In the autobiography of Mrs. Fletcher, who was for many years a conspicuous figure in Edinburgh society, there are some interesting references to Lancashire people.
Eliza Dawson was born at Tadcaster in 1770, and came of good yeoman stock, from whom she inherited a steady-going Liberalism that equally avoided the extremes of “divine right” either of kings or mobs. The beauty and good nature of the girl attracted admiration even in her school days, and she had to reduce several worthy young men to temporary despair by the rejection of their proposals of marriage. Mr. Fletcher, who became her husband, was twenty years her senior, and fell in love with her because she realized his ideal of Sophia Western in “Tom Jones”! He was a well-known Edinburgh lawyer, and in her new home she met Scott, Jeffery, and Brougham. Later she made the acquaintance of Wordsworth, Southey, Arnold, Lafeyette, Mrs. Gaskell, Mazzini, Kossuth, and a variety of other distinguished persons. Her husband died in 1838, but she survived for thirty years. Her latter days were spent at Grasmere, where she died in 1858. The impression made by this gifted woman upon those with whom she came in contact is vividly shown by the description which Margaret Fuller has left of her. “Seventy-six years have passed over her head, only to prove in her the truth of my theory that we need never grow old. She was ‘brought up’ in the animated and intellectual circle of Edinburgh, in youth an apt disciple, in her prime a bright ornament of that society. She had been an only child, a cherished wife, an adored mother, unspoiled by love in any of these relations, because that love was founded on knowledge. In childhood she had warmly sympathised in the spirit that animated the American Revolution, and Washington had been her hero; later, the interest of her husband in every struggle for freedom had cherished her own. She had known in the course of her long life many eminent men, and sympathised now in the triumph of the people over the corn laws, as she had in the American victories, with as much ardour as when a girl, though with a wiser mind. Her eye was full of light, her manner and gesture of dignity; her voice rich, sonorous, and finely modulated; her tide of talk marked by candour and justice, showing in every sentence her ripe experience and her noble genial nature. Dear to memory will be the sight of her in the beautiful seclusion of her home among the mountains, a picturesque, flower-wreathed dwelling, where affection, tranquillity, and wisdom were the gods of the hearth to whom was offered no vain oblation. Grant us more such women, time! Grant to men to reverence, to seek for such!”
She owed much of her religious feeling to the influence of the Rev. John Clowes. “It was in the winter of 1788 that I met, at the house of the Misses Hutton (two excellent maiden ladies) at Tadcaster, the Rev. John Clowes, rector of St. John’s Church, in Manchester. The bond between these pious and primitive old ladies and Mr. Clowes was, I believe, their mutual admiration of the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg. Although I could not participate in their enthusiasm for that visionary writer, I think it was from Mr. Clowes’s conversation and writings that I first became interested in the spiritual sense of true religion, or, in other words, felt its experimental truth; and I wish here to preserve the following transcript of the conversation which I made from memory after passing the evening with Mr. Clowes at Miss Hutton’s. Several ladies, some of the Methodist persuasion, were present. His views have always appeared to me to contain much of the true spirit of Christianity. Being asked his opinion of Mr. Law’s works, Mr. Clowes said, ‘I read them, madam, with great diligence and much affection, and I found that they tended to produce a pure, holy, and peaceable frame of mind, but I found likewise that they disqualified a man for the duty of his calling. I could not even go to perform my duty in the church without finding something to disturb me. This made me conjecture that all was not right in Mr. Law’s doctrine, and I conceive it to be this: that it is admirably suited for the contemplative but not for the active life of man, inasmuch as it does not bring the outward man into entire subjection to the inner man, for man has two lives, or two beings, in his very best state while on earth.’... When asked what he conceived to be the state of the blessed, he replied in a calm, but animated tone of voice, ‘I conceive the state of the blessed to be a total forgetfulness or absence of self, and to consist in beholding the good and happiness of others, so that every individual will enjoy the whole happiness of heaven.’... Every man is according to his own desire, for assuredly the Lord wills the good and happiness of all His creatures. If a man says he desires to be better, and that he is unhappy because his desire is not fulfilled, let not that man be impatient; he has begun to bear his cross, and if he bears it patiently, humbly waiting for a better state, he will certainly obtain his desire. The good he did, because he saw it was commanded, will soon be his delight; and to delight in good is the temper and disposition of angels.”
In the year 1808, during a visit to Lancashire, her friend, Miss Kennedy, made her acquainted with the family of Mr. Greg, at Quarry Bank. “We stayed a week with them, and admired the cultivation of mind and refinement of manners which Mrs. Greg preserved in the midst of a money-making and somewhat unpolished community of merchants and manufacturers. Mr. Greg, too, was most gentlemanly and hospitable, and surrounded by eleven clever and well-educated children. I thought them the happiest family group I had ever seen. Miss Kennedy also took me to visit her friends, the Rathbone family, at Green Bank, near Liverpool, and we there met Mr. Roscoe, the elegant-minded author of the ‘Life of Lorenzo de’ Medici.’ Mr. Roscoe took us to his beautiful residence at Ollerton Hall, and charmed us by the good taste of his varied and agreeable powers of conversation. He had been returned member for Liverpool during the Whig Ministry of 1806, and both he and Mr. Rathbone had taken a decided part in the cause of the abolition of the slave trade. We were taken to see the last ship which had sailed from the port of Liverpool for trade in human beings. It was then undergoing a change for the stowage of other goods than those wretched negroes who had formerly been crammed in the space between decks not more than four feet high. The iron hooks remained to which they had been chained. It was a sickening sight,—but those chains were broken. We stayed some days at Green Bank, where we enjoyed the society of the venerable William Rathbone, the zealous friend of civil and religious liberty. It was he, and Mr. Roscoe, and Dr. Currie, who by their personal influence and exertions established the first literary and philosophical society at Liverpool, and induced their fellow-townsmen to think and feel that there were other objects besides making money which ought to occupy the time and thoughts of reasonable beings.”
Mr. W. E. Forster, on a visit to Mrs. Fletcher, brought with him “Mary Barton,” which had then only just appeared, and was still anonymous. Mrs. Fletcher says:—“We were at once struck with its power and pathos, and it was with infinite pleasure I heard that it was written by the daughter of one whom I both loved and reverenced in my early married life in Edinburgh, so that I had a two-fold pleasure in making Mrs. Gaskell’s acquaintance through Miss M. Beever, who knew her at Manchester, and who told me that she always asked about me with interest.”
She visited Liverpool again in February, 1848, where Mrs. Rathbone, of Green Bank, introduced her to that worthy Irishwoman, “Catharine of Liverpool,” whose history is one of the romances of poverty.[12]
In 1851 she was in Manchester, and after dining with Mrs. Gaskell, went to hear Kossuth in the Free Trade Hall. She was delighted with the orator, pleased with the crowd, who considerately made way for the white-haired old gentlewoman, and impressed by the interest in foreign politics shown by “this great town of Manchester.” Next morning at breakfast she met Thomas Wright, the prison philanthropist, then a hale man of sixty-six.
Her autobiography was edited by her daughter, Lady Richardson, and published in 1875 by Edmondston & Douglas. Another edition appeared in the United States in 1883.
Mrs. Fletcher had not only ability, but the subtler gift of sympathy. She had an instinctive feeling for that which was beautiful alike in the spheres of literature and morals.
Footnotes:
