“The Scribbling Fever”
Elizabeth Strickland was determined not to let the family’s social status slip after her husband’s death in 1818. Until she herself died forty-six years later, at the robust age of ninety-two, she continued to live at Reydon Hall and cling to the position Thomas had established for them. In the early years of her widowhood, she even maintained the house in Norwich so the boys could carry on attending school there, and she sent her daughters Eliza, Agnes and Catharine to run that household. But with the loss of the family breadwinner, the Stricklands were plunged into a penny-pinching existence behind the brave front. Cooks, maids and gardeners all disappeared, and so did General Wolfe’s desk and the elegant carriage. The family tended the vegetable garden, and went out less and less.
Keeping up appearances was a strain on Mrs. Strickland; her temperament soured and she took to her bed. Many of the rooms of Reydon Hall were closed up, and one guest would remember that it smelled of “rats and dampness and mould.” When the girls travelled anywhere, they either had to borrow a neighbour’s donkey to pull their donkey cart or take the public coach. Invitations from neighbouring gentry dried up, since the Stricklands were unable to return the hospitality. Nor was there any hope of staying abreast of the rapidly changing fashions of the 1820s. This was an era when female clothing was increasingly influenced by Romantic attitudes. Puffy sleeves, tightly corseted waists and wide girlish skirts, in flower-bed colours of lilac and rose, transformed women into fragile Fragonard heroines, dependent on male protection. But Susanna and Catharine could barely afford to renew their wardrobes, let alone play out a fantasy that had little to do with the threadbare reality of their lives.
The lives of the Strickland sisters were now constricted by genteel poverty and rural isolation. They were excluded from the masculine world of army, navy, commerce or politics. Their brothers both embraced one of the few options open to gentlemen without means as soon as they were old enough to flee the stifling matriarchy of Reydon Hall. Both set off to settle in the years old when, in 1825, a family friend encouraged him to cross the Atlantic and try his hand at farming in the colony of Upper Canada. Within a few months, young Thomas too was gone, on his way to India and a life in Britain’s merchant fleet. After their brothers’ departure, the Strickland girls had few opportunities to meet men of the standing required for marriage. Socially, they fell between two stools—they were not wealthy enough to claim membership in the landed gentry class, but their residence in the country meant they were excluded from the new urban merchant class.
Catharine Parr Strickland, sweet-tempered and placid, was her father’s favourite child.
Catharine and Susanna were sixteen and fifteen when their father died. In the crisis of quiet desperation that followed, they forged a close alliance, based on their position as the two youngest daughters and on their shared love of reading. Both clung to the catalogue of family maxims—a belief that the darkest hour comes before the dawn, and a certainty that God helps those who help themselves. The difference in their personalities reinforced their reliance on each other. Catharine wrote of herself, “I think that I have a happy faculty of forgetting past sorrows and only remembering the pleasures,” and she often found herself reassuring her sensitive younger sister when Susanna plunged into the depths of despair. Only Catharine could cope with Susanna’s emotional intensity. While Susanna resented Catharine’s imperturbable patience, she also adored her. “I know I would rather give up the pen,” Susanna wrote to a friend in 1829, “than lose the affection of my beloved sister Catharine, who is dearer to me than all the world—my monitress, my dear and faithful friend.”
Susanna Strickland was impulsive and defiant, with a wicked sense of humour.
At the same time, Catharine enjoyed the fact that Susanna was, in her younger sister’s own words,a “wild Suffolk girl so full of romance.” Susanna could infuse placid Catharine with her own giddy joie de vivre. “Possibly it was the contrast between us that had the effect of binding us nearer to one another,” Catharine mused later in life. The primal bonds between the two women—far stronger than either felt for their four sisters and two brothers—were deep-rooted and comforting to both.
In Norwich, Catharine was a frequent visitor at the city library, and she was soon venturing “once more to indulge the scribbling fever.” At first, she didn’t see her little stories as a way to make money. Nor did her sisters, although by now both Agnes and Eliza (her contempt for “trash” notwithstanding) were experimenting with poetry and simple literary sketches. Their mother, clinging to respectability, would have decreed that it was unthinkable for a gentlewoman to consider earning her living. This was, after all, the era in which Jane Austen, the parson’s daughter from Hampshire, covered her notebooks with a piece of muslin when she heard somebody approach her room, and when the Norwich writer Harriet Martineau wrote her articles for a church magazine in her freezing bedroom between five and seven o’clock in the morning so her mother wouldn’t discover what she was up to. It was dangerous for a woman even to suggest that she had a brain: the eighteenth-century writer Lady Mary Wortley Montagu had once advised her daughter to hide her intellect “with as much solicitude as she would hide crookedness or lameness.”
Yet Catharine, Susanna and their sisters were aware of the intellectual ferment of the age in which they lived. Their father’s own library, inherited from Sir Isaac Newton, was out-of-date by the time they were old enough to take down the leatherbound volumes. Nevertheless, it contained enough early examples of Enlightenment thinking—the works of John Locke, several accounts of exotic travel and Sir Isaac Newton’s own scientific publications—to give them a sense of what was happening in the wider world. All the old institutions were under scrutiny—religion, monarchy, slavery and patriarchy. With their father’s death and their plunge into genteel penury, the sisters had a particular interest in some of the new thinking about women’s lives, such as Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women, first published in 1792. Wollstonecraft (who died in childbirth in 1797, before Catharine and Susanna were born) passionately championed women’s claim to equal treatment in the spheres of education, the professions, the law and politics.
The boldness of Wollstonecraft’s thinking was anathema to establishment figures such as Horace Walpole, who dismissed the author and her followers as “hyenas in petticoats.” Nevertheless, Wollstonecraft’s legacy directly touched the Strickland sisters’ lives. The spread of literacy among women during the previous hundred years meant that Wollstonecraft’s manifesto was widely read. And, thanks in part to her success, publishers realized that there was a growing market for works by lady authors. The tradition of women writers in England began to gather momentum: gentlewomen were producing belles-lettres, travel memoirs and domestic tales. Fanny Burney had already published four successful novels, the best-known of which was Camilla, depicting the lives of virtuous but inexperienced girls entering society. By 1815 Jane Austen had two bestsellers to her name (Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice) and had been invited to dedicate her new novel, Emma, to the Prince Regent. Writing was beginning to be both respectable and lucrative for women.
England had not yet been engulfed in the claustrophobic glorification of the family, and the idea of woman as the “angel in the house,” that would later characterize middle-class attitudes in Victorian Britain. Regency London was permeated with the elegance, extravagance and sartorial splendour that defined the age. It was a jolly, if exhausting, time to be alive, for both men and women. The preferred literary style was urbane and fastidious, and women excelled at it.
For the Stricklands, stuck in East Anglia, opportunities for women with literary ambitions still seemed hopelessly out of reach. But one day an old friend of Thomas Strickland’s came to visit, and chanced upon a children’s story about a highland piper that Catharine had written. When he left, he took it with him and showed it to a publisher in London. To Catharine’s delight, the friend arrived a month later and pressed five golden guineas into her hands. The publisher wished to produce a little book under the title The Blind Highland Piper and Other Tales. Five guineas was a considerable sum in those days, enough to finance a trip to London. It was particularly exciting for a young woman who had no expectations of legacies or marriage settlements. Catharine’s success encouraged the literary efforts of four of her sisters: Eliza, Agnes, Jane and Susanna. All five began to see that writing might offer an escape from their pinched circumstances, and an opportunity to shape better lives for themselves. Only pretty Sarah, known within the family as “the baker” because she made such delightfully light loaves, never showed any interest in publication.
Agnes, the brilliant and bossy elder sister, was the first of the Stricklands to see her work in print.
By the early 1820s, the Strickland girls had secured a limited entrée into the kind of London literary circles where Mary Wollstonecraft’s ideas were debated and Fanny Burney’s latest novel discussed. Their second cousin, Rebecca Leverton, was a wealthy widow who held court in the elegant terraced house in Bedford Square bequeathed to her by her husband, Thomas Leverton, the square’s architect. Bedford Square was one of the “best addresses” in the newly built district of Bloomsbury. Rebecca often invited her cousins to stay with her. She certainly appreciated their willingness to run errands and bring glasses of warm milk to her before she rose each morning, but she also tried to expand their horizons. Catharine particularly enjoyed the visits. “I am indeed very happy and enjoy the society of my London friends,” she wrote to her friend James Bird, a well-known poet who ran a stationery shop in the Suffolk village of Yoxford, and his wife Emma. “Mrs. Leverton takes me abroad in the carriage everyday to shew me some building or public place of note….I am so enchanted with [Westminster] Abbey that I could stand for hours looking on it.”
A less grand, but more exciting, connection was the artist Thomas Cheesman. Cheesman, whom the girls referred to affectionately as “Coz,” was a colourful character in a grubby artist’s smock who moved in somewhat raffish circles. His house in Newman Street was cluttered with musical instruments, books and half-finished paintings. Cheesman was a man ahead of his time, who encouraged Agnes and Susanna (the two most determined writers) to press ahead with their literary ambitions.
Agnes, who had been twenty-two when her father died, moved to London in the early 1820s to capitalize on her literary connections and potential. She was the first Strickland in print: in 1817, the year before Catharine earned her first five guineas, Agnes had published a poem about Queen Charlotte’s death in a Norfolk newspaper. The success of this florid eulogy to royalty catapulted Agnes into rather grand circles, and she never looked back. Soon she was mixing with minor aristocrats, dropping names and insisting that, in addition to the family connection with Catherine Parr, she had the Stuart blood of Scottish kings. With the sense of theatre acquired during their childhood dramatic evenings, and with an imperious toss of her well-dressed silky black hair, Agnes always enjoyed making an entrance at social events. She expended as much creative energy on her appearance as on her literary output. “Last week I was obliged to assist the mantua maker in making and altering my robes,” she wrote to a Suffolk friend. “Fitting and refitting, frilling and grilling …chased from the secret chambers of my brain a multitude of excellent ideas which had I been at leisure to have instituted would have furnished employment for a month.”
A third ally in the young women’s pursuit of publication was an old friend of their father’s, Thomas Harral, who had moved from Suffolk to London to edit a fashionable magazine entitled La Belle Assemblée. Harral’s daughter, Anna Laura, was one of Susanna’s best friends; his son Francis was Catharine’s first serious beau. Harral introduced the Stricklands to various writers and poets in the capital, and he gave them advice on how to get published. Through Harral, Susanna met a man who quickly became a father figure. Thomas Pringle was a Scottish poet and outspoken leader of the Anti-Slavery League. He found the admiration of a clever, lively young woman immensely flattering, and he frequently invited her to stay with him and his family in their townhouse in the Finsbury district of London, or in their country home in Hampstead. Pringle indulged Susanna, praised her poems and encouraged her to question convention. In turn, Susanna adored him, and she wrote to him daily when they were apart. It was an intoxicating relationship: a mix of paternal and erotic affection. Susanna took to calling Pringle “Papa.”
With the help of people like Harral and Pringle, the Stricklands were able to take full advantage of the latest literary fashion—literary “annuals.” These lavishly bound, expensive anthologies offered short narratives of love and chivalry. Specially commissioned steel engravings depicted pensive maidens gazing at the heavens, or sitting in solitude by a roaring sea. To a modern reader, the annuals offer only sentimentality and bad writing; to the Stricklands, they offered liberation. They gave women the opportunity to support themselves. For example, Mary Shelley (Wollstonecraft’s daughter, the author of Frankenstein and the wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley) earned enough money from the gushing romances she contributed to The Keepsake, edited by Lady Blessington, to keep her son in school at Harrow.
By 1829, five of the six Strickland sisters—Eliza, Agnes, Jane, Catharine and Susanna—had established toeholds in London’s literary cliffs. Eliza, who always hated Reydon Hall, was living in a furnished room in London and editing The Court Journal, a jaunty and rather snobbish periodical stuffed with fashion tips, gossip about the royal court and theatre notices. Agnes was publishing rapture-filled epic poetry and being mentioned as a writer of considerable promise (although a waspish reviewer suggested that “‘poems long and legendary’ are above the calibre of your muse”). Catharine quietly and methodically published a children’s book almost every year from 1825 onwards. Her income steadily rose, so that by 1830 she was being paid more than twelve pounds for The Sketchbook of a Young Naturalist. It is hard to estimate what this is worth in modern terms: the working rule for British historians is to multiply early-nineteenth-century values by fifty to render them in late-twentieth-century terms. Any equivalence is crude, since there were fluctuations within decades and the cost of services rose much more rapidly than the cost of manufactured goods. But Catharine was probably earning roughly six hundred pounds for each book in today’s money. Her annual income of twelve pounds would have made a significant difference to life at Reydon Hall, but it would not have been enough to live on in an era when an English farm labourer earned about thirty pounds a year.
In addition, there was a Strickland assembly line for the production of poetry, reviews and stories which regularly appeared in several of the seventeen annuals being published. The sisters often co-wrote stories, and several times an editor would attribute a certain piece to the wrong sister. Payment was meagre for most of these pieces, and the letters that the women wrote to their editors suggest more craven gratitude than aggressive pursuit of a fair fee. But anything was better than nothing. “I should be enabled to leave a sum for home expenses in Mamma’s hands,” a hopeful Catharine wrote to Susanna, in one note about a few shillings that were due for a particular article.
The Stricklands’ contributions to glossy anthologies were terribly conventional. Maidens swooned, lions roared, Byronic heroes martyred themselves. For Eliza, Catharine and Jane, this was enough. But Agnes and Susanna pushed at the limits of convention. Competition crackled between these two young women. Each recognized in the other a talent for expression that their sisters could never claim. All their lives, Susanna and Agnes envied each other’s successes even as they exchanged congratulations on achievements. The edge of competition was blunted only by the difference in their writing styles. At this stage, Susanna was pouring more and more of her creative energy into verse. She was also using, in some of her stories for La Belle Assemblée, a first-person narrative voice, which allowed her to include her own wit, and interest in magic and spiritualism, in her sketches of Suffolk characters. Agnes was going in a different direction. Acknowledging that she couldn’t make it as a poet, she had begun to interest herself in the past and to haunt the newly completed British Museum. Amongst its untidy piles of stilluncatalogued collections of state and private records, she took her first step towards her lifetime avocation: history.
As Susanna approached her late twenties, she became increasingly irritated by the dainty constraints of the glossy anthologies. At the same time, she was enmeshed in religious doubts. She was a young woman in search of herself, torn between her literary aspirations and a fierce religious faith. A close friend told Susanna that she sounded like “a mad woman and a fanatic” when she gave vent to the intensity of her emotions. Perhaps the young writer was simply disgusted by the vicar of Reydon’s preference for “huntin’ and fishin’” over giving sermons; perhaps she was swept away by the fervently anti-establishment views of her hero, Thomas Pringle, a Methodist. Pringle denounced Tory smugness with histrionic passion. For whatever reason, in 1830, Susanna turned her back on the pomp and rituals of the Church of England, whose comfortable pews were occupied each Sunday by the carriage set, and was admitted into a Nonconformist congregation in a village church three miles from Reydon. Most of her co-worshippers were farmers and their labourers, who arrived on foot or in creaking hay-wagons.
Mrs. Strickland and her three elder daughters, who were all busy clinging to the upper rungs of society, were horrified. This was a most unconventional step for a young woman of Susanna’s breeding. They had already had to deal with the fact that the fourth Strickland sister, Sarah, had also become a Dissenter. But Sarah’s conversion was less threatening than Susanna’s, since it had remained a private matter. The family knew that Susanna, unlike demure Sarah, would immediately rush into print, to embarrass her relatives with fervent proclamations of her new allegiance and criticisms of the spiritually slack. Sure enough, Susanna soon published an ambitious and heartfelt poem entitled “Enthusiasm.” She belittled “men of pleasure” in this epic work and glorified “the unlearned and those of low estate” who, with their simple faith, are the only Christians who will attain salvation. Agnes was mortified, wondering what her smart friends would think. It wasn’t the last time that Susanna would embarrass her.
Susanna was not only taking an unconventional spiritual path, she was also being politicized. Thanks to Thomas Pringle, she was increasingly involved in the abolitionist movement—as radical a political movement in the early nineteenth century as feminism would be in the mid-twentieth century. Pringle invited Susanna to transcribe the stories of two former slaves from British colonies, a twenty-four-year-old man called Ashton Warner from St. Vincent, and a forty-year-old woman, Mary Prince, from Bermuda. Mary, now working in the Pringle household, dictated “a recital of revolting cruelty” to the impressionable young Susanna, who carefully wrote down and shaped the narrative of exploitation. Susanna downplayed the project’s importance in a letter to a friend: “It is a pathetic little history and is now printing in the form of a pamphlet to be laid before the Houses of Parliament. Of course my name does not appear.” But the impressionable twenty-seven-year-old was gripped by Mary’s account of physical and sexual brutalities at the hands of her masters. She had seen with her own eyes the appalling crisscross of scars, evidence of repeated lashings, on the older woman’s back. Mary Prince was a tough, outspoken survivor, but her experiences as a malnourished, poor, powerless woman in a distant British colony fed Susanna’s fascination with the darker side of human existence. When Susanna subsequently published Ashton Warner’s story, she reproached her fellow countrymen with the “gross injustice and awful criminality of a free nation suffering such an abomination as negro slavery to exist in her dominions.”
Susanna’s letters reveal how much she enjoyed mingling with publishers, essayists and writers when they congregated in the Pringles’ London drawing room. She was flattered when the intelligentsia made a fuss of her, assuring James Bird with blatantly false modesty, “I am almost sick of flattering encomiums on my genius. How these men in London do talk. I learn daily to laugh at their fine love speeches.” She was eager for friendship with other “bluestockings,” as women writers were often called. Most of all, the ambition to be a much-published, well-known author—a path on which her sister Agnes was already launched—began to burn in her with a frightening fierceness. Although the Strickland girls were raised to respect intellectual achievement, they were also brought up to be docile wives to whomever they might marry. Susanna was both intoxicated and embarrassed by her hunger for fame—a hunger, she worried, that was “not only a weak but a criminal passion.” Her angst cannot have been helped by the fact that she was now over twenty-five and, like all her sisters, seemed fated for spinsterhood.
Rivalry between Agnes and Susanna continued to seethe as Susanna began to catch up with her sister’s success. The two women managed a temporary truce in 1830 when they co-produced a small pamphlet entitled Patriotic Songs, including eight poems, four by each sister, that celebrated England and the monarchy. King William IV was so impressed that he called its authors “an ornament to our country.” And Catharine was relieved to see Agnes and Susanna on better terms. “Could I tell you the joy that fills my heart at the reunion of two sisters, you would rejoice,” wrote the family peacemaker to “kindest and most affectionate Susy.” “May no worldly consideration, no prejudice, no contradiction of opinion on indifferent subjects ever disturb your love.”
Then, in May 1830, Lieutenant John Dunbar Moodie, an exuberant and cheerful thirty-three-year-old Scot who had just returned from South Africa to look for a wife, turned up at the home of his old friend Thomas Pringle. Soon, he and Susanna were taking walks together on Hampstead Heath, sharing their love of music and reading aloud to each other. Within two months of John’s arrival, Susanna’s interest in theological debate had been overtaken by her enthusiasm for the dashing lieutenant. In the words of her sister Catharine, she had “become a convert to Lieutenant Dunbar Moodie.” And John Moodie was petitioning Mrs. Thomas Strickland for her youngest daughter’s hand in marriage.
