The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

by Peter Dally

  Nursing came to be an important way for Julia to express her feelings and be valued. It was always difficult for Julia to show or admit to open affection; she seemed to be afraid of giving too much of herself away. She told her daughters, ‘Be sympathetic; be tender; flatter; deceive; use all the arts and wiles of our sex. Never let anyone guess that you have a mind of your own.’12 Through nursing she was able to do good and be looked upon as angelic, all the while remaining detached and in control. She occupied the centre of her stage, and yet her real self remained hidden. She kept her thoughts to herself. Years later, she wrote revealingly that ‘the relations between the sick and the well are far easier and pleasanter than between the well and the well.’13

  Mia Jackson occasionally worried that Julia, her ‘lamb’, was too solemn and secretive for her own good. She had few friends in childhood and none with whom she was intimate. She was not close to either of her sisters, although she was fond of the eldest Adeline and, despite the ten-year gap between them, became the confidante of Adeline’s unhappy marital experiences.

  Her uncle Thoby Prinsep probably understood Julia better than anyone. She worshipped him and early on in life came to look on him as a father-figure. He was nearly 60 when Julia and her mother arrived in England. A dynamic, extroverted man, he had held high office in the East India Company until retirement some ten years before. Like his wife, he was very involved in the arts and literature and one of his hobbies was to translate Persian poetry. He seems to have taken a close interest in Julia and she responded with a ‘simple, uncritical, enthusiastic’ hero-worship.14 Little Holland House was her home of education, where she learnt social ways and acquired many of her attitudes and interests. She spent much of her youth there and was, no doubt, spoilt and allowed to feel important. She became knowledgeable in the arts, learnt ‘to listen devoutly’ to distinguished men: ‘to accept the fact that Watts was a great painter, Tennyson a great poet; and to dance with the Prince of Wales’.15 Julia became, in other words, a well educated and cultured upper-class young lady. Sometimes she accompanied the Prinseps on their tours abroad, usually, but not always, with her ailing mother. She was invariably extremely anxious at any separation, worrying about her mother’s health and comfort and generally fearing the worst. Telegrams and letters of reassurance went backwards and forwards in a steady stream between mother and daughter whenever they were parted.

  Separation anxiety can be catching and readily passed on to the next generation. Virginia was similarly affected and, from the age of seven or eight, was intensely anxious when separated for long from her mother and later mother-substitutes. When Julia was late home, even by a few minutes, Virginia would work herself up into a lather of anxiety.

  It was during a visit to Venice with her mother and the Prinseps that Julia met Herbert Duckworth and immediately fell in love. Mia Jackson may not have been much surprised but she probably had very mixed feelings over the prospect of losing her lamb. But Uncle Thoby approved, despite Herbert being more hearty than aesthetically minded, and helped to persuade his sister-in-law to agree to the marriage. Julia was married soon after her twenty-first birthday in 1867.

  Herbert Duckworth was 13 years older, a barrister with plentiful private means. His family were minor county gentry and, despite their money having come originally from commerce, he was clearly a good catch.

  Julia was, she claimed, immensely happy in her marriage to Herbert. Although she never spoke of him to the Stephen children, Virginia came to believe, from what she learnt from her half-sister Stella, that Julia idealised Herbert, ‘the perfect man: heroic, handsome, magnanimous, “the great Achilles whom we knew”’.16 He was certainly different in every way from the intellectual Leslie Stephen, her second husband.

  Marriage did not change her controlling nature and from the start she mothered Herbert and fussed over his health. She was fearful she might lose him and was on tenterhooks whenever he was away from home for long. Once, he missed his train home and, when he failed to arrive at the usual time, Julia panicked and nearly collapsed.

  Her apprehension turned out to be justified when, after only four years together, Herbert suddenly died of a brain haemorrhage. Julia was inconsolable: a world of pure love and beauty had been taken away. Her anger and despair were immense, but she could not express her feelings. She refused to share her grief and her anger grew. Who could she direct it against other than herself? She could not rage directly against Herbert for leaving her, nor her mother hovering in the background. They were sacrosanct. Instead she made God the target of her anger. From henceforth, she declared, she was an atheist. She would no longer believe in a Christian God who permitted such suffering.

  Through her action Julia not only released anger but hurt her mother deeply, for Mia Jackson was a devout Anglican who pleaded and prayed for her daughter to return to the Faith. Julia was stony-hearted. So far as she was concerned, God was dead. Perhaps for the first time in her life she refused to give in to her mother.

  Whatever unsaid satisfaction Julia may have derived from this psychological twist, it did little to relieve her grief. Her anger persisted and melancholia became part of her nature, colouring her views of the world and life. For a while she wanted to die but she was now responsible for three children and, in any event, she lacked the self-destructive streak of her youngest daughter. She followed Samuel Johnson’s advice and filled every waking moment with humanitarian activity: caring for the children, helping her mother and doing good works outside the home. She often exhausted herself and melancholy was never far away, but her visits to the sick and needy helped her to keep up appearances: ‘Cheerfulness is a habit to be acquired’, she firmly declared. ‘no one venturing to attend the sick should wear a gloomy face.’17 So she passed the next nine years until she married Leslie Stephen in 1878.

  Chapter Two

  Leslie Stephen

  Leslie was born in 1832, three years after his brother Fitzjames. He was considered by his parents from infancy to be delicate and highly strung. As a result he was over-protected and spoilt by his mother, who continued for many years to treat him as a sickly child. Leslie took full advantage of his position and came to expect his mother and devoted young sister to satisfy his every wish and need. They usually did and when they failed to come up to expectation a paroxysm of rage ensued. He adored his mother and confided his fears to her, but in the presence of his father Sir James Stephen, the great colonial administrator, he became a changed being, inhibited and shy, incapable of talking freely about himself or his feelings. He feared his father – for no specific reason – and found him unapproachable. In turn, his father complained how ‘very inarticulate and very reserved’ his son was.1

  In 1847 Sir James became deeply depressed and had to retire from the civil service. He was never an easy man to manage and over the next year or two the patience of his wife must have been strained to the limit in looking after him. Significantly, Leslie collapsed in depression the following year and spent much of that summer in bed. At the time he was being tutored for Cambridge and living at home with virtually no friends. His brother was already at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, ‘successful and competent’. Although Leslie thought of himself as inadequate by comparison with Fitzjames, he was reasonably confident of getting into Trinity and was not unduly worried by the impending exams. It may be that Leslie’s depression was, partially at least, an unconscious attempt to draw his mother’s attention from her husband on to him. It was certainly a pattern that was to recur more than once during Leslie’s marriage to Julia whenever he felt neglected.

  All his life Leslie worshipped his womenfolk – mother, wives and substitutes – and painted them in angelic colours but, in return, he expected them to be perfect in every respect: always ready to come running, however inconvenient, to pander to his needs. Woe betide them if they disappointed him: the air was filled with recriminations. During his marriage Leslie’s behaviour exhausted Julia and caused immense difficulties between him and his chil
dren. Virginia firmly believed that ‘it would have been better for our relationship if she [Julia] had left him to fend for himself’.2

  Leslie went up to Trinity Hall when still 17. The new life there, away from home, transformed him. He grew in self-confidence, made friends and, at the end of the first year, won a scholarship. He also ‘toughened up’. He became an enthusiastic oarsman and, eventually, a renowned rowing coach, a formidable walker covering 30 or 40 miles a day, and a climber whose exploits in the Alps are still recalled. Mountaineering was a pleasure he delighted in and, until Julia’s death, he spent many of his holidays in the Swiss Alps. As he climbed, always in silence, his anxieties evaporated. But it was the conquest of the mountain rather than a search for tranquillity, a need to prove to himself, as much as to the world, that he was not the weak, mollycoddled youth of pre-Cambridge days that really motivated him. Yet however great his successes on the mountains or in the intellectual world, fear of being thought a failure was never far removed. Whenever he became depressed self-doubts immediately began to plague him.

  Leslie was elected a Fellow and Tutor of Trinity Hall in 1854. The fellowship required him to take Holy Orders and he was ordained the following year. He was expected to take priest’s orders within a short period but an inexplicable delay of four years ensued. Sir James, a staunch Evangelist, was disturbed and tried again and again to persuade his son to act, but not until his father was dying did Leslie move and enter the priesthood.

  Two years later Leslie faced a crisis of identity: was he to continue his enjoyable but narrow life at Cambridge and end up as a don in an ivory tower, or follow his brother’s example and seek to establish himself in the wider world of London? His father believed that Leslie’s delicate nervous system rendered him unfit for the competitive work market, and particularly the field of journalism where Fitzjames had already made a name. Leslie should not leave the protective environs of Cambridge, Sir James had counselled, but if he did he must return home and live with his mother and sister.

  Leslie’s solution to the dilemma was to lose his faith and become an atheist. He had never been a heartfelt Christian and religious controversy and doubt were widespread in academia at that period, (Darwin’s The Origin of Species by Natural Selection had been published in 1859), and Leslie now came to see that many of the biblical stories on which his Christian faith rested were unsustainable. The literal truth of Noah’s Ark, when viewed in the light of reason, vanished into thin air. He abandoned the priesthood. In so doing he had to give up the fellowship and so effectively ended a Cambridge career.

  Leslie’s loss of faith was surely linked to the death of his father and represented a rejection of his authority; for it was not a passive process, a simple loss of belief, but an aggressive rejection of Christianity. Leslie now became a militant agnostic, renowned for his writings and the logic of his arguments. His influence in persuading doubters was considerable and, in fact, Julia Duckworth’s interest in him was first aroused after reading one of his articles and finding intellectual justification for her own atheism.

  If Leslie had been motivated to free himself from his father by rejecting Christianity, he was only partially successful. A parent is far more difficult than God to kill and the phantom lives on long after death, as Virginia was to discover. Leslie’s conversion to atheism, by forcing him to leave Cambridge, certainly freed him to enter a wider, more satisfying world wherein he prospered and became a respected figure. At heart, however, he continued to feel a sham and a failure, never really deserving of good opinion.

  * * *

  In 1867, when he was 35, Leslie married the younger of William Thackeray’s daughters, Minny, then aged 27, a whimsical woman ‘with beautiful eyes’. Watt’s portrait of her shows a ‘sweet’, to use Leslie’s description, ‘rather dreamy face’. Leslie was attracted and thought her ‘pure minded and free of any taint of coarseness or conceit or self-consciousness’.3 His sister Caroline Stephen, a fair eccentric herself, saw her as ‘quaintly picturesque’.4 It is difficult to see what the two had in common apart from a mutual admiration for Minny’s father and his works. She was also inclined to be vague and spent much time rescuing flies from drowning in the garden after rain, and feeding stray cats. Nonetheless, she proved to be a capable housekeeper and caterer.

  Minny’s mother had schizophrenia (the illness had begun at Minny’s birth), and needed constant care although she lived on to the age of 76, and Minny’s aunt was ‘so queer as to be almost on the borders of sanity’.5 Possibly Minny herself, had she not died in pregnancy, would have broken down and become mentally ill.

  The pressure of being Leslie’s wife was not inconsiderable but Minny was protected from Leslie’s more extravagant demands and bullying by her older sister Anny, who lived with the couple and was able to control Leslie through a mixture of humour and ridicule. The sisters had always been close and became more so after their father’s death in 1863. ‘I shall never be separated from Anny except during my wedding tour,’ Minny had told Leslie before their marriage.6

  Anny was warm-hearted and enthusiastic with a lively sense of fun. She was very sociable, rather scatterbrained, extravagant and a compulsive talker. She was also fond of Leslie. Her chief complaint against him was the ‘cold bath effect’ he had on their enthusiasms.7 She could reduce Leslie to silent rage by her chattering and caused furious scenes when she ran up debts and was unable to pay her share of the household expenses. But Leslie’s outbursts mostly went over the Thackeray girls’ heads and Anny was more amused than chastened. Leslie was almost always brought to heel and a scene would end with Leslie lending Anny money to pay her debts which, to her credit, she invariably repaid in the new quarter.

  It was all in marked contrast to the scenes that would occur in Leslie’s second marriage. Julia Stephen, lacking Anny’s sense of the absurd, was unable to deflect Leslie’s wrath and laugh at him. She pandered to his whims and by doing so, as Virginia complained, perpetuated his bullying egocentric habits.

  Minny’s first pregnancy miscarried but, in December 1870, Laura was born. The child was autistic but the parents failed to remark on her strangeness and she was treated as normal while Minny lived. Five years later Minny again became pregnant; she felt unwell from the beginning and, in the last month, developed eclampsia and died after a series of fits. The child was stillborn.

  Leslie’s grief was deep but not unmixed with self-pity and resentment. For a while he withdrew from friends and continued to work, editing Cornhill Magazine and writing his ambitious project The History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century. He came to rely on Anny, who stayed on and looked after him and Laura for eighteen months until her unexpected and, to Leslie, unwelcome marriage. Anny, nearing her forties, had fallen in love with her cousin Richmond Ritchie, 16 years younger and an undergraduate at Trinity. His frequent visits to the house had already begun to concern Leslie when, on coming into the drawing-room one afternoon, he found Anny and Richmond kissing. Incensed, he told her she must ‘make up her mind one way or other’ to marry or to give up Richmond.8 He assumed his ultimatum would at once bring Anny to her senses. Richmond had no money and the age gap was, Leslie thought, indecent. To his astonishment she chose marriage and Leslie became distraught; that Anny could desert him was almost more than he could conceive. The prospect of being abandoned and left on his own aroused intense anxiety and he was reduced for a time to helpless indecision.

  He was rescued from his plight by a neighbour, Julia Duckworth. She had been a friend of the Thackeray sisters for many years and frequently visited Anny. She had looked on Leslie with awe and trepidation and kept her distance for fear of irritating or boring him, but she now saw him daily. She listened patiently to his repetitive denunciations of Anny’s marriage and then, suddenly, throwing caution to the winds, told him he was jealous and angry only because he was losing Anny. She stood up for Anny and in so doing lost her fear of Leslie. Leslie in turn was impressed by her firmness and from then on came increasi
ngly to depend on Julia. When Richmond asked Leslie for an interview in order to arrange the terms of marriage, Leslie insisted that Julia be present for moral support.

  At Anny’s wedding he and Julia made a peculiar-looking pair. Leslie ‘looked very deplorable’, silent and gloomy, while Julia ‘wore the thickest black velvet dress and heavy black veil [it was a hot day in August, 1877] and gave the gloomiest, most tragic aspect.’9 It was a foretaste of what lay ahead for this unusual couple who complemented so well each other’s needs.

  * * *

  Leslie soon asked Julia to marry him, but at first she was hesitant. She liked Leslie but she had ‘no courage for life’. Her ambivalence was patently clear. What she offered Leslie with one hand she took back with the other: ‘I do love you with all my heart’, she wrote to him, ‘only it seems such a poor, dead heart’.10 She felt no passion within her love for Leslie. She was attracted to his mind and, above all, to his overwhelming need for her, his pathetic helplessness.

  She discussed the question of marriage with her mother who, not surprisingly, advised against it. Mia Jackson feared for Julia’s happiness and, what was no doubt unsaid, her own position if Julia should adopt a new life. But Uncle Thoby, although terminally ill at Freshwater in the Isle of Wight, gave the marriage his approval. Julia returned from seeing him and told Leslie she meant ‘to be as good a wife as she could’. On 26 March 1878 the ‘tall, grave and thin couple’ were married.11

  Chapter Three

  The Stephen Marriage

  Leslie and Laura moved into Julia’s house at 22 Hyde Park Gate. The three Duckworth children accepted their stepfather with remarkable equanimity. George, the eldest, was ten. He possessed his father’s good looks and easygoing temperament and was the apple of his mother’s eye. He, in turn, adored Julia who was always ‘his own darling Mother’.1 Stella, a year younger, was just as devoted to her mother and already beginning to shape up to Julia’s notion of a ‘perfect’ daughter. Gerald was born after his father’s death and, as the centre point of Julia’s grief and attention, became the ‘delicate child’ of the family, pampered and difficult.