In 1850 George was sent to Birmingham, his second appointment there. The family was pleased to be going back to familiar places, old friends and, not the least of it, a good local school for Harry. He was now fourteen, and he left Wesley College in Sheffield with great pleasure. King Edward VI School was not only the most prestigious school in Birmingham: moving there also meant that he could live at home, and be cosseted by his doting mamma. Fred, at eight, as always received the smaller portion, and was sent to a little local school. In later life he stoutly defended the place, protesting that Mr Howell, its owner and single master, had ‘something of a reputation as a schoolmaster’, and ‘a constituency of his own’; but even he had to admit that ‘King Edward’s School overshadowed all others in the town’,1 not only in educational attainment, but also in its new buildings, recently designed by Barry and Pugin, who would next move on to rebuild the Houses of Parliament.
At Edward VI Harry fell in with a group of like-minded boys, all on the ‘classical’ rather than the ‘commercial’ side – that is, they expected to go to university rather than leave at sixteen to go into business. Ned Jones, Cormell Price, Richard Watson Dixon and William Fulford were already firm friends. Harry may have been brought into the group by Wilfred Heeley, who, as well as being a stalwart of Ned Jones’s group, was also the son of Methodist congregants who were close to George and, particularly, Hannah. The boys were from more or less the same background–the mildly prosperous middle class, professional people in a small way – and they spent their spare time together, visiting back and forth. Harry took them in turn to meet his family, where they were a great success:
They were sufficiently our seniors for us to think them wise and clever, yet not too much our seniors for free and genial intercourse. My sisters were bright, quick-witted girls, very responsive to intellectual and moral stimulus, and capable of ready enthusiasm for anything that appeared better or more beautiful than they had known before. They received with frank enjoyment the friendship of their brother’s friends; and these were only too pleased to have the companionship of girls who sang delightfully, had a blessed gift of humour, and were willing to be talked to and read to on all manner of subjects. So a good deal of new life came whirling through our doors with these our visitors, rejoicing in their youth and finding it bliss to be alive.2
They were the first independent friends the girls had – friends made because of their own mutual interests, not their parents’. The girls’ circle widened beyond chapel events – the missionary teas, the sewing circles, the Sunday-school picnics. They now knew people who were interested in the greater world, and particularly in the world of the arts that they so much admired, which had hitherto been for them an exclusively ‘girlish’ sphere. Fulford ‘fed us with Longfellow first of all, as the food suitable for our years, and so brought us gradually into a condition more or less fit for the revelation before introducing us to the works of his prime hero Tennyson … He loved music, also, and taught us the names and some of the works of Beethoven and Mendelssohn.’3 Heeley too entertained the girls. Born in 1833, he seemed much older than they – a manageable four years older than Alice, to the younger children he was virtually a grown-up. Even so,
a certain shyness and big-boy clumsiness made him occasionally the victim of the little girls to whom he was so indulgent. He could at all times express himself best in writing, and, as he found we enjoyed it, used to amuse himself and us with writing notes at school and sending them by our brother as postman to one or the other of the sisters … What he said and wrote lit up a new world for us, who, as girls, in those days had small chances of education.4
For two years they were all together, forming close friendships. Alice, with her razor wits, was rather taken with literary William Fulford, while Caroline became close to the lamb-like Wilfred Heeley. Georgie, quieter, often unaware of others as she moved in her own little world, remembered her first glimpse of Ned Jones more than half a century later:
Edward was then in his nineteenth year, and of his full height; to me he looked a grown man because he wore a coat, but I believe there was in fact an early maturity about him. His aspect made the deepest impression on me. Rather tall and very thin, though not especially slender, straightly built and with wide shoulders. Extremely pale he was, with the paleness that belongs to fair-haired people, and looked delicate, but not ill. His hair was perfectly straight, and of a colourless kind. His eyes were light grey (if their colour could be defined in words), and the space that their setting took up under his brow was extraordinary … From the eyes themselves, power simply radiated, and as he talked and listened, if anything moved him, not only his eyes but his whole face seemed lit up from within. I learned afterwards that he had an immovable conviction that he was hopelessly plain.5
The sole child of a picture framer of straitened means, Jones had won a scholarship to Edward VI and only late in the day had moved from the commercial to the classical side. He was unused to social gatherings, and to children in general, and when he first visited the Macdonalds he frightened three-year-old Edith to tears by making faces at her. He was a serious boy. He had elevated ideals, and planned to study for the ministry. Altogether he could be an uncomfortable guest:
someone mentioned the name of a certain girl and said of her that she was a ‘flirt’. At the word his face lit up suddenly, and without raising his voice at all he said with the utmost distinctness and volubility: ‘A flirt’s a beast, a bad beast, a vile beast, a wicked beast, a repulsive beast, an owl, a ghoul, a bat, a vampire.’ As we sat amazed at the rush of words the usual placid expression returned to his mouth … The ‘chatter’ of women had evidently struck him very much, for he denounced it in one of the visits mentioned, muttering to himself under his breath: ‘Hear the ladies when they talk; tittle tattle, tittle tattle/Like their pattens when they walk, pittle pattle, pittle pattle.’6
This virtuous demeanour hid a wilder streak. Georgie understood it from the beginning: Jones could be ‘ominous in silence whilst some swiftly conceived Puck-like scheme of mischief took shape, carrying all before it, compelling the least likely to join in it, always ending in the laugh that we remember, the cloud-scattering laugh!’7 ‘Sometimes he would laugh till he slid down from his chair to the floor and rolled there, holding himself together.’8 Crom Price said that the earliest thing he remembered about Jones ‘was his laugh – I knew him by that before I knew him any other way’.9
Their pastimes were wide-ranging: not only Tennyson and Beethoven, but also a new craze. Spiritualism had arrived from America in the 1840s, and during the next twenty years was to spread rapidly across England. Two seemingly opposing forces drove this. One was that church attendance had slumped radically, even if those who did attend were more fervent than ever before. While the decline in organized religion was pronounced, the habit of belief itself had not perished, and into that vacuum swept spiritualism. If you were not now going to see your loved ones in heaven, communicating with the dead became a serious concern to many in these days of early and frequent death. The second motivating force is more curious today. In the 1840s and 1850s there were many clergymen interested in mesmerism (the precursor to hypnotism). Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford, was fascinated; William Davey, a Wesleyan, was a well-known mesmerist who travelled the country ‘treating’ subjects with mesmerism’s ‘healing’ powers. The faith involved was seen as a counter to the dangerous currents of science; it ‘suspended the physical instincts and allowed one’s pure, untrammelled conscience to work’.10 Science believed in outside forces that were not seen but could be understood to be present, such as gravity. Those opposed to the great strides science was making became a receptive audience for another kind of unseen power, and the ‘other’ world was a reality for many.
With the ground thus prepared, table-turning, table-rapping and other séance-like preoccupations took root rapidly when they arrived in Britain. As with mesmerism, the clergy did not automatically condemn; they were not sure that the origins of these activities might not be divine. Table-turning moved quickly from professional demonstrations to become an amateur pastime, something to try out at home of an evening. By the summer of 1853 the Birmingham set had taken to it with enthusiasm, and according to Georgie they practised it regularly,
with what are still to me astonishing results. The power, whatever it might be, was discovered whilst our parents were from home, and duly reported to them on their return as treasure-trove. Our father said something like, ‘Well, well, my children, if ever it does it again, call me’; so one day, when he was safely within the double doors of his study, we set to work. We had no theory about it, and were only curious each time to see what would happen. The table, a large round one, did not fail us now, but seemed to awaken just as usual, turning at first with slow heaviness and then gradually quickening its pace till it spun quite easily and set us running to keep up with it. ‘Call Papa!’ was the word, and a scout flew to the study. He was with us at once, not even waiting to lay down his long Broseley pipe. Incredulity gave way to excitement at the first glance, but to convince us of our self-deception, he cried out, ‘Don’t stop, children,’ and leapt lightly between us, pipe in hand, upon the middle of the table, thinking to stop it in a second. His weight, however, made no difference – the table turned as swiftly and easily as before, and we ran round and round with it, laughing at our amazed father.
And not only tables did we turn, but other objects also, especially a very communicative tea-urn with which we established a code of rapping. Our removal [from Birmingham] put an end to these séances, but none of us ever understood the things we saw at them.11
Georgie, at least, wrote it off as a childhood experience; Alice took it far more seriously, and it became a major part of her later life.
There were wilder aspects to their play, too. One of Louie’s grandsons tells a story which he does not appear to find peculiar. He says, ‘There was a debate as to whether, if necessary, one could eat a mouse. Wilfred Heeley said that he would willingly eat one, so Alice issued him an invitation, and cooked a good mouse-pie, baked in a patty-pan. He never came to taste it, but Georgie ate some.’12 If true, this is an extraordinary story. Surely both they and all later auditors of the story would have made more of it? No, there is just the one mention – Alice made and Georgie ate a mouse pie. One can certainly see the discussion taking place; probably even the dare too. But baking a mouse pie? This would involve catching a mouse (not impossible, probably not even difficult, in Victorian houses, constantly waging war against vermin). Then, one assumes, to make a ‘good’ pie the mouse would have to be skinned and gutted before being cooked. Even in a time when people’s food sources were much closer to them than supermarket shelves are to shoppers today, can one really see this happening? This appears to be an instance of a family tall story which with retelling moved from being a comic tale to being gospel truth. All families have myths which, to a greater or lesser extent, they know are not true factually, even if they may be emotionally true. The mouse-pie story fits this mould – Alice the audacious, in a moment of mirth offering a dare; Georgie the determined, who will grit her teeth and see through anything that has to be done.
The Macdonalds, with their strong artistic streak, often preferred emotional and artistic truth over mundane facts. There are a number of family stories that have this smell about them. Another, also related by Louie’s grandson, tells of Mary Macdonald, Hannah’s first child: Hannah ‘once observed her struggling upstairs, puffing and chanting: “As he heard the great bell of St Genevieve chime, He strode up the back stairs three steps at a time”; which is a couplet (very slightly adapted) from the Ingoldsby Legends’.13 He adds a rider querying how this ‘grim and adulterous poem’ could have been known to a baby a year before its first publication, but concludes that this question ‘is not the main point’. On the contrary, it is very much the main point: the main point is that the story is not – cannot be – true. It is a conflation of what two separate children did, or a half-memory, a merging together of the two possibilities to create a greater, more interesting, story – one where the family is well read and well educated down to the youngest member of the nursery.
Louie’s grandson is not the sole disseminator of such stories. All the family did it. Edie said that her father was a natural orator, and once had a curious meeting. One evening after the service an actor stopped him to say how much he had enjoyed George’s preaching, and he offered him a gold pencil case. It was David Garrick. That is the story as Edie tells it. Louie’s grandson is not gullible; he points out that Garrick died in 1779, more than twenty-five years before George was born. He fails to understand, however, that this is a family myth; that literal truth is not the point. He thinks that Edie has simply made a mistake and has muddled one famous actor with another – he suggests Edmund Kean instead. Kean did not die until 1833, and in 1824 and 1825 George was preaching around the western reaches of London. But what are the chances of a nineteen-or twenty-year-old boy, yet to be ordained, preaching in small chapels in rural villages outside London, being heard by the most famous actor of his day, much less making that kind of impression? It is, of course, possible; it is also extremely unlikely. It is far more likely that Edie later heard her father praised as an orator (and he certainly was highly regarded as a preacher), heard him compared to Garrick, and unconsciously rearranged her memories to create a truth that was more ‘true’ than the facts.
In 1852 the group of friends, the Birmingham set, was partly broken up by the departure of Jones, Dixon, Heeley and Fulford to Oxford. Harry and Crom Price were younger and had another year to complete at school. Letters would, in the meantime, have to keep them in touch. Jones was looking forward to the Oxford of Newman and Pusey, full of ideals and the desire to create a better world through faith. The only lack would be Harry: ‘I would have given almost anything to have had Macdonald up here. No fellow has ever had more influence on me: at least on certain parts of the “Me”, and no fellow’s influence has been more advantageous.’14
Still, Ned was thrilled to be leaving modern Birmingham behind him for what he thought would be the glories of medieval Oxford. Birmingham, for all its new wealth, was not the City Beautiful. Even the local councillors had difficulty in finding good things to say about it. In a statement put out ten years earlier, they had described a place where ‘The streets are a scandal to the name – a nuisance in wet, and a greater nuisance in dry weather; the footpaths in the centre of the town would disgrace a rural village: both footway and horseway, in the remote streets and the outskirts, are but alternation of kennel [gutter] and mire: the lighting is little better than darkness visible.’15 The city came late to civic reform – in the 1850s there was no town medical officer, nor a public baths, nor a library; schemes which had previously been accepted, such as sewage and street lighting, were now cancelled as too expensive. The death rate rose rapidly in the late 1840s and early 1850s. Alcoholism among the working classes was a chronic scandal. Crom Price remembered ‘one Saturday night walking five miles into the Black Country, and in the last three miles I counted more than thirty lying dead drunk on the ground, more than half of them women’.16
The Macdonalds, the following year, would also be leaving Birmingham, at the end of George’s current three-year stint. Although there would be the same weary work – packing, organizing, moving – to do yet again on their seventh remove in twenty years, this time there was a new excitement in store. George’s next appointment was not for any of the usual round – Huddersfield, Wakefield, Sheffield. This time they were going to London – the capital, the largest city in Europe, the home of the only-just-finished Great Exhibition. Hannah’s favourite sister and her husband, Alice and Edward Pullein, were now living in London, in Great Coram Street, in the heart of what is now Bloomsbury, and in the early summer Alice had already been to stay with them for a fortnight.
In their final year in Birmingham, there were major decisions to be made. The most important was, What should happen to Harry’s education? He was settled at Edward VI and he was doing well. It was unlikely that they could find an affordable school of equivalent standing near them in London. And so it was agreed that Harry should stay behind. In June he moved into lodgings in the house of congregants of George. The other children presented less difficulty: Fred was eleven, and a local day school could be found anywhere; Alice, Carrie and Georgie had intermittently been going to Miss Howell’s, a little school nearby, when they were not needed at home; the smaller ones continued to be taught by Hannah. Certainly disrupting their education was not going to worry anybody.
The main anxiety was Carrie. Early in March 1852 she had had pleurisy. It did not seem serious and, apart from a persistent cough, she quickly recovered. By the summer, however, Hannah was worried: Carrie was still coughing. The doctor advised bed rest, and she was soon well enough to go to school again. By October she was back in bed, and this time nothing helped; she got weaker and weaker over the next few months, although tonics, cod-liver oil, iron and cough medicine were all tried. Around this time it was decided to have her portrait painted, no matter how tiring the sittings – an indication of how the family saw the illness progressing. In December Hannah wrote to a friend that Carrie now was never well enough to come downstairs – though, because she was still in the house, still clinging to life, her absence from the family circle seemed to pass unnoticed. The unspoken question Would Carrie ever come downstairs again? was always in the air for Hannah. The others, truly, seemed ‘scarcely to be aware’: when Edie wrote her little book of family memoirs, in 1923, she didn’t even bother to give Carrie’s birth date.
Hannah undertook all the nursing herself, as was expected of her. Not a lot could be done, apart from keeping the patient warm and comfortable. The main preoccupation was to ensure that she ate enough. There were entire books dedicated to invalid (or ‘maigre’) cookery, which were usually based on the premiss that food with little taste is more digestible to a ‘lowered’ constitution than anything flavourful.* Bread was the basis for many ‘strengthening’ foods, including ‘bread jelly’: pour boiling water over toast, boil the liquid until it turns to a jelly, strain, and (if desired) add sugar, lemon peel, wine or milk. ‘This jelly is said to be so strengthening that one spoonful contains more nourishment than a tea-cupful of any other jelly.’18 Mrs Beeton recommended toast and water, which was simply boiling water poured over toast, allowed to go cold, and then strained. She saved her highest recommendation for toast sandwiches: ‘Place a very thin piece of cold toast between 2 slices of thin bread-and-butter in the form of a sandwich … [it] will be found very tempting to the appetite of an invalid.’19 Luckily for the invalid, Mrs Beeton conceded that mutton, chicken, rabbit, calves’ feet or head, game, fish and boiled puddings were also easily digested.
The great unnamed fear all this time was consumption, a vicious killer. Over 50,000 deaths a year could be attributed to it, and only 20 per cent of those diagnosed as having the disease had any chance of survival. The symptoms were frighteningly general: listlessness, lack of appetite, weight loss, pallor (especially combined with flushed cheeks), night sweats, coughs and colds, a raspy throat, wheezing, shortness of breath.20 The only sure sign was unfortunately also one of the last – when the patient began to cough up blood. Infection and contagion were not yet ideas in common currency in disease theory: only that year the Committee for Scientific Enquiry had rejected the suggestion that cholera was water-borne; Ignaz Semmelweiss was still being ridiculed for his notion that doctors should wash their hands between doing post mortems and examining live patients; and it was to be another twenty-five years before Koch’s isolation of the tubercle bacterium was recognized. Until then, a varying range of causes were blamed: everything from unaired sheets to ‘improper clothing’, which by lowering body heat could give the disease a grip. The Revd Faunthorpe, author of that vade mecum Household Science: Readings in Necessary Knowledge for Girls and Young Women, had no doubts on this subject (or indeed on any other): ‘Severe colds, which may terminate fatally, are sometimes caught through wearing damp garments, or sleeping in unaired sheets. Nearly every person we meet knows some sad story of lameness, consumption, or early death from some other disease, as the result of sleeping in damp sheets. Putting damp sheets on a bed, is little short of murder.’21Other suggested causes ranged from air that had been rebreathed too often (Florence Nightingale was a supporter of this latter idea) to ‘the dread triad of sexual indulgence, masturbation and celibacy’. (‘We need look no further than the Catholic nunneries in France where not more than one in ten entrants survive their period of novitiate.’)22
Great strides had been made in the previous decade – in the 1840s, the stethoscope, the thermometer and the percussive technique for listening to the chest had all been developed23 – but there was still uncertainty of diagnosis. This meant that hope always existed, even where none appeared warranted. Treatment was as wide ranging as the causes were thought to be. The Family Oracle of Health recommended a version of asses’ milk for those who couldn’t get the real thing.* The application of blisters, to provide a ‘counter-irritation’, was common. Other drugs used included quinine, hydrocyanic acid and even creosote. Iodine was recommended for tubercular lesions – either applied topically or given orally as a liquid or in mercury pills. Dr John Savory of the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary noted that, in the last formulation, and in the doses recommended, it usually caused ‘serious derangements of the nervous system’, but ‘beneficial effects outweighed the disadvantages’25(a nineteenth-century variant of ‘The operation was successful but the patient died’?). Tonics and cod-liver oil, to build up the patients’ strength, at least had the benefit of not sending them mad, even if they died.
Although by December 1852 the doctors had definitively said that Carrie’s lungs were diseased, the family carried on as normally as possible. Alice went in March to stay with her aunt in Manchester for two months. In May they swapped over, Hannah, Carrie and Edie now travelling to Manchester. Hannah and Edie stayed with Aunt Howell briefly; Carrie visited for two months before she could think of enduring the trip back to Birmingham. Soon she would have to make a much longer trip south.
The family set off for London in September 1853, and Ned Jones came back from Oxford to see them off. Despite the allure of the capital, Georgie for one felt only regret: ‘As the train passed slowly through the tunnel of the Great Western Railway at the beginning of our journey … I grieved in the darkness because I was leaving the place where he lived.’26 However, the family settled quickly into their first London house, at 39 Sloane Square. George had been given the Seventh London circuit, centred on the Sloane Square Chapel in Chelsea, which, while having ‘nothing very heroic or high-pitched in [its] spiritual life … was honest and wholesome’.27 The large congregation was welcoming – within two days of moving, invitations to tea and dinner had already been received and accepted – but the house itself was too small for twelve people: ten family members (one now an almost complete invalid) and two servants. Hannah’s first job after getting them all settled was to begin the search for another place to live.
Chelsea was still a villagey outpost of the big city; Fred remembered it as
if not exactly rural, [it] had not quite lost its rural memories when we went to live there. Cheyne Walk had still an eighteenth-century look, and old mansions … preserved still earlier traditions. No one had as yet thought of rebuilding Sloane Square, and Lower Sloane Street had shabby little cottages on either side with dissolute-looking gardens before them … The Queen and Prince Albert used frequently to drive through Sloane Square on their way to or from Buckingham Palace and Kew, and it was my frequent joy to take off my cap to them as they passed.
Thomas Carlyle lived just down the road, at Cheyne Walk, although until the Chelsea Embankment was built in 1874 the area was subject to periodic flooding, and therefore not considered very desirable.* There were no wood (much less asphalt) pavements, ‘and the omnibus, which elderly and old-fashioned people still spoke of as “the stage”, rattled over cobble stones’.29
At the age of eleven Fred was comfortably settled in a local school near Eaton Square. He was without the heavy hand of his brother, and the joys of a big city were spread out before him. He went everywhere and saw everything: the new Houses of Parliament were nearly finished, and Fred managed to find a way to the top of ‘Westminster Clock Tower’ as it was called. ‘Big Ben had recently been put in position, and I crawled under the rim and stood upright within the great bell while it struck four, losing my hearing thereby for a while …’30 It was clearly well worth it for the glory of the deed.
Really the only anxiety was the school holidays, when Harry would return. Three weeks after they arrived in Sloane Square, Harry wrote to Fred:
I am glad so very convenient a school has turned up for you. Do yourself credit in both the amount of work you do, and in the manner of doing it. Accuracy will be no end of use to you … If your knowledge can be relied on, you will find people will be glad to make use of it in this careless, ramshackle world.
Three months later he fired off another missive:
Your handwriting is much improved, I see … When I come home you will be put through your drill, that I may see what progress you have made. If it’s satisfactory we shall both be pleased; if not, why – … What time do you go to bed? I expect we shall have to make a revolution in this …
Fred, ever mild, wrote in retrospect: ‘Perhaps they [the letters] will explain the fact that my love and admiration for him were just a little tempered with fear.’31
It was surely all the more irritating when just now Harry himself had been attracting unwelcome attention at school. He and Crom had started a school magazine, which they wrote out laboriously in longhand. After a few issues it was suppressed by the headmaster. Ned Jones wrote indignantly to Harry from Oxford:
I have written also to Crom, and expressed my sympathy with him on the suppressions of the Hebdomadal, – sympathy which I would offer you too as co-editor. Whatever heresy the article in question may have inculcated, it was unfair and undignified to take such proceedings – unfair because it involved in that suppression much that might have become beneficial, and undignified because it hinted at a fear that ‘absurdity and conceit’ would subvert obedience: the argument is either very lame, or the discipline of the school at a very low ebb.32
At this distance we cannot know what Harry was up to, nor what caused the suppression, but the words ‘absurdity’ and ‘conceit’ were being bandied about by those in authority in connection with him – a worrying sign for someone hoping to get a scholarship place at university within the year. But he didn’t let it worry him, even if others showed signs of anxiety. George wrote to him for his eighteenth birthday, ‘You will wear now, in my imagination, the toga virilis … The blessing of your father and mother be on your head. You are, I believe, fully impressed with the importance of improving this year to the utmost. It is the last of your school-boy life …’ Harry’s reply, just at this stage, cannot have reassured: ‘Toga virilis may come when it likes; but I will be a boy as long as I can. It seems jollier to me to be boy than man, just now; months and years will bring submission …’33 The boy who recommended to his brother the virtues of hard work, application and high moral seriousness felt that for himself a Peter Pan attitude was perfectly acceptable.
George reverted to his theme as the months went on:
We never forget you at family prayer. You are with us then. And seldom do I bow my knees in secret without imploring a blessing on you. The temptations and dangers of life now begin to thicken around you … Could you not in some thoughtful and studious hour write out a short prayer to be used daily before your private studies?
Harry’s reply is in hindsight a masterpiece of ambiguity: ‘Thanks for reminding me of what one is always tempted to forget, that with God lies the power of improving us, and that all attempts of our own merely will be failures.’34 It can be read as dutiful submission to God, or it can seen to be a fatalistic throwing up of the hands – why make an effort if only God can improve us? It is probable that Harry intended and George understood the former interpretation; in light of later events, the latter one is also worth bearing in mind.
It was not only Harry’s family who were worried. His friends were also noticing a difference from the serious boy they had left in Birmingham. Jones wrote to Price, ‘Macdonald one of the lapsed!! Good Evans, as Dixon says – can it be? Poor fellow, I pity him from the innermost recesses of my heart. Don’t let him influence you, Crom – remember I have set my heart on our founding a brotherhood.’35
In February 1854 the new house Hannah had found for the family was ready, and they left Sloane Square for 33 Walpole Street, around the corner, near the Royal Hospital and the old Ranelagh Pleasure Gardens. During the confusion of the move, Carrie had been sent to some ‘kind friends’, who looked after her tenderly; but only one outcome was now possible. By March Hannah acknowledged to a friend that ‘Dr Radcliffe has told us today that our dear Carrie is so much worse that our case is hopeless and the end may be very soon. God help me.’ Carrie was moved into Hannah’s room, and Hannah was determined that nothing but death would part her from her daughter now. Only one event that month could draw Hannah’s attention from her failing child: Harry had won his hoped-for scholarship, and with enormous pride Hannah informed her friends that he was due to leave for Corpus Christi, Oxford, in a few weeks.
Apart from this distraction, Hannah and George’s one hope was that Carrie would be able to make a ‘good death’ and would not suffer too much. A good death gave the sufferer time for moral reflection, to enable her to make amends for any transgressions. Wasting illnesses such as consumption were appalling physically, but morally they were conducive to good deaths because there was no delirium, nothing clouding the mind, and the patient’s lingering also gave the family time to gather; last thoughts could be exchanged, prayers said. For these reasons, death by consumption was sometimes called ‘the death of the chosen’.36 When it was decided that an illness was terminal, the patient was told, as ‘no human being should meet his Judge unprepared’.37 At that point, medicines were given to palliate the worst of the symptoms, so that the patient could prepare for the end with as few distractions as possible. Brandy or port wine was used to stimulate the heart and aid digestion; ether mixed with laudanum was an anti-spasmodic used to help breathing.38 Opium was given to suppress pain. It was only fairly good at that, but its sedative powers were supreme – fear vanished, and the dying could seem even happy under its influence.
Literature and painting in the nineteenth century glorified death by consumption. Its victims were often young (always a plus in art), and the hectic flush, the gradual wasting, could be seen as conferring a glamorous end. In addition ‘what was soon to become known as the spes phthisica, “the hope of tuberculosis”, an irrational optimism’ which was often present in the dying,39 made the going out appear gentle. Edgar Allan Poe said, ‘I would love to perish of that disease. How glorious! To depart in the heyday of the young life, the heart full of passion, the imagination all fire.’40 Later he described the actual death: ‘Suddenly she stopped, clutched her throat and a wave of crimson blood ran down her breast … It rendered her even more ethereal!’41 This last description was of his own wife, and Poe was fooling himself. Death by consumption was a laboured, filthy business, agonizing for sufferer and watcher alike. Hannah sat by her daughter, doing all the nursing alone, emptying cups as Carrie spat a mixture of blood and phlegm out of her lungs in a desperate attempt to breathe. Coughing could turn to paroxysm in an instant. Convulsions were common. The patient wasted away day by day. With luck, exhaustion or secondary infections took the patient before she literally drowned in her own blood.
In early April George’s health broke down and he became unable to preach – the first time he was to crack under outside pressure. The doctor diagnosed exhaustion, and prescribed bed rest and a change of air, those stalwarts of the nineteenth century. After a few weeks in bed George went to convalesce in Brighton, with Alice to look after him. It was cold and windy, and did not do him much good, but he stuck it out. By the end of the month it was clear that there was not much time left for Carrie. George and Alice were sent for, although Harry was left at Oxford for the moment. Hannah’s strength, mental and physical, was giving way under the strain of twenty-four-hour care and two invalids, and early in May Alice Pullein arrived from Great Coram Street to stay until the end and share the load with her sister. Carrie was conscious part of the time, and asked her mother to pray for her. On 15 May she died, five months before her sixteenth birthday.
On 20 May Carrie was buried. Early-Victorian funerals had been elaborate, and elaborately expensive; reaction was setting in, and funerals were now offered from £3. Even this included ‘a carriage with one horse, a lined elm coffin, and the use of a pall, bearers, coachman and attendant, complete with black hatbands and gloves’.42 (Flowers and wreaths were not to become routine until the 1870s, when the increasing simplicity of the ceremony seemed to call for something extra.) Brompton Cemetery was chosen: it was nearby, and it had a special area for Dissenters, consecrated by their own ministers. A private grave was purchased, and it was dug to a depth of fourteen feet, which indicates that George and Hannah expected it to accommodate another family member at a later date.* A tombstone was ordered, reading ‘In Sure and Certain Hope of the Resurrection Unto Eternal Life’.