In 1830 the young couple with three children came to live in St. Helen’s parish, Bishopsgate, where a year later Dorothea, their fourth child and third daughter, was born. She was baptized in the ancient church of St. Helen’s on June 10, 1831. ‘Awoke early. Baptism Day. Read the service,’ she wrote in her diary in 1891.
The Complins were a family of wide connections. Mrs. Beale’s aunt, Mrs. Cornwallis, wife of the Rev. William Cornwallis, rector of Wittersham, Kent, was an active, benevolent woman with literary tastes and occupations. She took a great interest in her two young nieces, Elizabeth and Dorothea Margaret Complin, who at an early age lost their own mother, her sister. The two little girls were sent to school at Ealing, where the elder, Elizabeth, gained many prizes or ‘Rewards of Merit,’ as school prizes were then called. After her sister’s marriage to Mr. Miles Beale, Elizabeth Complin lived for some time with her clever aunt and cousin, Mrs. Cornwallis and her daughter Caroline, sharing their interests and studies. On the death of her brother’s wife she came to live in London. There she was brought into immediate touch with her nieces, Dorothea Beale and her sisters, whom she delighted to help and advise in their reading, and who by her means became familiar with the aims and ideals of the Cornwallises. These more distant relations, whose intellectual aims and work Miss Beale always reckoned among the influences of her early life, were themselves authors of no mean merit. ‘Mrs. Cornwallis wrote several devotional books, and is said to have learned Hebrew in the first instance to teach her grandson, James Trimmer. She wrote also for him a series of papers on the canonical Scriptures, in four volumes. This was published by subscription, as was the custom with expensive works in those days. The Queen and a number of great people entered their names, and with the profits Mrs. Cornwallis was able to build schools in her husband’s parish.’[1]
James Trimmer died when only twelve. His other grandmother was also literary—Mrs. Sarah Trimmer, famous in her own day as the author of nearly thirty volumes for the young. Her Sacred History was the most important of these, but perhaps the best known now is The History of the Robins.
‘One story of his childhood,’ runs the autobiography, ‘was a great favourite with us as children. His uncle had settled to sell a pony of which James was very fond, and many were the tears he shed. His grandmother (Mrs. Cornwallis) said, “I think, James, that this life is a journey upwards; each time we do right, or bear a sorrow patiently, we get up one step of the ladder to Heaven.” So he dried his eyes and was quite cheerful once more. Meanwhile, his uncle, seeing the boy’s sorrow, cancelled the sale, and brought news to James that the pony was his once more. Again to his surprise, James burst into tears, and at length it was drawn from him that he feared now he would have to come down from that step of the ladder. He was finally consoled by some such doctrine as Browning has commended in the words, “’Tis not what man does that exalts him, but what man would do.” All her pupils were not as responsive as James. Once, after expending her eloquence on a plough-boy whom she was preparing for confirmation, she said: “Now, are you not glad that you have a soul?” to which she could only get the reply, “I don’t care very little about it....”
‘Mr. Cornwallis was a scholar; he was a descendant of Archbishop Cornwallis. I do not know any details of his College career; but he taught his only unmarried daughter Latin and Greek classics, and she gained such a rare facility in understanding that he used to read the classics aloud to her, and expect her to follow. He was a friend of Sismondi, from whom Miss Cornwallis received an offer of marriage, which she declined on the ground of great disparity of age. Sismondi lent her afterwards his villa at Pisa, and my aunt, her great friend, accompanied her there. A journey to Italy for two ladies was a great undertaking, and many interesting reminiscences used we to hear from my aunt. She there acquired a good knowledge of Italian, by which we benefited later.’[2]
In after years Miss Caroline Cornwallis moved to Maidstone, where she exercised her many talents and versatile mind in varied occupations. Miss Cornwallis not only studied Greek, Latin, and Hebrew, but such questions of the day as criminal procedure; she also read philosophy. She wrote besides articles for the Westminster Review and Fraser’s Magazine, several books in a series entitled ‘Small Books on Great Subjects—edited by a few well-wishers to knowledge.’ The first was Philosophical Theories and Experience of a Pariah. She said women were regarded as pariahs, and were it known that the book was written by a woman it would not be read.[3] Others of the series which she wrote were some volumes entitled A Brief View of Greek Philosophy, and some historical works, The State of the World before the Introduction of Christianity. She also wrote a classical novel called Pericles and Aspasia. Miss Cornwallis rejoiced in the fact that as a woman, though unknown, she obtained for her writings the praise of ‘big-wigs.’
‘“I long,” she wrote to a friend after one of her works had received flattering notices in the British Medical Journal, “to knock all the big-wigs together and say it was a woman that did all this—a woman that laughed at you all and despised your praise. And if, like Caligula’s wish, I could put all mankind into one and leave you to say that in its ears when I am gone quietly to my grave, I think it would be glorious. It is as a woman, and not as the individual C.F.C., that I enjoy my triumph; for, as regards my own proper self, I like to creep in a corner and be quiet; but to raise my whole sex and with it the world is an object worth fagging for. Heart and hand to the work.”’
Caroline Frances Cornwallis
From a painting by herself