Abstract
Mary Augusta Ward, more familiarly known as Mrs. Humphry Ward, became one of the most famous novelists of her generation as a result of the success of her third novel, Robert Elsmere, published in 1888. The book sold more than 30,000 copies in England and over 200,000 copies in America in its first year of publication. Her controversial novel drew on the life and work of her friend, the Oxford philosopher, Thomas Hill Green and attracted a great deal of attention in religious, social and political circles as the plot revolved around the loss of faith of a young Anglican cleric and his evangelical wife, Catherine. Although Mary acknowledged that some of the characters were drawn from her renowned Arnold family members and several of the Oxford intellectuals alongside whom she lived, socialised and studied as a young woman, she stated frequently in her writings that Green had been her main inspiration for the novel.
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Notes
- 1.
Due to the lack of copyright protection, Mary Ward received little financial benefit from her sales in America as the majority of the books were pirate copies. Forty-two editions of Robert Elsmere are noted in William B. Thesing and Stephen Pulsford, Mrs Humphry Ward, ed. Department of English, Victorian Fiction Research Guides (St. Lucia, Australia: Queensland University, 1987). The publication and copyright issues surrounding the novel is discussed in Vineta Colby, The Singular Anomaly: Women Novelists of the Nineteenth Century (New York: New York University Press, 1970), p. 135. For the most recent edition, with notes and an introduction, see Miriam Elizabeth Burstein, ed. Mary Augusta Ward and Robert Elsmere, 2nd ed. (Victorian Secrets, 2018).
- 2.
Mrs Humphry Ward, A Writer’s Recollections (London: Collins, 1918), p. 132; Robert Elsmere, Autograph Edition ed., vol. I (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin company, 1910), p. xli.
- 3.
Melvin Richter, The Politics of Conscience: T. H. Green and His Age (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1964), p. 140.
- 4.
For example, Richard A. Chapman, “Thomas Hill Green (1836–1882),” The Review of Politics 27, no. 4 (1965); William S. Peterson, “Gladstone’s Review of Robert Elsmere: Some Unpublished Correspondence,” The Review of English Studies 21, no. 84 (1970): 134; Olive Anderson, “The Feminism of T. H. Green: A Late-Victorian Success Story?” History of Political Thought 12 (1991); W. J. Mander, British Idealism: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 7.
- 5.
Andrew Vincent, “‘Here or Nowhere Is Your America’: Idealism, Religion and Nationalism,” History of European Ideas 43, no. 3 (2017).
- 6.
David Boucher, ed. The British Idealists (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), Introduction; T. H. Green, Prolegomena to Ethics, ed. A. C. Bradley, 4th ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1899), §380.
- 7.
The Witness of God and Faith: Two Lay Sermons. Edited with an Introductory Notice by the Late Arnold Toynbee, M.A. (London: Longmans, Green, 1886), pp. 25, 41.
- 8.
This is evidenced by the letters and notes collected and transcribed by his late wife, Charlotte, and the content of the obituaries published in newspapers and magazines, which she collected in two scrapbooks. These are held in Balliol College Archives (BCA), Papers of Green, Fellow of Balliol, BCAM.1.b and BCAM.1.d.28.I &II.
- 9.
Peter Nicholson, ed. Collected Works of T. H. Green: Additional Writings, vol. 5 (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1997), p. xv.
- 10.
T. H. Green, “The Witness of God (1870),” in The Witness of God and Faith: Two Lay Sermons, ed. Arnold Toynbee (London: Longmans, Green, 1886), p. 41.
- 11.
See Appendix 1 for a summary of MAW’s family tree.
- 12.
Colby, The Singular Anomaly: Women Novelists of the Nineteenth Century, p. 112.
- 13.
Giles Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians: Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Dr. Arnold, General Gordon (London: Chatto & Windus, 1918). See Appendix 2 for a list of people who feature in this book and brief details of their connection to Mary Ward and T. H. Green.
- 14.
William S. Peterson, Victorian Heretic: Mrs Humphry Ward’s Robert Elsmere (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1976), p. 7. See Appendix 3 for a list of Mary’s main works arranged into themes to correspond with the three parts of this book; religion, society, politics.
- 15.
Ward, A Writer’s Recollections, p. 99, Chapter VI.
- 16.
Ibid.
- 17.
Ibid., p. 191. See Appendix 4 for a diagram illustrating a time line of Mary’s main reforming activities, which are discussed in this book.
- 18.
Oxford, Bodleian Library (OBL), Taylor Institute, Taylor Institution account book, 1868–1912—TL 2/1/2.
- 19.
Stephen L. Gwynn, Mrs Humphry Ward (London: Nisbet, 1917), p. 16.
- 20.
“Mrs Ward at British Embassy,” New York Times, April 9, 1908.
- 21.
Jane Lewis, Women and Social Action in Victorian and Edwardian England (Aldershot: Edward Elgar, 1991); Seth Koven, “Borderlands: Women, Voluntary Action, and Child Welfare in Britain, 1840 to 1914,” in Mothers of a New World: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of Welfare States, ed. Seth Koven and Sonya Michel (New York and London: Routledge, 1993); Nigel Scotland, Squires in the Slums: Settlements and Missions in Late Victorian London (London and New York: I.B. Tauris, 2007).
- 22.
Ward, A Writer’s Recollections; Janet Penrose Trevelyan, The Life of Mrs Humphry Ward (London, Bombay, and Sydney: Constable, 1923).
- 23.
A third book of letters was published in 1919, after the First World War had ended. Mrs Humphry Ward, Fields of Victory (London: Hutchinson, 1919).
- 24.
Julia Bush, Women Against the Vote: Female Anti-Suffragism in Britain (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 300.
- 25.
Joan Scott, “Women’s History,” in New Perspectives on Historical Writing, ed. Peter Burke (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991).
- 26.
Colby, The Singular Anomaly: Women Novelists of the Nineteenth Century, p. 157.
- 27.
Trevelyan, The Life of Mrs Humphry Ward, p. 239.
- 28.
Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own: From Charlotte Brontë to Doris Lessing (London: Virago Press, 2009), pp. 185–186.
- 29.
Valerie Sanders, Eve’s Renegades: Victorian Anti-Feminists Women Novelists (Houndmills: Macmillan Press, 1996); Gisela Argyle, “Mrs Humphry Ward’s Fictional Experiments in the Woman Question,” Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 43, no. 4 (2003); Martine Faraut, “Women Resisting the Vote: A Case of Anti-Feminism?” Women’s History Review 12, no. 4 (2003); Judith Wilt, Behind Her Times: Transition England in the Novels of Mary Arnold Ward (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2005); Showalter, A Literature of Their Own: From Charlotte Brontë to Doris Lessing, Chapter VIII.
- 30.
Claire M. Tylee, “‘Munitions of the Mind’: Travel Writing, Imperial Discourse and Great War Propaganda by Mrs. Humphry Ward,” English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920 39, no. 2 (1996).
- 31.
Julia Bush, “‘Special Strengths for Their Own Special Duties’: Women, Higher Education and Gender Conservatism in Late Victorian Britain,” History of Education 34, no. 4 (2005).
- 32.
Colby, The Singular Anomaly: Women Novelists of the Nineteenth Century; Lewis, Women and Social Action in Victorian and Edwardian England; Bush, Women Against the Vote: Female Anti-Suffragism in Britain.
- 33.
Peter Gordon and John White, Philosophers as Educational Reformers: The Influence of Idealism on British Educational Thought and Practice (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), pp. 86–87.
- 34.
Abby Porter Leland, The Educational Theory and Practice of T. H. Green (New York: Teachers College, Columbia University, 1911).
- 35.
Anderson, “The Feminism of T. H. Green: A Late-Victorian Success Story?”
- 36.
Gordon and White, Philosophers as Educational Reformers: The Influence of Idealism on British Educational Thought and Practice, pp. 86–87.
- 37.
W. H. McDowell, Historical Research: A Guide (London: Pearson Education, 2002), p. 55.
- 38.
Peter Burke, “Overture: The New History: Its Past and Its Future,” in New Perspectives on Historical Writing, ed. Peter Burke (Cambridge: Polity, 2001), p. 11.
- 39.
Joan Scott, “Women’s History,” ibid. (Polity Press, 1991), p. 60.
- 40.
Jane Rendall, “Uneven Developments: Women’s History, Feminist History, and Gender History in Great Britain,” in Writing Women’s History: International Perspectives, ed. Karen M. Offen, Ruth Roach Pierson, and Jane Rendall (Houndmills, Basingstoke, and Hampshire: Macmillan, 1991), p. 51.
- 41.
Ludmilla Jordanova, History in Practice (London: Arnold, 2000), p. 101.
- 42.
Ibid., p. 95.
- 43.
Edmund Gosse, “Mrs Humphry Ward,” in Silhouettes, ed. Edmund Gosse (London: Heinmann, 1925), p. 209; Gwynn, Mrs Humphry Ward; Peterson, Victorian Heretic: Mrs Humphry Ward’s Robert Elsmere, p. 86; Enid Huws Jones, Mrs Humphry Ward (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1973), p. 48; Anne M. Bindslev, “Mrs Humphry Ward: A Study in Late-Victorian Feminine Consciousness and Creative Expression” (PhD diss., Almqvist & Wiksell International, University of Stockholm, 1985), p. 83.
- 44.
Anonymous, “Mrs Humphry Ward’s Latest, and Others,” The Saturday Review (1900), http://www.proquest.co.uk/.
- 45.
T. H. Green, “Essay on Christian Dogma,” in Works of Thomas Hill Green: Vol. III Miscellanies and Memoir, ed. R. L. Nettleship (London and New York: Longmans, Green, 1888), p. 164.
- 46.
Ibid.
- 47.
Although unfinished, after Green died this work was jointly edited by Charlotte Green and Green’s former pupil, A. C. Bradley and published. For further information on the background and composition of this work, see R. L. Nettleship, Memoir of Thomas Hill Green, Late Fellow of Balliol College, Oxford, and Whyte’s Professor of Moral Philosophy in the University of Oxford (London, New York, and Bombay: Longmans, Green, 1906), pp. 191–192; Peter Nicholson, “Green’s ‘Eternal Consciousness’,” in T. H. Green: Ethics, Metaphysics, and Political Philosophy, ed. Maria Dimova-Cookson and W. J. Mander (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 140, Footnote 141.
- 48.
Joan Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” in Feminism and History, ed. Joan Scott (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 162.
- 49.
T. H. Green, Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation, with a Preface by Bernard Bosanquet (London, New York, Bombay, and Calcutta: Longmans, Green, 1921), §233–246.
- 50.
Sarah Richardson, The Political Worlds of Women: Gender and Politics in Nineteenth Century Britain (2013), pp. 1–2.
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Loader, H. (2019). Introduction. In: Mrs Humphry Ward and Greenian Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14109-7_1
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