After their dramatic meeting in July 1841, Julia did not see Chev for almost a year. In November, he left Boston for a four-month fund-raising trip in the South, taking three of his pupils along on the principle that blind children attracted the highest charitable donations. In New York, the Wards were presiding over the sale of their Newport and Manhattan properties. They sold The Corner for $60,000, disposed of the furniture, and sold or gave away many of the paintings, including the Cole series of The Voyage of Life. The mansion itself survived until 1873, when it was razed to house the first showroom of Brooks Brothers. It was always a gentleman’s abode.
The Three Graces moved in with their widowed brother, Sam, at 32 Bond Street, and soon Julia was visiting Mary in Boston again. The surveillance team of Five of Clubs men in Boston avidly observed and logged her social activities in letters to Chev. “Julia is enjoying herself very much in Boston, and making many friends and admirers,” Longfellow reported. “Felton is in love with her; and in speaking of her uses the superlative degree only.”1
That winter, Boston was obsessed by the first American visit of Charles Dickens, who arrived in Boston on January 29 with his wife, Catherine; they left their four children behind in England. The finest minds and eldest statesmen of Boston vied to honor the great Boz. Confronted with a sunny young Englishman instead of a white-bearded Concord sage (Dickens had just turned thirty), young Bostonians also hosted a rowdy banquet with seriocomic speeches in the spirit of The Pickwick Papers.Women were not invited to the banquet, but Julia did attend a huge party “given to Boz and me . . . At least I was invited before he came here, so think that I will only give him an equal share of the honor,” she wrote playfully to Louisa and Annie. She danced with Sumner, Hillard, and Longo, and admired Dickens’s “bright and most sparkling countenance . . . He circulates as universally as small change, and understands the art of gratifying others without troubling himself.”2 Along with receiving honors, going to parties, and being mobbed by adoring American fans, Dickens was keen to see American social institutions, and Perkins was at the top of his list. In Chev’s absence, Sumner and the mayor of Boston, Jonathan Chapman, escorted him to the Institute, where the teachers and staff had been frantically scrubbing and dusting the rooms in preparation.
Dickens was polite about the beauties of the building but captivated by Laura Bridgman. In the journal of his tour, American Notes for General Circulation, which came out the following fall, he quoted extensively from Chev’s Ninth Annual Report, “a very beautiful and touching narrative”; but his description of Laura became the most celebrated account of her appearance and affect. In language very much like his portrait of Little Nell in The Old Curiosity Shop, he described Laura as a heartbreaking heroine, rescued from her tragic confinement by the valiant doctor. “There she was, before me; built up, as it were, in a marble cell, impervious to any ray of light, or particle of sound; with her poor white hand peeping through a chink in the wall, beckoning to some good man for help, that an Immortal soul might be awakened.” Dickens added a poignant detail to the standard description of Laura’s green blindfold: “Like other inmates of that institution, she had a green ribbon bound round her eyelids. A doll she had dressed lay near upon the ground. I took it up, and saw that she had made a green fillet such as she wore herself, and fastened it about its mimic eyes.” No one else had noticed the doll with the green blindfold. I suspect that Dickens had made it up.
Chev intensely regretted missing his chance to appear before Dickens as Laura’s knight. He had much in common with Dickens; they were both dashing, confident, energetic, extroverted, restless men, committed to social reforms of all kinds. On June 6, Chev got a second opportunity for a meeting, and he, Felton, and Mayor Chapman traveled down to New York to see Dickens at a farewell breakfast the day before he sailed back to London. It was a perfect summer day, and at the country estate of the host, James Gore King, in New Jersey, there were mountains of strawberries and champagne. Since King had been Samuel Ward Senior’s partner in the bank, Julia was also invited; and that evening Chev and Felton unexpectedly showed up at a party at Sam Ward’s house, claiming they had missed their boat back to Boston.
Julia sang at the party, living up to her reputation as the New York Diva; and after the music the guests all played blind man’s bluff with the children—a rather tactless choice, considering Chev’s profession. When the Doctor’s turn came to be blindfolded, he forcefully caught hold of Julia, tore off his shade, and looked commandingly into her eyes. She stared straight back and flirtatiously asked him, “Did you ever kill a man—Doctor—do tell me.” Women seldom dared to tease the Doctor, and Chev was intrigued. The next morning, he and Felton paid an unprecedented four-hour morning call on the Wards.
Once they got home, they composed an elaborate joint thank-you note, with Chev’s words in the center of a sheet of blue paper, and Felton’s message around it like a frame. Chev scolded Julia for her levity: “Laugh less at others now, and you will look back more complacently upon the past,” he lectured her. But he ended on a sweeter note: “I will not allow anyone but you to be amused at my expense; but you, you may laugh at me, scold at me, do anything, so you forget not that I am truly your ‘Gentle Doctor.’ ”3 Felton explained to Sam Ward that “the Chevalier” was not at all offended by Julia’s teasing, but flirting too after his fashion. “He thinks as I do that your incomparable sister writes extraordinarily natural poems with high intellectual culture, and that all this is lighted up with a play of fancy and wit which makes her conversation the most brilliant and delightful entertainment a man of sense can ever hope to enjoy.”4 Soon all the Club men were buzzing about the Doctor’s obvious interest in Julia Ward. “I think Howe very much touched by the Fraulein Julia’s various charms,” wrote Sumner to Longfellow.5 In September, Hillard reported to Longfellow that although Chev seemed “much captivated,” it was hard to tell whether Julia was responding or just “indulging her love of mischief.”6
In the fall, Chev wrote Julia two long letters in an elaborate language unlike his warm, chatty letters to the Club members. Half criticizing, half courting her, Chev expressed his fascination, but also addressed her as someone to be guided and controlled by his wisdom and experience. Undeterred, Julia came back to Boston for a repeat visit to the Institution, along with her sisters and George Hillard, and Chev escorted her to be reintroduced to Laura Bridgman. Now thirteen, Laura had grown taller and was no longer a little girl. When they arrived, she felt Chev’s hand, and her face “was irradiated with joy,” Julia told Louisa and Annie. Laura was not so pleased to feel the hand of a strange woman. “Where does she come from? New York. Whose friend is she? The Dr—do he go to see her. . . . Indeed, replied Hillard with a quizzical laugh.” Julia never says it straight out, but it must have been clear that Laura was besotted, jealous, and very possessive. The Doctor had begged Julia to wear her snake bracelet to show Laura “what a snake was like.”
The Dr put her hand upon my snake, and made her feel it. She started back, making a quick impassioned noise, half-laughing, half-afraid—at last she took hold of it, tried to clasp and unclasp it on my wrist, and laughed a great deal—she liked my muff very much and played with the little tails on it—the Dr went away and staid some time. When he came back, she took his hand, and said at once, “I do not want a snake.” She had been laughing in a very painful manner, distorting her features very much—the Dr told her she did not look pretty when she laughed so, whereupon she immediately stopped and forced her mouth into a pleasanter expression.7
To post-Freudian readers, Laura’s play with the snake, the muff, and its fur tails is almost parodically sexual. Of course, touch was her only sense, and she liked the feel of fur. Still, her “painful” laughter and her rejection of the snake bracelet, as well as the Doctor disciplining her by warning that she did not look pretty when she laughed, alerted Julia to the dangers of female dependence. Laura’s silencing and submission to the Doctor’s orders were a hint of what might be expected in the bonds of matrimony. “The Dr. calls me child,” Julia noted succinctly at the end of her letter to her sisters. The relationship they were establishing was uncomfortably like Julia’s with her father, and Chev’s with Laura Bridgman.
But by winter 1843, Chev seemed to have backed off from the edgy flirtation. Julia went to Boston for a long visit, but Chev stayed away from her, and she then took off for New York to see her sisters. Playing power games to the last, he gave Julia the impression that he was going to propose to Louisa. Julia pretended not to care, but wrote to Sam: “Howe left early this morning for Hartford without having seen me, and goes to New York. The object of his visit is not to be mistaken. . . . I do not think the position he has to offer is one suited to Wevie, who does depend very much on the atmosphere in which she lives. South Boston will not be Bond Street.”8
Thus everyone in their circle was surprised and relieved on February 21, when Chev and Julia announced their engagement. That day both of them wrote to Sam Ward, communicating the news, and revealing their emotions and expectations. The two voices of these letters were very different in language, style, and imagery. Chev’s letter was confident and triumphant:
My Dear Ward,
Since Julia considers you to be to her in loco parentis, she insists that I shall inform you I have had the boldness openly to offer her (what both you & she knew very well she possessed) my heart; and moreover, that she, unwilling to hold me in suspense, has accepted it, in the hope that you will ratify the compact.
I am too happy, too much ému, to be able to find any words at all fitted to express my feelings; so I trust I need not, for you will do me the justice to believe I can somewhat appreciate the rare charms & gifts of your Sister; & your own warm heart will tell you that, for such an one, mine cannot fail to bear a life long harvest of affection.
In a day or two, or as soon as I hear from you, I shall write you (if I do not see you) to say to you many things you will be desirous of knowing; until then, Dear Ward,
believe me very truly yrs9
Julia’s letter was one of constraint, sacrifice, and surrender: “The Chevalier says truly—I am the captive of his bow and spear. His true devotion has won me from the world and from myself. The past is already fading from my sight; already I begin to live with him in the future, which shall be as calmly bright as love can make it. I am perfectly happy to sacrifice to one so noble and so earnest, the daydreams of my youth. He will make life more beautiful to me than any dream.”10 Imagining herself as a trophy and captive, she was already planning to give up her daydreams and her worldly frivolities, in the interests of a calm life of service in which she would be “perfectly happy.” Perhaps she was echoing a famous line in Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, when Mr. Darcy tells Elizabeth Bennett she will be “completely and perfectly and incandescently happy” as his wife. In any case, her version was submissive and muted. To her sisters she confessed that she had made Chev extravagant vows of obedience. “Yesterday I sat with the Ch. and said to him, among other things: I shall try to please you in everything. ‘What?’ said he, ‘even to the paring of a nail?’ My dear children, you know the general state of my unfortunate nails. Of course I ran instantly upstairs and cut them very short, at which he was most pleased.”11
Chev wrote more emotionally to his friends, stressing his own joy. To Longfellow, he exclaimed about his luck and his requited love. “I need say but one word—Julia loves me! & you know all the rest; for such is your sensibility, & so carefully have you studied the passions, that you can perhaps form some faint idea of the rapture with which I pour out my long pent up affections for her. That she is a pure, & noble, & gifted creature, we all knew, & so this is much,—but oh! how little compared to what I alone have found her—gushing over with tenderness & love.”12
Julia’s family and Chev’s Club brothers expressed satisfaction about the engagement. “I approve most cordially of your decision,” Sam Ward wrote to Julia. “He is of all my acquaintances the man whom I should have chosen for you.”13 Sumner, who had become Chev’s dearest friend, wrote warmly to Sam, endorsing the “strength and beauty” of the Doctor’s character and emphasizing Chev’s mixture of womanly “gentleness and delicacy” with manly energy, “perseverance, constancy, [and] devotion.”14 Longfellow too assured Sam that “everybody seems delighted with Julia’s engagement.”15 Hillard reported on the consensus of the Club. “The piece of news which interests us most is Dr. Howe’s engagement to Julia Ward—the Diva, as she is generally called among the club. Howe is very happy—his whole heaven being painted with purple streaks of love and hope. I hardly know the lady myself well enough to know how wisely and well he has chosen, but her intimate friends all value and admire her very much, and that she has had the good sense to choose a true and good man, and give up all hope of a brilliant establishment . . . is in itself an excellent trait in her nature.”16 All in all, crowed Henry Cleveland, “When a hero and a belle—and such a hero, and such a belle—are thus connected, the sound of rejoicing should be spread far and wide over the land.”17
More privately, though, not everyone was rejoicing. Julia’s brother Francis Marion called Chev that “confounded bit of Boston granite.”18 And behind the scenes, the Club members had their own doubts about Julia. Hillard admitted that “I have not been altogether pleased with what I have seen of her, though there is certainly much to admire and doubtless to love.”19 Longfellow thought Julia was too high-maintenance and demanded too much attention from Chev. She is “a fine, young, buxom damsel of force and beauty, who is full of talent, indeed carrying almost too many guns for any man who does not want to be firing salutes all the time.”20 Julia’s two rivals for Chev’s affection and attention, Laura Bridgman and Charles Sumner, were especially upset and agitated by the news. Bridgman asked her teacher Mary Swift whether the Doctor loved her as he did Julia. “No,” Swift bluntly replied. Sumner too realized that he would never be Chev’s soul mate again. Both were forced to accept the new reality.
There were signs of trouble, or at least of a power differential, from the beginning. Julia had wanted a long engagement of two or three years; Chev insisted on two or three months. Of course, the wedding would be held in New York, at the home of Uncle John Ward at 8 Bond Street. Chev felt strongly, however, that they should not linger at Bond Street with her relatives after the ceremony. “I think you would like the privacy of a crowd,” he wrote to her, “on steam boat, car or hotel, to being the observed of all observed at home.”21 He was also determined to sail to Europe from New York for an extended honeymoon—to please and educate her, to be sure, but also to get her away from her family as fast as possible. Julia capitulated, since her prospective husband seemed “determined to have things his own way.” She found his eagerness to begin their marriage romantic and endearing. “The Chevalier’s way will be a very charming way, and is, henceforth, to be mine.” Still, in a letter to her sisters, she admitted to some worries of her own: “The thought of what I have undertaken weighs upon me . . . but the wind is tempered to the shorn lamb, and the Chevalier is an angel of light—so all will be well.”22
Only a few weeks after the engagement, however, Chev’s alleged angelic temper was tested even more by the discovery that Julia was an heiress as well as a diva. He would have preferred, he said, a “penniless bride.” Sam, the trustee of her estate, also wrote to Julia urging that for safety, the couple should take a steamer to Europe from Boston, rather than a sailing ship from New York—indeed, the steamer he recommended was the Britannia, the Cunard ship Dickens had traveled on. He offered to lend Chev money to cover the extra expenses. The Doctor was offended and shot off a testy reply:
I did not press her to a decision respecting the European expedition because I wished her to be with you, & uninfluenced by my views, to decide as you & she should think it best. I must say however that when I proposed to take her to Europe I did so in the full expectation, of course, of bearing the expenses myself, nor can I conceive how you should supposed (as you seem to do by your letter) that it would be otherwise. And this leads me, my brave Ward, to say a word to you on my own circumstances. I am a poor devil of a Chevalier, it is true, but when I asked Julia to share my lot in life I did so in the full belief & conviction that I could support her decently during my life, to leave her above actual want at my death, for I was led to believe that she would bring nothing with her to my humble roof but her own precious self to by my my [sic] household deity. My salary is 2000$ besides my quarters which are good enough for a bachelor; my pen occasionally might bring me more coppers than Riches, & I have some property well invested, which, at simple interest, gives me 1000$ per annum; so that while I can work, I can count upon 3000$.23
Chev was touchy about his authority, manly prerogatives, and earning capacity, and his insistence on the husband’s rights would only intensify over the succeeding years. Julia tried to see both sides. Chev, she wrote, is “very sensitive, and accustomed to an independent course of action. Sam, on the other hand, is fussy, has a great love of power, and is fond both of finding fault and of giving advice, things to which Dr. Howe is not accustomed.”24 In the end, they agreed on a compromise, which pleased nobody. Julia would have a trust fund of $3,000 a year; her property would be handled by her brothers and Uncle John Ward; and Chev would have $10,000 to draw upon when they came to buying a house. Counseled by Sumner, he signed an “antenuptial agreement,” which listed all her considerable assets. Having spent his entire adult life disdaining money and property, Chev was not an expert on investments and real estate. But he saw no reason why he should not easily become one, and as his ironic joke about being “a poor devil of a Chevalier” implied, he was irritated by Sam’s giving advice to an older man of fame and honor.
Julia, Chev, and Sam also clashed over her insistence on continuing to write poetry, and Chev’s expectations that a wife and mother should find her sole fulfillment in her family. Again, Sam tried to persuade him not to antagonize Julia by insisting on her obedience, but to trust love and time in figuring out a mutually satisfying arrangement. He reminded Chev that poetry was as much a part of the Diva’s nature and attraction as her music: “As for a woman’s poetical aspirations, I should cherish them as I would the melody of her voice.”25
Chev was unconvinced, but also deeply in love. In the two months between the engagement and the wedding, he wrote passionate, if still highly abstract, love letters to Julia. “I have no longer any me,” he rhapsodized; “what formerly was me is taken away, & you hold its place.”26 He even accepted her unusual wish to call herself Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, instead of Mrs. Samuel Gridley Howe. “My family wish me to retain my maiden name, and I am myself attached to it,” she wrote to AuntieFrancis.27 It was not a great victory. The marriage began with Chev holding most of the power, and Julia trying to please him by giving up what little power she retained.
The wedding took place as scheduled on the evening of April 26, 1843. Julia’s uncle, Reverend Benjamin C. Cutler, performed the ceremony, and Sumner was the best man. Compared to the glamour of Sam’s Arabian Nights celebration, the wedding was modest and subdued. In fact, Julia was making such an effort to control her love of parties and fashion for Chev’s sake that she turned over all the planning and shopping to Louisa and Annie. They picked out the wedding gown, fine white muslin with lace inserts, and she wore square-toed white satin shoes. Chev was rather more splendid in a bright blue broadcloth suit with gold buttons, and a waistcoat of white satin with white velvet brocade. Engraved on the gold wedding ring were their names and Chev’s watchword, “Truth.” Nobody noticed what Sumner was wearing—no doubt his black suit—but at the reception Julia playfully planted some silver spoons in his pocket and accused him of nicking them. Already depressed at losing his beloved friend, Sumner could not have been amused.
Laura Bridgman, the other competitor for Chev’s attention and affection, was not at the wedding. She had pleaded to attend, but the Doctor refused, on the grounds that the trip to New York would be too tiring. After the wedding, Laura had a nightmare that a pig had come into her bed and was crushing her. To compensate for excluding her, Chev had suggested that Laura and another Perkins pupil, Oliver, be taken on an excursion to Boston Harbor to visit the Britannia, a big ship with twelve furnaces and two giant paddle wheels, which carried seventy-three passengers, forty-four crew members, and a cow. On board Laura insisted on touching everything, including the cow. If she could not share their honeymoon cabin, she could at least participate vicariously in the voyage.
On May Day, the Howes boarded the ship for Liverpool, taking Annie along with them. At seventeen, she was shy and graceful, looking, people said, “so like a lily-of-the-valley that one expected to see two long green leaves spring up beside her as she walked.”28 She had been a rather droopy lily for some months, though, and everyone in the family felt that it was good for her to have a long trip abroad and to keep Julia company while Chev was doing the research he planned to carry out in Europe. Horace Mann, and his bride, Mary Peabody, who had been married that very morning, were on board as well. They were older than the Howes, and Julia found them unfashionable and given to embarrassing public displays of affection. “Mr. and Mrs. Mann are very loving;” she wrote home, “she wears a monstrous sunbonnet; he lies down in his overcoat.”29
The voyage was much smoother than Dickens’s stormy winter crossing had been, but Julia and Annie were very sick. Chev was chivalrous and attentive. Julia wrote home:
During the first two days of the voyage, I was stupefied with sea-sickness, and even forgot that my sister was on board the steamer. On the evening of the second day I remembered her, and managed with the help of a very stout stewardess to visit her in her stateroom where she had for her roommate a cousin of the poet Longfellow. We bewailed our common miseries a little, but the next morning brought a different state of things. As soon as I was awake, my husband came to me bringing a small dose of brandy with cracked ice. “Drink this,” he said, “and ask Mrs. Bean (the stewardess) to help you get on your clothes, for you must go up on deck; we shall be at Halifax in a few hours.” Magnetized by the stronger will, I struggled with my weakness, and was presently clothed and carried up on deck. “Now I am going for Annie,” said Dr. Howe, leaving me comfortably propped up in a safe seat. He soon returned with my dear sister, as helpless as myself. The fresh air revived us so much that we were able to take our breakfast, the first meal we ate on board, in the saloon with the other passengers. We went on shore, however, for a walk at Halifax, and from that time forth were quite able-bodied sea-goers.30
The whole trip lasted fourteen days.
On a pitching and plunging ship, Chev’s masterful behavior was very welcome. “I cannot tell you,” she wrote to Louisa, “how good my husband is, how kind, how devoted—he is all made of pure gold.”31 He was playful, too. One night he came to bed with his hat on, and another night he wore his “hair mittens,” or horsehair massage gloves, which made Julia laugh. (A brisk rub with these gloves stood in for exercise aboard ship; Harriet Martineau had taken them along when she sailed to America in the 1830s.) The evening before they landed, the captain hosted a formal banquet with a champagne toast to the Queen. The next morning, Julia assembled all the female passengers in the ladies’ lounge, where she led them in singing a tribute to their hardworking stewardess:
God save our Mrs. Bean,
Best woman ever seen,
God save Mrs. Bean!
She followed it up with a toast to the cow, which one Scottish lady declined to drink; “I think she is the poorest coo I ever heard of.”32
On June 2, the Howes arrived in London and moved into lodgings at 31 Upper Baker Street. The culture shock of foreign travel and setting up a household in a new country may have exacerbated Julia’s anxieties about married life, and perhaps sharing a bed with Chev was more intimate on land than in a tiny cabin on a tossing ship where he was wearing his hat and hair mittens. At any rate, poems in her diary, dated June 4, suggest that she was already disappointed in marriage and apprehensive about the future. In “The Present Is Dead,” she wrote about her fear of merging with a stronger personality and losing her creative gifts:
I feel my varied powers all depart
With scarce a hope they may be born anew,
And nought is left, save one poor, loving heart,
Of what I was—and that may perish too.33
Even worse, she wrote that “Hope died as I was led / Unto my marriage bed.”34
What was wrong? Both Chev and Julia had high expectations of their honeymoon, but with every passing week and month, she felt more strongly that Chev’s masterfulness could become domination and that his chivalry was no substitute for tenderness. For his part, he was doing his best to entertain and protect her, although as always he was impatient of socializing and wanted to be working. In London he was a celebrity. They were besieged by callers and deluged with invitations to dinners, balls, musical evenings, late-night suppers, and ten a.m. breakfasts, which were a popular way of fitting even more social occasions into the day. Samuel Rogers served plover’s eggs at his, and the first week they had breakfast out four times.35She was fascinated by the city and diverted by the social opportunities it presented. In her letters to Louisa, she reported on the astonishing freedom older women had to dress colorfully and seductively. The Duchess of Sutherland, who had grown-up children, dressed girlishly for her ball in “a dress of brown gauze or barége over light blue satin, with a wreath of brown velvet leaves and blue forget-me-nots in her hair.”36 The Duchess of Gloucester wore a low-cut gown and white plumes in her hair; Caroline Norton’s dress was “unusually decolletée,” and Julia hinted that her hair, which was “decidedly black,” might be dyed. Harriet Grote, the intellectual wife of the great historian George Grote, struck her as “grotesque . . . very tall and stout”; but even she was decked out in blue silk with a pearl necklace. In New York, married women and women of a certain age were expected to look matronly, to wear plain dresses and neat bonnets.37
In London, Julia realized that her husband was a luminary. Edward Everett, the American minister to Britain, said that “none of our countrymen, since I have been here, have excited greater interest,—received more attention,—or left a better impression than the Howes.”38 Julia wrote proudly to Auntie Francis, “Chev receives a great deal of attention, ladies press forward to look at him, roll up their eyes, and exclaim, ‘Oh! he is such a wonner!’ I do not like that the pretty women should pay him so many compliments—it will turn his little head!”
Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe was a London lion; but a Bond Street belle, even a diva, Julia quickly realized, had no special claim to distinction. “Annie and I are little people here—we are too young to be noticed,” she wrote home. “We are very demure and have learned humility.”39 At one musical evening, she told Louisa, she had shyly “lent my little wee voice.”40 Carlyle invited them for tea and toast, and favored them with a monologue, including a jab at Sumner, “a very dull man, but he did not offend people.”41 Unfortunately, Jane Carlyle had a headache that day or said she did, and so we have lost the benefit of her sharp remarks about the Howes in her diaries. Julia tried to be patient during a side trip to Dublin, when they had lunch with Maria Edgeworth. She greeted them warmly and had an animated conversation with Chev about Irish politics, slavery, Dickens, and other important things, but said to Julia only “what one says to little women in general.”42
Julia put up with the snubs for a while, but she could not stay meek and little for long. In July, they were invited to tea with the Wordsworths, and went up to the Lake Country by train. The visit was a disaster; the trip was tiring, the weather was chilly and wet, the Wordsworths were stingy and inhospitable, and the much revered Great Poet, she wrote to Louisa, was “a crabbed old sinner, who gave us a very indifferent muffin.” His widowed daughter had lost a lot of money by investing in Mississippi lands, and the conversation became increasingly “harassing” as “he was inclined no doubt to cast part of the odium upon us.” The Wordsworth ladies, mother and daughter, sat icily at one end of the drawing room, Annie and Julia at the other, balancing their teacups and feeling very miffed not to be seated for a proper tea at a table. Finally the Wordsworths whined one time too many about their losses, and Julia exploded, telling them that it was their own fault for speculating in foreign stocks. “Why did you not keep your money at home?” she cheekily asked.43 Wordsworth himself came across as narrow, biased, and rude. Decades later she remembered his obnoxious assertion that “the misfortune of Ireland is that it is only a partially conquered country.”44 She was glad to get away.
On their side, the Wordsworths were just as pleased to see her go. “The Husband is an intelligent man,” the poet opined in stately prose, “and his Wife passes among Americans as a great specimen of the best they produce in female character.” His daughter Dora was much more irate about the tea party in a letter to her cousin. Dr. Howe “came with a horrid, rude, clever, radical woman of a wife. Oh what a dislike I took to that woman.”45
After a few weeks, Julia recovered some of her American confidence. To her pleasant surprise, the performers at fancy London musicales were no better than trios she and her brothers sang back home. “They have, of course, infinitely better voices,” she told Louisa, “but hang me if they sing with half the enthusiasm.”46 She was getting used to life as the silent partner of a sought-after spouse, although she was rethinking what it might be like to be a mother as well. As she confided to Louisa, “I am not good with children—for their sakes, I should almost be willing not to have any.”47
It was too late to make that choice, if she could have. By August she knew she was pregnant and told the Howes. Sam was annoyed; he thought Chev should have brought her home before starting a family. He married again on September 20, however, so he was too busy to complain. The Howes continued on their Grand Tour, to Switzerland and Vienna, then to Milan, where Julia and Annie spent a month alone while Chev was in Paris getting his teeth fixed. A month seems like a long time for dentistry, and Francis Marion Ward, who came to visit his sisters, thought that Chev was neglectful of Julia’s needs for companionship and reassurance. “The good Chev is so taken up with his own ideas and notions of education and reformation that he cares and thinks little about the objects which interest Jule and Annie.”48 Yet from his side, Chev was still ecstatic about married life, and urging Sumner from Paris to take it up. “I have been married six months; I have been by my wife’s side nearly twenty-four hours of every day: I thought I knew how much I loved her but, now in my solitude, I find I did not value her enough, and all that Paris or the world could present would not hold me away from her a minute. Charlie, dear, dear Charlie, get married and make my happiness complete by the consciousness of yours.”49
In November, back in Milan, Chev confided the news of Julia’s pregnancy to Sumner, with many moral precepts on women’s feelings about childbearing: “No true woman ever considered it a burden to bear her infant within her, to nourish it with her own blood, & to furnish every fibre of its frame from her own flesh. It is not, however, as some suppose, the long gestation, the pain & the suffering, that cause the mother’s love for her child, because her love begins long before she feels any pain, or any inconvenience; hardly has she become conscious of the existence of her infant, when an intense and absorbing love for it fills her bosom.”50
Julia was not quite so selfless. In her diary she recorded her fears that she would not survive childbirth. When they settled in Rome to await the birth of the baby, she found the city dark and medieval: “a great gloom and silence hung over it.”51Catholicism offended her. The city, she wrote to Uncle John, was populated by “artists, priests, and beggars,” and the Catholic Church seemed to value pomp and ceremony far above charity and humility. “They take, I think, the fattest priests to make the Cardinals, and the fattest Cardinal to make the Pope.” She actually saw the Pope three times, and he looked like “an old woman dressed up very finely.”52 Chev was even more cynical about the Pope and the Catholic Church. On this at least they agreed.
Louisa’s unexpected arrival on December 11, bearing trunks of beautiful clothes, and introductions to Italian society, cheered Julia up considerably. Soon, to Chev’s annoyance, they were going to balls. Prince Torlonia’s ball, he wrote to Sumner, was “vulgar, stupid, tawdry,” ditto the Austrian ambassador’s ball. There were also private parties, and Julia sang at one to great acclaim. “Julia sang beautifully, far better than she usually does,” he boasted to Sumner; but he was frustrated by the long months in Rome. He whiled away the time by horseback riding with Annie and setting up a small class for blind children in their apartment. At Christmas, he tried to cheer up their chilly apartment by lighting some yule logs, but he managed to set the beams under the floor on fire instead. Annie and Louisa kept the accident a secret from Julia.
Fortunately, George Combe and his wife were in Rome for the winter. Chev and Combe busied themselves by studying the heads of Roman statues from a phrenological point of view. Julia went with them to the sculpture gallery of the Vatican, where they were much taken with the head of Zeus; and she made sly fun of them in her straight-faced account of their approval of the mythic statue by the standards of phrenology. She did get some fashion tips from Cecilia Combe, who always wore black, and told her that “she adopted this dress on account of its convenience, and that English ladies, in traveling, often did so.”53 As the daughter of the great actress Sarah Siddons, Cecilia knew something about dramatic clothes. A painting of Julia in Rome during the winter shows her dressed in black, holding a lace handkerchief, sad and pensive.
Julia herself was going to galleries and museums, particularly the Villa Borghese with its Sala dell’Ermafrodito, exhibiting statues of beautiful hermaphrodites. They fascinated her, and she was trying to write about them. In an 1843 diary, there is a fragment, perhaps a piece of a letter to an unidentified person:
My pen has been unusually busy during the last year—it has brought me some happy inspirations, and though the golden tide is now at its ebb, I live in the hope that it may rise again in time to float off the stranded wreck of a novel, or rather story, in the which I have been deeply engaged for three months past. It is not, understand me, a moral and fashionable work, destined to be published in three volumes, but the history of a strange being, written as truly as I knew how to write it. Whether it will ever be published, I cannot tell, but I should like to have had you read it, and to talk with you about it.54
The Boston Unitarian minister Theodore Parker and his wife, Lydia, arrived in Rome on February 17, 1844, and stayed for two months. Chev knew Parker and invited them to dinner, and a friendship began, which for Julia would be “one of the great opportunities of my life.”55 Parker was a learned clerical radical, more of a transcendentalist than a Unitarian, a linguist who had mastered Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and German. In his studies of German biblical criticism, he had begun to doubt the historical truth of the Bible and the validity of Christ’s miracles. His ordination sermon, A Discourse on the Transient and Permanent in Christianity (1841), scandalized the Boston Unitarian clergy, and in September 1843 they tried to force him to resign from their association. In an emotional sermon, Parker resigned his pulpit in the Spring Street Church and they set out for a sabbatical year in Europe, to reflect and let things simmer down. Julia had heard reports in Boston of his heretical and sacrilegious views, but she found him delightful company, with a youthful vigor contrasting with his prematurely bald head. From the beginning she regarded him as an inspiring theologian and thinker, although Jane Carlyle had seen only “a little dreary snubnosed American with long hair over his coatneck, . . . who always had a hand like a frog when you touched it.”56
Julia was impressed by the Parkers’ marriage, which seemed much closer and more affectionate than her own. Lydia Parker was quiet, shy, and childlike. “A certain want of physical maturity,” Julia wrote mysteriously, “seemed to have prevented her from blossoming into full beauty. It was a great grief both to her and to her husband that their union was childless.”57 Nonetheless, Parker made a game of calling “this mild creature ‘Bear,’ and he delighted to carry out this pleasantry by adorning his étagère with miniature bears, in wood-carving, porcelain, and so on. His gold shirt stud bore the impress of a bear. At one Christmas time he showed me a breakfast cup upon which a bear had been painted, by his express order, as a gift for his wife.”58 Chev did not have teasing pet names for Julia or collect little nightingales to please her.
Yet behind this illusion of conjugal bliss lay a story even grimmer than the Howes’. Julia could never have suspected how much animosity and even despair Parker had felt in his marriage; he kept his comments in his diary in Latin, or crossed out, or even in code. Lydia was a Cabot—that most elevated of Boston families—and he had worked his way through Harvard as a schoolteacher. In January 1842, they had quarreled violently over his romantic friendship with a young woman named Anna Shaw. Both the marriage and his career were at a low point when they came to Europe. In Berne, Lydia had been entranced by the bears who lived in their own pit in the center of town. There Parker started to call her “Bear” or “Bearsie,” and to collect bear artifacts and souvenirs. Parker’s biographer, Dean Grodzins, speculates that the pet name had double meanings for Parker, who had pleaded in his journal in the trying, woeful, unhappy days, “Let me bear bear bear.”59 While abroad, he and Lydia seem to have reached a deeper understanding, but the reconciliation and second honeymoon of Europe did not last long. Both Lydia and the Unitarian ministry soon made Parker miserable, but he could not leave either one. He accepted his fate. “I cannot be otherwise than hated,” he would boast in 1852. “I believe there is no living man in America so widely, abundantly, and deeply hated as I have been, and still continue to be.” No one, before or since, has managed to feel quite so put-upon by Unitarians. “Bear & Forebear,” he wrote in his journal in 1855.60
There was no English-speaking midwife in Rome, and Chev had had no formal training in obstetrics, although he would assist at several of Julia’s deliveries. Fortunately, her first labor was relatively short—eight hours—and she delivered a baby girl on March 12, 1844. The Howes decided to name their daughter Julia Romana. The name drew attention; as the only American minister in Rome, Parker was asked to christen the baby, and suggested they should also have a son and name him “Samuel South Boston.”
Chev was overjoyed to be a father and wrote to Sumner that witnessing childbirth had given him “further knowledge of the depth & strength of woman’s nature.” He felt that Julia loved him even more, in her intense love of her baby. “How beautiful, how wonderful is nature,” he rhapsodized. “Only a year ago, Julia was a New York belle—apparently an artificial, possibly by some thought a beautiful one. Now she is a wife who lives only for her husband & a mother who would melt her very beauty, were it needed, to give a drop of nourishment to her child.”61 Or so he wished. Thoroughly satisfied that all had gone well, and confident in Julia’s ability to manage with the help of Louisa and Annie, he took off by himself for a long-postponed trip to Greece to see at firsthand developments in the fourteen years since the war, to revisit Corinth, and to meet the king in Athens.
Meanwhile in Rome, Louisa, a lighthearted flirt who already had one broken engagement, had begun a serious romance with the expatriate sculptor Thomas Crawford, who had made the fireplaces at The Corner. Sumner had connected him with the Howes, and by the spring he had proposed to Louisa. To the horror of Sam Ward and Uncle John Ward, who regarded him as an impoverished artist at best, and a fortune hunter at worst, they wanted to be married in Rome. Chev took Crawford’s side, although Tom had annoyed him by making fun of Combe and phrenology. “He seems to be doing well,” he wrote Sumner, and praised Crawford’s talent, taste, imagination, and potential as a brother-in-law. In fact, Crawford would have a very successful career as a sculptor and get enough important commissions to make him a rich man. His marriage to Louisa was a happy one.
In June, the Howes and Annie packed up for the slow trip back to Liverpool and the ship home, by way of Naples, Marseilles, Avignon, and then Paris, where they spent a few weeks. Chev was so sure that motherhood was a minor issue for a healthy young woman like Julia that he booked their passage to Marseilles aboard a steamer without sleeping accommodations, and he had to rush ashore to hire mattresses every night when they docked in port. Julia drily chalked up the lack of planning to his “love of the unusual.”62 They stopped in Paris for a few weeks with Crawford tagging along, and Chev persuaded him to put off the marriage until he could go to New York himself to plead his case to the Wards. But Chev could not bring himself to set a date for their departure and nearly drove Crawford crazy with his dithering. Crawford writes from Paris on June 20, “Howe has kept everything and everybody as usual topsy-turvy . . . One day the berths would be engaged in the summer and the next day abandoned; the packet would be thought of and talked about and given up . . . God only knows when we shall leave Europe.”63
At last they headed to London, stopping often for the Doctor to make detours to schools for handicapped children. Making the most of their remaining time, he and Julia went to Embley in August to visit the Nightingales. Florence Nightingale, exactly Julia’s age and also an heiress, was then pleading with her family to be allowed to study nursing, and she sought the Doctor’s advice in a private consultation. “Dr. Howe, do you think it would be unsuitable and unbecoming for a young Englishwoman to devote herself to works of charity in hospitals and elsewhere as Catholic sisters do? Do you think it would be a dreadful thing?” she asked. He replied, “My dear Miss Florence, it would be unusual, and in England whatever is unusual is apt to be thought unsuitable, but I say to you, go forward if you have a vocation for that way of life; act up to your inspiration, and you will find that there is never anything unbecoming or unladylike in doing your duty for the good of others. Choose, go on with it wherever it may lead you, and God be with you.”64
It was a pivotal moment for Nightingale, and also for Julia, who corresponded with Nightingale, an astringent and informative letter writer, for several years but increasingly resented Chev’s double standards of womanly behavior. He seemed hypocritical in encouraging Nightingale but objecting to any vocational ambitions of her own. When she confronted Chev with the paradox, he “responded by saying that ‘if he had been engaged to Florence Nightingale, and had loved her ever so dearly, he would have given her up as soon as she commenced her career as a public woman.’ ”65
In the few days left before they caught the ship back to New York, Chev managed to squeeze in some time to meet the venerable physician Richard Fowler at Salisbury. At the age of eighty, Fowler still walked three miles a day and had become an enthusiast of phrenology. He insisted on palpating Julia’s head and annoyed her by pronouncing she had “no music in you by nature.”66 She was not pleased either when Chev, at Fowler’s insistence, rushed down to visit a blind, deaf, and crippled old woman in the Portsmouth workhouse.
In her parting shot at Fowler, phrenology, and Chev’s obsession with the disabled, Julia wrote “a humorous travesty” of his report on the visit:
Dear Sir, I went south:
As far as Portsmouth,
And found a most charming old woman,
Delightfully void
Of all that’s enjoyed
By the animal vaguely called human.
She has but one jaw,
Has teeth like a saw,
Her ears and her eyes I delight in:
The one could not hear
Tho’ a cannon were near,
The others are holes with no sight in.
Her sinciput lies
Just over her eyes,
Not far from the bone parietal;
The crown of her head,
Be it vulgarly said,
Is shaped like the back of a beetle. . . .67
When she showed the verses to Chev, he was not amused. As Julia admitted in her old age, at this time in her life she was “a person of antipathies rather than sympathies.”68 At last they sailed from Liverpool on August 17. Despite Chev’s rebuke, Julia was still in high spirits on the voyage, composing a comic “Milsiad” for their friend Arthur Mills, a Conservative MP who was on the ship. As they approached Boston Harbor, she wrote an elegiac note of farewell to her poetic harp, her laughter, and her youth.
Harp of the West, through wind and foggy weather
We’ve sung our passage to our native land,
Now I have reached the terminus of tether,
And I must lay thee, trembling, from my hand.
That hand must ply the ignominious needle,
This mind brood o’er the salutary dish,
I must grow sober as a parish beadle,
And having fish to fry, must fry my fish.
Some happier muse than mine shall wake thy spell,
Harp of the West, oh Gemini! farewell.
The belle and the hero were beginning their marriage for real.