Good Wives

by Margaret Forster

  Still in a state of shock as well as grief – because the fever had advanced so rapidly and he had not thought until the last two days that Mary would die – he applied himself to writing necessary letters. In all of them he expressed himself in almost the same way, though it was only to his eight-year-old son Oswell that he confessed he was writing ‘with my tears running down my cheeks’. He went over, in each letter, the course of Mary’s illness, emphasising its unexpectedly speedy nature, and over and over again repeating that he believed she knew she was dying and that she died full of faith. He made no attempt to hide his desolation, particularly in the letter to his mother-in-law with whom he had so often had disagreements over his treatment of Mary. ‘My dear mother’, he wrote:

  With a sore heart I give you the sad news that my dear Mary died here on the 27th. This unlooked for bereavement quite crushes and takes the heart out of me. Everything else that happened in my career only made the mind rise to overcome it. But this takes away all my strength. If you know how I loved and trusted her you may realise my loss … There are regrets which will follow me to my dying day. If I had done so and so2 – etc. etc.

  It was very rarely that he had acknowledged regret over anything, and never to his mother-in-law. But it was to a friend rather than a relative that he wrote not just of his sorrow and regret but of his true appreciation of what Mary had been, a good wife par excellence, the ‘faithful companion of eighteen years’ who when he looked back had worked so hard:

  At Kolobeng she managed all the household affairs by native servants of her own training, made bread, butter and all the clothes of the family; taught her children most carefully; kept also an infant and sewing school – by far the most popular and best attended we had. It was a fine sight to see her day by day walking a quarter of a mile to the town, no matter how broiling the sun, to impart instruction to the heathen Bakwains. MaRobert’s name is known throughout all that country and 1800 miles beyond … A brave, good woman was she.3

  Nobody, receiving these letters, was in any doubt how much his wife had meant to him. But what was not so clear was whether Livingstone realised how he had exploited Mary’s natural tendency to obey and to put him first at all costs. He had expected far too much of her, justifying his expectations on the grounds of his great work. His dedication to it had robbed her of the opportunity to enjoy the quiet, married life she was made for.

  His grief was profound and in his personal journal he tried to examine the change he felt had taken place within him. ‘It is the first heavy stroke I have suffered,’ he wrote, ‘and quite takes away my strength. I wept over her who well deserved many tears. I loved her when I married her, and the longer I lived with her I loved her the more.’ It was what he had said to her in a letter early in their marriage, that he had always loved her (no matter what people made of their marriage, branding it as one of ‘convenience’). This love had not only grown but, as he now realised, become part of his own strength. Mary, his good wife, had made him feel complete. Her loss was his ‘first heavy stroke’, far worse than witnessing baby Elizabeth’s death, or being attacked by a lion, or failing in his duty to make many converts. No other sort of adversity compared with it and he felt he had never been so sorely tested before. His misery burst out on the page – ‘Oh Mary, my Mary! How often we have longed for a quiet home …’ But it was she who had longed for it, he who had denied it to her, and the guilt lacerated his conscience.

  The worst possible people for him to be with were Kirk and Stewart, one of whom had never liked Mary and the other who had grown to dislike her. All they were good for was to help him sort out her things. In the end, he had to leave them to do this themselves – he had not the heart. He tried ‘for an hour’, wrote Stewart, ‘then says I can’t stand it’. He was visibly, for the time being at least, a changed man ‘peculiarly communicative and agreeable’. Stewart’s opinion was that ‘his recent loss seems to have had some effect of a softening kind on him’. This new ‘softeness’ was remarked upon by all, but to Livingstone himself it was not softness but that loss of strength he had noted – he no longer felt invincible. As he wrote to Mary’s brother John, ‘I had got so into the habit of feeling her to be part of myself I did not fear but she would hold out.’ They were a unit, strong together, man and wife joined for ever. Now that she had died, his own hold on life felt loosened. In spite of the long separations they had had during their eighteen-year marriage here was the evidence, in his letters and journal, that she had been essential to his sense of self, something no one had suspected. He had always seemed supremely independent and tough, obsessed with his work. Unemotional, self-disciplined, hugely ambitious, fearless – how could such a man be thought to need a wife?

  The future looked infinitely bleak. What was a man who had lost such a wife to do? Find another? The idea never seems to have occurred to him. Much was later made of a comment he made years after Mary’s death that he wished he had remained single, but I believe this was misinterpreted by Mary’s detractors. The reason he wished he had remained single was twofold: guilt over what he had put his wife through, and despair after she had died. His marriage had brought him feelings he had never known; joy and pleasure, which he had lacked before he married Mary. His capacity to experience such light-hearted emotions had been buried so deep that he had hardly known it existed. Mary matched him in the strangest way – neither of them was fun-loving, both were known for their gravity, their serious demeanour, but together they could ignite joy in each other. Writing to a friend whose daughter was to be married, months after Mary’s death, he wished the young couple ‘as much pleasure as I enjoyed during eighteen years with my wife’.4 Enjoyment, pleasure, where would he find them now? In his journal, a month after her death, he remembered their pleasure in each other: ‘I said to her a few days before her fatal illness, “We old bodies ought now to be more sober, and not play so much.” “Oh, no,” said she, “you must always be as playful as you have always been; I would not like you to be as grave as some folks I have seen.”’ The idea of his being playful with his wife would have astonished those sober folk (Stewart, Kirk) with whom they had lived at such close quarters. It might even have disgusted them.

  The playfulness had gone. Only his children could give it back to him, in a different but still meaningful way, but he was a long way from them. Another two years went by, two years of more valiant exploration ending in the Zambesi Expedition’s being ignominiously recalled, and reckoned a failure since no suitable places to establish either missions or trading stations had been found, before he was reunited with them. He had never seen Anna, the baby his wife had been compelled to leave in charge of her aunts in Glasgow, and the other children had grown so much that he felt he was meeting them all for the first time. It brought home to him at last how much they had suffered in losing a mother, just as much, if not more, than he had in losing a wife. But he did not give them a new mother. He never remarried.

  David Livingstone had the wife he wanted. Mary Livingstone did not have the husband she would have preferred. She never had a fault to find with him as a man, and was supremely happy to be with him, but as a husband he made of her a wife who was constantly called upon to obey too much and to her own detriment, eventually fatally. She never thought she had much choice when it came to the big decisions. Her husband said he had to go into the interior of southern Africa and so she went with him because she felt unable to function properly without him; he said she had to go to England with the children because they were hindering his work, so she went, dreading her fate; her husband summoned her to the Zambesi and she answered his call though knowing her children should have prior claim. At every turn her interpretation of ‘wife’ was ‘one who obeys’, which in her case meant following her husband to the ends of the earth, or at least the Zambesi, exposing herself, in his name, to extreme danger.

  She was not alone – there was nothing unusual about Mary Livingstone as a wife in the mid-nineteenth century except the degree of obed
ience she gave. The wife as the chief mainstay, the ‘rib’, the ‘main spoke in the wheel’, the ‘guardian angel’, was an accepted image. The Victorian wife had few opportunities to define her role in any other way.

  The doctrine of separate spheres for women and men prevailed and the woman’s was domestic. The circumstances of Mary’s marriage were exceptional but her status within it was mirrored in millions of other Victorian marriages. A bad marriage, in which a wife was not content to be as submissive as Mary was, or in which a man abused his power, was a hell from which there was virtually no escape. Spinsterhood, nevertheless, was rare. The vast majority of women preferred to risk marriage rather than remain single. Very few were prepared to believe Harriet Martineau the spinster was speaking the truth when she swore she was ‘the happiest woman in England’ (because ‘the older I have grown … the more serious [I see] … the evils … of married life’) but instead agreed with Queen Victoria, who said that ‘being married gives one one’s position which nothing else can’. It might turn out to be a position of absolute dependency, but it was still sought for precisely that reason.

  Men, of course, also saw themselves as dependent, but in their case on making the right choice – marriage was risky. As the popular ditty ran:

  In many a marriage made for gold

  The bride is bought – and the bridegroom sold.

  Men were led to believe that women would do anything to become wives and that they must therefore be on the look-out for every kind of trick. They must be suspicious of beauty – ‘no man is so much to be pitied as the husband of a professional beauty’ – and of wealth – ‘the girl who brings to her husband a large dowry may also bring habits of luxury learned in a rich home’. A potential bride’s intelligence must also be checked out. No man wanted a wife too obviously clever, one who would perhaps make him look stupid, but a foolish wife would also be a disaster for him because she would be incapable of running a household properly. All the handbooks on marriage at this time agreed that the qualities wanted in a wife were those of patience, frugality, punctuality, gentleness, charm and what was enigmatically described as ‘a genius for affection’. Thackeray put it well: ‘What we [men] want for the most part is a humble, flattering, smiling, child-loving, tea-making being, who laughs at our jokes however old they may be, coaxes and wheedles us in our humours, and fondly lies to us through life.’ But even if such a paragon could not be found, marriage was still reckoned desirable for a man as well as for a woman. Dr Johnson was one of many who pontificated that ‘marriage is the best state for man in general; and every man is a worse man in proportion as he is unfit for the married state’.

  Judged by the standards of her own time, Mary Livingstone was undoubtedly a good wife. The ways in which she was considered by some not to score so highly were trivial: her appearance and clothes let her husband down in society, her drinking threatened to disgrace him, her friendship with Stewart called her reputation into question. But judged by other standards, those of our own time, Mary was not a good wife at all. She was a foolish wife, if a loving one, an indictment of all that was wrong with the stereotypical role of wife. Passive, humble, self-deprecating, with low expectations of her own rights, she makes the calling of ‘wife’ seem like a punishment. All the dreadful things that happened to her were because she was a wife. And yet her selflessness and that terrifying obedience of hers still lend her a certain dignity, a dignity and heroism she would never have attained without being married. She could never have been a ‘partner’. Her relationship with Livingstone had little of that balance. He didn’t want a partner. What he wanted was what he got, total commitment from an adoring wife. If she had been a partner, his whole life would have been different.

  And so, of course, would hers, and the lives of her children. Livingstone sacrificed his family’s happiness and security in the cause of his own self-fulfilment. Even after his wife’s death, he did not go home immediately to his grieving children, (and when he did, he soon left them again) though he wrote to them much more often, constantly telling them how he loved them and how he mourned their mother. When he died, in 1872, soon after Stanley found him near Lake Ujiji, he had done nothing to compensate them for the loss of a mother who had chosen to put him first, and not them.

  Reflections

  THERE ARE VERY few points at which my experience as a wife touches Mary Livingstone’s and yet there are some, some things that haven’t changed much and which unite all wives. In-laws, for example. A wife has to face taking on her husband’s family. Most women, unlike Mary, have met their prospective in-laws before they marry and a delicate and threatening business they find it. A wife automatically becomes part of a new family, when she takes its surname in place of hers, in a way a partner does not. She has to adapt, but Mary didn’t or couldn’t.

  Unlike Mary, I met my parents-in-law long before I became a wife. It wasn’t a meeting which went well. The very first meeting doesn’t really count – it was New Year’s Eve 1956 and the Davies house was crowded with people – but a week later I was taken to meet my future mother- and father-in-law properly. I can’t say I was nervous, not being of a nervous disposition, but I was certainly curious, certainly aware, too, of how important this introduction was. I didn’t then intend ever to get married, but I knew I would have to become involved with his family if, as we did intend, we were going to live together. Since his father was an invalid (he had multiple sclerosis and was by that time bedridden) his mother was the more significant parent. I had an image in my head of what she would look like: small, slight, dark-haired. Only the dark hair was right. She turned out to be tall and heavily built and looked nothing like her son except for her colouring. Her first words to me were, ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ If I’d merely declined the offer politely that would’ve been bad enough – tea in this Scottish household was the magic word, the key to friendship, the essential social lubricant – but, stupidly, I found myself not only saying that I didn’t want tea, but adding the inexplicable and offensive words, ‘I hate tea.’

  It was so unnecessary. Why on earth did I have to say it at all? I saw incredulity in Mrs Davies’s face. ‘You hate tea?’ she gasped. ‘But everyone likes a nice cup of tea, it’s good for you, I’ve never heard of anyone hating tea …’ She didn’t know what to do. Hospitality demanded that the kettle be boiled, the tea-pot filled, the cups and saucers laid out, the milk and sugar brought, the sublime liquid poured. I’d made our meeting awkward. By insulting tea, I’d insulted her. Tea-less, we sat and tried to chat. Every remark I came out with damned me further in her eyes and it was all my fault. The trouble was, I could never let a pleasantry pass or respond to one with another, simple enough you’d have thought. ‘It’s been a nice day,’ Mrs Davies offered, ‘quite warm.’ And I had to say, ‘I don’t like this kind of weather, it isn’t warm actually, it’s muggy. I like bracing weather.’ Mrs Davies sniffed, helplessly, and said, ‘Oh. Well.’ So it went on, each exchange more excruciating than the last.

  I got on better with Mr Davies, which was not what I’d expected. He was in a little front room, mainly confined to bed. The MS had not only made him unable to walk but had by then also affected his speech and eyesight. Whenever someone new came into the house, I later learned, he was always on his best behaviour, very much wanting to see and talk to visitors, many of whom found it quite hard to make out what he was saying. I managed fairly well. He’d had his wireless on when I was taken in and whatever programme it was gave me something to talk about. Oddly, I felt more at ease sitting at his bedside than I did in front of Mrs Davies, and I noticed she seemed surprised and pleased that I’d stayed with him so long. But I left the house knowing she and I were opposites – there was going to be no instant rapport. I imagine Mary felt much the same, in her case with disastrous consequences.

  Later, after I’d become her son’s wife, I tried hard to gain my mother-in-law’s approval, though I’m not sure she would have thought so. I know that for years and years
she didn’t think I was the right wife for her son. She never, ever, said so and she was never, ever, hostile – she was much too benign a person for that. She wasn’t jealous, either, she wasn’t struggling to compete with me for her son’s affection (and in fact, much though she loved him, it was her twin daughters who were far the more important to her). But all the same she let little hints drop, some of them funny. ‘Keep £100 to yourself,’ she told me, and when I asked why, she said, ‘So you can run away.’ Then, on another occasion, after she’d heard me yelling in some argument, she murmured that Hunter needed calm, because of his asthma. I wasn’t calm, dear me, no. I was too volatile, too aggressive, and it worried her. Raised voices distressed her and she always read sinister undercurrents into what she heard. A wife should never shout, especially at her husband. She herself never shouted. And a wife should never call her husband stupid; that was unforgivable.

  The only way I scored any points at all was by being a good, Mary Livingstone-style housekeeper, but one with more financial sense. She stayed with us often and marvelled at the speed with which I could clean the house and prepare good meals. She was slow and I was quick, and she was impressed; she was always in a muddle and I seemed organised, and she sighed with envy; she found making decisions (as simple, say, as what to have for tea) agony and I decided things, wrongly or rightly, in two seconds. She knew her son was being beautifully looked after in a practical sense and this relieved her. (Orderliness was after all also good for his asthma, a well-regulated existence extremely soothing.) I made a fuss of her when she stayed and since no one had ever done so, except for her beloved daughters, I think, this touched her. I took her tea in bed in the morning, together with the mug of boiling water she always needed to drink first (‘for the bowels’). I told her to put her feet up and become a lady of leisure – though this was a mistake. She felt uncomfortable when idle, endlessly drifting round the house, looking for jobs to do. I learned to let her do them. The way she did them was not how I did them. Everything would take her ages and she’d get in a great mess doing the simplest task, though it would be done to far higher standards than my own. Cleaning drains was her speciality. I’d occasionally chuck a bucket of boiling washing soda down, followed by some disinfectant, and that was that, but she’d lift the grid off the drain and go back and forth with brushes scrubbing inside as far down as she could get and then there would be much scraping of the grid itself with a variety of implements which she would collect around her and end up tripping over. I couldn’t bear to witness all this and had to go and hide till she was finished.