Once more after this Mrs. Fry visited France, but she was growing feeble and tired out with her many labours. She had to suffer some months of illness, during which her daughters tended her with the greatest devotion. She wrote herself that she was much struck in this illness with the manner in which her children had been raised up as her helpers. Many sorrows came to her in her last years from the death of her relations, but suffering and sorrow did not shake her faith. She had the comfort during the last years of her life, of hearing of all the improvements that were being made in the prisons, to reform which she had done so much. To the last she shared all the joys and sorrows of her children and of the other members of her large family. For about two years she led more or less the life of an invalid, and died in October 1845, at the age of sixty-five.

It has only been possible to tell a very little of all the work she did for others during the years of her busy life. But whilst she did all this public work, and influenced kings and governments in favour of reforms, and ministered herself to the needs of the sinful and the suffering, she never forgot her duties as a devoted wife and the mother of a large family of children, who loved her with the deepest tenderness. Neither did she neglect her brothers and sisters and their children. Her public work, though it absorbed much time and thought, did not take her away from her other duties. She remains an example of what a woman can do who feels the call to serve others, and who does not believe that she can refuse to obey that call even though she has a family and a husband to care for.

VII
MARY SOMERVILLE

Mary Fairfax, who grew up to be the most learned woman of her day, was born in Scotland in 1780. Her father was a captain in the navy, and whilst he was away with his ship, her mother, who was not at all well off, lived quietly with her children at Burntisland, a small seaport on the coast of Fife. She did not take much trouble about Mary’s education. In those days it was not thought necessary that girls should learn much; Mary was taught to read the Bible and to say her prayers morning and evening, but otherwise was allowed to grow up a wild creature. As a little girl of seven or eight she pulled the fruit for preserving, shelled the peas and beans, fed the poultry, and looked after the dairy. She did not care for dolls, and had no one to play with her, for her only brother was some years older; but she was very happy in the garden, and loved to watch the birds and learnt to know them by their flight.

Photo: Emery Walker.

Mary Somerville.

When her father came home from sea, he was shocked to find Mary, who was then nearly nine years old, such a savage. She had not yet been taught to write, but she used to read the “Arabian Nights,” “Robinson Crusoe,” and the “Pilgrim’s Progress.” He was horrified too at her strong Scotch accent, and made her read aloud to him that he might correct it. This she found a great trial, but she delighted in helping her father in the care of his garden, to which he was devoted. He at last felt that something more must be done to educate her, and said to her mother: “Mary must at least know how to write and keep accounts.” So at ten years old she was sent to a boarding school. The change from her wild, free life made her wretched, and she spent her days in tears. They were very particular in those days that a girl’s figure should be straight, and used strange means to ensure this. Mary was perfectly straight and well-made, but she was enclosed in stiff stays with a steel busk; bands were fastened over her frock to make her shoulder-blades meet at the back, and a sort of steel collar was put under her chin, supported on a rod which was fastened to the busk in her stays. Under these uncomfortable conditions, she and the other girls of her age had to do their lessons. These lessons were far from interesting. The chief thing she had to do was to learn by heart a page of Johnson’s Dictionary, so as to be able, not only to spell all the words and give their meaning, but to repeat the page quickly. She also learnt to write, and was taught a little French and English grammar.

A year at this school was supposed to finish her education, and it is not surprising that when she got home again at the age of eleven she could not write a tidy letter. She was reproached with not having profited better by the money spent on keeping her at an expensive school; her mother said that she would have been content had she only learnt to write well and to keep accounts, as that was all a woman was expected to know. Mary was delighted to be free again, and felt like a wild animal escaped out of a cage. She spent hours on the seashore studying the shells and the stones, and watching the crabs and jelly-fish. When bad weather kept her indoors, she read every book she could find, and especially delighted in Shakespeare, but an aunt who visited them found fault with her mother for letting her spend so much time in reading, and she was sent to the village school to learn plain sewing. She soon made a fine linen shirt for her brother so well that she was taken away from school and given the charge of all the house linen, which she had to make and to mend. But she was vexed that people should find fault with her reading, and thought it unjust that women should have been given a desire for knowledge, if it were wrong for them to acquire it. Every opportunity for study was used by her, and when a cousin lent her a French book, she set to work, with the help of a dictionary and the little grammar she had learnt at school, to make out the sense of it. There were two small globes in the house, and her mother allowed the village schoolmaster to come during a few weeks in the winter evenings to teach her how to use them. She loved to watch the stars from her bedroom window, and to find out their names on the celestial globe.

When Mary was thirteen, her mother spent a winter in Edinburgh, and then at last Mary went to a school where she learnt a little arithmetic and to write properly. An uncle gave her a piano, and she had lessons in playing it. When they got back to Burntisland she used to spend four or five hours daily at her piano. She also began to teach herself Latin, but did not dare to tell this to any one till she went to stay with an uncle who was very kind to her. She told him what she was doing, and he encouraged her by telling her about learned women in the past, and what was more, read Virgil with her in his study every morning for an hour or two. Whilst staying with another uncle in Edinburgh, she attended a dancing school, and learnt to dance minuets and reels. Party politics were violent in those days, and Mary’s father and uncle were strong Tories. She heard such bitter abuse of the Liberals that her sense of justice was revolted, and she adopted Liberal opinions, which she stuck to all her life.