An Unconventional Wife Page 3
Not far past the gaol were the soldiers’ barracks. The military presided over this penitentiary town on the edge of the world, and its presence was pervasive. The drums of the military band regulated the town’s movement, while the officers’ dinners and balls provided an opportunity for the powerful and the fashionable to meet and mingle.
On the short journey to her father’s home, Julia was momentarily struck by the convicts, the chain gangs, the soldiers, even the remnant number of the island’s original inhabitants. However, she knew that before long she would not notice such things. Instead she would only see the shimmering surface, the beautiful harbour, the provincial English air. But there was much else that she did not know instinctively or otherwise about life in Hobart.
She did not know of the need to maintain distance between the free, the manacled, and the dispossessed. She did not know that the obsession with upholding rank and distinction prompted frivolous debates and slighted honour. She did not know that social ostracism was routine and privacy non-existent. Nor did she know yet how, in this community where men outnumbered women three to one, relentless scrutiny and gossip might be used with spectacular effect against women who transgressed the unwritten rules of fashionable society.
These were matters that the older and more worldly Louisa Meredith understood immediately when she settled in Hobart. Nowhere, she believed, were the decent and becoming observances of social and domestic life more strictly maintained, nowhere was the punishment of exclusion from society more effective, and nowhere were people’s past lives more minutely and rigidly canvassed, than in the higher circles of this little community. The smallness of this community certainly intensified the impact of scrutiny and gossip, but Louisa felt it was also a result of the frightful amount of snobbishness, which prevails here among those who might really well dispense with the feverish terror of being said or thought to do anything ungenteel or unfashionable.
Julia made her entry into this dissembling, confined world in the sitting rooms of her many aunts and cousins. Eager as they were to nibble morsels of cake and sip tea with their vivacious young relative, few appeared willing to act as her mentor, to impart to her the feminine counsel she required. Julia felt this failure deeply. She struggled with her ignorance, years later telling her husband that few families have been blessed with such a home training as yours, and very few in our rank of life have been cursed such as mine. But the independence she had developed in her years in Brussels enabled her now to look elsewhere for support and for knowledge. She sought those women in her father’s circle who were a little older than she was, who were able to proffer advice and to hold up to her the mirror that would reflect back the experience of being a woman, something that for all her closeness to her father, he could not give her. Female succour had begun in the close relationships she had forged in Brussels with her younger sisters, Gussie and Ada, and it would be an enduring thread in Julia’s life. The Sorell sisters were not unusual in this regard. Confined for much of their time to the domestic hearth and with little opportunity to forge strong relationships with outsiders, sisters inevitably turned to each other.
Julia quickly found a rhythm to her life. As mistress of her father’s house, she had first to learn the art of household management, an arduous array of duties that included keeping the household accounts, caring for the younger children, dealing with tradesmen, arranging functions and social gatherings, overseeing the garden and the cooking, and, importantly, supervising the servants. She found it daunting, as did her contemporary, the artist Mary Allport, who groaned under the weight of extra work caused by domestic violence and disarray among her servants. On one occasion she had all her Saturday’s work to do as usual owing to the gentle Wordsworth knocking down his wife, my washerwoman, and cutting her eye with the corner of the door. The diarist George Boyes also experienced similar difficulties, but George, not burdened in the same way with domestic responsibilities as Mary, was able to adopt a more acerbic view, noting that after the 1840 Hobart Regatta took place, his servants drank of course and the gardener gave Ann a thrashing in the kitchen to prove his love for her and enmity to a supposed rival. Regardless of her mistakes and failings, Julia was never condemned or criticised by her father for her housekeeping. Instead, he praised her efforts and encouraged her, delighted that this whirlwind of a daughter was back with him.
And Julia’s life was not all domestic duties. Women in the upper echelons of this society had concocted a world full of pleasure and activity to pass the time. Since her departure for Europe, there had been a burgeoning of cultural life in Hobart. Governor and Lady Franklin had become strong patrons of the arts and education on assuming their vice-regal role in 1837, and despite the bishop’s wife, Mrs Nixon, believing that no one cared a straw for the arts, or even for reading, there was an abundance of cultural groups and organisations including a choral society, a piano-playing group, a library, two theatres, and a mechanics institute, in which a course of lectures were delivered weekly during winter. Julia quickly embraced this world and she passed her days in a whirl of visiting and receiving visitors, sketching, playing music, attending regattas, picnics, fetes, shooting parties, racing, cricket matches, and horticultural shows.
When she was not involved in the events that festooned Hobart’s social calendar, Julia would join her father, whenever he could escape from his job, to ride with him in the government domain. It was, apart from music and dancing, her greatest pleasure, and she became a fearless, confident rider. In such a constrained and decorous world, riding was a release, a space where she could express her exuberance without fearing its effects. Julia was not exceptional in her enjoyment of riding. Louisa Meredith had been shocked when she first arrived in Hobart and found conversation was so laced with veterinary references among ladies that the first questions asked were not enquiries after parents, sisters, brothers, or friends: no, nor even the lady-beloved talk of weddings and dress, but almost invariably turfy, which she found unfeminine in the extreme.
Julia’s days were full, as too were her evenings, which revolved around Government House and its dinners, concerts, dances, balls, soirées, and theatrical performances. She excelled at dancing and much preferred those evenings when the carpets came up and the military band came in rather than the conversazione-style evening parties the governor’s wife, Lady Franklin, often liked to hold. Again she was not exceptional, as many of her friends were uniformly horrified at the idea of being stuck up in rooms full of pictures and books, and shells and stones, and other rubbish, with nothing to do but to hear people talk lectures, or else sit as mute as mice listening to what was called good music.
Julia loved the theatre too and was often among the crowd at The Victoria, although she much preferred to act herself, and when another governor’s wife, Lady Caroline Denison, introduced tableaux vivants to Government House, she and Gussie and Ada were all keenly sought as actors. In one such tableau, The Winter’s Tale, Julia took the role of Hermione, and she was, according to onlookers, a vision, lovely and motionless, on her pedestal, until at the words ‘Music! Awake her! Strike!’ she kindled into life.
Not long after Julia’s return to Hobart, Bishop Francis Nixon, a keen amateur artist and an avid collector, established an artists’ group. It triggered a landscape and watercolour craze, and suddenly sketching materials, along with parasols, cushions, shawls, and cloaks, were added to picnic lists. The bishop’s passion for art also caused a boon in commissions for professional painters, and William Sorell, like many of his peers, decided to commission a portrait. Curiously, it was not of his beautiful eldest daughter, Julia. Instead he asked the artist Thomas Bock to paint his eldest son, Percy. Julia, who was said to resemble the ‘Aurora Raby’ in the annual Heath’s Book of Beauty, may have reminded Sorell too much of his errant wife. Aurora is no pale English miss, but a dark-haired beauty with the robust and sensuous look of European ancestry. In truth, Sorell’s reluctance was more likely caused by h
is unwillingness to have Julia sit for a convict artist who had been transported for seducing a young woman. When completed, Percy’s portrait revealed a beautiful child with a cherubic face, but it was still not inducement enough for his father to commission a portrait of Julia. That would have to wait.
3
A Colonial Belle
Julia was not introspective. She much preferred to be with her family and friends, doing things, rather than writing about them, pouring fragments of her life and those of her friends into a diary. Others in her circle did keep diaries, and her name flits in and out of these pages. Chief among the diarists were George Boyes, the auditor-general of Van Diemen’s Land and a contemporary of Julia’s father, and Annie Baxter, the young wife of an officer stationed in Van Diemen’s Land and a near contemporary of Julia. Boyes was deeply cynical about the people of Van Diemen’s Land, believing they resembled the Americans in their presumption, arrogance, impudence, and conceit. He also thought them narrow, lying, slandering, envious, hateful, malicious, and incapable of any generous sentiments. Annie Baxter was a very different diarist to Boyes. She was given to spite and pride rather than cynicism, writing defiantly that Plebeian blood is beneath my notice when a group of young women behaved coolly towards her.
When Julia first met Annie at the Hobart Regatta in 1844, she immediately took her under her wing and introduced her to all and sundry, despite Annie being the older, married woman. From this initial encounter, Julia was subjected to Annie’s relentless scrutiny and to her spite. The two young women mixed in the same circles, shared many of the same friends, and were courted by the same men — in Annie’s case surreptitiously, due to her married status — but Julia’s independence, her decisiveness, and her popularity aroused Annie’s envy, and she took her revenge in her diary. When Julia took off her bonnet, Annie construed it as Julia wanting to show off her good hair. When Richard Dry, with whom Annie was secretly in love, paid marked attention to Julia, Annie described Julia as not pretty but good-looking, with the Vixen depicted in her eyes. There is something vivid and flirtatious in that word ‘vixen’, although it does not fit with another description of Julia as being very like the Waverley novels’ illustration of Amy Robsart, a young woman with a challenge in her direct gaze and the suggestion of a laugh on her bow-shaped mouth.
Richard Dry, possibly the colony’s most eligible bachelor, was one of Julia’s earliest beaus. He had inherited Quamby, a 30,000-acre estate in northern Van Diemen’s Land, on his father’s death in April 1843, and he was a favourite with all. Julia met him when, not long after her return from Europe, she had accompanied her father, along with the rest of fashionable society, to Quamby for the wedding of Richard’s adopted sister, Ellen. As a young, attractive girl of marriageable age, Julia’s every movement was remarked upon, especially any exchanges with men, and without an ever-vigilant mother, she was able to give free rein to her lively, impetuous, generous nature. Inevitably a bevy of admirers gathered around her and the slightest suggestion that she admired someone would lead to wild speculation and gossip.
When Julia and Richard met, they liked each other, and they continued to like each other. It was enough to spark Annie’s jealousy and to raise expectations that Julia and Richard would soon be engaged, the first of many occasions when this type of gossip, always carrying a hint of salaciousness, would engulf Julia. Sometimes she was rumoured to be engaged to several men simultaneously. At the same time that gossip raged about her relationship with Richard Dry, there were suggestions that she was engaged to her father’s friend, the sixty-year-old colonial secretary, James Bicheno.
Julia was constantly cast in the shadow of her flamboyant, scandalous mother and never permitted to bask in the glow of her gentle, affectionate, and strictly honourable father. Subjected to an unremitting, remorseless gaze, her every action, no matter how trivial, triggered the same predictable response. When she was part of a large party visiting the governor at his New Norfolk cottage, she fell from a chair, and Annie Baxter noted in her diary that Julia was far from the first of her family to fall through the machinations of Man! But such judgements only made Julia more, not less, wary of men and marriage.
If gossip plagued her whenever she and Richard met, it went into a frenzy when she met Chester Eardley-Wilmot, one of the governor’s sons, at Government House. Their friendship blossomed at fetes, dances, picnics, and in the drawing rooms of Hobart notables. It was not long before Chester trusted her not only to keep a confidence — he sent her a book that he had enjoyed reading and told her not to tell anybody that I have lent it to you as it is not mine — but to offer her his horse to ride when he could not accompany her to a picnic. Rarely, if ever, did a man offer his horse to another man, but to offer it to a woman bespoke a singular trust, a trust that went deeper when Chester eventually asked her to marry him — and Julia agreed. No formal announcement was made, yet only months later their relationship had foundered, smothered by colonial politics, the tightly bound, confined circle they inhabited, and Julia’s own doubts about marriage.
Chester’s father had been appointed governor of Van Diemen’s Land in 1843 for a term of six years, and when he had arrived with his three sons but not his wife, his every action, his every judgement, and his every interaction with women was exposed to forensic scrutiny on the part of the colonists. At the same time, divisions were growing between Whitehall and the colonists over Whitehall’s attempt to place the full burden of convict expenses on them. As the colonists saw it, transportation was British government policy and the British Treasury should pay for it. So when Governor Eardley-Wilmot sought to impose new and higher taxes, it not only made him very unpopular in Van Diemen’s Land, but the unrest it provoked caused Whitehall to brand him incompetent, and his enemies in both the colony and in London began attempts to remove him from office. They would use any weapon to hand, and when a rumour began circulating that the governor had taken Julia to his cottage at New Norfolk where it was alleged they had remained alone for the night, Julia became caught up in these political manoeuvres.
The gentle William Sorell acted quickly and decisively to defend his daughter’s honour and called upon the governor to denounce the story as untrue. When it transpired that it had been started by one of the governor’s political enemies, the gossip about Julia subsided, but the story itself became another weapon against the increasingly beleaguered governor in his fight to remain in office. A climax came only months later when six members of the Legislative Council, known as the Patriotic Six, resigned and brought government in the colony to a standstill. One of the six was Julia’s old beau Richard Dry.
In the midst of this turmoil, Julia and Chester Eardley-Wilmot decided to marry, although before any formal engagement notice was made, Julia sought reassurances from Richard Dry that he did not think that they had any prior commitment to each other. She had developed her own code of honour. There would be none of her mother’s duplicity in any relationship she established. George Boyes’s view on the relationship — he thought Chester a bold youth if he was aware of the risk he ran in making a connection with Julia — revealed yet again the prison of opinion her mother’s behaviour had caged her into.
The politics surrounding the governor grew darker when Whitehall received details of the constitutional crisis caused by the resignation of the Patriotic Six, and he was dismissed immediately. His incompetence, the public explanation, together with his fondness for the younger part of the fair sex, the private explanation, had sealed his fate, and although his family, friends, and even the colonial press maintained his innocence, he died a broken man just six months later. In the wake of the governor’s dismissal and death and the political furore that followed, the backbiting and rumours went into overdrive. Julia’s alleged relationship with the governor re-emerged, and despite her love for Chester — some of his letters were still in her keeping at her death — she ended their relationship.
Julia’s courage was depleted
and knowing the gossip would only become more repugnant, she determined to leave Hobart immediately. Even the normally spiteful Annie expressed a rare sympathy for her, saying that Julia could not be blamed for breaking the engagement and declaring bluntly that had she loved Chester as much as Julia, then she would have done the same thing. Annie’s sympathy went even further. She noted that though Julia was very passionate in every way, she had no mother to help her at this time, and it would be well indeed if we could judge others as we do ourselves. But Julia, not wanting sympathy any more than she wanted derision, fled Hobart to stay with a friend. There she nursed her bruised heart in private. Two years later, in December 1848, Chester married the sketcher and lithographer Jeannie Dunn. Annie had an opinion on that, too. She believed Chester was still in love with Julia and doubted the likelihood of happiness as Chester had told her that Jeannie was old and ugly enough to marry!
As a way of distracting her, of soothing her despair, William Sorell decided to commission Julia’s portrait. He did not ask the seducer Thomas Bock to paint her, but turned instead to another ex-convict, Thomas Wainewright, an artist who had also established a reputation among prominent Hobart citizens. Wainewright was a mere forger, but curiously, it was Wainewright who was never allowed to be alone with the daughters of the gentry during sittings. This did not, however, deter sitters. Some critics of Wainewright deplore his maudlin sentimentality and his affected portraits of women, a style they argue that served to satisfy the sentimental family yearnings of the colonists, but others applaud his Regency discretion and simplicity. Whatever its artistic merit, his portrait is the earliest image that exists of Julia.
Following the conventions of the period, she poses facing the viewer. Wearing long pendant earrings and a richly decorated gown, which exposes her soft rounded shoulders, Julia reveals none of the French vivacity and the overflowing energy that she was so renowned for, yet those large dark eyes, delicate features, and bow-shaped mouth explain why she was the belle of Hobart society. Her famously expressive hands lie hidden from view. This may reflect the artist’s lack of confidence in painting hands — none of his many portraits of Tasmanian colonists depict them — but it might also point to the discomfort Julia felt at having to sit still for any length of time. There is, too, a hint of sadness in that rather pensive face, an acknowledgement that, at twenty-one years of age, life had already bruised her.