It had been somewhat of a difficulty to me after my home duties ended at my father’s death, to decide where, with my heretical opinions, I could find a field for any kind of usefulness to my fellow-creatures, but I fortunately heard through Harriet St. Leger and Lady Byron, that Miss Carpenter, of Bristol, was seeking for some lady to help in her Reformatory and Ragged School work. Miss Bathurst, who had joined her for the purpose, had died the previous year. The arrangement was, that we paid Miss Carpenter a moderate sum (30s.) a week for board and lodging in her house adjoining Red Lodge, and she provided us all day long with abundant occupation. I had by mere chance read her “Juvenile Delinquents,” and had admired the spirit of the book; but my special attraction to Miss Carpenter was the belief that I should find in her at once a very religious woman, and one so completely outside the pale of orthodoxy that I should be sure to meet from her the sympathy I had never yet been privileged to enjoy; and at all events be able to assist her labours with freedom of conscience.
My first interview with Miss Carpenter (in November, 1858) was in the doorway of my bedroom after my arrival at Red Lodge House; a small house in the same street as Red Lodge. She had been absent from home on business, and hastened upstairs to welcome me. It was rather a critical moment, for I had been asking myself anxiously—“What manner of woman shall I behold?” I knew I should see an able and an excellent person; but it is quite possible for able and excellent women to be far from agreeable companions for a tête-à-tête of years; and nothing short of this had I in contemplation. The first glimpse in that doorway set my fears at rest! The plain and careworn face, the figure which, Dr. Martineau says, had been “columnar” in youth, but which at fifty-two was angular and stooping, were yet all alive with feeling and power. Her large, light blue eyes, with their peculiar trick of showing the white beneath the iris, had an extraordinary faculty of taking possession of the person on whom they were fixed, like those of an amiable Ancient Mariner who only wanted to talk philanthropy, and not to tell stories of weird voyages and murdered albatrosses. There was humour, also, in every line of her face, and a readiness to catch the first gleam of a joke. But the prevailing characteristic of Mary Carpenter, as I came subsequently more perfectly to recognise, was a high and strong Resolution, which made her whole path much like that of a plough in a well-drawn furrow, which goes straight on in its own beneficent way, and gently pushes aside into little ridges all intervening people and things.
Long after this first interview, Miss Elliot showed Miss Carpenter’s photograph to the Master of Balliol, without telling him whom it represented. After looking at it carefully, he remarked, “This is the portrait of a person who lives under high moral excitement.” There could not be a truer summary of her habitual state.
Our days were very much alike, and “Sunday shone no Sabbath-day” for us. Our little household consisted of one honest girl (a certain excellent Marianne, who I often see now in her respectable widowhood and who well deserves commemoration) and two little convicted thieves from the Red Lodge. We assembled for prayers very early in the morning; and breakfast, during the winter months, was got over before daylight; Miss Carpenter always remarking brightly as she sat down, “How cheerful!” was the gas. After this there were classes at the different schools, endless arrangements and organisations, the looking-up of little truants from the Ragged Schools, and a good deal of business in the way of writing reports and so on. Altogether, nearly every hour of the day and week was pretty well mapped out, leaving only space for the brief dinner and tea; and at nine or ten o’clock at night, when we met at last, Miss Carpenter was often so exhausted that I have seen her fall asleep with the spoon half-way between her mouth and the cup of gruel which she ate for supper. Her habits were all of the simplest and most self-denying kind. Both by temperament and on principle she was essentially a Stoic. She had no sympathy at all with Asceticism (which is a very different thing, and implies a vivid sense of the attractiveness of luxury), and she strongly condemned fasting, and all such practices on the Zoroastrian principle, that they involve a culpable weakening of powers which are intrusted to us for good use. But she was an ingrained Stoic, to whom all the minor comforts of life are simply indifferent, and who can scarcely even recognise the fact that other people take heed of them. She once, with great simplicity, made to me the grave observation that at a country house where she had just passed two or three days, “the ladies and gentlemen all came down dressed for dinner, and evidently thought the meal rather a pleasant part of the day!” For herself (as I often told her) she had no idea of any Feast except that of the Passover, and always ate with her loins girded and her umbrella at hand, ready to rush off to the Red Lodge, if not to the Red Sea. In vain I remonstrated on the unwholesomeness of the practice, and entreated on my own behalf to be allowed time to swallow my food, and also some food (in the shape of vegetables) to swallow, as well as the perpetual, too easily ordered, salt beef and ham. Next day after an appeal of this kind (made serious on my part by threats of gout), good Miss Carpenter greeted me with a complacent smile on my entry into our little dining-room. “You see I have not forgotten your wish for a dish of vegetables!” There, surely enough, on a cheeseplate, stood six little round radishes! Her special chair was a horsehair one with wooden arms, and on the seat she had placed a small square cushion, as hard as a board, likewise covered with horsehair. I took this up one day, and taunted her with the Sybaritism it betrayed; but she replied, with infinite simplicity, “Yes, indeed! I am sorry to say that since my illness I have been obliged to have recourse to these indulgencies (!). I used to try, like St. Paul, to ‘endure hardness.’”
Her standard of conscientious rigour was even, it would appear, applicable to animals. I never saw a more ludicrous little scene than when she one day found my poor dog Hajjin, a splendid grey Pomeranian, lying on the broad of her very broad back, luxuriating on the rug before a good fire. After gravely inspecting her for some moments, Miss Carpenter turned solemnly away, observing, in a tone of deep moral disapprobation, “Self-indulgent dog!”
Much of our work lay in a certain Ragged School in a filthy lane named St. James’ Back, now happily swept from the face of the earth. The long line of Lewin’s Mead beyond the chapel was bad enough, especially at nine or ten o’clock of a winter’s night, when half the gas lamps were extinguished, and groups of drunken men and miserable women were to be found shouting, screaming and fighting before the dens of drink and infamy of which the street consisted. Miss Carpenter told me that a short time previously some Bow Street constables had been sent down to this place to ferret out a crime which had been committed there, and that they reported there was not in all London such a nest of wickedness as they had explored. The ordinary Bristol policemen were never to be seen at night in Lewin’s Mead, and it was said they were afraid to show themselves in the place. But St. James’ Back was a shade, I think, lower than Lewin’s Mead; at all events it was further from the upper air of decent life; and in these horrid slums that dauntless woman had bought some tumble-down old buildings and turned them into schools—day-schools for girls and night-schools for boys, all the very sweepings of those wretched streets.
It was a wonderful spectacle to see Mary Carpenter sitting patiently before the large school-gallery in this place, teaching, singing, and praying with the wild street boys, in spite of endless interruptions caused by such proceedings as shooting marbles into hats on the table behind her, whistling, stamping, fighting, shrieking out “Amen” in the middle of the prayer, and sometimes rising en masse and tearing, like a troop of bisons in hob-nailed shoes, down from the gallery, round the great schoolroom and down the stairs, out into the street. These irrepressible outbreaks she bore with infinite good humour and, what seemed to me more marvellous still, she heeded, apparently, not at all the indescribable abomination of the odours of a tripe-and-trotter shop next door, wherein operations were frequently carried on which, together with the bouquet du peuple of the poor little unkempt scholars, rendered the school of a hot summer’s evening little better than the ill-smelling giro of Dante’s “Inferno.” These trifles, however, scarcely even attracted Mary Carpenter’s attention, fixed as it was on the possibility of “taking hold” (as she used to say) of one little urchin or another, on whom, for the moment her hopes were fixed.
The droll things which daily occurred in these schools, and the wonderful replies received from the scholars to questions testing their information, amused her intensely, and the more unruly were the young scamps, the more, I think, in her secret heart, she liked them, and gloried in taming them. She used to say, “Only to get them to use the school comb is something!” There was the boy who defined Conscience to me as “a thing a gen’elman hasn’t got, who, when a boy finds his purse and gives it back to him, doesn’t give the boy sixpence.” There was the boy who, sharing in my Sunday evening lecture on “Thankfulness,”—wherein I had pointed out the grass and blossoming trees on the Downs as subjects for praise,—was interrogated as to which pleasure he enjoyed most in the course of the year? replied candidly, “Cock-fightin’, ma’am. There’s a pit up by the ‘Black Boy’ as is worth anythink in Brissel!”
The clergy troubled us little. One day an impressive young curate entered and sat silent, sternly critical to note what heresies were being instilled into the minds of his flock. “I am giving a lesson on Palestine,” I said; “I have just been at Jerusalem.” “In what sense?” said the awful young man, darkly discerning some mysticism (of the Swedenborgian kind, perhaps) beneath the simple statement. The boys who were dismissed from the school for obstreperous behaviour were a great difficulty to us, usually employing themselves in shouting and hammering at the door. One winter’s night when it was raining heavily, as I was passing through Lewin’s Mead, I was greeted by a chorus of voices, “Cob-web, Cob-web!” emanating from the depths of a black archway. Standing still under my umbrella, and looking down the cavern, I remarked, “Don’t you think I must be a little tougher than a cobweb to come out such a night as this to teach such little scamps as you?”
“Indeed you is, Mum; that’s true! And stouter too!”