The Ambitions of Jane Franklin: Victorian Lady Adventurer
The Ambitions of Jane Franklin: Victorian Lady Adventurer
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| ISBN-13: | 9781743433966 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Allen & Unwin Pty., Limited |
| Publication date: | 07/01/2013 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| File size: | 3 MB |
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The Ambitions of Jane Franklin
Victorian Lady Adventurer
By Alison Alexander
Allen & Unwin
Copyright © 2013 Alison AlexanderAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-74343-396-6
CHAPTER 1
A GIRL WHO DID NOT FIT IN
When Jane Griffin was six, her father commissioned a portrait of his four children. The son and heir stands bathed in light, tall and handsome, the focus of the painting. His three sisters sit in his shadow, indistinguishable in their matching white dresses, except by height. Fanny, the eldest, gazes adoringly at their brother; little Mary peeps out sweetly from under Fanny's shoulder; and Jane, the middle one, sits slightly apart from the others, staring glumly at the floor.
No one looking at Jane in her cradle would have prophesied world fame — the third child, and a girl at that, daughter of obscure silk-weavers in the narrow streets of Spitalfields, a far from fashionable district of London. Both her grandfathers were silk-weavers, descendants of Protestant Huguenot refugees who fled Catholic France at the end of the seventeenth century. Jane felt her Calvinist heritage gave her steadfastness and determination, as well as intellectual vitality.
Jane's father's family, the Griffins, came from Normandy and were undistinguished. Her father John, born in 1757, worked with his own father as a silk-weaver at the family home, a tall, narrow house with a shop on the ground floor, two storeys of living quarters, and weaving looms in the best light at the top. In 1781 Jane's grandfather was admitted as a liveryman of the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths, one of London's twelve great trade guilds, which now admitted other crafts. Admittance meant a craftsman was successful and respectable, and Jane's father John was admitted in his turn in 1791.
As an adult, Jane rarely mentioned the Griffins. She preferred her mother's family, the Guillemards, who were much grander. In France they had been landowners; as silk-weavers in London they became wealthy. In 1786 Jane Guillemard married John Griffin, and bore him children at two-yearly intervals: in 1788 Fanny, a sharp-witted, strong-willed girl; John, the only son, in 1790; Jane, named after her mother, on 3 December 1791; and sweet-tempered Mary in 1793. Jane Griffin senior died in 1795, in childbirth according to descendants. John Griffin did not marry again, but employed a member of their Huguenot circle, Mrs Peltrau, as housekeeper. She brought up the children, and her daughter saw to their early education. Sadly, young John died at fourteen of a lung disease, possibly tuberculosis. For Jane, the loss of her mother and brother could have been shattering, but in later writings she does not refer to either death. She was never one to dwell on the past.
Apart from these bereavements, her childhood sounds happy enough. John Griffin was a fond and easygoing father, and a letter he wrote to Jane when she was twenty reads as from one equal to another, as he passes on gossip and jokes about Fanny's high sense of decorum. After a century in England, Huguenots like the Griffins were well assimilated into English life, attending the Anglican church and using English names. However, Jane grew up surrounded by Huguenots. They formed the family's social circle, and when Jane was ten, she and Mary, always close, were sent to a boarding school run by Huguenots, Mrs Peltrau's sisters.
The school was small, with only six to eight girls. Two became Jane's lifelong friends, one recalling Jane telling her the plot of the popular novel The Mysteries of Udolpho as they walked in the garden or went to their dancing lesson. The school ensured fluency in French, but otherwise was not stimulating. Girls learnt by heart from textbooks, with questions discouraged. One of Jane's textbooks survives. Published in the year she used it and written 'on a new plan' (so the Peltrau ladies tried to keep up to date) it contains hundreds of historical events arranged by the day of the year they happened, isolated facts with no context. Jane made some annotations — for example, she or the teacher knew that Napoleon won the battle of Lodi in 1796 not 1797 — which suggests some level of intellectual activity, but learning these facts by heart would be terribly boring. In old age Jane described her education as 'meagre', and recited one particularly fatuous fact she had to learn. To the question 'What is metaphysics?' the book gave the meaningless reply: 'A science more sublime than physics'. However, such schooling was standard for girls. Jane Austen suffered similarly.
Jane Griffin's school report when she was twelve shows that she excelled (as far as that went) in arts subjects like Reading, French and History, was less good at Sums, and unenthusiastic about Work (needlework), with comments like 'very well but little' or even 'none'. Her conduct was excellent except for one lapse, laughing impudently at the French master. At sixteen a throat infection meant she was brought home in case she shared her brother's delicate constitution, so she was 'freed from the shackles of school' — free to fulfil her ambition to seek adventure, to do and see everything she could.
This gentle if dull upbringing, doubtless disciplined but without any strict authoritarian figure, meant Jane's natural liveliness was never crushed, while young John's death left no son to be favoured, no brother whose superior education showed up hers. In a family where she was the clever one, she flourished. As often happens, each child was assigned a label: Mary was the pretty one, Jane clever, and Fanny difficult, inheriting the Guillemard trait of irritability.
Despite finding school inadequate, Jane never rebelled outwardly, though she managed to avoid things she disliked, such as needlework. If her later adventurous life is a guide, she might have been a tomboy. She was possibly her father's favourite, as she seems to have been in adult life, and if she was Papa's little princess it would explain her later self-confidence and sense of entitlement. But tomboyish inclinations and a dislike of girlish activities meant growing up could have been hard, especially with no mother to love and guide her. Jane's mentors were her father and her uncle, neither much help in the difficult process of becoming a young lady.
* * *
After Jane left school, two advantages lifted her life above the humdrum. One was her uncle's encouragement. Her mother's brother, John Guillemard, was the other clever member of the family. The Guillemard wealth meant he could leave silk-weaving, and he gained a Master of Arts at Oxford University and was appointed to the commission establishing the boundary between Canada and the United States. This could have led to an impressive career, but his eccentricity meant he gained no more such appointments. He lived as a gentleman, became a Fellow of the Royal Society and took an interest in his bright niece. When she was seventeen, he and his wife, a childless couple, took her to Oxford. They attended balls in the conventional way, but also inspected every college and attended academic functions.
Perhaps Jane was unhappy that as a girl she could not attend university, for two years later her uncle took her on a six-month visit to relations at Tredrea Cottage in Cornwall, where he instructed her as, perhaps, she would have been instructed at Oxford. The rest of the family did not take this seriously. 'Fancy then you are at Tredrea College, where you are fully occupied during the term, to take your degree if you have leisure & like it, learn a little latin, & qualify it if not disagreeable by a subordinate qualification, the knowledge of Whist', joked her father, and her sister Fanny sent Jane an essay on Pedantry. (No wonder Jane preferred Mary.)
Her immediate family might laugh, but Uncle Guillemard did not. As dusk descended they would draw their chairs round the fire and he would examine her in, say, grammar, or what it meant to be a Christian. Jane often felt ignorant, and when an algebra problem defeated her, she was so annoyed with her own stupidity that she burst into tears. Uncle Guillemard was all sympathy. 'Don't think it's stupidity, my dear', he said; she only needed to pay a little more attention.
Life at Tredrea was not all study. Out for a ride with her uncle, Jane wrote,
I canter'd fast, & my petticoats disarrang'd by the violent motion, refused to cover my legs, & shocking to relate, rose above my knees; my scanty, flimsy habit too light to be kept down by its own weight, experienced a similar fate, & only served just to shade my garter from observation ... my cruel Uncle ... was maliciously amused with my misfortune, & came on tittering behind me & making caustic observations on the fine figure I should cut in Hyde Park [where London society rode in prim respectability].
Back in London, Jane continued her intellectual development, drawing up a plan for her 'employment of time & improvement of the mind'. Mornings were for study, afternoons for compiling her papers, evenings for needlework, music (rare mentions) and conversation, with 'easy natural reflections' on her reading; then, in her room, she would summarise her day's work. Beneath the plan, many years later Jane wrote, 'Alas! alas' — but though she might not have carried out the plan rigidly, she did take learning seriously, becoming engaged, as historian Penny Russell comments, in 'a sort of dilettante intellectualism'. Jane's lengthy reading lists include memoirs, sermons and books about travel, history, geography and education, as well as poetry and novels by Jane Austen and Walter Scott. Like many autodidacts building on an inadequate education, she loved facts — all facts, without discrimination as to their importance, and little idea of any underlying theory. Just like her school textbook.
Jane's other stimulus was travel, which her father loved. He retired early from silk-weaving, and each summer the family went on a long holiday. Before they left, Jane read all she could about the district they were to visit; she left nothing undone to reap fruit from any opportunity, commented her obituarist and niece Sophia Cracroft. Her lengthy journals described where she went, what she saw, what she did, whom she met, the district's principal products and buildings ... No detail was too minor. As she travelled she took notes in pencil on a piece of paper which she slid up her glove when she was not writing, and in the evenings she turned the notes into fluent prose. She wrote these journals until she was in her late seventies, producing books full of detail about many parts of the world, a mine of information for modern researchers. At first the journals dealt with her travels only, but soon they described home life too. She never so much as hinted why she wrote so much; recording everything seemed to be a compelling need.
Her powers of observation were acute, sometimes uncharitable. She regretted 'that Miss Browne should have that unfortunate taint of vulgarity about her', and described her friend Anne Hind as 'shewy-looking, stiff in the limbs, & excessively talkative'. (She rarely mentioned anything as unladylike as limbs, except for one startling entry, when in Egypt she described a man 'wriggling his bottom'.) This is a self-confident writer who feels her judgements are as good as anyone's.
Socially Jane was less comfortable. She blushed easily and was shy and nervous, and a birthmark on one temple would not have helped a teenager's self-confidence, though she could cover it with her hair. At a ball she did not have the courage to look a partner in the face, and she could not cope with compliments from a young man. Perhaps she was unwilling, or did not know how, to play the role society allotted to girls, an empty-headed butterfly admiring the superior male — irritating for someone more intelligent than most of her partners. As she grew older, parties often featured in her diary as 'stupid'. It was not that she was unattractive; although she was described as more 'piquante' than beautiful, she was small and slender, with dark hair and blue eyes, and her portrait, painted in 1816 when she was 24, depicts a pretty young woman — Jane thought it true to life but Fanny, among others, did not. The three Misses Griffin were described, tepidly, as 'sensible and agreeable, & not unpretty'.
Jane's description of a visit with Mary to Anne Hind, in whose home 'stylish smartness' reigned, shows that she felt superior to the usual young-lady interests of clothes, music, needlework and chatter, though 'we entered into it as much as we could'. Mary found this easier, playing duets with Anne while Jane read Johnson's Journey to the Hebrides. Jane enjoyed a timid male visitor's horror at being 'unwillingly caught in a party of ladies', especially when, at dinner, Mrs Hind's muslin tippet slipped from her shoulder and left the strap of her corset visible. Jane was so amused she found it hard not to laugh, and she was glad when any foolish thing was said, giving her an excuse. Fortunately many were, she wrote in her condescending way.
At a final meal, wrote Jane, Mr Hind admired 'our dressed heads & smart pink low gowns', saying, '"you look like strawberry cream, fit to be eaten", a remark which did not a little nettle our friend Anne who had a pink gown in her wardrobe too & a prettier one than ours which her father only a few days before had most unmercifully abused'. In later years Jane showed almost no interest in dress, but in her youth she enjoyed looking attractive.
There was a purpose to this social life. As Jane Austen's novels show, young ladies were expected to find husbands, to establish themselves with homes and financial support, and fulfil their expected role as wives and mothers. Other roles were seen as second-rate: paid work was only done from financial necessity, and remaining single was an admission of failure. 'You will be an old maid! and that's so dreadful!' exclaims Harriet Smith in Jane Austen's Emma.
The Griffin girls would have expected to marry men from a similar background to theirs, well-to-do gentry. By the time John Griffin's daughters were entering society, he was accepted as a gentleman; when in 1824 the Athenaeum Club was founded for literary and scientific gentlemen, he was invited to become a member. However, his background in trade left the Griffins socially vulnerable.
By now the family had a better address. The silk industry in Spitalfields was declining, the district was going downhill, and like other wealthy weavers the Griffins moved, in 1815 leasing a terrace house, 21 Bedford Place, off Russell Square. It was a comfortable upper-middle-class home, one large room wide with five storeys: kitchen in the basement, dining room and drawing room on the ground floor, two floors of family bedrooms, and servants' bedrooms at the top. The 1841 census showed John Griffin employing five servants, and ten years later there were six: butler, footman, cook, lady's maid and two housemaids. Mrs Peltrau left, and Fanny, the eldest daughter, probably ran the house; Jane mentioned only once that she herself did the housekeeping, as an unusual event.
John Griffin maintained a keen interest in the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths — to the point of garrulity, according to Jane. In 1814 he was elected to its governing body and moved up its hierarchy, in 1819 becoming Prime Warden (chairman), a most prestigious position, for which he needed a coat of arms and a motto. The College of Heralds provided one, with the central figure a mythical griffin, and the motto Nosce te ipsum (Know thyself). However, Jane disliked any mention of this trade-related activity, and only attended the Company's annual dinner for ladies reluctantly, to please her father.
It was not among the mercantile Goldsmiths but in general cultured society that the Griffin girls looked for husbands. The only one to marry young was Mary. In 1814, aged 21, she married Frank Simpkinson, a London barrister who was not a favourite with his sister-in-law Jane. Of one of her suitors she wrote, 'Mr Simpkinson in his usual manner began to abuse him as a person whom he could not bear the sight of, & me as an arrant flirt'. Perhaps they saw each other as competitors for Mary's affection.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Ambitions of Jane Franklin by Alison Alexander. Copyright © 2013 Alison Alexander. Excerpted by permission of Allen & Unwin.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Introduction,Chapter 1 A girl who did not fit in,
Chapter 2 The Franklin connection,
Chapter 3 An occasional marriage,
Chapter 4 To Van Diemen's Land,
Chapter 5 The governor's lady,
Chapter 6 The home front,
Chapter 7 Female convicts,
Chapter 8 Improving the colony,
Chapter 9 The Aborigines,
Chapter 10 Mount Wellington, Sydney and beyond,
Chapter 11 Three women's lives,
Chapter 12 The political question,
Chapter 13 Jane Franklin v. John Montagu,
Chapter 14 John Franklin disappears,
Chapter 15 Jane Franklin's Search,
Chapter 16 Family upsets,
Chapter 17 Victory,
Acknowledgements,
Notes,
Bibliography,