The little family grew. Margaret was followed by Edward, in 1824 or 1825. Peacock was working hard, both at his job at India House, where he was rising, and at his writing. Like a modern executive, he stayed in town at Stamford Street during the week and joined his wife and children at the suburban establishment on weekends. Sometimes he would bring famous people home: Coulson, the editor of The Traveller, or Jeremy Bentham, or one of his associates at work, James Mill perhaps, or Edward Strachey.
•
At first Mary Ellen had, we suppose, a happy and uneventful infancy, a happy childhood in a devoted and successful family in a beautiful place by the river. But then, in 1826 sorrow came to the family, a usual sort of sorrow that Victorians often had to bear—more often than we—and while they undoubtedly never got used to it, they do seem to have had a sort of fatalistic expectation of blows of this kind; death was a part of life. The deaths of little children were commonplace. Little Margaret died.
It was on Sunday. Margaret was ill, a trifling illness that had caused them some anxious moments, but she seemed to be getting better. Peacock had brought Edward Strachey and one or two other men home for the weekend, one of those weekends of walking and talking and good eating he was fond of providing for them. They went out in high spirits for a walk, Peacock and his friends, and when they came back Peacock was told that Margaret was dead.
Peacock, stunned, who had just been laughing and joking with his friends, told Edward Strachey that he saw, he saw now, there were times the world could not be made fun of. It was the first time, or almost the first time, that the world had treated Peacock in this unkind way, but it was to keep after him, the way it will keep after good-natured people, to try them.
Peacock wrote a little epitaph for Margaret:
Long night succeeds thy little day;
O blighted blossom! can it be,
That this gray stone and grassy clay
Have closed our anxious care of thee?
The half-form’d speech of artless thought,
That spoke a mind beyond thy years;
The song, the dance, by nature taught;
The sunny smiles, the transient tears;
The symmetry of face and form,
The eye with light and life replete;
The little heart so fondly warm,
The voice so musically sweet.
These lost to hope, in memory yet
Around the hearts that lov’d thee cling,
Shadowing, with long and vain regret,
The too fair promise of thy spring.
The vicar of Shepperton Church objected to the line “Long night succeeds thy little day.” It made no provision for immortal life. It was not suitable to be carved upon a stone in a churchyard. They quarreled bitterly—it was perhaps a diversion for Peacock’s grief, which was also bitter; he had no belief in immortality—had only poetry to console him.
Jane had, apparently, a belief in immortality, but she had no poetry to console her, and no resilience. A strangeness came over her. It must have been a bewildering and sad time for Mary Ellen, who was five. The little sister as if asleep, over whom everyone wept, whom she had never seen before so still and white—and then carried away in a tiny coffin, and no one laughing. Papa never laughed any more, and such a strangeness had come over Mama. Mama sat alone in her room; Grandmama dressed and fed them. Mama was never the same after this.
•
“My grandmother was inconsolable for the death of this little child, Margaret; she fell into a bad health, and until her death . . . she was a complete invalid,” Edith wrote. Edith means “nervous invalid,” which in itself was a euphemism, of course, for something worse. Mary Shelley, for all her faults, was not one for euphemism: “Peacock’s wife,” she wrote to Maria Gisbourne, “lives in town, quite mad.”
As to the origin or the nature of Jane’s illness—we can only guess. Perhaps she raved, like Mrs. Rochester, and blamed Peacock for her agonies of spirit. More likely she suffered from one of those long, household forms of madness, or severe neurosis, to which ladies in those days seemed especially prone: they languished with enormous patience, dreadfully hysterical and morbid, unfit for any real task, and were borne by their families with a certain rather creditable fortitude whereas nowadays they would be packed off to an institution. It was not uncommon for the Victorian family to have an “ill” relative upstairs. But what hideous torment for everyone this “illness” meant. Children motherless, prodigious chastity and sublimation for the young father (or the furtive embraces of opera dancers?), the burden of a large household fallen upon an old woman, Sarah Peacock, seventy-two years old. And Jane, in her madness, lived on after this, a burden to everybody for twenty-six more years.
Peacock biographers, as a group, have not had much sense about the human plausibilities of this situation, or perhaps they have been constrained by Peacock’s own theories about unintrusive biography. But it seems odd that they could go on for a hundred years blandly referring to Jane’s “bad health,” and maintaining that Peacock was devoted to her nonetheless, and grief-stricken when she died. Can the several years of happiness—well enough attested to by his fond letters to the bride—possibly sustain a man through twenty-six years of caring for a woman hopelessly insane? At the best his feelings could only have been those of bitter disappointment, masked perhaps by resignation. At the worst, hatred, bitterness. Peacock was not much over forty when all this happened to him: his child died, and then the woman he had embraced so fondly turned in his arms to someone, something else.
And how the twenty-six years passed for Jane we cannot say. Madness is not a happy condition; it is a painful one, tormented, despairing, haunted by alien presences, surrounded by strangers (her husband, her children, the old woman), people who did not know her. They did not understand how she suffered.
Margaret died, and Jane fell ill with grieving over it, and so the next strange thing happened, in that same year, 1826.
•
Imagine a child playing on the step before a cottage. She has a little game with sticks. She draws the stick through the dust and it makes a trail with a tiny ridge on either side, like the track of a caterpillar. She draws a windy trail and then—this is the principal joy—she stamps it all out with her dirty, bare little feet. Nice dry dust between the toes. She has forgotten her tears that her brothers went off to the river without her. Ma, busy within, will call her soon for she is to be given a lump of the bread dough to play with when Ma is ready. It is warm in the sun.
The mad lady comes. She comes slipping around the hedge and through the low gate. The little girl knows it is the mad lady because they have seen her on her way to church, and Ma said. But the little girl does not know what it means to be mad, and she smiles. The lady is smiling too. Her eyes are great and dark and shining. She whispers softly like Ma when it is time for bed; the lowest whisper, and puts out her hand, and she has cake! So much nicer than bread dough, though not as nice to squeeze. The lady holds the cake out and then she pulls it away again. The little girl watches her and waves her stick. The lady whispers. The little girl is very young, but she understands that the mad lady will give her the cake a little later. She is gathered up, and quickly, very quickly the mad lady, who smells sweet with perfume, carries her off down the street, pressing a bit of cake into her mouth so she will not call out.
The mad lady carries her into a house by the river, and sets her down while she pulls out from a trunk all manner of lovely things: dolls, ribbons, little lace caps. The child clasps a stuffed doll. Eagerly the lady undoes her simple muslin dress and pulls it off, and draws her little arms through a different dress of shiny silk. Her eyes on the doll, the child does not protest.
Later a gentleman comes. His voice is loud, his face very pale. The lady holds the child tightly in her arms, as if she will not let her go, and weeps all over the violet silk.
Edith tells the story as if it were not peculiar: “Very soon after Margaret’s death, my grandmother noticed a little girl in its mother’s arms, at the door of a cottage on Halliford Green; she was much taken with the child, seeing in it a strong likeness to the little one she was so sorely grieving after; she coaxed the little girl, Mary Rosewell, into her own house by a promise of some cake, and dressed it in her lost child’s clothes. My grandfather, on his return from town, looked in through the dining room window as he passed round to the door of his house, and seeing the child standing on the hearth-rug in the room, he was so struck by its likeness to Margaret, that he afterwards declared that he felt quite stunned, for the moment believing that he really saw her again before him. My grandparents finally adopted the child, Mary Rosewell, whose family had lived for generations much respected in the neighborhood, and a most devoted and unselfish adopted daughter she always proved to be.”
That is how the family acquired Mary Rosewell. It cannot have been so easy, of course: Peacock’s hope—vain—that the new little Margaretlike child would fill some place in Jane, would help her to be herself again; visiting the Rosewells, simple poor people, making his strange proposal; their anguish, or perhaps relief, depending on how poor they were; his pleas. (Boys, of course, were not given away so easily.) But Mary Anne, whom they called “May,” was no cure.
Perhaps a new baby of their own? One more, the last, was born to them the next year. This was Rosa Jane, and she too had to be raised by Sarah Peacock. There were no more children after that.
The little family was complete—the beautiful and complex father, with his laconic manner, his ambition and great energy. The faded and mad mother, who, having been able to adjust to life as a spinster in a little Welsh village, could not adjust to married life, to her brisk husband, to her noisy children or to the loss of one in a real world where mothers lost many of their many children, bore others, managed big households, endured. Sarah Peacock, an old, strong, intellectual woman, who had devoted her life to her one brilliant son, now found herself in her seventies with a large household and four little grandchildren to rear. The children: Mary Ellen, the most brilliant and promising, little Edward, the baby Rosa Jane, and the fisherman’s child, May Rosewell, beloved for her face of Margaret who died, taken from her own mother, her own cottage, to grow up a lady at the Peacock’s, like a changeling.
So from then on it was not the usual sort of childhood. The children were left, at first, in the complete care of their grandmother, while their father continued to live in town during the week, attending to his India House and becoming involved in the intellectual life of London. He wrote on various topics for the Westminster Review, the periodical identified with his colleagues, the Mills; later he reviewed operas and musical events for the Examiner, the Globe, and the London Review. During this period he wrote two novels (Misfortunes of Elphin and Crotchet Castle). It may be supposed he did not spend a lot of time at home.
Yet he was a fond father; his children were his emotional realities, for he had no wife. Mary Ellen was his favorite child, perhaps because she was the first, born in a happy time, and she seemed to justify his convictions that girls could be as strong, as spirited, as intelligent and learned as men.
In the nineteenth century this was by no means universally admitted. It was felt by many that women were in fact inferior. Daring thinkers, progressives, later in the century, held the more controversial view that women were not inferior, exactly: they were different. But just as good in their way. Not as smart, perhaps, but more intuitive; especially gifted with moral intuition, which made them the natural tutors of men, who, liable as they were to error, especially sexual error, were taught to look for moral and spiritual guidance to the naturally pure-minded females of their families—first to mother, later to wife. And it was thought better not to tamper with the naturally pure, intuitive moral faculties of girls and women by cluttering their heads with a lot of dangerous, even corrupting, knowledge—like certain passages of Shakespeare or, certainly, the wicked classics of Greece and Rome.
•
Of course no woman was ever so ideal as the ideal Victorian woman, but it was an age when you tried very hard; you heard lectures and wrote notes to yourself, and read improving volumes on the subject. It was an age that assumed a standard of moral perfection that under the right circumstances could in fact be achieved in this world. There was little indulgence for folly; a severe but rather optimistic view of human nature.
The education of girls and women was mostly directed at preserving them the way society—that is, Victorian fathers and husbands—thought they ought to be. Victorian women knew a little geography and how to add and subtract; they read the cleaner classics and literature of a spiritually improving nature. If you drew and painted and played the piano a little, you were “accomplished.” You sewed, perhaps you understood about cooking and domestic management. You were an influence for purity and religiousness in your family; you endured but did not enjoy sex (like the famous lady who confided her secret for getting through it: “I just lie on my back and think of England”). And there was a whole lot about the world you did not know or think of, because you did not want to know, and your husband and brothers did not want you to know, and if you found out, you pretended not to know just the same. You did not know, for example, exactly what happened to any poor girl who was “ruined,” although whatever it was, you knew, was dreadful. The ideal Victorian woman was innocent, unlearned, motherly, and, though devoutly worshipped, she was also notoriously dull company both at the dinner table and in bed.
One is tempted to suppose that she must have been encountered more often in the breach than in the observance. The picture that comes down to us of the ideal or even the typical woman is so constrained, so exploited, so ignorant, so dull, that it could not be borne; yet millions of women bore their lives with cheerfulness, or at least fortitude, shored up, it is true, by ramparts of fear (fear of disgrace, shame, and starvation) and of sentiment (motherhood, wifehood, an angel in the house)—and by the preoccupying rigors of relentless childbearing (the average number was nine). Common sense urges us to suppose that beneath the Victorians’ public postures of rectitude, formality, and reserve, beneath the bustles and beards, lurked beings much like ourselves. But closer inspection (books, letters, statistics) suggests that our sympathy is misplaced. They were not like us. People’s psyches conformed, as much as their manners did, to the peculiar notions they had created. Women did loathe sex, and they did call their husbands by their surnames.10 Husbands did suffer to feel base sexual impulses toward the pure creatures they married; and they did creep ashamedly off to prostitutes, or became impotent—another widespread affliction of the time. (Regarding the incidence of both impotence and large families in the Victorian age, we can only suppose the former intermittent, and the latter, perhaps, a function of anxiety over the former.)
Everyone had headaches, and lay about on sofas. Many households, like the Peacocks’, had someone crazy or invalid upstairs, as often a victim of the bizarre psychological patterns as of the pitiable medical ignorance then abounding.
•
Peacock, an affectionate father, a warmhearted man, gazes upon his first-born, a little girl: a cheerful little thing who ran and shouted, and learned to read precociously. Was she to grow up to do nothing better than gossip, have headaches, faint? Was she never to know about good books, running, port wine, physical love as a pleasure? As the Chinese bound the feet of their women, Englishmen bound their minds. Peacock determined that this should not happen to his girl. She would be educated, free of cant, self-respecting.
Whether Peacock was right to bring up Mary Ellen as he did is hard to say; it is the old problem of the happy swineherd and the discontented philosopher. Perhaps—people must have often made this remark to one another—perhaps Mary Ellen Peacock would have been better off if she had not been so clever and educated.
•
> Peacock has often aired his views on female education in his books. Even before he created the real Mary Ellen, he had created the fictional Anthelia (the heroine of Melincourt). Now that Peacock, Mary Ellen, and Anthelia are all just people in books, perhaps we may say Anthelia is someone Peacock used to know.
Although he created her in 1817, before his marriage, her situation oddly prefigures his own and Mary Ellen’s. Anthelia was raised by her father: a “man of great requirements, and of a retired disposition, devoted himself in solitude to the cultivation of his daughter’s understanding; for he was one of those who maintained the heretical notion that women are, or at least may be, rational beings; though, from the great pains usually taken in what is called education to make them otherwise, there are unfortunately very few examples to warrant the truth of the theory.”
Victorian society amply attested to this. Anthelia, owing to the care of her father, was like Mary Ellen, an exception—studious, sincere, direct, thoughtful. In the book she is admired by an idealistic young man named Forester, who realizes before he has even seen her that she is a rare creature—because he learns that she occasionally locks herself up in her library, something which astonishes his sensible friends Mr. Fax and Mr. Hippy.
“‘Locks herself up in a library!’ said Mr. Fax: ‘a young lady, a beauty and an heiress, in the nineteenth century, thinks of cultivating her understanding!’
“‘Strange but true,’ said Mr. Hippy.”
Mr. Forester is fascinated; later, when he meets her, he is ecstatic to discover she has a taste for Italian poetry, and praises her effusively.
The True History of the First Mrs. Meredith and Other Lesser Lives Page 6
