Good Wives

by Margaret Forster

  It may well have been only the alcohol which caused trouble so spectacular that it resulted in Mary’s having to leave the Livingstones’ teetotal house. ‘A little brandy’ was as shocking as a bottle to a Scotsman who had signed the pledge. Alcohol relaxed Mary, as it does most people, and when ‘relaxed’, possibly very relaxed, her nature changed – she became uncharacteristically boisterous and voluble. But there is no way of estimating how much she drank at this stage and there is no record of anyone commenting in 1852 on her drinking (though there is much unfortunate comment later). Every description of Mary which has survived up to this time stresses her calm demeanour, her patience, her kindness, her eagerness to please. Whether she drank or not, she was no drunken harpy, but on the contrary, a young unhappy wife in a strange environment struggling to look after four confused children and missing her husband desperately. From her point of view, the scenario is equally easy to imagine: forbidding father-in-law, who rarely smiles and expects total obedience, imposing a routine to which it is hard to adjust; mother-in-law and sisters-in-law very much under his thumb and afraid to side with her; a house so cold she is never warm and so cramped the children whine constantly to go out but can’t, because outside it is freezing and raining, and they haven’t adequate clothing; all her attempts to be pleasant misunderstood and disappointment evident on every face; no husband to negotiate on her behalf and stand up for her. No wonder she turned to drink.

  At any rate, within six fraught weeks Mary had vacated the cottage she’d rented and was in lodgings in Almada Street, Hamilton. She rented one room only, for the five of them – one room in a dark, stone house in a street of similar houses. Humbly, she wrote to Tidman: ‘as you so kindly gave me permission to write to you, I now sit down … to tell you of my difficulties. My health has been very poor since we arrived in Scotland, but I am a little better now. We are in lodgings at £15 a quarter, independent of food and other expenses.’6 She tells him she cannot go on paying that but that she knows of an unfurnished cottage she can have for £7 a year. She can furnish it with help from her parents’ friends and sell everything when she goes back to Africa, but she needs a contribution from the London Missionary Society. Scrupulously, she accounts for the £30 they have already given her on her arrival – £5 customs duties, £12 train journeys, £5 rent so far, £2 other expenses, stating (inaccurately) that this leaves only £5, which has to cover food. She asks for another £20 (which is granted). But then she decides to leave Scotland entirely and spends 1853 going from one set of her parents’ friends to another, moving between Manchester, London and Kendal. The travelling costs money, and so does buying warm clothes for the growing children, and in spite of the generosity of these hospitable people she is soon begging Tidman for another contribution. ‘I trust you will not refuse,’ she writes, in February 1853, ‘as I have no one else to look to.’ By October of that year she is

  not able to go on for want of money … I would beg of you to be lenient with me, I don’t attempt to justify myself, I may not have been so discreet in the use of my money … if you do not think it proper to give any allowance, will you kindly let me have £5 of Mr Livingstone’s salary, I shall acquaint him of it.

  By then, eighteen months after arriving with such high hopes in England, she had had enough. Never mind the children’s education – they were getting very little education anyway in the circumstances – she wanted to go home. She hated the itinerant life and wanted to be in her own house among her own things. But even that, supposing she could have arranged her return to Africa, was denied her – her home at Kolobeng had been attacked and gutted in a Boer raid, all the furniture wrecked, the books torn up and scattered. She had no home to return to, only a tantalising image of what it had been, to which to cling. But in any case, the London Missionary Society would not send her home and her husband wanted her to stay where she was. Whatever she was suffering, he wrote to her, she couldn’t suffer worse than he did, trekking from west to east across Africa on his latest expedition, or worse than the enslaved women he described to her in his letters – ‘each has an iron ring round her wrist, and that is attached to a chain, which she carries in her hand.’7 If this, and the account of his own hardships, was meant to cheer her up, it failed.

  But she was trapped in England, without the power to direct her own fate. The person to whom she might naturally have turned, her sister Helen, who had married and now lived with her family in Surrey, seems not to have extended a prolonged welcome. Helen, to whom Mary had never been as close as she was to Ann, had two children of her own and was also housing Bessie and Jane, the two youngest Moffat sisters who had been sent to England for their education. To take in her eldest sister plus the four Livingstone children may simply have been too much to contemplate. So there were no close relatives to take charge of Mary and she had to fall back on kind friends of her parents, like the Braithwaites in Kendal. She stayed with them a long time, obviously finding some solace in their uncritical company and even in Kendal itself – a small town in the middle of beautiful hills, much more congenial to her than the cities of Glasgow or London, or Manchester. The children had some freedom there, and it was healthier for them. Not for her, though. She was ill in January 1854 – ‘my illness has been long and severe’, she told Tidman. But at least medical attention had cost her nothing, so she wasn’t begging for money to cover bills (the doctor ‘kindly refused any remuneration for his services’). She was writing to tell him it was her duty ‘to acquaint you that it is neither just to myself nor to you for me to remain any longer in England than the ensuing quarter’. The doctor has said she will be fit to travel in May and that the sea-voyage would in fact be beneficial. Her husband, she maintains, will meet her at the Cape in August and she will wait there for him. Revealingly, she adds: ‘I have asked him to come to England, but he sternly refuses to do so, on account of this throat, which would be aggravated by the damp weather in this country.’8 That ‘sternly’ was significant and pointed – clearly, her pleas had been rejected because she was thinking of herself and not of him. But she still needed the London Missionary Society’s money to get to the Cape and her request for it becomes increasingly passionate – ‘I beg and entreat you … I have had much to try me in every respect … I ask … you not to deny my request … a longer residence in England will not improve me. Let me go before I do get ill again.’

  May came and went and still she was stuck in England, by then at Epsom with another Moffat friend. By July 1854, she is writing in a panic to Tidman: ‘I have no money whatever.’ Some was sent, and she staggered on, still wretchedly unhappy, but at least not ill. Robert and Agnes were at the Quaker school in Kendal, living with the Braithwaites, and she could manage the five-year-old Thomas and three-year-old Oswell better. But mentally she was very low, ever anxious for news of her husband. Livingstone seemed to have disappeared: he certainly had not turned up at the Cape, where he was supposed to be going to meet her, and she had to wonder if she would ever see him again. Soon, she might be a widow, rather than a wife, and a widow with no means of support and no family nearby, willing or able to help her. To the London Missionary Society, she was becoming a nuisance, the wife not of a highly admired missionary but of a man whom they suspected of being more explorer than missionary (though he denied it) and whose explorations they were less and less inclined to finance. Wife or widow, Mary knew she would get little help from them. But Tidman was kind, his answers to her entreaties always gentle, and he invariably managed to persuade the directors to advance Mary something. It was never enough, and by June 1855 she was reduced to writing from Epsom: ‘I have not a shilling to go on with.’

  How much she wrote of her plight to her husband, and how often, is impossible to establish. Livingstone complained she never wrote to him, but even he knew that letters would find him only with difficulty, and might well be lost on the way, as were so many that he wrote to her. One of his got through, though, acknowledging a letter of hers that was a year old when it r
eached him. In a letter dated September 1855 (when in June that year she had not a shilling) he brought himself to apologise for ‘a delay I could not shorten. But as you are a merciful kind-hearted dame, I expect you will write out an apology in proper form and I shall read it before you with as long a face as I can exhibit.’ His main excuse for not joining her within the year or so he had promised was his illnesses – he had had many attacks of fever. ‘I have written to you by every opportunity and am very sorry your letters have miscarried … I cannot be long now.’

  He had a different idea of ‘long’ from his wife. It was almost another year before news came that her husband had reached Quelimane, on the east coast of Africa, after his extraordinary trek right across the continent, exploring along the way the magnificent waterfalls he named the Victoria Falls. He put to sea at last, arriving at Dover on 9 December 1856 to a hero’s welcome. Unfortunately, Mary had gone to Southampton, where his ship was supposed to land, so their reunion, in London, was delayed. When finally they met, on 11 December, Mary had something to give him. Not used to expressing her feelings in writing (she struggled even with letters), she had, however, composed a poem:9

  A hundred thousand welcomes, and it’s time for you to come From the far land of the foreigner, to your country and your home.

  Oh, long as we were parted, ever since you went away.

  I never passed an easy night, or knew an easy day.

  Do you think I would reproach you with the sorrows that I bore?

  Since the sorrow is all over now I have you here once more.

  And there’s nothing but the gladness and the love within my heart,

  And hope so sweet and certain that never again we’ll part.

  A hundred thousand welcomes! How my heart is gushing o’er

  With the love and joy and wonder just to see your face once more.

  How did I live without you all those long long years of woe?

  It seems as if t’would kill me to be parted from you now.

  You’ll never part me, darling, there’s a promise in your eye;

  I may tend you while I’m living, you will watch me when I die.

  And if death but kindly lead me to the blessed home on high,

  What a hundred thousand welcomes will await you in the sky!

  If Livingstone managed to read it without being moved then he must have had a heart of stone. For Mary, always so reticent, its sentiments were overwhelmingly extravagant and clear: she adored her husband, could not do without him, blamed him for nothing, found happiness only with him. He could give her what neither parents nor children could, confidence in herself, that sense of emotional security she so needed. And attitudes, of course, changed dramatically towards her. Livingstone was heaped with honours – a Victorian public hungry for excitement could not get enough of this slight, dour-looking Scot who had triumphantly crossed Africa exposing on the way the horrors of the continuing slave trade, tracing the Zambesi to the sea, and everywhere identifying areas in which missions to save thousands of souls could be established. The great and the good, including the Queen, were as intrigued by him as was the general public. Everyone wanted to see him, everyone wanted to hear him. And his wife. From being utterly neglected, except by her parents’ friends, Mary was now being fawned over by people she had never heard of. Being the wife of a hero made her suddenly sociably desirable.

  This new respect mattered hardly at all to her. She neither hated nor loved it, remaining apparently impassive and unmoved. Those who observed her in company at the functions she attended with her husband, when praise was heaped on her as well as him – and there were plenty of beady-eyed observers about who later scribbled their impressions – were fascinated by Mary’s blank expression. She reacted to no compliment, moved not a muscle at any applause for her. When eminent men such as Lord Shaftesbury spoke in her honour (at the Royal Geographical Society meeting, to award her husband the Victoria Medal) and praised her self-sacrifice – ‘she … surrendered her best feelings … her own private interests to the … great interests of Christianity’ – or when Livingstone himself referred to her publicly as ‘my guardian angel’ she sat like a sphinx. A nod was the most she ever managed, when urged to acknowledge tributes. Praise belonged to her husband. She had no use for it. A wife’s job was to keep in the background. In her own opinion, she had merely behaved as a good wife should. The fact that in none of the audiences who gathered to see her husband was there a single woman who had endured what she had endured was of no interest to her.

  This was fortunate because it protected her from being aware of how she was patronised. Those who tried to talk to her found she had little to say and was incapable of the kind of conversation they sought. Society judged her as either dull or stupid, because of her lack of small-talk, as well as graceless. Worse, and more cruel, was how she was judged on her appearance. She was sniggered at as vulgar – not in the sense of being showy but in the sense of looking common. Then, even more than now, clothes were the measure of the man or woman, and Mary’s signified that she had absolutely no fashion sense. Oswell, knowing how appalled people would be by Mrs Livingstone’s tramp-like apparel, had of course kitted her out, but that was in Cape Town four years previously, a lifetime in terms of fashion. The mid-Victorian period was renowned for dresses that became yearly more extravagant and elaborate, covered in flounces and needing vast numbers of petticoats underneath. The year 1856 was when the crinoline came in – every truly fashionable woman wore one at grand assemblies. Mary had no crinoline and would not have worn one even if she had. Her figure was not made for such clothes – she had no waist to cinch in above the absurd skirt. Nor was her modest dress of silk or satin with lace trimmings: it was of a ‘stout linsey’ (thick cotton) and plain. She wore her unbecoming bonnet indoors as well as outside, even when other women were in ball-gowns and had their hair fashionably dressed. Remarks were made about her weight, as they always had been, and about what a sorry figure she cut as wife of the nation’s most famous man-of-the-moment.

  He looked little better himself, but he was a man, a missionary, a doctor and, above all, an explorer, so it did not matter that he, too, cut a slightly absurd figure in funny clothes more suited to tradesman than hero. He was judged on his achievements, not his costume, and it was in his favour that he had not decked himself out splendidly – he was given full marks for humility and modesty. Mary was given none for the same virtues in dress. Instead, she was despised for her shabbiness and for not attempting to ‘make something of herself’. It was felt she let her husband down, that she was not a wife he could be proud to have on his arm. But Livingstone experienced no such embarrassment. He hadn’t fallen in love with Mary’s looks or clothes, and her appearance didn’t matter to him now he was famous either. The public must take both of them as they found them, no concessions would be made to the folly of fashion.

  And yet Mary tried to make other adjustments during this period when her husband was lionised. Her role as wife, after almost twelve years of marriage, changed and she found it difficult to adapt. When she’d been at her husband’s side on the ox-wagon travelling through dangerous unknown territory, she had had to be first and foremost a stoic, a role suited to her temperament. Now, in London, being stoical was not enough. She was required to be animated in company, she needed the ability to protect him from the exhausting attentions of admirers, she wanted to be able to extricate him from tricky social encounters – and she could do none of these things. She was not, and never would become, a society wife. She was not an asset to him, as she had been in the wilds of Africa where, in every sense, she knew the language. She didn’t understand fashionable London’s peculiar language and was useless as an interpreter. She couldn’t smooth his way or relieve him of crushing obligations. All she could do was what she had always tried (though not always successfully) to do: to provide him with a well-ordered domestic background to which he could return and be refreshed.

  Nevertheless, there were some hap
py times for Mary during those fifteen months she and her husband were in England with their children, even though she had no more settled a home than she had had during their four years of separation. Her husband’s presence was the vital factor, but money made a huge difference too. She was no longer poor to the point of not having a shilling. The London Missionary Society did not provide much, but the publisher John Murray gave Livingstone an advance to write about his travels; and once the book, Missionary Travels and Researches in Southern Africa, was published, it was such a huge success that more money flowed in. After all those months of moving around, staying with her parents’ friends, they could finally rent a house at Hadley Green, then a pretty village to the north of London. There the children could play freely, and, surprisingly, Livingstone played with them, showing a side of himself never revealed before, while Mary supervised the running of the house, as she liked to do. England did not seem such a bleak and terrible place any more, and even when her husband went off on lecture tours she could bear it. He, on the other hand, minded not taking her, writing from Dublin that it had been a mistake not to bring her with him.