My Dearest Martha: The Life and Letters of Eliza Hillier

By City University of Hong Kong Press

At once a reflection on the daily components of empire, an entertaining narrative of familial relationships, and the story of one woman's inner feelings, this book guides us through the vagaries of British family life in East and Southeast Asia.

• Language: English
• Publisher: City University of Hong Kong Press
• Release date: Aug 21, 2021
• ISBN: 9789629376208

Book preview

Introduction:

An Epistolary Relationship

I will now give you in detail all that has happened to me since I parted with you all.¹

In the early hours of 12 May 1846, the schooner, Mazeppa , was lying at anchor off Wusong (Woosung), some twelve miles downstream from the bustling port city of Shanghai. Its captain, Mr Wade, was making ready to sail for Hong Kong, a six-day journey, assuming good weather, but one that would often take much longer. On board was Eliza Medhurst, setting out to join her fiancé, Charles Batten Hillier, who was about to be appointed the colony’s Chief Magistrate. As dawn rose, she began writing a letter to her younger sister Martha. The first of many such letters she would write over the next ten years, this was different from all the others: not just because it was written before her wedding but also because she had only just said good-bye to Toddles, as she called Martha. Yet, she needed to tell her everything that had happened since they had parted, just hours before. It is with this letter that we get our first insight into Eliza’s ebullient and effusive character and the close and deeply affectionate relationship that lies at the heart of their correspondence.

She was seventeen and Martha fifteen, and the two sisters had seldom, if ever, been apart. It is no wonder, therefore, that Eliza had so much to say and felt she could have burst out crying every moment, it made [her] so miserable to think of home. What she did not know was that they would not see each other again for five years, and for another five years after that, they would only meet on a handful of occasions. Although until now, their lives had been inextricably entwined, for the next ten years their relationship would be almost entirely epistolary. Whilst they would marry, have children, and experience the usual incidents and misfortunes of life for an overseas family, they would be reliant on their correspondence for knowledge of each other’s developing lives. In that sense, as we read the letters, we will come to know almost as much about Eliza’s life as Martha did during this period, watching her develop from a young ingénue into a mature married woman with children.

However, in another sense, we will know far less than Martha. Apart from the first letter, the surviving correspondence only begins two years after Eliza’s marriage, and she and Martha must have exchanged plenty of letters in the meantime. Martha will also have received news about Eliza from other sources, particularly from their elder brother, Walter, with whom they had the closest of relationships. Most importantly, when she read the letters, Martha will have had in mind all that she knew about her sister from their early life together: when she was being serious, when she was teasing, and what significance should be attached to the matters that were left unsaid. Even Martha, however, could not be sure that she was always reading the letters correctly and drawing the right conclusions. The lack of any actual meetings meant that Eliza could construct her own persona, a plausible epistolary self, knowing that she was safe from being questioned and, possibly, unmasked. Before we can draw any conclusions about this, we first need to have some understanding of Eliza’s early life and the context in which the letters were written.

Chapter 1 begins by exploring her family background and her upbringing, and that of her siblings, primarily Walter and Martha, in the mission station of the London Missionary Society (LMS), first in Batavia (modern day Jakarta, the capital of Java), and then in Shanghai, when it opened as a treaty port in 1843. Two years later, Eliza became engaged to Charles Hillier, who had been living in Hong Kong since its earliest days as a Crown Colony. To understand how they met and the challenges Eliza faced in her early married life, the chapter goes on to examine Charles’s background, the events that brought him to Hong Kong, and the way of life that Eliza encountered when she was first married, one that would be very different from what she had known when living with her parents in Shanghai. Whereas Shanghai was already developing into a relatively stable and commercially successful settlement, Hong Kong’s early promise was quickly fading, and the small foreign community was already becoming enmeshed in discord and corruption, with Charles, as Chief Magistrate, being at the centre of those events. To give context to the letters, the chapter concludes by providing an overview of their life together, which ended with Charles’s untimely death in Bangkok at the age of thirty-six, only months after being appointed Britain’s first Consul to Siam.

Eliza arrived in the colony shortly after the opening of an official mail service between India and Hong Kong, and by 1848, there was also a regular, albeit unofficial, service between Hong Kong and Shanghai. However, apart from her letters, few examples of personal correspondence have survived from these early years, and even fewer from women.² We have, therefore, a rare opportunity to analyse such correspondence both on a personal level and in its colonial context. Chapter 2 considers the letters first as an intimate archive and then as part of a process that reflected and shaped Britain’s colonial presence and familial relations within the empire. Written from Hong Kong, Shanghai, England, and Siam, as well as on her journeys to and from these locales, they provide a lens through which to view these outposts of the British World, including the in-between places, as Elizabeth Sinn calls them,³ and Eliza’s life at home in the metropole. As Laura Ishiguro has argued,⁴ this sort of private correspondence places family at the centre of empire. Yet, despite its importance and the substantial scholarship on epistolary literature,⁵ Ishiguro’s is one of the few studies to examine how this worked in practice. On the other hand, there has been considerable discussion about how such letters should be read as an archival source, with Laura Ann Stoler criticising the tendency to read such material against the grain of colonial conventions and emphasising the importance of exploring the grain with care and reading along it first.⁶ However, we must also be alert to the possibility of the letter-writer using distance to shield their identity and project an epistolary self and way of life that may not always reflect the truth. For example, for four years, Minnie Wood’s letters, sent from India to her mother in England, extolled the success of her marriage until, suddenly, she revealed that she had been deeply unhappy for a long time.⁷ We must, therefore, read Eliza’s letters with care.

In analysing family letters, scholars have explored the way in which particular issues and topics have been discussed and how much this reflected and was influenced by the colonial context. Elizabeth Buettner, for example, has examined how the health of British children in late Imperial India was discussed in letters home and how separation between parents and children might be mediated through such correspondence.⁸ Elizabeth Vibert has shown how the exchange of letters enabled settlers to maintain connection across the cold space of empire and to continue to live by reference to the life enjoyed by their siblings at home.⁹ Similar themes have also been explored in a six-volume study of women writing home from various corners of the empire, an invaluable source in relation to the territories covered but of limited interest for our purposes as it does not include the British World in East and Southeast Asia, which had its own distinct contours.¹⁰

More recently, in her study of letter-writing in British Columbia as a distinct and significant form in its own right, Ishiguro has shown how the very banality of the contents of these letters helped to normalise the colonial presence.¹¹ Through discussion of particular subjects, such as food and eating habits, letter-writing reflected broader concerns about place, identity, and belonging and re-configured the incidents of family life, such as marriage, birth, and death, on the periphery of empire. However, as she acknowledges, most of her examples are letters written by men. Building on that scholarship, this book breaks new ground by focusing on the correspondence of one young woman in a colonial setting very different from that of British Columbia and on how such correspondence shaped and revised familial relations and practices and helped consolidate Britain’s presence in East and Southeast Asia.

Part II (Chapters 3–10) sets out the letters in their entirety, together with some linking commentary and notes. If, as one of Eliza’s descendants, I have an interest in the way I have read the letters, I have tried not to let that colour my approach. I have also tried not to overwhelm the text with too much supplementary detail. References are largely excluded from the letter commentary, but all sources are listed in the Bibliography. The Pen Portraits include additional details about Eliza’s family and important people who appear repeatedly, whilst notes are included only when necessary to add context and clarity. However, where the references to characters and events remain elusive, the letters are well able to speak for themselves. They end with Charles’s death and Eliza making her melancholy way back to England. However, it would be wrong to conclude the story at this point. Having come to know her so well, Part III (Chapters 11 and 12) focuses on how these experiences influenced her later life and the lives of her children. Although she would re-marry, her early life would continue to have a major impact: through her memories, through her relationships with her mother, Martha, and Martha’s children, who would be living nearby; and through her own children, three of whom would go on to make their careers in China.¹²

How the letters came to be preserved and whether Eliza ever re-read them will never be known. Found in her papers when she died, their retention is testimony to the importance that both she and Martha attached to the relationship they sustained across the distance of empire. It was one that owed much to their happy childhood, and it is with those years that the story begins.

Part I

Intimate Empire

1

Evangelical Families

I often think of Batavia — it was such a dear happy home to us all.¹

Eliza’s parents, Walter and Betty Medhurst, first met in 1817 at the home of the Lovelesses, ² a missionary family with whom Walter was temporarily staying in Madras. Sent out by the LMS to join, what became known as, the Ultra Ganges Region, he was waiting for a ship to take him the final leg of his journey to Malacca, a small colonial settlement on the Southwest coast of the Malay Peninsula. Also living with the family and working as a governess to the two children was Betty Braune. Although only twenty-two years old, she had already suffered more than her fair share of misfortune. Her mother had died in 1807 when Betty was thirteen and her father, George Martin, who was an officer in the Indian Army, had married her off the following year to a fellow officer, the twenty-seven-year-old Lieutenant George Braune. Martin then left for England. Whilst the ostensible reason was to make representations to the East India Company in connection with a dispute over pay in which the Madras Army had become embroiled, it was also a convenient way of off-loading his responsibilities. ³ Six years later, in 1814, Betty’s husband died, leaving her with a four-year-old son, George, to support (her other child had died in infancy). Taken in by the Loveless family but scarred by these experiences, she hesitated when the young and impetuous Medhurst began courting her. However, although zealous and evangelical, he was also debonair and persistent, and shortly before his ship was due to sail, she relented. The couple were married immediately and set off the next day. This much is clear from the family records, in particular, a letter written by Eliza’s youngest sister, Augusta. ⁴ What is not clear is who Betty’s mother was and whether her parents were ever married.

Augusta had obviously discussed this with Betty, because, in a letter she wrote in her seventies, she says that Betty had always understood that her parents were lawfully married and that her mother (whose first name is never mentioned) was the daughter of a tea-planter, called Thomson. Whether Eliza had ever discussed this with Augusta or her other siblings, we do not know. The issue is not mentioned in her letters nor in the short memoir that she wrote. The baptismal records, however, do throw some light on it. On the original certificate, dated 12 October 1795, the year of Betty’s birth is given as occurring one year before, on 23 October 1794. Martin is identified as the father, but the mother is stated to be unknown. Two further correcting certificates have been filed, both of which have illegitimate inserted, and this seems to make it clear that Betty’s parents were not married. Assuming that is right, it is highly likely, as John Holliday suggests, that Betty’s mother (Eliza’s grandmother) was of Tamil origin.⁵ Support for this may also be found in Revd Medhurst’s letter informing the LMS of the marriage, in which he says:

She speaks Tamil as fluently as English and can also talk in Gentoo. Born in India and having travelled over the greatest parts of the peninsula living in tents under a scorching sun, she is more likely to endure the terrors of an eastern climate than one of our English ladies.⁶

If she was Tamil, this would not have been unusual in the context of officers in the Indian Army and does not detract from Betty telling Augusta that her father and mother lived most happily together.⁷ Betty had a younger sister, Sophia, born some four years after her, who, according to Augusta, was a child of the same union but there is no record of her birth or baptism. After their mother’s death, Sophia was placed in an orphanage, where Betty would leave her when she set off with Medhurst. Save for her death, no more is known about Mrs Martin, as she was no doubt called. One point that seems certain, however, is that Eliza never thought that her mother might be illegitimate, let alone that she was of Tamil origin. Given the importance that, as we shall see, she would attach to status and her own attitude to racial differences, she probably would not have welcomed such news.

Walter and Betty, along with little George Braune, arrived in Malacca in May 1817. Medhurst was impetuous, forthright, and extremely energetic, and after four controversial years in Malacca and then, briefly, in Penang, during which he crossed swords with a number of his colleagues, he was transferred to the mission station in Batavia. Although he and Betty would spend just over twenty years in the Dutch colony, Medhurst’s ambition, in keeping with that of the Ultra Ganges Region of the LMS, was to enter China and convert its many millions. His primary focus, therefore, was on seeking out and preaching to the Chinese diaspora, and this entailed extensive travel across the Malay archipelago.⁸ Whilst his assistant, William Young, ran the mission station in his absence, Betty also carried out missionary work and taught in the school, as well as running the household and producing children at regular intervals.

Born on 24 July 1828, Eliza Mary was the third of the children to survive infancy, following her sister Sarah, who was nine years older, and her brother Walter, who was six years older. Two more children quickly followed — Martha, who was born on 7 January 1831; and a second brother, Ebenezer, born two years later. Their half-brother, George Braune, had been sent to school in England in 1819 when he was just nine years old, a parting that must have been extremely painful for him and for his mother. They would not see each other again for seventeen years.

Shortly before Eliza was born, Betty’s sister, Sophia, re-joined the family, invited no doubt to help out with the growing number of children. She would spend four years in the mission station, becoming proficient in Chinese and a devout member of the congregation, before moving to the newly established port city of Singapore, in search of a healthier climate. There, Sophia would marry, and her home and that of her daughter, named Sarah Sophia but always referred to as Sophia, would become an important hub for the family on its way to and from England.

As Eliza’s letters show, she and Martha had fond memories of their life in Batavia. Although their father was frequently away on long expeditions and was intensely evangelical, his was not a hell-fire faith, and there is no sense of the children being brought up in an over-disciplined household. The evidence points to their having great affection for both their parents and a happy home-life. They had settled in Weltvreden, the recently established European quarter where westerners were able to enjoy a leisurely colonial lifestyle, one captured in a vignette by a young English surveyor, who spent some months there before moving to Singapore. Evening comes on, wrote John Turnbull Thomson, and out pour all classes of the inhabitants ranging from the Dutch paterfamilias with his charming daughters and the wealthy civilian with his delicate white lady to the merchant tradesman and shipmaster accompanied by their dark-eyed mistresses.⁹ If there was a certain loucheness about this expatriate world, Medhurst made sure his family played no part in it, and Eliza and her siblings led an extremely sheltered life. Educated in a small school for European children, they kept to themselves, spending much of their time with the Dutch governess and having little contact with the local people, apart from the Javanese servants. Eliza did, however, learn to speak Malay, which was the principal local language and which would stand her in good stead in one memorable incident many years later, as we shall see.

When he was twelve, her brother Walter was sent back to England to be educated at Mill Hill Congregational School, on the outskirts of London. Shortly afterwards, in the spring of 1835, her father set off on an expedition which lasted the better part of a year, sailing up the East China coast and exploring the prospects for spreading the gospel and converting the heathen, an extraordinary experience which he later described in China: Its State and Prospects.¹⁰ During his absence, an American missionary, Henry Lockwood, whom Medhurst had met in Guangzhou (Canton), arrived to assist at the mission station. Eliza’s sister Sarah was already doing a large amount of teaching in the mission schools that had been set up — one for European and at least one other one for native children — and, although only sixteen years old, she was probably already quite mature. As so often happened in such remote settings, despite Lockwood being nine years older, he and Sarah became attached to one another almost immediately. For Eliza, it must have been exciting to watch the romance unfold, even more so when, on her father’s return, her parents gave their consent to their marriage, something for which she would later chide them. However, apart from being a love-match, it was also extremely convenient. Medhurst had long been planning to return to England for a much-needed rest, and this arrangement suited him well. With Lockwood to assist William Young, the mission station would be in safe hands. The wedding took place on 17 February 1836, and Walter, Betty, and the three youngest children — Eliza, Martha, and Ebenezer — set off in early April. An arduous undertaking, they sailed via the Cape of Good Hope, reaching Southampton four months later. From there, they travelled the last leg of the journey by coach to London, where they were put up in lodgings in Hackney, just round the corner from the LMS chapel in St Thomas’s Square. Revd Medhurst was soon off on extensive tours, preaching the China cause and raising funds, whilst Eliza and Martha were sent to a local school, with the fees being paid by the LMS.¹¹ They were also able to meet their family — their brother Walter, whom they had not seen for two years and, for the first time, their half-brother, George Braune. Educated at Oakham School, he had graduated from Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, and taken holy orders.¹² Married with a daughter, he was now the curate at the Church of St John the Baptist in Frome, Somerset. They were also introduced to a number of other Medhurst family members.

It must have been exciting for Eliza but also daunting to be on the fringes of the vast city of London, but all the more so for her mother, Betty, to whom England was also wholly unknown. We know almost nothing of how she took to the country and a way of life quite different from anything she had previously experienced. However, from what we know of her — Eliza would later describe her mother as having a morbid disposition¹³ — she probably did not like it and kept herself aloof. Although Eliza makes little mention of this time in her later letters, there are hints that she also did not enjoy it, telling Martha, when she was about to go there with her husband: England is a cruel cold place. I dread the name.¹⁴ Despite this, she would always refer to it as home, and when she came to spend two years in Bury St Edmunds with her own children, she would begin to enjoy the life of a provincial town and the surrounding countryside.

Eliza’s memories of this time may have been coloured by two tragedies that struck the family. In December 1836, news arrived that, shortly after they had left Batavia, her older sister, Sarah, had fallen seriously ill and died from a fever. Then, just eight months later, they had to watch helplessly as little Ebenezer caught scarlet fever and died. For Eliza, both events will have been extremely traumatic. Having revered her older sister and being protective of her little brother, she had to cope with not only her own grief but also that of her mother and Martha. Meanwhile, her father continued touring the country addressing large audiences and enlisting support for the conversion of China.

Given these sorrows, Betty and her two girls were probably only too glad when it was time to leave. For the return journey, the family party had expanded. In addition to their brother Walter, they were accompanied by two sisters, Catharine (Kate) and Isabella Parkes, aged fifteen and thirteen. Having lost both their parents and then their guardian, the girls had been invited to live with their cousin Mary,¹⁵ who was married to the eccentric missionary Charles Gutzlaff, whom the Medhursts knew well, as he had stayed with them for several months in Batavia. They were, therefore, only too happy to chaperone the two girls on the voyage. This was the start of a long relationship between the two families, one later cemented with the arrival of the sisters’ younger brother, Harry Parkes, who would become one of Britain’s most prominent officials in China over the next forty years.¹⁶ Completing the party was William Lockhart, a doctor who, inspired by Medhurst’s teachings, had recently joined the LMS and would also become a close friend and a leading figure in Shanghai. As Revd Medhurst informed the LMS directors shortly before their ship, the George IV, weighed anchor,

We find our ship, cabins and company very comfortable and agreeable. Our family circle, at our domestic altar, is large, some of the passengers joining us and we hope to be permitted to preach to the crew on Sabbath days. We anticipate an agreeable voyage.¹⁷

It would, indeed, be an agreeable, if long, voyage. Music would become a strong bond between the two sets of sisters. Eliza, who had an excellent voice and loved performing, later said how they all sang glees and part songs on board.¹⁸ It was also the beginning of a romance — Kate Parkes and Lockhart fell in love, and despite the twelve year difference in age, they would marry three years later.¹⁹

After Lockhart and the Parkes sisters had disembarked in the Portuguese settlement of Macao, the Medhursts headed on to Batavia, where they arrived at the end of a four month journey. Still mourning the loss of Sarah and Ebenezer, the family resumed its missionary life. Young Walter soon left to join Lockhart and assist with setting up a hospital in Macao. Whilst contact would be maintained through the unofficial and somewhat erratic mail, over the next five years, Eliza and Martha would, once again, be largely dependent on each other’s company. The only significant event to disturb their quiet and settled life was the arrival of their youngest sister, Augusta, named after the month of her birth in 1840. Across the South China Sea, however, in the southern port of Guangzhou, a very different position was unfolding.

Whilst the Chinese authorities had for a long time turned a blind eye to British merchants unlawfully importing opium, firm instructions had now been given that the regulations were to be strictly enforced. Incensed at how this was being implemented, the merchants became defiant and successfully sought the support of Britain’s Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston.²⁰ In October 1839, the first shots were fired in what would become known as the First Opium War. Although Batavia was unaffected, the Medhurst family will have watched closely as Walter had enlisted as an interpreter with the British Expeditionary Force and would spend much of the war in Zhoushan (Chusan), a group of islands off the coast of Ningbo (Ningpo), China. Overwhelmed by Britain’s vastly superior forces after three years of bloody conflict, the Chinese surrendered and submitted to the terms imposed by the Treaty of Nanjing. These included the cession of Hong Kong and the opening of five treaty ports.²¹ Impatient to be in the vanguard, Revd Medhurst obtained permission to close the Batavia mission station and set off with his family to Shanghai, heading first for Hong Kong to meet fellow missionaries to discuss the way forward.

On the way, they stopped off in Singapore to stay with Betty’s sister. Married to Thomas Whittle, a surveyor/civil engineer, Sophia had recently set up her own missionary school in North Bridge Road.²² Acquired by Sir Stamford Raffles²³ in 1819, the thriving multi-cultural port city gave Eliza a foretaste of her life to come, with its bustling and colourful markets contrasting with the leisurely world of the European quarter (see Plate 22). Three years later, her brother would stay with Aunt Whittle, writing to Martha:

How pretty Singapore is. Every House is surrounded with a garden, large or small, filled with flowers and beautiful creepers seem to overrun everything. Aunt Whittle’s House is adorned very prettily in this way.²⁴

This will have been the first time that Eliza met Aunt Whittle’s daughter, Sophia, who was five years her junior. Although Sophia’s home would be an important hub for the family, the relationship between the two cousins seems at times to have been somewhat fraught. The family then travelled onward to Hong Kong, arriving in July 1843, where they were put up by fellow missionaries.²⁵ Established only one year before, the Crown Colony was in its very earliest stages of development with something of a Wild West atmosphere hanging over it. The three hundred or so westerners (including no more than about sixty women and children) were outnumbered by some 20,000 Chinese, and Eliza’s parents will have been careful to shelter her and Martha from this world. However, females were in short supply in the small western community, and while Eliza’s father immediately plunged into missionary work, her brother, who had been taken on as an assistant in Governor Henry Pottinger’s Secretariat, began introducing her to his friends. Although only fifteen, she was expected to behave in a manner older than her years. So too were the boys. Harry Parkes, who was exactly her age and had arrived from England the previous year, was also working in Pottinger’s office and will have been an obvious choice for a match given Eliza’s friendship with his sisters, Kate and Isabella. However, she was also introduced to the twenty-three-year-old Charles Batten Hillier, who had already acquired a working knowledge of Chinese and was making a name for himself as the colony’s Assistant Magistrate.

Although the original plan had been for Betty and the children to accompany Revd Medhurst to Shanghai, this had to be changed when Eliza and Martha fell ill, and he decided to go on without them in August. Betty and the three girls were put up by Revd Samuel Brown, an American missionary,²⁶ and his wife, and this gave Eliza plenty of time to get to know Charles. As we have already seen, although he was eight years older than her, it was not unusual in such small overseas communities for there to be as much as a ten year age difference in such relationships. It was not something that would have worried Eliza’s mother, particularly as Charles was just the sort of young man she would have approved of. How quickly their relationship blossomed is not clear, but they were obviously close by the time Eliza left the following year.

Meanwhile, her father’s plans had been severely disrupted when his ship, the Argent, was caught in a severe typhoon in which he lost all his possessions and had to return to Hong Kong, arriving unexpectedly but safe, much to the relief of his family, who had feared the worst.²⁷ Setting off again, he finally reached Shanghai in December 1843, where he was greeted by his son, Walter, who had arrived only days earlier to take up his new appointment as an interpreter in the recently established China Consular Service. Whilst the details of this position had been left vague and would have to be worked out, the Consul was responsible for acquiring and mapping out an area in which British nationals (and those of other European states under similar treaties) would be permitted to reside and carry on business, subject to the Consul’s exclusive jurisdiction. In practice, the Chinese would only be allowed to enter the settlement in a subordinate capacity — as servants, tradesmen, rickshaw-pullers, and the like — a position that would only change in the mid-1850s, with the massive influx of refugees fleeing from the Taiping.²⁸

The first British Consul in Shanghai was an ex-military man named Captain Balfour, and given that he only spoke a smattering of Chinese, he was heavily dependent on both Medhursts in his dealings with local officials. Land was acquired and a grid of streets laid out with western-style buildings. At the same time, Revd Medhurst and Dr Lockhart were setting up the mission station and hospital. Lockhart’s wife, Kate, and her sister, Isabella, had also arrived and the smallest of western communities began to take shape on the edge of the Chinese port city.²⁹

The following June, Eliza’s brother sailed down from Shanghai and escorted his mother and three sisters to their new home. They also had a hazardous journey, their ship running aground off the coast of Zhoushan. Although steam was replacing sail, this sort of problem was familiar for passengers travelling between Hong Kong and Shanghai and, indeed generally, along the China coast, with typhoons and gales being a constant threat.³⁰ In the event, they only reached Shanghai at the end of June, but when they did finally arrive, it is clear from the Lockharts’ letters home that they received the warmest of welcomes.³¹ For at least two months, Kate and Isabella had been eagerly anticipating this moment, and for a while, the two families were inseparable, Lockhart telling his father, we are on terms of intimate friendship, seeing each other constantly. Eliza and Martha are two very fine girls, we love them very much.³²

Soon, the main talking point was that Walter and Isabella, who had first met six years earlier on the journey from England, had now fallen in love and were engaged. As Kate wrote home, they are very well, delighted and write love notes every morning.³³ However, in circumstances that would become typical of Walter’s private life — one beset by personal tragedy and failed relationships — problems soon emerged. Although in favour of the match in principle, Lockhart was concerned about Walter’s bouts of ill health, and as Isabella’s brother-in-law, he saw it as his duty to counsel delay. However, this was not the Medhurst way of doing things. Egged on by his mother, Walter gave Lockhart an extraordinary ultimatum, saying that the marriage had to take place by 14 October 1844 or he would call it off. Isabella was heartbroken when Lockhart refused to give in and a major rift developed between the two families, Kate describing Walter as young, inexperienced and very proud withal.³⁴

The girls still continued to see each other from time to time, with music remaining an important bond between them, and singing would be one of Eliza’s abiding pleasures, as is reflected in a volume of songs and music that she was given at this time (see Plate 23). Unfortunately, from now on there would be tensions beneath the