Mathilde Blind: Late-Victorian Culture and the Woman of Letters

By James Diedrick

With Mathilde Blind: Late-Victorian Culture and the Woman of Letters, James Diedrick offers a groundbreaking critical biography of the German-born British poet Mathilde Blind (1841–1896), a freethinking radical feminist.

Born to politically radical parents, Blind had, by the time she was thirty, become a pioneering female aesthete in a mostly male community of writers, painters, and critics, including Algernon Charles Swinburne, William Morris, Ford Madox Brown, William Michael Rossetti, and Richard Garnett. By the 1880s she had become widely recognized for a body of writing that engaged contemporary issues such as the Woman Question, the forced eviction of Scottish tenant farmers in the Highland Clearances, and Darwin’s evolutionary theory. She subsequently emerged as a prominent voice and leader among New Woman writers at the end of the century, including Mona Caird, Rosamund Marriott Watson, and Katharine Tynan. She also developed important associations with leading male decadent writers of the fin de siècle, most notably, Oscar Wilde and Arthur Symons.

Despite her extensive contributions to Victorian debates on aesthetics, religion, nationhood, imperialism, gender, and sexuality, however, Blind has yet to receive the prominence she deserves in studies of the period. As the first full-length biography of this trailblazing woman of letters, Mathilde Blind underscores the importance of her poetry and her critical writings (her work on Shelley, biographies of George Eliot and Madame Roland, and her translations of Strauss and Bashkirtseff) for the literature and culture of the fin de siècle.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Release date: Jan 12, 2017
• ISBN: 9780813939322

Book preview

Victorian Literature and Culture Series

JEROME J. MCGANN AND HERBERT F. TUCKER, EDITORS

Mathilde Blind

LATE-VICTORIAN CULTURE AND THE WOMAN OF LETTERS

James Diedrick

University of Virginia Press

CHARLOTTESVILLE AND LONDON

University of Virginia Press

© 2016 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

First published 2016

1  3  5  7  9  8  6  4  2

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Diedrick, James, 1951 – author.

Title: Mathilde Blind: Late-Victorian culture and the Woman of Letters / James Diedrick.

Description: Charlottesville : University of Virginia Press, 2017. | Series: Victorian literature and culture series | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016012003 | ISBN 9780813939315 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780813939322 (e-book)

Subjects: LCSH: Blind, Mathilde, 1841–1896. | Women authors, English—19th century—Biography. | Women critics—Great Britain—19th century—Biography. | Feminists—Great Britain—19th century—Biography. | Blind, Mathilde, 1841–1896—Political and social views. | Blind, Mathilde, 1841–1896—Interpretation and criticism.

Classification: LCC PR4149.B55 Z55 2017 | DDC 821/.8 [B]—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016012003

Cover art: Mathilde Blind, by Harold Rathbone, 1889. (Private collection; photo © Philip Mould Ltd, London/Bridgeman Images)

To the memory of my parents

Contents

List of Illustrations

Preface

Acknowledgments

Chronology

1  The Making of a Cosmopolitan: 1841–1867

2  Romancing Shelley and Others: 1868–1870

3  A Pioneering Female Aesthete: 1871–1872

4  Translating Strauss, Traveling in Scotland: 1873–1874

5  Freethinkers and Feminists: 1874–1881

6  Biographer, Novelist, Polemical Poet: 1882–1887

7  A Leading New Woman: 1888–1893

8  But a Bird of Passage: 1893–1896

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

Algernon Charles Swinburne, ca. 1865 33

Mathilde Blind, ca. 1870 46

Richard Garnett, 1901 56

William Michael Rossetti, 1865 61

Joaquin Miller, 1874 78

Mathilde Blind, by Lucy Madox Brown, 1872 83

A. Mary F. Robinson, ca. 1880 142

Ford Madox Brown, ca. 1870 146

Mathilde Blind, by Ford Madox Brown, 1876 149

Vernon Lee, by John Singer Sargent, 1881 171

Jean et Jacques, by Marie Bashkirtseff, 1883 207

Arthur Symons, ca. 1885 212

Mathilde Blind, by Harold Rathbone, 1889 221

Frontispiece by Ford Madox Brown for Mathilde Blind’s Dramas in Miniature, 1891 223

Mathilde Blind, ca. 1890 229

Cover of Birds of Passage, 1895 240

Monument to Mathilde Blind by Edouard Lanteri, St. Pancras Cemetery 256

Mathilde Blind portrait bronze plaque by Edouard Lanteri, 1898 257

Preface

THIS BIOGRAPHY BEGAN NEARLY TWO DECADES AGO, WHEN I WAS asked to write an entry on Mathilde Blind for the Victorian Women Poets volume of The Dictionary of Literary Biography. I knew that Blind had written the first biography of George Eliot, and I was intrigued by the few poems I had read in anthologies. Perry Willett at the Indiana University library had just launched the Victorian Women Writers Project, one of the first important digital humanities initiatives, which was electronically publishing hundreds of first editions by lesser-known poets and women of letters. This gave me immediate access to online first editions of Blind’s six volumes of poetry as well as the printed version of her 1886 lecture Shelley’s View of Nature Contrasted with Darwin’s (her Eliot biography and her only novel, Tarantella, would later be added to the archive). Reading through her poems, I was struck both by their daring and by their remarkable variety. In Dramas in Miniature alone, for instance, a supernatural ballad of deathless female desire shares space with a dramatic monologue in the voice of a privileged, sexually predatory male; another monologue voices the bitter lament of a dying prostitute; a lyric addressed to a much younger lover expresses erotic yearning and despair; an artful variation on the Petrarchan sonnet conveys the ravages of time and the rage of art to create a place where mortality kills death in deathless art. As I gathered examples of her contributions to other genres (biography, critical essays, fiction, reviews, translations), I quickly recognized that beyond her achievements as a poet, Blind was a widely published, well-reviewed, and influential writer whose career illustrated the emergence of the professional woman of letters in late-Victorian England.

During a research trip to London one hundred years after Mathilde Blind’s death, I sat in the same British Museum Reading Room that Blind herself frequented between 1859 and 1895 and poured over the four bound volumes of her manuscripts, including the fragment of her autobiographical narrative, letters to Prime Minister William Gladstone, letters from her mother and half-sister, and over two hundred letters to and from Blind and Richard Garnett, who as Keeper of Printed Books from 1895 to his death in 1906 was responsible for gathering and preserving this rich archive. This first research trip also led me on a search for other collections of Blind and Blind-related letters in cities throughout Great Britain and North America. As I delved into the lives of her mother and stepfather, radical refugees who were imprisoned in Bavaria in 1847 for inciting workers’ demonstrations, participated in the 1848 Baden uprising, and were granted political asylum in London in 1852, I began recognizing important connections between the experiences that shaped Blind’s early years and her subsequent friendships in England—with leading aesthetes, freethinkers, positivists, socialists suffragists, New Woman writers, and decadents.

Blind’s story has a historical as well as literary significance, illustrating the complex affiliations linking radical thought, revolutionary politics, and aestheticism in the mid- to late nineteenth century. One dimension of these intertwined histories with special significance for Blind is the Woman Question. She was friends with leading suffragists in the 1870s, and subsequently befriended and encouraged emerging New Woman writers. She openly criticized marriage and the patriarchy while boldly expressing female agency and sexual desire, often looking to the Continent or a mythically reimagined past for alternatives to contemporary social and gender relations. Feminist theory and theories of cosmopolitanism inform this biography, but while making use of contemporary theoretical paradigms, I show how they are rooted in and linked to Victorian discourse—on aesthetics, citizenship, nationhood, imperialism, gender, and sexuality—and how Blind herself contributed to this discourse.

This feminist perspective will be most apparent when I discuss Blind’s relationships with influential men of letters, especially Richard Garnett, William Michael Rossetti, Algernon Charles Swinburne, and Arthur Symons. Anyone who has written about Blind is indebted to Garnett and Rossetti, both for the ways they encouraged and supported her writing career and for the details of her life and letters they preserved in their letters and diaries. Garnett corresponded with Blind for her entire adult life, and he gave most of this correspondence to the British Library. Rossetti and Blind’s correspondence is more sporadic and scattered, but his letters to others about her, and his diary, contain revealing anecdotes about her career as well as tantalizing glimpses of her personal life. At the same time, and despite their professed radical or progressive views, men like Garnett, Swinburne, and Symons (less so Rossetti) downplayed the subversive strains in her writing. They slighted her dramatic monologues, for example, formally complex and double-voiced, in favor of her lyric poems, which they claimed expressed her true voice. Garnett in particular, always a source of support and professional contacts, repeatedly offered Blind dubious literary advice, whether urging her to write a hagiography of George Eliot, to remove the comic and sexually subversive language from one of her sonnets, or to beware of certain fin de siècle writers and editors. For these reasons, while detailing the statements, suggestions, and editorial decisions of these and other men, I interrogate the extra-literary assumptions that motivated them.

A comprehensive biography of Mathilde Blind makes it possible to take a full measure of her career as a woman of letters. Thanks to the excellent scholarship on late-century women poets over the past thirty years, her poetry has been fully recovered, and much of it has received significant critical analysis. But emphasizing Blind’s poetry to the exclusion of her work in a wide variety of other genres can misrepresent her achievements and her legacy. She wrote two highly praised biographies (of George Eliot and Madame Roland), two translations of seminal works that have been judged superior to the other available translations (of David Strauss’s The Old Faith and the New: A Confession and The Journal of Marie Bashkirtseff), and over three dozen critical essays and reviews. Her translation of Marie Bashkirtseff’s journal placed both the author and her translator at the center of late-century debates about decadence and the New Woman, also evident in the short fiction and poetry she subsequently published in the magazine Black and White and in two of her best volumes of poetry, Dramas in Miniature and Birds of Passage: Songs of the Orient and Occident. Moreover, the hundreds of letters she wrote and received simultaneously offer entrée into her interior life, supplement and complicate the ideas in her poetry, and possess literary merits of their own.

Blind’s translation of Bashkirtseff’s journal, and her two essays on Bashkirtseff, point to another facet of her significance, and of her importance to questions of gender and sexuality in the nineteenth century and beyond. In many ways Blind was a postmodernist avant la lettre, representing and exploring the fluidity of identity, including gender and sexual identity, well before these ideas became commonplace in the cultural discourse. In comparison with Mary J. Serrano’s 1889 translation of Bashkirtseff’s journal, for instance, Blind’s translation intentionally emphasizes Bashkirtseff’s awareness of how gender affects the self, as in this complaint: I grumble at being a woman because there is nothing of the woman about me but the envelope. Blind’s thinking about identity had been influenced by the lectures of her friend W. K. Clifford, the University of London mathematician and philosopher whose 1875 lecture On the Scientific Basis of Morals destabilizes the self in terms that are taken up and woven through Blind’s subsequent writing in a number of genres.

Critical and scholarly writing in a number of domains—history, cultural studies, gender and queer studies, the sociology of literature—has aided my work on Blind. This includes but is not limited to recent work on literary and cultural cosmopolitanism; studies of the relationship between the radical refugees of Germany and Italy and English radicalism; analyses of late-Victorian women writers and aestheticism; and discussions of the interrelationship of scientific positivism and decadence. In addition, biographies of late-Victorian artists and women poets closely associated with Blind have proven invaluable, especially Linda Hughes’s life of Rosamund Marriott Watson and Vineta Colby’s biography of Vernon Lee. Angela Thirwell’s biographical studies of William Michael and Lucy Rossetti and Ford Madox Brown chronicle three of Mathilde Blind’s closest and most important relationships and have proven especially useful.

While I have organized the biography chronologically, each chapter also has a thematic focus. I begin by tracing the origins of Blind’s rooted cosmopolitanism, from her early years in Germany and Belgium to her subsequent meetings and discussions with the far-flung community of radical refugees from the European revolutions of the 1840s. Chapter 2 discusses how her love and knowledge of Percy Bysshe Shelley introduced her to a community of like-minded radicals and writers and established her own literary authority. Chapter 3 concerns her publications in the Dark Blue and her involvement with the loose-knit community of London aesthetes it attracted and published, which established her early identity as a pioneering female aesthete. I then move on to consider her other major affiliations, reflected in her friendships and publications, which also constitute chapters in the book and in the history of London’s avant-garde and progressive communities. These include her associations with fellow freethinkers and feminists, manifest in publications ranging from her 1873 translation of The Old Faith and the New to her 1881 volume The Prophecy of St. Oran and her 1883 biography of George Eliot; her lectures and writings related to positivism, evolutionary theory, and psychology in the mid-1880s through the early 1890s; her friendships and affiliations with the New Woman writers of the late 1880s and 1890s; and her complicated relationship to the decadent movement of the fin de siècle.

In the introduction to her translation of The Journal of Marie Bashkirtseff, Blind wrote that Bashkirtseff was too intensely modern for repose. This is equally true of Blind herself, and it is one of the reasons her distinctive voice continues to speak to us in the twenty-first century.

Acknowledgments

THE MANUSCRIPT HOLDINGS AND GENEROSITY OF FOUR GREAT research libraries made this biography possible: the British Library; the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin; the Bodleian Library at Oxford University; and the University of British Columbia Library. I am grateful to the expert staff at these libraries for their assistance, and to travel grants from the British Academy and Agnes Scott College for extended stays at the British Library, the Bodleian, and the Ransom Center. A 1997 National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar at the Newberry Library in Chicago entitled Biography and Social History helped me begin this project in earnest, and I thank co-directors Elliott Gorn and James Grossman for their early guidance. An NEH Summer Stipend enabled me to make additional use of the Newberry’s rich collection of nineteenth-century materials.

Aspects of Mathilde Blind’s eventful life and writings are documented in many other archives and research libraries, which I also gratefully acknowledge: the Special Collections Division at the Cambridge University Library; the Digital and Special Collections Division of the Colby College Library; the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections at the Carl A. Kroch Library, Cornell University; the Charles E. Young Research Library Special Collections at UCLA; the Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University; the University of Liverpool Library; the Cooperative Union Library, Manchester; the John Rylands University of Manchester Library; the House of Lords Records Office, London; the Special Collections and Archives at Kent State University; the Norman Colbeck Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Library; the William Blackwood and Sons Papers at the National Library of Scotland; the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library; the Sophia Smith Research Room, Smith College; Trinity College Library, Dublin; the University College London Special Collections; the Reading Library Special Collections, University of Reading; the Irving Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, University of South Carolina; the National Art Library, Victoria and Albert Museum.

My research and writing have benefited enormously from the interest and advice of Linda K. Hughes, Ana Parejo Vadillo, Margaret D. Stetz, Mark Samuels Lasner, Terry L. Meyers, Michael Galchinsky, my editors at the University of Virginia Press—Cathie Brettschneider and Eric Brandt—and managing editor Ellen Satrom.

Above all, I thank LeeAnne M. Richardson for her advice, support, good humor, and love.

Chronology

1

The Making of a Cosmopolitan

1841–1867

It was a big leap from the schoolroom of the Plymouth sister schoolmistress to the group of brilliant Revolutionists with whom after a week or two I was on the most intimate terms.

—Mathilde Blind, undated autobiographical narrative

IN THE EARLY 1870S MATHILDE BLIND CAST OFF THE MALE PSEU -donym she used for her first volume of verse (Poems, by Claude Lake, 1867) and announced herself as a formidable literary critic, a provocative poet, and a fearless freethinker. In January 1870 she delivered a lecture on Percy Bysshe Shelley at the Church of Progress in London, stressing the poet’s political radicalism; in July of that year she published a review essay on William Michael Rossetti’s edition of The Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley in the Westminster Review that earned the praise of Algernon Charles Swinburne and led Rossetti to issue a corrected edition in 1878. While Blind’s name was not attached to this essay, her authorship was well known in London’s literary community, though even her friends and colleagues may have been surprised by her bold praise of Prometheus Unbound as an enfant terrible of a poem designed to take by storm that triple-headed power which rules the world: theology, monarchy, and matrimony. One year later, Blind took to the pages of the Dark Blue, a new Oxford-based journal that during its brief and shining moment published prose and art by many of Britain’s leading Pre-Raphaelites and aesthetes. Her wide-ranging publications in this journal are those of a feminist aesthete who could write haunting poems about haunted lovers, erudite essays on Icelandic poetry, and short fiction exploring the corrosive effects of class divisions on human relations. In the fall of 1872, as her association with the Dark Blue was ending, she began reviewing contemporary poetry and fiction for the Athenaeum, where over the next fifteen years she passed judgment on a wide range of contemporary writers, from William Morris to Margaret Oliphant. Before the year was out she published Selections from the Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley for the Tauchnitz Collection of British Authors containing an introductory Memoir of Shelley’s life, and in the following year, she brought out her translation of David Friedrich Strauss’s Der Alte und der Neue Glaube: Ein Bekenntnis (The Old Faith and the New: A Confession). In this book Strauss follows the demythologizing impulse first expressed in Das Leben Jesu (The Life of Jesus, translated into English by George Eliot in 1853) to its logical conclusion, abandoning the Hegelian principles to which he had previously adhered and embracing a distinctly antitheist form of historical and scientific materialism.

The generic range of these early works (poetry, fiction, criticism, biography, translation), as well as their subject matter and themes (female autonomy and agency, antitheism, aestheticism, the interrelationship of literary and political radicalism), indicates the aesthetic principles and themes that would characterize the remainder of Blind’s career. They also indicate the cosmopolitan nature of her sensibility and outlook. The same year she issued her Shelley edition, another Anglo-Jewish writer, Benjamin Disraeli, delivered his Crystal Palace speech in which he castigated those who, like Blind, professed cosmopolitan views—in terms that indicate the politically charged nature of late-Victorian cosmopolitanism. Delivered two years before Disraeli would return as prime minister to lead the Tory government for the next four years, this speech illuminates the reasons Blind’s career and writing mattered to her contemporaries, and why her story still speaks to contemporary cultural debates. Disraeli aligns the Conservatives with nationalism and the Liberals (and their leader William Gladstone) with cosmopolitansm, which he equates with radicalism on the Continent. He also attempts to enlist the British working classes in the Conservative cause, claiming they repudiate cosmopolitan principles. They adhere to national principles. They are for maintaining the greatness of the kingdom and the empire, and they are proud of being subjects of our sovereign and members of such an empire.¹ Blind’s anti-monarchical, antitheist, anti-imperialist ideas, not to mention her socialism, made her an unnamed target of Disraeli’s speech.

Disraeli’s dichotomies obscure what are in fact a range of complex political positions. His opposition of nationalism and cosmopolitanism, for example, leaves no room for Blind and her friend William Morris, socialists who also adhered to national principles in the sense that they were English citizens who organized to support national movements in Germany and Italy. Moreover, Blind and Morris were simultaneously cosmopolitans, socialists and aesthetes, and their careers challenge those who have cast the aesthetic movement as the apolitical precursor to the avant-garde.² As Elizabeth Prettejohn has suggested, the motto art for art’s sake should be understood not as the name of an art theory, but rather as the statement of the problem.³ Since much of Blind’s writing contributed to a tradition of aestheticist political intervention, this emphasis is particularly important. Borrowing a phrase from Friedrich Nietzsche, Regina Gagnier describes late-Victorian cosmopolitans like William Morris as citizens of the world who perceived no conflict between individualism and the social state, who never fell into the depoliticized idealism that that phrase evokes today."⁴ This is especially relevant to Blind, whose career coincided with the revival of socialist internationalism in Britain, Europe, the Americas, and Australasia (the Second International was formed in Paris in 1889, the year Blind published The Ascent of Man, many of whose poems express a kind of apocalyptic socialism). Like her countryman Nietzsche—whose books Beyond Good and Evil and Human, All Too Human her friend Helen Zimmern would translate into English—Blind writes from the perspective of those free spirits or good Europeans who in Nietzsche’s words are characterized by a dangerous curiosity for an undiscovered world, one that flames and flickers up in all the senses.⁵ Blind uses a similar metaphor to express this same curiosity in Birds of Passage, her last volume of poetry. Implicitly rejecting Western exceptionalism, Blind invites her readers in one poem to honor the Egyptian god Horus:

In manifold disguises,

And under many names,

Thrice-holy son of Isis,

We worship him who rises

A child-god fledged in flames.

In order to understand late-Victorian cosmopolitanism, Gagnier writes, we need to give up vulgar notions of socialism that see it as incompatible with individualism or with the freedoms and choice that modern citizens have come to expect. But we also need to give up modern market notions of individualism that see it as unimpeded personal sovereignty.⁶ Morris, for instance, determined to balance the Fine (the domain of the aesthetic) and the Good (the domain of ethics and politics), insisted in 1889 that variety of life is as much an aim of true Communism as equality of condition, and nothing but an union of these two will bring about real freedom.⁷ Blind anticipates this argument in her 1870 essay on Rossetti’s edition of Shelley when she argues for the inseparability of what she calls the Beautiful, the True, and the Good. Asking what would become of the Beautiful if, securely dammed up against the influx of moral convictions and the speculations and discoveries of the reasoning faculties, it were subsisting in proud isolation only on and through itself, she answers that the world would be deprived of such epics as The Divine Comedy and Paradise Lost, as well as all of tragic drama, which has its foundations laid in the ethical convictions of mankind (86). Morris and other forced and voluntary Victorian cosmopolitans, in Gagnier’s words, conceived of themselves and were perceived by others as international comrades, international feminists, translators, Europeans, and even world citizens.⁸ For Blind, whom Richard Garnett would describe as a traveler, continually on the move from land to land, who accumulated the impressions derived from many different regions, and many different societies,⁹ this self-conception was part of her birthright and her status as an expatriate.

Blind’s cosmopolitan identity is distinct from that of Morris, however, and not only because of her gender. In William Michael Rossetti’s loaded words, She was of Jewish race.¹⁰ Though she was thoroughly secular in her outlook, and unlike her friend Amy Levy did not self-identify as Jewish, she was often identified as such in ways that also cast her as an outsider. This is important because one of the late-century debates concerning cosmopolitanism is directly bound up in questions of Jewish identity and citizenship. Were Jews considered rooted citizens of their nations, or rootless cosmopolitans? Anti-Semites cited Svengali (in fiction) and the Rothschild banking family (in fact) as proof of the latter. In this debate, cosmopolitan is a pejorative term meaning stateless and not deserving of a state, as in the myth of the Wandering Jew. Though Blind was herself a self-confessed wanderer, and frequently traveled on the Continent, she also thought of herself and described herself as English. In the words of her friend William Sharp, Nothing ever so disconcerted or even offended her as the imputation that she spoke or wrote English marvelously well for a German.¹¹ She would have been especially offended by the brief summary of her career in the 9 June 1900 issue of the London Times, occasioned by the posthumous Poetical Works of Mathilde Blind, which insisted on her outsider status, calling her a clever and vehement writer who never attained the status of poet because she never learnt to use our speech with perfect freedom.

At the same time, she identified and sympathized with those struggling for self-determination on the Continent as well as in Scotland and Ireland—a sympathy linked in part to her awareness of the Jews’ history of being treated as aliens. For this reason Nathan Sznaider’s Jewish Memory and the Cosmopolitan Order provides a valuable framework for discussing Blind’s subject position, especially his appropriation of Anthony Appiah’s concept of rooted cosmopolitanism.¹² Sznaider’s observation that throughout much of their history Jews were both a nation and cosmopolitan, living in a constant tension between particularism and universalism, also relates to two other late-Victorian debates. The first concerns nationalism and internationalism. Though Disraeli’s simplifications elide this fact, both liberal and socialist versions of internationalism were circulating at the time of his speech, as well as positions that combined them. The liberal version derived from Kant’s essay Perpetual Peace, in which he first advocated a league of nations—the inspiration for the League of Nations established after World War I (which Blind’s half sister Ottilie would campaign for). The socialist version envisions the eventual disappearance of nation-states. While Blind supported the formation of independent national states (the goal of the European revolutions of 1848) and later Irish Home Rule, she was also one of those who looked toward an altogether different future. In the words she used to translate David Strauss’s unsympathetic definition of cosmopolitanism in The Old Faith and the New, she would have the large consolidated states resolve themselves into groups of small confederated republics, organized on the socialistic principle, between which, thenceforth, differences of language and nationality could no longer act as barriers, or prove the cause of strife (301).¹³

This links Blind and her career to a related late-century debate, that concerning particularism and universalism. Sznaider writes that the Jewish experience straddles the interstices of universal identifications and particular attachments, and that cosmopolitanism combines appreciation of difference and diversity with efforts to conceive of new democratic forms of political rule beyond the nation-state.¹⁴ Blind was a German-born child of the Enlightenment who imbibed the totalizing ideas of Kant, Hegel, Feuerbach, Strauss, and Marx—and later Comte, Wollstonecraft, and J. S. Mill. And her own universalist ideals—concerning universal suffrage, equality of the sexes, the religion of humanity, and socialism—were shaped by them. Yet they were also productively complicated by her particular experiences of alienation—as a Jewish female, a sexual nonconformist, a political radical, and an expatriate. She understood that those who formulated universalist ideals often ignored the realities of race, class, and (in particular) gender. Her writing does not. Like cosmopolitanism as defined by Sznaider, it is sensitive to historic cultural particularities, respecting the specific dignity and burden of a group, a people, a culture.¹⁵ The next two sections of this chapter will explore the particular ways in which Blind’s childhood experiences and early education contributed to her becoming a rooted cosmopolitan in her adopted home.

She was born Mathilda Cohen on 21 March 1841 in Mannheim, then part of the Grand Duchy of Baden in southwestern Germany (Germany would not become a unified nation for another thirty years).¹⁶ The Cohen Family Book lists her parents as Jacob Abraham Cohen and Friederike (née Ettlinger), Jewish citizens of Mannheim. Mathilde’s mother, whom Garnett described as a woman possessing the beauty which, equally with many of her mental characteristics, became her daughter’s heritage,¹⁷ had married Jacob Cohen in 1839, when she was nineteen and he was forty-nine. The couple had two children, Mathilde and Ferdinand, born in 1844. (Jacob’s first marriage had produced a son, Meyer Jacob, who would make Mathilde the main beneficiary of his will in 1892.) While the Cohen Family Book describes Jacob’s occupation as partikulier, or merchant entrepreneur, Garnett calls him a retired banker of independent means.¹⁸ Given Mannheim’s importance as a commercial shipping center, it is quite possible he was both at different times in his career.

Whatever the sources of Jacob Cohen’s income, it helped fund the revolutionary activities of both Friederike and Karl Blind, even before Cohen’s death in 1848. Friederike met Karl Blind in 1845, when she was twenty-six and he was nineteen. Blind was a Protestant, working-class radical and a scholarship student at Heidelberg University, though in 1846 he was expelled for writing an article denouncing the punishment of a freethinking soldier. Despite their different class and religious backgrounds, both were committed to a united Germany under a republican government with a socialist constitution, and by 1847 they were combining forces—which also suggests that Friederike was estranged from her husband by this time. Karl and Friederike traveled together to Bavaria in August 1847, with Mathilde and Ferdinand in tow. Karl Blind describes this trip in part 1 of his self-aggrandizing five-part series In Years of Storm and Stress in the Cornhill Magazine, written some thirty years after the events it describes. These were glorious August days, he writes. A hot sun shone when we made a trip, with Friederike’s children and their governess, to Neustadt on the Haardt—a little town known for the advanced views of its inhabitants, which were then shared by the large majority of the people of Rhenish Bavaria.¹⁹ They were there to disseminate Karl Peter Heinzen’s pamphlet The German Famine and the German Princes, appealing to the working classes to participate in demonstrations known as the bread and potato riots, and when they did so they were arrested, tried, and imprisoned on charges of high treason. After a short examination, we were separately caged. . . . The children were sent back with the governess to Durkheim, and afterwards to Mannheim. They were Mathilde, who later became distinguished in England as a poetess, and Ferdinand.²⁰ In the remainder of this essay, we learn more about their incarceration, including the conditions of their cells, their prison readings (books on political economy, jurisprudence, and Bulwer Lytton’s novel The Last Days of Pompeii for him, the works of Ludwig Feuerbach for her), and their staggered releases before the end of the year. Friederike returned to Mannheim and her children (and presumably her husband) while Karl remained in prison for another month. In March of the following year, he became one of the leaders of the Baden uprising, and then a member of the short-lived provisional government.

In October 1848, when she was seven and a half, Mathilde Blind’s father died. Her only oblique reference to the emotional toll of this event was recorded more than thirty years later in a diary entry by her close friend William Michael Rossetti, who hosted her at his home on 25 January 1880 along with the painter Ford Madox Brown and his wife Emma. In the course of the evening, Rossetti reported, Brown recalled that one year during his childhood he passed a whole year in great mental dismay, having somehow (he can’t fix how) come to the conclusion that all he saw about him, including his parents +c., might be nothing but a vision + simulacrum. This revelation sparked a similar memory in Mathilde, who told the group that she also in childhood was subject to fancies + superstitious terrors. For instance, one day . . . lifting her infant brother Rudolf from the cradle, it suddenly struck her that he must be a changeling, + she dropped him again, + scurried away.²¹ This would have occurred a few years after her father’s death, and it vividly conveys the experience of a world suddenly grown strange and menacing—a feeling Freud would later explore in his essay on the uncanny.

Blind’s emotional turmoil was playing out, and likely intensified by, the political ruptures partly instigated by her mother and stepfather. In 1848 her future stepfather participated in the uprising in the Grand Duchy of Baden led by Friedrich Hecker. The next year, he joined the band of liberals headed by Gustav Struve that invaded southern Germany. He and Struve were taken prisoner and sentenced to eight years’ imprisonment in Bruschal, but after eight months’ confinement they were both freed by fellow revolutionaries during the May 1849 uprising. Karl Blind then made his way to Karlsruhe, and from there he was sent by the Baden provisional government as an envoy to Paris. There he met Louis Blanc, the socialist and advocate of workers’ cooperatives who was a member of the provisional government of France, as well as Karl Marx, a supporter of the revolutions in Germany and France, who was soon to become a fellow refugee with Blind in London. On 13 June he was arrested for conspiracy along with his fellow revolutionary Alexandre Ledru Rollin, and after spending two months in La Force jail, he was expelled from France. He then traveled to Brussels, where Friederike, Mathilde, and Ferdinand had moved earlier that year. Prussian troops had defeated the Revolutionary army in Baden in July, and in August, Blind traveled to England with Marx and Sebastian Seiler, another participant in the 1848–49 revolutions.²² All three sought and were granted political asylum.

The next three years were eventful for Karl Blind, Friederike, Ferdinand, and Mathilde. After the failure of revolutions on the Continent, London became the chief center of exile politics. Karl Blind shuttled between Belgium and London, between his commitments to his fellow revolutionary refugees and to Friedrike. He and Karl Marx, along with several other German expatriates, established the Committee of Support for German Political Refugees in London in September 1849, one year after Marx and Engels published The Communist Manifesto (in London and in German). He joined Marx’s Communist League the next year. When Blind first arrived in London, he rented a room in Grosvenor Square, and Marx stayed here until his family arrived from Paris.²³ The two were mostly on good terms in 1849 and the early 1850s, a period that represented the high-water mark of their personal relationship and political affiliation.²⁴ But starting in the mid-1850s, Marx grew increasingly frustrated with Blind. What Marx called Karl’s genius for self-advertisement was emblematic for Marx of Blind’s determination to remake himself as the leader of the German petit-bourgeois exiles in England. Marx’s letters to Engels in the 1850s and ’60s are full of execrations against Blind, whose name he repeatedly associates with terms like slimy, swine, and, most damningly, philistine. Writing to Engels in 1864 about the Italian revolutionary Garibaldi’s April visit to England, he excoriates Blind for insinuating himself into the meetings honoring Garibaldi at the Crystal Palace. What a talent for puffing himself up the last-named hydrocephalous crab-louse displays!²⁵

Back in Belgium, Karl Blind’s affair with Friederike continued; they had two children together—Rudolf in 1850 and Ottilie in 1852, both born in Belgium—and also they married around this time.²⁶ Mathilde and Ferdinand Cohen then took the last name Blind (Ferdinand would later refer to himself as Cohen-Blind), pronounced blint in Germany but likely blinned in their adopted country. Karl brought Friederike to London in October 1851 in search of a home, and while there they visited the Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace on 6 October. They also paid a call on Karl and Jenny Marx at their home at 28 Dean Street, Soho. The visit did not go well for Friederike. In his letter to Frederick Engels about the visit, Marx describes Friederike as a vivacious Jewess who was showing off on atheism, Feuerbach, etc. He then reports that I attacked Feuerbachus, but very civilly of course, after which Wilhelm Pieper, a fellow revolutionary and at the time Marx’s private secretary, amplified Marx’s attack in a more dogmatic tone. Then, Marx adds, I noticed that the woman was in a flood of tears.²⁷ This would not be the last time Marx mocked a female member of the Blind family. In 1883, the last year of his life, while working on the second edition of The Communist Manifesto, Marx wrote to Engels about his illness and alluded to Mathilde in a way that implicitly criticizes her for taking her stepfather’s name and for her public persona as a cosmopolitan aesthete: "Since my long . . . confinement to the house began, but especially as a result of constant nausea, or, to use the more aesthetic south German expression, à la Madame Karl Blind, née Cohen, as a result of daily ‘puking’ (caused by my cough), I have up till been scarcely capable of pressing on with the revision."²⁸

While her mother and stepfather visited London, Mathilde stayed behind in Brussels. From 1851 to 1852 she was enrolled in a boarding school—likely Constantin Héger’s school, which Charlotte and Emily Brontë attended in 1842 and where Charlotte subsequently taught. The results of Mathilde’s early education—by her mother and governess more than her boarding school teachers—can be seen in the first of her poems that survives: a birthday ode for her mother’s thirty-third birthday. It is handwritten in German Sütterlin script, and dated 15 August 1852.²⁹ The poem was composed in the small village of Ghistelles near Bruges and the Belgian coast, where Mathilde and her family were on holiday. It simultaneously illustrates her precocious talent, her literary impulse, and her close bond with her mother. The expansive geography of the poem combines the near-mythical (Thule, which then referred to the far north, specifically Scandinavia, and Albion, the ancient name for Great Britain) with the Continental (Italy, France, Germany, England).

Consisting of eight irregular stanzas of unrhymed lines, the poem begins with a two-line stanza describing a friendly day, a joyous occasion / to wish you health and a happy life full of love. The second stanza refers to this as the second time her mother has celebrated her birthday at Flanders shore, a place both beautiful and sublime, for the ocean has a hundred shapes, / As the fable teaches us through the shape-shifting Nereus. The third stanza describes another trip taken with her mother, to the south towards France (presumably near Mathilde’s birthplace in Mannheim), where valleys and gorges and mountains . . . reach deeply into the land, and where the barren silence hears no step, no tone, no sound. / And the song of the lark only sounds from shimmering clouds. Even at this young age Blind is exhibiting a quality that would characterize her mature nature poetry, what Garnett in 1898 would call a "feeling for nature . . . far beyond that which merely prompts clever descriptive passages; her local poems are