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Cambridge University Press
0521861557 - Faith, Duty and the Power of Mind - The Cloughs and their Circle 1820–1960 - by Gillian Sutherland
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Introduction

In January 1823 a Liverpool merchant named James Butler Clough set sail with his wife and young family for Charleston, South Carolina. Based in this city, he hoped to make his fortune in the cotton trade. He failed wretchedly, going down into bankruptcy not once but twice, and finally retreating back to Liverpool in straitened circumstances, saved from total collapse only by the support of his and his wife’s extended family networks. His youngest son, George, fell victim to yellow fever and lies buried in the churchyard of St Michael’s Church in Charleston. Yet two of his other children, Arthur, his second son, and Anne Jemima, his only daughter, would make the name Clough celebrated in the England of their day and subsequently. Arthur became a poet, whose verse strikingly divided his contemporaries. The best of it, especially his great poem Amours de Voyage, has worn extraordinarily well: his ear for the cadences and rhythms of conversational exchange, his delicate scepticism about grand postures of belief, whether emotional, moral or political, have a startlingly contemporary ring. He also lost his Christian faith, painfully and publicly, paying a high price materially and emotionally.

   For Annie, Arthur’s sister, the collapse of the family fortunes proved to be an opportunity. She wanted to opena school, one of the few things ‘ladies’ could do without losing caste. She began in a room of their house; and gradually began to address questions of the education and training needed to pursue this work properly. Eventually this led her to play an important role in the transformation of schooling for middle-class women in nineteenth-century England, from an essentially informal, domestic enterprise, sometimes exciting and creative, sometimes a sham parade of ‘accomplishments’, into something altogether more structured and systematic, and ultimately more stable and enduring. Part and parcel of this process of transformation was the development of institutions for the higher education of women; and in 1871 Annie became the first Principal of Newnham College, Cambridge. Annie’s beloved niece, Arthur’s youngest child Blanche Athena, always known to her family as Thena, came to share in this work. Thena, an administrator of rare talent, became a key member of the second generation of women in higher education, who had to build on the foundations laid by the pioneers, often a less glamorous task, but no less vital in consolidating the transformation and preparing for new phases of growth.

   Studies of Arthur’s life and poetry have become a minor academic industry. Fresh light can be shed on these by a fuller consideration of his family and their context. Moreover to put his sister and his daughter at the centre of the study is to grasp a thread which leads us deep into the moral, mental and material world of a key stratum of the English middle class, those who sustained gentility through the practice of a profession. In his novel The Bertrams in 1859, Anthony Trollope somewhat cynically defined a profession as ‘a calling by which a gentleman not born to the inheritance of a gentleman’s allowance of good things might ingeniously obtain the same by some exercise of his abilities’. Much grander claims had been made two years earlier by Henry Byerley Thomson, in his 1857 guide, The Choice of Profession: ‘The importance of the professions and the professional classes can hardly be over-rated, they form the head of the great English middle class, maintain its tone of independence, keep up to the mark its standard of morality, and direct its intelligence.’ Temperamentally not disposed to follow his own father into the Church, James Clough had attempted to make his own way and sustain the lifestyle of a gentleman by trading in cotton. When this definitively failed, his son and daughter had to turn elsewhere. Arthur became first a university teacher and then a civil servant. His sister became a teacher who metamorphosed into an educational reformer. His son followed him into government service, while his daughter followed her aunt, eventually becoming a powerful university administrator. And the fluctuating fortunes of other family members and friends show again and again the economic and status lifelines which ‘some exercise of their abilities’ could provide. This study is more than a biography and a family history: it is a case-study so situated as to help us follow the evolution and expansion of professional opportunities and roles for the English middle class over almost a century and a half – a crucial period. In their classic study, The Professions, published in 1933, Carr-Saunders and Wilson wrote, ‘within the ranks of the professions are to be found most of those upon whose special skill the functioning of modern society depends’.

   To put the women members of the family at the centre of the story is also to make the point that the rise of professional occupations in England was not a purely male affair. ‘Some exercise of their abilities’ proved eventually to be able to sustain ladies as well as gentlemen. The women members of the Victorian middle class were peculiarly vulnerable to, and often victims of, its fluctuations in prosperity and status. For much of the nineteenth century they were able to do so much less than their menfolk to shape their own destinies and control their own lives. The need first to transform the provision of secondary education and create institutions of higher education for women meant that their entry into the professions came at least a generation or more behind that of the men, and the occupations on offer at first were a much more restricted group. But by the beginning of the 1920s there were systematic opportunities in teaching both in secondary schools and in universities where none had existed before; and Thena’s experience showed too that the new institutions offered scope for those who were administrators as well as those who were teachers and scholars. Slowly, other opportunities and career patterns would take shape. Putting the women centre stage reveals also their crucial roles within the family networks which are so marked a feature of the Victorian and Edwardian middle class. The public rhetoric of middle-class achievement might be individualist; but the wider family mobilised loans, cash, contacts, possibilities, time and again; and the women were often the correspondents, those who kept the networks alive and in good order, the exchanges of information flowing. When, at the beginning of the 1930s, the affairs of Thena and her brother collapsed into bankruptcy, a melancholy echo of the bankruptcy of their grandfather almost a century before, they, and the young cousin Thena had brought up, were sustained by networks of family, friendship and profession, expressed in and intertwined with the institution she and her aunt had done so much to create.

   In drawing on such networks the Clough family was typical. In two other respects it was distinctive and especially illuminating. Few families produced outstanding educational innovators in two successive generations, two women who played key roles in the creation and development of an institution, Newnham, which was both symbol and agent of the transformation of educational opportunities for women. Few families and their friends acted out so vividly and publicly the crisis of Christian faith faced by the mid-nineteenth-century generation and demonstrated the continuing power of a Christian sense of duty, even when belief had faded. Arthur’s honesty about his loss of faith cost him dear. For the generation who followed him, epitomised by Henry Sidgwick, the Cambridge philosopher and educational reformer, the material costs were less high; but the analogies between his intellectual and emotional journey and that travelled by Arthur formed the bedrock of his relationship with the Clough family. Newnham was the first institution in either Cambridge or Oxford to be without denominational affiliation; and among Thena and her Bloomsbury friends and contemporaries absence of faith was taken for granted.

   To be part of the movement for the secularisation of intellectual life was to align oneself on the left, to be among those whom Arthur’s friend Matt Arnold was to call ‘the lights of liberalism’. In this company the creation of educational opportunities and structures for women took its place with other schemes for enlarging access to education, a concern with class as well as with gender, a concern that Cambridge and Oxford should behave less like corrupt little oligarchies and more like responsible elites. Among Annie’s schemes of the 1860s was the germ of what would become the University Extension Movement; and at the beginning of the 1920s Thena would fight to get the Asquith Commission, considering the affairs of the two universities, to take an appropriately broad and truly national view of their roles and duties.

   Although secular, this reforming liberal agenda did not lack a moral dimension. Although Christian belief had faded, much of the moral and ethical matrix within which it had been embedded remained. The point had been made forcefully by the novelist George Eliot, one of the earliest supporters of women’s education and of Newnham. Shortly after her death in 1880, Sidgwick’s friend F. W. H. Myers recalled a conversation in which, ‘taking as her text the three words which have been used so often as the inspiring trumpet-calls of men, – the words, God, Immortality, Duty, – [she] pronounced, with terrible earnestness, how inconceivable was the first, how unbelievable the second, and yet how peremptory and absolute the third ’. Successive generations of the Clough family and the liberal intelligentsia in which they came to be embedded all acknowledged this imperative. Annie, sanguine by temperament, and with a generosity of spirit which made life endlessly interesting to her, pursued her duty most cheerfully. The depressive strain, which Arthur and Thena shared, made it harder for them; and one strand of Arthur’s great poem, Amours de Voyage, is a reflection on the power of what he called ‘our terrible notions of duty’. Thena, having done without God from adolescence, was nevertheless in no doubt that there were good and bad courses of action and selfish and unselfish ways to conduct oneself. The demands of duty are an important root of the rhetoric of service which has been so marked a feature of English professional life. Such rhetoric could be deployed bombastically, as in the remarks of Henry Byerley Thomson, quoted above, or cynically – or sincerely. The Cloughs and their friends and colleagues were strenuous in pursuing what they perceived to be their duty, sometimes at no small cost to themselves. Professional life and occupations provided them with lifelines in terms of status and material survival; but seizing the opportunities these offered was not incompatible with a genuine belief that, in ingeniously exercising their abilities, they were also serving the wider society.

Chapter 1
Childhood and Charleston

In the first two decades of the nineteenth century Charleston, South Carolina, appeared an inviting and prosperous city of some 25,000 people. In 1817 exports from Charleston were outstripped only by those from New York. Its economy was dominated by cotton, demand for which soared with the ending of war in Europe in 1815, and in 1818 the price of short-staple cotton reached an all-time high of 35 cents per pound. Throughout the eighteenth century the city had looked naturally to Europe for cultural exchange and models; and some of the profits from cotton and rice, the other principal crop, supported both domestic and institutional building in a graceful neo-classical style. ¹ At the beginning of 1823 it must have appeared simultaneously civilised and exotic to the tiny Anne Jemima Clough, just three years old, disembarking from the sailing ship which had brought her and her family from Liverpool. Forty years later the image of Charleston in the 1820s remained clear and sharp in her mind’s eye.²

The first sight of it showed a long line of wharves made of palmetto logs fastened together into a sort of wall, stretching perhaps half a mile along the bay, and lined with the ships and smaller craft that frequented the port. As you approached from the water you heard the songs of the negroes at work on the vessels. At the end of the wharves was a battery or public walk, supported against the sea by a substantial very white wall formed of oyster shells beaten fine and hard. This species of pier extended nearly a mile along the sea, and was a favourite resort both for walking and driving in the summer. It was all roughly done, as most things were in the South, but the sunshine and clear skies made it bright and cheerful. The city was not regularly built like the Northern towns. In the lower part indeed the houses were mostly built close together in rows; but in the upper part, where the wealthier people lived, it was full of villas with gardens, all built with verandahs, and many with two, an upper and a lower one. In the gardens grew many flowering trees, such as the almond, occasionally the orange, the fringe tree, a gay shrub with a very abundant white flower, and the fig; and these hung over the garden walls into the streets. The streets, too, which were for the most part unpaved, were often planted with trees for the sake of shade. Here and there one came on a large old-fashioned mansion, that at once showed it belonged to the times before the Revolution.

   Anne – or Annie as she became known, perhaps to distinguish her from her mother, also Anne – was the third child of James Butler Clough and his wife, Anne Perfect. The Cloughs traced their ancestry back to the sixteenth century, to Sir Richard Clough who acted as Sir Thomas Gresham’s agent in Antwerp and was a man of substance in his own county, Denbighshire. Successive generations of Clough gentry and clergy remained based in North Wales until James, born on 22 April 1784, moved to Liverpool early in the new century, to launch a career as a merchant. Perhaps the move was linked to his father’s business dealings. For the Rev. Roger Clough, Vicar of Corwyn, Rector of Llansannen and ultimately Canon of St Asaph, had married Ann Jemima Butler, a Sussex heiress; and the land she brought helped underpin his partnership in Clough, Mason & Co., private bankers in Denbigh and Llanrwst from about 1794.³

   The assets of Clough, Mason & Co. included not only land but also a paper factory and a woollen mill. James, however, from his Liverpool base, had begun to follow a newer star in the economic firmament, cotton, whose manufacture has been described as ‘the most dynamic industry of Britain between 1760 and 1800’. ⁴ But this very dynamism brought intense competition, with large numbers of business formations driving down profit margins. The pressures were intensified by the rapid technological development of the industry; while dependence on an imported raw material rendered the trade prey to variations in harvests and the depredations of warfare. All of these factors made dealing in raw cotton, cotton yarns and the finished goods highly speculative and risky activities: what soared high could also tumble down to earth; and the fluctuations of James Clough’s fortunes illustrate this vividly. His first period of dealing in cotton came to an end in 1810. A brief relaxation in the Napoleonic blockade of Britain brought a fall in cotton prices and the failure of several houses, including that of Wilkes and Clough. For the next six years James traded in corn.

   Clough, Mason & Co., his father’s bank, survived the crisis of 1810, only to fall prey, like so many other country banks, to the crisis of confidence in paper money which accompanied the end of war in Europe: they went down to bankruptcy in 1816.⁵ Their assets were sufficient to enable them eventually to pay twenty shillings in the pound; but realising these proved a prolonged process, which found James in January 1819 seeking a large short-term loan, writing, ‘I am so circumstanced in my engagements and arrangements for my poor Father that I want the assistance of about a Thousand Pounds⁶ until I can convert some of his personal property into money, which I hope to do in a few months.’⁷ Roger Clough made no more forays into business, but James was not at all deterrred by these early reversals. In 1816, the very year of his father’s bankruptcy, he returned to cotton, this time in partnership with Thomas Crowder. This partnership was underpinned by a complex web of family connections. That same year, James married Anne Perfect, one of the daughters of John and Catherine Maria Perfect of Pontefract. Thomas Crowder was married to another Perfect daughter, Eliza; and Anne and Eliza’s eldest brother, John Perfect, was married to another Crowder, also Eliza. The Perfects were Yorkshire lawyers whose success in land deals had drawn them too into banking, an involvement which was to prove more enduring and robust than that of Clough, Mason & Co. The Perfect family network and its resources were to provide a sheet anchor for both James Clough’s and Thomas Crowder’s families in the years to come; it was a pattern not uncommon in this period of economic transformation and upheaval.⁸

   Four children were born to James and Anne Clough in rapid succession. First came Charles Butler in 1817, then Arthur Hugh on 1 January 1819, Anne Jemima on 20 January 1820 and George Augustus on 26 July 1821. In the meantime James travelled back and forth from Liverpool to the United States, spending about eight months there in 1821.⁹ Then at the end of 1822 came the great bold step: the whole family removed to Charleston, South Carolina. Pressed forty years later to set down her earliest memories, this was the very first thing which Annie could remember: ‘Leaving England at the end of 1822 with my Father & Mother 3 brothers & 2 nurses – We sailed on the Ship Perfect & went to Charleston.’¹⁰

   The Cloughs settled in Charleston at 188 East Bay, a large three-storey house, the ground floor of which was office and store-rooms. Annie described it as ‘a large ugly red brick house near the sea’.¹¹ It still stands, renumbered 184, and its proportions are graceful. Perhaps the ugliness lay in the fact that the red brick was not concealed by stucco, unlike the brick of neighbouring houses. From their back windows the children could watch the wooden wharves on the Cooper river and the house was likewise admirably close to the market and commercial areas. The first two years in Charleston were happy. The members of the family were all together and there seemed enough financial margin to allow them to travel within the United States, going north each summer to escape the worst of the heat and humidity.¹² No more is heard of one of the two nursemaids who travelled with them from Liverpool; but the other, Ann Marshall, remained with the Cloughs throughout their years in Charleston, a devoted although sometimes temperamental family retainer. With her help and that of the black slaves they hired as servants, Anne Clough ran the household and cared for the children: she took pleasure in spending time with her children, teaching them to read and then reading with them.

   Yet cotton remained no less volatile a commodity and Crowder, Clough & Co. were brought down in the general financial crisis of 1825–6, which damaged many areas and trades, well beyond cotton. Crowder, Clough & Co. failed on 8 August 1825: as Anne was to put it much later, ‘the grand stop to our apparent greatness took place’.¹³ In the winter James left for England, to try to salvage what he could. He was away this time for eleven months and in August 1826 was formally declared bankrupt in London. The Perfect family seem to have done what they could. Anne’s younger brother, Henry Thomas Perfect, was named in the certificate of bankruptcy, along with Clough and Crowder, although there is no evidence that he was other than a sleeping partner. In July 1826 Thomas Crowder had written to remind their brother-in-law John Perfect ‘of your kind promise to become security for me’. He asked him to guarantee ‘about £1500 worth of Goods for my American friends payable in 6 Months’, by which time the sale of property would ensure that Crowder himself could meet the liability. The up-beat tone of this letter suggests that Crowder and Clough had already decided to use the provisions of the 1825 Bankruptcy Act, 6 Geo Ⅳ c.16; this, for the first time, allowed traders to declare themselves bankrupt and avail themselves of the protection of the law in limiting their liabilities and clearing the way eventually for a resumption of trading.¹⁴

   For the household left behind in Charleston, however, it was a lonely and an anxious time. Years later Arthur was to remember what a great event was the arrival of a letter.¹⁵ The children worked at their lessons and everyone waited. Their father’s eventual return in November 1826 was a joyous occasion: ‘And then the door opened and our father was in the room, catching up our mother in his arms, for she was nearly fainting, while we skipped about for joy.’¹⁶

   James Clough, ever optimistic, set about building up his business once again. ‘My father’, wrote Annie much later, ‘was very lively, and fond of society and amusement. He liked life and change, and did not care much for reading. He had a high sense of honour, but was venturesome and over sanguine, and when once his mind was set on anything, he was not to be turned from it, nor was he given to counting consequences.’¹⁷ In the short run, this robust approach paid off. The Federal Census of 1830 records a substantial establishment which included five hired slaves.¹⁸ Annie’s mother’s reaction to crisis was very different. Anne Clough was a more private person, reacting to adversity by withdrawal within the family circle. She read a great deal, nourishing her imagination and that of her children with myth, history and poetry. Underlying all this was a powerful sense of Christian duty. ‘Our Mother taught us about great men & their noble deeds & with her we read the Bible & learnt to look up to our Heavenly Father.’¹⁹

   The spring and summer of 1827 were good times for the younger Clough children. They played and tumbled on the cotton heaps in the store-rooms: ‘One of our games was playing at the Swiss Family Robinson, in which I remember Arthur was always Ernest, because Ernest liked reading and knew so much.’²⁰ In the high summer the whole family escaped the worst of the heat by taking a house across the bay, on Sullivan’s Island, a long narrow sandy strip, on which Edgar Allan Poe was to set his 1843 story The Gold-Bug. From Sullivan’s Island, James Clough could go in to his office by boat, while the children were free to explore the fine white sand of the beach and the low myrtle woods, where the curlews wheeled and called. Annie and George went happily barefoot and paddled, although Arthur was too fastidious to do so.

   The Cloughs were, however, as Annie wrote wistfully, ‘too English to let us go to school’²¹ in Charleston. Whether or not he succeeded in making his fortune, James was determined to follow the conventions of his family and of the day in educating his sons as English gentlemen. Formal schooling was coming increasingly into vogue for middle- and upper-class English boys: endowed grammar schools were being reformed and some, taking boarders, were turning themselves into public schools; new proprietary boarding schools were being founded; and preparatory schools were springing up. In sending his sons to boarding school, James was part of the trend.²² Charles, aged eight, had already been taken to prep school in England by his father at the end of 1825. At the end of 1828 it would be Arthur’s turn. In June 1828 the whole family set off for England, to see Charles, pay a round of family visits and sort out the first stage of Arthur’s schooling. The initial encounter with a large household of cousins was something of a shock: ‘Arthur could not enter into the boys’ rough games and amusements, and missed the constant companionship with his father. We travelled however for some months from one relation’s house to another, and by degrees Arthur became more sociable.’²³ The children paid a long visit to their maternal grandmother, near Pontefract, while their parents travelled in Europe. ²⁴ In November Arthur joined Charles at Mr Pepper’s preparatory school in Chester and the rest of the family prepared to return to Charleston. ‘This was practically the end of Arthur’s childhood’, wrote Annie.²⁵