800 Years of Women's Letters (34 page)

This morning we are on the opposite bank of the river to Allahabad, almost a mile from it. It will take three days to pass the whole camp. Most of the horses and the body-guard are gone to-day.

E. EDEN,
UP THE COUNTRY: LETTERS FROM INDIA
(1872)

Emily Eden only went to India to keep house for her brother. Her letters give a varied picture of their life there.

October 1838

This day fortnight we are to be in our wretched tents – I could have a fit of hysterics when I think of it. The work of packing progresses and there are no bounds to the ardour with which everybody labours to make us uncomfortable. Already there are horrible signs of preparation with camel trunks and stores going off. A great many people have to go down to the plains this week. Poor things, it is about as rational as if a slice of bread were to get off the plate and put itself on the toasting fork.

E. EDEN (1872)

On 9 November 1838, after seven months in Simla, they returned to the tramping way of life. Emily's desperation was compounded by the weather.

We have been six days in camp and it is pouring as it only pours in India. It is impossible to describe the squalid misery; little ditches run round or through each tent with a slosh of mud that one invariably steps into; the servants look soaked and wretched, the camels slip down and die in every direction; I have to go under an umbrella to George's tent and we are carried in palanquins to the dining tent. How people who might by economy and taking in washing and plain work have a comfortable back attic in the neighbourhood of Manchester Square, with a fireplace and a boarded floor, can come and march about India, I cannot guess.

E. EDEN (1872)

The meeting between the Governor-General and the Lion of the Punjab had been arranged for Ferozepore on the border between British India and the Punjab. On 26 November Lord Auckland and his party arrived to discuss averting war – unsuccessfully.

Today was the great day. George and all the gentlemen went on their elephants to meet Ranjit who arrived on an equal number of elephants – indeed there were so many that the clash at meeting was very destructive to howdahs and hangings. George handled the Maharajah into the large tent where he sat down for a few minutes on the sofa between George and me.

E. EDEN (1872)

Harriet Martineau devoted most of her life to helping women achieve greater rights. When she visited the southern states of America in the 1850s she was appalled at what she saw.

A lady from New-England, staying in Baltimore, was one day talking over slavery with me, her detestation of it being great, when I told her I dreaded seeing a slave. ‘You have seen one,' said she. ‘You were waited on by a slave yesterday evening.' She told me of a gentleman who let out and lent out his slaves to wait at gentlemen's houses, and that the tall handsome mulatto who handed the tea at a party the evening before was one of these. I was glad it was over for once; but I never lost the painful feeling caused to a stranger by intercourse with slaves. No familiarity with them, no mirth and contentment on their part, ever soothed the miserable restlessness caused by the presence of a deeply-injured fellow-being. No wonder or ridicule on the spot avails anything to the stranger. He suffers, and must suffer from this, deeply and long, as surely as he is human and hates oppression. . . .

There is something inexpressibly disgusting in the sight of a slave woman in the field. I do not share in the horror of the Americans at the idea of women being employed in outdoor labour. It did not particularly gratify me to see the cows always milked by men (where there were no slaves); and the hay and harvest fields would have looked brighter in my eyes if women had been there to share the wholesome and cheerful toil. But a negro woman behind the plough presents a very different object from the English mother with her children in the turnip-field, or the Scotch lassie among the reapers. In her pre-eminently ugly costume, the long, scanty, dirty woollen garment, with the shabby large bonnet at the back of her head, the perspiration streaming down her dull face, the heavy tread of the splay foot, the slovenly air with which she guides her plough, a more hideous object cannot well be conceived, unless it be the same woman at home, in the negro quarter, as the cluster of slave dwellings is called.

ED. MARIA W. CHAPMAN,
HARRIET MARTINEAU'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY AND MEMORIALS OF HARRIET MARTINEAU
(1877)

Barbara Bodichon also dedicated much of her time to reform, even when travelling. She visited the southern states of America soon after Harriet Martineau, and felt impelled to record her varied reactions:

The happiness of these niggers is quite a curiosity to witness. I don't mean that Slavery is right but that if you want to move your bowels with compassion for human unhappiness, that sort of aperient is to be found in such plenty at home that it's a wonder people won't seek it there. Every person I have talked to here about it deplores it and owns that it is the most costly domestic machinery ever devised. In a house where four servants would do with us (servants whom we can send about their business too, when they get ill and past work, like true philanthropists as we are) there must be a dozen blacks here. The hire of a house slave from his master is 120 dollars – £25 – besides of course his keep, clothing etc. To be sure that leaves the great question untouched that Slavery is wrong. Of course they feel the cruelty of flogging and enslaving a negro – Of course they feel here the cruelty of starving an English labourer, or of driving an English child into a mine. Brother, Brother, we are kin.

ENGLISH WOMAN'S JOURNAL
8, DECEMBER 1861

I have been to the Methodist Church. It is a pleasant-looking, white, Noah's ark kind of building, very large, very white, very cheerful, with windows all round. As I approached I heard singing. The minister, a slave and a very black negro, gave a good sermon on the Communion. In the evening I went to my Baptist Church close by, and heard another slave preach. I asked a few questions of a very old man who seemed to be an authority. He said the minister could read and write and had studied. I asked how he could study if he worked all day and I was told: ‘He studied at night. Of course he can't do as well as white men who have all their time, but he worries so gets a little learning.'

I found the congregation as polite as usual. I have talked to a good many and cannot say they look unhappy even when their circumstances would naturally have made them so. For instance a woman told me today that she is the property of a gentleman in the country who hires her out – to a white washerwoman. Here she always stays unless she is going to have a child, and then she goes to the plantation till her child can toddle; then out to work again. She has had five children, but never sees them except under these circumstances. ‘Well', I said, ‘How do you get along?' ‘Splendidly; of course I must get along. You see there ain't no other way.' Sometimes, it is true I meet faces which are tragedies to look on; but these are generally mulattoes.

– 12th – In the beautiful fir wood where I have been several times to paint, I heard a pleasant voice singing hymns. Yesterday the singer appeared, a young negro girl very slight and small, but she says she is eight years of age. She and her little sister of four or five sang to me negro songs and hymns. A boy came and joined them; and after much conversation I found he was given to running away and was often whipped for it. The girl said she would never do anything so wicked. I was amused with these children and they were amused with me. ‘Never was anybody like you.' They were not sure whether I was Indian or not. They peeled off the inner bark of the fir, and chewed it like tobacco; but the girl said ‘If master seed us do that He'd whip us, because it spoils the teeth.'

March 13

Polly my servant is black, a real black woman. I said to her, ‘Polly, how many times have you been sold?' ‘Twice.' ‘Have you any children?' ‘I had three; God only knows where two of them are – my master sold them. We lived in Kentucky; one, my darling, he sold South. She is in one of those fields perhaps, picking with one of those poor creatures you saw. Oh, dear! Mum, we poor creatures have need to believe in God; for if God Almighty will not be good to us some day, why were we born? When I hear of His delivering His people from bondage, I know it means the poor African.' Her voice was so husky I could hardly understand her; but it seems her master promised to keep
one
child, and then sold it without telling her. When she asked in agony ‘Where is my child?' the master said it was ‘hired out'. But it never came back. I found she was a member of the church I had visited in Louisville. She said to me on parting ‘Never forget me; never forget what we suffer. Do all you can to alter it.'

ENGLISH WOMAN'S JOURNAL
8, DECEMBER 1861

Lucy Duff Gordon went to Upper Egypt for seven years, a longer stay than any other European. Her sympathy for the Arabs contrasts with many English attitudes of the time; she proved the only contemporary witness to the disastrous governments of Ismail praised as Viceroy by English male politicians. Her
Letters from Egypt
(1865), reprinted three times in their first year, remain a valuable historical document and a lively account of one remarkable individual's view of another culture. Here she tells her husband of Egyptian food and drink.

Thebes 11 Feb 1863

Dearest Alick

We got quite intimate over our leather cup of sherbet (brown sugar and water), and the handsome jet-black men, with features as beautiful as those of the young Bacchus, described the distant lands in a way which would have charmed Herodotus. They proposed to me to join them, ‘they had food enough,' and Omar and I were equally inclined to go. It is of no use to talk of the ruins; everybody has said, I suppose, all that can be said, but Philae surpassed my expectations. No wonder the Arab legends of Ans el Wogood are so romantic, and Abou Simbel and many more. The scribbling of names is quite infamous, beautiful paintings are defaced by Tomkins and Hobson, but worst of all Prince Pückler Muskau has engraved his and his
Ordenskreuz
in huge letters on the naked breast of the august and pathetic giant who sits at Abou Simbel. I wish someone would kick him for his profanity.

I have eaten many odd things with odd people in queer places, dined in a respectable Nubian family (the castor-oil was trying), been to a Nubian wedding – such a dance I saw. Made friends with a man much looked up to in his place (Kalabshee – notorious for cutting throats), inasmuch as he had killed several intrusive tax-gatherers and recruiting officers. He was very gentlemanly and kind and carried me up a place so steep I could not have reached it. Just below the cataract – by-the-by going up is nothing but noise and shouting, but coming down is fine fun –
Fantasia khateer
as my excellent little Nubian pilot said. My sailors all prayed away manfully and were horribly frightened. I confess my pulse quickened, but I don't think it was fear. Well, below the cataract I stopped for a religious fête, and went to a holy tomb with the darweesh, so extraordinarily handsome and graceful – the true
feingemacht
noble Bedaween type. He took care of me through the crowd, who never had seen a Frank woman before and crowded fearfully, and pushed the true believers unmercifully to make way for me. He was particularly pleased at my not being afraid of Arabs; I laughed, and asked if he was afraid of us. ‘Oh no! he would like to come to England; when there he would work to eat and drink, and then sit and sleep in the church.' I was positively ashamed to tell my religious friend that with us the ‘house of God' is not the house of the poor stranger. I asked him to eat with me but he was holding a preliminary Ramadan (it begins next week), and could not; but he brought his handsome sister, who was richly dressed, and begged me to visit him and eat of his bread, cheese and milk. Such is the treatment one finds if one leaves the highroad and the backsheeshhunting parasites. There are plenty of ‘gentlemen' barefooted and clad in a shirt and cloak ready to pay attentions which you may return with a civil look and greeting, and if you offer a cup of coffee and a seat on the floor you give great pleasure, still more if you eat the dourah and dates, or bread and sour milk with an appetite.

At Koom Ombo we met a Rifaee darweesh with his basket of tame snakes. After a little talk he proposed to initiate me, and so we sat down and held hands like people marrying. Omar sat behind me and repeated the words as my ‘Wakeel,' then the Rifaee twisted a cobra round our joined hands and requested me to spit on it, he did the same and I was pronounced safe and enveloped in snakes. My sailors groaned and Omar shuddered as the snakes put out their tongues – the darweesh and I smiled at each other like Roman augurs. I need not say the creatures were toothless.

L. DUFF GORDON,
LETTERS FROM EGYPT
(1865)

Isabel Burton accompanied her adventurer husband to Brazil in 1865. These extracts come from letters to her mother.

1865

It was fortunate that I had the foresight to take iron bedsteads along, as already at Lisbon three-inch cockroaches seethed about the floor of our room. I jumped onto a chair and Burton growled ‘I suppose you think you look very pretty standing on that chair and howling at those innocent creatures'. My reaction was to stop screaming and reflect that he was right; if I had to live in a country full of such creatures, and worse, I had better pull myself together. I got down among them, and started lashing out with a slipper. In two hours I had a bag full of ninety-seven, and had conquered my queasiness.

Santos: