i Princess Dinubolu was the subject of the film Forgotten Black Essex (2018), made by the Southend-based artist Elsa James, working with historian Steve Martin. The Senegalese beauty attributed the remarkable softness of her skin to a habit of burying herself up to the neck in the sand at Yarmouth Beach, a claim which may well have been a justifiable prank on the locals.
ii In an interview with the Observer in May 2020, the political journalist and commentator Beth Rigby – an Essex girl, born in Colchester – said, ‘I thought I’d posh-ed up my accent when I went to Cambridge. But then I joined the FT, and I realised that I really hadn’t. A colleague, who was very posh, took the mickey out of the fact that I can’t pronounce my Gs. I was absolutely crushed. For a while, it really affected my confidence. At Sky, I had a conversation with one of my bosses. “Shall we fix this?” I asked. They said: “Do you want to fix it?” I thought: no, actually, I don’t. This is who I am.’
iii In her biography of George Eliot, the historian Kathryn Hughes describes Martineau – not, I think, without a faint suggestion of dislike – as ‘plain, gauche and gossipy’, and one whose ‘oldmaidish respectability ran alongside a prurient interest in other people’s doings’. ‘Hans Christian Anderson’, she writes, ‘once met her at a garden party in London, and was so exhausted by the experience that he had to go and lie down afterwards.’
iv In Encounters with Harriet Martineau: A Victorian Living Ahead of her Time (2017), Stuart Hobday writes that ‘She seems to have been deliberately written out of history, which calls into question the nature of how history is remembered and recorded, the power of myth-making and why some things are deemed relevant and others not. Martineau had two important qualifications that led to her dismissal by the later 19th-century male establishment: she was an intellectual woman and also became widely known as an atheist.’
v Matthew Hopkins is commonly understood to have been a Puritan, and Puritans are commonly understood to have been the motivating force behind the witch trials. But a belief in the literal presence of demons and malign spirits was not confined to Puritanism, and in fact where Puritan scholars addressed the matter directly it was often with a profound unease. The Essex Puritan minister George Gifford, who published two works on witchcraft, believed the fear of ‘cunning men and women’ to be purely a spiritual matter, to be dealt with by prayer, and not ducking-stools and pyres in the town square. Nor, as an aside, were Puritans especially puritanical where sex is concerned: a good deal of Puritan writing urges couples – albeit ones decently wed – to, as one anonymous preacher put it, ‘joyfully give due benevolence one to the other; as two musical instruments rightly fitted do make a most pleasant and sweet harmony in a well-tuned consort.’
vi Copies of The Acts and Monuments were ordered to be placed in churches alongside the King James Bible, and noble families were instructed to ensure copies were available for the edification of the household staff. It began to affirm a kind of English exceptionalism: of a valiant indomitable island nation, mercifully severed from the continent by water, and free from the Catholic Church – but free only for the moment, and never to rest easy, but to be alert to the merest whiff of Popish incense drifting across the Channel. I do not think it is entirely fanciful to suggest that the outcome of the Brexit Referendum in 2016 was influenced – however unconsciously, and however dissipated by the passage of time – by the work of John Foxe.
vii By December 2019, the UK government had closed 800 public libraries since 2010.
viii By way of context, it should be noted that Anne Knight’s travels took place eight years after the publication, in 1817, of Persuasion by Jane Austen, whose fiction has done so much to form the contemporary image of women in the first part of the nineteenth century. But Anne Knight was both exceptional and typical. In an article in the Quaker History Journal in 1982, Gail Malmgreen writes: ‘Even in the heyday of Victorian feminine and domestic ideals a determined single woman (always assuming that she had some small income of her own) could find a haven in hotels, apartments, and lodging-houses frequented by co-thinkers … if sufficiently healthy and intrepid she could travel, even unaccompanied, and she could speak in public, attend meetings and conferences, and build her own circle of acquaintance.’
ix It would appear to have been a point of pride on the part of Emily Hobhouse to be physically strong. In To Love One’s Enemies: The Work and Life of Emily Hobhouse (1994), Jennifer Hobhouse Balme writes that ‘Emily, being the youngest [of her sisters], was determined to keep up with the other two, a tenacity which she showed when, in a game of shuttlecock and battledore – a type of badminton – she and her father’s curate kept a rally going for two thousand strokes, a feat that lasted two hours.’
x In January 2019, during an episode of Question Time on the BBC, the then British government minister Jacob Rees-Mogg suggested that the British internment camps during the Boer war had been a wholly humanitarian effort on the part of the British, designed to feed and house Boer women and children while the men of what was largely a farming community were occupied in the war. In fact, though the British camps had initially been designed to house, for the duration of the war, the ‘Protected Burghers’ who had made pledges of neutrality, in the three years from 1899 approximately 48,000 people died in what had become concentration camps. Of the 28,000 deaths of white Boers, 22,000 were children. Of the Black population imprisoned there, no proper record was taken of the child mortality rate, but it is estimated to be 80 per cent. In response to the Question Time episode, the novelist Damian Barr sent Rees-Mogg a copy of his novel You Will Be Safe Here, which is set in a Boer concentration camp, and through which I first met Emily Hobhouse.
xi The National Women’s Monument is the largest memorial to Emily Hobhouse, but by no means the only. Roads, towns and university campuses bear her name, and in 1968 a French-built Daphné class submarine was christened the SAS Emily Hobhouse. In 1994, with the end of apartheid, when all naval vessels bearing European names were renamed, the submarine became the SAS Umkhonto, this being the Zulu word for ‘spear’.