MARY RUSSELL MITFORD The Tragedy of a Blue Stocking

By

W. J. ROBERTS

(Author of “The Love Story of Empress Josephine,” “Literary Landmarks of Torquay,” etc.).

Illustrated from Photographs by the Author and from Contemporary Pictures.

LONDON: ANDREW MELROSE 3 YORK STREET, COVENT GARDEN, W.C. 1913

Dedication. To CONSTANCE, LADY RUSSELL, of Swallowfield Park, I Dedicate this Book as a slight token of Gratitude For the Help and Encouragement she has so graciously afforded me in its Compilation.

W. J. ROBERTS

London, March, 1913.

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PREFACE

No figure in the gallery of Early Victorian writers presents a character so charming or so tenderly pathetic as that of Mary Russell Mitford. Added to these characteristics is the fact that her life was, in reality, a tragedy brought about by her blind devotion and self-sacrifice to an object which we are forced to regard as altogether unworthy.

Miss Mitford’s name is not a familiar one to this generation and it is with the desire to alter this that the following pages have been written. It would be impossible, within the compass of a book of this size, to show forth Miss Mitford’s life in its entirety: what we have done has been to select from the records of her life and work such incidents and such friendships as seemed to us to portray her most faithfully. Whether we have succeeded must be left to the reader to judge.

In the compilation of the book many sources of information have been drawn upon and the author desires to acknowledge his indebtedness to all who have so kindly helped him in his labours. Chief among these has been Lady[6] Russell of Swallowfield, who, in addition to supplying much material, has made the author still further indebted by her acceptance of the dedication of the book. Miss Rose G. Kingsley has also to be thanked for copies of letters written by Miss Mitford to her father, Charles Kingsley, who lies buried at Eversley, in the neighbourhood with which the book deals largely.

To Miss Josephine M. H. Fairless, Messrs. G. A. Poynder, W. Smith, T. Rowland Kent, H. T. Pugh, J. J. Cooper, J.P., and Alderman J. W. Martin (all of Reading) the author’s best thanks are tendered, as also to the Rev. J. Henry Taylor, of Canterbury (Miss Mitford’s “Little Henry”), the Rev. Alexander A. Headley, Rector of New Alresford, Mr. Bertram Dobell, the well-known bibliophile of London, Mr. W. H. Greenhough, Chief Librarian to the Borough of Reading, and W. H. Hudson, Esq.—the last named for his very kind loan of the pencil sketch of Miss Mitford which figures in this book.

W. J. ROBERTS.

London, 1913.

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

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CHAPTER I EARLY DAYS IN ALRESFORD

Within the stained but, happily, well-preserved registers of the Church of St. John the Baptist, New Alresford, Hampshire, is an entry which runs thus:—

No. 211.

George Midford of this parish, Batchelor, and Mary Russell of the same, Spinster. Married in this Church by Licence this Seventeenth day of October in the Year One Thousand Seven Hundred and Eighty-five by me, Will Buller,[1] Rector.

It is a prosaic enough entry and yet, as we shall endeavour to prove, it marked the beginning of a tragedy composed of the profligacy and wicked extravagance of one of its signatories,[12] of the foolish, docile acquiescence of the other, and of the equally foolish and docile, but incomprehensible, infatuation for the profligate one which Mary Russell Mitford, the child of this union, made the guiding principle of her life.

George Midford—or Mitford, as he subsequently spelt his name—was the son of Francis Midford, Esq., of Hexham (descended from the ancient house of Midford,[2] of Midford Castle, near Morpeth), and of his wife Jane, formerly Miss Jane Graham, of Old Wall in Westmoreland, related to the Grahams of Netherby.

He was born at Hexham, November 15, 1760, received his early education at Newcastle School, studied for the profession of medicine at the University of Edinburgh, and was for three years a house pupil of the celebrated John Hunter, in London.

At the conclusion of his studies young Midford, or Mitford as we shall henceforth speak of him, went on a visit to a relative—Dr. Ogle, then Dean of Winchester—through whom he obtained an introduction to Miss Mary Russell, then living alone in the adjacent town of Alresford.

Mary Russell was an heiress—ten years the senior of George Mitford, being then in her thirty-sixth year—and just recovering from a recent bereavement in the death of her mother.

[13]

She was the daughter of Dr. Richard Russell, a lineal descendant of the ducal family of Bedford, Vicar of Overton and Rector of Ash—parishes adjoining each other and near to Whitchurch in Hampshire—who, as a widower, married Miss Dickers, the daughter of a Hampshire gentleman of considerable property, in the year 1745.

Childless by his first wife, the offspring of this second marriage was a son and two daughters.

Of these the son and elder daughter died in childhood, leaving Mary, who was born June 7, 1750, the sole heiress to the property of her parents.

Dr. Russell eventually resigned the Vicarage of Overton, but continued both his ministrations and residence at Ash, where he died in 1783, aged eighty-eight years.

At his death his widow and daughter—the latter then thirty-three years of age—removed to a pleasant and commodious house in the Broad Street of that old-world and peaceful township of Alresford, a town the houses of which, save the inns, bear no distinguishing name and number, the staid and sober life of whose inhabitants was only relieved by the mild excitements of market-day or by the noisy passage of the mail-coach as, with clatter of hoof-beats and blast of horn, it rattled gaily through, on its passage from London to Winchester or vice versa.

Mrs. Russell only survived her husband for[14] a little more than two years and died on March 8, 1785, leaving her daughter with a fortune of £28,000 in cash, in addition to house and land property. In the admirable introduction to The Life and Letters of Mary Russell Mitford (published 1870, and contributed by the Editor, the Rev. A. G. L’Estrange) we have a pen-portrait of Mary Russell at this period of her life which, in the absence of any other form of portraiture, we cannot do better than quote.

“In addition to these attractions [her inheritance] she had been carefully educated by her father; and to the ordinary accomplishments of gentlewomen in those days had united no slight acquaintance with the authors of Greece and Rome. She was kind-hearted, of mild and lady-like manners, of imperturbable temper, home-loving, and abounding in conversation, which flowed easily, in a soft and pleasant voice, from the sources of a full mind. Her figure was good, slight, active, and about the middle height; but the plainness of the face—the prominent eyes and teeth—the very bad complexion—was scarcely redeemed by the kind and cheerful expression which animated her countenance.”

To this excessively plain but undoubtedly charming and accomplished woman was the young surgeon introduced, “being easily persuaded by friends more worldly wise than he to address himself to a lady who, although ten[15] years his senior, had every recommendation that heart could desire—except beauty.”

She certainly had every recommendation that the heart of George Mitford could desire, for “though a very brief career of dissipation had reduced his pecuniary resources to the lowest ebb, he was not only recklessly extravagant, but addicted to high play.”

A few months later they were married.

“She, full of confiding love, refused every settlement beyond two hundred a year pin-money, out of his own property, on which he insisted”—words written by Mary Russell Mitford, many years after, and which would contradict our statement of her father’s pecuniary embarrassment, were they not discounted by the words of the Rev. William Harness, who, writing on the matter to a friend, says: “I hear that when Mitford was engaged to his wife she had a set of shirts made for him, lest it should be said that ‘she had married a man without a shirt to his back!’ Of course the story is not true; but it expressed what folk thought of his deplorable poverty and the impossibility of his making that settlement on her, for which my father was trustee, out of funds of his own, as Miss Mitford suggests.”

And so they were married, the bride being given away by her trustee, Dr. John Harness, then living at Wickham, some few miles south of Alresford.

[16]

Had the confiding wife misgivings, we wonder? Or was it the excitement natural to such a momentous event in her life that caused the little hand to be so tremulous as it signed the nervous characters, Mary Russell, beneath the bold hand of her lord and master, on that eventful October 17, 1785?

Henceforth, had she but known, she would have need of all the comfort she might wring from those fatalistic words, “Che Sarà, Sarà,” the motto of the Bedfords, whose ancestry she took such pride in claiming.

It had already been decided that Alresford should witness the commencement at least of the surgeon’s professional career, and seeing that the house in Broad Street was commodious and, what was more to the point, well-furnished, there was no need to make a fresh home, and it was there they set up housekeeping together.

That the young man had good intentions is fairly evident, for he continued his studies and, in the course of a year or so, took his degree in medicine which permitted him to practise as a physician.

Thirteen months later a son was born to them, but did not survive. In the Baptismal Register of New Alresford Church is the entry:—

“Francis Russell, son of George and Mary Midford, was privately baptized on the[17] 12th, but died on the 23rd of November, 1786.”

It is important that this entry should be placed on record, for while, in after years, Miss Mitford speaks of herself as the only survivor of three children, two sons having died in infancy, it has been stated in print that “Mary Russell Mitford was their only child.” On the other hand, although careful search has been made, no record of the baptism or burial of a third child has been discovered in the Alresford registers, and we can only assume, therefore, that this child must have died at birth and on a date subsequent to that of his sister.

Sufficient for us, however, is the entry in these same registers:—

“Mary Russell, daughter of George and Mary Midford, baptized February 29, 1788”—

the child having been born on December 16, 1787.

Of these early days we have, fortunately, a picture left by the child herself. “A pleasant home, in truth, it was,” she writes. “A large house in a little town of the north of Hampshire—a town, so small, that but for an ancient market, very slenderly attended, nobody would have dreamt of calling it anything but a village.[3][18] The breakfast room, where I first possessed myself of my beloved ballads, was a lofty and spacious apartment, literally lined with books, which, with its Turkey carpet, its glowing fire, its sofas, and its easy chairs, seemed, what indeed it was, a very nest of English comfort. The windows opened on a large old-fashioned garden, full of old-fashioned flowers, stocks, roses, honeysuckles and pinks; and that again led into a grassy orchard, abounding with fruit-trees. What a playground was that orchard! and what playfellows were mine! Nancy [her maid], with her trim prettiness, my own dear father, handsomest and cheerfullest of men, and the great Newfoundland dog, Coe, who used to lie down at my feet, as if to invite me to mount him, and then to

prance off with his burthen, as if he enjoyed the fun as much as we did. Most undoubtedly I was a spoilt child. When I recollect certain passages of my thrice-happy early life, I cannot have the slightest doubt about the matter, although it contradicts all foregone conclusions, all nursery and schoolroom morality, to say so. But facts are stubborn things. Spoilt I was. Everybody spoilt me—most of all the person whose power in that way was greatest: the dear papa himself. Not content with spoiling me indoors, he spoilt me out. How well I remember his carrying me round the orchard on his shoulder, holding fast my little three-year-old feet, whilst the little hands hung on to his pig-tail, which I[19] called my bridle (those were days of pig-tails), hung so fast, and tugged so heartily, that sometimes the ribbon would come off between my fingers, and send his hair floating and the powder flying down his back. That climax of mischief was the crowning joy of all. I can hear our shouts of laughter now.”

A pretty picture this, and one to which, as she wrote of it, the tired old woman looked back as on one of the few oases in a life which, despite certain successes, was nothing short of a desert of weariness and of struggle with poverty.

But apart from this boisterous love of play, the little girl early developed a passion for reading, fostered and encouraged, no doubt, by that “grave home-loving mother,” who “never in her life read any book but devotion,” in whose room, indeed, it was matter for astonished comment to find the works of Spenser.

At the age of three, little Mary showed a remarkable precocity of intellect, and even before she had reached that early age her father was accustomed to perch her on the breakfast-table to exhibit her one accomplishment to admiring guests, “who admired all the more, because, a small puny child, looking far younger than I really was, nicely dressed, as only children generally are, and gifted with an affluence of curls, I might have passed for the twin sister of my own great doll.”

On such occasions she would be given one or[20] other of the Whig newspapers of the day—the Courier or Morning Chronicle—and, to the delight of her father and the wonder of the guests, would prattle forth the high-seasoned political pronouncements with which those journals were filled.

Following this display there was, of course, reward; not with sweetmeats, however, “too plentiful in my case to be very greatly cared for,” but by the reading of the “Children in the Wood” by mother from Percy’s Reliques, “and I looked for my favourite ballad after every performance, just as the piping bullfinch that hung in the window looked for his lump of sugar after going through ‘God save the King.’ The two cases were exactly parallel.”

But one day “the dear mamma” was absent and could not administer the customary reward, with the result that papa had to read the “Children in the Wood,” though not before he had searched the shelves to find the, to him, unfamiliar volumes. Following which search and labour he was easily constrained by the petted child to hand over the book to Nancy, that she might read extracts whenever called upon. And when Nancy, as was inevitable, waxed weary of the “Children in the Wood,” she gradually took to reading other of the ballads; “and as from three years old I grew to be four or five, I learned to read them myself, and the book became the delight of my childhood, as it is now the solace of my age.”

With a child so apt it is not surprising that we[21] find no record of a governess or tutor during these early years—that is, so far as general education was concerned; but there was one item of special education which the fond papa did insist upon, an insistence which was the cause of much grief to and some disobedience from the spoilt girl.

“How my father, who certainly never knew the tune of ‘God save the King’ from that of the other national air, ‘Rule, Britannia,’ came to take into his head so strong a fancy to make me an accomplished musician I could never rightly understand, but that such a fancy did possess him I found to my sorrow! From the day I was five years old, he stuck me up to the piano, and, although teacher after teacher had discovered that I had neither ear, nor taste, nor application, he continued, fully bent upon my learning it.”

Nevertheless, she did not learn it and, as we shall see later, this fixed idea of her father’s gave place to another equally futile.

Chief of her playmates at this time was William Harness, the son of her mother’s trustee. He would be brought over from Wickham in the morning, and after a day of romps, be taken back in his father’s carriage late in the afternoon. Although two years the junior of Mary, William was her constant and boon companion, and remained to be her friend and counsellor through[22] life, although his counsels were, at times, very wilfully disregarded.

Mutually genial of temperament, they sympathized with each other’s tastes and pursuits, particularly as these related to Literature and the Drama. On one point only did they disagree, and its subject was “dear papa.” By a sort of intuition the boy must have, even in those early days, come to regard the handsome, bluff, genial, loud-voiced surgeon with something akin to suspicion, a suspicion which was maintained and fully justified in the years to come.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Then also Dean of Exeter and, subsequently, Bishop of that Diocese.

[2] Derived from the situation of the Castle keep, which lies between the fords of the river Wansbeck, Northumberland.

[3] Many years afterwards, when appointed to the See of Winchester, the late Bishop Thorold alluded to it as one of a number of Town-Villages which he said he found so peculiarly distinctive a feature of Hampshire.

[23]

CHAPTER II LYME REGIS AND TRAGEDY’S SHADOW

The picture, given us by Miss Mitford herself, of those early days in the Hampshire home, is one from the contemplation of which we are loth to drag ourselves.

Again and again in her Recollections we note how the memory was drawn upon to conjure up some pleasant scene from the past. Of the town itself her vision is of “a picturesque country church with yews and lindens on one side, and beyond, a down as smooth as velvet, dotted with rich islands of coppice, hazel, woodbine, hawthorn and holly reaching up into the young oaks, and overhanging flowery patches of primroses, wood-sorrel, wild hyacinths, and wild strawberries. On the side opposite the church in a hollow fringed with alders and bulrushes, gleamed the bright clear lakelet, radiant with swans and water-lilies, which the simple townsfolk were content to call the Great Pond.”

Fortunately for us the hand of Time has touched this old town gently. It is true the picturesque country church has, by sheer force[24] of decay begotten of a hoary antiquity, given place to one not less picturesque on the old site; but the peaceful aspect of the streets and inns remains, together with that commodious house in the Broad Street which, excepting one slight internal alteration, differs in nothing from the house which Miss Mitford knew in her childhood, the place of her birth.

With steep-pitched roof and painted front, its old dormer-windows look out with a certain grave dignity befitting the windows of a house which enshrines such a tender memory, on the town “through whose streets streamed Cavaliers and Roundheads after the battle of Cheriton,” on the downs where, a full hundred and twenty years ago, the little mistress was wont fearlessly to ride on her father’s favourite blood-mare, seated on a specially-contrived pad and enclosed so fondly by that same father’s strong and loving arm.