The letters of Caroline Abraham

Turnbull Library Record, Volume XIX, Issue 1, 1 May 1986, Page 27

The letters of Caroline Abraham

FRANCES PORTER

At the end of the United Nations Decade for Women and of the first ten years of women’s studies at the Turnbull it is salutary to remember and acknowledge the debt owed to those colonial women who kept journals and wrote letters. With access denied to provincial assembly or General Assembly, to clubs or (for the gentler sort) to pubs, to church vestry or school board, to jury lists or editorial columns, there was little opportunity for a woman’s voice to be heard in public. Women did, however, use well—those who were able —the one talent colonial society allowed them; they wrote letters. Thank God for the letters of Charlotte Godley, Jane Maria Atkinson, Sarah Selwyn, Sarah Greenwood, Mary Taylor, to name but a few among many who now provide so much of the minutiae of colonial life, who flesh out the speeches, documents, enactments and incidents with their own trenchant and perceptive comments. A recent purchase 1 by the Turnbull Library has enabled Caroline Abraham to join the company. The bulk of the Caroline Abraham collection 2 consists of letters written between 1841 and 1877 to Sophia Marriott, a life-long friend, and to Sophia’s mother. In 1898, when she was 80, Sophia Marriott put together a selection of letters from what remained of Caroline Abraham’s correspondence in five exercise books, with pockets for the letters and her own comments on the facing page, and sent them to Caroline’s son, Charles Thomas Abraham.

On the death of her father Charles Palmer, Caroline together with her mother and sisters left their home Wanlip in Leicestershire for Farnborough Hill in Hampshire, where their near neighbours were the Abrahams of Frimley. Charles Palmer’s sister Harriet had married John Richardson, whose daughter Sarah was to marry George Augustus Selwyn. Both Caroline and ‘Sasa’ as she called her cousin were born in 1809. This propinquity brought Caroline into the Etonian circle of friends of which Selwyn, the acknowledged leader, was aptly known as ‘the Royal George’. Caroline was among those who farewelled the Tomatin party on 26 December 1841 and she felt equally uprooted by the departure, so completely had her ‘brightest hopes & thoughts for the future . . . intertwined themselves with George & Sarah’. 3 For the next few years she suffered from the principal malaise of Victorian gentleladies—not enough to do: ‘I cannot be content

merely to glide down the stream of life.’ 4 She wrote to Selwyn to see if she could be of use to Sarah and was, according to Sophia Marriott, rather discomfited by his eventual reply, ‘it was so very brief & business like. As my Mother said, “if Caroline had been a young clergyman, offering himself to the Mission, of whose family the Bishop knew nothing, it would have been all right”.’ 5

Equally worrying to a single woman advancing into her thirties would have been the apparent failure of the friendship between herself and Charles Abraham to blossom into anything further. She had turned to Charles for counselling about the duty of women in a church divided between High and Low practices and had been advised that it was ‘no less our privilege than our duty ... to stand aside & not suffer the sharp winds of controversy to ruffle . . . our peace of mind’. 6 Time whiled away for Caroline and she thought of becoming an Anglican nun. But at Eton, where he was a housemaster and assistant master, Abraham had set his hand to the plough and, until the reforms he contemplated had been carried through, both his marriage and his promise to Selwyn were held in abeyance.

In 1850 Abraham accomplished both. On 17 January he and Caroline were married. The bride was not excited by the day: ‘I was so weary of the wedding gown & all the outside preparations & so wishing that another Prima Donna cd. go thro’ the part.’ 7 On 14 March they left for New Zealand on the emigrant ship Lloyds. The emigrants were orderly; there was neither illness nor open misconduct, which was just as well, for Charles, appointed chaplain, was seasick most of the time. The captain was upright, but the cuddy passengers Caroline thought ‘all very colonial’. Denied kindred spirits she and Charles ‘yawned together over disputes about Cargoes & Dollars & Coal trade etc’. 8 At Sydney they were entertained most hospitably by the bishop but, Caroline observed:

such a different state of outward things and such a different atmosphere—moral and intellectual as this, and I suppose all Colonies present... if we see a Gentleman in the street —when he comes near, he is sure to be a Clergyman. 9

After an appalling Tasman crossing during which unfavourable winds buffeted the Emma for three weeks —‘a tedious voyage’— they arrived at Auckland on 6 August 1850. Letters from New Zealand had made ‘Bishop’s Auckland’ no strange place. ‘Everything’, Caroline wrote, ‘was so much like one’s imagination of it.’ The Royal George not so much altered: ‘His voice, his look, the curl of his lip, the twinkle of his eye all takes one back to Eton and the friends around him at that time.’ The Martins’ house at Taurarua was ‘all so true to one’s fancy that it

seemed like a dream’. The next day Selwyn took Caroline to the brow of the hill at Taurarua and pointed out all the features:

staying for a moment as he always does, when the Undine comes in sight to expatiate on her excellence and beauty—and then dilating on all [his] hopes and plans—and the intermarriages which would take place between his trained Maori youths at St John’s Coll, and these educated maidens at Mrs Kissling’s school and how he looked to the raising of a new tribe in this way. I()

A little later she wrote, ‘What do we find him? —All that he was; all that we believed . . . Every day [at St John’s College] makes me feel more really here, made members of a “Holy House”.’ 11 The following month the Selwyns’ end of Stjohn’s was more like a ‘Lyingin Hospital’ with three confinements —even Tibi the cat had kittens —and the Selwyns’ indefatigable nurse was ‘in her glory’. Sarah Selwyn’s daughter was born on 5 September; about the same time Tirena, wife of Rota Waitoa, also had a baby daughter and shortly after ‘our child’, born prematurely, died. 12 Of particular interest in Caroline’s letters from St John’s is the light that she throws on Sarah Selwyn. The remarkable stamina, even zest for colonial life, which is apparent in Sarah Selwyn’s letters and in her Reminiscences 13 was not, it appears, easily achieved or (in the case of her Reminiscences), was achieved only in retrospect. Caroline frequently felt ‘desolate in this far land’, but in contrasting her life to Sarah’s asks,

What must it have been to Sasa in those early days wh. even yet she has never spoken of really to me but only alluded to as if she dared not trust herself to speak even now! “How wondrous it is to think of all that the heart does bear, time after time, without growing a bit more used to it”, as she says, 14

and comments on how keenly Sarah felt her husband’s frequent and lengthy absences:

She used to shut herself up in her room & come out only to slave away at some drudgery, or some teaching work, & look distressed & one dared not notice it, least she shd. put on a forced cheerfulness. 15

Most bitter pill of all. Just when English letters began arriving full of congratulations about the birth of Margaret Selwyn, the five and a half month old baby died suddenly of fever. Caroline, who had suffered intensely ‘beyond what I imagined wh. was bad enough’ during her first confinement, and was to go through a miscarriage the following year wrote, ‘I have shrunk back from the thought of the cares & anxieties & pains wh. seem to me to make up so much the largest portion of a mother’s lot.’ 16 Selwyn, on the other hand, often spoke of his lot having fallen unto him in a fair ground. 17

For the first two years at St John’s College delicate health and aborted pregnancies had kept Caroline largely confined to bed or sofa. She became practised at writing while flat on her back and fretted at being frequently told that ‘those laid aside may still help in praying for those who work’. 18 Later in 1852 her physical strength was to return; in May, Mary Martin wrote,

You will rejoice to hear that Cary Abraham is getting quite strong and well. The Bath Chair arrived just as she had grown too well and saucy to use it... . Sasa and I quiz Cary that she is getting down from her aesthetic heights to our level of divine drudgery. She teaches black boys their A.B.C. —little dull girls to read, and has a mind ever alive to the best way of making a stew or boiling bones to jelly to feed hungry lads. 19

Caroline always tried to find satisfaction in the ‘simple all-sufficient employment of daily duties —however poor & circumscribed that daily duty seems’. 2) Like many women of her social class she indulged in watercolour painting, but from time to time she suffered ‘deep gashes of memory’, yearning for past voices and faces, for walks with friends in the English countryside, for the daily services of an English cathedral. Considering the extent of the upset it is strange that her letters contain no mention at all 21 of the ‘sad cloud of calamity, the passing tempest of moral evil’ which overtook St John’s College, of which her husband was the effective head, in the summer of 1852. 22 Or perhaps Sophia Marriott considered the subject of such letters unedifying and simply removed them. ‘The evil’, J. F. Lloyd wrote, ‘originated altogether with the English and had been in existence almost from the commencement of the college ... & fearing that the evil might spread also amongst those who were still free from it, it was thought best to dissolve the whole institution.’ 23 The last meeting of the College Council held on 7June 1853 decided ‘that the existing buildings of St John’s College be devoted to the purposes of an English Collegiate Institution’ and that ‘Archdeacon Abraham 24 be authorised to take measures to organise that Institution’. 25

Caroline’s letters are sparse for the remaining years at St John’s but fortunately Vicesimus Lush was a regular visitor. In February 1854 he was surprised at finding a ‘slight increase to that for some time most desolate place—viz. four pupils, the beginning of the College after the English model’. 26 Charles Abraham wrote to Edward Coleridge that he was ‘at the old trade of Latin Grammar etc’ and ‘adopting rather a private tutor system, so as to mould their character in a more gentlemanly fashion than is ordinary here’. 27 The passing years had not modified Caroline’s earlier view of colonial society:

. . . that caricature of English evils & vices that stalks abroad fearlessly in Colonial life & society, especially that precocious insubordination of youth to all authority. . . [Europeans] look in air & dress & appearance altogether like tradespeople at home—quite respectable, but snobbish. 2

On 5 July 1855 the Selwyns returned from England and Caroline observed how good it must have been for Sarah to see her husband among those who duly honoured and appreciated him. 29 But like all Selwyn’s friends who felt that ‘a drag-chain rather than a spur’ was needed in his Melanesian mission, Caroline wished ‘the Bp. would only limit himself to Auckland & the Native church . . . now I fear it will be the same rush and scramble for time as before’. 30 Selwyn had brought back with him the Reverend J. C. Patteson, an old Etonian, a kindred spirit and a better sailor than Charles Abraham. ‘Provokingly’, Caroline found, he had the same total absorption in his work as the Bishop, ‘so that the society of his Black Boys seems really to suffice . . . whenever we try in vain to get hold of his mind about other subjects.’ 31 The great event of 1857 —oddly there is no letter to cover it —was the birth on 13 April of Caroline’s son. At the end of the month Vicesimus Lush visited the Abrahams and reported that after dinner ‘Nurse’ (still the Selwyns’ ‘old Nurse’) brought in the baby,

a tiny mite of a thing, very fragile but very pretty. Mrs Abraham is in a very delicate state of health. They purpose naming the child Charles Thomas; the Pakehas call him “the little Archdeacon”—the Melanesians were the first to say he should be named Isaac. 32

Caroline was nearly 48 when her son was born. Some weeks before, Charles Abraham had suffered a riding accident and had badly damaged his arm. Caroline, apart from anxiety about the injury (she had no confidence in any Auckland surgeon), found his constant company very pleasant—‘almost too pleasant for Lent’. In 1858 the Abrahams were in England, where Charles was consecrated as Bishop of Wellington at Lambeth Church on 29 September 1858. He had previously thought, according to Caroline, that he would have been of more use to Selwyn as the latter’s ‘Stationary Man at Auckland, than as a Brother Bp. in the south’, 33 but when Octavius Hadfield finally declined the see on grounds of ill health 34 Selwyn proposed Abraham; a proposal accepted both at Lambeth and at Wellington. The Abrahams returned briefly to Auckland in March 1859 and then went straight down to ‘Bishop’s House’, Wellington. Charles was enthroned in St Paul’s on 3 April 1859. Caroline had not been ambitious for her husband, could not bear to think of the social side of being a bishop’s wife, and pondered

deeply the Archbishop of Canterbury’s warning in the consecration service of how a bishop should rule his own house —‘the fear that one might hinder & cd. scarcely help. It seemed as if the shadows lay thick upon me.’ 35 Always intense and something of a worrier, within the idiom of Tractarian piety, she was now a mother for the first time when some of her contemporaries were grandmothers. It all exacerbated her tendency to self depreciation. Worry over her ability to be Charlie’s ‘playfellow’ as well as to train him to stamp out Satan under his feet colour many of her later letters. Fortunately Charlie abounded in self-confidence and, although it was pain and grief to his mother, in normal naughtiness. When the Hadfields with four young children came to stay, Charlie bit Occy Hadfield and then shaped up to fight Annie. ‘There is no innate gallantry in him I fear’, Caroline solemnly wrote to Sophia Marriott. When Prince Albert died she even worried about the responsibility resting on the Queen’s shoulders in raising a son who was heir apparent. But when she turned her mind to public affairs her opinions are pertinent and significant. In letters she was outspoken at the folly and injustice of the Waitara purchase and at the short-sightedness of the ‘grasping and covetous Settlers’:

What one chiefly mourns is the thought of our doing wrong to this people [the Maori], and then supporting it by force and so beginning what may be a long chain of wrong and misery to both races; like all evil, the beginning seems small. 36 She was also contemptuous of the folly of the military who never having walked over a mile of the interior & knowing nothing of the nature of the Country say, “Make roads thro’ it, destroy the Bush & the Forests etc”. . . . and now he [General Cameron] finds even in peace without the least shadow of opposition from the Natives, that in making the road into Waikato, he had the utmost difficulty in maintaining an advanced post only a few miles beyond the metalled road! Does it not seem curious that men shd. not have common sense about such things? 37

She had found Gore Browne kindly and courteous as a private person but she had no time for his ability as governor: I feel rather disposed to be indignant with the Home Govt... A Country like this . . . ought not to have been confided to a man whose Governing powers had only been exercised on the rock of St Helena .... It became well known to the Natives that McLean, the land Commnr. was in fact Governor ... & that their character was judged by him only by their willingness to sell land. 38

From Sir George Grey who was a frequent visitor to Bishop’s House she expected better things. But she became more and more puzzled by him as he too became involved in the coils of war:

You ask me about Sir George & the mistrust wh. people have of him & I hardly know how to answer. Can anyone have a diplomatic political mind & be continually acting on its dictates & be really true & honest? It is a question I can never 39 answer.

On a lighter note was her brief description of the consecration of the Cathedral Church of St Paul (Old St Paul’s) on 6 January 1866. Because the architecture was ‘mixed’, ‘Early English, Middle Pointed & Perpendicular, Charles selected the music mixed also’. 40 The service was more of a ceremonial than the local people were used to and, to their surprise, they were impressed. As she grew older Caroline was no more at ease with colonial manners. When the seat of government shifted to Wellington she wrote to Sophia,

One perceives a marked difference in the appearance & demeanour of the people in the streets already. We hear that the rough swaggers with bandit sort of hat & air are Australians . . . The sole benefit wh. the change has conferred on us is in bringing Mrs Sewell here. She is so good & kind & helpful in the Parish .... While Mrs Sewell remains we are sure of one person besides ourselves at any Weekly Service. 41

Charlie was a boarder at the Church Grammar School at Kaiwharawhara in the charge of the Reverend H. W. St Hill, but when he reached ten years it was unthinkable to his parents that he should continue anywhere but at Eton. In April 1867 Caroline and Charlie left Wellington and (temporarily) Charles. That first English winter with its dull gloomy sky she contrasted with ‘my own bright land — the blue sky & sparkling water wh. come to me when I shut my eyes’. 42 One notes the pronoun; in spite of colonial society, politics and warfare did New Zealand finally exert a claim, if only in retrospect? Like her husband, the Martins and Selwyn himself, Caroline was appalled at Selwyn’s appointment to Lichfield though she agreed with Mary Martin that with ‘his principles of unflinching obedience, GANZ [as they now called him] cd. not have done otherwise’. 43 In 1869 Charles Abraham was also in England. At Selwyn’s plea—one thinks of him always as Selwyn’s lieutenant — he resigned the see of Wellington in 1870 to become, along with Edmund Hobhouse, Selwyn’s coadjutor at Lichfield. Charlie thrived at Eton but even this was a cause for worry to Caroline in case ‘it will be like so many “charming little Boys” . . . who turn out differently as they grow up’. 44 In 1875 Abraham was made a Canon of Lichfield. By now he and Caroline lived in the Close alongside the Selwyns. When Charlie was 17 his parents —Caroline was 65, Charles 61 —gave him a Christmas dance: ... it was a great success. We took up the carpet & have a very nice Oak floor.

About 45 . . . sat down to supper & danced merrily from Vb past 7 to Vb past 11... we thought our young men & maidens danced quietly & nicely—even with all the fun of figure dances & the ease of Boy & girl acquaintance. 4^ Caroline was again suffering ill health —‘falling back into bed & then creeping out’. She was also disturbed, more for the young than for herself, by the current interest in biblical criticism; too much of the Catholic doctrine she felt was now held as an ‘open question’. In reply to Sophia Marriott who was having trouble with the Athanasian Creed she wrote, ‘The line between the things of faith & the things of reason may be a fine one, but I believe there is such a line & I had rather wish enlarging it on the side of faith.’ 46 One of her frequent visitors was Sarah Selwyn and with the resignation and perception of the invalid Caroline commented, ‘She is overwhelmed by the more of life & diminished powers to meet it.’ 47 On 11 February 1877 with difficulty she wrote,

I did think dear Soph & still do at times that my time has come . . . God knows it is for no lack of love to my dearest that I am willing to leave them but just because I do love so intensely. 48 It was her last letter.

REFERENCES All manuscript sources referred to are held by the Alexander Turnbull Library. 1 From Virginia Browne-Wilkinson. Many extracts from Caroline Abraham’s letters appear in Browne-Wilkinson’s The Far Off and the Near (Florence, Privately printed, 1983). 2 MS Papers 2395. Unless otherwise stated, all letters quoted are by Caroline Abraham and from this collection. In addition, the Turnbull Library holds ‘Correspondence of Caroline Harriet Abraham’ (MS Papers 2305) which is a typed transcript (with errors) of some of the originals in MS Papers 2395. There are twelve further Caroline Abraham letters in ‘Letters from Bishop Selwyn and Others’, 4 vols (typescript), v. 4 (qMS sequence). H. W. Tucker, Memoir of the Life and Episcopate of George Augustus Selwyn, 2 vols (London, 1879), v. 1, pp. 331-5, contains her description of St John’s College. Extracts of Letters from New Zealand on the War Question (London, 1861), includes one Caroline Abraham letter. The 87 letters in MS Papers 2395 fall into four main sections: English letters, 1841-March 1850; from St John’s College, Auckland, July 1850-March 1857; from ‘Bishop’s House’, Wellington, March 1860-November 1867; from Wimbledon and later ‘the Close’, Lichfield, May 1867-February 1877. 3 Letter to Mrs Marriott, 19 January 1842.

4 From Sophia Marriott’s introductory letter, 5 March 1898. 5 Idem. 6 Letter to Sophia Marriott, 22 September 1845. 7 Ibid., Feast of the Purification, [2 February] 1850. 8 Letter to Mrs Marriott, 22 June 1850. 9 Letter to Rev. E. Coleridge, 13 July 1850, ‘Letters from Bishop Selwyn and Others’, v. 4, p. 760. 10 Ibid., 10 August 1850, p. 765. 11 Letter in Tucker, Memoir . . . of George Augustus Selwyn, v. 1, p. 332. 12 Letter to Mrs Marriott, Feast of St Luke, [lB October] 1850. 13 Sarah Selwyn, Reminiscences, 1809-1867, edited by Enid A. Evans (Auckland, 1961). 14 Letter to Mrs Marriott, 28 March 1852. 15 Ibid., 11 March 1851. 16 Ibid., [lB October] 1850, 25 February 1851. 17 He was quoting from Psalms 16. 7. 18 Letter to Mrs Marriott, 6 July 1851. 19 Mary Martin (wife of the Chief Justice, Sir William Martin), 21 May 1852, ‘Letters from Bishop Selwyn and Others’, v. 4, p. 699. 20 Letter to Mrs Marriott, 4 July 1851. 21 Apart from a comment written some years later: ‘So often, alas! our first meetings have been clouded by unpleasant matter . . . This time as Chas & I rode in we rejoiced that there was nothing disgraceful to communicate.’ (Letter to Mrs Marriott, 22 September 1856.)

22 When 19th century writers use such phrases (in this case G. H. Curteis, Bishop Selwyn of New Zealand and of Lichfield (London, 1889), p. 143), one can be sure that homosexuality was at the root. No other ‘moral evil’ aroused such fervent condemnation although it was seldom specifically alluded to. So thick was the miasma in this case that it is still difficult to find out what precisely happened at St John’s in the summer of 1852. 23 Letter to his sister, 28 December 1853 (MS Papers 1786). Lloyd was ‘Tutor of the Maori side’of St John’s College. See also R. M. Ross, Melanesians at Mission Bay, Historic Places Trust Publication, 18 (Wellington, 1983). 24 Charles Abraham was appointed Archdeacon of Waitemata, 27 November 1852. (New Zealand Government Gazette, Province of New Ulster, 1 December 1852). 25 W. J. Simkin, The College of St John the Evangelist (Wellington, 1938), p. 17. The College was also used intermittently from 1856 until the Kohimarama buildings were ready by the Rev. J. C. Patteson and his Melanesian students. 26 The Auckland Journals of Vicesimus Lush 1850-63, edited by Alison Drummond (Christchurch, 1971), p. 153.

27 Charles Abraham to E. Coleridge, 15 March 1855, ‘Letters from Bishop Selwyn .. . v. 3, p. 749. 28 Letter to Mrs Marriott, 25 February 1851. 29 At this time relations between Selwyn and the C.M.S. missionaries were cool. The failure of St John’s College to provide a suitable education for missionary sons, the supposedly ‘high church’ practices of Selwyn which were anathema to the evangelicals and the erratic manner in which he conducted his episcopal duties within New Zealand were all factors held against him. Caroline took the bishop’s side entirely accusing the C.M.S. missionaries of being willing ‘to abuse the Church’ (Letter to Mrs Marriott, 4 July 1851). 30 Letter to E. Coleridge, 16 March 1855, ‘Letters from Bishop Selwyn v. 4, p. 787. 31 Letter to Mrs Marriott, 20 March 1857.

32 Auckland Journals of Vicesimus Lush, 30 April 1857, p. 187. Isaac was the divinely promised son of Abraham and Sarah after a long childless marriage. 33 Letter to Sophia Marriott, 2 June 1858. 34 Selwyn had already planned (see his letter dated 21 January 1857 in ‘Letters from Bishop Selwyn . . . ’, v. 2, p. 295) to have Hobhouse at Nelson, Hadfield at Wellington and Abraham at Auckland. ‘I shall then have coadjutors in whom my heart would rejoice ... I would work Melanesia . . . until old age and infirmity makes me resign the field into Coley’s [Patteson’s] hands.’ Hadfield had ‘reluctantly’ let his name go forward to the Archbishop of Canterbury in March 1857 and withdrew his original acceptance in December. (W. P. Morrell, The Anglican Church in New Zealand (Dunedin, 1973), p. 62. 35 Letter to Sophia Marriott, 30 September 1858. 36 Letter, 24 April 1860, printed in Extracts of Letters from New Zealand on the War Question. 37 Letters to Sophia Marriott, 1 December 1860, lOJune 1864. 38 Ibid., 1 December 1860. 39 Ibid., 6 March 1865. 40 Ibid.,June 1866. 41 Ibid., 6 March 1865. 42 Ibid., 20 February 1868. 43 Ibid., 4 April [lß6B], Selwyn was enthroned at Lichfield Cathedral 9 January 1868. 44 Ibid., 13 October 1868. 45 Ibid., 19January [1875], 46 Ibid., 19 August [1876], 47 Ibid., 3January 1877. 48 Ibid., 11 February 1877.