Love of little children was one of the noticeable characteristics of Dr. Mitford’s life, and it was one in which his daughter shared. That she entered most fully into the games and pursuits of the village youngsters is evidenced in Our Village, where we obtain delightful little portraits of Joe Kirby, Jack Rapley, Jem and Lizzie, which sufficiently indicate the author’s knowledge of the child-mind, to say nothing of those breezy, hilarious descriptions of the slide and the cricket-match.
Shortly after Dr. Mitford’s death there came into her life a little boy named Henry Taylor—frequently alluded to as “K——’s little boy” in her letters, and as “little Henry” in the Recollections, but not to be confounded with the “little Henry” of Our Village, who was a lad sometimes hired by the Doctor for the performance of odd jobs.
Henry Taylor was born in Reading—the child of K——, Miss Mitford’s companion and hemmer of flounces—and at the mistress’s own request the boy was brought to live at her cottage when he was just upon two years old. He came as a new and welcome interest into her life and, while she petted and spoiled him, gave him wise and tender counsel. “A little boy, called Henry,” she wrote of him in her Recollections, “the child of the house (son, by the way, to the hemmer of flounces), has watched my ways, and ministered unbidden to my wants and fancies. Long before he could open the outer door, before, indeed, he was half the height of the wand in question” [her favourite walking-stick], “there he would stand, the stick in one hand, and if it were summer time, a flower in the other, waiting for my going out, the pretty Saxon boy, with his upright figure, his golden hair, his eyes like two stars, and his bright, intelligent smile! We were so used to see him there, silent and graceful as a Queen’s page, that when he returned to school after the holidays, and somebody else presented the stick and the rose, I hardly cared to take them. It seemed as if something was wrong, I missed him so! Most punctual of petted children!”
Whilst the child was at boarding-school in Reading, a rather serious outbreak of smallpox in the town, and particularly in a house adjoining the School, necessitated his being sent home to the cottage without delay, though not, unfortunately, in time to prevent his being infected. He was extremely ill and his life, at times, despaired of, the mother and Miss Mitford taking it by turns to watch over and nurse him. In the Recollections there is a most touching reference to this incident, which proves how strong was Miss Mitford’s affection for the child, how much a mother’s heart was hers. Quoting from Leigh Hunt’s poetry, she says:—“There is yet another poem for which I must make room. Every mother knows these pathetic stanzas. I shall never forget attempting to read them to my faithful maid, whose fair-haired boy, her pet and mine, was then recovering from a dangerous illness. I attempted to read these verses, and did read as many as I could for the rising in the throat—the hysterica passio of poor Lear—and as many as my auditor could hear for her own sobs.” And then she quotes those beautiful verses:—“To T. L. H., six years old, during a sickness.”
“Little Henry” is one of the few survivors of those who knew Miss Mitford intimately, and he has many tender memories of the kindly woman who, as time went on, made him her constant companion when she walked in the lanes and meadows in and about the neighbourhood. Woodcock Lane, of which we have already made mention, was among her favourite haunts, and thither she would take her way, with little Henry and the dogs, and while she sat with her writing-pad on her knee, would watch the eager child gathering his posies of wild flowers. “Do not gather them all, Henry,” was one of her regular injunctions on these occasions, “because some one who has not so many pretty flowers at home as we have may come this way and would like to gather some”; and sometimes she would add, “remember not to take all the flowers from one root, for the plant loves its flowers, and delights to feed and nourish them”—a pretty fancy which the child-mind could understand and appreciate. “Never repeat anything you hear which may cause pain or unhappiness to others” was a precept which often fell from her lips when speaking to the child and it was a lesson which he says he has never forgotten and has always striven to live up to in a long and somewhat arduous life spent here and abroad. Miss Mitford had a great and deep-seated objection to Mrs. Beecher Stowe. It arose principally from disapproval of certain derogatory statements about Lord Byron and his matrimonial relations which Mrs. Stowe had expressed to friends of Miss Mitford’s and which, after Miss Mitford’s death, were published in the work entitled Lady Byron Vindicated. The reason for this attitude of mind on Miss Mitford’s part is not difficult to understand when we remember that her great friend, William Harness, was among the earliest and dearest of Lord Byron’s friends. Thus, when Uncle Tom’s Cabin was published in this country, Miss Mitford refused to give any credence to the revelations it contained, and in this connection it is interesting to record that it was among the few books which she counselled the boy not to read.
For the children in the village she had ever a kind word and smile, inquiring why they did this or that when playing their games, and nothing delighted her more than to come upon a game of cricket being played by the youngsters, for then she would watch the game through, applauding vigorously and calling out encouraging remarks to the players, all of whom referred to her as the “kind lady.”
During the year 1844 Queen Victoria paid an unofficial visit to the Duke of Wellington at Strathfieldsaye, and Miss Mitford conceived the idea that it would please the Queen to be greeted on the roadside by the village children. With the co-operation of the farmers, who lent their wagons, some two hundred and ninety children were carried to a point near Swallowfield—some few miles from Three Mile Cross along the Basingstoke Road—each carrying a flag provided at Miss Mitford’s expense and by the industry of her maid, Jane, who was very skilful at such work. The wagons were decked out with laurels and bunting and made a very brave show when the Queen, escorted by the Duke, passed by them. “We all returned—carriages, wagons, bodyguard and all—to my house, where the gentlefolk had sandwiches and cake and wine, and where the children had each a bun as large as a soup-plate, made doubly nice as well as doubly large, a glass of wine, and a mug of ale”—rather advanced drinks for children, but probably thin enough to do no harm. “Never was such harmless jollity! Not an accident! not a squabble! not a misword! It did one’s very heart good.... To be sure it was a good deal of trouble, and Jane is done up. Indeed, the night before last we none of us went to bed. But it was quite worth it.”
All this sounds very delightful and light-hearted and truly the years seemed now to be passing very gently and kindly with the warmhearted woman who had, hitherto, suffered so much.
There were, of course, the usual ailments due to advancing age, which had to be endured, but, with short trips to town and a long holiday at Taplow, these ailments had no serious, immediate effect on Miss Mitford’s general health.
In 1846 the dear friend, Miss Barrett, was married to Robert Browning, an incident which proved—so Miss Mitford recorded—that “Love really is the wizard the poets have called him”. There is no mention of a wedding-present being despatched from Three Mile Cross—it will be remembered that the marriage was a somewhat hurried and secret affair, due to Mr. Barrett’s opposition to the whole idea—but we do know that when the happy couple left for Italy via Paris they took with them Flush, the dog, which Miss Mitford had sent as a gift to her friend some years before. Flush was a character, and figures very much in the Barrett-Browning correspondence from 1842 to 1848; he died much loved and lamented, and now lies buried in the Casa Guidi vaults.
All the world knows what a wonderful marriage that was—two hearts beating as one—and how remarkable and romantic was the courtship, the story of which, from Mrs. Browning’s own pen, is so exquisitely told in Sonnets from the Portuguese—the “finest sonnets written in any language since Shakespeare’s,” was Robert Browning’s delighted comment—“the very notes and chronicle of her betrothal,” as Mr. Edmund Gosse writes of them, when he relates how prettily and playfully they were first shown to the husband for whom they had been expressly written. But—and this is why we make mention of them here—before ever they were shown to the husband they had been despatched to Miss Mitford for her approval and criticism, and she urged that they be published in one of the Annuals of the day. To this suggestion Mrs. Browning would not accede, but consented at last to allow them to be privately printed, for which purpose they were again sent to Miss Mitford, who arranged for their printing in Reading—probably through her friend, Mr. Lovejoy—under the simple title of Sonnets: by E. B. B., and on the title-page were the additional words:—“Reading: Not for Publication: 1847.”
Miss Mitford often made complaint of the number of visitors who thronged her cottage, but now that she had none but herself to consider she seems to have found her chief delight in receiving and entertaining, in quiet fashion, the many literary folk who made pilgrimages to her, visits which were always followed by a correspondence which must have fully occupied her time. This year, 1847, brought Ruskin to the cottage through the introduction of Mrs. Cockburn (the Mary Duff of Lord Byron). “John Ruskin, the Oxford Undergraduate, is a very elegant and distinguished-looking young man, tall, fair, and slender—too slender, for there is a consumptive look, and I fear a consumptive tendency.... He must be, I suppose, twenty-six or twenty-seven, but he looks much younger, and has a gentle playfulness—a sort of pretty waywardness, that is quite charming. And now we write to each other, and I hope love each other as you and I do”—Miss Mitford’s note on the visit, written to another friend, Mr. Charles Boner, in America.
Hearing that William Chambers, the Edinburgh publisher, was that year in London, an invitation was sent to him to call at the cottage, and while there he, his hostess and Mr. Lovejoy discussed a project which had long been occupying the minds of Miss Mitford and her bookseller-friend, on the subject of “Rural Libraries.”
Mr. Chambers refers to the visit in his Autobiography. “The pleasantest thing about the visit was my walk with the aged lady among the green lanes in the neighbourhood—she trotting along with a tall cane, and speaking of rural scenes and circumstances.... I see she refers to this visit, stating that she was at the time engaged along with Mr. Lovejoy in a plan for establishing lending libraries for the poor, in which, she says, I assisted her with information and advice. What I really advised was that, following out a scheme adopted in East Lothian, parishes should join in establishing itinerating libraries, each composed of different books, so that, being shifted from place to place, a degree of novelty might be maintained for mutual advantage.”
In any case, this Mitford-Lovejoy project was well considered and, after many delays, the two friends issued a little four-page pamphlet (now very rare) with the front page headed “Rural Libraries,” followed by a circular letter in which was set forth the origin of the scheme—due to a request from the young wife of a young clergyman in a country parish who wanted to stimulate the parishioners to the reading of sound literature—and an invitation to interested persons to correspond with “M. R. M., care of Mr. Lovejoy, Reading.” The rest of the pamphlet was occupied with a list of some two hundred titles of books recommended, among them being Our Village, the inclusion of which caused Miss Mitford to tell a friend that she “noticed Mr. Lovejoy had smuggled it in.” Whether anything definite resulted from the distribution of this pamphlet is not certain, but the labour it entailed is a proof of the interest which both Miss Mitford and her coadjutor had in matters affecting the education of the people.
By the year 1850 the cottage again became so bad as to be almost uninhabitable—“the walls seem to be mouldering from the bottom, crumbling, as it were, like an old cheese; and whether anything can be done to it is doubtful,” and, acting under Dr. May’s advice, it was decided to leave the old place for good. The neighbourhood was scoured in the endeavour to find something suitable, and at last the very thing was found at Swallowfield, three miles further along the Basingstoke Road. “It is about six miles from Reading along this same road, leading up from which is a short ascending lane, terminated by the small dwelling, with a court in front, and a garden and paddock behind. Trees overarch it like the frame of a picture, and the cottage itself, though not pretty, yet too unpretending to be vulgar, and abundantly snug and comfortable, leading by different paths to all my favourite walks, and still within distance of my most valuable neighbours.”
The removal, “a terrible job,” involving, among other items, the cartage and re-arranging of four tons of books, took place during the third week of September, 1851, just in time to enable the household to get nicely settled in before the winter.
“And yet it was grief to go,” she wrote. “There I had toiled and striven, and tasted as deeply of bitter anxiety, of fear, and of hope, as often falls to the lot of woman. There, in the fulness of age, I had lost those whose love had made my home sweet and precious. Alas! there is no hearth so humble but it has known such tales of joy and of sorrow! Friends, many and kind, had come to that bright garden, and that garden room. The list would fill more pages than I have to give. There Mr. Justice Talfourd had brought the delightful gaiety of his brilliant youth, and poor Haydon had talked more vivid pictures than he ever painted. The illustrious of the last century—Mrs. Opie, Jane Porter, Mr. Cary—had mingled there with poets, still in their earliest dawn. It was a heart-tug to leave that garden.... I walked from the one cottage to the other on an autumn evening, when the vagrant birds, whose habit of assembling here for their annual departure gives, I suppose, its name of Swallowfield to the village, were circling and twittering over my head; and repeated to myself the pathetic lines of Hayley as he saw these same birds gathering upon his roof during his last illness:—
Thoughts soothing and tender came with those touching lines, and gayer images followed. Here I am in this prettiest village, in the cosiest and snuggest of all cabins; a trim cottage garden, divided by a hawthorn hedge from a little field guarded by grand old trees; a cheerful glimpse of the high road in front, just to hint that there is such a thing as the peopled world; and on either side the deep, silent, woody lanes that form the distinctive character of English scenery.”