shawe. The name Minny can mislead us today. Though small of stature and weak in body, Harriet Thackeray was no mouse.
Like many intelligent Victorian women born into the affluent middle class, Minny Thackeray knew how to exploit illness and to play, for her own purposes, the role of innocent passivity. Far from being a sweet little lamb, she was spoiled, not a little selfish, capable, pragmatic, and, within the life prescribed for her by her father and society at large, accustomed to having things her way—a cleverer, nicer version of George Eliot’s character Rosamond Vincy in Middlemarch. One can imagine opera lover Minny singing with Rosina in The Barber of Seville, “I am a sweet little woman, glad to do as I am told—BUT I do have my little weaknesses, and if someone takes me the wrong way, I can be a viper.” Her father knew this and chuckled about a woman’s wiles. Her sister knew this and loved Minny the more for being strong of mind if not body. Her husband, by his own written account, seems never to have known it. In eight years of marriage, Leslie Stephen never understood what a clear-sighted, decisive, sophisticated, self-willed woman he had in Minny Thackeray.
But to return to the courtship days of Leslie and Minny, while clearly seeing the advantages offered by marriage in general and by marriage to the wealthy, well-connected Miss Minny Thackeray in particular, Stephen did not fall head over heels in love. In fact, he found it hard to make up his mind to propose. So, when his mother and sister suggested he meet up with the Thackeray sisters in his beloved Switzerland, Leslie Stephen agreed, but no sooner had he arrived than he lost his nerve. To the assembled women’s shock and dismay, Leslie took off for the high Alpine huts and climbed some more mountains. Once back at home in London, however, persuaded that it was not the work of a gentleman to refuse a proposal that a young lady had been led to expect, he proposed, assured that he would be accepted. And he was—on one condition. “I cannot conceive of life without my sister,” we can imagine Minny saying. “In our home together, dearest Leslie, there must always be room for Anny.”
And Leslie agreed. What choice did he actually have? Leslie liked facts, and given the fact that he was barely able to meet his own meager expenses, the new Stephen household would have to be established at 8 Onslow Gardens, Kensington, which Anny and Minny owned jointly. It would run for the foreseeable future on Thackeray money, with Anny and Leslie-Minny (who as husband and wife, according to English law, became one single legal entity, that is, the husband) sharing expenses. And apart from the financial advantages, there were social ones too. Leslie was often out of the house on journalism business in London, and he still intended to take long mountaineering holidays in the Alps. On weekends in England he was beginning to organize a group of younger men for what he called tramps—day hikes for as long as forty miles. Anne would be company for Minny when her husband was away. If children came along, as Leslie devoutly hoped, Anny would be the perfect aunt. And Anny and Minny, though so different in temperament, got on so well. Late in life, Leslie Stephen likened the relationship between his first wife and her sister to that between a “popular author and his wife,” a remark both snotty and insightful from a man whose own erudite tomes never sold many copies. Leslie Stephen, his friends at the club agreed, was a lucky dog to have gotten the wealthy Miss Minny Thackeray for free, and as a bonus, her sister as a paying guest in her own home.
If there was one issue that separated the two Thackeray sisters, it was their mother, but even Isabella Shawe Thackeray seems never to have become a source of open conflict between the two. Anny could not forget the day when Isabella had almost drowned her in the sea at Margate, but she never stopped loving her mother. After their father’s death, the Thackeray sisters maintained Isabella in her own home on the south coast, at not inconsiderable expense, and Anny went to see her mother when she could. Over the decades, Isabella became calmer, more aware, more responsive to old songs, old poems, and old memories, and mother and daughter developed a loving relationship. At the age of seventy-five, Isabella died in Anne’s arms, the two of them watched over in turn by Anne’s friend, Julia Jackson Duckworth Stephen. The relationship of Isabella and Anne Thackeray was a triumph of love over adversity.
Why Minny was never expected by either her father or her sister to take her share of Isabella’s burden is an important part of the Thackeray bequest to the Stephens. The surface reason was that Minny Thackeray was an infant when Isabella fell into madness, and had no memories of her mother. The deep reason was that William Thackeray feared that exposing Minny to her mad mother might push Minny into madness too.
William Thackeray saw his older daughter, Anny, as strong and resilient like himself. He saw Minny as weak and vulnerable like Isabella. Jane Shawe, Isabella’s sister, also went mad late in life, and William feared that Minny might have inherited the insanity that ran in her mother’s family.
This idea that Minny might go mad if placed under extreme stress, as her mother had done, was more fear than fact. Minny Thackeray was an eminently rational and practical person, a good deal more sane, in many ways, than her mildly manic-depressive sister Anne or Minny’s extremely neurotic husband, Leslie. But the fear of inherited madness was passed on by William Thackeray to Anny, who took on the role of Minny’s protector when their father was gone. When Minny married, her father’s fear of Minny’s mental vulnerability was passed down once again to Minny’s husband, Leslie Stephen.
The fear of what might be called the Shawe-Thackeray inheritance had, as we shall see in the next chapter, tragic consequences for Leslie and Minny’s child, Laura Makepeace Stephen, but it would also cast a shadow over the adult life of Virginia Woolf. She, of course, bore no genetic relationship to the Shawe women, but her parents were convinced that madness was a trait that women, as the weaker sex, inherited, suffered from, and could pass on to their children. The severe mental illness from which Woolf suffered from her mid-teens regularly created havoc with her life, but she had also to bear the fear that, in modern terms, madness was part of her genetic makeup and could affect her children.
