Private Lives Revealed: Letters, Diaries, History
Life Lines: 19th Century Women's Letters and Diaries / Patricia Clarke
It is hardly necessary to state how valuable nineteenth century women's letters and diaries are in illuminating history, in adding another dimension to the past through their unveiling of the rich detail of women's lives. They should be treasured also for the central role they played in women's lives and for their literary qualities.
The first challenge, however, is to find these letters and diaries and it's mainly about this aspect that I'll talk today-my experiences in finding nineteenth century women's letters and diaries and some of the limitations as well as the richness of this resource. (See also Pat Clarke's article "Family history and beyond", which appeared in the June 1997 National Library of Australia News, on a similar topic.
My first encounter began in the National Library where I discovered a microfilm copy of the letters written by a group of governesses whose migration to British colonies in the 1860s and 1870s had been financed by the London-based Female Middle Class Emigration Society. Here in their own words were the experiences of women who had come alone to a new world where the values inculcated into them about their social position, expectations of marriage, and an ordered class system were turned upside down.
There were government schemes for assisting migrants with their passage money but, in a class-conscious age, this particular group of governesses retained their independence by borrowing money for their fares from the Female Middle Class Emigration Society. When they repaid these loans in instalments many wrote accompanying letters and it is these that have been preserved. Their letters were laboriously copied into letterbooks now in the Fawcett Library, University of London Polytechnic; the copies here were microfilmed in 1963 as part of the Australian Joint Copying Project.
What emerges from the best of the letters are fresh perceptions on life in colonial Australia and a fascinating perspective on the attitudes and prejudices of the type of British middle-class women who migrated under this scheme.
There are reservations, however, about these letters-they were written by members of a small, atypical group of nineteenth century migrants and they were, in a sense, duty letters written not to family and friends, but to a Society. This sometimes limited their frankness in revealing personal details, but it ensured that their letters were very rich in observations on economic and social conditions because this was the information the Society wanted as it decided whether to support the migration of more governesses.
Seen through the eyes of these letter writers, colonial society was much more complex than it appears in official reports, social statistics or newspaper reports, to name a few sources.
There were some success stories, but there were at least as many who suffered great hardship and degradation. They had decided to leave Britain because there were so few opportunities for educated women to obtain employment and they'd been misled into believing that governesses were in great demand in the colonies. Instead they entered a buyers' market where there were always more governesses seeking employment than there were jobs. During times of economic depression so widespread in the 1860s the market dried up almost completely, a situation that was to be exacerbated with the introduction of free State education.
Their letters document the extreme difficulty educated women faced in obtaining employment. One emigrant governess stood in a queue of 90 women waiting to be interviewed for a position in Sydney. 'The avenue to her house was peopled with girls,' she wrote. [1] The plight of another, Eliza Bernard, who travelled to Brisbane on the Conway in 1862 was desperate. She didn't write her first letter to the Society until nearly three years after her arrival when after obtaining a position in Sydney she was able to make the first repayment on her loan. She wrote:
I regret greatly it has not been in my power to send it to you before; it is only in the last nine months that I have been in a situation; the first two years I was most unfortunate, in fact, suffered the greatest poverty. I tell you this that you may dismiss from your mind it was from want of principle I did not send the money before. [2]
Another, Laura Jones, was tryannised for her religious beliefs in a small mining settlement, Waranga, near Rushworth on the Goulburn goldfields in northern Victoria. She had obtained a position as assistant teacher in a small school:
I soon discovered that everyone connected with the school were dissenters and objected to me on account of my religious principles. I couldn't and wouldn't go to their chapel, until at last I was obliged to give up my situation. For five months following I existed by doing needlework for the diggers' wives ... [3]
Those who did find constant employment were often exploited. Mary Bayly, employed by Robert Hills of 'Marionette', Cook's River Road, Tempe, near Sydney was required to teach six children not only the normal subjects but French, German, Latin, music and singing. Because she couldn't teach drawing her salary was reduced. She wrote:
until late in the evening I have no time to myself. I rarely see any of my friends ...
It is almost more than my health can stand working from morning to night without even time for a walk. [4]
There's another aspect to the predicament of these governesses. These were women with deeply ingrained ideas of status. They almost all, for instance, objected to travelling second class-although they had to borrow money to pay even second-class fares-not mainly because of discomfort, but because they felt superior to the people with whom they had to mix. Comments such as that made by Miss Cary, who wrote, 'no Lady should come out on those emigrant ships', were common. [5]
These attitudes made the success of some at least unlikely. Rosa Phayne wrote after her arrival in 1869. 'I was not an hour in it [Melbourne] when I regretted deeply the step I had taken; had I possessed the money I would have returned in the next ship ... no one with the tastes, habits or feelings of a lady should ever come out to Australia'. [6] When she obtained a position on a station in the Victorian Wimmera she described her employer: 'she has not one feeling like a lady, although one ostensibly'. [7]
Like others in this group of governesses, Rosa Phayne regarded herself as a lady but found it difficult to discern ladylike qualities in a colonial woman who may have been doing the family washing or preparing the meals-in effect breaking all the rules that applied in England regarding what was genteel and ladylike behaviour.
Louisa Geoghegan, an acute if class-conscious observer of country life in the Victorian Wimmera, had a similar view. She commented:
In the district for three gentlemen there are six mushrooms [upstarts] ... the mushroom class pay largely but expect rather queer things, viz. that the Governess should light the schoolroom fire and similar things ... [8]
Interesting and valuable as these letters are they are an extreme example of a more general problem-that most nineteenth century letters and diaries that have survived were written by middle and upper class women. This is a limitation in presenting women's lives through letters and diaries. The more obvious one, of course, is the absence of Aboriginal women except as they were observed and commented on by European women. In varying degrees, these observers had the prejudices of all classes of European society, that it was legitimate to take land from the original inhabitants and that any defence they made of their land was unjustified attack.
There's nearly as complete an absence of letters and diaries of convicts and working women. Researching the convict section for Life Lines[9], I discovered few letters and no diaries written by the 3 000 women convicts transported to New South Wales and Tasmania. Illiteracy was part, but not all, of the problem. For those who were illiterate, their inability to contact their families and friends, and sometimes even small children left behind in England, Ireland or Scotland, whom they had no real hope of ever seeing again, was an added punishment.
A surprising number, however, were literate-over a quarter of the women who arrived on the First Fleet and who married within the next two years were able to write their names in the marriage register. [10] A more comprehensive study of the latter years of transportation indicates that of women who arrived as convicts between 1826 and 1840 a roughly similar figure of 22 per cent could read and write. [11] But for those able to write there were other problems. Paper was expensive and scarce, mails were infrequent and unreliable. Until the introduction of the penny post in 1840 the cost of postage was determined by the distance and the letter size, and was often paid by the recipient. One way to economise was to cross-write-writing first across the sheet then turning it at right angles and writing again. These letters were difficult to write and read and the difficulties are enormously increased, as many of you would know, when they have to be researched on microfilm.
Even when these obstacles were overcome, letters from convicts and from
working-class women would have been sent, generally, to poorer families, who
were often forced by economic circumstances to move from place to place and in
the process to throw out letters. It is not surprising that few have survived.
The letters of the great convict letter writer Margaret Catchpole survived
because they were written to, or collected by, her former employers in England,
people with a substantial and permanent abode. Her letters are the only known
record of a woman convict's life in her own words over a considerable period
during the early years of the settlement at Sydney. They are a rich direct
source of information about many aspects of life. She wrote the only eyewitness
account of the devastating flood on the Hawkesbury River in March 1806.
Margaret Catchpole was saved by the arrival of a rescue boat but many others
were drowned. The enormity of the disaster overwhelmed the settlers and caused
a severe food shortage with great rises in the price of food. She wrote of her
plight as she perched on top of a house:
we had not been there [long] before the chimney went down and the middle wall went, then I expected the next chimney to go and all the walls and then to be crushed to dead for the water was about five feet deep in the house at that time it was that depth in about 2 hours ... but great providence turned up a boat to save us from a watery grave, come and took us away ... Some poor creatures riding in their houses some on their barns crying out for God sake to be saved others firing their guns in the greatest distress for a boat. There was many thousands of head of all kind of cattle was lost and as many bushels of all sorts was lost of grain so now this place is in great distress for wheat. [12]
Anyone looking for intimate written records of women convicts, apart from Margaret Catchpole, in the early years of settlement is forced to take second best. [13] These are letters written by women convicts published in various ways in official records. Some were published in British newspapers and then recorded in Historical Records of Australia or Historical Records of New South Wales. In some cases, these may have been written on behalf of the women; in all cases they appear to have been standardised in terms of style and grammar. Some may have been written with publication in mind rather than as purely private communications. Despite their limitations they provide striking accounts of the desolation of women convicts, the deprivations they suffered, particularly those with young children or pregnant, and the acute distress of those who were separated from children. One of these letters, unaddressed and unsigned, was written by a woman transported on the First Fleet. This unknown woman who probably arrived on the Lady Penrhyn which carried more than half of the First Fleet female convicts wrote:
I take the first opportunity that has been given to us to acquaint you with our disconsolate situation in this solitary waste of the creation. Our passage, you may have heard by the first ships, was tolerably favourable; but the inconveniences since suffered for want of shelter, bedding &c., are not to be imagined by any stranger ... As for the distresses of the women, they are past description ... [14]
A few other convict letters can be found in other official records. A letter by Lydia Esden, a victim of prostitution on the convict ship Janus, was published as part of the evidence when an official inquiry was held into the conduct of the captain and officers of the ship. [15] When she arrived in New South Wales in 1820 she was pregnant to a ship's officer, one of the many victims of officers and sailors to many of whom women prisoners were fair game. Her letter was written to Nicholas Bayly of Bayly Park, Cabramatta, to whom she was assigned, begging for a pass so that she could visit Sydney to confront the officer concerned.
My Fellingd is Mutch Hurt At the Disponding News I Heard From you This morning. That of Being Put off with the Passes. As you have given me But Little Hopes After prommising me you would. Sir! I hope you Will Not be Worse than your word. [16]
It is the letter of a woman prepared to fight vehemently for her rights, yet possessing a touching naivety in imagining, erroneously, that the ship's officer who had seduced her would adhere to promises to support her. It reveals by implication the devastating position in which many women convicts found themselves, not only sentenced to a remote country but pregnant on arrival after being prostituted either through rape or because of the position of mastery of ships' crews.
A letter from another women, Mary McDonald, an ex-convict who became a farmer's wife at the Field of Mars in the Ryde district of New South Wales, can be found in another type of official report-the appendix to the inquiry by Commissioner J.T. Bigge on agriculture and trade in New South Wales. [17] Mary McDonald wrote to her daughter in England in June 1806 urging her to migrate with her children. Her letter was recorded in this way because she wrote in glowing terms of the prolific wheat yields, abundant fruit crops and fine cattle. But it also contains a strikingly emotive phrase describing the heart-wrenching separation many women convicts endured when forcibly separated from their children. She longed for her daughter's safe arrival, she wrote, 'that I may once embrace you in my longing arms to clasp you'. [18]
Letters by working-class women are almost as scarce as those written by
convicts. When I began researching Life Lines with Dale Spender our aim
was to locate as many women's letters and diaries as possible written in the
first 50 years or so of European settlement. We searched catalogues in all the
major libraries, read local and family histories, and referred to published
directories, for instance Women in Australia. An Annotated Guide to
Records published in 1977 and now unfortunately nearly 20 years old, and
the bicentennial Australian Historic Records Register, a listing of
manuscript sources in private hands. We were looking in particular for new
voices, the records of women previously unpublished but the result would have
been unbalanced if we'd ignored the better-known records of women such as
Elizabeth Macarthur, Georgiana Molloy and the Bussell sisters. Often what we
found were single letters-not as valuable as a series-but each opened a small
window on the life of an individual at a particular moment and in a particular
setting.
Some letters had survived in haphazard ways. I got the name of the
donor of a letter written by Jane Synnot from Launceston in March 1838 to her
aunt in Ireland from the Mitchell Library in order to ask permission to quote
it. Surprisingly the letter was not donated by the Synnot family-a well-known
Victorian western district family of graziers and politicians-but by a Captain
Tom Ward of Viewmont, New South Wales. His reply giving permission to use the
letter disclosed that he'd collected many early letters purely for their post
marks. His interest as a postal historian was in the carriage of mail between
Britain and the Australian colonies. Fortunately he'd realised that the letters
themselves had historic value and allowed the Mitchell Library to copy them.
Regardless of how haphazardly they were kept, women's letters and
diaries from these early years are a rich resource. Life Lines was at
least half as long again in manuscript form and had to be cut to achieve an
economic publication.
Writing letters was both part of women's work and an art that was part of the genteel world they'd left behind, part of the literary inheritance of middle- and upper-class women. Letters were often written to be read aloud and to be passed around among relatives and friends. When the Bussell sisters, Fanny and Bessie, arrived in Western Australia in 1833 to join their four brothers, they were determined to share their experiences with their mother and family members still at home. They referred to the journals they kept as 'public reading property'. In them they recorded their daily lives and then parcelled them up and sent them home when a ship was sailing. Their journals were 'conversations' with family and friends. Often written when some sort of drama was taking place, they convey a powerful sense of immediacy. They are adventure stories in which the authors cast themselves in the role of heroines. They convey to their readers and listeners how wonderful, strange or sometimes terrifying were their experiences in a distant and exotic land. But keeping everyone informed, maintaining relationships, and helping to shape themselves and their own worlds were not the only purposes of these journals. Like conversations, where there are frequent interruptions and changes of topic, in these journals there are sudden shifts of direction as the writer thinks of important items to include, or just random thoughts that crowd in. Fanny wrote from Perth in April 1833, 'Oh! may we be found worthy of you our own Mother and as useful to the dear boys as we hope to be. We have two cows, one is a heifer and the other in calf.' [19]
In the colonial context letters were essential at a basic level to get
supplies ranging from bolts of cloth to needle and thread, patterns for
children's clothes, recipes, seeds to plant, books and periodicals. They were
also essential in order to stay in touch with loved ones at home so that the
family would not fade from the writer's memory or the writer from family
memory.
For many women thrown often unwillingly into a new country far from
their family and friends, writing letters and keeping diaries helped to make
sense of their lives. Explaining to family and friends at home the
extraordinary situations in which they found themselves and the demands made on
them helped them to adjust.
From the accounts that women give in their letters and diaries it's
clear that their contribution to the establishment of the Australian colonies
was both enormous and essential. In the process the women themselves were
changed by the challenges, the labours and the opportunities of their new
lives. Their letters reveal lives of hardship and self-sacrifice but also the
rewards in personal self-worth. Elizabeth Macarthur, for example, was for
periods totalling over 12 years (when her husband was absent in England)
responsible for running the Macarthur farming and business enterprises-growing
crops, breeding sheep, developing a dairy, marketing farm products-at the same
time as she cared for her younger children who remained in New South Wales. She
wasn't tempted to sell up and return to England as her husband suggested. She'd
come to enjoy the responsibility and authority of a life that would have been
unthinkable had she remained in England.
The demands and relative independence of colonial life were difficult
to explain to families at home. One of the topics that preoccupies colonial
letter writers is trying to conform to the standards of home while breaking
just about every genteel rule in their daily existence. A lady was not meant to
do the family washing, prepare meals, sew her own clothes, engage in buying or
selling, or embark on farming, grazing or dairying enterprises. The task of
these letter writers was to convince their audience that they suffered no loss
of refinement-despite the hard work and lack of civilising influences. Their
letters indicate the growing gulf between the lifestyles and values of colonial
women and those who had not ventured from the rigid class structure of England.
Sometimes it was easy for colonial women to present their lives in a
positive light to their English families. There was much about the excitement
and the freedom, about the challenge, the change and the fulfilment that
Englishwomen-whose daily existence was so much more circumscribed by edicts on
decorum-could find very appealing. Elizabeth Hawkins' account of her crossing
of the Blue Mountains in 1820, with eight young children and her 70-year-old
mother, the first European women to cross to the Bathurst Plains, made such
dramatic reading to her sister in England that she sent it to The Times
in London with the idea of sharing it with a wider audience. [20] From its beginning her story raised the
expectations of her readers:
I had now before me this tremendous journey. I was told I deserved to be immortalised for the attempt and that Govt. could not do too much for us taking such a family to a settlement where none had gone before.
Then as they approached the most precipitous range:
The following morning the 18th a morning never to be forgotten for to all my complaints about the road I was constantly silenced by 'Say nothing about it until you get to the big Noll.' We were now within eleven miles of it ... I desired Tom [her eldest child, aged twelve] to ride on and give us some account of it he soon came galloping back. 'Oh Ma you will never get up I am sure you won't I can't see much of the road but I can see the valley you are to reach it is dreadful' our courage began to fail by the time we reached the top ... [21]
And so Elizabeth Hawkins continued her account of her journey, so
fearful at the time, so courageous in recollection.
The circumstances of letter writing enhanced the qualities of drama and
suspense. Because often months went by before there was the opportunity to send
letters, they were added to over a period of weeks or months becoming serial
letters, often indistinguishable from diaries. Many diaries from this period
were daily records to be sent home rather than private records of inner
thoughts.
The keeping of diaries is a subject in itself. I would just like to
mention one aspect of the diaries of Mary Braidwood Mowle who lived on the
Limestone Plains (now the site of Canberra) in the years around 1850 and whom I
used as the subject of a book. [22]
Mary Mowle had been brought up as the privileged daughter of a large
landowner, Dr Thomas Braidwood Wilson after whom Braidwood was named, but had
been left a penniless orphan following the depression of the early 1840s and
had married a man in a similar financial situation. I'll read a couple of
extracts and I think you'll agree that keeping this diary fulfilled a deep
emotional need-that hovering around the bare facts she records are feelings of
fury and frustration, despair, pride and resilience. She wrote on 7 January
1851:
The same old story, get up, dress the children, feed the poultry, breakfast, go to work [she always referred to sewing as work], put Kate to sleep, hear Florence her lesson, dine, read, feed chickens, work till sunset, feed chickens, stroll about till dusk, put Kate to bed, have tea, undress the others-play [the piano] for an hour (my chief solace) work till eleven, go to bed & rise next morning to recommence the same routine. [23]
On 17 April 1851 she wrote :
This was a miserable day for all of us. We had no wood, no tea, no meat, & no flour & we could not succeed in borrowing any of the latter there being a general scarcity of it-glad to get the children off early to bed. [24]
Mary Mowle described her chief solace as playing the piano but it's
obvious that keeping a diary was at least as important as an emotional
solace.
Her diary is interesting from many other aspects-as one example, her
style of writing. She was capable of remarkably direct expressions-the minister
at St John's was a 'regular ninny', the settlers on the Limestone Plains were
'yahoos', but when she returned to Braidwood to visit her mother's and father's
grave she recorded this deeply emotional event in a heightened 'literary'
style.
I was tolerably composed although it cost me severe struggles to subdue my agitation on passing each well remembered spot. When at length we reached the Township and Braidwood, dear, dear Braidwood lay before me, I felt as if crushed to the very earth. I could not describe my feelings. God only knows their sadness & bitterness ... I was soon kneeling by my poor Father's grave, nearly heart broken and completely exhausted. Oh! how did the desolate one long to lie with those she was weeping over & be at rest.' [25]
I had a loan of this diary from a great grandson (a microfilm copy is in the National Library [26]) who gave me permission to attempt to decipher sections obliterated after Mary Mowle's death. But the use of a different ink manufactured at a later date made it impossible for experts to uncover the writing beneath. From the context I was able to speculate that the subject matter was criticism of her husband. The obliterations had been done by a descendant of Stewart Mowle's second marriage.
In recent years I've searched for letters and diaries for another purpose-for use in writing biographies of women writers. Although the use is different, finding these materials is just as difficult and sometimes requires some lateral thinking.
When I began researching Tasma, [27] the Tasmanian-born writer Jessie Couvreur who wrote under this name, I had very little information apart from some sketchy personal details and records of her novels and journalistic writing. At an early stage I wrote to every Huybers in Australia whose address I could find-Huybers was her maiden name-in the hope that they might be descended from her brothers. Initially I had the hope that if I pursued every relative, in some cases through three or four generations, I would find an elusive bundle of letters. Research, of course, never lives up to dreams. I still remember my elation at finding one particular letter, fortunately a very important one. Altogether I located only a few letters. The major success from my inquiries was establishing contact with Dr Renée Erdos (a descendant of Tasma's sister, Maria Theresa Loureiro), who lent me two invaluable diaries as well as a few letters.
It would have been very difficult to write Tasma's biography without these diaries-and since the publication of the biography I've edited these diaries for publication by Mulini Press. [28]
Superficially my problem in finding material to write a biography of Queensland-born novelist Rosa Praed was quite the opposite. As an indication of the extent of material, there are about 500 of her letters in the Manuscripts room at the National Library and much other material at both the John Oxley Library, State Library of Queensland, and the National Library. But biographers are never satisfied. The great bulk of her letters in the collection at the National Library are from the last 25 years of her life. They are a remarkable record of the old age of a woman whose personal life continued on a tragic course and whose literary fame had, to a great extent, disappeared. Ideally, I needed more letters from an earlier period when she was at the height of her fame as a novelist and at the centre of London literary and artistic life. I thought of all the well-known people in literary, political, social, theatrical and theosophical circles with whom she corresponded and hoped some of her letters may have survived in the archives of these people. I checked the Location Register of English Literary Manuscripts and Letters at Reading University and the National Register of Archives in London without success. I did succeed, however, in finding a small collection of Rosa Praed's letters through this method of tracing the papers of her correspondents.
This has been a personal account of finding some of the hidden treasures that remain of the lives of some nineteenth century women. I am always hopeful that much more remains to be found.
Notes
- Patricia Clarke, The Governesses: Letters from the Colonies 1862-1882. Melbourne: Hutchinson, 1985, p. 18.
- Ibid., p. 94.
- Ibid., p. 120.
- Ibid., pp. 95-97.
- Ibid., p. 36.
- Ibid., p. 111.
- Ibid., p. 115.
- Ibid., pp. 106-107.
- Patricia Clarke and Dale Spender (eds), Life Lines: Australian Women's Letters and Diaries 1788-1840. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1992.
- B. Penglase, '1788: That Illiterate Freight of Misery', Royal Australian Historical Society Journal, Vol. 75, Part 2, October 1989.
- Deborah Oxley, Convict Maids: The Forced Migration of Women to Australia. Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1996, p. 265.
- Clarke and Spender, op. cit., pp. 13-14. Margaret Catchpole's letters are written in phonetic English which is hard to decipher. The extract here is reproduced with conventional spelling.
- An important letter by Mary Haydock (Reibey) dated 8 October 1792 was discovered in mid-1996 in the Mitchell Library by John Thompson.
- Historical Records of New South Wales, British Museum Papers Newspaper Extracts, Vol. II, pp. 746-747.
- Historical Records of Australia, Series I, Vol. X, 1820, pp. 319-320.
- Clarke and Spender, op. cit., pp. 17-18.
- Bonwick Transcripts, Box 60A, Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales. Transcript of appendix to J.T. Bigge, The State of Agriculture and Trade in New South Wales, 13 March 1823.
- Clarke and Spender, op. cit., p. 29.
- Ibid., pp. 210-211.
- Royal Australian Historical Society Journal, Vol. IX, Part IV, 1923. No record has been found of its publication.
- Clarke and Spender, op. cit., pp. 111, 116.
- Patricia Clarke, A Colonial Woman: The Life and Times of Mary Braidwood Mowle 1827-1857. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1986.
- Ibid., p. 110.
- Ibid., p. 125.
- Ibid., pp. 117-119.
- National Library of Australia, Mfm G2204.
- Patricia Clarke, Tasma: The Life of Jessie Couvreur. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1994.
- Patricia Clarke (ed.), Tasma's Diaries. Canberra: Mulini Press, 1995.
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It is
hardly necessary to state how valuable nineteenth century women's letters and
diaries are in illuminating history, in adding another dimension to the past
through their unveiling of the rich detail of women's lives. They should be
treasured also for the central role they played in women's lives and for their
literary qualities.