33. "Another olive branch": the arrival of babies

Alice gave birth to baby John barely ten months after her wedding day.   He was the first of a large family.  In less than 20 years – between 27 July 1849 and 23 February 1868 – Alice had thirteen babies.  She was 24½ years old when John was born; she was 43 when she gave birth to Harry, the thirteenth.  

Both Alice and John seem to have been quite unprepared for how soon they were to become parents and for the emotions that would wash over them.  On 4 April 1849 John wrote in a careful attempt at encouragement to Alice, who was visiting the family in Skipton 

At first the thought of such responsibility and others attaching to the parental relation, seemed too serious and weighty to contemplate without almost alarm, and I felt little interest or, perhaps while a bachelor, none in the idea; but now my paternal feelings are taking root and I find increasing pleasure in the anticipation of being a father.  It has seemed so odd to me while writing this last sentence; yet it is true and I cannot help feeling certain that, in a little time, you will experience yet greater interest in the thought of having a babe of your own than I do [1]

Alice replied miserably on 6 April 1849

I wish I could rejoice in looking forward; however, I will try to hope that a time will come when I shall be happy either in the expectation or in the realization of a mother's love, a mother's joy. [2]  

There is still a trace of formality in these letters, written after six months of marriage – this soon disappeared and their open and loving letters reflect over the years how they grew ever closer and more appreciative of each other. 

When, in the summer of 1861, Alice – now 37 years old and the mother of seven living children – took them to Abergele on the North Wales coast to recuperate from whooping cough, John wrote to her on 12 July

The true, faithful, confiding heart of my most precious and valued wife, the trustful fondness of my sweet children – all these are God's good gifts to me [3]

and she replied, thinking of the Manchester friends who were inviting John round while she was away,

Now you see, if you had remained a bachelor, what kind attentions you would have received.  Well, never mind.  Nobody would have loved you better than your old wife.  None would have valued your society so much as she does. [4]

Alice always had a livelier way with words than John; he was a very serious man while she combined her serious nature with a sense of fun. 

Ellen Ewing wrote that from the day of their wedding they were "lovers for ever"[5] and that 

as their cares and responsibilities increased so did their solicitude and help for each other.  

She added

John was, by nature, more unselfish than Alice and had more opportunities for succouring her [6]

and the letters she quotes show his constant concern for her health and strength.  On 2 April 1868 he wrote

I am rejoiced indeed, more than I can express, to hear of your continued progress.  It gives me fresh strength every morning for the day.  If you are well and bright I can get on and can work with a will [7]

They lived, wrote Ellen Ewing, in an "atmosphere of perpetual exaltation and admiration", of "constant mutual admiration, as well as love and sympathy." [8] 

John was always aware of the burdens on Alice and determined to take his share.  Away on business to Sweden, he wrote on 3 February 1853 from Karlshamn 

I hope to come home with the anxious desire and earnest resolution to try to make you and the dear ones happy there – to put away any cloud that may sometimes, though rarely, damp our sympathies and shade our intentions.  I have been thinking more of your household cares and will try to share them more fully so that they may be less of a burden to you – and will try to leave the cares of work, of business within the office doors – except so far as your own dear sympathy in them shall sometimes make them lighter for me.  So we will bear each other's burdens, and they will be lighter for us both [9]

They were united in their religion and in their understanding of life and their purpose in the world.  This shared view sustained them both, in good times and bad, as we can see when Alice wrote to John in 1853 

I could not help shedding tears when I read of your business disappointments.  This is your special trial my husband; it must be one.  Is it not intended to be one?  Is it not a part of your education for eternity?  Let us try to look on our disappointment, our blighted hopes in this way, remembering that this is not our rest. [10]

Their thirteen children were

1.  John, born Friday 27 July 1849

2.  Alfred, born Saturday 28 June 1851

3.  Ellen, born 7 October 1853

4.  Charles, born 16 November 1854

5.  Alice, born 27 April 1856.  Died aged 2

6.  Mary, born 16 August 1857

7.  Edward, born 28 May 1859

8.  Elizabeth Lilian ("Lilian"), born 24 October 1860

9.  Gertrude, born 9 May 1862

10.  Albert, born 7 October 1863

11.  Mabel ("May"), born 17 December 1864

12.  William Henry, born 30 September 1866.  Died soon after birth

13.  Harry Dewhurst, born 23 February 1868.  Died aged 9

(Ellen Ewing described the first pregnancy at length and gives the date of birth for all except Lilian, whose birthday I have taken from the 1939 Register.)

Alice and John were not alone in having such a large family.  Alice's brother Tom had thirteen children and Bonny Dewhurst had seven.  John's sister Ellen Tubbs had nine and his sister Mary Tubbs had ten.  So many "olive branches" as a friend of Alice coyly called babies in a letter of 1866

I hear you are promising your good husband another olive branch.  Doubtless it is all well though suffering nature cannot see it so, and even faith at times finds it hard to believe.  Still your offspring, even now, are beings of joy and comfort to you amid all the care and anxiety you have for them [11]

If Alice ever felt well and happy during pregnancy, Ellen Ewing does not mention it.  And it's noticeable that, apart from the tiredness, back ache and usual pains which come with pregnancy, her descriptions are all of Alice's state of mind.  

This was worst of all in her first pregnancy.  In early April 1849 she was in a depressed and anxious state and spent some time in Skipton.  To add to her misery, the depression brought on some form of spiritual crisis.  Ellen Ewing wrote of her "spiritual distress – worse than many a physical pain" and that her "habit of religious introspection" was made rather "morbid by the depression of her spirits" [12] but she does not quote from any of the relevant letters.  Perhaps Alice suffered something like the crisis of despair described by Mrs Sarah Buchannan (see "Becoming a member of the Rusholme Road Chapel") or the feeling of worthlessness described by Fanny Burnett (see "Henry Burnett & Fanny Dickens at the Rusholme Road Chapel" ).  Perhaps it was a frightening loss of confidence in God's Providence and a sort of terror at the thought of being responsible for a new little soul.  

She tried, sometimes successfully, to escape it by paying attention to outside events.  Her sister Jane, heavily pregnant with her second, tried to help her reason her way out of it.  Her sisters-in-law wrote her kind, encouraging letters saying that they had been depressed too.  Ellen Tubbs wrote from Ireland on 24 April 1849

Most likely you possess Dr Bull's little book, if not you would find it very useful – "Hints for Mothers". [13]

Dr Thomas Bull's manual, Hints to Mothers for the Management of Health During the Period of Pregnancy and in the Lying-in-room had come out in 1837 and so it was relatively new.  It was very popular with middle-class women, and was revised in edition after edition through the century.  Perhaps Ellen Tubbs was thinking of advice on these lines (this is from the 1865 edition)

Pregnancy occasions in some women, in the early months, a very excitable state of their nervous system, yet without disease.  In consequence of this continued irritation, the temper of such persons is sometimes rendered less gentle and patient than is consistent with their usual character. One of the most naturally amiable and sweet-tempered women that I am acquainted with, is always thus affected when pregnant … This claims a kindly regard and forbearance from a husband and friends …

If Alice had bought the book, we can only hope she wasn't too much alarmed by this sort of passage (again from the 1865 edition)

Observation and daily experience prove the fact, that any serious mental disturbance to which the mother may be exposed during the pregnant state will tell upon the future constitutional vigour and mental health of her offspring.  A sudden gust of passion, or indeed any violent mental emotion, will sometimes be followed by an immediate effect upon the system; and convulsions, haemorrhage or a miscarriage may ensue. … A calm and equable temper, a life of quiet cheerfulness and active duty, are most conducive not only to the health of the parent, but to that of the offspring also

This was followed by the discouraging account of a respectable woman whose "premature child, puny and fretful, late to smile, with a head much larger than it ought to be" was the result of her being very depressed in pregnancy because of her husband's obsessive worry about his ability to support a large family.  

And Alice might not have welcomed Ellen Tubbs' depressing reminder of the pandemic of Asiatic Cholera that had begun the year before.  It was the second in her lifetime, as the first dreadful appearance of cholera had been in 1832, and it was a disease which, in those days when rehydration wasn't understood, had a mortality rate of 50%

Does Cholera prevail in Manchester?  Here it is ravaging in surrounding districts and in this town there are many who have been cut down in the last three weeks.  We are close by the Hospital whence seven coffins were taken on Sunday, and the fifth is now going away today.  What is our life! [14]

Alice was clearly in low spirits, spiritual agony and anxiety for some weeks.  She was daunted by the thought of the responsibilities she was taking on and she was also, unsurprisingly, frightened.  She wrote to John in her letter of 6 April

What a weight of responsibility seems to attach to the parental relationship!  I do often feel – who is sufficient for this?  … You know some other reasons why I fear – some of them, I fear very selfish ones, I wish I could rise above them 

We are not told the fears but we can imagine that the thought of the pain of childbirth and the risk of death must have loomed very large.  Things had been so different the year before, she added, trying for a little cheerfulness

Do you remember last Good Friday, how gallantly I scampered with you over Malham Moors?  Fancy me there now!  I am growing stouter and stouter; I think change of air has had some effect; so you must prepare yourself for the worst! [15]

Malham Moor, by Trevor Littlewood

More than a fortnight later, on 23 April, she was still in the same state of distress

I would like for once to send you a cheerful letter; but I fear, if my note bears the impress of my feelings, it will tell you more of sadness than of gladness.  Forgive me if it be so for I cannot disguise my feelings when I write or talk to you my own kind husband. [16]

As Alice approached the birth, we can only hope she was cheered and encouraged by the message her sister Jane had sent on 12 May after she gave birth to her second baby, John Frederick.  Jane's husband Benjamin wrote

I was to tell you that she got through it much better than she anticipated, and recommends you to look forward to having to go through the same course of nature's penalty without fear [17]

Most of Alice's depression lifted when baby John was born on 27 July 1849, but she seems to have been left with some post-natal baby blues after the birth.  Luckily she found that caring for him helped take her out of herself.  On 14 September 1849, when he was two months old, she wrote to John

You ask me to tell you what I do and how I feel.  As soon as you were gone I could not help indulging my feelings for a little while.  Then dear baby required attention and thus my thoughts were diverted.  I have not felt nervous at night and the little pet has been very good … I am in very good spirits; I have been too busy to cry.  We rise early and the maids go to bed at ten or before.[18]

In the later pregnancies she seems always to have felt some "nervous strain", as Ellen Ewing describes it, but it seems the spiritual distress did not come back.  She must have been feeling well during her next pregnancy because, a month before baby Alfred was born, John was wondering whether Alice could join him in London where he had been to the Great Exhibition at Crystal Palace.  

Overwhelmed with admiration for the "wondrous extent and magnificence" of the exhibition, he wrote to her on 5 May 1851 

I have been thinking and thinking whether you might not come.  If once you were here there would be no further difficulty for the place is not overcrowded or overheated – there is an abundance of comfortable backed seats so that even an infirm person might see a great deal without fatigue … We saw many ladies there yesterday evidently in your condition [19]

The Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace

But we don't know if she went.  

Ellen Ewing says that Alice felt her "old introspective doubts" while she was pregnant with Alice, her fifth baby, but these seem to be more personal than spiritual:

Oh for the grace to fulfil my mission far differently from what I have done in the past! [20]

she had written on 15 September 1855 when the pregnancy was only about two months advanced.  She was brooding on whether she had spent too much of her energies on housework and not on time with the children, and on the anxiety of bringing up children in "just and right principles".  Baby Alice was born on 27 April 1856, and that summer Alice was still feeling very nervous, writing to John from Skipton

My mind is in a perpetual agitation about the business of this life and I perceive, not the undercurrent of peace, rather a restlessness of spirit.  You would pray for me, my own best friend, that God would again speak peace to my soul [21]

 A visit to her sister Ellen Milne and her little children did her good.  Ellen's husband James Milne had taken Belmont, a very comfortable country house with some 20 acres of land, outside Cheadle in Cheshire.  The auction particulars from its sale in 1834 describe it lyrically – its luxuriant plantations and shrubberies, pine and melon pits, hot-houses, gardens and lawns, and the handsome rooms, the seven bedrooms and water closet upstairs, and every convenience including a brewhouse.

Alice wrote to John on 19 September 1856

I feel it is pleasant to be out here today; everything looks green and pleasant; it seems to relieve my irritability.  I had a good cry last night about my impatience:  I feel it is so bad for the children [22]

She often described herself as feeling "fidgety" and when she was pregnant with Gertrude this reached such a pitch that Ellen Ewing describes her as "excessively nervous"[23].  While expecting Edward she seems to have been physically ill as well.  On 19 January 1859, four months before his birth, she wrote

I am glad to say I feel better today; I can sit up longer without feeling faint and my knees do not tremble so much when I walk [24]

This was only about nine months after the death of two year old Alice; in old age, Alice's voice still shook with grief when she spoke of the loss of her little girl.  She had suffered a terrible loss.  And of course these repeated pregnancies were exhausting.  

Penmaenmawr c1890-1900

Nobody can be surprised to read that Alice, pregnant with her tenth, was worn out after struggling round Penmaenmawr in July 1863 in search of lodgings for the sisters-in-law and their families who wanted to join the Hopkinsons on their holiday on the North Wales coast:

I was completely overdone; the post office woman looked at me with tender compassion after my hurried round. [25] 

The only surprise is that they didn't realise it would be kinder to find someone else to do the job.

This wasn't the only time she undertook a family holiday while pregnant – hardly surprising, as she was so often pregnant in the summer – and it wasn't an easy task even though the servants went too.  Travelling to Wales in such a large party with all the trunks, the tin bath, perambulator and all the equipment for a seaside stay must have been quite a strain, without reckoning the work involved in managing the household in an unfamiliar place.  

To add to the workload, John seems usually to have been at work, joining the family at weekends and in 1864 at Llanfairfechan she had an extra two teenagers – her sister Ellen's boy John Milne and John's niece Mary Tubbs.  But she loved to gather family together, writing cheerfully to John when young John Milne had decided to stay on and accommodation was going to be tight

I will enquire about beds out, for, during the hot weather, it is best not to have too many in a room

adding

We shall have to compress a little tighter to accommodate all [26]

In 1862 and 1864, when she was expecting Gertrude and May, her letters sounded strong and confident as she got near to term.  John was away on business at the end of April 1862 when she wrote to him to reassure him that he didn't need to hurry home in case she went into labour

I feel a decided change these two days; less of faintness and exhaustion … However, there is as yet no positive indication.  Therefore I hope you will stay over Thursday; it would be a pity for you to leave your work unaccomplished … No one would make up for you; but I would not bring you home on a peradventure [27]

And in October 1864, when her sister was so worried about Alice that, without telling her, she called out the doctor, Alice wrote to John from Skipton 

Do not be anxious about me.  I promise to act very prudently.  I do feel the case is a little critical but quite hope the pain will pass off and all will be well.  Our times are in His hands who will arrange all wisely [28] 

But two years later, in early July 1866 when she was expecting William Henry, the baby who died at birth, it was quite a different matter.  There had been a succession of family deaths in the previous two years – Alice's parents, two of the adult children of John's sister Ellen Tubbs, Alice's sister Jane's widower Benjamin Harrison, and the traumatic deaths in childbed of her sister Lizzie and John's sister Mary.  So it is no surprise that, on holiday in North Wales, Alice was not well.  She wrote to John on 7 July 1866,

I shall have Nelly to sleep with me.  I was so faint for some time last night that I feel it unwise to be alone.  And my increasing deafness gives me a nervous feeling [29]

She was so feverish at one point that she had to "devolve nearly all my maternal duties on dear Nelly."  Nelly (Ellen, the eldest daughter) was then twelve years old and already an invaluable helper. 

I cannot help longing for strength and vigour to do more for my large family 

she wrote to John

I do hope I shall get safely to my home again to abide the time, whether it be for life or death. [30]

What were the duties that 12 year old Nelly had taken on?  How did Alice manage her household?  What did she do and what did her servants do?

Notes

[1] & [2] John and Alice Hopkinson 1824-1910, p. 14

[3] & [4] ibid., p. 32

[5] ibid., p. 11

[6] ibid., p. 23

[7] & [8] ibid., p. 51

[9] & [10] ibid., p. 23

[11] ibid., p. 49

[12] ibid., p. 13

[13] ibid., p. 15

[14] ibid., p. 15

[15] ibid., p. 14

[16] ibid., p. 14

[17] ibid., p. 15

[18] ibid., p. 16

[19] ibid., p. 21.  The Great Exhibition opened in 1851, not 1852 as stated by Ellen Ewing

[20] ibid., p. 25

[21] & [22] ibid., p. 26

[23] ibid., p. 34

[24] ibid., p. 29

[25] ibid., p. 38

[26] ibid., p. 41

[27] ibid., p. 34

[28] ibid., p. 42

[29] ibid., p. 48

[30] ibid., p. 48

32. Starting married life: Manchester 1848

When Alice came back with John to Manchester on 5 October 1848, it was to the house of her new mother-in-law.  In fact, there were three Alice Hopkinsons at Number 1 York Place:  61 year old Alice, John's mother; 24 year old Alice, his new wife; and 20 year old Alice, his sister.

O.S. map 1848-50:  York Place, Manchester
National Library of Scotland

Weeks later the youngest Alice left Manchester to join her married sisters, who were thriving comfortably in Plymouth.  Elizabeth Rooker's husband Alfred was already an Alderman and they had a one year old – yet another Alice – while Mary Tubbs and Charles had little Charles and Mary.  The two families lived not far from each other in the old part of Plymouth near the Hoe.

Alice Dewhurst had written laughingly to John in July 1848 before their marriage that she knew very little of housekeeping.  If she wasn't simply joking, she will have learned as much as she could from her mother in the weeks before her wedding.  She had been the eldest daughter in the house for three years by then, so she must really have had a very good idea of how her home in Skipton was run.  Her younger sister Lizzie took over the running of the house when their mother's poor health got too much for her, but we don't know when this happened.  

We know of Mrs Dewhurst's character – Mary Hopkinson described her grandfather Dewhurst as  "quick tempered, impulsive and outspoken" and grandmother Dewhurst as "calm, equable and more reticent" [1].  Perhaps that gives us an idea of how she might run a house.  But we never hear her voice because there are no letters from her.  She seems to have left letter-writing to her husband and Lizzie – she probably felt she hadn't had good enough schooling, and writing was better left to her better-educated daughters – and Ellen Ewing comments  

So far as the material for this record is concerned, there are no letters either to or from her and very little about her. [2]  

In Manchester, Alice had to learn how to deal with the servant girls who had been hired by John's mother.  We catch a glimpse of this when she wrote to John on 14 September 1849 

Tell dear Mother I can manage to tell Anne of her omissions and commissions if she will only do the things she says she will [3]

and then she had to learn to hire and manage staff on her own.  We don't know whether she found that neighbours and servants in Manchester had different ideas and standards from the people she knew in Skipton, but she had her mother-in-law at hand for the first year and her sister Ellen Milne was nearby.  

Notes

[1]  John and Alice Hopkinson 1824-1910, p. XXIII

[2]  ibid., p.42

[3]  ibid., p.17

31. John & Alice Hopkinson: 1848 to 1910

At the end of the Second World War three of John and Alice Hopkinson's thirteen children were still alive, and they were all in their eighties.  It was the eldest, Miss Mary Hopkinson, who led the plan for a history of their parents' lives.  The task was taken on by her niece, Ellen Ewing, the widow of Sir Alfred Ewing and the daughter of Mary's eldest brother John.  

The result was the book John and Alice Hopkinson 1824-1910, which begins with a preface by Sir Gerald Hurst, whose wife Margaret was one of the granddaughters.  Mary Hopkinson provided the Introduction to set the scene, with her own memories of her parents and little vignettes of their later lives – friends, family, holidays.  Ellen Ewing created a history of John and Alice told through extracts from their many letters, written whenever they were apart.

As far as anyone can tell, all the letters Ellen Ewing used in her account were destroyed after her book was published.  We don't know how many letters there were – we don't know whether we would have agreed with her choice of extracts – we can't check the accuracy of her transcriptions – we have no way of knowing whether we would have come to Lady Ewing's conclusions.  We can see that she thought of her work as a stop-gap because of the constraints under which she was working.  She wrote at the end of the book [1]

For a variety of good reasons, Mary Hopkinson and others wished that the history of her parents should, in part at any rate, be perpetuated.  This book is the result.  It is too fragmentary to be in any sense a complete biography.  

She describes her part in the book as a

selection, not always judicious, from the great number of private letters, sometimes almost illegible, together with the avoidance of such commentary as might offend the susceptibilities of the Living still closely connected with the Dead.  For some future family historian there awaits a congenial task in, say twenty years, when there should be ample scope, free from present day restrictions and inhibitions, among the abundant material still available.

But we don't have the abundant material, so I'll make do with what we have and I'll supplement it, where I can, with further research together with material from the memoirs written by John and Alice's children and grandchildren.  This is, in fact, a re-working of Ellen Ewing's book, with extras and a fair bit of social history because it's very hard to convey the lost world of Puritan Manchester Nonconformity without showing John and Alice in their proper setting.  Unfortunately they didn't leave us many photographs of themselves, so I've had to make do with what I have.

Notes

[1]  John and Alice Hopkinson 1824-1910 (1948) ed. Mary Hopkinson and her niece Lady Ewing, with a Preface by Sir Gerald Hurst, K.C., pp 110-111

30. 1848

1848 – the year of revolutions across Europe, Chartism at home and, out in California, the first Gold Rush – was full of courtship in Manchester and Skipton.

The Adamson family: National Portrait Gallery

We have no photographs of John and Alice when they were young – they would both have their 24th birthdays that year – but we can imagine that they and their friends looked rather like the Adamson family (left).  We will have to imagine the colours of the clothes by looking at websites such as this one.  As this was before the invention of aniline dyes, colours were not as intense and bright as they would be in the later 19th century. 

This calotype of 1844-5 from the studio of David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson shows Robert Adamson (standing, left) and his brothers, two sisters and sister-in-law.  

Robert Adamson became a photographer when poor health cut short his apprenticeship as a millwright.  He was three years older than John Hopkinson.  His brother John Adamson (standing, right) was a doctor, physicist and lecturer.  His sisters (Melville with knitting and Isabella, standing behind her) were much the same age as Alice Dewhurst.

John Hopkinson's letter of proposal, filled with his devotion and longing to marry her, must have been very welcome and cheering to Alice Dewhurst.  Only three weeks earlier her schoolfriend Mary Harrison (described in 19. Alice Dewhurst goes to school in Halifax, 1836) had died at her aunt's home in Penrith.  

The doctors put her death down to typhus, which the newspapers were reporting as prevalent from Ulverston to Carlisle and for which the "morbid state of the atmosphere" was being blamed.  As there was still some confusion between typhus and typhoid fever and the causes for both were then still unknown – body lice in the case of typhus, contaminated water for typhoid – it was quite possibly typhoid.  The next year would see the second pandemic of Asiatic Cholera spreading across the country; it was another disease whose origin in water contaminated by faeces was still unknown at the time.

John's letter was written on 7 February.  He and Alice were formally engaged at Skipton on 11 February, John's birthday.  The next day he wrote in his book "February 12th.  Walked out with my Alice".

From this point on, they began to write to each other – rather formal and slightly stiff letters at first.  They told each other of going to chapel, of sermons heard.  Ellen Ewing in John and Alice Hopkinson 1824-1910 comments that they exchanged letters "the noticeable feature of which was enthusiasm, not for the recipient as might have been expected, but for the type of Christianity, then probably at its zenith".

But with visits and letters they grew to know each other better and to be increasingly comfortable in each other's company.  We only have the extracts quoted by Ellen Ewing but we can see a progression.

On 3 March Alice wrote 

On Wednesday I visited the poor woman who had lost her husband so suddenly; she appears to feel her loss deeply and yet she is resigned; … I always feel particularly pleased to find instances of this kind amongst the very poor; there are so many circumstances attendant upon their situation which appear to me calculated to blunt the finer feelings of our nature.  The middle walk of life seems the most favourable to the cultivation of the home affections

She signs herself

Accept my warmest love and believe me ever

Your affectionately attached

Alice

Knowing the influence on John of the Revd James Griffin and his deep sympathy for the poor, we can see that John's reply seems to be both encouraging and gently correcting Alice:

I am interested in the story of the poor woman whose sorrows you have been striving to heal.  I do think with you that there is much more true affection and tender feeling among the poorer ranks of life than we are apt sometimes to suppose – that generous, even refined feelings, are not infrequently hidden beneath a rough exterior.

They spent time together towards the end of April and explored the limestone uplands above Skipton.  "Do you remember last Good Friday, how gallantly I scampered with you over Malham Moors?" wrote Alice a year later.

Malham Moor by Trevor Littlewood

Ellen Ewing's quotation from Alice's letter of 12 May shows that her letters were growing livelier – and that she and her 20 year old sister Lizzie and brother Tom, then 18½, were still able to play boisterously like puppies

I have just been enduring a severe castigation from my younger brother and sister, and have returned from the wars with trembling hands and beautified with a variety of bruises.  I think, when you come, we must have a battle on even terms

(Perhaps readers will be able to remember, as I can, similar rather juvenile larks at that age?)

She was a physically active and intrepid girl:

If I had many walks with Tom as my leader I should become quite an accomplished climber.  He does not allow walls to be an impediment.  I had to scramble over several in our evening's ramble; he met with no serious objections to his mode of procedure

While Alice's letters became more playful, it seems from the extracts that John's were rather sober and plodding.  Sir Gerald Hurst, who wrote the Preface to John and Alice Hopkinson and who was married to their granddaughter Margaret, wrote

John Hopkinson had not a light touch and, I imagine, little sense of humour

By June, Alice was teasing John that he might prefer the quiet of a bachelor life to having

a saucy woman's tongue to interrupt your solemn musings, nothing to do when you come home but to make yourself comfortable

and John was assuring her earnestly

So quiet, so free, "no woman's tongue to interrupt my solemn musings" – pardon, 'tis that which constitutes my lack and makes a vacancy mind cannot fill.

And, very sweetly

I honestly told you my Alice that I liked you the better as I knew you better, and spoke the truth

He told her of his working day 

Armley Mills, now the Leeds Industrial Museum
by Mark Stevenson

After parting so reluctantly with you on Monday afternoon I was soon in Leeds whence, after making one call, I pursued my way to Armley Mill, where I found an accident had occurred on Saturday to the works requiring immediate attention.  I doffed my coat and hat and was soon at work, accepting by the way the offer of one of the workmen of some bread and butter and tea from a can (both capital) … I reached York Place at half past eleven – and was at the works at six …  This morning I left home at 5 o'clock …

He and Henry Wren were feeling pressure of work and criticism

Do what we will, Henry Wren and I are abused on all sides.  He is sorest now; I am getting case hardened and past feeling …

I do mean now to try to make my working hours shorter – and later must try, if it is possible by method, arrangement and punctuality to secure more despatch – that is, to do the same work in less time …Henry Wren has been asking more about my overhours work at Chapel etc, and suggesting, again very deferentially, that I should, for the present, exchange some of them for light outdoor exercise.  He proposed a riding horse for the firm and my scruples on this head are weaker than they were …

(Henry Wren, I am fairly sure, was an Anglican) 

By July Alice was making her views on women's abilities and rights to education very clear to John

In the meantime you can study Benjamin Parsons On the Mental and Moral Dignity of Woman.  He is a champion, though I am not quite sure that all his arguments are the soundest possible.  And we must also overlook a degree of coarseness; but his intention is so good that we will readily accord him every indulgence.  I mean we of the womankind ...

Alice was up-to-date with her reading – Benjamin Parsons' book (which can be read online) had only been published in 1842.  His subject was women's mental powers and education and he was forthright:

Most of us have seen boys and girls learning the same lessons and studying the same subject, but we never found that the girls were inferior to the boys … I never yet could detect any mental inferiority in girls, as scholars.  Indeed, my own observation would lead me to give them the preference over boys in their aptitude to learn … I am fully persuaded that experiment and observation can detect no inferiority whatever in the minds of females, during infancy, childhood, or youth.

But once the girls grew up – 

That young gentleman who aspires to her hand, although very polite and agreeable withal, is such an ill-informed personage, that an intelligent woman for a wife would quite bewilder him, and by contrast sadly expose his folly; and therefore he has come to the prudent conclusion that he will never marry a woman who knows more than himself; consequently, the lady is doomed to employ all her skill to contract her intellect to the dimensions of her lover's.  Books are abandoned or thrown away; French is forgotten, and perhaps English at the same time; and every effort is made to educe mental paralysis, until, perhaps, this seraph of a woman seems in part assimilated to the mere animal who is to be her companion until death

He thundered his conclusion:

To limit female education and acquirements, and doom husbands, son, and daughters to the sway of ignorance and caprice, is to inflict on society and on the nation one of the heaviest calamities.

Alice never attempted to hide her intellectual capabilities and literary tastes and John was proud of her.  Years later he quoted a remark of his sister Mary

Your wife's mind, John, is too good to be spent on secondary objects.

By August Alice was writing to John teasingly and her sister Lizzie was so much at home with him that she could tease him too

I feel concerned about your wounded leg, fearing that you will not take the necessary care.  It would be a serious affair if I had to make you.  But alas! that would be useless; you are such a master; I will not say My Master.  Oh no! "There's time enough for that, says I." I am still Alice the untamed, living in the land of liberty, town of Single Blessedness …

Lizzie sends her respectful compliments; she hopes you will take care of your leg as she certainly would not admire a cork legged bridegroom. 

On Saturday 4 September, a little more than a fortnight before the wedding, John had an unexpected setback.  It perhaps shows John Dewhurst's character, described by his granddaughter Mary as "quick-tempered, impulsive and outspoken" and casts further light on why his brother Isaac left their partnership.  When John Hopkinson proposed to Alice – as he explained to her in a stilted but heartfelt letter written on the Monday – it was with no thought of any private money she might have

I loved you for your own sake, and wished to marry you because I loved you – I do so still – I never have had any other reason

He hadn't even thought about the Dewhursts' financial position.  He had simply told Mr Dewhurst, in their first private interview, all about his own situation and prospects.  Mr Dewhurst had said something to the effect that "he could give his daughter something tidy".  John had assumed that this meant he was going to make some sort of marriage settlement.  But, he assured Alice, "money on your side found no item in my calculations".

On the Saturday, as he left Skipton, John thought he had better explain what he could do for Alice himself apart from what he earned in business – presumably he thought his future father-in-law was expecting him to tie up some capital sum in her name – and check out Mr Dewhurst's plans.  Slightly defensively and sounding rather hurt, he told Alice that he felt that this was  

A question with regard to the propriety of which I do not entertain the slightest doubt

Something seems to have gone rather wrong here.  John Dewhurst seems to have said that he had made the same provision for Alice as for her elder sisters, but John Hopkinson was left with no idea whether this meant on marriage or by his Will.  Now Alice had written to John, but as her letter didn't survive we don't know what had been happening in Skipton, what was said by Mr Dewhurst, or what had passed between Alice and John.  We have only his answer, quoted by Ellen Ewing.  It begins

My own dearest Alice 

The frankness of your note has relieved me from some perplexity, and I shall endeavour to answer it with equal candour. 

In our intercourse hitherto there has been no reserve on my part, and I do not intend that there should be any in the future.

Perhaps there was some question about whether they could afford to marry, whether John had been deterred by the question of money – he assured her that 

If we do not assume any wrong standard, I believe we may be comfortable.  I care little for the artificialities of life.  If I wish for wealth it is for your sake, that you may be a remove farther from want.  Do not oversestimate me in character, position or intelligence.  If you expect too much you may be disappointed.  Dearest Alice, I have long loved you for your own sake – the basis of my affection is unchanged.

He signed his letter

Your own true lover, 

John

Alice wrote back, Ellen Ewing noted, with "with religious reflections and contrition" saying

Weak, thoughtless and full of faults as I am, I would fain hope that the endeavour to promote your happiness, resulting from true affection, will not be altogether unavailing, I feel as if I had much to say: but my heart is too full to write

All was well between them.  Preparations for the wedding gathered pace.  On 16 September Alice sent John a very practical note

My dearest John 

Will you send by post six of the cards you said you would get for tieing round the cake; we wish to have the cake for Manchester packed.  If we wait till you come, there will be so many things to do, cards, directing, etc., that we should have rather too much bustle to do anything well.  

Ellen arrived in safety at half past six.  The various etceteras she brought are all approved.

We shall look for you by the half past four train on Tuesday. 

With kindest love to you Mother and sisters.  Believe me, in very great haste.  Your own affectionate 

Alice 

Skipton

Saturday afternoon,

1848

On Tuesday 19 September John arrived with his mother, sisters Alice and Mary in Skipton.  The next day he and Alice were married at the Zion Chapel by the Revd R Gibbs.  John Dewhurst rather characteristically put the announcement in a new weekly journal that he was evidently supporting.  It was called The Standard of Freedom and came out on Saturdays at a cost of fivepence.  It called for subjects dear to John Dewhurst's heart – Free Trade and religious liberty.

Meanwhile the newly married couple had left Skipton for York on their way for a fortnight's honeymoon in Scotland.  

The families wrote to them while they were away.  Alice's sister Jane sent a letter which, Ellen Ewing wrote, began with "the usual hopes" for their spiritual welfare and went on to say 

The party you left behind on your wedding day were as happy as possible to be under the circumstances.  Our dear father and mother kept up wonderfully and the two dear sisters, who were most certainly the greatest sufferers, bore up heroically … 

I feel very sorry to hear that dear John's leg is far from well; I do hope you will neither of you exert yourselves too much.  Remember now that you ought to lay up a stock of health for the Winter and not exhaust what little strength you have by trying too much …

I do not know when it became the custom – a sort of cult of sensibility – to dwell on the suffering of the families left behind by the young couple nor for how long this lasted.  John and Alice's daughter-in-law Esther wrote a very self-pitying letter to her daughter after Margaret's wedding in 1905.  In this case I think the "two dear sisters" were John's sisters.  Ellen Ewing comments on the "possessive quality of the sisters' affection for their only brother" shown in his sister Elizabeth Rooker's letter to him of 12 April 

Remember one visit to Skipton is equal to a dozen letters.  So, since you are able to pop over now and then, I cannot allow that it is needful for you to spend much time in writing also – this portion must be devoted to us I think … Do write very soon.  Remember you have three sisters here all longing to hear.

Alice's father wrote to them while they were in Scotland but no letters from Alice's mother from any period have survived.  There is no way of knowing whether she wrote too many to keep or whether she always left it to her husband and younger daughter Lizzie to write.  At some point, possibly before the elder girls' marriages, she began to suffer from very poor health and left the household management in her daughters' hands.  Alice spoke with admiration to her own daughter Mary of her mother's "uncomplaining patience and her great power of endurance" but we have no clue as to her illness.  

Ellen Ewing comments on John Dewhurst's lack of full stops (which was usual in his generation) and occasional spelling faults.  Here is his letter of 23 September 1848 in her transcription

Dear Alice, 

I am in receipt of your very welcome Letter dated Sunday 21 inst presuming you were well when you wrote as you say nothing to the contrary; you may probably get a sight of the Queen and prince Albert while you are in Scotland; they appear to be very much thought of in that part and they both appear inclined to make themselves very agreeable: your thanks for past favours are accepted and your pardon for all past faults but I do not recollect any (only the last) which cannot be repaired and that is leaving us: but John will say that is no fault, therefore I suppose we must take it for granted you must excuse all blunders as I have written in haste, may the Lord bless and protect you from all dangers and bring you both safe to your intended abode. 

I am Dear Alice, 

Your affecte Father, 

J W Dewhurst

His letters are in great contrast with the letters from the Hopkinson and Dewhurst daughters, who had all attended the sorts of schools which produced a uniformly decorous and formal way of writing.  The Hopkinson daughters were greatly given to pious reflections; possibly an awareness of their illegitimacy made virtue and piety even more imperative.  Ellen Tubbs wrote

You are the first sister we have acquired and it is delightful to have our circle enlarged and our affection strengthened by one who is one in heart with us and with whom we shall journey to the same everlasting rest.

She adds in a more chatty tone

You sent us a noble piece of cake, and very excellent it is.  For all the wedding symbols accept our thanks

Elizabeth Rooker "after elaborate expressions of regret" (Ellen Ewing's comment) that she could not help to prepare 1 York Place for Alice's arrival, wrote

We must not expect your lot to be perfectly exempt from trials; for, during our earthly pilgrimage, the cloud will sometimes obscure the brightest path; but, as far as human foresight can devine, there is every prospect of yours being a truly happy home, and most sincerely do I rejoice with Dearest John and yourself in the happiness which is at present your portion and which seems to be laid up in store with you.  To have such a pastor as our beloved Mr Griffin is no ordinary privilege.  May our Heavenly Father continue to smile on you …

John Dewhurst was much more down to earth about the Revd James Griffin.  Possibly he had listened to what he felt was excessive praise of Mr Griffin from his daughter Ellen and from the visiting Hopkinson women – he was clear-sighted about the dangers of creating a cult around a highly valued pastor

I hope he will continue long amongst you and that his labours will be blessed as they appear to have been, and that you may not make too much an Idol of him as sometimes there is very great danger in doing so with men of his worth.

On Thursday 5 October, showered with good advice and prayerful wishes by their families, John and Alice came home to 1 York Place.  They would begin their married life in Manchester in a household shared with John's mother and sister Alice.

Next:  31. John & Alice Hopkinson: 1848 to 1910

29. Alice Dewhurst: Skipton 1840 to 1848

Alice led a sheltered life:  a little Sunday School teaching – chapel on Sundays – some visiting of the sick – fun with her younger brother and sister – staying with schoolfriends and family – writing letters – and quiet and thoughtful reading.

We don’t know how much she knew of the lives and hardships of the millhands in Skipton.  She told her children about the fire that nearly finished her father’s business before it could begin, but there is no mention of her talking about the "Plug Plot" Riots of 1842.  This was something that nobody who was in Skipton at the time would forget.

In the long hot summer of 1842, with the Chartists exasperated at Parliament's refusal of their demands and an economic depression bringing poverty and desperation, anger was building across industrial Yorkshire and Lancashire.  A General Strike began.  While Chartists were persuading the men of Messrs Wren & Bennett to come out, thousands of workpeople were taking to the roads and forcing the shutting down of mills by taking the plugs out of the steam boilers.  In those days the fire was underneath the boiler and not in a flue through it, so if the iron plug at the bottom of the boiler was knocked out, the water escaped.  

On Tuesday 16 August some 3,000 people walked the ten miles to Skipton from Colne in Lancashire.  It seems that Skipton was trying to manage the distress – of a population of 18,610, there were reported to be 4,308 individuals trying to survive on an average of only 17d (17 pence) per week – by creating some employment through schemes of public works.  This wasn't the case in East Lancashire.  Declaring that man was "born to live and not to clem" [starve], men, women and boys set off foraging from Colne and Burnley, stopping the mills, calling on workers to strike, and demanding food as they went.

The Skipton magistrates – who had sent for soldiers and quickly sworn in special constables – tried to talk them out of coming into the town, while shops hastily closed, blinds were drawn, doors and windows shut and some householders got hand-outs of food ready in case the protestors appeared at their door.  Some 500 of the marchers went to John Dewhurst's mill and pulled out the plug.  Alice's 23 year old brother Bonny went out to the protestors and gave them some money.

The huge crowd had filled the town when about 50 foot soldiers and 12 mounted troops arrived and the Riot Act was read.  Given five minutes to disperse, they left town quickly and settled in a field called Annahills on the road to Carleton to eat the food that they had begged.  

61st Regt at the capture of Delhi, Sept 1857

Local magistrates were moving among them trying to persuade them to break up the gathering but they were slow to move on and were caught out by the arrival of the 61st Regiment of Foot.  

Things turned ugly and stones were thrown.  A soldier later died of his injuries and James Braithwaite Garforth JP was blinded in one eye.  This was known in Skipton as the Battle of Annahills and it was long remembered.

  

(The man charged with assaulting Mr Garforth came before the York Assizes, where he was found guilty of riot but not of assault and was sentenced to 6 months in prison)

Either all the family except Bonny were out of town by chance, or John Dewhurst made sure that Alice and the younger ones were sent away when he saw trouble brewing, but it seems probable from Mary Hopkinson's silence on the subject that Alice must have missed it.  W H Dawson wrote in his History of Skipton (1882) that the episode "put the inhabitants into a state of terror from which it took them several days to recover".

The horizons of Alice's quiet life were broadened by the marriages of her elder brother and sisters.

Alice's elder sister Ellen, described by Mary Hopkinson as "a very bright, energetic and sociable girl", was the first to marry.  She was twenty-two when, on 5 September 1843 in the parish church of Skipton, she married 37 year old James Milne.  

He must have been quite a catch and she was going to have a very comfortable life.  He came from the same part of the country as Ellen and Alice's mother Alice Bonny, being the son of a farmer from a village a few miles from Blackpool.  But he had been apprenticed in the textile trade and for the past few years had been a partner in a thriving department store called Kendal, Milne & Faulkner.  They were silk mercers and general furnishers, selling bonnets and silks, ladies' dress materials, carpets and soft furnishings from a grand establishment in Deansgate, Manchester.  Only the year before they had created a sensation by lighting their shop with Bude Lights, a very bright oil lamp

Kendal, Milne & Faulkner in 1850

Manchester Courier 17 September 1842

On Wednesday evening last, for the first time, this most extraordinary artificial light was seen by thousands, at what is known as the Bazaar, Deansgate, Manchester, belonging to Messrs Kendal, Milne and Faulkner.  This shop is 120 feet long by 48 feet wide, and though only four lights were burning, (three of which were at the front windows, and in consequence one half of the light was thrown away – at all events, into the street,) still the light was so good that the smallest print or hand-writing could be read in any part of the shop, with as much ease and facility as though it had been noon-day.

(The department store was celebrated in Manchester and was run by the descendants of Kendal and Milne until the business was sold to Harrods in 1919)

Ellen's marriage had a significant impact on her sister Alice's life because it brought her to Manchester.  She met John Hopkinson for the first time when staying with Ellen – the Milnes and the Hopkinsons were neighbours in York Place. 

In 1844 Alice's brother Bonny was married in Colne to Frances England.  This was another textile-related match – Frances's father Nicholas England and grandfather Thomas Thornber were both cotton manufacturers.

Jane was the eldest of the Dewhurst children and inspired a loving reverence in her younger siblings, who relied on her judgement and wisdom.  In 1845 she moved away to Bradford on her marriage to a Skipton-born worsted manufacturer called Benjamin Harrison.  

So Alice could now extend her visiting range to Manchester and Bradford and she was soon an aunt.  Ellen's daughter Alice was born in 1845, Jane's son Alfred in 1846, but poor Bonny and Frances lost their seven-month old son Arthur, who was buried at the Zion Chapel in Skipton on 13 August 1846.  Alice can never have been in any doubt about the perilous nature of childbirth and the frighteningly tenuous hold on life of even tenderly cared-for, middle-class children. 

Next: 30. 1848

28. John Hopkinson at chapel & at home: 1840-1848

Outside work, John’s time was absorbed, then and for many decades to come, by the Rusholme Road chapel and its activities.  Just as his elder sisters had done, he became a Sunday School teacher, starting at the age of 16 after he had left school.  In the letter he wrote to his mother on 28 May 1846 – she was away in Wiltshire visiting his married sister Ellen – he gave her the latest news from the Sunday School before turning to the subject of his prospects at Messrs Wren & Bennett.

Kinder Downfall, by Stephen Burton

He was writing on the Thursday just before the Whit Sunday weekend.  On Whit Tuesday, he told her, he planned to join a walking party to climb Kinder Scout, setting off early by train to Mottram or Tintwistle and walking the rest of the way "making a good day's work of it, and returning by train in the evening".  This can't have been an expedition he had made before because he had to explain to his mother that "Kinderscout" was "the highest mountain in Derbyshire, and within sight of Manchester".  In fact, Kinder Scout isn't so much a mountain as a plateau of high moorland; part of it, at 636 metres (2,087 ft) above sea level, is indeed the highest point in Derbyshire.  John knew the Pennines from his time at school, but perhaps this was the serious beginning of his lifelong passion for walking in the uplands and mountains of Britain and Europe.  

An adventure like this had been opened up for him and his friends by the railways.  Mottram station (now Broadbottom) was opened in 1842 on the Sheffield, Ashton-under-Lyne & Manchester line, and it lies 10 miles east of Manchester Piccadilly station.  It would depend on the route they took, but I think Mottram station to Kinder Scout would be a 10 mile walk.  A long energetic day.

Three days later, on the Friday, he would be back at Mottram station with the Sunday School children.  They were going "to the field as usual" on the Thursday and the next day were "to have an excursion to Mottram, where a field is engaged and a tent is to be fixed, the scholars to pay their own fares by the railway train and to take their dinners."

The letter shows that John at 22 years old was evidently a level-headed young man with a good deal of common sense and wry sense of humour, and he had done his best to scotch this plan only to find that, as a safe pair of hands, he was landed with the work:

I made quite a speech at the teachers' meeting in opposition to the proposal of taking the children out of town on account of the risk, responsibility, etc; but all my objections, in common with many others of the prudent teachers, were over-ruled.  And, being quite beaten, I had the amiability to say that, as they had thus decided to go out of town, I would go with them and do all I could to promote the safety and pleasure of those who went, which they have so far appreciated as to give me, with some others, the duty of seating the children in the carriages and seeing them safe there and back.

His letter gives us a glimpse of his mother's social life in the chapel – "very many of the friends enquire particularly and frequently about you" – and home life at York Place.  Only he and his younger sister Alice, aged 19, were in Manchester and Alice was running the house.  "Our maids go on pretty well" he says

Alice makes a very good mistress; but she is not afraid to speak when there is necessity for doing so.  Jane does far better than Anne, so much more ready to oblige, manifests more interest in her work and in us.  Alice is looking out for servants in place of Anne and Jane, as the former has given notice because there is so much work to do, the place is so hard, but was not a little surprised when Alice accepted it most cordially.

(He doesn’t mention the wage that Anne was clearly trying to negotiate.  I would think it possible that employers were in a strong position in Manchester, safe in the knowledge that there were always more young women newly arriving in town and looking for work)

Ellen, the eldest, had been the first.  Her husband was George Ibberson Tubbs, the Congregational minister of the Independent Common Close chapel at Warminster, a market town on the western edge of Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire.  When the census was taken on the night of 6 June 1841, Elizabeth, the second of the sisters, was staying with Ellen at her house in Boreham Road and Ellen will have been glad of her company and support as she was expecting the first of what would be a large family.  Her niece Mary Hopkinson wrote that Ellen had five boys and four girls in all and was "beautiful in character, most gracious and refined in manner and very sweet in appearance".  

By the end of the decade Ellen had four children and her husband George had left the Congregational church and become an Anglican clergyman.  

Perhaps doubts had crept into his mind and, from careful study, he had come to believe that he had been wrong all along and that the church should, as the Church of England held, be run by bishops.  We don’t know how the Hopkinson family reacted, but it had no effect on the relations between John’s family and Ellen’s.  His wife Alice and her sister-in-law were close and supportive of each other throughout their lives.  

His congregation in Warminster was certainly sorry to lose him.  The Patriot of 13 May 1847 reported that the members of the Common Close Chapel had held a meeting where they unanimously adopted a resolution expressing their "most unfeigned regret" at the resignation of their "beloved pastor".  They deeply deplored "the circumstances which have made it appear to him his imperative duty to sever those bonds which they had fondly hoped would have been long perpetuated" and decided to send a deputation to wait upon him "to request him to reconsider".  It was no use.  The Church of Ireland, traditionally of the Low Church tradition, was a natural home for him at least at the beginning of his ministry and he was ordained deacon for the diocese of Lismore in the Cathedral Church of Waterford on 19 Nov 1847.  In 1848 he was priested and until late 1849 he was curate at Innislormagh.  

The main result of Mr Tubbs' decision as far as John’s mother was concerned was that Ellen and the children were living on the other side of the Irish Sea and so she may not have been able to visit them.  However, in early 1848 when John was proposing to Alice Dewhurst, Ellen was in Manchester with her mother for the birth of her fourth baby, and as the decade ended Ellen and George had moved to London where he was curate at Trinity Church in the parish of St Mary Newington.  

Ellen’s marriage clearly led to the marriage of the third sister, Mary.  On 25 June 1844, Mary married Charles Foulger Tubbs at Rusholme Road Chapel.  He was her brother-in-law George's younger half-brother.  He was then a 28 year old dentist with a practice in Gosport, which lies across the harbour from Portsmouth, the birthplace of James and Eliza Griffin and Henry and Fanny Burnett.  Mary was five years his junior.  When she died in 1866 at the age of 43, her sister-in-law Alice, who had known her for nearly twenty years, wrote to John urging him to 

say something of our dear Mary in a Sunday School address.  Her earnest piety, great prayerfulness, unobtrusive but earnest endeavours to bring others to Jesus, her gentle meek spirit, altogether there was such a sweet savour of Christ about her that it seems as if the perfume of such life should be shed abroad …

John’s sister Elizabeth married on 19 September 1845 at the age of 26.  Her husband was 31 year old solicitor Alfred Rooker from Plymouth on the Devon coast.  Alfred was, of course, another Congregationalist.  His father William, a Congregational minister in Dorset, came up for the wedding and Elizabeth's two married sisters came from the South of England to be there.  "Twenty friends and relations were at the wedding breakfast" wrote John's daughter Mary.  Mary’s fondness for her aunts Ellen and Mary doesn't seem to have extended to her aunt Elizabeth.  She comments on Elizabeth’s rather sententious letters and her "customary little homilies" while praising Uncle Alfred Rooker as a "standby in the family" and a "valuable helper".

The census of 1841 had found John’s younger sister Alice still at school.  She was 13 years old and at a boarding school at The Elms in Lance Lane, Wavertree.  Wavertree was a genteel area, a place to which wealthy Liverpool merchants moved out of the city, with Georgian town houses in the High Street and new villas being built.  It was a very suitable school – its headmaster Thomas Sleigh was a Congregational minister.

By the time John reached his 21st birthday in 1845, three of his sisters were living far from Manchester – Ellen was in Warminster and Elizabeth was in Plymouth where she would soon be joined by Mary and her husband Charles.  Their mother Alice could now get a complete change of scene by visiting her married daughters.  When John wrote to her on 28 May 1846 from 1 York Place, only he and 19 year old Alice were in Manchester 

I am really glad, dearest Mother, to find that you are so much enjoying the pure air of Wiltshire and the society of our dear ones

It was after the move to York Place in 1845 that John first met his future wife, Alice Dewhurst.

Next: 29. Alice Dewhurst: Skipton 1840 to 1848

27. Henry Burnett & Fanny Dickens at the Rusholme Road Chapel

The unaccompanied hymns at the Chapel had always been plain and hearty, led by a rudimentary choir.  But at the beginning of the 1840s two musicians, fresh from London and the stage, had joined the congregation and, as their contribution to church life, formed a new and inspiring small choir to lead the singing.

They were Henry and Fanny Burnett, the two young people mentioned in blogpost 7. Becoming a member of the Rusholme Road Chapel.  Theirs was a world beyond John Hopkinson's imaginings.  He was 59 when he first went to the theatre in 1883 and seemed to his son and daughter-in-law to be fairly baffled by it, while his wife dared not tell his sister Elizabeth, "she would have been so shocked."  

Henry and Fanny Burnett came to Manchester after the baptism of their second son in London in the middle of May 1841.  Three or four weeks after settling in, they were walking along the Rusholme Road one Sunday evening when they saw the lights of the Chapel and the people going in.  They followed and were shown to seats.  Something – they could never say exactly what it was – impressed them deeply with the earnest wish to come again.  At the end of the service, Fanny had turned to Henry and said, "Henry, do let us come here again: if you will come, I will always come with you."  He was quite taken aback because she had never said anything like this before.  

For him, a Nonconformist service was a coming home.  He had been an acclaimed and successful operatic tenor, trained in music from an early age – at the age of ten he had stood on a table to sing a solo in the Brighton Pavilion to the Court and seen the old king George IV, gout-ridden and wrapped in bandages.  But though his father had been persuaded by a friend that the boy's voice was too good to be wasted, that he could make an excellent living from it, it was reluctantly because theirs was a Nonconformist family.  Henry had lived until the age of seven with a pious grandmother and aunt and their early teachings left a lasting impression on him.  And so his success in the world of music had become less and less fulfilling.  He was, as Mr Griffin wrote in his memoirs

gradually coming to feel the emptiness of worldly pleasure, and to yearn in his "secret heart" after more substantial satisfaction

In the end, he could no longer bear the contradiction between the life he was leading and what he felt to be right.  He decided to leave the stage and make his living from teaching.  He and his wife were advised that Manchester was the place to go, as music was highly appreciated there.  

Fanny Burnett wrote to Mr Griffin in these early days that 

I was brought up in the Established Church, but I regret to say, without any serious ideas of religion

but of that evening in the Rusholme Road Chapel, she said 

More or less all through the service, I seemed in a state of mind altogether new to me; and during the sermon it was as if I were entering a new world.

Her old world had been very different.  She was the elder sister of Charles Dickens.  In the Revd James Griffin's description of her new life in the chapel we can see the distinctive world of John Hopkinson and his family. 

Fanny Dickens, 1836

Fanny (1810-48) and Charles (1812-70) were born in Portsmouth, the first of the large family of John Dickens, a pay-clerk in the Navy Pay Office, and his wife Elizabeth Barrow.  

In 1822 John Dickens was posted to London where Fanny was one of the fortunate children to get a place at the newly established Royal Academy of Music at its opening in March 1823, where she studied piano and singing.  The fees were 38 guineas a year, which wasn't cheap – as is recorded in A History of the Royal Academy of Music (1922) one of the committee members wrote to another, "we find that there are a great many schools where children do not pay so much".

At this point, her parents' Micawber-like attitude to money, their habit of living beyond their means, caught up with them.  In September 1823, to save school fees and boost the family finances they sent their bright little 11 year old boy Charles to work in Warren's boot-blacking factory at Hungerford Stairs, an experience which Michael Allen (in this article on the National Archives website) has shown lasted for one year and which certainly marked him for life.  

On 20 February 1824 John Dickens was finally arrested for debt and sent to the Marshalsea Prison  where he, Elizabeth and the younger children lived for three months.  They managed to keep paying Fanny's fees, a strangely unworldly decision.  Boys' education was usually prioritised because their far greater earning capacity frequently meant they would be relied on to support family in need.  Fanny, though very able and determined – after February 1827 when her father's debts had left her fees badly in arrears and she had to leave the Academy, she was able to keep receiving tuition by taking on part-time teaching there – didn't in fact have a voice for the operatic stage where high earnings would have been possible.  Charles' feelings about his mother were permanently soured by his experiences.  He always said he never felt jealous of Fanny, but the contrast in their fortunes was dreadful for him.

Fanny married Henry Burnett, who had also studied at the Royal Academy, in 1837.  When Charles, already famous for The Pickwick Papers (serialised 1836-7) and Oliver Twist (1837-9), began to write Nicholas Nickleby (1838-9), people hailed Henry Burnett as Nicholas because he looked exactly like the pictures.  Dickens' illustrator Phiz (Hablot Browne) had probably used Henry as a model – and in fact there was a likeness of character too between Henry and Nicholas Nickleby (cf this article in the Christian Science Monitor)

At the time when Henry decided to remove himself and Fanny and their boys from London, they were spending their Sundays as professional singers at the Chapel of the Sardinian Ambassador and their Sunday evenings in the lively jollities of Charles Dickens' house – "in a manner which, though strictly moral, was not congenial" to his feelings, wrote Mr Griffin.  Fanny later told Mr Griffin that she too 

seemed gradually to lose my relish for the pleasures of the world, but I was still wholly ignorant of gospel truths. 

Charles Dickens found his brother-in-law's decision incomprehensible.  He was never a friend of this sort of religion.  As is obvious from his books, he had a great love of conviviality, parties, parlour games, dancing and noisy family fun and he loved the theatre.  He didn't think "the world, and pleasure, and dress, and company" – the sort of life condemned in the story called The Dairyman's Daughter described in this earlier blogpost  – were necessarily blameworthy.  He campaigned fiercely against the Sabbatarian movement which tried for decades to have work, trade and travel banned on Sundays.  Sunday was the only day of the week on which the lower classes could enjoy the sort of pastimes and entertainments that the upper classes could enjoy at any time.  He saw Sabbatarians as totally un-Christian and in 1843 he voiced his condemnation through the Ghost of Christmas Present speaking to Scrooge in A Christmas Carol 

"There are some upon this earth of yours," returned the Spirit, "who lay claim to know us, and who do their deeds of passion, pride, ill-will, hatred, envy, bigotry, and selfishness in our name, who are as strange to us and all our kith and kin, as if they had never lived. Remember that, and charge their doings on themselves, not us"

But by the time A Christmas Carol came out, Fanny was delighting in Sundays as a day of holy rest spent at divine service and prayer.

 

Perhaps Fanny had found life darker and sadder because of her anxiety over her eldest boy, Henry, who was far from strong.  He was born in 1839 with a physical disability – Mr Griffin wrote of a "deformed back".  He described little Harry, whom he knew well, as "a singular child – meditative and quaint in a remarkable degree".  It's said that he was the inspiration for Tiny Tim in A Christmas Carol.  Mr Griffin wrote that

He was the original, as Mr Dickens told his sister, of little "Paul Dombey."  Harry had been taken to Brighton, as "little Paul" is represented to have been, and had there, for hours lying on the beach with his books, given utterance to thoughts quite as remarkable for a child as those which are put into the lips of Paul Dombey.  But little Harry loved his Bible, and evidently loved Jesus.  The child seemed never tired of reading his Bible and his hymns, and other good books suited to his age: and the bright little fellow was always happy.

(Dombey and Son was published in instalments between October 1846 and April 1848)

A few weeks after their first visit to the chapel, Fanny and Henry approached Mr Griffin to talk about joining the congregation.  They soon became good friends of James and Eliza Griffin – interestingly, they were all born in Portsmouth – spending many evenings together over the following years.  One year they all spent a month on holiday in the Lake District, driving and walking about Windermere, Rydal Water, Keswick and Coniston.  

James Griffin thought that because Henry and Fanny might still be exposed to "strong worldly influences which it might require no common degree of Christian principle to withstand" they should take becoming members slowly.  A year later Fanny wrote to Mr Griffin describing her progress in her faith.  "By degrees," she wrote,

my eyes were opened, and I saw with shame and confusion my utter worthlessness in the sight of God, and that unless I came to Him through His dear Son, I could not be saved  

Now, 

I seem to have clearer views.  I delight in the ordinances of the sanctuary.  I feel great pleasure in mixing with God's people.  I feel anxious to be spiritually-minded and to devote myself entirely to the service of Christ

During this time she and Henry "greatly endeared themselves to the hearts of the good people" of the congregation, who were deeply moved at the meeting in which Henry and Fanny were received into the church.  I feel sure we can assume that John Hopkinson and his family, with their deep involvement in the chapel and John's closeness to his friend and mentor Mr Griffin, knew the Burnetts.

The life of John Hopkinson and his family – described years later by his daughter-in-law Evelyn Oldenbourg as "their fine, almost austere, life" – and the ways of the people of the Rusholme Road Chapel could not have been more different from the life Fanny had known, the life loved by her brother Charles.  Mr Griffin wrote

the principles, the tastes, the pursuits, the habits of life, of those with whom she now came into daily intercourse, were almost entirely new to her …  

Thrown very much by the nature of her [teaching] engagements into worldly company, and with her natural buoyancy of spirits and fondness for society, her chief difficulty consisted in maintaining a spiritual and visible separation from the world.  No doubt it would demand much prayerful effort to make natural and educational tendencies bend to the requirements of religious duty and disposition 

She persevered.  She now felt that "a saving change had been wrought on her soul by the Spirit of God" and she "delighted to feel that she was now decidedly and irrevocably 'on the Lord's side,' for ever devoted and given up to Him".  She knew when she saw old friends that her "supposed fanaticism might be the object of their pity or contempt" but she kept on in her new ways all the same. When her parents came to stay, she told her husband not to miss out family prayer morning and evening.  John and Elizabeth Dickens stayed for many months and the Griffins got to know them well.  They went to chapel services and seemed to show great interest "in the new character and new associations of their daughter".

James Griffin's description of Fanny is very reminiscent of descriptions of her brother Charles – he wrote of Fanny's 

habit of endurance, fortitude, self-reliance, and firmness, in no ordinary degree – together with almost restless activity and practical energy

Her new life didn't change her attitude to her brother's work – she enjoyed equally the humour and the pathos of his books

She was no ascetic or recluse; nor was there any assumption or affectation of extraordinary piety ... She despised and detested affectation, assumed mannerisms, and shams of all sorts

Frank and open, a cheerful companion and hearty friend, she became "a general favourite.  She mingled freely with all classes, and apparently with equal interest".  She frequently asked at the end of evening service if they could go home with the Griffins and stop with them a while, even though this took the Burnetts quite out of their way.  The Griffins lived in Richmond Terrace in the hamlet of Old Trafford, more than a mile to the west of the chapel, while the Burnetts lived a considerable distance in the other direction.  They would have supper and family prayer and she would say, "Can't we have a hymn?" and they would usually sing the hymn  

When, O dear Jesus, when shall I

Behold Thee all serene …

O.S. map 1848: Richmond Terrace, Old Trafford
(National Library of Scotland)

Fanny's friends often feared that 

her incessant exertions were undermining her health.  It was difficult, however, to prevail on her to relax them

And then, about seven years after the Griffins first met her, Fanny's health began to show serious symptoms of decline.  She could not believe she was really ill, but in fact she had tuberculosis of the lung.  At last she was persuaded to go for medical care to London, where she stayed with her sister.  James and Eliza Griffin went there to see her for the last time, a "deeply affecting" and "touching" interview.  She died on 2 September 1848.

By her dying request, Mr Griffin went to London to take her funeral.  She was to be buried in "a secluded and picturesque nook in Highgate Cemetery".  All the men of her family were there.

Mr Dickens appeared to feel it very deeply.  He spoke to me in terms of great respect and affection for his departed sister – he had always so spoken of her – as I accompanied him in his brougham on my way to my brother's house.  His behaviour to myself was most courteous and kind.

Henry Augustus Burnett

Henry Burnett returned with his little boys Harry and Charles to Manchester.  Little Harry did not long survive his mother.  He died at the age of nine on 29 January 1849.  Mr Griffin wrote

He died in the arms of a dear, dear nephew of mine since passed away, John Griffin.

(John Griffin became a merchant in Manchester and lived in Bowdon.  When little Harry died, John was a youth of about 18)

I think this photograph of Harry, from the New York Public Library's digital collections, was possibly taken after his death, a not uncommon practice at the time.

Henry Burnett remarried in early summer 1857 and moved back south with his family in 1860.  

By then Mr Griffin had left Manchester, retiring from the Rusholme Road Chapel in September 1854 on account of his health.  He and his wife returned to their native South Coast where the climate did him so much good that he was able eventually to go back into the ministry in 1858.

Note:  James Griffin and his wife Eliza Marden knew Henry and Fanny well and he wrote of them at length in his Memories of the Past: Records of Ministerial Life, published in 1883.  I’m afraid this seems no longer to be available as a free e-book online.

Next: 28. John Hopkinson at chapel & at home: 1840-1848