Maria Jane Jewsbury

Maria Jane Jewsbury
Born 25 October 1800
Measham, Derbyshire, England
Died 4 October 1833
Poona, Maharashtra, India
Occupation writer, poet, literary reviewer
Nationality British
Notable works The Three Histories
Spouse
William Kew Fletcher (m. 1832)
Relatives Geraldine Jewsbury

Maria Jane Jewsbury (later, Maria Jane Fletcher; 25 October 1800 – 4 October 1833) was an English writer, poet and literary reviewer. Her principal works were Phantasmagoria, or Essays on Life and Literature; Letters to the Young; Lays for Leisure Hours; and The Three Histories, all of which were highly popular.[1]

While bringing up her brothers and sisters, she read avidly, and began to contribute to the Manchester Gazette in 1821.[2] She devoted herself assiduously to domestic and family duties, while applying her mind to study, and simultaneously pursuing a course of literary compositions, while forming friendships with the principal authors of the day, and finding the confirmation of her secret aspirations in their approval and applause. Dreading, perhaps, to be instrumental in communicating doubt, or in eliciting presumptuous inquiry, her advice on theological and religious subjects tended rather towards dogmatism. She had painfully acquired an assured belief in the vital doctrines of Christianity, and she enforced their reception upon other persons through a sense of duty.[3]

Jewsbury's first book, Phantasmagoria; or, Sketches of Life and Literature, published in 1825, contained poetry and prose.[4] The book attracted the attention of William Wordsworth and his sister, Dorothy. Jewsbury visited the Wordsworths in Lancashire in July of that year. Another friend was Felicia Hemans, with whom she stayed in Wales in the summer of 1828. She was also friendly with Barbara Hofland, Sara Coleridge, the Henry Roscoes, the Charles Wentworth Dilkes, the Samuel Carter Halls, the Henry Chorleys, and Thomas De Quincey. Her presence was courted in London, as well as in various parts of England, where her brilliant conversation confirmed and increased the reputation won by her writings.[3]

Through acquaintance with Dilke, the editor of the Athenaeum, she began to write for it in 1830. Against the wishes of her father, she married Rev. William Kew Fletcher (died 1867) in 1832, at Penegoes, Montgomeryshire. The couple set out on the long sea journey to India, where she continued to write poetry en route and a journal. The poetry was published in the Athenaeum and was called The Oceanides.[5]

Early life and education

Maria Jane Jewsbury was born in Measham in 1800, then in Derbyshire, now in Leicestershire.[4] She was the daughter of Thomas Jewsbury (died 1840), a cotton manufacturer and merchant, and his wife Maria, née Smith, (died 1819).[2] Her paternal grandfather, Thomas Jewsbury Sr (died 1799), was a non-professional surveyor of roads, an engineer of canal navigation, and a student of philosophy. Upon his death he left the family four cottages, a warehouse, a piece of land in Measham, and a large sum of money.[6]

Jewsbury was the eldest of the children. Her younger brother Thomas was born in 1802, then Henry in 1803, Geraldine in 1812, Arthur in 1815, and Frank in 1819.[6] Jewsbury attended a school in Shenstone, Staffordshire kept by a Miss Adams, and there passed through the routine of ordinary female instruction. Ill-health obliged her to leave school at the age of 14.[7]

Jewsbury's father worked as the master of a cotton factory. However, the War of 1812 with America hurt the cotton business and the family moved to George Street in Manchester in 1818, after her father's business failed. Jewsbury's mother died one month after giving birth to Frank, the youngest of the children. Then 19, Jewsbury took on the mother's role for the household so that her father could keep working, continuing in the role for over twelve years after their mother's death.[6][8]

Although she developed literary ambitions at nine years of age, she did not begin to read systematically until she was twenty-one.[9] In 1821, she commenced a course of reading combined with the composition of prose and verse. Her love of reading took the form of desultory enjoyment rather than that of consistent pursuit of knowledge.[10] It appears to have been about this time that she addressed a letter to Wordsworth, whose poetry she admired, but to whom she was unknown, presumably keen for sympathy from someone with whose sentiments she sympathised. The application led to the establishment to correspondence, to personal and family intercourse, and to steady friendship, but without any direct benefit for her as an author.[11]

Career

Early publications

Mr Aston, the editor of the Manchester Gazette, being acquainted with her father, had the honour of first printing and publishing a little poem of hers; and being impressed with a high opinion of her talents, he introduced her to Alaric Alexander Watts, who, from the latter part of the year 1822, edited the Leeds Intelligencer, and three years afterwards resigned that paper, removed his residence to Manchester, and became the editor of the Manchester Courier, and of an annual volume, called The Literary Souvenir, to which Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, Montgomery, and Mary Jane Jewsbury, were contributors. Watts, who married Priscilla "Zillah" Maden Wiffen, the sister of Jeremiah Holmes Wiffen, the historian of the House of Russell, was less than two years older than Jewsbury, and he aided her in the work of mental culture, gave publicity to her occasional poems, urged the composition of her first book, Phantasmagoria, and found a publisher for it.[11]

Geraldine Jewsbury

In 1825, Watts gave up the local newspaper. She wrote letters to her sister in 1828 while Geraldine was in the Misses Darby's school. In one of these Letters to the Young, she wrote about the dangers of fame to Geraldine, who was already aspiring to be a writer. She warned her that fame would bring unhappiness and that the only true happiness to be found was in religion. These letters were written after Jewsbury had a spiritual crisis in 1826.[3] In 1828 and 1829, he edited an annual, called The Poetical Album, or Register of Modern Fugitive Poetry, to which, and to several other volumes of a similar kind, Jewsbury became a distinguished contributor. The Literary Magnet, The Literary Souvenir, and The Amulet, were likewise indebted for much of their popularity to her writings. At a later period, she also wrote for The Athenaeum, and many of the best pieces which she ever composed are found in that work.[12]

Wales

The residence of Mrs Hemans, at Rhyllon, Wales

Mrs Owen of Rhyllon, in her Memoir of her sister, Mrs Hemans, wrote of Jewsbury's first trip in Wales: "She had long admired the writings of Mrs Hemans with all the enthusiasm which characterised her temperament; and having been for some time in correspondence with her, she eagerly sought for an opportunity of knowing her more nearly, and, with this view, determined upon passing a part of the summer and autumn of 1828 in the neighbourhood of St Asaph. No better accommodation could be found for her than a very small dwelling, called Primrose Cottage.[12]

The place in itself was as little attractive as a cottage in Wales could well be, and its closeness to the road took away even from its rurality; but it possessed the advantage of being not more than half a mile from Rhyllon, and it had its little garden and its roses, and its green turf and pure air; and these to an inhabitant of Manchester, which Jewsbury then was, were things of health and enjoyment. There she stayed with her young sister and brothers; and there Mrs Hemans found her established on her own return from Wavertree at the end of July. From a young age, she had had to contend with poor health, and when she arrived in Wales, she came as an invalid, but her health soon improved. Many of the poems in her Lays of Leisure Hours, which she dedicated to Mrs Hemans, 'in remembrance of the summer passed in her society,' were written in this little cottage. Some of them were immediately addressed to her, particularly that "To an Absent One", and the first of the series of "Poetical Portraits" in the same volume was meant to describe her. The picture of Egeria, in The Three Histories, written by Jewsbury some time afterwards, was avowedly taken from the same original.[13]

India

Having, in the year 1831, become engaged to Rev. William K. Fletcher, one of the chaplains of the East India Company, she subsequently accepted the invitation of her friend, Mrs Hughes, the sister of Mrs Hemans, and then the wife of the rector of Penegoes, Montgomeryshire; and assembling her family party there in the July of the following year, she married Rev. Fletcher in the church of that parish on the 1st of August, 1832. Having already commenced her preparations to accompany Rev. Fletcher to India, she said goodbye to her family, and left for a honeymoon in Britain.[3]

In London, Mr and Mrs Fletcher were received by hospitable friends. They embarked from Gravesend on board The Victory, East Indiaman, commanded by Captain Christopher Biden. The first entry in the journal of her voyage bore the date of September 20, 1832. This record is interesting as a manifestation of character. In it, Jewsbury enlivened the monotony of routine by directing attention to every striking change of weather and variety of appearance in the ocean, moon, stars, clouds, fog, and wildlife.[14] However, her "Verses composed during a very discomposing breeze", a comic strain; and "The Burden of the Sea", a didactic one, were not among her best effusions.[15]

The voyagers spent Christmas week of 1832 on shore at Port Louis, Ceylon, and put to sea again on 29 December 1832.[15] On 2 March 1833, she landed at Bombay, and was hospitably received at the house of the Archdeacon. Proceeding to Hurnee with Rev. Fletcher, they remained there until the end of May, when Rev. Fletcher received orders to proceed to Sholapoor, which they reached on 17 June. Entering with animated expectation upon every new scene, keenly observing every point of contrast between the Asiatic and European aspects of nature, art, and social life, and every peculiarity of local manners and habits; and more especially studying the character Of the people in connection with their worship, she carefully prepared herself for usefulness among them. Drought prevailed at that period in and around Sholapoor; it produced a famine; and Rev. Fletcher's principal employment on his arrival was to mitigate the sufferings of the emaciated and perishing population. The anxiety and over exertion of Rev. Fletcher brought on a dangerous illness, and for seven weeks, his wife nursed him. On his recovery, obtaining a medical certificate that his health would not bear that climate, they set out on September 26th on their return to Hurnee.[16] The last entry she ever made in her journal was dated "Babelgaum, September 26, 1833".[17]

Death and legacy

Her mind tended chiefly towards metaphysics and a poetic form of moral philosophy. Letitia Elizabeth Landon said of her, "I never met with any woman who possessed her powers of conversation. If her language had a fault, it was its extreme perfection. It was like reading an eloquent book, full of thought and poetry. She died too soon...."[18]

Jewsbury became ill in June 1833 and died of cholera at Poona on 4 October 1833.[4][19] Her remains were interred in the cemetery at Poonah.[17]

She had brought several of her unpublished works to India, and many were published anonymously after her death.[6][7][20] After Jewsbury's death, her siblings, Geraldine Ensor Jewsbury and Francis Jewsbury, retained a collection of their sister's private letters, and of the manuscript "Journal of her Voyage and Residence in India". All her letters, however hasty and unstudied, bore marks of a fine mind under the steady and habitual control of the highest principles. Her pen ennobled all it touches, and gives interest even to trivial details. Those letters throw a clear light upon one important feature of her character – the strength and constancy of its attachment – showing her father, her sister, her brothers, and her friends, to have been continually present to her thoughts, and that her best affections and most sedulous cares ever hovered protecting over all the members of the paternal household.[21]

Many of Jewsbury's papers are now in the library of Manchester University.[22]

The Three Histories

The Three Histories is reckoned indisputably her best work.[1] It comprise those of an Enthusiast, a Nonchalant, and a Realist. In the first there is certainly a misnomer; the heroine as a child might in parts be deemed enthusiastic, but grows up into a selfish woman of genius, full of worldly ambition, which predominates strongly over her few and weak social affections; valuing her rare abilities and attainments merely as forming a lever to raise her into the sphere of fashionable distinction ; delighting neither in literature nor in anything else for its own sake; not loving with that true affection which rests satisfied in finding an appropriate object, while regarding all adventitious advantages as pleasant superfluities, Julia seeks not the gratification of her friends, nor her own in theirs, nor in the joy of conscious usefulness. Her genius is made a wretched slave Of the lamp, a ministering drudge to vanity and worldliness. Having an independent fortune, she neither writes for bread, nor for the additional comforts or luxuries of terrene existence: fame, the trumpet-sound, the far reverberation, the adulation of strangers, the establishment of a name in the records of futurity, is the great object of her life. Julia is not a genuine enthusiast, devoting heart and soul, genius and its fruits, to the promotion of any one extraneous and special purpose. She is not ennobled by her fine faculties, but debased; and having sown the Wind, no reader pities her when she reaps the whirlwind.[1]

This tale evinces much ability in the delineation of character. The grandmother deserves to live and last among the inhabitants of our popular world of fiction. The 'Nonchalant' would have been more justly named the 'Brokenhearted.' There is a dreamy, sickly haze over this supposititious autobiography, but it bears, perhaps, the record of much personal feeling. The gloomy hero resembles a planet, which, passing through deep masses of cloud, pierces them every now and then with rays which promise a triumphant emergence. The 'Realist' merits its title, and is conceived in a strong and healthful, though somewhat hard state of mind. It is not so much the ability displayed in the construction of either of these 'Histories' that impresses the reader with respect for Miss Jewsbury's genius, as the combined effect of the "Three 2" the able depiction of so many distinctly-marked characters carrying with it the conviction of unusual skill, and of still latent power.[23]

Style and themes

In the process of self-education she had not only much to acquire, she had also much to unlearn. Obsolete phrases of a local dialect haunt her prose, probably derived from the daily conversation of uncultivated associates, caught up and made habitual before her taste was formed on purer models. The mercantile idiom, "I will write you" occasionally occurs; and an odd substitution of the preposition "of" in the proper place of the preposition "for", which disfigures her style: "I liked it more than I have liked anything of years," "He has not seen you of a year," etc. This idiosyncratic use of the prepositions occurs frequently in the epistles of Margaret Tudor, Queen of Scotland, who, for instance, desires Cardinal Wolsey to "thank his grace (King Henry VIII.) of his diamond that his grace sent me." Half-consciousness of this habitual fault may probably have induced, by way of counteraction, that sort of fantastic daintiness which sometimes vitiates even her family letters. In a writer of less merit, these faults might be suffered to pass unremarked; they are mentioned here chiefly to confirm that despite her natural fluency of expression and aptitude in selecting words, the general correctness and elegance of her diction resulted rather from vigilant care. See Mrs Everett Green's Letters of Royal and Illustrious Ladies.[24]

Many passages of her journal are eloquent.[15] "In the best of everything I have done you will find one leading idea – Death; all thoughts, all images, all contrasts of thoughts and images, are derived from living much in the valley of that shadow; from having learned life rather in the vicissitudes of man than woman; from the mind being Hebraic. My poetry, except some half-dozen pieces, may be consigned to oblivion; but in all you would find the sober hue, which to my mind's eye blends equally with the golden glow of sunset, and the bright green of spring; and is seen equally in the temple of delight as in the tomb of decay and separation. I am melancholy by nature, but cheerful on principle."[9]

Selected works

  • Letters to the Young
  • Phantasmagoria
  • The Oceanides[5]
  • The Three Histories (1830)[4]

References

  1. 1 2 3 Virtue and Company 1875, p. 385.
  2. 1 2 Maria Jane Fletcher, Romantic Circles, retrieved 17 January 2015
  3. 1 2 3 4 Virtue and Company 1875, p. 373.
  4. 1 2 3 4 "Merriam Webster's Biographical Dictionary". Biography in Context. Gale. 1995. Retrieved February 1, 2016.
  5. 1 2 The Oceanides, Maria Jane Jewsbury, ed.by Judith Pascoe, retrieved 17 January 2015
  6. 1 2 3 4 Howe, Susanne (1935). Geraldine Jewsbury, Her Life and Errors. London: George Allen & Unwin.
  7. 1 2 Joanne Wilkes: Jewsbury, Maria Jane (1800–1833), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, UK: OUP, 2004). Retrieved 17 January 2015
  8. ↑ Virtue and Company 1875, p. 367-68.
  9. 1 2 Virtue and Company 1875, p. 381.
  10. ↑ Virtue and Company 1875, p. 365.
  11. 1 2 Virtue and Company 1875, p. 368.
  12. 1 2 Virtue and Company 1875, p. 369.
  13. ↑ Virtue and Company 1875, p. 370.
  14. ↑ Virtue and Company 1875, p. 374.
  15. 1 2 3 Virtue and Company 1875, p. 375.
  16. ↑ Virtue and Company 1875, p. 376.
  17. 1 2 Virtue and Company 1875, p. 377.
  18. ↑ Virtue and Company 1875, p. 378.
  19. ↑ Bewell, Alan (1999). Romanticism and colonial disease. Baltimore (Md.): The Johns Hopkins University Press. ISBN 0801877342.
  20. ↑ Clarke, Norma (1990). Heights: Writing, Friendship, Love: The Jewsbury Sisters, Felicia Hemans, and Jane Welsh Carlyle. London: Routledge.
  21. ↑ Virtue and Company 1875, p. 372.
  22. ↑ Jewsbury Papers, The University of Manchester Library, retrieved 17 January 2015
  23. ↑ Virtue and Company 1875, p. 386.
  24. ↑ Virtue and Company 1875, p. 382.

Attribution

  • This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Virtue and Company (1875). The Art Journal (Public domain ed.). Virtue and Company.
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