Parallel Lives

by Phyllis Rose

  He composed, to be cut into the marble, another series of hopelessly hyperbolic praises of Harriet, destined, like his autobiography, not to be believed. Mill never wrote worse than when his heart was most engaged. ‘Her Clear Powerful and Original Comprehensive Intellect.’ ‘As Earnest for the Public Good As She was Generous and Devoted to All who Surrounded Her.’ The phrases knock together bombastically. ‘Were there but a few hearts and intellects like hers, the earth would already have become the hoped-for Heaven.’59 The monument became a stopping place on the Victorian Grand Tour, and Marian Evans, travelling to Italy in 1861 with Mr Lewes to do research for Romola, was touched by the way in which the vast marble surface seemed too small for the overflowing of Mill’s devotion.60

  Every day, when he was in Avignon, Mill spent an hour by the grave. Away, he did the work Harriet would have wanted him to do. She continued to guide his life. It was, in a sense, satisfactory. As with Petrarch and Laura, Dante and Beatrice, Auguste Comte and Clothilde de Vaux, the woman who had inspired great work as well as great love died into the condition of pure, disembodied inspiration. Moreover, to Mill’s great comfort, Harriet had left a daughter, Helen Taylor, twenty-seven at the time of her mother’s death. She would be Mill’s companion for the rest of his life. ‘Surely no one ever before was so fortunate, as, after such a loss as mine, to draw another prize in the lottery of life – another companion, stimulator, adviser and instructor of the rarest quality.’61 Whether she was ‘the inheritor of much of [Harriet’s] wisdom, and of all her nobleness of character’, as Mill claimed, we will not attempt to discover. Certainly she took Harriet’s place in the way most necessary to Mill, by providing someone outside himself whom he could obey.

  One of Matthew Arnold’s touchstones of greatness in poetry was Dante’s line, ‘In la sua volontade è nostra pace’ – in Thy will is our peace – a line whose beauty must reside as much in the reassurance about divine protection it offered as in anything innately poetic. We have heard about the secularisation of love in the nineteenth century, how love of God was replaced by love for a specific human being as the most exalting experience of life. It could also be said that with the ‘disappearance of God’, serious thinkers, those with an essentially religious temperament but divorced from religion by the failure of faith, were bound to search for a personal, freely chosen authority to validate their lives, as T. H. Huxley would elevate in the place of God an abstraction called Fact.62 The history of nineteenth-century thought is the record of various people’s efforts to find substitute sources of authority. John Mill, brought up an atheist, trained to distrust any authority outside himself, a man who scorned in every way the notion of one person surrendering his will to another, nevertheless felt as one of the profoundest needs of his emotional life the need to do precisely that – to surrender the will. In imagining that being what some would call henpecked constituted a utopian marriage of equals, he created a delusion which he and his wife could happily share.63 He invented a role for her which she liked both in theory (she liked the idea of equality) and in practice (she liked the feel of mastery). Her subject was willing. Mill’s mind approved equality but his soul craved domination. He atoned for the subjection of women by the voluntary, even enthusiastic, subjection of one man and portrayed the result as a model marriage of equals.

  NOTES

  1. Ruth Borchard, John Stuart Mill, the Man (London: Watts, 1957), 41–43.

  2. Mary S. Hartman, Victorian Murderesses (New York: Schocken Books, 1977). See particularly the case of Adelaide Bartlett, a victim of an arranged marriage, for some interesting ways to avoid having sex. Bartlett consulted a woman named Mary Nichols who specialised in the problems of unhappily married women and often advised platonic unions.

  3. F. A. Hayek, John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor: Their Correspondence and Subsequent Marriage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), 77. Henceforth referred to as Hayek.

  4. Carlyle’s account of how Mill met Mrs Taylor, the source of all later versions, may be found in The Letters of Charles Eliot Norton, 2 vols. (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1913), 1:496–97. Prof. Norton moved through literary London between 1850 and 1880 keeping a running account of his conversations with the great, particularly with Ruskin and Carlyle, whom he most admired.

  Fox’s motives for introducing Mrs Taylor to Mill are debatable. Michael St John Packe suggests that he wanted to get Mill to contribute to the Monthly Repository and was using Mrs Taylor as ‘a handsome sprat to catch an exceptional mackerel’ (Packe, The Life of John Stuart Mill [New York: Macmillan, 1954], 128). And what did he imagine happening after he introduced them? In what sense was Mill the cure for Harriet’s problem? Adelaide Bartlett’s marital adviser, Mrs Nichols, ‘for a time at least … appears to have counselled that in some cases love unions which the world labelled adulterous might be called for’ as solutions to marital unhappiness (Hartman, Victorian Murderesses, 200). Could the Unitarian minister have been thinking along similar lines? His own domestic arrangement was unconventional, ultimately scandalous. He had taken into his household two talented members of his congregation, Eliza and Sarah Flower, upon the death of their father. Eliza Flower and Fox became lovers. By 1835, Mrs Fox brought a formal accusation against her husband and forced him to defend himself in church. He was allowed to continue in charge of the congregation and promptly left his wife, setting up a new establishment with Eliza Flower. In later years, he disapproved of the concessionary path that Mrs Taylor and Mill chose to pursue in their conduct towards Mr Taylor.

  Whatever Fox had in mind, it seems to have been a sincere interest in women’s rights that brought Mrs Taylor and Mill together when they met. Mrs Taylor had probably been complaining to Fox that her husband was insensitive in this area and Fox thought of Mill as Taylor’s opposite. This would explain why Mill says in his Autobiography that his belief in the equality of men and women pre-dated his acquaintance with Harriet and was the reason she became interested in him (The Autobiography of John Stuart Mill [New York: Columbia University Press, 1944], 173n.).

  5. Mill, Autobiography, 94.

  6. Ibid., 124.

  7. Jack Stillinger, ed., The Early Draft of John Stuart Mill’s Autobiography (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1961), 199.

  8. Letters of Charles Eliot Norton, 1:496.

  9. Hayek, 58.

  10. Ibid., 76.

  11. Ibid., 73.

  12. Ibid., 69.

  13. Mill, Autobiography, 161.

  14. Hayek, 49.

  15. Ibid., 99–100.

  16. Ibid., 46, 49, 50.

  17. Ibid., 52.

  18. Hayek, 80.

  19. Ibid., 82.

  20. Ibid., 85.

  21. Ibid., 79–80.

  22. Mill, Autobiography, 161.

  23. Hayek, 122.

  24. Ibid., 120–21.

  25. Ibid., 130–31.

  26. Ibid., 161.

  27. Ibid., 162–63.

  28. Ibid., 168.

  29. Alexander Bain, John Stuart Mill: A Criticism (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1882), 151.

  30. Hayek, 177–78.

  31. Ibid., 196.

  32. Stillinger, Early Draft, 171. In the interest no doubt of tact, this passage did not survive the first draft. A milder version was substituted.

  33. See, for example, on the non-consummation of the Mills’ marriage, Ruth Borchard, 106, and Bruce Mazlish, James and John Stuart Mill (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 301–2. That the Mills’ marriage should have been sexless fits all too neatly Mazlish’s theory of infantile dependency in Mill. Borchard seems more disinterested, if less pretentious. For Bain’s comments on Mill’s sexuality, see Bain, John Stuart Mill: A Criticism, 149. For an interesting and amusing account of Mill’s dream, see Hayek, 253–54.

  34. See J. A. and Olive Banks, Feminism and Family Planning in Victorian England (New York: Schocken Books, 1964).

  35. Alice Rossi, ‘Sentiment and Intellect’, introduction to Essays on Se
x Equality by John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1970).

  36. The Letters of Sigmund Freud, ed. Ernst Freud (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), 75–76.

  37. Packe, The Life of John Stuart Mill, 318–19.

  38. Mill, Autobiography, 171.

  39. Rossi, ‘Sentiment and Intellect’.

  40. Packe, The Life of John Stuart Mill, 371. See also Hayek; Borchard, John Stuart Mill, the Man; and Gertrude Himmelfarb, On Liberty and Liberalism: The Case of John Stuart Mill (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974). An exception is H. O. Pappe, John Stuart Mill and the Harriet Taylor Myth (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1960), which disputes Harriet Taylor’s influence on Mill, but the work is short, silly and dismissible.

  41. Quoted in Hayek, 300. I am indebted to Packe for his treatment of this episode.

  42. Hayek, 134–35.

  43. Ibid., 300.

  44. Ibid., 137.

  45. The Later Letters of John Stuart Mill, 1849–1873, ed. Francis E. Minetka and Dwight N. Lindley, vol. 14 in The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972), 165.

  46. Minetka and Lindley, Letters, 14:197.

  47. Hayek, 192.

  48. Minetka and Lindley, Letters, 14:197.

  49. Bain, John Stuart Mill, 171.

  50. Mill, Autobiography, 131.

  51. Minetka and Lindley, Letters, 14:273.

  52. ‘Mill’s Intellectual Beacon’, Partisan Review 19 (1952): 115–20. To Mrs Trilling, the egregious New Year’s greeting is a ‘transgression difficult to forgive even in the name of neurosis’.

  53. Mill, Autobiography, 131.

  54. Mill was an inspired linguistic stickler in the service of feminism. Reviewing the first volume of Grote’s history of Greece, he criticised his friend for using the words masculine and feminine to describe the scientific and artistic sides of the Greek mind. As Bain said, ‘Mill could never endure the differences of character between men and women to be treated as a matter of course.’ And later, as a member of Parliament, Mill initiated the first parliamentary debate on women’s suffrage by proposing that the word person replace the word man throughout the Reform Bill of 1867, which extended the franchise.

  On the issue of women’s rights Mill stood firm and virtually alone among his male contemporaries. Even Auguste Comte, whose work Mill admired early for its progressive, scientific cast, differed from Mill on the position of women. Comte took the more usual determinist line. Character derived from physical properties of the brain (he was the originator of phrenology), and women were destined to inferiority because their brains were smaller than men’s, although they compensated for their intellectual inferiority by moral and spiritual superiority. Mill was not surprised when Comte’s later work became nightmarishly totalitarian, extolling a utopia in which no books would be allowed because none was necessary: truth would have been established. This view provoked Mill to write On Liberty (why did all systems of social reform seem to end in liberticide?) and he claimed it was predictable from Comte’s belief in the inferiority of women. To believe that anything was innately true was, to Mill, a fatal flaw of thought on which no healthy structure could be built. If you got your epistemology right, the rest would follow.

  55. Bain, John Stuart Mill, 171.

  56. Hayek, 210.

  57. Minetka and Lindley, Letters, 14:165.

  58. Hayek, 195.

  59. Ibid., 125.

  60. The George Eliot Letters, ed. Gordon Haight, 9 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954–78), 3:407n. They had previously stopped at Père Lachaise to see the tomb of Héloïse and Abelard, but it was being repaired.

  61. Mill, Autobiography, 184–85.

  62. See J. Hillis Miller, The Disappearance of God: Five Nineteenth Century Writers (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963).

  63. A friend has pointed out that we require an equivalent term for henpecked, referring to women. She suggests peckerpecked.

  CATHERINE HOGARTH

  and

  CHARLES DICKENS

  1835–1858

  prelude: the carlyles and the magnetised body

  In the 1830s a new therapy called Mesmerism or Animal Magnetism became popular in England. (We call it hypnotism now.) It offered cures for the nervous problems which would seem increasingly to be the nineteenth century’s characteristic form of illness. By manipulating the electric fluid field that was thought to exist between people, using certain movements of the hand called ‘passes’, the operator could throw the subject into a magnetic sleep or trance. This was an odd state, resembling death as much as sleep, in which the subject could do things impossible for her to do in normal life, in which she might say things she would never say in normal life, and in which she was immensely susceptible to suggestion. (The operator was almost invariably male, the subject usually female.) Insomniacs could be made to sleep. A person prey to fears and horrors might be brought to speak of them – and so to exorcise them. Mesmerism’s potential for good seemed great, yet many people worried about the possibilities for sexual abuse.

  Charles Dickens was an early and enthusiastic amateur of mesmerism. England’s leading mesmeric practitioner, Dr. John Elliotson, became a close friend. From Elliotson and Chauncey Hare Townshend, Dickens learned how to perform the mesmeric passes. His first subject, in 1841, was his wife, whom, in a few moments, he successfully threw into hysterics and then into a magnetic trance. Later, he practised on other family and friends. In 1844–45, on a sabbatical from writing passed in Genoa, Dickens spent the best energies of three months in the mesmeric treatment of Madame de la Rue, the English-born and mildly disturbed wife of a Swiss banker who lived nearby.1 Although he would never allow himself to be mesmerised, Dickens was fascinated by what the process revealed about the mind’s secrets and by the curious way in which one personality seemed able to exercise influence over another.

  Jane Carlyle would have none of it. She was sniffy about all fads and mass enthusiasms. One night in 1847, at Mrs Buller’s house, she and Mr Carlyle witnessed a demonstration of magnetism. The magnetiser was a lower-class person who did not pronounce his h’s and who irritated Mrs Carlyle by telling her that mesmerism depended on ‘moral and intellectual superiority’.2 Nevertheless, in a quarter of an hour, by gazing into the eyes of a Miss Bölte and by holding one of her hands, he succeeded in throwing her into a deep magnetic trance. She looked like a marble effigy: pale, cold, motionless. Her face had that beautiful expression seen only on the faces of the dead or the mesmerised. The mesmerist arranged Miss Bölte’s arms and legs into unnatural positions which they could not have held ordinarily for a moment and left her like that for an hour. Mrs Carlyle stepped up to the magnetised body and touched the arms. They felt horrible, stiff. With all her force she could not unbend them. Other people poked Miss Bölte’s skin with a penknife, but she showed no signs of feeling anything.

  The mesmerist was triumphant. ‘Now are you convinced?’ he asked the Carlyles.

  ‘Yes,’ said Carlyle. ‘There is no possibility of doubting that you have stiffened poor Miss Bölte into something very awful.’

  ‘Yes,’ Mrs Carlyle agreed. ‘But then she wished to be magnetised; what I doubt is whether anyone could be reduced to that state without the consent of their own volition. I should like for instance to see anyone magnetise me!’

  ‘You think I could not?’

  ‘Yes. I defy you.’

  So Mrs Carlyle gave him her hand, and he made some passes over it, and she thought to herself, ‘You must learn to sound your h’s, Sir, before you can produce any effect on a woman like me!’ and then, to her horror, she felt her body seized from head to foot by a galvanic flash. Fortunately, she retained enough self-control to keep him from seeing her state, thus disproving his theory of power through superiority. For had it not taken superiority to keep him from seeing her response? At the same time, it was disturbing to learn that her theory of the need for a consenting will
was also nonsense.

  paterfamilias

  When he turned twenty-three, Charles Dickens, a young reporter for the Morning Chronicle, threw a birthday party for himself in his rooms in Furnival’s Inn. He had good reason to feel like celebrating, for he was beginning to attract attention as the author of sketches of London life being published in the Chronicle and the Monthly Magazine under the pen name ‘Boz’. Not long before, he had been jilted, because of his lack of ‘prospects’, by Maria Beadnell, a woman he had loved desperately. Young Dickens would not, on the strength of his mounting fame, with the growing acclaim for ‘Sketches by Boz’, renew his suit, but he could allow himself to gloat a little. He could offer himself a party. It was a Saturday night. There was dancing. His mother and his sisters presided, and the lovely and talented Fanny Dickens, one of his sisters, favoured the company with her singing.

  Among the guests was George Hogarth, also a journalist on the Morning Chronicle, and some of his family. Dickens particularly respected this older man who was an accomplished writer, a genial person and had been, in his native Edinburgh, a friend and adviser to Sir Walter Scott. Dickens was the son of a navy pay clerk distinguished only by his inability to provide for his family. George Hogarth, by contrast, seemed confidently and even glamorously established in the literary world which Dickens aspired to enter. The young man was proud of his friendship and pleased to go to his colleague’s house. The eldest of the Hogarths’ children, twenty-year-old Catherine, particularly enjoyed Dickens’s birthday party. She also liked the host. ‘Mr Dickens improves very much upon acquaintance he is very gentlemanly and pleasant,’ she reported later to a Scottish relative.3

  By the end of that spring, in the year 1835, Catherine Hogarth and Charles Dickens were engaged to be married. She was three years younger than he, pretty, with heavy-lidded blue eyes and fresh plump skin, good-natured and affectionate. He liked and esteemed her family. Although she did not elicit from him the passion that Maria Beadnell had, she seemed to suit him admirably. Dickens intended to make a place for himself in the world. He meant to live hard, and his pace was naturally fast. He wanted a wife and a family. His deeply passionate nature attached itself to his chosen mate. They were a team. She was ‘his better half’, ‘the missis’, ‘Mrs D’. In the early years of their marriage, he flung around those references to her with exuberant delight. He was evidently proud of her, and proud of himself for having acquired that dignifying satellite, a wife.