A Curious Life for a Lady

by Pat Barr

  But Isabella’s fortune was by no means flawless; it was blemished from an early age by that ill-health which beset her whole life. Those maiden aunts were also stern in their insistence that all the grandchildren should stand throughout the endless Sunday services, for instance, and this, a weariness to the healthy, was a torture to Isabella with her incipient spinal disease. As Miss Stoddart suggests, ‘Had her courage not ridden above it, she might have delivered herself over to confirmed ill-health and adorned a sofa all her days. But even as a child, her brave spirit scorned prolonged concession to this delicacy’, and she rode, ran, climbed with the rest of the children, refusing to be outdone by any and more daring than the most reckless boy because she, in compensation for her physical weakness, had the strength of utter fearlessness.

  When Isabella was eleven her grandfather died, a death that presaged the end of the halcyon gatherings at Taplow. That same year, seeking more testing mettle for his zealous spirit, Edward Bird moved with his family from Cheshire to a parish in Birmingham. Bird was an extreme and vociferous opponent of Sunday labour and, as such, had alienated many of the Tattenhall farmers whose cows were in the habit of producing as much milk on Sundays as on other days and who therefore continued to make their famous cheese on Sundays also. The Tattenhall church had apparently ‘become discouragingly empty’ by the time Bird left; nevertheless, he at once raised the same battle-cry in Birmingham, where he found that ‘his parish was given over to Sunday trading and the fight he had to wage on the Lord’s side was with a very Apollyon’. It must have been a depressing change for Isabella, with her abiding dislike of the urban scene, to leave the fields and farms of Cheshire for the airless, overcrowded, sullen city. She gamely taught Sunday school classes of girls of her own age, trained a choir and continued her studies – which must have included a Tory-biased investigation into current politics, for her first published work, printed privately a year or so later, was a quaint and intemperate diatribe against the free-trade theories of Cobden and Bright. Meanwhile, Edward Bird struggled for the souls of his parishioners, many of which he found to be inert, oppressed and bitter. Though the congregations responded to the first flush of his febrile idealism, numbers of his flock soon fell by the wayside and some openly derided him over the vexed question of Sunday observance.

  In 1848, Bird’s physical health and the mainspring of his proselytising zeal broke down; Birmingham was left behind, and for the last ten years of his life Isabella’s father was resigned to the little parish of Wyton, Huntingdonshire, which had a population of some three hundred souls who had never felt impelled to do a great deal of work on the Sabbath. The change benefited Isabella in some ways, though it meant that the family had in effect withdrawn in defeat from the harsh realities of the godless city. In Wyton, she could indulge her deep delight in nature, as she drifted along the flat reedy Ouse and rode over its misty water-meadows, and her social confidence increased as she made congenial friends among the local gentry and stayed at the cultured homes of her ecclesiastical relatives, the Bishops of Chester and Winchester.

  When she was eighteen, Isabella underwent a partially successful operation for removal of a spinal tumour, but her health remained poor. It improved greatly in the Scottish highlands, where the family spent part of each summer; for Scotland appealed to them, on account of both its wild natural beauty and its stricter conformity to Mr Bird’s belief on the sanctity of the Sabbath. But, returned to the flat Wyton, where the rooks cawed in the elms and the ivy hung damp on the garden walls, she dwindled, half-recumbent on the drawing-room sofa, listlessly pursuing her literary studies and needlework.

  Clearly, as Isabella herself recognised, the trouble was partly psychological. Years later, a skilled Scottish physician diagnosed that she was ‘one of those subjects who are dependent to the last degree upon their environment to bring out their possibilities. It is not a question of dual personality, it is the varied response of a single personality under varied condition …’ Today, with a little more knowledge at their disposal, doctors would probably diagnose that the root cause of the ailments she suffered when ‘in civilised society’ was reactive depression, resulting from a temperament so at odds with its environment. Certainly her recurrent attacks of vague aches and pains, insomnia, mental lethargy, backache, and feelings of guilty insufficiency would suggest this; certainly too, the social environment in which she grew up must have been intensely frustrating, for it did nothing to ‘bring out’ her very special possibilities. Isabella’s doctor at Wyton partly understood her predicament and prescribed a long sea voyage – classic remedy for single, highly-strung, rather too intelligent young women of the period. And so, in 1854, Isabella embarked on her first long journey abroad.

  She was then twenty-three years old, she had startled none with her wit or beauty, never run away from home or questioned her parents’ judgement, nor, as far as we know, had she ever fallen in love with any romantically suitable young man. She was not a literary prodigy and kept no intimate journal of her youthful joys and woes. Consequently, until the publication of her first book, she can only be seen from the outside, mainly through the eyes of her adoring hagiographer, Anna Stoddart. And the outside image is not very inspiring: Miss Bird, elder daughter of a country parson, devout, earnest, plain, charitable, high-minded, priggish, intelligent, delicate and, it must be said, a little dull. That was by no means all of Isabella, she was one of the most mettlesome daughters who ever flew from a rectory nest, but evidence of this from her early years is sorely lacking.

  Miss Bird went to Canada and North America armed with a hundred pounds from her father and permission to stay away as long as it lasted. It lasted a long time, and she did a great deal with it. The book she wrote about that first journey is fairly informal, personal, discursive and gives considerable indication of her writing talent. It bustles with people who are keenly and sympathetically observed: the frontier town ‘colonial ladies’ who plied her with questions about Queen Victoria and the latest Paris fashions (which they naïvely imagined she was wearing); the Boston sea-captain who prided himself on being a ‘thorough-going-down-easter’ and poured scorn on the lazy ‘Blue Noses’ of Halifax; the kindly railroad conductor who wrapped her in a buffalo robe, gave her tea, explained the differences between English and American braking-systems; sturdy Kentuckians who slapped each other on the back and asked, by way of greeting, ‘Well, old alligator, what’s the time o’ day?’; and the supercilious Englishman in the Canadian backwoods who sought to impress her with his tales of the dukes and duchesses he’d left behind. Later, and even more precisely to Isabella’s taste, there were the thrilling wild men who boarded the trains as they went West: ‘Californians dressed for diggings with leather pouches for the gold-dust, Mexicans with dark soft eyes singing plaintive Spanish airs, and real prairie rangers, handsome, broad-chested and athletic, with aquiline noses, piercing grey eyes and brown curling hair and beards. They wore leather jackets slashed and embroidered, large boots with embroidered tops, silver spurs and caps of scarlet cloth worked in somewhat tarnished gold thread, doubtless the gifts of some fair ones enamoured of the handsome physiognomies and reckless bearing of the hunters.’ Clearly, Isabella had an early penchant for the Rocky Mountain Jim type.

  The infinitely rich variety and quantity of the transatlantic scene, as she travelled a thousand miles west from Halifax and back again, amazed her, and she didn’t miss a thing. Almost as soon as she landed, apparently, her pain and lassitude fell away, and she became immensely resourceful and energetic. In Nova Scotia she thumped in ancient coaches over corduroy roads made of pine-trunks, and, sitting outside on the box, regaled the coachman after dark with tales of ghosts and hobgoblins. She felt her success, she says, when he suddenly jumped with fright at the gleam of a nearby silver birch. In Saint John she loved the wharf-side bustle: ‘a thousand boatmen, raftmen and millmen, some warping dingy scows, others loading huge square-sided ships; busy gangs of men in fustian jackets engaged in running of
f the newly-sawed timber …’ And she relished the dramatic switch from one world to another, to, for instance, the ‘parlour’ in a Boston hotel: ‘The carpet of the room was of richly flowered Victorian pile, rendering the heaviest footstep noiseless; the tables were marble on gilded pedestals, the couches covered with gold brocade. At a piano of rich workmanship an elegantly dressed lady was seated, singing “And will you love me always?” – a question apparently satisfactorily answered by the speaking eyes of a bearded Southerner, who was turning over the pages for her. A fountain of antique workmanship threw up a jet d’eau of iced water scented with eau de Cologne; and the whole was lighted by four splendid chandeliers interminably reflected, for the walls were mirrors divided by marble pillars. The room seemed appropriate to the purposes to which it was devoted – music, needlework, conversation, flirting.’

  In Cincinnati, ‘Palmetto hats, light blouses and white trousers were all the rage, while Germans smoke chibouks and luxuriate in their shirt sleeves’ and ‘dark-browed Mexicans in sombreros and high-slashed boots dash about on small active horses with Mamelouk bits’. Somewhere isolated and uncouth along the Mississippi, the breakfast served was ‘johnny cake, squirrels, buffalo-hump, dampers and buckwheat, tea and corn spirit’; later at Chicago the only available fare was ‘pork with onion fixings’. No cutlery was provided, so each diner hacked at the pork with his bowie-knife; ‘Neither were there salt-spoons, so everybody dipped his greasy knife into the pewter pot containing salt’ (which shocked Isabella).

  The next day she crossed Lake Ontario in a gale, during which, she says, she was swept out of the steamer’s saloon on one wave and back on its deck with the next. At Toronto they were celebrating the Fall of Sebastopol, bonfires of tar-barrels were roaring under the sicklied gas-lamps, the crowd was shouting ‘Down with the Rooshians, Hurrah for Old England’, and Isabella was most gratified by their loyal sentiments. Back in New York, there were traffic jams: ‘There are streams of scarlet and yellow omnibuses racing in the more open parts, and locking each other’s wheels in the narrower – there are helpless females deposited in the middle of a sea of slippery mud, condemned to run a gauntlet between cart-wheels and horses’ hoofs – there are loaded stages hastening to and from the huge hotels – carts and waggons laden with merchandise – and “Young Americans” driving fast-trotting horses, edging in and out among the crowd – wheels are locked, horses tumble down, and persons pressed for time are distracted. Occasionally the whole traffic of the street comes to a dead-lock, in consequence of some obstruction or crowd, there being no policemen at hand with his incessant command “Move on!”’

  There is a surprising familiarity about several of her comments as a European seeing the American continent for the first time. Jewellery in the Broadway stores was preposterously expensive; men were uncomplainingly chivalrous; hotel rooms were unbearably over-heated; ice-water was happily ubiquitous; casually-met strangers were intimately loquacious – and yet chill; urban women were enviably slim and elegant; masculine yarns were extraordinarily chauvinistic; and everywhere there was the overwhelming sense of heterogeneity, change and impermanence, a fascination with the wealth and promise of the future. ‘An entire revolution had been effected in my way of looking at things since I landed on the shore of the New World,’ she declared with the earnest primness which characterises this early work. ‘I had ceased to look for vestiges of the past or for relics of ancient magnificence and in place of these I now contemplated vast resources in a state of progressive and almost feverish development, and having become accustomed to the general absence of the picturesque, had learned to look at the practical and the utilitarian with a high degree of pleasure and interest.’

  In fact the revolution in Isabella’s thinking was by no means ‘entire’; ‘All my prejudices melted away as a result of these American experiences,’ she states rather grandly in her preface. But she retained a fair number intact, though she did not then recognise them as such, rather as immutable laws ordained by God and proven on history’s pulses. She deplored the lack of Sunday observance wherever she found it; truth, she felt, ‘was at a fearful discount in America’ compared with its rating at home; and, in comparison with the glorious constitutional monarchy of imperial Britain, Republicanism was a wayward, crude and feeble creature indeed and ‘its present state gives rise to serious doubts … whether it can long continue in its present form’. Republicanism also resulted in a very peculiar ‘mingling of ranks’ (she once heard one chambermaid call another ‘a young lady’) but on the whole this was far from disagreeable, and its greater freedoms meant that she, an ‘unattended young lady’ could travel alone by train in a way that would have been quite inappropriate in dear England.

  And so, much too soon, it was time to return to the proprieties, refinements, dutiful repose of her homeland, for which the orderly routines aboard Cunard’s America bound for Liverpool somewhat prepared her. There were regular strolls on deck, too many large meals, interminable chess and card games, violins with afternoon tea, and to these she resigned herself with detached amusement. But she came alive when a gale suddenly blew up and the ship displayed ‘its special capabilities for rolling’. ‘The view from the wheel-house was magnificent. The towering waves which came up behind us heaped together by mighty winds, looked like hills of green glass, and the phosphorescent light like fiery lamps within – the moonlight glittered upon our broad foaming wake – our masts and spars and rigging stood out in sharp relief against the sky, while for once our canvas looked white. Far in the distance the sharp bow would plunge down into the foam, and then our good ship, rising, would shake her shiny side, as if in joy at her own buoyancy. The busy hum of men marred not the solitary sacredness of midnight on the Atlantic. The moon “walked in brightness”, auroras flashed, and meteors flamed, and a sensible presence of Deity seemed to pervade the transparent atmosphere in which we were viewing “the works of the Lord, and his wonders in the deep.”’

  There was no surer proof of God’s omnipotence than a display of the beauty he made, no more heady draught than one of nature’s dramas spiced with danger, no more exhilarating stimulant than the novelty of constant change and movement. But once safely returned to port, slowed down and pampered with ‘civilisation’, her very sap drained away, leaving her distressed in mind and body; ‘I always feel dil [dull and inactive] when I am stationary,’ she wrote years later from the Sandwich Isles. ‘The loneliness is dreadful often. When I am travelling I don’t feel it, but that is why I can never stay anywhere.’

  Stayed, perforce, at Wyton after her American adventure, she shelved the dilemma as she always did, by reliving her travels in writing. Her manuscript was shown to John Murray, who at once recognised its merits, and thus began the cordial friendship between Isabella and her publisher which lasted for the rest of her life. This first book, under the decorous guise of anonymity and the title An Englishwoman in America, appeared in 1856 and was accorded a fair success. But the following year her health again deteriorated in the spiritless environment of the Rectory; again she tried the cure of transatlantic travel (of which little record survives); and, very soon after this second journey, her father died. He had been ‘the mainspring and object’ of her life, she cried, in the fervour of that passionate grief which utterly swamped her on each occasion that she lost a member of her close family. And certainly his influence upon her was strong, his moral creed governed much of her thinking, and she modelled her obstinate integrity on his.

  II

  The father’s death naturally meant that the Rectory had to be vacated, and early in 1860 the Birds moved to Castle Terrace, Edinburgh. It was one of those prim, trim, grim residences admirably suited to the housing of a reasonably well-off clergyman’s widow and her two delicate spinster daughters. Isabella was then twenty-nine years old, and to her future biographer, Anna Stoddart, who first met her at this time, we owe one of the few descriptions of her youthful appearance. ‘The memory of a small, slight figure dressed in mour
ning is still vivid – of her white face shining between the black meshes of a knitted Shetland veil; of her great observant eyes, flashing and smiling, but melancholy when she was silent; of her gentleness and the exquisite modesty of her manner; and above all, of her soft and perfectly modulated voice, never betrayed into harshness or loudness, or even excitement, but so magnetic that all in the room were soon absorbed in listening to her.’ It is really not unkind to focus this slightly misty-eyed portrait by adding that Isabella had very prominent front teeth (a defect remedied by later dental treatment after a riding accident); that, ‘Her quiet, slow, deliberate manner of speech might have been a little tedious in one less gifted’, as a friend gently put it; that when she drew herself up to her full height it was, on her own admission, four feet, eleven and a half inches.

  Isabella started her new life in the Scottish capital as a semi-invalid unable to rise before midday. During her bedridden forenoons, she wrote articles for worthy family periodicals such as Good Words, The Leisure Hour, The Family Treasury. Hymnology and metaphysical poetry were favourite themes, and her approach to them is lucid and erudite, her style muted, polished, conventional, deyout, like a piece of best-quality grey silk. Rising in the afternoon, she busied herself with a number of local good works, attended committee meetings, often dined out.

  The first ‘cause’ that aroused her charitable sympathy was that of the Hebridean crofters, whose plight she saw for herself during a tour of the Outer Hebrides in 1861. The ‘Pen and Pencil Sketches’ of that journey, which were later published, afford ample evidence of how vividly and directly she could write when stirred to compassion by first-hand experience of human misery. Entering a hovel on the Isle of Uist, she records, for instance, that ‘The oppressive smell of dirt overpowered that of the peat smoke which was so thick that we could hardly discern anything and acrid enough to bring tears to the eyes; and tears were not inappropriate. The earthen floor was all holes, some dry, some wet. In one of the wettest, a crippled infant was dabbling its long lean fingers. There was no light but that which came through a smoke-hole and this also seemed to admit great gusts of the wind which blew the smoke down and left it to densify inside. Peat reek dripped from the roof, and the five human inhabitants looked as if peat smoke had so penetrated their tissues as to become part of their being. Over the peat fire which smouldered drearily, sat an ancient crone who had been dried in smoke till her skin was hard and withered like a mummy’s and the puny infant on her knee looked up with old pinched features like her own. A sickly woman scantily clad sat on a heap of ashes rocking to and fro, the sick child lay on a dirty blanket on the floor with smoke and embers driving into its bleary eyes. There was no partition in the den, but two cows and some poultry seemed to understand that it was proper to keep at the other end of the room, at least while visitors were present.’