Wives of Fame: Mary Livingstone, Jenny Marx and Emma Darwin

By Edna Healey

Here are portraits of three very different Victorian women, all of whom married men of exceptional talent, energy and genius. To be the wife of such frenetic, explosive characters as David Livingstone, Karl Marx or Charles Darwin, especially at this period in history, demanded rare qualities. Yet the late twentieth-century view of these women is perhaps best summed up in the frequently heard comment: 'I didn't know he had a wife.'

The mid-nineteenth century was a time of unprecedented movement and upheaval. The revolutions of 1848 set Europe ablaze and sent swarms of political dissidents to seek freedom outside their homelands. Britain and her Empire were ruled by a young Queen Victoria, inspired by her enterprising, vigorous consort, Albert; it was a climate in which invention and discovery were encouraged. Men were creating new frontiers, both geographically and intellectually, and where they went their wives and families accompanied them.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Dec 1, 2011
• ISBN: 9781448207725

Edna Healey

Edna May Healey, Baroness Healey (14 June 1918 - 21 July 2010), née Edmunds, was a British writer, lecturer and filmmaker. Shewas born in the Forest of Dean and educated at Bell's Grammar School, Coleford, Gloucestershire, where she was the first pupil to gain a place at Oxford University. While studying English at St Hugh's College she met Denis Healey, who was studying at Balliol College. She then trained as a teacher and married Healey in 1945 after his military service in World War II. She became Baroness Healey in 1992 when her husband received a life peerage. Though she began her writing career relatively late in life, her books were critically acclaimed and sometimes best-sellers. She wrote non-fiction books, often biographies of successful women in powerful positions. Lady Healey also made two award-winning television documentaries. She was elected in 1993 a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature

Book preview

Wives Of Fame

Mary Livingstone, Jenny Marx and Emma Darwin

Edna Healey

Contents

Prologue

Mary

LIVINGSTONE

Jenny

MARX

Emma

DARWIN

Epilogue

Bibliography

Manuscript Sources

Prologue

The summer of 1857 has been the most beautiful in memory. The last echoes of the Crimean War have died away a year ago, and here in the quiet Kentish countryside the horrors of the Indian Mutiny are far away. The garden at Down House, bright with summer flowers, is silent save for the distant voices of children, the rattle of the flywheel of the well, and from the great lime trees the murmur of myriad bees. A clock chimes twelve and Charles Darwin, stick in hand, comes out over the shiny, pebbled path to take his morning walk. Down the sunny side of the Sand Walk to the summer house he paces, rapping the marker stones with his stick. By a bank of wild flowers Emma, in her faded cotton gown, waits for him and quietly they walk back together through the wood. It is a tranquil scene, and a casual observer watching this quiet routine would not have guessed the tumult in Charles Darwin’s mind. For the book he has been wrestling with for almost twenty years was to startle the world. When The Origin of Species was published in 1859 it would transform the thought of his and future generations.

That same summer, in the woods at Hadley Green on the edge of the peaceful Hertfordshire hamlet of Barnet, a man, lean and sun-tanned and wearing a battered peaked cap, plays with his children, leaping from the bushes and startling them with his lion’s roar. David Livingstone is taking a break from the agony of writing of his missionary travels in southern Africa. Beside the path a small, sturdy woman watches. In her old-fashioned bonnet and plaid shawl she could be his housekeeper. It is four years since Mary Livingstone and the children last braved real lions at their home on the edge of the Kalahari desert, years of separation wandering through chilly Britain while Livingstone trudged across the unknown heart of Africa to return a hero. Now he is writing a book which is to be seminal in his own time and which still affects our own. ‘We are sowing seeds’, he would write, ‘which will bud and blossom when our heads are low.’ His description of the fertile highlands of Central Africa, which men had thought was arid desert, would encourage merchants, explorers and governments to scramble for the riches of the new country; while his searing account of the slave trade - ‘the open sore of the world’ - would inspire generations of missionaries to follow in his steps.

It is Sunday evening on Hampstead Heath. A group of picnickers singing German folksongs makes its way from the grassy heights of Hampstead Heath towards the city spread out beneath them. At the rear a sturdy maid humps the huge, empty picnic basket; in front of her run three pretty girls. At the head of the procession a powerfully built man with a shock of greying hair and a black beard walks with his wife. Karl Marx and his family are heading home to their house in north London. His wife, Jenny, looks thin and ill but she strides beside him as one who is accustomed to walking. Her dress is simple, even poor, but her style is unmistakable. The singing stops and she begins to recite Shakespeare in a clear, musical voice. For a while she is Desdemona, then the girls call, ‘Come on, Moor - your turn!’, and Karl begins the long, long story that will hold them spellbound all the way home. He too is taking a break - from his work at the British Museum. For more than twelve years he has laboured at his mammoth Critique of Political Economy. On its publication, in 1859, it would hardly cause a ripple of interest. But it was to be the first instalment of his later work Das Kapital, which would disturb the whole world.

When Engels delivered his funeral oration at the graveside of Karl Marx in Highgate Cemetery he spoke of Marx and Darwin as the two giants of the age, claiming that, just as Darwin discovered the law of development of organic nature, so Marx discovered the law of development of human history’. Livingstone too still towers above his contemporaries. He was, according to Florence Nightingale, ‘the greatest man of his generation’, a supreme example of the hardy working-class Scots who dominated the sphere of exploration in the nineteenth century. Each of these men pushed back the frontiers of knowledge. Each in his different way changed the thought of their age and of ours, and each still arouses fierce controversy.

The figures of the great, who loom so grandly in the halls of fame, appear to stand alone. But shine a light into the darkness and slowly dim outlines emerge behind them. Few men achieve greatness in isolation. Somewhere in the background is a colleague, a sister, or even a housekeeper or valet, without whom they could not have endured the stress and loneliness. But often there stands a wife, invisible and forgotten, whose name is not recorded on the tablets of bronze and of whose famous husband it is so frequently said: ‘I didn’t know he had a wife.’

Only three such wives have been chosen here, but there are hundreds more throughout history who still await recognition. The reason for their obscurity may be in part that the followers of great men are jealous and resentful that their hero has a private world into which they may not intrude. Often they feel that marriage diminishes divinity. Many wives of famous men have been happy to be obscure. When asked if she took part in his work, the wife of the scientist Michael Faraday replied, ‘I am content to be the pillow of his mind.’

Mary Livingstone, Jenny Marx and Emma Darwin were three very different but exceptional women, living in the same turbulent period and married to three of the most outstanding men of the century. To understand their problems it is necessary to try to understand the nature of those who are spurred on to go, in Livingstone’s words, ‘beyond other men’s lines’.

Men and women who break through boundaries are unique, but they have much in common. There is an extraordinary energy that impels the great. This electrifying power often strikes with such force that they describe it as coming from outside themselves. Francis Darwin wrote that his father worked ‘as if an outside force were driving him’, and ‘as though he were charged with theorising power’. Some believe, as Wellington did, that they were directed by ‘the finger of God’, while some are led by their ‘star’. Missionaries have seen before them a pillar of fire which they are compelled to follow, and many religious men and women, feeling this power, have agonized over its source, wondering whether it comes from God or the devil. But whatever the source of the power it can lead to feats beyond the usual bounds of endurance, and woe to him who resists it. This force can make a man a fanatic. In his unfinished tragedy Oulanem Marx wrote:

I must bend myself to a wheel of flame

And dance with joy in the circle of eternity.

When the manic energy subsides it leaves black despair. He continued:

We are the apes of a cold God.

Thomas Huxley believed that, as he wrote to Joseph Hooker in 1860,

we have certain duties to perform to ourselves, to the outside world and to science. Don’t flatter yourself that there is any moral chloroform by which either you or I can render ourselves insensible or acquire the habit of doing things coolly. It is assuredly of no great use to tear oneself to pieces before one is 50. But the alternative for men constructed on the high pressure tubular boiler principle like ourselves, is to lie still and let the devil have his own way. And I will be torn to pieces before I am 40 sooner than that.

Genius also demands exceptional powers of concentration. Darwin advised his son Francis to pursue his theories ‘to the death’. Dickens’s biographer Forster wrote of him, ‘In all intellectual labour his will prevailed so strongly when he fixed it on any object of desire that what else its attainment might exact was never duly measured … it may be doubted if any man’s mental effort cost him more.’

An extraordinary restlessness commonly accompanies this energy and concentration. As Byron wrote in his journal, ‘My restlessness tells me I have something within that passeth show. It is for Him, who made it, to prolong that spark of celestial power which illuminates, yet burns this frail tenement.’ Too often the sword of the mind is too sharp for the body. As Charlotte Brontë said of her sister Emily, ‘The spirit is inexorable to the flesh.’

Such intense mental effort often causes illness. Sometimes the stress produces the malady; sometimes the malady is created to protect the vital energy. After a period of intense physical activity both Charles Darwin and Florence Nightingale became chronic invalids, reserving their energy for concentrated thought. There is a formidable list of famous invalids; were it not for the discretion of doctors and the loyalty of partners dedicated to preserving the legends, the list would be even longer.

Coping with these problems is difficult in any age, but there were additional stresses in the mid-nineteenth century, when families were haunted by fear of the cholera epidemics that swept through Europe. This was a period of medical change when treatments such as blood-letting, by cupping or leeches, were being discarded in favour of new cures. Many became addicted to the opium and laudanum that were as easily available as aspirin is today. Apart from the notorious addicts such as Coleridge and de Quincey, devout men like William Wilberforce also took opium. Neither Lady Lovelace, Byron’s brilliant daughter, nor Elizabeth Barratt Browning could do without what Browning called ‘the red hood of poppies’. This was also a time of medical experiment. Dickens, Tennyson, Carlyle, Marx, Darwin, Florence Nightingale and many others flocked to Malvern for the new water cure, or travelled abroad to Spa or Karlsbad in search of health.

There were other problems, too, for wives at this period. Between 1801 and 1871 the population of England and Wales increased from nine million to twenty-two million. In human terms these statistics meant that wives had a life of constant child-bearing - and until the late 1840s without the relief of chloroform. Emma Darwin is not an isolated example - she married at thirty and then had ten children. At a time when birth control was considered immoral and merely to write about it was illegal, there was little alternative.

For women comfortably at home in a stable environment this was difficult enough, but there is no other period in which so many families were on the move. In 1815 fewer than two thousand people left the British Isles, while between that year and 1860 seven million emigrated. Many saw emigration as the only solution for overcrowding and poverty. In the 1850s two million were driven out of Ireland by the potato famine. Other emigrants, lured by gold fever, struggled across America to join the Forty-Niners in California, and as many as eighty thousand joined the gold rush to Australia in 1852.

For restless adventurers there were exotic lands to be discovered, and for missionaries there were heathen hordes to be converted. Their wives had to choose between suffering the loneliness of separation or packing up and following them - to share the dangers, but often without the faith that sustained their men. Yet frequently the wives’ existence was only acknowledged in missionary records by an asterisk against their husbands’ names. Year after year they bore their babies on crowded ships or ox wagons, and then trudged on into the unknown. Mary Livingstone was only one of the many thousands of uprooted wives. In the words of her sister Bessie, also married to a missionary, ‘Wives act as organ blowers to the musicians.’

Jenny Marx, on the other hand, was one of the multitudes who were displaced by the political upheavals of the century. The earthquake of the French Revolution sent shock waves rumbling through Europe for decades, erupting in revolutions in 1830 and 1848 in France, Poland, Hungary, Italy and Germany, and even shaking the pragmatic British. Revolutionary ideas ricocheted from country to country. Not only politicians were involved: poets, artists and musicians - all were carried on the tide. In 1848 Wagner fought on the Dresden barricades; Heine and Lamartine took active parts in the revolutions in Germany and France; Byron and Shelley fanned the flames. When the revolutions failed many fled to the New World, and more took refuge in an already overcrowded Britain.

In this age of scientific discovery it was no longer possible to rest on the rock of religion. The newly awakened interest in archaeology and geology shook men’s belief in the Bible. It is hard for the modern reader to understand the upheaval in religious thought during this time. Many of the Jews of the period were for political or social reasons cut off from their religious roots: Marx, born a Jew, was confirmed in the Lutheran Church and as a schoolboy wrote devout Christian essays. Engels came from a strictly religious Protestant family and wrote hymns in his youth. Darwin had intended to become a clergyman. Yet all three, like many of their generation, became atheists or agnostics. The Churches retaliated with revivalist movements which swept across Europe, but for many ordinary people it was a time of great uncertainty. When death struck there were many who could no longer take consolation from the belief that their loved ones had gone to a ‘happy land far, far away’. The mementoes - withered flowers, faded portraits, and locks of hair treasured among family letters - are pathetic reminders of the Victorian need to hold on to something in the face of ever-present death.

Three of the men who made this an age of change, disruption and insecurity themselves demanded the reassurance of wife and family. Mary Livingstone, Jenny Marx and Emma Darwin gave their husbands the love and support that were so desperately needed. They deserve to be brought out of the shadows, to share their husbands’ place in history.

Mary

Livingstone

The best spoke in the wheel

It was midsummer at the remote mission station of Kuruman, eight hundred miles from Cape Town in the South African interior. The low hills around were arid and bare; only the stunted thorn trees broke the monotony of the bleached landscape. But down in the Kuruman valley Robert Moffat had created an oasis by channelling the clear water from an underground spring, and had planted neat vegetable gardens and orchards of peaches and apricots, apples and pears. There, swallows skimmed the streams between tall willows, and by the great thatched stone church the mimosa was in full bloom. Beyond the square stone mission houses were clusters of thatched huts, ringed by rough-hewn stockades. These were the homes of the Batlapings and other tribes who, over the years, had settled at Kuruman.

On this day, 9 January 1845, the gardens were deserted as throngs of Africans, in Sunday dress, crowded into the cool dark of the church for the marriage of Robert Moffat’s eldest daughter, Mary, to David Livingstone, the Scots missionary who two years earlier had come out to Africa. As the full-throated harmony of African voices swung to the rafters, transforming the old Scots hymns, there was general rejoicing - this was a royal wedding. In twenty-four years Robert and Mary Moffat had become as king and queen of the whole region. Robert had fought alongside them, protected them from their enemies, black and white, and had made their desert blossom. He had learned their languages, had patiently translated into their native Sechwane the Bible and the hymns that they were now singing, and taught them to read. This huge church, that could hold a thousand people, he and his mason had built with their own hands. He had stood for days in the swamps, cutting the reeds for the thatched roof, had laboured by slow ox wagon to distant Matabeleland and hauled back the great beams. Gardener and blacksmith, doctor, teacher, preacher and translator-there was nothing he could not do.

Tall, handsome, with piercing black eyes, Robert Moffat had an eloquence and a magnetic personality that had enthralled thousands who had heard him preach during his four years’ leave in England, and had totally mesmerized Mzilikatze, the fierce chief of the neighbouring and hostile Matabele. Yet he remained simple and unaffected and, though his faith was rigid and uncompromising, with a firm belief in the Day of Judgement when sinners would perish in hellfire and white-robed saints rejoice in Heaven, he had a gentle sense of humour. Now, Mary was marrying a fellow Scot whose courage and energy and sense of mission matched his own, and he was well content.

Mrs Moffat, too, was glad that at last Mary had found a husband. Her keen blue eyes scanned the congregation, approving the clean cotton dresses – and woe betide any wife whose husband was not properly dressed. It was Mrs Moffat’s indomitable will that had created not only a well-organized, comfortable home in the wilderness, but also a haven for all travellers to the far interior. There were old women in the congregation who, twenty-three years before, had, in the dust of their huts, clasped her baby to bosoms shiny with grease and red with ochre dust. She knew that there was a rough life ahead for her daughter, but she looked forward to teaching David and Mary how to run a mission station.

David Livingstone, standing beside Mary, stiff and awkward in his black missionary suit, was more than content. His bride was not a beauty. As he told his brother, she was ‘a little, black haired girl, sturdy and all I want’, always so clean and fresh in the dust and heat - ‘always’, he said, ‘the best spoke in the wheel’. As she stood there, calm and modest in her crisp white dress and bonnet, he knew he could never find a better wife.

As they left the church, Mary Livingstone too was quietly happy. Finally she had found someone who could compare with her father. But she had no illusions about their future. Now it was high summer, the air heavy with the scent of syringa, the mimosa golden in the hard, bright sunlight. But she had said ‘Yes’ in July, in midwinter, when the African mimosa showed its cruel, long, silver thorns. Born and brought up in the beauty and harshness of Africa, she knew full well the rigours of mission life.

It takes some fortitude to live at rest in this tumultuous land

amidst barbarians

Mary Livingstone was African-born, but it was only after years of study and toil that her father had been able to say, ‘I am an African.’ And for her mother, brought up in a comfortable Lancashire home, the learning had been hard. At a Moravian school Mary Smith received an excellent education and also absorbed a deep and lasting faith. As a girl she was remembered as being ‘ever active and attentive’ in the Independent Chapel. Her father owned a market garden, and when Robert Moffat, a tall young Scot, came to work for him Mary was soon in love. Robert shared her religious zeal and after a visiting missionary, John Campbell, had spoken of his work in a place called Lattakoo in the Kuruman valley they were both determined to go out to Africa as missionaries. Robert, encouraged by a local minister, William Robey, taught himself enough to be accepted by the London Missionary Society, an ecumenical organization, and sailed for the Cape in 1817. Having overcome her parents’ objections Mary followed him, and they were married in St George’s church, Cape Town, on 24 December 1819.

At this time on the maps of southern Africa the interior was still mainly a blank, although the Cape of Good Hope had been settled since King John of Portugal named it in 1488. It remained the Portuguese port of call on the way to India until the British East India Company took temporary possession of it as a refuelling and victualling station for its own ships.

But it was the Dutch who had been the chief settlers, who had built a fort and cultivated the land as farms. In 1795 Holland was defeated by France during Napoleon’s Revolutionary Wars, and to forestall French occupation of the Cape Britain took possession in the name of its ally, King William of Holland. In 1814 William sold the Cape to Britain, which appointed a governor who was directly responsible to the Secretary of State for War and the Colonies. The administration was now British, but the white population was still mainly Dutch – in 1819 there were forty-seven thousand Dutch inhabitants but only four thousand British. The neighbouring tribes - the Hottentots – provided slave labour.

Until 1819 the British government regarded the Cape as a halfway house to India and discouraged settlers. But at this time a great Zulu army was on the march on the colony’s eastern border. To protect the frontier, therefore, the government now changed its policy and actively encouraged emigration to the eastern Cape. In 1820 whole families and even entire villages from England and Scotland uprooted themselves and settled along the frontier.

When the Moffats started their work they found a number of missions, but they were scattered and badly organized, and many disheartened missionaries had deserted their flocks. Mission wives often could not stand the strain in the remote villages; some died in childbirth, while many left their husbands and escaped back to Cape Town or took ship for Britain. Missionaries were in any case unpopular. The London Missionary Society sent out a deputation under Dr Philip to report and reorganize. He stayed there, to become the Society’s superintendent, and built a reputation as a fierce champion of the Africans.

At this time the British government saw nothing to gain by increasing its responsibilities in the barren lands beyond the boundaries of the Cape Colony, and it was some time before Robert Moffat was allowed to start for Lat-takoo to become superintendent of a mission there. With John Campbell, the missionary who had himself been stationed there, they trekked by slow ox wagon from Cape Town across the barren, sandy Karroo plateau to Beaufort West, then comprising only a few houses and almost the last outpost of the Cape Colony. Their trail took them across the colonial boundary through country unexplored by white men except for hunters and missionaries. Luckily the Orange river was low. Had it been in flood they could have been marooned on the bank for weeks. They forded the Orange and the Vaal, their oxen straining and stumbling across the rocks, until finally they reached the Kuruman valley.

Both Robert Moffat and his young bride were convinced that they had been divinely called to Lattakoo, but until the mission authorities at the Cape gave them permission to settle there they went to Gricqua Town, ninety miles away, where their daughter Mary was born on 12 April 1821. Gricqua Town was the nearest approach to civilization for hundreds of miles. It was a small community, inhabited by people of mixed descent; there were coloureds, half-castes, and escaped Hottentots from the Cape Colony. But it had a number of prosperous farmhouses, including some, as Mrs Moffat reported home, ‘even with wagons before the door’. When their daughter was a year old they were finally given permission to settle at Lattakoo, and for the next twenty years Mrs Moffat was to need every ounce of her indomitable spirit. Diminutive but determined, she organized them in Lattakoo as she had bossed them back at the chapel in Lancashire.

She came to accept the strange and dangerous life, but it took time. The reality was far from the romanticized story of mission life with which old Johnny Campbell had first fired Mary’s imagination in far-off Lancashire. Though the valley here was open and beautiful as she had imagined, under a burning sun the stream dried up and clouds of fine white dust filled the air. At first they lived among the Batlaping tribe in a hut, built by Robert in the traditional manner. It had no furniture: they slept on the mattress from the wagon laid on goatskins on the mud floor, and their seats were ledges moulded into the clay of the walls. She cooked over an open fire, and in summer the air in the smoky hut was suffocating.

Mary had no privacy. To the women of the tribe this blonde, blue-eyed little creature with the delicate, fair skin was a strange curiosity. They pressed into her hut, squatting on her floor, watching every movement, clutching and fondling her precious baby Mary. She had watched them with horror mixing with their hands the cow dung and clay with which they built the walls and floors of their huts, seen them climbing up to thatch roofs, heard them chant of their aching backs as they threshed the corn or hoed the fields. She started to pick up their language, Sechwane, and she became, in the traditional way, ‘Ma Mary’, the mother adopting the name of the eldest child.

Their customs still appalled her: polygamy in her eyes was a mortal sin, yet as she looked at the wives of the chief- each in her little hut around the master’s - she realized in despair how woven it was into the fabric of their lives, how long it would take to change them. She began to appreciate, however, that some of their seemingly barbarous habits made sense. The nights were long and in winter - surprisingly - bitterly cold; yet by the light of the candles they made themselves Mary Moffat wrote vivid letters home.

You will perhaps think it curious that we smear all our room floors with cow dung once a week at least. At first when I saw Sister Helm do it I thought to myself, ‘but I’ll do without that dirty trick or I will try hard’. However, I had not been here long but was glad to have it done and I had hardly patience to wait till Saturday. It lays the dust better than anything, kills the fleas which would otherwise breed abundantly and is a fine clear green … it is mixed with water and laid on as thinly as possible. I now look upon my floor smeared with cow dung with as much complacency as I used to do upon our best rooms when well scoured.

There was, however, no sign that they were succeeding as missionaries. ‘Could we but see the smallest fruit we could rejoice amidst the privations and toil which we bear,’ Ma Mary wrote to her parents; ‘but as it is, our hands do often hang down.’ Robert’s eloquent sermons fell on deaf ears. His favourite theme - the Day of Judgement - was received with incredulity. Did he mean that their enemies, slain in battle, would rise again? ‘Alas!’ Robert wrote home, ‘we still hang our harp on the willows, and mourn over the destiny of thousands hastening with heedless but