IT may seem to those who commemorate the Centenary of the Oxford Movement this year that it is pre-eminently a memorial of great men. In the centre of the stage stands Manning, the young inscrutable widower, turning away from his girl-wife’s grave: Newman, the celibate, leans weeping at the church-gate of Littlemore not for any earthly spouse but for his tarnished Bride, the Church of England. Casual visitors to Hursley saw Mrs. Keble only as an invalid, draped gracefully in shawls upon her couch. It was only 1839 when Dr. Pusey watched the white pall on his wife’s coffin flutter in the wind as the bearers carried her to her grave in the cloisters of Christ Church. Only one woman really popularised the movement by her pen, and Charlotte Yonge hesitated to send her most popular stories to her publisher from her secluded country cottage until they had received the approval of her parents and clerical friends. A hundred years ago women were, for perhaps the last time in the story of our civilisation, content to be neither seen nor heard.

But that impression is superficial. No student of the literature or history of the early nineteenth century can fail to realise that one of the most interesting developments of the period is the change in the mental outlook of women. They reveal a Renaissance in feminine education hardly surpassed by that of the sixteenth century. No greater gulf lies between the doubtful hoydens of Henry VIII’s early court and Lady Jane Grey, bent over her Greek and Latin studies, than between Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey and Ethel May in the less classical but once popular story of The Daisy Chain. Pusey and Newman were in their nurseries when Miss Austen’s dear little tomboy announced to the Tilneys at Bath that ‘something very shocking was coming out in London presently,’ and in the thirty years which followed a great many surprising things appeared in London and in England. Slowly, almost invisibly, the education of women had begun. Forces were at work in the country which, in that period, changed the mental outlook of the upper and middle classes. The Methodist, Quaker [3/4] and Unitarian movements outside the Church, and the Evangelical reformers within, sobered and civilised the whole of English society save for the sordid and glittering Court of the Regency. The splendid dawn of Liberty in the French Revolution had passed, no less than the stories of its excesses, into a commonplace, universally accepted belief of the need for social freedom and reform. The Romantic movement had lifted the eyes of young England to the Lake hills and opened their ears to the romance of old, unhappy, far-off things. Printing was cheaper, books were multiplying; means of communication were enormously improved just before railways began. Even in Miss Austen’s books themselves we can realise that, as she wrote thirteen years after the composition of Northanger Abbey, ‘period, places, manners, books and opinions have undergone considerable changes.’ Edmund Bertram takes a far more serious view of his clerical duties than Henry Tilney; Fanny Price and Anne Elliot both seek the consolations of literature as a balm for disappointed affections. If Pride and Prejudice had been written a few years later Mr. Bennet would have called all his daughters into the library to study every morning, and Mary might have been the heroine, not the butt, of the family.

For that was what was happening all over the country. Clergy and country gentry, possessed of a leisure almost unimaginable to us to-day, sat down to educate themselves, their children and their child-wives. The rich and worldly might engage governesses and patronise Miss Pinkerton’s Academy, but everywhere the serious parents, and they were in the majority, set to work to instruct their children seriously. Such were the homes of the leaders in every school of thought, of the Arnolds and Cloughs, the Shaftesburys and Lytteltons, the Wilberforces, Bucklands, Macaulays, Trevelyans and Huxleys, no less than those of the Fabers, the Wards, the Wordsworths and Moberlys. It is therefore extraordinarily interesting to see how the ideals of the Movement itself influenced and illuminated these early Victorian homes.

And first and foremost we observe that there was no alteration in the nobler ideals of womanhood which the Tractarian ladies inherited from the past. The Oxford Movement was not revolutionary. In its essence it was conservative, for its aim was to guard truly and rigorously every law and custom of the Church, and it was only because so many laws and customs had fallen into disuse that the world looked upon its leaders as innovators. For [4/5] twenty years the English Prayer-Book, moulded here and there possibly into the form they desired, was the sole guide of its leaders. There was no endeavour to change the life or social ideals of the day: the object was to infuse every home with the new spirt. There was no revolution in the ideal of womanhood. A woman’s first duty was still, to them, to obey her parents and her husband in all things spiritual and temporal. The only change lay in the fact that this submission was viewed by Churchwomen as the highest religious duty, demanding every effort of their brains and souls. The picture is presented most touchingly, and, to tell the truth, most exasperatingly, in the life of Mrs. Pusey. Brought up in one of the great country homes of the day, married after an engagement of ten years to the brilliant young scholar, she settled down in her pleasant drawing-room at Christ Church and proceeded to fill the nurseries above it with all the happiness of an ordinary wife and mother. But Pusey was no ordinary husband. One child died in infancy, his two daughters were far from robust, his only son, always delicate, was crippled and marked by phthisis from his youth. Mrs. Pusey was never strong, but austerity and severity were the notes of the home. England needed churches for the reformed doctrines and the churches needed money. The Puseys sold the carriages and horses which were as necessary to young couples then as the baby cars of to-day; Mrs. Pusey sold all her jewels, daily services were instituted in the church, and who but Mrs. Pusey should attend them regularly? The suspect Tractarians must show no less interest in good works and education than the Evangelicals, so Mrs. Pusey visited the sick and taught in a Sunday School. Mr. Pusey was always overwhelmed in work: it was natural that his wife should help him. She copied his manuscripts, she kept up her Latin and Greek in his service, she consulted authorities for him in the Bodleian; she took a prominent share in collating the Tauchnitz text of St. Augustine with the Benedictine for her husband’s contribution to the Bibliotheca Patrum. ‘You and your delicate wife should not do this,’ wrote a German scholar indignantly, and the same protest rises in the mind of the reader. ‘It was so cold and dark with the snow that I took my Notes to the fireside to-day,’ she writes apologetically. ‘From ten to five I worked at St. Augustine till I was interrupted by the children and some visitors.’ That the work was due to her own choice and not to the exactions of her husband is clear from the fact that she began on her own account [5/6] a Commentary on St. Matthew, and worried herself in her spare moments as to whether her Baptism, by a dissenting minister, were valid. But when Dr. Liddon remarks that ‘the growth of Mrs. Pusey’s character after eleven years of married life was remarkable and testified to her husband’s influence,’ the modern reader feels that his neglect for her physical welfare, till she succumbed to her last illness, is no less striking. His mother, it is true, belonged to the same stern school. ‘She was always quiet, humble and cheerful,’ he writes of Lady Lucy Pusey. ‘Even when she was old and ill she never allowed herself to lie down during the day or even to lean back in a chair.’ When Mrs. Pusey’s health gave way he was heart-broken. After her death it was years before he re-entered her drawing-room: thirty-five years later he recalled the agony as he watched the wind blow about her pall in the May sunshine against the mellow walls of Tom Quad, and spoke of ‘eleven years of scarcely earthly happiness,’ but it is impossible not to feel that a little reasonable relaxation might have doubled or trebled those eleven years.

Few indeed rivalled the severities of the Puseys’ home, but Miss Yonge’s novels, the repository of the social history of the Movement, are full of dutiful wives who wore themselves out in the service of their husbands and the Church. Not a few of them took to their sofas in self-protection, but on their sofas they remained always the Heart of the Home. ‘She is my conscience, my memory and my common-sense,’ wrote Keble of his wife, and ‘for twenty years of health and fifty of sickness,’ he says of his sister, ‘she was always at hand and within reach, and never a look nor a word that I knew of but was kind and wise with the true kindness and true wisdom.’ Never more touchingly perhaps is the attitude expressed than in a letter from the child-wife of George Ridding, written from her new little home at Oxford, ‘beside the beautiful stand of flowers George has given me for my drawing-room with two geraniums, a heliotrope and deep purple cineraria.’ ‘Every month that we have been married I have been growing happier and happier, knowing my dear husband better and therefore loving and reverencing him more and more. And he teaches me and helps me to be good in such a kind gentle way.’ That was the typical attitude, and in two of the most popular of Miss Yonge’s novels, Heartsease and The Heir of Redcliffe, we see how clearly the authoress felt that a wife superior in mental or even spiritual qualities to her husband should disguise the fact as far [6/7] as possible from the outer world and her own consciousness. It is not till 1845 that the story of a wife leading the way for her husband strikes the reader with a note of novelty. Mrs. William Ward sat in her cottage at Rosehill beside her brilliant incorrigible husband, the enfant terrible of the Movement, the greatest intellect, perhaps, of his time, shortly after the bitter day when he was publicly deprived of his degrees in the crowded Sheldonian for the publication of his treatise on the Ideal of a Christian Church. She was copying an article for their friend, Mr. Newman, for the Press, when she broke down altogether. ‘I cannot stand it,’ she cried. ‘I shall go and be received into the Catholic Church!’ She went, and Ward went with her, but that is the only occasion on which a woman’s voice is heard, making an individual and independent decision in those early days.

But these Victorian ladies were not only wives, they were, in that prolific generation, devoted mothers. From them we hear, naturally, none of those rebellious sentiments which startle the reader in the diaries of eighteenth-century ladies. They accepted motherhood as a vocation, and devoted themselves to the spiritual and secular education of their over-crowded nurseries. ‘Another little treasure has been added to my store,’ writes the wife of a Church dignitary to Mrs. Arnold, after the arrival of her fourteenth baby. ‘Another little soul given to me to bring up in the fear of God! Ah, my quiver is full indeed!’ cries a consumptive curate joyfully, in Miss Yonge’s Pillars of the House, when the twins who bring the number of his arrows up to thirteen are presented to him on his death-bed. It was not so much families as clans which were raised in Oxford homes, country vicarages and cathedral closes. Never again, probably, will the world see homes like those, with their ranks of children and faithful and long-suffering servants, their carefulness in spiritual and casualness in physical hygiene, their scanty entertainments and perennial enjoyments. Those of an older generation who can remember visits to old-fashioned grandparents know those houses still; through the widely opened doors we can see the serviceable wallpaper of the hall and drawing-room, the carpets that stretched inexorably to the skirting-boards, the crimson rep curtains and table-covers, the solid sensible furniture not yet vulgarised by Mid-Victorian clumsiness. We know the dark engravings of Raphael’s prints on the walls, the acres of sober books in vast book-shelves, (ten tons of books accompanied the new Bishop of Lincoln on his removal thither in the sixties), the [7/8] bead fender-stool and fire-screens, the college groups, and the microscope and albums on the round table. Above the portentous bedrooms of parents and guests on the first floor the rooms grew smaller and barer, and here each child had its own tiny home for its treasures, the rare books, the collections of birds’-eggs and shells and moths which took the place of our expensive toys. Up there was the threadbare schoolroom with its hard chairs and one vast comfortable sofa, and not far away were the big nurseries with a battered rocking-horse which had to carry three children at once, a fire-guard where baby clothes were always airing, the dreaded medicine-chest and an unchanging Nana in her rocking-chair. To those nurseries the slender, straight-backed little mothers ascended every morning to teach Bible stories and prayers to the babies as soon as they could talk. In the schoolroom below they reigned supreme till an older daughter could share the task. ‘We have determined on relinquishing our governess and trying the plan of educating our children ourselves,’ writes the wife of the Master of Pembroke, Mrs. Jeune. ‘I believe we are very hard to please and that no female, scarcely, would teach as my husband considers well.’ Almost every biography and novel of the day presents the picture. The little Wordsworths were set down to Prideaux’s Old and New Testament History, followed by French and Italian; Miss Yonge and her numerous families of cousins sat at work with their mothers, morning by morning. If the actual education was one-sided and often interrupted, it was continued when the great bell rang and the vast family assembled for midday dinner round the big table in the dining-room. For by then the papers had arrived and the news of the day was discussed in all high seriousness. From their earliest days they had to take an intelligent interest in politics, social reform and above all, the Church. To them the Tracts, the Bampton lectures, the Gorham controversy and the official censures passed on Pusey and Ward, the tragedies of the secession of Newman in 1845 and Manning in 1851 were events in the history of the world. It was only when the lamps were lit in the drawing-room after tea that this high seriousness relaxed a little, and history and poetry and the novels of Sir Walter Scott entranced these children of a sterner day, as they sorted their collections and wrote appropriate Latin names beneath their specimens. There were indeed real incentives to culture within the Movement itself. The houses of Bloxam, the naturalist, and Johnson, the astronomer, were open always to their kindred spirits in Church affairs. Two Professors of poetry adorned their ranks, Isaac Williams and John Keble. The poetry of the Christian Year satisfied its own generation too completely to make much appeal to our own, but those verses, so impregnated with the atmosphere of the English country church and rectory, were the voice of the Tractarians to England at large. In the homes thus described the lines of Keble rose naturally to the lips of every family event. To their stories of adventure were added also the romance of the Mission-field, for the Movement was not slow to form a Mission of its own.

They were cultured and happy, and they were united homes. The age of reactionary children was yet to come, and the clans who issued from these homes, Wordsworths and Selwyns, Freres and Churches, Johnsons and Ottleys, Fabers and Moberlys, were all inspired by that defensive loyalty against a critical and hostile world which the families of martyrs habitually exhibit. ‘We must be content to live and die suspected,’ wrote Dean Church, and it is in days of prosperity rather than adversity that children are critical.

‘The Ark of God is in the field
Like clouds around the alien armies sweep,’

sang Keble. The homes of the Tractarians were essentially loyal, the devoted instructions of gentle wives and mothers not in vain. Nor was there in these homes any of the emotionalism which children dread. Consistency and self-control were virtues prized above all others. This is not perhaps the place in which to speak of the depth of their spiritual lives and the serenity of their intercourse with the unseen. We can perhaps estimate it most clearly as we remember that they lived in a world where illness was never removed hastily to the fastnesses of Nursing Homes, and where pain and suffering and death had to be met without the mitigations of anaesthetics and trained nurses. The gentle ladies, who seem so inefficient to modern eyes, rose heroically to the call. In their diaries they accept death as submissively as they accepted life; over the sick-beds and graves of their children they kept their faith with God.

But their lives do not only exhibit heroism. They reveal also, charmingly and absurdly, the refinement and gentility of Perfect Ladies, in those far-off days when there was nothing humorous about those phrases. The Oxford Movement was the first of the religious revivals of the preceding fifty years not to demand severance [9/10] from the world. Methodists and Evangelicals, Quakers and Unitarians shut themselves off from the ordinary pleasures of society. The Tractarians carried their high standards with them into the outer world. Their young people were allowed to go to dances and theatres, and their own high principles were trusted to keep them from the dangers of gambling and drunkenness. Not even their enthusiastic desire for learning, nor their good works, were allowed to interfere with a proper care for dress, decorum and social amenities. ‘I don’t think,’ says one of Miss Yonge’s heroines, ‘that dear Mamma would ever have let your Greek and Latin and Cocksmoor School interfere with all the little lady-like things.’ The days of practical housewifery were, unfortunately for England, over in the upper and middle classes. (Mrs. Bennet, we may remember, assured Mr. Collins with some asperity that she was very well able to keep a good cook, and that her daughters had nothing to do in the kitchen.) But the Tractarian Movement spread all the more quickly through the country because its members played an ordinary part in society, and in their homes young girls were found watering the flowers, tending the bird-cages, practising at the pianoforte and embroidering their little collars. There is no more delightful picture of the true early Victorian lady than that given by her daughters of Mrs. Moberly, wife of the head-master of Winchester, who was preferred in later life to the see of Salisbury. She was a woman of the deepest spiritual convictions and self-denying life: she had fifteen children and met many great sorrows with saintly courage. Yet, we hear:

‘She was beautiful and possessed a most characteristic love of beautiful things. Her dress was always of the best materials and she insisted on having it sewn with silk on both sides; when we asked her irreverently what difference it would make whether silk or cotton was used she would reply: “I should know it was cotton and I should not like that.” ... She loved to be surrounded with flowers but they were all carefully chosen for their sweetness and colouring; ordinary garden flowers gave her no especial pleasure, and even as little children we only offered her roses or scented geranium, verbena or mignonette.... Her rooms had an indefinable fragrance of lavender and violets about them; bottled scents were far too coarse for her.... Her wrath at being subjected to such smells as gas, coal-smoke and lamp-oil was strong and despairing.... If possible she would never touch a penny and if it could not be avoided, hurried to wash her hands; [10/11] she always washed the silver or gold coins before giving them in the offertory.... She was extremely shy and reserved. During the first year of her married life she managed not to call her husband anything, and as soon as Alice could speak, adopted her name of Papa from that time forward.... Her rule over her many sons and daughters was quiet, equal and very firm but not demonstrative.’

‘I see,’ wrote a Wykehamist on her death, ‘how her high ideal and personal beauty impressed me with a certain awe which had its charm.’ ... ‘Amused,’ says her daughter, ‘as we were at her dainty fancies we recognised that they imparted an air of exceeding refinement.’

It is in this rarefied air that the heroes and heroines of Miss Yonge’s novels lived and moved to her readers. It is not in this world that we must look for revolutionary sentiments of universal brotherhood or the breaking down of the barriers between classes. All her characters, including even the consumptive curate, are wellborn and well-connected, however poor they may be. They would not dream of pursuing the Rich and the Great: they would not dream of neglecting the poor or failing in their duties to the sickbeds and schools of the villagers. But a gentle air of class consciousness, if not of snobbery, pervades their atmosphere as evasively yet definitely as the musk in their garden borders. It would be easy to study one novel after another without discovering that tradespeople or the vast lower middle classes of England existed. The society of the day was of course exclusive with an intensity it is hard to imagine. Whigs and Tories might refuse to meet; in Oxford itself the Heads of the Colleges and their wives knew no one outside their charmed circles. ‘It was so strange and pleasant,’ remarks Mrs. Jeune, ‘to hear people asking at a dinner party who the other guests might be.’ Evangelicals and Tractarians often refused to meet. None of Miss Yonge’s heroes made as great a sacrifice as the (well-born) lad who became a bookseller. ‘There is,’ wrote Miss Yonge to a friend, ‘a much larger amount of people who don’t come into contact with University folk, and it is the great disadvantage of the modern girl that the Curate instead of being her hero is often her inferior in social standing!’ From their portraits and miniatures the ladies of the day gaze forth, aware of Heaven and of Hell, of God’s poor and their own connections and dependants, of the heathen over the seas, and sublimely unconscious of the rest of the world around them.

[12] Of the development of the Oxford Movement itself and of the children and grandchildren of the Tractarian leaders who grew up to call themselves Anglo-Catholics, this article cannot attempt to speak. The obvious results of their upbringing were, on the one hand, the desire of the more spiritual to retreat from the world into religious communities, and on the other to use their education and influence independently in the world without. Both these movements were later developments. It was not till 1845 that four ladies under Miss Langston, ‘who never spared herself or others,’ were consecrated ‘with tears of joy’ to form a Sisterhood in Park Village. The story of the Anglican Communities, and of many lives of heroic self-denial and effort, belong to the later half of the nineteenth century.

The history of those other women, or rather of their descendants who emerged into the world, is still in the making. It was, to the older people of their own day, a story of the same lawlessness and undisciplined love for extremes which marked the development of the Oxford Movement itself, though very few of them lived to see the strange victories women have won and the stranger uses to which they have put their triumphs. But they had to realise that improvements in education would lead to a new freedom for women, and, in this new liberty, they saw girls throw aside refinements and restraints, burst into athletics and clamour for openings in the world. In so far as the early Tractarians saw the problem of surplus women at all, they saw them happily occupied as handmaidens of the Church. That was a favourite phrase of Miss Yonge’s, but before her death she was to hear of girls at High Schools and Women’s Colleges, girls on bicycles and girls on hockey fields. ‘I know,’ she writes in a letter, ‘of several cricket matches, and one poor girl wrote in the greatest distress to ask me how to manage about a cricket match where gentlemen were to play!’ . . . ‘I even hear of girls using the word "beastly" in confidential moments. ... I also hear of rompings, chiefly in High Life, I regret to say.’ Only the strongest and most broad-minded of the old school could face the new world.

One of these, known to many successive generations in Oxford, has only left us recently. Dame Elizabeth Wordsworth lived to her ninetieth year. She was a child when Newman left Littlemore, she could remember the consternation caused by Manning’s secession to Rome. In her home at the Head-master’s lodge at Harrow and later in his Palace at Lincoln, she grew up in the [12/13] authentic spirit of the Tractarian school. ‘Here’s dear Miss Wordsworth,’ said the Head of an Oxford College, ‘trying to make a bridge between her Father and the Modern world.’ Because, in her own personality, she revealed so clearly the vistas at the distant side of that bridge this article may be forgiven for paying some tribute to her memory. She belonged to one of the large and intellectually distinguished families of the period: she was educated and educated herself at home in blissful ignorance of examinations certificates. She had grown up in a home where public affairs and every movement in literature or science or social reform had been readily and critically discussed: she had never been absorbed in a purely feminine circle. She grew up also to assume the virtues of self-control, self-denial and consistency as the normal make-up of a reasonable human being. She did not so much distrust emotion as laugh at it. It was only with some reluctance that she left her home when she was invited to become Principal of a College for Women at Oxford. The leaders of the Anglo-Catholic party, having recognised reluctantly that higher education for women was an inevitable blessing, decided to do their best to ally it with the Church, but Miss Wordsworth received no undue encouragement in the home circle. ‘If,’ said her brother, the Bishop of Salisbury, ‘I thought your not going would put an end to the whole thing I should say. Don’t go: but as I don’t suppose it will, I think you had better accept.’ Probably in her heart of hearts Miss Wordsworth never viewed the University of Oxford as anything but a beneficent and tolerant host to her handful of girls at Lady Margaret Hall. She was never a feminist or an anti-suffragette, for to her the world consisted primarily of human beings, distinguished by individual characters rather than by sex. She eluded parties and labels with a mischievous craftiness. She met hot-headed rebels from home and girl fanatics in religion or politics with just that kindly humour which pierces their armour most effectively. From first to last she considered home the best place for a woman and marriage the best life for a woman, even while she rejoiced in the triumphs of those who were obliged to make their own way in the world. ‘Our patron saint,’ she declared of Lady Margaret, ‘was a gentlewoman, a scholar and a saint, and after being three times married she took a vow of celibacy. What more could be expected of any woman!’ The writer of her memoirs will only be able to explain her sense of proportion, her extraordinary sincerity and humour, her delightful prejudices and real scholarship, her feminine [13/14] adroitness and her spiritual gifts if he or she studies the home and generation from which she sprang.

She was one of the Ladies of the Oxford Movement, and nothing ranges her more accurately in the ranks of those fair, submissive, dauntless little ladies than her choice of a motto for the Hall dining-room. A group of the portentous girl students of the nineties were suggesting, no doubt, ostentatious and ambitious sentiments, when Miss Wordsworth, with her sudden smile and quick enthusiasm, made a choice of her own. ‘Study to be quiet and do your own business’ were the words she chose for the independent and rebellious woman of the day. That was the motto of the wives and mothers of a hundred years ago, of those ladies who had no Rights and such unbounded influence. As they flit from our vision through their sunny rectory gardens across the quiet churchyards, there may be some who regret those ideals of dutifulness, self-effacement and gentle reticence which vanished with them from the world.