by Pat Barr
Something had to be done, and to Isabella and others of active conscience, the best solution seemed to be that of emigration to North America and Canada. In retrospect, this answer may not seem quite so satisfactory, but to those then concerned the issue was clear: here were crofters living in wretched conditions such as Isabella described; there were the empty, fertile, spacious lands across the Atlantic that she had also seen; and from them came the supporting testimony of many emigrants who had gone before and who reported back, ‘We have plenty of food and grog’; ‘We shall never want for timber and water’; and the famous, ‘In America we have pies and puddings.’ These were sound enough reasons for Isabella, who was always roused more by immediate social problems than by long-term historical perspectives.
She had a flair for organisation and personally supervised many of the practical arrangements. Wrote Mr Dunlop, a shipowner whom she approached in this connection, ‘The impression left by our interview is of my great desire to serve the singularly gifted young lady well. She astonished me by her energy and her capacity in making arrangements … When all was settled and her people were about to embark, she was amongst them, seeing to their every want. The embarkation took place the day before their departure. Miss Bird remained with them all night, and when the official visit prior to their departure took place she had them marshalled in order, tidy and cheerful. The sadness at leaving their native shores had given place to cheerfulness – due to Miss Bird’s presence among them.’ The marshalling in good order of the ‘tidy and cheerful’ dispossessed has a distinctively bossy and patronising ring about it. Yet, Mr Dunlop adds, ‘There was something about Miss Bird that filled every one with whom she came in contact with a desire to serve her. She never complained of inattention to her people, nor asked for special consideration for them or for herself. She was personally self-denying, her only wish being to make them happy. There was a fascination in all her ways. She was small of stature, simple and neat in her attire, and was full of a refined humour that brightened her conversation. There was always a grace in what she said, and an ever-present evidence of latent intellectual power; and presiding over all there was a dignity that forbade the slightest approach to familiarity.’ Those qualities, so clearly discerned in her years before she began to travel seriously, were most important to her future success. For it really seemed to be the case, that coolies, interpreters, guides, muleteers were positively inspired to serve her with uncommon devotion, and that, though she moved so frequently in masculine domains, there was a presiding dignity about her which forbade undue ‘familiarity’.
Isabella Bird’s participation in local good works, allied to her social standing and that personal magnetism to which many who knew her refer, ensured that she soon had plenty of Edinburgh friends, most of whom were well known in the intellectual and philanthropic circles of the day. Anna Stoddart remembers ‘Many a bright gathering at No. 3 Castle Terrace when artists, professors, poets and publishers were present. One occasion is specially vivid when Dr John Brown came, after taking precautions against “being mixed up with strong-minded women” and bandied genial quips with Professor Blackie, Dr Hanna, Mr Constable, Sir Noel Paton …’ Among these, Isabella’s closest friends were Professor John Blackie and his wife Ella. Blackie, Professor of Greek at the University, was a character in the city, an eccentric, rumbustious, clever, restless, huge man in a broad-brimmed hat, a student’s cloak, with a long flowing beard and a kilt. His wife Ella was Isabella’s closest friend for many years, but the configuration of her personality has been almost totally obscured by the shadow of her towering dynamic husband, in whose wake she lived. She was a highly-strung, deeply introverted woman with a beautiful melancholy intelligent face that suggests withdrawal and repression. She was thrifty, childless, and could make any place a charming home for her restless spouse when he cared to stay with her, which was seldom. She was, says Miss Stoddart, ‘blighted with self-distrust’, and in later years was a frequent victim of ‘nervous depression’, that disease so significantly prevalent among Victorian women and against which Isabella herself fought a lifelong battle. Isabella was a frequent visitor to Ella’s drawing-room, a somewhat classical bower apparently, with walls panelled in ivory and gold, carved cornices and couches of crimson plush. To it, during the winter evenings of the 1860s, flitted a number of bonneted and cloaked young ladies of studious temperament, including members of the Stoddart and Cumming families, and the Bird sisters. Their conversation was impassioned upon such subjects as the schisms in the Scottish church, the rights of women, the merits of George Eliot’s novels, and later, Anna says, when the kettle boiled, Blackie himself came stomping in ‘with a crackling discharge of quips and compliments for the tea-drinkers’.
Isabella’s letters to Ella (in which Blackie is referred to with affectionate forbearance as ‘The Pro’) are loving, intimate, frank, the chief surviving charts of her emotional life at this time. From them it seems that she was keenly interested in current influential philosophical and religious ideas, but that her intellectual enjoyment was marred, as so much of the enjoyment in her life, by a sense of guilt. ‘I am in great danger of becoming perfectly encrusted with selfishness,’ she told Ella, ‘and this summer I have made very painful discoveries on this subject, and long for a cheerful intellect and self-denying spirit which “seeketh not its own and pleaseth not itself”.’ Yet the painful truth was that Isabella did not possess these gifts; she was a strong-minded, fairly self-centred person with a deep secret lust for simple selfish happiness that no amount of high-thinking and self-denial could totally assuage. But, because of her upbringing, she enormously admired and envied those to whom a selfless devotion to moral duty came easily – as it did, apparently, to her mother and sister.
In 1866, to the great sorrow of both sisters, Mrs Bird died, and from then on all Isabella’s love was centred upon Hennie. Hennie was a less complex and passionate person than her elder sister. The prevalent clerical strain in the family had run true to form in her, and produced a shy, staid, gentle, studious, warm-hearted, good young woman, pure in mind and spirit and with a simple certainty of Christian faith that never faltered. She possessed a quality that Anna Stoddart terms ‘unruffled peace’ and allied to it was a timid grace, a responsive interest in the concerns of others that charmed Isabella’s friends so that they became her friends too. She seldom sought friends of her own or ventured outside the tranquil warmth of the family circle; she shared little of her sister’s intellectual breadth, few of her spiritual and emotional uncertainties, none of her drive. The initiatives that Hennie took were few: she sketched and painted in water-colours; she came third in Professor Blackie’s Greek class for ladies; she leased the cottage in Tobermory on Mull which, after her mother’s death, became her favourite refuge and where, Isabella says, she was always ‘so happy and delightful’. Like Isabella, she took a deep pleasure in the apprehension of natural beauty, though her tastes were less dramatic, and she preferred the glow of burnet roses along the island shore, the tumble of a mossy burn to the cataracts and chasms that fed Isabella’s imagination. In Tobermory where, according to Anna Stoddart, the villagers called her. ‘The Blessed One’, she spread her wings with a barely perceptible rustle and arranged a number of tea-parties for friends. ‘Henrietta’s friends,’ says Anna, ‘were made for reasons very unusual; for the sake of their poverty and need of her, of their loneliness and dependence on her affection, of their sensitive youth and instinctive turn to her for understanding and guidance, of their sickness and sorrow and bereavement, and their faith in her sympathy and help.’ It implies no denigration of these motives to add that Hennie, unlike her sister, had a strong and frustrated maternal instinct and that she half-adopted and paid for the education of a young girl in the village.
The Blackies, who had a house at Oban, occasionally visited the cottage on Mull, and one of these visits inspired the ‘Pro’ to a ballad about Hennie in her favourite setting. It is really quite a gem of its kind, apparently t
ypical of the compositions that Blackie dedicated to various spinsters who adorned the fringes of his busy days, all of the verses, Anna explains, ‘too rollicking to be dangerous’. It is called A Ballad of Mull:
In a tiny bay,
Where ships lie sure and steady,
In a quiet way
Lives a tiny lady;
In a tiny house
Dwells my little fairy,
Gentle as a mouse,
Blithe as a canary….
But above all fare,
Of which my song is telling,
Sits my lady there,
The mistress of the dwelling.
Dressed in serge light blue,
With trimming white and snowy,
All so nice and new,
With nothing false and showy …
It goes on; incredibly, it gets worse.
Hennie, the reserved sister, composed all of a piece, would gladly have stayed the whole year in her tiny Tobermory dwelling; Isabella, a network of contradiction, needed the stimulation and challenge of urban life even while she hated its tiresome conventions and obligations. So they wintered in Edinburgh, and Isabella took up her second ‘cause’ – that of the city’s slums. Again her pen was her most potent weapon, and her Notes on Old Edinburgh, published in 1869, are a furious and spirited indictment of the appalling conditions that existed less than a mile away from those trim terraces where she and her friends circulated. She describes the ragged, sore-blotched kids sitting stupefied in verminous gutters, the ‘haggard, wrinkled vicious faces’ peering from dirty windows, women shuffling along with buckets and waiting up to three hours to draw water from the one communal well, gratings ‘choked up with fish-heads and offal’, ashes and excrement. Inside it was worse: dark labyrinths of filthy rooms, in one a pregnant woman on a straw bed with her idiot child crawling in the grate; in another a dying man, covered with bed-sores, moaning for water; nearby, three half-clad prostitutes with their babies lying on the slimy floor, and brawling men plunging roughly down the stairs crying for a ‘wee drap’. So, says Isabella, ‘would the President of the Temperance Legion himself if he was hidden away in such a hole’. She pours vials of wrath on the landlords who charged extortionate rents for these wretched cells, with their walls swarming with lice, their floors with vermin, their foundations literally rotting with accumulated garbage of every odious sort. ‘These miserable thousands are surely entitled to at least as much light, space and air as we give our beasts!’ she exclaimed. Her report aroused some response, but, as Anna Stoddart says, ‘philanthropy was only rubbing its eyes awake from slumber’ in those days, and this was too vast a problem to be even partially remedied by the publication of one pamphlet, however powerful and inflammatory. Undoubtedly Isabella realised that, if she were truly determined to alleviate the slum conditions in the city, it would have taken some twenty years of wholehearted effort – a course that would have given her great moral satisfaction, but little health or true happiness.
Soon after these endeavours, her health deteriorated further. In June 1869 her doctor ordered that she must ‘go to the sea, sleep on the ground floor and be out in a boat most of the day’, says Anna Stoddart, who conscientiously documents the great variety of medical advice Isabella received over the years. The next month, Isabella, taking up the sad tale, admits that she has been ‘as ill as could be with choking, aching, leeches, poultices, doctors twice a day, etc’. A year later she was still ‘frail and in pain’, Anna says, and her doctor ‘suggested a steel net to support her head at the back when she required to sit up, her suffering being caused by the weight of her head on a diseased spine’.
In these distressing circumstances it was little wonder that deeper sloughs of depression and insomnia engulfed her. On medical advice, she took a chartered voyage to New York and back via the Mediterranean, but was too ill to leave the ship, and returned in worse health, and even more beset by a frustration that was physical, mental and spiritual. Yet still the doctors could only come up with the same suggestion – travel. And so in the summer of 1872 when she was forty years old and in a mood of kill-or-cure desperation, Isabella resolved to go to the very Antipodes in search of whatever it was her body and spirit craved. At last, in the enchanted Sandwich Isles and the rugged Rockies, she found her own very individual way to happy and creative fulfilment. And the puzzle of it all was that the frail lady who could not lift her head from the pillow without support in the summer of 1870 climbed Mauna Loa, the ‘Matterhorn of the Pacific’, three years later, and then went on to round up wild cattle in the Rockies.
CHAPTER VI
The Doctor’s Wife
HENRIETTA BIRD, writing to Ella Blackie from Mull in the summer of 1873, reported that she had recently received ‘three delightful cheerful letters from Isa…. They have not contained a single word which has left other than a pleasant impression. Is not this delightful?’ The cheer and delight continued during the years spent abroad, as we know, and these and other brimful letters positively bounded into the sedate Tobermory cottage, sparkling with details of Isa’s marvellous adventures on the other side of the world. And Hennie – ‘My Dearest Pet’, ‘My Ownest’, as her sister called her – sipping a cup of tea by the fire or ensconced in the window-seat overlooking the bay, read and re-read the letters with pleasure and shared their contents with her intimate friends.
First came the stories of the dangerous climb to the top of the volcano on Hawaii, with Isa actually sleeping in a tent on the crater’s very edge, and that was followed by Isa’s reckless winter ride in the Rockies, and her friendship (if not more than friendship) with poor Mr Nugent, who sounded such an extraordinary man. Then after Isa had been at home again, which, alas, didn’t seem to suit her at all, came the letters from North Japan, describing those terrible flea-ridden inns in which she had stayed during the wet summer of 1878. So much of that Japanese journey had sounded very dismal and bad for Isa’s health – but then the ‘Great Perak Letter’ had arrived, a hundred and sixteen pages of it and each one a burst of colour and vitality. And soon after, in the early spring of 1879, the still waiting, faithful, patient Hennie heard that darling Isa was truly coming home again at last. She was stouter, she said in her last letter from Malaya, and even her face was fatter, and the tropic sun had browned her so much that she ‘could be taken for a Portuguese’! And everyone everywhere – in Hawaii, Colorado, Japan, Perak – had liked Isa; and so they should because she was extremely intelligent and most interesting to listen to, and so loving, sympathetic and really most amazingly courageous and enterprising. It would be very delightful to see Isa again.
II
On her way home from the Golden Chersonese, Isabella stopped at Cairo where she contracted a fever; while still weak, she went off to camp on the slopes of Mount Sinai for four nights alone; she developed pleurodynia (rheumatism of the chest muscles). So, when she finally reached the shelter of the Tobermory cottage in May 1879, she was not as robust and brown as a Portuguese after all, but something of a physical wreck. To Ella she wrote, ‘My body is very weak and I can only walk about three hundred yards with a stick, but my head is all right, and I am working five hours a day in this delicious quiet. Hennie has improved wonderfully since I came and we are very happy together. I feel that “goodness and mercy have followed me” and the joy of returning to Hennie’s unselfish love and the precious affection of many dear friends is new every morning.’ Hennie’s love was large enough to bask in, it was pure, total, undemanding and threatened no unforeseen invasions of body or mind. It was enough for Isa; there was, she concluded that peaceful summer, ‘no room for a third’.
The third, aspiring intruder, the man who worshipped Isabella with a devotion and constancy akin to Hennie’s love, was Dr John Bishop, an Edinburgh physician. Bishop, ten years Isabella’s junior, a native of Sheffield, had settled in Edinburgh some years before. He had been resident surgeon at the Royal Infirmary, a private assistant to Sir Joseph Lister and had then set up in private prac
tice. He was a favourite of his patients, many of whom, Anna Stoddart says, ‘belonged to the more intellectual class of that generation’. Among them, not surprisingly, were Hennie and Isa, both of whom were in distressingly frequent need of medical attention.
Friendship blossomed between John Bishop and the sisters during the mid-seventies when, after her Sandwich Isles journey, Isabella pursued the study of histological botany, in which Bishop was something of an expert. The general scientific field then called simply ‘microscopy’ so fascinated Isabella for a while that she contemplated giving up her literary work for it and, though dissuaded from this, she and Bishop spent much time together, enthusiastically ‘busy with the marvels of the Atlantic ooze’, as Anna Stoddart puts it. Bishop was immensely attracted by Isabella’s intelligent grasp of the subject and by much else besides – her charm, her charitable concern for others’ welfare, her breadth of interest. He had first proposed to her in 1877 and Isabella’s reply must have been of the ‘shilly-shally’ kind that she usually deplored. In a letter to her publisher at that time she reported her ‘conditional engagement’ and hoped that Murray still had ‘romance enough to sympathise with a “love match”’. Anna Stoddart however says that, even then, Isabella persuaded Bishop ‘to let their friendship abide undisturbed by considerations which she was unwilling to face’, and that he resignedly acquiesced in this. Nevertheless, the doctor continued to dance a variety of attendances, and Isabella told Ella a month later that he was staying at Tobermory ‘healing the sick’ – the quotation marks are hers.
