The Girlhood of Mary Cowden Clarke
Newcastle University
Highly respected as a scholar and popular as a writer in her own time, later mocked by an academy unsympathetic to amateur female scholarship, Mary Cowden Clarke is once more being taken seriously as a formative influence on Victorian perceptions of and responses to Shakespeare. The inclusion of her work in the volume of women’s critical responses to Shakespeare edited by Ann Thompson and Sasha Roberts, Women Reading Shakespeare 1660–1900, made a significant contribution to this revaluation, and it has more recently been consolidated by her inclusion in the pantheon of Great Shakespeareans in an essay by Ann Thompson and Gail Marshall.1 This essay takes as its point of departure Cowden Clarke’s recollections of her childhood in her memoir My Long Life. I argue that her early education, conducted within her family and by Mary Lamb, exemplifies the incorporation of Shakespeare into liberal pedagogic practice and the culture of childhood in the Romantic period, and prepared her for a remarkable Victorian career in which she engaged with Shakespeare as a scholar, actor, and creative writer.
My title alludes to The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines, probably the work for which Cowden Clarke is now best known.2 In 15 substantial narratives, it imagines the pre-history of Portia, Lady Macbeth, Helena, Desdemona, ‘Meg and Alice the merry maids of Windsor’ (contents page), Isabella, Katharina and Bianca, Ophelia, Rosalind and Celia, and Juliet, up to the point when they enter the scene of Shakespeare’s play. Introducing the volume, Cowden Clarke explains that her goal was ‘to imagine the possible circumstances and influences of scene, event, and associate, surrounding the infant life of his heroines, which might have conduced to originate and foster those germs of character recognized in their maturity, as by him developed’ (Preface, p. 1). The idea that early experiences shape the adult self has become naturalized in modern Western conceptualizations of subjectivity, but for Cowden Clarke and her readers this was still a relatively new insight, and one which would be crucial to the development of the Victorian novel as a study of character. Cowden Clarke explained that her interest was in ‘the development of character’ (Ibid.) which she considered to be formed by the setting in which the child is brought up (‘scene’), by childhood experiences (‘event’), and by the influence of the people around the child (‘associate’). How, then, did the setting, experiences, and influences of her own childhood prepare her to become the author of The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines?
Mary Victoria Novello (known in childhood as Victoria) was the eldest of eleven children in a happy and affectionate family. She recalled her early years warmly in My Long Life, mapping for her readers a social and spatial world characterized by pleasure and sustenance, bodily and mental. Describing her childhood home near Hyde Park, she recalls how outings there with her brothers and her sisters combined ‘enjoyment of those fine old elm trees, those stretches of grass’ with the purchase of little mugs of curds and whey, a ‘dainty refection [which] seemed properly rustic’ (p. 2). These healthily pastoral physical pleasures are matched with the pleasures of textual culture which were also available in the park from the sellers of cheap printed materials: ‘The railing adjacent to the gate was … strung with rows of printed old-fashioned ballads, such as “Cruel Barbara Allen”’ (pp. 2–3). In many ways, this is a verbal culture that could have been available to Shakespeare and his contemporaries, and stories from the oral tradition, too, shape her early encounters with her environment. The memory of escorting her brothers to their preparatory school is associated with a neighbourhood anecdote of a little boy who was lost, brought up under a false identity associated with a much more humble rank in life, and eventually found his way back to his home and mother (p. 8). Reminiscent of one of Shakespeare’s late romances, this tale of loss and restitution comes immediately before Mary’s account of the books her parents provided for their children: to be safely part of the family is to be nourished with reading material, as well as to be loved and sheltered.
Mary is at pains to explain that though her parents ‘were bountiful in providing us with books’ (p. 8), that bounty is moral and intellectual, rather than material. She contrasts the carefully-selected but ‘plain, unornate’ volumes of her childhood with the excessive abundance of gaudily-illustrated but unappreciated products of late-Victorian commercial publishing for children, highlighting the pleasurable intimacy that came from close, repeated study of a small, select library. Among the books ‘re-read and treasured by us young Novellos’ (p. 8) were ‘Miss Edgeworth’s “Frank”, “Rosamond” and “Parents’ Assistant”; Day’s “Sandford and Merton”… “The Book of Trades” and Aesop’s Fables’ (p. 9). Maria Edgeworth’s didactic fictions for children and Thomas Day’s The History of Sandford and Merton (1783) were hugely popular and combined instruction with delight for their enthusiastic early readers in a way that typified the impulses driving the growth of children’s literature at the turn of the century. In contrast ‘The Book of Trades’ (a volume which illustrated workers displaying their skills) and Aesop’s Fables are instances of genres that had enjoyed sustained popularity with youthful readers since at least the mid-sixteenth century. Thus both the distinctively innovative literary culture of Romantic-period English childhood, and a transnational popular textual culture with deep historical roots, played a formative role in Mary Cowden Clarke’s early reading.
Pride of place in the Novello children’s reading matter is accorded, however, to Shakespeare, who is introduced in a resonant passage in which father and children gather in the intimate space of the parental bedroom to enjoy a moment of easy community and shared study:
Often, after a hard day’s teaching, my father used to have his breakfast in bed next morning, when we children were allowed to scramble up to the counterpane and lie around him to see what new book he had bought for us, and listen to his description and explanation of it. Never can I forget the boundless joy and interest with which I heard him tell about the contents of two volumes he had just brought home, and showed me the printed pictures it had. It was an early edition of ‘Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare.’ And what a vast world of new ideas and new delights that opened to me – a world in which I have ever since much dwelt, and always with supreme pleasure and admiration.
(p. 9)
This account of the youthful Mary’s first encounter with Shakespeare recapitulates and develops the clustering of associations – pleasure in familial proximity, wholesome food, and the sharing of printed matter – repeatedly invoked in her recollections of her early years. In My Long Life, Mary Cowden Clarke attributes the integration in her life of professional success and a happy family existence to this early domestic introduction to Shakespeare.3 It was in his works, she says, that she found ‘the emotional warmth and loyalties of that family life best reflected’ (p. 59), and in the prefaces to her scholarly works on Shakespeare she repeatedly attributes her devotion to Shakespeare to the early influence of her parents. When in 1845 she published in book form the first-ever concordance to Shakespeare’s plays – widely acclaimed as a landmark achievement and reprinted in ten editions over the subsequent three decades – she remarked in the preface on her intellectual debt to her mother, ‘who first inspired me with a love of all that is good and beautiful, and who therefore may well be said to have originated my love of Shakespeare’. 4 In the preface to her 1860 edition of Shakespeare’s Works – the first edition produced by a sole female editor, Henrietta Bowdler having collaborated with her brother on the Family Shakespeare in 1807 – she echoes the cited passage from My Long Life in ascribing the origins of her interest in Shakespeare to her father’s gift of the Lambs’ Tales (Ibid.).
Communal reading aloud was a highly valued part of the culture of the educated middle-class family in this period: Henrietta Bowdler was inspired to produce her Family Shakespeare by her own memories of their father’s domestic performances of carefully edited versions of the plays, while Charlotte Yonge staged a scene of domestic Shakespeare reading in which a brother and sister pore over Henry V together in her immensely popular novel The Daisy Chain (1856).5 Later Yonge would concur with Cowden Clarke in citing both Bowdler’s edition and the Lambs’ Tales as ‘the best stepping-stones to Shakespeare himself’.6 Shakespeare is twice-mediated in Cowden Clarke’s recollections: through Victor Novello’s ‘description and explanation’ of the volume he presents to his children, and within that volume through Charles and Mary Lamb’s retelling of the plays as stories for young readers. Gendered mediations within the family context are envisaged in the Preface to the Lambs’ Tales as a vital part of the process whereby young girls may gain access to Shakespeare, and such practices have been construed by critics as underlining girls’ marginalization from the world of print culture and the masculine control of their engagement with literature.7 Yet Mary Lamb – like her contemporary Henrietta Bowdler – had to read Shakespeare’s plays herself in order to mediate them, and for Mary Cowden Clarke too this first mediated encounter was to facilitate a life of extraordinarily extensive direct engagement with Shakespeare.
The Lambs’ Tales constituted a site of first encounter with Shakespeare for many children in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.8 Mary Cowden Clarke celebrates their continuing presence in the reading lives of girls in particular in her 1887 article, ‘Shakespeare as the Girl’s Friend’:
Happy she who at eight or nine years old has a copy of ‘Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare’ given to her, opening a vista of even then understandable interest and enjoyment!
That they played an exceptionally significant role in her own early introduction to Shakespeare is not surprising, given that Charles and Mary Lamb were close friends of the Novellos and frequent visitors to the family home, alongside other figures from the London literary world such as Leigh Hunt, John Keats, and ‘ever-welcome, ever young-hearted Charles Cowden Clarke’ (p. 12), the man Victoria would eventually marry. This friendship network was to prove of particular value to the young Victoria when ‘dear, kind Mary Lamb offered to give [her] lessons in Latin and to teach [her] to read verse properly’ (p. 17). Cowden Clarke records three formative experiences associated with her education by Mary Lamb: meeting the distinguished actress Fanny Kelly, who was a close friend of the Lambs, when she arrived for her lessons one day (‘Look at her well, Victoria’, said Mary Lamb, ‘for she is a woman to remember having seen’, p. 18); attempting to imitate Hazlitt’s son in ‘scamper[ing]’ through her Latin lesson at speed and being advised to work in a way more suited to her ‘sober, steady’ personality (‘Best be natural in all you do’, p. 19); and listening to Mary Lamb’s ‘beautifully natural and unaffected’ way of reading poetry, especially Paradise Lost, which still ‘remain[ed] on my mind’s ear’ (p. 19) at the time of writing.
Despite her beneficial pedagogic influence on Mary Victoria Novello, Mary Lamb had had relatively little formal education herself (family financial difficulties limited this to six months of part-time attendance at a day school), and was uncomfortably aware of the way this affected her as an adult. It was as a contribution to redressing the limitations of the education on offer to girls, Jean I. Marsden contends, that Mary Lamb would compose her Tales from Shakespeare.9 But while Lamb was eager to offer girls wider educational opportunities and access to great literature, nonetheless, Marsden argues, the kind of education on offer remains limited in that it is primarily moral and social: its purpose is to form girls as virtuous members of society conforming to normatively gendered social expectations (p. 51). Demonstrating the remarkable durability of this gendered pedagogy (and the ideology of gender that informed it), Mary Cowden Clarke articulates her own understanding of the role Shakespeare could play in it as late as 1887, in ‘Shakespeare as the Girl’s Friend’.10 By studying Shakespeare’s ‘feminine portraits’ she argues, the girl reader can come to recognize what she must imitate or avoid ‘in order to become a worthy and admirable woman’:
She can take her own disposition in hand, as it were, and endeavour to mould and form it into the best perfection of which it is capable, by carefully observing the women drawn by Shakespeare.
While the reading girl is positioned as an active subject here, she is required to deploy her agency to conform to gendered norms of behaviour. In other works, however, notably the tales which recount the Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines, Cowden Clarke undertakes more questioning negotiations with Victorian ideologies of gender.
As Kathryn Prince argues, ‘Shakespeare as the Girl’s Friend’ is typical of much of the material published in the periodical where it first appeared, the Girl’s Own Paper, in its ‘blend of instruction and delight’ and its focus on ‘teach[ing] Victorian girls how to become exemplary women’.10 What in practice this meant, for a girl of Mary Victoria Novello’s background, was an education that prepared her for a transitional period spent educating other people’s children before settling into marriage, a process described in her autobiography. This life course is prefigured in the way that the romances and comedies in Lambs’ Tales all become, in the absence of subplots and lower-class characters, narratives centred on the elite young woman’s journey towards heterosexual courtship and marriage. The Lambs’ Tales clearly provided Mary Cowden Clarke with a model for her own efforts to frame Shakespeare for girl readers, and such a narrative focus on the female journey through life-stages from girlhood to womanhood, accompanied by a powerfully gendered ‘moral pedagogy’,12 is also pervasive in the book for which she remains best known, The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines. These dramatically inspired novellas celebrate good and dutiful daughters, but they do not merely reproduce a gendering of culture through a pedagogic and affective emphasis on virtuous feminine behaviour. They also expose and critique the factors that constrain feminine education and the sphere of activity open to girls and women, and explore what other opportunities girls might be able to seek out to learn, develop as women, and exercise agency. As Seth Lerer puts it, Clarke’s heroines ‘constantly need to find a middle way between the demands of private life and the temptations of public life’, negotiating the ideological complexities of ‘mid-Victorian girlhood’ in ways that are not wholly compliant.13
Indeed, Gail Marshall and Ann Thompson have argued that Cowden Clarke explicitly challenges some of the limitations on Victorian girls and women by framing several of the stories to illustrate the damaging effects of ‘women’s exclusion from education and consequently from the professions’ (p. 64) – an exclusion visible in her renditions of The Taming of the Shrew and The Merchant of Venice and still in force when she was writing these tales in mid-Victorian England. When Cowden Clarke was writing The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines the admission of women to London University – the first university in Britain to accept them – was still two decades away, and entrance to the professions would take a good deal longer. Cowden Clarke’s reminiscences of her early years in My Long Life make plain that she herself benefited immensely from home education, within a family circle in which she chose to remain for much of an adult life which saw her making a significant contribution to public literary culture. Her experience shows that familial education for girls was not necessarily inferior to schooling, and did not inevitably limit their ability to engage with a wider world. However, many of the stories in Girlhood produce a less positive sense of familial education: they suggest that a lack of adequate moral pedagogy within the home is often at fault in producing difficult daughters. These narratives reflect on the limitations and possibilities of the institutions and experiences that shape girls’ education and form them as women. At a time of considerable social constraint on the possibilities for women’s and girls’ lives, by imagining pre-histories for a number of Shakespearean heroines Cowden Clarke opened up for herself and her readers a larger creative space in which to imagine the lives and choices of Shakespeare’s female characters, and thereby provided a template – as, in many ways, she did in her own life – for thinking differently about female lives and choices.
Notes
1Ann Thompson and Sasha Roberts, Women Reading Shakespeare 1660–1900 (Manchester), 1997; Gail Marshall and Ann Thompson, ‘Mary Cowden Clarke’, in Gail Marshall ed., Great Shakespeareans Volume VII: Jameson, Cowden Clarke, Kemble, Cushman (London: 2011), pp. 58–91.
2Mary Cowden Clarke, The Girlhood of Shakespeare’s Heroines in a Series of Tales (London, 1851–52).
3Mary Cowden Clarke, My Long Life: An Autobiographic Sketch (London, 1896).
4Marshall and Thompson, pp. 61–2.
5Georgianna Ziegler, ‘Introducing Shakespeare: the Earliest Versions for Children’, Shakespeare 2, 2(2006), 132–51 (133).
6Charlotte Yonge, What Books to Lend and What to Give (London, 1887), p. 61.
7Erica Hateley, Shakespeare in Children’s Literature: Gender and Cultural Capital (London, 2009).
8Naomi J. Miller, ‘Play’s the Thing: Agency in Children’s Shakespeares’, in Kate Chedgzoy, Susanne Greenhalgh, and Robert Shaughnessy (eds), Shakespeare and Childhood (Cambridge, 2007), pp. 137–52.
9Jean I. Marsden ‘Shakespeare for girls: Mary Lamb and Tales from Shakespeare’, Children’s Literature 17 (1989), 47–63 (48).
10Reprinted in Thompson and Roberts, pp. 101–3 (p. 101).
11Kathryn Prince, Shakespeare in the Victorian Periodicals (London, 2008), p. 7.
12Marshall and Thompson, p. 63.
13Seth Lerer, Children’s Literature: A Reader’s History from Aesop to Harry Potter (Chicago, 2008), p. 233.