Private Lives Revealed: Letters, Diaries, History
Keynote Address
Private Lives and the Fortunate Voyeur / Chris
Tiffin
We write some documents that we expect or hope will be read by many people whom we do not know; we write others with a specific and limited, known audience in mind; a third type-and I think there are comparatively few of these-are written in the expectation that no one else will ever read the documents. Examples of the first category might include a novel, or a letter to a newspaper; examples of the second category might include a commissioned report for a business, or a letter to a friend; examples of the third type might include a shopping list or a personal diary. These categories are not always clear-cut, however. What are ostensibly written as totally private diaries are sometimes shown to intimate friends. An article like this, although ostensibly directed to people unknown to the author, does make certain assumptions about their interests and textual experience.
The key factor in each case is the implied audience. Because writing is a communicative transaction, there is always a sense of the reader we are addressing guiding our pen across the page or our fingers across the keyboard. How we conceive of that audience is a major determinant of how we write. It is actually quite hard to write entirely without a sense of audience, except for the most basic aide-memoire shopping-list kind of purpose. One can experiment with this by trying to write an extended account of something entirely for oneself. You will find that some sense of a readership will keep coming at you and shaping the way you say things.
Writing, then, is usually a two-headed monster, and when the technologies of transmission work flawlessly there are no great problems in the interpretative transaction. However, because writing is usually instantiated-because it is usually embodied in a more permanent form than the particular transaction requires-there is the possibility that a number of subsequent transactions may take place. The document becomes available to a readership for which it was never intended.
And that is what this seminar is largely about. Much historical, biographical and literary research depends upon the use of materials which were written for a very limited audience that is quite different from the one that subsequently reads it. There are obvious practical outcomes of this. The private or semi-private communication makes assumptions about what the audience can take for granted, and uses incomplete names and dates, nicknames, private allusions and so forth that are all meaningful within the shared discourse of author and intended audience but do not belong to the discourse shared by that author and the modern scholar. Add to this the facts that private or semi-private written communications are often hastily written in careless and unfamiliar handwriting, they are seldom proofread, and the paper on which they are written may have suffered from degeneration or tearing, and you have multiple levels of difficulty in interpretation. Worst of all, the document may be made available by well-meaning but fierce librarians only on microfilm, giving you a week's worth of sick headaches and eyestrain.
All these constraints are grimly familiar to anyone who has worked on the documents that flutter from private lives, and perhaps listing them does not convey the true horror of it all to those who have not. But there are corresponding rewards, and there is a particular pleasure in exploring the history of the private. This pleasure, I suggest, is textual voyeurism.
Voyeurism is usually thought of as sexual gratification derived from watching unwitting victims engage in some activity, typically undressing, which renders them sexually vulnerable. It is essentially a scopic pleasure-a pleasure of seeing. But as voyeurs are often not interested in more formalised visual sexuality like strip-shows, the scopic pleasure is not the total, or possibly even the most important, aspect of the experience. Voyeurism breaks a privacy taboo whose gratification may be asexual. As Dorothy Kalins argues in her article 'Voyeurism in New York':
Looking in on people's lives is an agreeable voyeuristic sensation even when there is no intimation of sexuality in what you see. The stimulation is in getting at what used to be withheld. [1]
But since 'what used to be withheld' is the behaviour of another person who believes himself or herself to be unobserved, voyeurism implies a one-sided personal relationship. The gratification of the voyeur is the gratification of knowing another person without that person being aware; it is a gratification of unactualised power because the person observed makes himself or herself vulnerable by paradoxically exhibiting non-exhibitionist behaviour.
We think of voyeurism as a private pleasure, but of course it transfers to the public world with varying degrees of respectability when it is objectified as photojournalism or the activities of private investigators.
Although scholars and editors do not normally lurk outside bedrooms, or scrutinise apartment blocks with high-powered telescopes, in reading unpublished private letters and journals they find themselves in a comparable situation to the voyeur's. They too become privy to information and behaviour which would normally be withheld from them. There is a difference though. The private behaviour observed by the voyeur is unconscious; the victim is not acting out in any way unless it is a pair of people performing for each other. What the voyeuristic scholar of private letters observes, however, is behaviour which is inevitably a performance for a limited audience. As we saw earlier, writing is directed by the audience as well as by the writer.
A letter or other document written with a particular readership in mind makes the writer vulnerable to people outside that readership. The private pleasure of declaring infatuation or lust to a beloved, the relief of admitting depression or indecision to a confidant, the collusive excitement of formulating plots and machinations with an associate all depend on a confidence that the audience is limited and known. But because letters as physical documents outlive the moment, their audience can be subsequently extended with unexpected and even destructive effects to writer or intended recipient or both.
The scholar, then, is in a voyeuristic position. It is a position of cognitive privilege, and there can be situations when that privilege imposes obligations of reticence and self-censorship. I don't intend to discuss the ethics of scholarship, as other speakers in the seminar will have more to say on that. Instead I wish to talk about what has come out of this scholar's privileged voyeurism in reading the letters of a not very well-known nineteenth-century Australian woman.
Over the last 20 years there has been an enormous upswing in interest in less prominent figures from the past. Family history, oral history, collections of ephemera, academic interest in popular culture, and community arts movements all testify to a revivified demotic in our sense of what constitutes history and culture. I am preparing, with Lyn Baer, an edition of letters which belong in this more private arena. These are the letters of Nora Murray-Prior.
In December 1872, Nora Clarina Barton, an aunt of the poet Banjo Paterson, married Thomas Lodge Murray-Prior. Murray-Prior was a prominent member of Brisbane society with assorted cattle properties around Queensland, public service experience as Postmaster-General and a seat in the Legislative Council. His first wife, Matilda, had died four years previously having borne him 11 children; Nora would bear him a further eight. Among the step-children Nora acquired by the marriage was Rosa Caroline, who had married Campbell Praed just a month or two earlier and who went on to become an important novelist. Praed was only five years younger than Nora and a sisterly relationship developed between them immediately. It is Nora's 70 letters to Praed in the 1870s and 1880s, totalling about 120 000 words, that we are editing.
Nora's letters throw light on many aspects of life at the time, but the topic I wish to concentrate on-and this re-raises the spectre of the scholar as voyeur-is Nora's account of her successive pregnancies and confinements.
The proximity of Praed's and Nora's weddings meant that their childbearing overlapped. Praed was to have four children between 1873 and 1879; Nora had eight between 1873 and 1884. It is clear that neither welcomed children and Nora professed to having a horror of large families. The topic is first raised in the extant letters by Nora who refers to her first accouchment as a 'triste affaire' (3 May 1873). Two years later she sympathises with Praed who has just announced her second pregnancy:
I am sorry at the hint you give of future expectations, but you could not expect to go scot-free & you have waited for some time. As for me I shall be bitterly disappointed if I ever see signs of another coming. (mid-1875)
In May 1878 Nora gave birth to her fourth child, and for some reason had become confident that she was proof against further pregnancy:
I have been lining the basket & preparing & adding to the layette-it is so nice to make pretty things for other people & to have no further responsibility in the matter & nicer still to know-as I do-that one is not likely to have such need of pretty things for oneself. (22 Dec 1878)
Why she felt she was proof we cannot know, but the belief was shortlived, for two months later Nora was again pregnant despite having 'had such good reasons too for thinking my tasks & troubles over in that line' (9 Feb 1879). She miscarried, however, and later when again pregnant was 'wicked enough to live in hopes of another catastrophe' (27 July 1879). She is excited when Praed mentions having a recipe for an abortificant:
Please send me the remedy you speak of in your last. I shall have no moral scruples in useing it for I think it wrong to bring children into the world without a fair prospect of educating & settling them in the position to which they were born & [with] those clergyman's families & others in the same position with very limited incomes where a new baby comes every year-the parents having no idea what to do for them as they grow up-I have no sympathy whatever ... I know Florence has a remedy wh she got from her mother-who is an experienced [lady?] but I never felt intimate enough with her to ask her for it-& besides was not sure of its efficiency. (24 November 1879)
But if Praed ever supplied the recipe and Nora tried it it did not work, for she bore the child and became fond of it. Five years later finding herself pregnant again for the second time in little more than a year, she adopted more desperate measures:
What will you say to me?-how will you manifest yr disgust?-when I tell you that I am again sick, sorry & expecting. You can imagine my own feeling on the subject. When it first began I resolved to try heroic remedies so went to town made an appointment with the dentist & had sixteen teeth out-but what was the use?-ordinary rules that effect other women do'nt apply to me at all.-I was soon pulled down & very sick after it, but my prospects remain the same. (21 Dec 1884)
Nora had a reasoned objection to bringing into the world children for whom a place could not easily be made (21 Dec 1884), but she also had a comprehensive distaste for unwanted pregnancy that embraced the immediate physiological and its attendant psychological, and the long-term commitment and constraint that childbirth entailed. She writes on her 37th birthday in December 1883:
You can perhaps imagine some little of the mortification, chagrin and disgust with wh I have been forced to recognise myself once again in the valley of the shadow of a baby. I cannot at all describe to you the unfathomable bottomless slough of despond in which I wallowed for some months after the truth broke upon me. All pleasant plans were broken up & at an end. So many more years of necessary repetition in this quite dull place, of which by the bye, I am heartily fond when I do not feel extremely tied to it-but it is the tendency of such circumstances to turn all my physical senses to the disagreeable side of things & quite to darken the future outlook spiritually. Nothing tastes, smells, sounds, feels or looks anything but disgusting & sickening to me physically & mentally; I am overshadowed with an irritating sense of wrong from whom I am not prepared to say & a still more trying sense of guilt towards whom I know not-unless to the poor little 'morsel of humanity' who is being forced into the world where he is not at all wanted.
The traditional consolation of accepting pregnancy as God's will did not appeal to Nora who was an agnostic. Moreover, as she wryly points out, babies do not come from providence without human assistance. In May 1881, again pregnant, and again hoping it is for the last time she writes:
Coming babies weigh heavily both mentally and physically & and I am glad that [this next bids] fair to be the last. It is a trouble with which [Papa] has no sympathy, so he only gets cross with [my] being miserable. He looks upon it as a sign of my free thinking tendency & want of faith of the [divine]. [He] thinks one ought to feel grateful for what prov[idence] sends, even tho' it costs one health strength & [even] life. I should feel this too if they came like fair [&] foul days over which (at present-at any rate) we [have] no control-but I cannot feel that providence [carries] all the responsibility of what we take such a large share in bringing about.
'Papa' there is her husband-Praed's father. In her less depressed moments Nora can be witty and wry about her condition. In April 1880, still hoping she can avoid future pregnancies she asserts: 'What a blessing that good Fairy would receive from me wh would give me a charm to work this end'. Sympathising with a delicate relative in February 1881 she canvasses a new social order: 'A wife in Australia has a hard time of it-I am not [sure] that in hot climates polygamy would not be advisable.' And in May 1881 she looks to bio-technology to solve the problems:
I hear that Tessie Mort is taking her matrimonial troubles hardly-& looks wretchedly ill & miserable-Oh! these babies-these babies-I am sure that a day will come (that I shall never see) when a plan of 'artificial maternity' shall be matured, & the present clumsy way of populating the world be done away with.
Nora's sharpest words of protest are reserved for the male medical profession who had the power to alleviate suffering but elected not to for reasons that Nora saw as smug and unfeeling. Significantly, the doctor concerned was a connection by marriage whom Nora admired for many of his qualities, but not for his Old Testament attitudes to the pain of childbirth which he imposed upon his wife. In April 1881 Nora writes:
Dr Lightoller is a staunch opponent of chloroform tho' his chief argument against it seems to be the cowardice of taking it, which I think is a question for the sufferer to decide and could not help telling him what I felt keenly that were it a misfortune to which both sexes were liable, chloroform would have been given ages ago. He looked astonished at my venturing to discuss the subject, looking upon it as becoming in a man and a Dr to lay down the law-for the women-'theirs not to make reply-theirs not to reason why-theirs but to suffer and die' a view of the case against which I as one of the suffering class, protest vehemently ... I wish [Minnie] would not be so submissive as regards chloroform. She told me that she had been 12 hours in the most fearful agony, at the end of wh they had given her chloroform, wh had brought it on, so that they could use instruments-I said, 'Oh! what a pity they did not give it you before.' She answered, 'Oh Harry knew that it would bring it on, but he doesn't approve of giving it.' I thought that I should want to know a very good reason why before I would suffer like that in deference to my husband's general principle, & it stands to reason that she would recover better, if she were not so long ill & in pain but he has actually made her promise to go thro' with it again (unless it should be again necessary to use instruments) without chloroform.
Lightoller was adamant however, and a year later the second child was born after a 12-hour labour. Nora reports grimly, 'Aunt Rosa says that she begged & implored chloroform, but her husband was hard-hearted' (15 Aug 1881).
The Australian Dictionary of Biography records baldly that Thomas Lodge Murray-Prior had 11 children by his first wife, Matilda Harpur, and eight by his second, Nora Clarina Barton. (We now know that he also had two or three illegitimate children as well.) But with latter-day voyeurism of letters which we were never intended to read, we can know something of the experiences and tensions and costs which underlie that triumphal statement of dynastic assertion.
The second aspect revealed by these letters that I wish to touch on is their connection to the early writing career of the recipient, Mrs Campbell Praed. The first point can be made very simply by juxtaposing two passages, one from Nora's letter of 1880 and the second from Praed's 1902 memoir, My Australian Girlhood. Nora writes:
On Monday last we had a frightful visitation-a clergyman appeared among us. A Mr Fuller, the most H.y man that I ever came across. He is the first of the kind that has troubled us for more than 2 years & I was in hopes that they had given us up & left us to sin in peace-of course we had to assist in swelling a small congregation for him in the evening & his sermon (addressed to Hooper & Elver & Mary & Bessy, Hugh, Meta & myself) consisted chiefly of an anecdote of a young lady of his acquaintance who was possessed of the most elegant traits of mind & person & who moved in the 'ighest circles, named Mary Hann (Hugh pricked up his ears on hearing of this prepossessing young lady, but his face fell visibly on hearing her name) who, though repeatedly warned by her spiritual pastors, & master, refused to give up going to balls & parties & such like dissipations. Of course she got typhus fever & after we had been harrowed by an account of her bodily sufferings &c, he brought us to her deathbed where on becoming unconscious, she gave vent to the most 'art rending groans. Her faithful adviser asked her 'Mary Hann What mean these hunearthly-these hagonising groans?'-Feeling this to be a telling point, he repeated it three times over tragically & each time his H's got stronger & stronger by way of emphasing it.-Of course Mary H was being treated to a foresight of the future which she had danced for herself. After he had kept her dying & howling for an unconscionable time-he allowed her to go down to an eternity of torment 'where weeping weeps for hever & where wailing wails for hever', as he put it, with more regard for sound than sense. As Hugh says it was rather 'rough' on us to come up & bully us for & warn us against a crime that we never have a chance of committing.-But why didn't they send us somebody capable-or leave it alone altogether. The above is not in the least exaggerated but just what he said. I have this morning packed him off to Mrs Lightbody's who is to benefit by his ministrations today.
In Praed's memoir, the sermon is given:
So in the evening, Bibles and Prayer-books were mustered, the stockmen, servants, and Kanakas called in, and after service the minister delivered himself of an extemporaneous discourse.
There had been a young lady of his acquaintance who moved in the 'ighest circles and was endowed with the most elegant traits of mind and body. An amorously inclined youth pricked up his ears at the mention of this fair being, but his countenance fell again; she was named Mary Hann.
Mary Hann, it appeared, had been repeatedly warned by her spiritual pastors and masters of the terrible penalties which follow upon an obstinately pursued course of worldly vanities. But Mary Hann declined to give up 'dancing, dress, and dissipation' and the 'ighest circles still held their own. Retribution came, however, in due time. Mary Hann was seized with typhus fever, and after harrowing and convulsing his hearers by a graphic description of her physical sufferings, the narrator held forth upon her moral ones and upon the appalling example of poor Mary Hann's deathbed.
Having become unconscious, Mary Hann gave vent to the most 'eart-rending groans. 'Mary Hann', said the ghostly adviser, 'what mean these hunearthly, these hagonising 'owls?' Feeling this to be a telling point, the preacher reiterated his question in tragic tones, fixing the round-eyed, mild Kanakas with a stern, indignant gaze.
Mary Hann was being treated to a preliminary glimpse of the inferno into which she had danced herself, and it was a relief when her biographer allowed her to go down into an eternity of torment where, as he phrased it, 'weeping weeps for haye, and wailing wails for hever'; and then the benediction was pronounced. [2]
Although there are significant differences between the two versions, most readers would feel that they are far outweighed by the similarities, and that this is Nora's anecdote being reproduced. What I want to point out though is the willing and active role played by Nora in this apparent pattern of plagiarism, for this is not an isolated example. Before her first novel had appeared, Praed was scavenging for information and description to incorporate into her next novel. The materials she requested initially were her own letters sent to her sister, a manuscript of her grandmother's, and a good deal of specific description of people and places that Praed either did not know very well or had forgotten. Subsequently Hansards, her father's memoirs, and further descriptions of specific places were requested. We can see from Nora's responses, the sort of requests Praed made. In February 1880 Nora writes:
I am striving to do your behests but find it difficult. I suppose circumstances make me more than usually stupid. Aunt Lizzie is the only one with whom I have had a chance as yet, & with her I have scruples. She is so genuinely kind and good as she comes trotting in almost daily to look me up that I could hardly find it in my heart to do justice to her little foibles.
Then there are another half dozen people mentioned who were apparently on Praed's hit list.
Sometimes the requests were more general. Nora responds on 9 June 1880:
You want a postman. Of course my idea of a postman is Ryan. Short thickset man with rather bandy legs & uncertain walk, clad in old grey coat & very dirty white trousers (moleskins) an old felt hat with dirty wispy puggarie round it-the winter thick comforter round neck.
Nora is even disposed to call in Praed's satiric skills to avenge an insult to her husband. On 17 October 1880 she writes of Ernest White: 'I wish you put him (E.W.) in a book and have at him. He would be an easy character to describe I think.'
The writer of these passages, remember, is Nora Murray-Prior, author of nothing, living in comparative obscurity in pastoral Queensland. The recipient is Mrs Campbell Praed, rising literary star in London who was occasionally consulted as a foremost authority on Australian lore.
By 1883 Praed seems to have proposed to Nora some sort of joint authorship of a book of Australian sketches drawing on the material in Nora's past and future letters. Nora was delighted to continue supplying material, but declined the recognition. She also proposed another source of material to Praed:
To begin with your delightful book plan. What help I can give you, it will be a great pleasure to give. I know Lady Barker's 'station life' & have often thought it quite within the compass of my own powers ... It would be absurd acknowledging (as you put it) any help you could get from my letters. To what I have written you are entirely welcome, if you have kept the letters-also to what I may write, but I cannot promise that I shall ever write a letter worth reading again ... Therefore, unless I grow young & jolly again, my part in the book must be a passive part. Lizzie is likely to be more useful to you. The world looks all so bright and new to her now, I should think her impressions of Aberfoyle, & the journey up there, wd be invaluable. (3 Dec 1883)
Nora Murray-Prior's letters are an important archive for all sorts of reasons. They have much to say about Brisbane politics and Queensland pastoral life in the 1870s and 1880s. Their concern with pregnancy and childbirth is only one aspect of their concern with colonial health. But perhaps most important of all is the light they throw on the early literary development of Nora's step-daughter, Mrs Campbell Praed. The detail of this is too complex to trace here, but I hope I have shown enough to make it clear that a little voyeurism around private letters can make a major difference to the way we understand historical, literary and cultural forces.
Notes
This is an edited version of a paper given at the National Library's Private Lives Revealed seminar in March 1996. The letters discussed are held in the National Library, Canberra (MS 7801), and in the John Oxley Library, Brisbane (OM81-71).
- Philip Nobile (ed.), The New Eroticism: Theories, Vogues and Canons. New York: Random House, 1970, p. 69.
- Mrs Campbell Praed, My Australian Girlhood: Sketches and Impressions of Bush Life. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1902, pp. 180ñ181.
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