Aristocrats: Caroline, Emily, Louisa and Sarah Lennox 1740 - 1832

by Stella Tillyard

  Little children did die. Vulnerable at birth, they were in danger throughout the early years of their lives. Emily lost many children in their early years. Caroline, born in 1750 died in 1754; Henrietta, born in 1753 died at the age of ten; Augustus, born in 1767 died in 1771; Fanny, born in 1770 died five years later; Louisa, born in 1772 died about five years later; George, born in 1773 died in 1783. Only half her huge brood survived into adulthood.

  Parents prepared themselves emotionally and mentally to expect the deaths of their toddlers. In 1749, when William was three months old, Emily then aged eighteen, wrote to her parents on the subject, which had been lingering on her mind since his birth. ‘Since I know what it is like to be a mother I can feel it more strongly and surely nothing can be so dreadful … when they do happen He that sends them will also send us strength to go through these trials. This is the only and greatest comfort on such an occasion, for if it was not for this thought, people that have tender hearts must lead a miserable life only from the apprehension of what might happen to those they love.’

  Love and anxiety went hand in hand; mothers accepted that they came together. In Caroline’s case the one fuelled the other. Ste, who was by her own admission her favourite child, was a constant source of worry to her; the older he got the dearer he became and, as his health continued to be precarious, with corpulence and deafness taking the place of his earlier twitching, the more she worried. ‘One’s children ought to turn out very well, to recompense one for all one suffers on their account,’ she grumbled, adding, ‘I have never been six months without some anxiety or other about Ste since his birth.’ Harry Fox, in contrast, who had always enjoyed rude good health, got less than his fair share both of illness and of love. ‘As for Harry,’ Henry Fox wrote in the mid-1760s, ‘he is the happiest of mortals,’ and left it at that. The same equation between love and anxiety held in Ireland too. Charles Fitzgerald was seriously ill in 1764 and his condition bound Emily ever more closely to him. In 1764 Louisa wrote about Emily’s daughter Louisa Bridget: ‘I am sorry to think how much I love her, for a little child of that age must be liable to so many dangers.’ Louisa had good cause for her anxiety: Louisa Fitzgerald died a year later at the age of four and a half.

  Children did not always die. Charles Fitzgerald was taken to Malvern, a spa recommended for its air and its waters. Against all expectations he recovered, only to go down with smallpox when he got back to Ireland. Smallpox was a devastating and deadly disease. But it, too, was survivable. After initial anxiety about the strength of the virus, whether it was, as Louisa put it, the ‘good’ kind (where the spots remained few and far between) or the ‘bad’ kind (where the spots joined up, covered the body and moved to the lungs), eight-year-old Charles progressed well. Isolated in Dublin he told jokes and stories and made light of the soreness of his spots.

  Congratulating Emily on Charles’s recovery, Caroline took the opportunity to recommend inoculation for the rest of the Carton brood. Horace Walpole’s friend Lady Mary Wortley Montagu had brought back the practice of inoculation (in which the patient was injected with a mild dose of the virus from a sufferer) from Turkey in the 1720s. Her example garnered the support not only of the Whig aristocracy and their doctors but also of another authority with equal influence in the Fox household, Voltaire, who had praised her in his Lettres philosophiques of 1733. Not surprisingly, Caroline was warmly in favour of the innovation and had her own children inoculated at early ages.

  Inoculation was a tedious business, involving a month’s preparation on a low diet to bring the child to a suitable physical state and an anxious period of waiting for the spots to appear after the injection. It was not without danger either. Children given a mild dose of the virus as protection against a full-blown attack did every now and then succumb and die. But quite apart from her fondness for advanced medical practice, Caroline regarded it as the lesser of two evils.

  Emily was less enamoured of doctors than Caroline, preferring her own methods of caring for children to professional advice. She prescribed children a good diet, exercise (especially sea bathing at all times of the year) and plenty of physical affection. Hugs and kisses – what Louisa called ‘delightful mumbling’ – were never in short supply at Carton. Seeing Edward Fitzgerald act Tom Thumb one afternoon in 1771, Louisa wrote to Sarah: ‘Eddy did Tom Thumb, and you can have no idea how pretty it was to see him. His figure, his voice, his action and grace, with a vast deal of spirit was really enchanting, one was ready to eat him up … I dined at Carton today and mumbled Lucy pretty well, she is just of the right age.’

  When children did fall sick Emily was prepared to send for the doctor. But both she and Caroline fished in their store of folklore and consulted their own medical textbooks as well. The Foxes’ library at Holland House was well stocked with medical opinion. Besides two editions of Tissot’s Avis au Peuple sur la Santé, a volume Sarah mentioned consulting at Carton, were Mead on poisons and the smallpox, Cheyne’s Essay on Regimen, Manderville on diseases and Barry on digestions. There were five volumes of miscellaneous medical tracts, a book on sea-water bathing, Pringles’ Diseases of the Army (bought not because of any interest in the army but because army doctors were renowned for their advanced medical techniques), Quincy’s Dispensary and, for sick travellers, guides to continental spas. As the children grew up they could consult Venette’s Tableau de l’Amour conjugal, a sex manual complete with advice, anatomies and amorous illustrations. After 1769, Buchan’s Domestic Medicine nestled snugly on every shelf, joined in 1771 by Cadogan on gout. Sarah sent Buchan to Louisa who, along with thousands of other grateful readers, pronounced it ‘very sensible’.

  If children survived the worst that nature, the doctors and the apothecaries could throw at them, they had to be educated. Emily and Caroline were both interested in education and Caroline started out by educating her sons herself at home. Her children knew their letters by the age of two. By five they could read fluently, browsing not only in children’s books but also in novels and plays which their parents were reading. Caroline did not just teach reading and writing. She used prints to train her children’s understanding and maps to help them with geography. At the age of three Harry Fox was thumbing through Hogarth’s works (of which the Holland House library boasted a complete set) and explaining the contents of engravings (even, his doting father said, their meaning) to his nurse. By 1762, when Harry was seven and Rousseau had made his mark at Holland House and Carton, Caroline had added exercise to his regimen and she taught him geography using jig-saw puzzles, recently invented for that purpose. She reported to Emily from Kingsgate in Kent: ‘Dear little Harry is a pleasant child to have here; he really works very hard all day out of doors, which is very wholesome and quite according to Monsr. Rousseau’s system. He eats quantities of fish and is so happy and pleased all day. At night we depart a little from Monsr. Rousseau’s plan, for he reads fairy-tales and learns geography on the Beaumont wooden maps; he is vastly quick at learning that or anything else.’

  In the winter months Harry was at school at Wandsworth. Caroline believed firmly that ‘school is the best place for boys’ and all her children progressed from Wandsworth to Eton. In 1764 Charles Fox, then fifteen, left Eton for Oxford. He had outgrown Eton but was too young to enter Parliament. Besides, Caroline was not in favour of his choosing a political career, hoping to steer him instead towards the law and see him Lord Chief Justice in due course. She was not really keen on Oxford either, but could not come up with an alternative educative scheme for her precocious boy. Somewhat to everyone’s surprise, Charles loved Oxford. His passion for literature and his intermittent but fierce concentration on other subjects, particularly mathematics, astonished his fellow gentleman-commoners and his tutors. ‘I really think,’ he wrote, ‘to a man who reads a great deal there cannot be a more agreeable place.’

  By their own and their parents’ admission, the Fitzgerald children had few of the intellectual interests of their Fox cousins. Emily could see littl
e profit in pushing her boys fruitlessly towards scholarly pursuits, and she had a bevy of girls for whom a domestic education was the only one ever planned. Nobody expected that girls should have anything but a basic grounding in the classics and mathematics, and despite the acknowledged variety and excellence of her own education, Emily concentrated as much on their dancing, deportment, drawing and singing as on more scholarly pursuits. Her daughters grew up to be excellent French speakers and they had the usual drawing masters, singing and music teachers, and dancing masters. This standard education for girls of their station was supplemented by hours of varied reading in the Carton library.

  Boys’ education could not be so easily dealt with. After Ophaly’s death and Charles Fitzgerald’s illness, Emily turned against formal schooling because it meant English schooling and she no longer wanted her sons to leave Ireland. So she began to search for alternatives to Wandsworth and Eton. She had already read Rousseau on education and now she turned to him as an authority to endorse her own decision to educate her sons outside school. Rousseau wrote two works about education: Émile, published in 1762 and La Nouvelle Héloïse of 1761. La Nouvelle Héloïse, one of the most sensational and popular novels of the century, was about the relationship between a tutor, Saint Preux, and his pupil Julie. It was, as well as a work about moral and sentimental education, a steamy love story. Julie and Saint Preux fall passionately in love. Forbidden to marry by the unwritten laws of society, they part, he to wander the world in despair, she to accept the hand of a suitor found and sanctioned by her father. This arranged marriage brings Julie tranquillity and the happiness of motherhood, and it is an education in sociability and responsibility. But when Saint Preux reappears, Julie dies tragically, knowing that their forbidden passion is unextinguished and burning bright.

  Like its prototype Clarissa, which dwelt with sadistic enjoyment upon the violent sexual conquest of a young woman, La Nouvelle Héloïse condoned what it appeared to condemn. The illicit love between tutor and student, rejected as not only unworkable but also a threat to class and property, was yet the only relationship in the book that seemed attractive. Rousseau implicated his readers in the forbidden, exciting them and involving them in the couple’s love by describing, with hyperbolic realism, their beating hearts and stolen kisses. ‘I felt,’ wrote Saint Preux, in a passage calculated to cause havoc in parlours and drawing-rooms, ‘My hands shook – a gentle tremor – thy balmy lips – My Eloisa’s lips – touch, pressed to mine, and myself within her arms? Quicker than lightning a sudden fire darted through my soul.’ La Nouvelle Héloïse was a brilliant book, written with fast-moving, rhetorical flourish, and it took Europe by storm, scandalising and seducing as it went.

  As seasoned readers of sensational fiction, Caroline and Emily were sure targets for some of the novel’s more melodramatic flourishes. But its endorsement of social propriety and its apparent condemnation of illicit romance were less likely to have struck a chord. Caroline complained in 1764 that Rousseau and Richardson, with their long-drawn-out love affairs, millions of words and high-flown sentiments, had destroyed the earlier vogue for melodramas like Prévost’s Le Doyen de Killerine which she and Emily had read so avidly as children. ‘The Marquis de Roselle, a new stupid story book, shall be sent to you with your other books … It’s rempli de beaux sentiments, the style of novel I hate, unless its very excellent of its kind, and I think Rousseau, Richardson and Crébillon have quite ruined the good old-fashioned story books like Doyen de Killerine and Mlle. de Salens etc etc; now they all pretend to wit or sentiment.’ Emily passed a judgement on Richardson that was succinct and severe. When Clarissa was finally published in its entirety in 1749 she dubbed it simply, ‘that stupid book’.

  This short verdict on a long work was not simply aesthetic. It was also rooted in Emily’s experience. Clarissa’s tragedy turns on her refusal of an arranged marriage, the kind of union that Emily herself had happily accepted two years earlier. Clarissa’s insistence that marriage should be founded on romantic love as well as respect, and must rest on fidelity, seemed pig headed to a woman who was well aware of her husband’s philandering and cheerfully wrote in 1751: ‘my turn for getting a lover will come in good time.’

  In the early 1750s, taken up as she was with her growing brood of children, the improvements at Carton and her husband’s political career, Emily could easily reject the claims of sensibility that Richardson advanced. Besides, her marriage was happy and admirably successful within its own lights. But by the 1760s the cult of sensibility had reached even aristocratic circles; it swept all before it and brought romantic love, female modesty and marital propriety in its train. The cultural and emotional climate was changing and changing Richardson’s way. Life and literature were beginning to march hand in hand to Richardson’s tune, and Rousseau added fuel to the fires of romantic love. Hundreds of second-rank novelists, lacking Rousseau’s subversive instincts and Richardson’s sadistic streak, baldly promoted female virtue and modesty and plot lines were resolved either in tragedy or in marital fidelity based on romantic love. If in the upper echelons of literary endeavour Fielding’s vision of literature and life as a tragi-comedy of manners won out over Richardson’s sense of life as spiritual melodrama, in the realms of the storybook, the shilling magazine and the mental lives of readers Richardson was the winner. Women who rode to hounds, told dirty jokes, flirted, argued vigorously in drawing-rooms and carried on open affairs became anachronistic curiosities. The new plot lines through which many aristocratic women dreamed their lives were those of the novel of sensibility.

  Caroline, whose romantic life had been decisive and subversive, was relatively immune to the siren call of sensibility. Emily was not. When, in the midst of misery and grief after Ophaly’s death in 1765 she became dissatisfied with her life, she turned not to the storybooks and conventions of her youth, which might have prompted a low-key affair with an Irish peer, but to newer works which advocated romantic love and total, absorbing passion. Clarissa, in which the passion between Lovelace and the heroine oozes unexpressed beneath the surface, remained a novel that no self-loving woman would want to translate into her own life. But La Nouvelle Héloïse, which contained passages of genuine sexual abandon, was more capable of emulation. On Emily, for one, the story of the love between Julie and the tutor made a great impression.

  After La Nouvelle Héloïse, Rousseau turned his attention to the education of young children and produced Émile, a semi-novelised manual of moral and practical education, subtitled prosaically de l’Éducation, Émile sets forth the way to bring a boy from babyhood to married life, with digressions upon the nature of humanity, society and religion. In some respects, Rousseau wrote in unbridled form what John Locke had advocated in his Thoughts Concerning Education of 1683; that, for the most part, people ‘are what they are, good or evil, useful or not, by their education’. As Rousseau put it, ‘we are born totally unprovided, we need aid; we are born stupid, we need judgement; Everything we do not have at our birth and which we need when we are grown is given us by education.’ Education for Rousseau began at birth with the mother’s milk. Rousseau insisted that a mother’s place was by her children’s side and argued that women should forsake the drawing-room and the wider world for the nursery and the country, offering their children the love and support upon which family and thus national morality depended.

  But there the mother’s role ended. Characteristically flinging out a premise which flatly contradicted his emphasis on nurture, Rousseau said that because women were shallow creatures governed by their passions, children should be handed over to tutors for education. Once isolated from the family the little boy will be taught reason, not by insistence and punishment but by example and experience. At the heart of Rousseau’s system was the axiom that children should ‘learn nothing from books that experience can teach them’. Complicated games were devised to teach boys mathematical, physical and moral truths. Rote-learning was forbidden. Books of all sorts, including the prayer bo
ok, were discouraged until nature’s lessons had been thoroughly learned.

  In Rousseau’s time-consuming and intensive educational plan there was much that Caroline and Emily could endorse. But there was much also that they disregarded. Rousseau’s hatred of the theatre where, he said, actors exhibited themselves for money and women for sex and money, fell on deaf ears. His diatribes against courts, assemblies, doctors and ‘learned and brilliant’ women, they managed (though not without some difficulty on Caroline’s part) to disregard. ‘I have just finished Rousseau’s Sur L’Éducation,’ Caroline wrote in August 1762, ‘there are more paradoxes, more absurdities and more striking pretty thoughts in it than in any book I ever read that he did not, write.’ But she baulked at Rousseau’s denigration of book learning, and thought his scheme of practical education wildly impractical, concluding in her tartest manner, ‘there is certainly a small objection to putting his scheme of education in practice, viz. that its impossible – there are a number of contradictions in his book but its immensely pretty.’

  Emily thought so too. She took what she wanted from Émile and abandoned the rest. The elevation of the countryside, of games, exercise and loose clothing for toddlers fitted in both with her own practice and her wish to keep her children close at hand. Rousseau’s hatred of academies endorsed her decision not to send any more of her children away to school. Offering Émile as her model and justification, Emily decided to set up a school for her children at Black Rock on the coast south of Dublin. In 1766 the Duke of Leinster bought a bathing lodge close to the sea with several fields for hay making and gardening. Eventually some of the rocks by the water’s edge were blasted away to make a bathing pool and an alley was built for bowling. But at the beginning the children had to make do with unimproved nature, the sand and waves of the Irish Sea.