Parallel Lives

by Phyllis Rose

  Traditional marriage shores up the power of men in subtle ways which I believe few men – even sensitive men of the greatest goodwill towards women – appreciate. When you are playing tennis and the wind is blowing from your back, you may not be aware of the wind at all and think only that you are playing very well. All your shots go in swift and hard. It isn’t until you change courts and the wind is blowing against you that you appreciate the force of the wind. Power is like that. You feel it most when it is working against you. Women sometimes marry to find that the wind is suddenly blowing against them. I am speaking now of spirited women, strong women, who are the most likely to resent the sudden change. They feel overwhelmed in marriage by husbands who have been raised to act, if not to be, strong in their dealings with the outside world and to expect devoted care from a woman in the family. Both their outward strength and inner dependency are reinforced by the usual order of things in marriage. So that women who are sensitive to power negotiations in their relationships – and women seem to be particularly sensitive to power – may prefer men with some handicap. (By handicap, I simply mean the absence of one of those surpluses, or advantages over women, with which men are traditionally expected to enter marriage – height, money, age, social status, achievement.) Or they may avoid marriage altogether. For ‘50–50’, the rule of fair partnership, is a deceptively lucid ideal. How do people achieve it? How do they keep from slipping into 49–51? Splitting the household chores is a beginning, but only a crude one, on the path to achieving the psychopolitical equality many of us aspire to.

  Judy Benjamin’s lawyer husband, in the film Private Benjamin, advises a client on how to protect himself in marriage: ‘Pre-nups, baby! Pre-nups is the only way to go.’ (He is also speaking to the dark side of our contemporary sense of marriage as business partnership.) But Judy’s husband dies on their wedding night, leaving her as dependent as ever. She cannot understand the behaviour of another film heroine, in An Unmarried Woman, who refuses to marry the attractive artist played by Alan Bates. But by the end of Private Benjamin, Judy, too, will reject marriage. Pre-nups can’t help her. Only the army – which, as we all know, makes a man of you – can help. Private Benjamin and An Unmarried Woman are among some films of the late seventies and early eighties which focus on what marriage can – and mainly cannot – do for women. The suspicion grows that it cannot do very much.7

  My aim throughout this book has not been to show that Dickens or Ruskin or Carlyle were ‘bad’ husbands, but to present them as examples of behaviour generated inevitably by the peculiar privileges and stresses of traditional marriage. It is probably clear that George Eliot and George Henry Lewes are, in one sense, the heroine and hero of the book. In their case, devotion, stability and equality grew outside the bounds of legal marriage – whether in accord with some psychological quirk of human nature which resists fulfilling promises, or because sanctioned marriage bears some ineradicable taint which converts the personal relationship between a man and a woman into a political one, I cannot finally say, although both may be true. I hope it is also clear that some of the other women I have written about are heroines, too: Harriet Mill for her thinking about marriage and her desire to reform it, as well as for making the most of a very weak hand, and Effie Gray for realising she was in a mess (not crazy, as her husband said) and getting out of it. To think of Catherine Dickens as a heroine is impossible, but, in the annals of marriage, perhaps she has earned a place as a martyr. Above all, my heroine is Jane Carlyle. Feisty Jane went down fighting, demanding equal time and writing about it all in marvellous prose which just might outlast her husband’s. Because of her, the Carlyles’ marriage seems, in the strange afterlife which literature grants, to be also a marriage of equals, where equality consists – as perhaps it must, in an imperfect time such as hers, or ours – in perpetual resistance, perpetual rebellion.

  NOTES

  1. Joseph Irving, The Annals of Our Time: A Diurnal of Events … from 1837 to 1871 (London and New York: Macmillan and Co., 1890), 718; see also 717, 721–22. Based largely on newspaper accounts, but relying also on memoirs, diaries, parliamentary debates, proceedings of learned societies and so on, this volume is a fascinating and valuable daily record of Victorian history. On the Governor Eyre affair, see also James G. Paradis, T. H. Huxley: Man’s Place in Nature (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1978).

  2. Jane Welsh Carlyle, Letters and Memorials, 2:380–81.

  3. Quoted Paradis, T. H. Huxley, 63–64.

  4. See Helen Singer Kaplan, Clifford Sager et al., ‘The Marriage Contract’ in Progress in Group and Family Therapy (New York and London: Brunner/Mazel, 1972), 483–97.

  5. ‘The Golden Rule and the Cycle of Life’ in The Study of Lives, ed. Robert White (New York: Atherton Press, 1963), 421–23.

  6. See Stanley Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981).

  7. See Jessie Bernard’s The Future of Marriage, rev. ed. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1982), which points out how much better marriage works for men than for women. Bernard believes, however, that it is the role of housewife enjoined by traditional marriage rather than marriage per se which weakens women and helps men to thrive.

  A Chronology

  1821 Jane Baillie Welsh meets Thomas Carlyle.

  1823 Francis Place tries to distribute information on birth control, assisted by seventeen-year-old John Stuart Mill; Mill is arrested on obscenity charges but the case is dismissed.

  1826 Jane Welsh marries Thomas Carlyle.

  Harriet Hardy marries John Taylor.

  1828 The Carlyles move to Craigenputtock.

  1830 Harriet Taylor consults her minister about marital dissatisfaction; he arranges an introduction to John Stuart Mill.

  1831 John Stuart Mill meets Thomas Carlyle.

  Maria Beadnell refuses to marry Charles Dickens because of his lack of prospects.

  1833 Arthur Hallam, friend of Tennyson, fiancé of Tennyson’s sister Emily, dies suddenly, aged twenty-two.

  1834 The Carlyles move to 5 Cheyne Row, Chelsea.

  1835 The manuscript of the first volume of The French Revolution is burned while in Mill’s possession; the Carlyles are momentarily relieved that the bad news Mill has come to tell them is not that he has decided to elope with Mrs Taylor.

  1836 Darwin returns from the Beagle voyage of five years.

  Ruskin falls in love with Adèle Domecq, daughter of his father’s partner in the sherry trade.

  Dickens marries Catherine Hogarth.

  1837 Anne Thackeray, first child of W. M. Thackeray, the novelist and his wife, is born. Another daughter, Minny, will be born the next year. Then Mrs Thackeray will be committed to an institution, on grounds of mental instability, for the rest of her life. Thackeray, unable to re-marry, will devotedly raise his daughters.

  Charles Dickens, Jr, the first child of Charles Dickens the novelist and his wife, Catherine, is born. Dickens is already famous for Pickwick Papers, which he concludes in this year; he has begun Oliver Twist.

  Victoria, aged seventeen, ascends the throne of England.

  1838 Mamie Dickens born.

  1839 Charles Darwin marries his cousin Emma Wedgwood, daughter of the great chinaware manufacturer, Josiah Wedgwood; they take up residence in Upper Gower Street, London; in December, William Darwin is born. Darwin reads Malthus’s Essay on Population, a key factor in generating his theory of natural selection.

  Kate Dickens born.

  1840 Queen Victoria, dreading only the prospect of having many children, marries her cousin, Albert of Saxe-Coburg.

  1841 Anne Elizabeth Darwin born.

  Walter Landor Dickens born.

  Emily Tennyson announces her engagement to a lieutenant in the navy; it is eight years after Hallam’s death, but many people are horrified by her betrayal of him.

  1842 The Carlyles meet Mr and Mrs Baring (later Lord and Lady Ashburton).

  The Da
rwins settle at Down, Kent; Mary Eleanor Darwin born, dies.

  1843 Henrietta Darwin born.

  1844 Thackeray and Jane Brookfield, each unhappy in marriage, vow to be close friends for life.

  Francis Jeffrey Dickens born.

  1845 Alfred d’Orsay Tennyson Dickens born.

  George Howard Darwin born.

  1847 James Simpson, the Edinburgh physician, publishes his discovery of chloroform as an anaesthetic, revolutionising the procedure of childbirth.

  Jane Eyre published with a dedication to Thackeray, leading many people to suppose (mistakenly) that its author was a governess in Thackeray’s household and that the novel’s portrait of Mr Rochester and his mad wife was based on Thackeray and his.

  Sydney Smith Dickens born.

  Elizabeth Darwin born.

  1848 Ruskin marries Euphemia Gray in Scotland, on the day of the Chartist demonstration in London.

  Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood founded, with the goal of truth to nature; it includes John Everett Millais, the painter.

  Emma Darwin gives birth to Francis Darwin, her seventh child; four days later, Charles Darwin makes enquiries about chloroform.

  1849 Mary Ellen Peacock marries George Meredith.

  John Taylor, husband of Harriet Taylor, dies of cancer.

  Henry Fielding Dickens born.

  1850 Leonard Darwin born; Charles Darwin administers chloroform to his wife.

  Dora Annie Dickens born. Dickens insists on use of chloroform for the delivery.

  Tennyson marries Emily Sellwood, to whom he has been engaged since 1838; In Memoriam, his extended elegy for Arthur Hallam, is published.

  1851 John Stuart Mill marries Harriet Taylor.

  Marian Evans (the future George Eliot) meets George Henry Lewes.

  William Brookfield, the popular minister, after a quarrel with wife, forces her to end her friendship with Thackeray.

  Horace Darwin born; Annie Darwin dies, aged to.

  Dora Annie Dickens dies, aged 10.

  Thomas Love Peacock’s wife (Mary Ellen’s mother), who has been mad and locked away for twenty-five years, finally dies.

  1852 Ruskin, as J. M. W. Turner’s executor, discovers and burns his pornographic sketches.

  Effie Ruskin, as a charitable act, arranges to have chloroform sent from Scotland to the Fate Bene Fratelli, nursing friars with a hospital on one of the islands of the Venetian lagoon.

  Edward Bulwer Lytton Dickens born.

  1853 The Ruskins spend part of the summer at Glenfinlas, taking along John Everett Millais for the sake of his education; Ruskin works on the index to The Stones of Venice; Effie and Millais fall in love.

  Queen Victoria is given chloroform for the birth of her fourth son, eighth child, Prince Leopold.

  1854 The Ruskins’ marriage annulled by the ecclesiastical court; the judgment cites Ruskin’s ‘incurable impotency’, which allegation he resents.

  Marian Evans and George Henry Lewes ‘elope’ to Germany, beginning their lifelong union.

  1855 Effie Gray marries John Everett Millais.

  Maria Beadnell re-enters Dickens’s life but proves to be a disappointment.

  1856 Jane Carlyle records in her diary increasing misery about her husband’s attentions to Lady Harriet Ashburton; she follows with interest the trial of Palmer, the man accused of poisoning his wife for her insurance policy; George Rennie, one of her Haddington beaux, re-enters her life but is disappointingly adult.

  Charles Waring Darwin born, the Darwins’ tenth and last child.

  1857 The Matrimonial Causes Act establishes secular divorce in England. Dickens meets Ellen Ternan.

  Lady Harriet Ashburton dies; Jane Carlyle’s depression lifts.

  Millais’s reputation as an artist begins to decline.

  Women and children are massacred at Cawnpore, during the Indian Mutiny.

  Madeleine Smith of Glasgow accused of poisoning her lover, a poor shipping clerk, who has been threatening to prevent her marriage to a man of higher social standing by making public her love letters; Miss Smith acquitted after a sensational trial which Jane Carlyle follows in the newspapers; public sentiment strongly in favour of Miss Smith.

  1858 Ruskin meets Rose La Touche, with whom he will fall in love; he is thirty-nine and she is nine.

  Dickens separates from his wife and explains himself to the public by statements in many newspapers.

  Harriet Taylor Mill dies in France, where she and husband had gone in search of health.

  The birth of ‘George Eliot’, the novelist, with the publication of Scenes of Clerical Life; Mrs Carlyle, sent a copy by the author, decides he is ‘a man of middle age, with a wife from whom he has got those beautiful feminine touches in his book, a good many children and a dog’.

  Mary Ellen Peacock Meredith elopes to Capri with Henry Wallis, a painter who has used George Meredith as the model for Chatterton in his painting, The Death of Chatterton.

  Queen Victoria’s daughter, the Princess Royal (known as Vicky), is married to Prince Frederick William of Prussia and almost immediately becomes pregnant, which her mother considers ‘horrid news’.

  1859 Publication of The Origin of Species; Mill’s On Liberty; Adam Bede; and A Tale of Two Cities.

  William Morris marries Jane Burden.

  In America, a member of Congress shoots a Washington lawyer for ‘a systematic career of guilty intercourse with his wife’ and is acquitted, to general delight.

  1860 Kate Dickens (Dickens’s daughter) and Charles Collins (Wilkie Collins’s brother), modelling for Millais’s The Black Brunswicker, get increasingly attached to each other and eventually marry; Kate’s A Chronology mother is not invited to the wedding; it is thought that Miss Dickens has agreed to marry the sickly Collins in order to escape the unpleasantness of her father’s household.

  1861 Queen Victoria is widowed.

  Marian Evans and George Henry Lewes, on their way to Florence, stop at the Avignon cemetery to visit Harriet Mill’s tomb and find the inscription sweetly excessive.

  Mill is writing The Subjection of Women.

  Madeleine Smith marries George Wardle, an associate of William Morris; they will have two children and become members of the Socialist League; after his death she will move to America, re-marry and die in Brooklyn at the age of ninety-two.

  1863 Fairy-tale wedding of Albert, Prince of Wales, to Alexandra, who caught the popular imagination because she had grown up poor, but Jane Carlyle is sniffy: ‘Such a noise about that “Royal marriage!” I wish it were over.’

  1865 The publication of the popular volume Sesame and Lilies, including the essay ‘Of Queen’s Gardens’, establishes Ruskin as a major authority on the nature of women.

  Governor Eyre puts down with brutal efficiency an uprising among black subjects in Jamaica, causing controversy in England over the proper exercise of authority.

  1866 Thomas Carlyle installed as rector at Edinburgh University; Jane Welsh Carlyle dies.

  1867 John Stuart Mill, as a member of Parliament, initiates the first parliamentary debate on women’s suffrage by proposing that the word man be replaced by the word person in the Reform Bill under discussion.

  1868 Mr and Mrs Charles Eliot Norton of Cambridge, Massachusetts, stay with Dickens and his family at Gad’s Hill, then take up residence near the Darwins, with whom they become good friends.

  Visiting Oxford, Norton meets George Henry Lewes, who tells him, with tears in his eyes, how his wife came to write fiction.

  1869 Carlyle reads through all Jane’s letters, preparing them for publication, ‘task of about eleven months, and sad and strange as a pilgrimage through Hades’.

  Mill publishes The Subjection of Women.

  Charles Eliot Norton dines with Mill at Blackheath and with Ruskin at Denmark Hill; for the first time he meets Carlyle, who tells him America would be the mightiest nation in the world if it had a king and if it put its ‘nagurs’ back into slavery or killed them off by massacre or starvation.
<
br />   1870 Dickens dies, leaving The Mystery of Edwin Drood unfinished; his will gives £8,000 to Georgina Hogarth and to each of his sons, Charles and Henry; £1,000 plus an annuity until she marries is left to his daughter, Mamie; and £1,000 goes to Ellen Ternan.

  Married Women’s Property Act guarantees a wife’s right to her own earnings, savings and so on.

  1872 Charles Eliot Norton, recently widowed, has Ruskin and Carlyle to lunch, arranging a Punch-and-Judy show for Ruskin’s amusement.

  1873 John Stuart Mill dies. Norton breaks the news to Carlyle, who says, ‘What! John Mill dead! Dear me, Dear me! John Mill! how did he die and where? And it’s so long since I’ve seen him, and he was the friendliest of men to me when I was in need of friends. Dear me! it’s all over now,’ and tells Norton the story of Mill’s debilitating intimacy with Harriet Taylor.