by Peter Dally
Julia was a strict disciplinarian and all her children were well brought up, good mannered and polite. The contrast between the courteous, conventional Duckworth children and the eight-year-old Laura was extreme. Leslie described her at this time as a ‘normal, though obviously backward, child’,2 but, in fact. she was seriously autistic, possibly from Asperger’s Syndrome. This condition is characterised by inappropriate social interaction, repetitive behaviour, bizarre intonation and body language, and poor motor co-ordination. Intelligence is usually in the low–normal range. The child’s inability to communicate and the chilling way he or she ignores and looks through anyone else present can be very disturbing.
Autistic behaviour develops during the first three years of life and is always strongly influenced by how the child is treated. While Laura’s mother was alive and when warm-hearted Anny cared for her, Laura’s eccentric behaviour could be and was readily overlooked, but with Anny’s departure she deteriorated and regressed. When she went to live with the Duckworth children, where she was expected to behave as a normal child, the effect was catastrophic. Leslie repeatedly lost his temper over her strange behaviour, her inarticulate ways of thinking and speaking. His unsuccessful attempts to teach Laura to speak, read and write terrified the girl and served only to increase her regression. Eventually he was forced to accept defeat and hand over Laura’s management to Julia.
Julia was convinced that Laura’s behaviour was entirely due to her having been brought up badly and she was sure the remedy lay in firm discipline and strict training. When she discovered she was wrong she became more and more punitive and eventually, after four years and when pregnant with Virginia, banished Laura to the top of the house in the care of a ‘governess’, after which she was only seen at family meals. Five years later she was sent away to a ‘home’, and later still to an asylum. Julia washed her from her mind as a hopeless lunatic, but Leslie continued to feel responsible and to visit his daughter until his death. Laura lived to be 76.
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Julia Stephen quickly became pregnant. Vanessa was born in May 1879 and Thoby followed 15 months later. Julia wanted another boy but it was Virginia who arrived on 25 January 1882. Her last child, Adrian, was conceived at the beginning of the next year.
Julia’s reactions to her pregnancies throw a light on her personal difficulties and the tensions and problems Virginia encountered in early life.
Some women are profoundly affected by the sex of their child. Julia was cheered when her infant proved to be male, and depressed when it turned out to be female. Julia perhaps visualised each of her children in utero as male – certainly when pregnant with Virginia she imagined a boy and referred to him as Chad – and was disappointed when a girl was born. Julia took the line that males are superior to females, but that throughout their lives they need to be protected and mothered. She believed a women’s primary role in life was to care for her men: husband first, then sons. For Julia the birth of a son, full of promise, was the start of a natural loving process. A daughter was no better than a formless lump of clay at birth which had to be pummelled and moulded into a ‘perfect’ woman.
Julia’s sons were admired and loved, her daughters criticised and made to conform. Julia could always make Leslie jealous by speaking of George with ‘so evident a thrill of maternal love and pride’.3 She fussed over Gerald and pampered Adrian. Only with Thoby, who was disconcertingly self-contained and distant, was she more reserved and less at ease. She was a strict disciplinarian with her daughters, particularly the eldest, Stella, whom she treated with ‘the severity with which she should have treated her own failings’. When Leslie protested on more than one occasion, shocked by her harshness, she justified herself on the grounds that she ‘felt Stella part of myself’.4
Leslie quickly adapted to the marriage. His pattern of life, in fact, continued much as before: he continued to go on walking holidays on his own, his work satisfied him and his comforts were ably provided by a protective Julia. She gave him ‘an infinity of care’. His one complaint and wish was that she would become more happy. Her melancholic looks when she was with him – not a single photograph shows Julia smiling, although she was capable of being merry in the right company – must sometimes have irritated and upset Leslie, as well as arousing his anxiety over the depth of her love. Time after time he asked her to say she loved him and she always avoided giving him a direct answer. He enjoyed their sexual life although how much was duty and how much was pleasure to Julia – given her self-confessed ‘deadness’ – is an open question. There were no apparent difficulties on that score, although Leslie once warned that, ‘by abstaining so much’, he became even more obstreperous, or as he called it, ‘tantarous’.5
Julia was ill for some months after Vanessa’s birth and no sooner did she begin to improve when her mother’s rheumatoid arthritis flared up. At the time Mia Jackson was staying at Eastnor Castle, the home of her younger sister Lady Somers, and Julia was at once summoned. She nursed her there for several weeks and then brought her to London, where she stayed before moving on to the Brighton home of her second daughter Mary Fisher to convalesce.
Mia was left partially crippled after this relapse and consequently decided to move permanently to Brighton to be near her daughters. For some years she went the rounds of the spas and hydros and underwent the current fashionable treatments without lasting benefit. In her latter years she was confined to a wheelchair. Much of her later disability was genuine but it can never have been easy for the Stephens to distinguish real physical distress from manipulative behaviour. She made frequent demands on Julia, and Leslie was more than once angered and driven to protest at what he considered unreasonable calls. He was not being altogether unfair when he said his mother-in-law needed ‘managing’ rather than ‘nursing’. Leslie tolerated much from her and put up with Julia’s absences from home with, for the most part, little more than a rumble of protest. Not that he was ever physically inconvenienced. Julia always ensured his comforts were catered for and his favourite food prepared, and by the time Virginia was a few years old, Stella was able to deputise efficiently for her mother.
Julia warned Leslie before marriage that she would continue to nurse her mother and respond to her calls, as well as visit the sick and the dying, and might sometimes be away from him for days and even weeks. He had agreed readily at the time but as the years passed, and the demands on Julia from her mother and other relatives continued, his protests slowly became louder. In the first four years of marriage, until he undertook to edit The Dictionary of National Biography, he was generously supportive of his wife. He accompanied Julia when she went to nurse her mother in 1879 and later travelled with her to Brighton to settle Dr and Mrs Jackson into their new home. It was during those trying months that Julia again became pregnant.
Thoby was born in September 1880. The birth and early weeks were uneventful but she had no time to recover her full strength before her eldest sister Adeline Vaughan fell critically ill with heart disease and Julia at once went to her assistance. Friends criticised her for leaving her young children but Leslie stoutly defended her. Adeline’s death added to Julia’s melancholia but did not prevent her becoming pregnant again, this time with Virginia (christened Adeline Virginia after her aunt).
Virginia always claimed that she and her younger brother Adrian were unwanted children, but there is no evidence for this and it is much more likely that Julia wanted to become pregnant. Melancholic women frequently compensate for their unhappiness by conceiving and, once pregnant, Julia was convinced she had another male child to love and protect. One can only presume her disappointment when ‘Chad’ turned into Virginia, but Julia was a determined woman and, despite Leslie pronouncing Chad to be the last child, a fourth pregnancy followed. Adrian became her ‘Benjamin’, her ‘Joy’ and she spoilt and pampered him and treated him in baby fashion until her death. Virginia was jealous of the attention Adrian received, and was disparaging and often very cutting of him late into the
ir lives.
Whatever hopes for happiness in the marriage Julia may have had, they soon faded, although she never ceased to be the good wife. There was no possibility of Leslie taking over Herbert Duckworth’s role and becoming another ‘great Achilles’, for he was the antithesis of Herbert in character and interests, but he was capable of being sympathetic and understanding, as he had demonstrated during their courtship. Had he developed that side and paid more attention to Julia’s needs and less to his own, Julia’s melancholia might have lifted. But Leslie was too fixed in his ways to change. He left all family responsibilities to his wife, although he continually criticised and interfered with her decisions. Whatever the problems at home, however tired or unwell Julia might be, Leslie went off on his climbing holidays to the Alps or on long country walks with the Sunday Tramps, an ‘athletic fraternity … which he founded after his second marriage’.6 The couple never travelled abroad together. Leslie rarely saw a play or went to a concert or picture gallery, which Julia would have enjoyed. They shared almost nothing outside the home and family.
He went on a hiking tour in the last trimester before Virginia’s birth, when Julia was unwell. Remembering Minny’s death in pregnancy, Julia might have expected him to curtail his holidays, but he merely sent her a note warning her to rest, for if any disaster occurred he would suffer dreadfully: ‘life would indeed be bleak’.7
Yet Leslie loved his wife. ‘Good God! how that man adores her,’ Henry James, a family friend, observed, but for once the great novelist failed to paint the full picture.8 Leslie’s devotion to Julia led him to expect total devotion from her and this allowed him to behave with extraordinary selfishness in his marriage. He expected to be mothered; every complaint listened to and understood, every pain kissed away. He wanted Julia to be instantly available, willing to abandon whatever she was doing to please him. It irked him terribly that Julia would never say she loved him but he never wondered why, never looked below the surface and allowed himself to glimpse resentment over his behaviour. His anxiety only served to increase the self-pitying scenes which led Julia having to hold him as though he was a small child. His tantrums, which sometimes disturbed the house, were often contrived ‘in order to extort [from Julia] some of her delicious compliments’.9
Julia was trapped, for the more she petted and mothered Leslie, the more greedy and infantile he became. Yet had she ignored him he would have become ‘tantarous’. She would not have tolerated such behaviour in the children – although George and particularly Adrian had special dispensation – but her compulsive need to mother Leslie immediately took over when he appealed to her. Virginia, watching critically, condemned her mother for making a fetish of Leslie’s health and comfort that, in the end, disrupted the household and, Virginia believed, hastened Julia’s death.
Why did Julia indulge Leslie? From her earliest years at Little Holland House she had been adored by men of ability and fame. They had praised her beauty, painted her, sought her in marriage, in short, had valued her and placed her on a pedestal; she had been made to feel a goddess. By the time of her first marriage she had become conditioned to attracting male adoration. With the passage of years the quality of adoring men had dropped and one of Leslie’s attractions for Julia had been the breadth of his learning and renown in the literary world. Julia’s pleasure in being the object of Leslie’s adoration was immense, and although she was exhausted by much of his behaviour she was trapped in her own addictive needs.
Time after time Leslie would wring his hands and lament that he was a failure as a writer and bewail his inability to be the genius he should be. Julia would listen and take his hand and comfort him, assuring him he really was the great man she knew him to be, respected and sought after by everyone. She repeated praise she had read or overheard; he was famous, admired, quoted and known everywhere. Gradually he allowed her to calm his agitation until, soothed, a contented child, he sat back and adored her in turn.
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Until 1882, the year of Virginia’s birth, Leslie’s mental stability was good and his neurotic behaviour, by and large, restricted to reasonable limits. Thereafter he deteriorated steadily and became an increasing burden on his wife and family.
In 1882 The Science of Ethics, on which Leslie had worked for the past five years, was published. It was not the success he anticipated and he was upset by the lack of enthusiasm. At the same time he learnt that the Cornhill Magazine he had edited for nine years was running at a loss, its circulation having halved during his editorship.
He at once resigned but almost the next day he was invited ‘to edit a vast new project’ thought up by the publisher George Smith: The Dictionary of National Biography.10 It was a daunting challenge involving choosing who to include and exclude, and then finding suitable contributors. He had to keep a tight rein on the length and quality of the articles, watch for plagiarism and ensure promised contributions were delivered on time. Over and above all that, Leslie was himself a major contributor and ‘wrote the lives of most of the major poets and writers’.11 The ‘DNB’ that was to be the great achivement of his life was well within his intellectual capacity, but the demands it made on his emotional life were too much for him and it slowly crushed him.
The first volume appeared in 1884 after little more than two years and thereafter a new volume appeared quarterly without fail. The pressure on Leslie was unremitting, despite his having an exceptionally able assistant in Sidney Lee. Fear of failure haunted him and he was never free of anxiety. The work came to obsess him and he thought and talked of little else.
Almost from the time of the DNB’s inception Leslie began to break down. His sleep, normally sound, became broken. Waking with ‘the horrors’, convinced he was capable only of third-rate work, he would rouse Julia and, in Ancient Mariner style, pour out his fears. Eventually, exhausted and pacified, he drifted back to sleep, leaving his wife wide-awake and worried. The strain on Julia was immense. Watching the effect of the DNB on her husband made her loathe the work. She struggled to persuade him to give it up and in 1885 warned George Smith that she feared for Leslie’s state of mind. But Leslie’s pride was almost too great for him to admit defeat, although he agreed to make some concessions. Thinking to spare himself, he gave over to Julia the handling of the household finances. All that achieved was increased friction between husband and wife, for Leslie was incapable of giving Julia a free hand and continually criticised her. The weekly inspection of expenses invariably ended in noisy shouts about extravagance, and the banging of doors. The more depressed he became, the more outrageous was Leslie’s behaviour; exhausted by the broken nights Julia’s patience, hanging by a thread, started to give.
Although by the beginning of 1887 Leslie was on the edge of a breakdown, he continued to cling to the editorship. All Julia’s pleading for him to resign was ignored. In desperation she appealed to the family doctor who, recognising the crisis, ordered Leslie to take a holiday of at least three weeks in the Alps. He obeyed reluctantly and when, after walking twenty miles a day for a week, he felt better, he began badgering Julia with daily letters demanding his early return. He assured her that she was the best cure for his nerves and the longer he stayed away the worse he would be. Julia, however, was at the end of her strength and would brook no compromise. Leslie threatened ‘tantarums’ but she not only stood her ground but suggested he stay away an extra week.
Leslie’s satisfaction on returning home was short-lived, for after a few weeks Julia was summoned to Brighton to nurse her dying 83-year-old father. Stella ran the household efficiently in her absence but whatever she did compared badly to Julia in Leslie’s eyes. At first he tolerated Julia’s absence but his letters soon became angry and self-pitying. Julia was neglecting him, for his needs were surely as great as the dying man’s. When Dr Jackson died after ten days, Leslie expected Julia to return home immediately after the funeral, and when she stayed on, saying her mother needed her, he became irate. He suggested his mother-in-law should return with Ju
lia and stay with them until she felt better. When he heard that Mia Jackson wanted Julia to remain at Brighton for a second week to sort through her father’s papers he was incensed. Julia, he wrote, was allowing herself to be manipulated by her mother, whose nerves were perpetually weak. Indignant letters flowed between them, until finally, Julia cast off pretence and admitted she was exhausted and needed time away from him and the family.
Leslie was astonished and disturbed. It had never occurred to him that Julia could be run down. Puzzled, he travelled down to see her and thrash out the matter. He returned, only partially mollified and without Julia, who stayed on for a further two weeks.
Leslie’s mental health continued to deteriorate and household tensions were high. There were always broken nights and histrionic scenes; Armageddon was at hand; he was threatened with financial and professional ruin; Julia’s extravagance would end in their bankruptcy. Leslie had giddy fits, which were diagnosed as ‘stomachic vertigo’ by the family doctor but were probably manifestations of panic attacks. Yet, remarkably, he continued to produce good work and it was not until 1891, after 26 volumes, that he handed over the editorship of the DNB to Sidney Lee. He continued to contribute biographies to the Dictionary until shortly before his death.
The strain on Julia persisted despite Leslie having given up the Dictionary. She had to spend long hours reassuring him he was still the country’s leading man of letters. She encouraged him to begin the book on the English Utilitarians he had been planning for some years, which he might write at his own pace and without pressure. But nothing could hold back the tide of depression and he continued to worry about his reputation and the future until the end.
