Life of Frances Power Cobbe, as told by herself / with additions by the author, and introduction by Blanche Atkinson

by Frances Power Cobbe

Newbridge, Co. Dublin.

I was born on the morning of the 4th December, 1822; at sunrise. There had been a memorable storm during the night, and Dublin, where my father had taken a house that my mother might be near her doctor, was strewn with the wrecks of trees and chimney pots. My parents had already four sons, and after the interval of five years since the birth of the youngest, a girl was by no means welcome. I have never had reason, however, to complain of being less cared for or less well treated in every way than my brothers. If I have become in mature years a “Woman’s Rights’ Woman” it has not been because in my own person I have been made to feel a Woman’s Wrongs. On the contrary, my brothers’ kindness and tenderness to me have been unfailing from my infancy. I was their “little Fà’,” their pet and plaything when they came home for their holidays; and rough words not to speak of knocks,—never reached me from any of them or from my many masculine cousins, some of whom, as my father’s wards, I hardly distinguished in childhood from brothers.

A few months after my birth my parents moved to a house named Bower Hill Lodge in Melksham, which my father hired, I believe, to be near his boys at school, and I have some dim recollections of the verandah of the house, and also of certain raisins which I appropriated, and of suffering direful punishment at my father’s hands for the crime! Before I was four years old we returned to Newbridge, and I was duly installed with my good old Irish nurse, Mary Malone, in the large nursery at the end of the north corridor—the most charming room for a child’s abode I have ever seen. It was so distant from the regions inhabited by my parents that I was at full liberty to make any amount of noise I pleased; and from the three windows I possessed a commanding view of the stable yard, wherein there was always visible an enchanting spectacle of dogs, cats, horses, grooms, gardeners, and milkmaids. A grand old courtyard it is; a quadrangle about a rood in size surrounded by stables, coach-houses, kennels, a laundry, a beautiful dairy, a labourer’s room, a paint shop, a carpenter’s shop, a range of granaries and fruitlofts with a great clock in the pediment in the centre; and a well in the midst of all. Behind the stables and the kennels appear the tops of walnut and chestnut trees and over the coach-houses on the other side can be seen the beautiful old kitchen garden of six acres with its lichen-covered red brick walls, backed again by trees; and its formal straight terraces and broad grass walks.

In this healthful, delightful nursery, and in walks with my nurse about the lawns and shrubberies, the first years of my happy childhood went by; fed in body with the freshest milk and eggs and fruit, everything best for a child; and in mind supplied only with the simple, sweet lessons of my gentle mother. No unwholesome food, physical or moral, was ever allowed to come in my way till body and soul had almost grown to their full stature. When I compare such a lot as this (the common lot, of course, of English girls of the richer classes, blessed with good fathers and mothers) with the case of the hapless young creatures who are fed from infancy with insufficient and unwholesome food, perhaps dosed with gin and opium from the cradle, and who, even as they acquire language, learn foul words, curses and blasphemies,—when I compare, I say, my happy lot with the miserable one of tens of thousands of my brother men and sister women, I feel appalled to reflect, by how different a standard must they and I be judged by eternal Justice!

In such an infancy the events were few, but I can remember with amusement the great exercise of my little mind concerning a certain mythical being known as “Peter.” The story affords a droll example of the way in which fetishes are created among child-minded savages. One day, (as my mother long afterwards explained to me), I had been hungrily eating a piece of bread and butter out of doors, when one of the greyhounds, of which my father kept several couples, bounded past me and snatched the bread and butter from my little hands. The outcry which I was preparing to raise on my loss was suddenly stopped by the bystanders judiciously awakening my sympathy in Peter’s enjoyment, and I was led up to stroke the big dog and make friends with him. Seeing how successful was this diversion, my nurse thenceforward adopted the practice of seizing everything in the way of food, knives, &c., which it was undesirable I should handle, and also of shutting objectionably open doors and windows, exclaiming “O! Peter! Peter has got it! Peter has shut it!”—as the case might be. Accustomed to succumb to this unseen Fate under the name of Peter, and soon forgetting the dog, I came to think there was an all-powerful, invisible Being constantly behind the scenes, and had so far pictured him as distinct from the real original Peter that on one occasion when I was taken to visit at some house where there was an odd looking end of a beam jutting out under the ceiling, I asked in awe-struck tones: “Mama! is that Peter’s head?”

My childhood, though a singularly happy, was an unusually lonely one. My dear mother very soon after I was born became lame from a trifling accident to her ankle (ill-treated, unhappily, by the doctors) and she was never once able in all her life to take a walk with me. Of course I was brought to her continually; first to be nursed,—for she fulfilled that sacred duty of motherhood to all her children, believing that she could never be so sure of the healthfulness of any other woman’s constitution as of her own. Later, I seem to my own memory to have been often cuddled up close to her on her sofa, or learning my little lessons, mounted on my high chair beside her, or repeating the Lord’s Prayer at her knee. All these memories are infinitely sweet to me. Her low, gentle voice, her smile, her soft breast and arms, the atmosphere of dignity which always surrounded her,—the very odour of her clothes and lace, redolent of dried roses, come back to me after three-score years with nothing to mar their sweetness. She never once spoke angrily or harshly to me in all her life, much less struck or punished me; and I—it is a comfort to think it—never, so far as I can recall, disobeyed or seriously vexed her. She had regretted my birth, thinking that she could not live to see me grow to womanhood, and shrinking from a renewal of the cares of motherhood with the additional anxiety of a daughter’s education. But I believe she soon reconciled herself to my existence, and made me, first her pet, and then her companion and even her counsellor. She told me, laughingly, how, when I was four years old, my father happening to be away from home she made me dine with her, and as I sat in great state beside her on my little chair I solemnly remarked: “Mama, is it not a very comflin thing to have a little girl?” an observation which she justly thought went to prove that she had betrayed sufficiently to my infantine perspicacity that she enjoyed my company at least as much as hers was enjoyed by me.

My nurse who had attended all my brothers, was already an elderly woman when recalled to Newbridge to take charge of me; and though a dear, kind old soul and an excellent nurse, she was naturally not much of a playfellow for a little child, and it was very rarely indeed that I had any young visitor in my nursery or was taken to see any of my small neighbours. Thus I was from infancy much thrown on my own resources for play and amusement; and from that time to this I have been rather a solitary mortal, enjoying above all things lonely walks and studies; and always finding my spirits rise in hours and days of isolation. I think I may say I have never felt depressed when living alone. As a child I have been told I was a very merry little chick, with a round, fair face and abundance of golden hair; a typical sort of Saxon child. I was subject then and for many years after, to furious fits of anger, and on such occasions I misbehaved myself exceedingly. “Nanno” was then wont peremptorily to push me out into the long corridor and bolt the nursery door in my face, saying in her vernacular, “Ah, then! you bould Puckhawn (audacious child of Puck)! I’ll get shut of you!” I think I feel now the hardness of that door against my little toes, as I kicked at it in frenzy. Sometimes, when things were very bad indeed, Nanno conducted me to the end of the corridor at the top of a very long winding stone stair, near the bottom of which my father occasionally passed on his way to the stables. “Yes, Sir! Yes, Sir! She’ll be good immadiently, Sir, you needn’t come upstairs, Sir!” Then, sotto voce, to me, “Don’t ye hear the Masther? Be quiet now, my darlint, or he’ll come up the stairs!” Of course, “the Masther” seldom or never was really within earshot on these occasions. Had he been so Nanno would have been the last person seriously to invoke his dreaded interference in my discipline. But the alarm usually sufficed to reduce me to submission. I had plenty of toddling about out of doors and sitting in the sweet grass making daisy and dandelion chains, and at home playing with the remnants of my brother’s Noah’s Ark, and a magnificent old baby-house which stood in one of the bedrooms, and was so large that I can dimly remember climbing up and getting into the doll’s drawing-room.

My fifth birthday was the first milestone on Life’s road which I can recall. I recollect being brought in the morning into my mother’s darkened bedroom (she was already then a confirmed invalid), and how she kissed and blessed me, and gave me childish presents, and also a beautiful emerald ring which I still possess, and pearl bracelets which she fastened on my little arms. No doubt she wished to make sure that whenever she might die these trinkets should be known to be mine. She and my father also gave me a Bible and Prayer Book, which I could read quite well, and proudly took next Sunday to church for my first attendance, when the solemn occasion was much disturbed by a little girl in a pew below howling for envy of my white beaver bonnet, displayed in the fore-front of the gallery which formed our family seat. “Why did little Miss Robinson cry?” I was deeply inquisitive on the subject, having then and always during my childhood regarded “best clothes” with abhorrence.

Two years later my grandmother, having bestowed on me, at Bath, a sky-blue silk pelisse, I managed nefariously to tumble down on purpose into a gutter full of melted snow the first day it was put on, so as to be permitted to resume my little cloth coat.

Now, aged five, I was emancipated from the nursery and allowed to dine thenceforward at my parents’ late dinner, while my good nurse was settled for the rest of her days in a pretty ivy-covered cottage with large garden, at the end of the shrubbery. She lived there for several years with an old woman for servant, who I can well remember, but who must have been of great age, for she had been under-dairymaid to my great great-grandfather, the Archbishop, and used to tell us stories of “old times.” This “old Ally’s” great grandchildren were still living, recently, in the family service in the same cottage which poor “Nanno” occupied. Ally was the last wearer of the real old Irish scarlet cloak in our part of the country; and I can remember admiring it greatly when I used to run by her side and help her to carry her bundle of sticks. Since those days, even the long blue frieze cloak which succeeded universally to the scarlet—a most comfortable, decent, and withal graceful peasant garment, very like the blue cotton one of the Arab fellah-women—has itself nearly or totally disappeared in Fingal.