CHAPTER FIVE
IN THE BOSOM OF THE FAMILY
If life in the colony had taken the wind out of the sails of Alice Gordon's first employers - if they had not been able to find their place in the complex, ambiguous struggle for identity in this Van-Diemens-Land-becoming-Tasmania, the same could not be said for the family into whose service she was now entering. Its paterfamilias was a man of enormous energy, determined to form a dynasty in the colony and make his mark in the Empire. Whether the issue was political, institutional, professional or entrepreneurial, Dr William Lodewyk Crowther was to be found either at the helm, or battling to grasp hold of it.
The household that Alice Gordon now entered was hard-won. Unlike Major Cotton, whose entry in Burke's Peerage assured him a social status that was not dependent on his personal success, Dr William Lodewyk Crowther hovered in the upper middle classes. And although as a medical professional his position should have been assured, he still smarted from the childhood humiliation of social exclusion: on the voyage out his intemperate father had taken to the future Attorney-General with a horsewhip, scuppering any chances of a government appointment in the colony. As an adult, Dr Crowther may have been lampooned for his earnest self-promotion by Tasmanian Punch,but no one could accuse him of the Georgian dissolution of his father.1 Alice Gordon's new employer was a man of his time, the kind of role model Samuel Smiles held up in Self Help: with illustrations of character, conduct and appearance, a runaway empire-wide bestseller published that year. He was a doctor, a landowner, a politician, an entrepreneur, a major employer. There was an ethos attached to the name of Crowther now; self-consciously produced, perhaps, but pervasive, nonetheless, with its Carpe Diem motto and blue 'C' on the white flags that were hoisted on
1
It seems likely that his family's voyage to Van Diemens Land in 1824 may have been precipitated by his father's put-upon relations, eager to separate the hard-drinking, improvident Crowther Senior from the temptations of the gambling clubs and drinking parlours of Georgian London. He had 'borrowed heavily on the expectation of his father's will' and been forced to train for a profession, travelling out as a ship's surgeon armed with recommendations from Astley Cooper and Dr Davis, important documentation in a period when patronage was often of greater importance than skill. W E L H Crowther, 'For the Grandchildren', typescript, 1967, SLT Crowther Collection.
Crowther-owned ships in the Hobart docks. Had Alice Gordon not been a woman, encumbered by a body that marked and confined her as a dependant rather than agent, Dr Crowther was probably the kind of man she would have liked to become. As it was, her new employer would later go to self-jeopardising lengths to champion her cause when she broke from the mould of acceptable behaviour for female embodiment. Although Alice Gordon's status with the Crowthers may not at first have been markedly different from the one she held with the Cottons, it would place her in a quite different relation to her employers. At the Cottons her role as parlour maid had been primarily looking after objects and smoothing processes, ensuring that everything was in its right place at the right time. It was, for the most part, a keeping quiet and out of sight kind of job, even when she was in the room. It was a role that may have developed a taste for fine things, but it invited no personal attachment and little reward. Her new position, though, was centred around the children of the household. Alice Gordon was now in the bosom of a family and would play a key role in the maintenance and cultivation of the Crowther ethos. It appears to have been a situation that suited her, where she in some sense found her place. She remained with the Crowthers at 1 Albert Terrace, Macquarie Street for over ten years.
Albert Terrace, constructed not long after Queen Victoria's marriage, was named in honour of the Prince Consort. This evocation of royalty by the Crowthers was a reminder to those who passed by that the mistress of the house had more closely entered the monarch's orbit than all but a very few. The 'tall and stately' Victoire Marie Louise was endowed not only with the name of Queen Victoria's mother, the Duchess of Kent, but also the child-sized silver gilt cutlery setting her godmother, the duchess, had given her at her christening.2 The Crowther residence lay just beyond the margins of scenic views taking in the civic centre; a block townwards from the Cottons. Images are rare and are framed from such an oblique angle, and with the house so far in the background, that the details are obscured. From that little information, it is possible to identify a structure, still Georgian in influence and layout, whose only embellishment consisted of the classical arched windows that marked the beginning of the Victorian period. Although the depth of the house is not visible, the frontage of each of the terraces shows three windows on the first floor and two either side of a central doorway below. A shadowy smudge indicates the possibility of an attic window to the
2W E L H Crowther, 'An Account of the Life of my Father, E L Crowther', typescript, SLT, Crowther
rear. But its situation was still prestigious: on the town-side corner of the block stood a building housing the Royal Society Museum. The collection had outgrown the space and would soon be moved to purpose-built premises, but some fifteen years in the future it would become the home of Truganini, mythologised as the last Tasmanian Aborigine and after whose death in 1876 the house was renamed Lallah Rookh.3 On the far side of Albert Terrace, but always photographed in isolation, the Hutchins School was described by James Smith in 1886 as 'one of the ornaments of Macquarie Street; where its ivy-mantled gables, its central tower, and its generally antique appearance, cause it to resemble a bit of mediaeval Oxford, dropped amidst the commodious and modern residences that abound in that neighbourhood'.4
In 1846, when Victoire and William Crowther first moved into their new house with three children, it must have seemed quite a spacious residence, but by 1859, when Alice Gordon arrived, it was bursting at the seams.In addition to the two parents there were now eight children, another on the way and, until 1863 when she died, William
Crowther's mother, Sarah. Such an expanded family also required more servants than the two indicated in the 1843 census: living in would be a cook, a housemaid, a nurse, and possibly a 'girl' from the orphanage. 5 A governess was employed and had to be accommodated. And then there were the two grooms, although they probably lived above the stables, and possibly a gardener as well.6 This was a vital, active place to be, a place of arguments and opinions, of outbursts and passions, of big ideas and hard work, of containment and explosion. It was full of the stately Victoire, determined to maintain the standards to which she had been bred; it was full of the energetic and pugnacious but thin-skinned William, 'an otherwise man' who 'did not understand such a thing as compromise'; it was full of babies and children and teenagers, and it was full of servants
3
British 'protectors' named Truganini 'Lallah Rooke' after the daughter of the Mughul Emperor Aurangzeb as depicted in Thomas Moore's poem of that name. The poem, like Byron's Don Juan that was inferred in the context of the female immigrants, uses an oriental setting to legitimise its eroticism.
4
James Smith, 'Tasmania – descriptive sketch', Picturesque Atlas of Australasia, Sydney: Picturesque Atlas Publishing Co., 1886, vol. 2, p. 103.
5
Census AOT CEN 1/1/1943.
6 Based on the wanted advertisements placed in the local newspapers by Mrs Crowther. HTC, 21
January 1852; HTC, 1 March 1854; Mercury, 17 June, 1, 6, 8, 10, July, 14 August 1857; Mercury, 5 July 1859.
with lives that were and were not contained by the cheval de frise walls that marked the boundaries of Albert Terrace.7
Although Alice Gordon clearly felt a sense of belonging in this household, it is difficult to pinpoint the position she was appointed to in 1859. Years later, both she and Dr
Crowther referred to her place as that of nursery governess. Victoire, also writing retrospectively, described the position as that of children's nurse. 8 Although the actual work involved may have overlapped, the two descriptions are not interchangeable. There is an implied class difference, with a middle-class governess being perceived as playing a role in the intellectual and moral development of her charges, and a working- class nurse devoting herself to their physical needs. Victoire's distinction between the two is indicated in the wording of her advertisements, and her use of the terms 'woman' and 'lady':
Wanted:
1852 A steady, respectable young woman as nurse.
1853 Immediately. A respectable young woman accustomed to the care of children and who can make herself useful at her needle.
1854 A nurse.
1855 Young woman as nurse.
1856 A steady, respectable young woman as nurse.
1857 A young lady as governess for children under ten years of age. She must be a good hand with her needle, and accustomed to children.
1858/9 Immediately. Young woman as nurse. References required.9
I think it most likely that Alice Gordon filled the last vacancy. The advertisement reads like a terse crie de coeur, and was repeated several times into the new year. The urgency, and the insistence on references had not appeared in Victoire's previous advertisements, an indication that the last nurse may have given, or been given, notice
7 W E L H Crowther, 'An Address: aspects of the Life of a colonial surgeon, the Honourable W L
Crowther FRCS, CMZS, sometime Premier of Tasmania', Hobart, 1942, SLT, Crowther Collection.
8 26 July 1879, SGD 13/1/10, p. 19.
9 HTC, 26, 29 May 1852; 28 March 1853; 1 March 1854; 16 March 1855; 2 June 1856; 3 April
suddenly. With threatened pandemonium at home, and no response to her
advertisements, Victoire may have approached the Servants' Home and found Alice Gordon. The position of nurse seems a more likely move from parlourmaid than the elevation implied by a position of nursery governess. And a nursery governess would have been less likely to be found at a Servants' Home. This is not to say that she
remained a nurse throughout her service with the Crowthers. Her likely progression can be plotted by looking at the age and gender of the Crowther children when the 'young lady' was employed as governess in 1857 to teach children 'under ten', and the situation two years later when Alice Gordon was employed.10
The difference between the tasks of the young lady governess and Alice Gordon may have been that the former was employed to prepare the boys for the liberal education they were to receive at Hutchins while Alice Gordon had to combine child-care and the teaching of girls. But the variant descriptions of her position indicated later by Victoire and William suggests that they were using different points of reference. For Victoire, the essential difference between the governess and Alice Gordon had little to do with the different levels of skill and knowledge of the two women, and everything to do with their social backgrounds: Alice Gordon's class precluded her from being an acceptable governess. This suggests that William, in describing her as a nursery governess, was identifying her according to her merit, a classificatory system from which women were excluded.
Victoire had her own complicated position in the household to police. The roles of governess, nursery governess and nurse were all implicated with her own identity as a bourgeois mother. They were extensions of her own role, but also foils against which
10
In 1857, Edward, then fourteen, was at Hutchins School. His younger brothers, Henry and Willie, aged nine and eight, would have just begun as day scholars at Hutchins (Index to Hutchins School Register, AOT NS36). There is, tellingly, no record of the whereabouts of Victoire Marie, the eldest daughter. She was twelve at this point, not 'under 10', so may either have been attending one of Hobart's schools for young ladies or been under the tutelage of her mother or grandmother. (Arthur) Bingham and Herbert, aged seven and five were at home, and most likely the children who needed teaching; Caroline (three), Eugene (one) and Emmeline (newly born) would have been under the charge of a nurse. Two years later, when Alice Gordon arrived, Edward, at sixteen, was either in his last year at Hutchins or boarding at the exclusive Horton College in the north of the colony (Register of Horton College, AOT NS588/1), and Willie, now aged ten, had been at Hutchins for two years. Bingham, now nine, would follow in 1861 and Herbert, seven, in 1862. My surmise is that Alice Gordon's primary responsibility lay as nurse to Caroline, Emmeline, and the new baby expected later in the year. Eugene had died aged two, the year before (HTC, 6 January 1858). The governess may have left in 1862, when Herbert became a Hutchins day scholar, leaving Alice Gordon in charge of the elementary education of a six-year old, five-year old and two year-old, all girls, whom she would 'nanny' until they no longer needed that kind of care.
her status could be favourably measured. In a culture that glorified the image of
maternity in its Queen, she occupied a position of supreme matriarch. But the nature of motherhood - its extreme physicality in terms of the changing shape of the maternal body as it boldly manifested a sexual act, in terms of the mess and leakage and animality of the processes of birthing and nursing, and in terms of the messiness, non- containment and absence of control of the infant – made this an untenable position for someone not only representing the ideal of bourgeois female embodiment, but the primary model of this embodiment for her children.11 The physicality of child-bearing was inescapable, but to be unspoken, hidden; a lady was indisposed, babies were conducted into the world through the birth columns of the press.
Child-rearing, though, was something that could be managed at arm's length. Mrs Henry Wood, in her bestselling novel, East Lynne (1861), encapsulates the appropriate attitude for a lady through her character Mrs Carlisle:12
I never was fond of being troubled with children. When my own grow up into childhood, I shall deem the nursery and the schoolroom the best places for them. I hold an opinion Madame Vine, that too many mothers pursue a mistaken system of management of their family … They are never happy but when with their children; they must be in the nursery; or, the children in the drawing room. They wash them, dress them, feed them; rendering themselves slaves, and the nurse's office a sinecure. The children are noisy , troublesome, cross; all children will be so; and the mother's temper gets soured, and she gives slaps where, when they were babies, she gave kisses. She has no leisure, no spirits for any higher training: and as they grow old she loses her authority … Now, what I trust I shall never give up to another, will be the training of my children,…Let the offices properly pertaining to a nurse be performed by the nurse – of course taking care that she is thoroughly to be depended on. Let her have the trouble of the children, their noise, their romping; in short let the nursery be her place and the children's place. But I hope I shall never fail to
11
Leonore Davidoff, Worlds Between: historical perspectives on gender and class, Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995, pp. 108-10.
12 I am employing fiction here for what Jenny Sharpe describes as 'the absent text of history' that
can be found 'in the margins of literature'. History 'forms the conditions of existence to the literary imagination', she writes, it 'places limits and restrictions on what can be represented at any one time. Fiction is granted the license to imagine events as they might have happened or in a way that history has failed to record.' Sharpe, p. 21.
gather my children round me daily, at stated and convenient periods, for higher purposes: to instil in them Christian and moral duties; to strive to teach them how best to fulfil the obligations of life. This is a mother's task – as I understand the question; let her do this work well, and the nurse can attend to the rest. A child should never hear aught from its mother's lips but persuasive gentleness, and this becomes impossible if she is very much with her children.13
In this interchange, Mrs Carlisle is actually speaking to a new governess, whose role is peculiarly absent from the monologue. The governess is sitting down, a social equal (in terms of birth), but not to the point of presenting her own opinion. She occupied an unsettling position in the household. The lady had somehow to assert her own authority towards an employee who could be seen as undertaking precisely those tasks – the training, the genteel behaviour – that should be her own, that define her as an upper- class mother.14 Should the governess, as her class would dictate, be treated as one of the family; or, as she was a paid employee, should she be treated as a servant? Her dislocation often placed her neither at the family dining table nor in the servant's hall, but alone in her room with a tray.15
The governess's position was complicated by the anomaly of being both a lady and the recipient of a wage. Sarah Lewis, a former governess, stressed the need for vigilance in policing professional boundaries. Broader education and economic hardship had swelled the numbers of governesses in England in the 1840s as the 'daughters of tradesmen' entered the field. These women, she felt, brought 'degradation of a body so important to the moral interest of the community'.She proposed a regulatory