Eliza Orme’s Ambitions E-Book

Leslie Howsam

• Herausgeber: Open Book Publishers
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

Why are some figures hidden from history? Eliza Orme, despite becoming the first woman in Britain to earn a university degree in Law in 1888, leading both a political organization and a labour investigation in 1892, and participating actively in the women’s suffrage movement into the early twentieth century, is one such figure.


Framed as a ‘research memoir’, Eliza Orme’s Ambitions fills out earlier scant accounts of this intriguing life, while speculating about why it has been overlooked. Established historian Leslie Howsam shapes the story around her own persistent curiosity in the context of a transformed research landscape, where important letters and explosive newspaper accounts have only recently come to light. These materials show how Orme’s career ambitions brought her into conflict with the male-dominated legal community of her time, while her political ambitions were cut short by disputes with other women activists whose notions of political strategy she repudiated. In public, Orme was a formidable debater for the causes she supported and against opponents whose strategies—even for women’s suffrage—she repudiated. In private, she was generous, warm, and witty, close to friends, family, and her female partner. Howsam’s account of uncovering Orme’s professional and personal trajectory will appeal to academic and non-academic readers interested in the progress and setbacks women experienced in the late-Victorian and Edwardian decades.
 

Leseprobe

Eliza Orme’s Ambitions

Eliza Orme’s Ambitions

Politics and the Law in Victorian London

Leslie Howsam

https://www.openbookpublishers.com

©2024 Leslie Howsam

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Leslie Howsam, Eliza Orme’s Ambitions: Politics and the Law in Victorian London. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2024, https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0392

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ISBN Paperback: 978-1-80511-233-4

ISBN Hardback: 978-1-80511-234-1

ISBN Digital (PDF): 978-1-80511-235-8

ISBN Digital eBook (EPUB): 978-1-80511-236-5

ISBN XML: 978-1-80511-237-2

ISBN HTML: 978-1-80511-238-9

DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0392

Cover illustration: Eliza Orme (1889, The Cameron Studio), ©The estate of Jenny Loxton Young. Background: Sketchepedia / Freepik

Cover design by Jeevanjot Kaur Nagpal

Contents

About the Author vii

List of Illustrations ix

Prologue 1

1. An Unthinkable Job for a Woman 9

Eliza and Me, and the 1980s 12

2. Before Law, 1848 to 1871 21

Eliza and Me, 1989–2016 30

3. The Commitment to Law: 1872 to 1888 37

From Lincoln’s Inn Fees to ‘a Miniature Girton’ 43

Discrimination and Challenges 48

‘A Fine Chaos’: Co-workers and Business Partners 50

4. Private Life 55

Family and Childhood 59

Friends and (perhaps) Lovers 64

Playing to the Gallery 77

5. Public Figure: 1888 to about 1903 81

Public Engagement and the Campaign for Irish Home Rule 86

The Women’s Liberal Federation Splits over the Question of Suffrage 90

Factory Inspection and the Royal Commission 94

Prison Committee 101

An Independent Single Professional Woman in Public Life 103

6. Journalism and Authorship 105

Contributions to The Examiner, Englishwoman’s Review and Longman’s (and an Index) 107

Leaders for the Weekly Dispatch 110

The Women’s Gazette and the Royal Commission 111

A Trial in India, a Literary Labour of Love, and More 113

National Biography 117

7. Last Years 119

Contemporaneities 122

Retirement 125

8. Who Was Eliza Orme? 129

Eliza and Me, since 2016 130

Loyalty, Logic, and Strategy: The Case of Charles Dilke’s Divorce Scandal 134

Speculation: Eliza’s Thwarted Ambition 137

Who was Eliza to Her Friends and Family? 138

Who Was Miss Orme to Lawyers (Then and Now)? 141

Who Was She to Posterity? 143

Appendices 147

Acknowledgements 147

Documentation 148

Major Figures, and Families 150

Eliza Orme: A Partial Bibliography 153

Correspondence (Manuscript and Print) 153

Eliza Orme’s Known Publications (in Chronological Order) 154

Publications about Eliza Orme 156

Index 157

About the Author

Leslie Howsam is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (FRSC) and Emerita Distinguished University Professor at the University of Windsor in Canada; she is Senior Research Fellow in the Centre for Digital Humanities at Toronto Metropolitan University. Leslie was a founding member of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing (SHARP) and served as its president 2009 to 2013. Her most recent book is the Cambridge Companion to the History of the Book (2015), while her best-known book is Old Books & New Histories: An Orientation to Studies in Book and Print Culture (2006). For further information please see https://lesliehowsam.ca

List of Illustrations

Fig. 1. Portrait of a woman, possibly Eliza Orme senior (1854–55, John Brett), ©The British Museum. 23

Fig. 2. John Stuart Mill and Helen Taylor (n.d., photographer unknown), Wikimedia, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:J_S_Mill_and_H_Taylor.jpg, CC-PD-Mark. 29

Fig. 3. Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon (1861, Samuel Laurence), ©National Portrait Gallery, London. 38

Fig. 4. Reina Emily Lawrence (n.d., photographer unknown), ©John Partington, London. http://www.pjohnp.me.uk/famhist/lawrence-re.pdf51

Fig. 5. Eliza Orme (1889, The Cameron Studio), ©The estate of Jenny Loxton Young. 57

Fig. 6. Samuel Alexander (1932, Francis Dodd), ©National Portrait Gallery, London. 69

Fig. 7. Sir Charles Wentworth Dilke, 2nd Bt. and Emilia Francis (née Strong), Lady Dilke (1894, W. & D. Downey, published by Cassell & Co. Ltd.), ©National Portrait Gallery, London. 72

Fig. 8. George Robert Gissing (1897, William Rothenstein), ©National Portrait Gallery, London. 74

Fig. 9. Rosalind Frances (née Stanley), Countess of Carlisle (1900s, H. Walter Barnett), ©National Portrait Gallery, London. 91

Prologue

©2024 Leslie Howsam, CC BY-NC 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0392.00

Eliza Orme was a rarity in Victorian Britain, an independent single woman in public life. Academically trained in law but excluded from formal practice, she forged a precarious career on the fringes of the patriarchal legal community and used that as a springboard for energetic involvement in party politics. She lived, and worked, and made her mark in the last quarter of the nineteenth century in Britain. After that, she was more or less forgotten, until I got curious, remained interested, eventually came to understand why and how her story had disappeared from history, and finally wrote this book. It is my story almost as much as hers, and it is not a biography, because even after half a lifetime the author still does not know enough about the subject to write what is known as ‘the definitive work’. (Perhaps no one will ever know enough about this elusive figure.) Instead, this is a research memoir, which allows me to integrate my own research adventure with an account of Eliza Orme’s private life and public career, and to ask what it is about her that has intrigued me for some forty years. As for what it is about me that lets me speak for her—I am a historian, and one who takes joy in using the documents to be found in archives and libraries. But I also know that much of what happened in the past—especially to women—was never documented, or the documents were lost, or got buried among someone else’s papers. I have discovered a lot, and recognized some connections, and finally allowed myself to speculate about her motives and her ambitions.

When Eliza Orme set about challenging the deeply patriarchal profession of law as practiced in Britain—at the remarkably early date of 1872—one of the reasons was that she believed nothing would assist the cause of women’s suffrage so much as practical work done by women. This was typical, She once told an audience, ‘I am hopelessly practical’. Her approach to being an agent of change meant getting things done, rather than rising into clouds of rhetoric about the causes she supported. Still less did she talk to people about her private hopes and dreams, perhaps for a brilliant career in public life. Instead she set about testing the limits of what could be done. Other women who espoused the same causes as she did were not noticeably practical; they were visionaries, and now they’re celebrated as the leaders of Britain’s contemporary campaigns for women’s suffrage, for career opportunities, for all those crucial reforms. Perhaps that’s why they are remembered, while Orme was all but forgotten until—as this book recounts—a chance encounter in a Canadian university seminar room somehow ignited decades of research. Orme was, it turns out, a remarkable woman: not only practical, but ambitious, competent, well-connected, witty, generous, and a strategist. What she wasn’t, however, was England’s first woman barrister or solicitor; those achievements happened almost half a century later, to other people. She wasn’t the iniquitous anti-women’s-suffrage schemer of some of her contemporaries’ jealous imaginations, either. Formidable competence and relentless practicality, it turns out, are not always appreciated by the visionaries.

So, who was Eliza Orme? I have spent almost forty years following her traces through books, magazines, and newspapers preserved in libraries, and through handwritten records in archives. For most of that time, there was almost no information, not even a photograph, and I was too busy with other things to do much with what I did know. Now, with both retirement leisure and digital search engines at my disposal, I have learned enough to change the question. I know who she was, especially her public persona—first woman in England to earn a law degree (in 1888 at the age of thirty-nine); powerful behind-the-scenes strategist for the women’s branch of the Liberal Party; a key figure in factory inspection and prison reform; active in Anglo-Irish politics; part of the first wave of the feminist movement; a journalist and public speaker who addressed women’s work, their financial independence and their right to vote. I know what she did for a living, too, though that’s hard to describe because it’s complicated, implausible, and somewhat disheartening. Totally and irrevocably excluded from the practice of law either as a barrister or a solicitor, she set up a business at the fringes of those professions, discreetly preparing legal paperwork and charging a hefty fee for the service. (Her clients were credentialed men who commissioned her services privately in order to publicly claim her labours as their own.) And she had other side hustles and gig jobs, albeit presenting herself in a much more dignified way than those words suggest, but I use them to stress that she was a precursor of today’s precarious labour economy. More on that later, but for now the question has to change, to ask whose she is, beginning with whose she was—how her colleagues, friends, family, admirers, detractors, clients, competitors and protégées all measured an outsized personality against their own needs and ambitions. Further, whose academic or cultural research quarry is she now? What do twenty-first century lawyers and legal-history scholars make of her anomalous position with respect to a stringently regulated professional status? Are historians of the first wave of feminism ready to accept her as one of that number, despite a strategic position on the suffrage question that set her apart from her peers? Is her adventurous personal life of interest to readers more attracted to the woman than the legal pioneer?

Most of all, she was her own woman. Eliza Orme was independently single and financially secure, at a time when marital status pretty much defined identity for women and earning a comfortable self-sufficient living was very rare. She came from a large, loving, prosperous and supportive family from whom she inherited a talent for friendship and a sense of security that let her be combative in encounters with people she disagreed with. She was often funny, and I think she was probably a lot of fun to spend time with. She had one very close lifelong companion who was both a fellow-student and a family friend, later a business partner, and eventually the executor of her estate. That was Reina Emily Lawrence. It is reasonable to speculate that theirs was an intimate relationship, the kind that was acceptable in advanced social circles at the time as long as it was not made explicit. There is no hard evidence for this idea, but neither have I found a scrap of evidence that she had any love affairs with men.

This book is about Eliza Orme, but it is also about me. I have written it partly to figure out why I remain intrigued with her story, even after spending decades researching and teaching a different branch of British history. Like me, like most people with a reputation, she was a public figure whose private side was accessible only to those she trusted. And like almost everyone, neither Orme nor the people close to her obliged posterity by leaving very many records of that private side behind. Having said that, though, I am going to start with two remarkable bits of historical evidence—both of them I discovered quite recently—one that shows the public Miss Orme, LL.B. another offering a glimpse of the private Eliza.

The public person was well known for being a divisive figure in the Women’s Liberal Federation—or as an anonymous newspaper article called them, ‘a group of Liberal dames’. On 3 March 1892, an article in TheBritish Weekly suggested, rather snidely, that a book might someday be written about such anomalous political figures. The imagined book, an epic poem, would solve a contemporary conundrum about Eliza Orme: ‘In that serio-comic epic which must surely one day depict to the world the story of the early days of the women’s Liberal movement, it is an entertaining matter for conjecture which of Miss Orme’s two reputations the poet will find most convenient for his artistic purposes’. She had adversaries within the Federation, so-called ‘progressives’, who aspired to force their party to start accepting women’s suffrage as a matter of policy and felt thwarted by her insistence on more circumspect tactics. To those people, Miss Orme was ‘the arch-villain, the malignant schemer, who spends her nights in laying traps for innocent “Progressives” and her days in leading her victims to the snare, whose every action is full of sinister meaning, to whom intrigue is both meat and drink, in whose “good morning” there is guile, and on whose lips the multiplication table would be full of undiscoverable, but none the less dangerous wickedness’.

For her friends and colleagues, however, for those who had Liberal interests at heart, there was another Miss Orme. To them, she was ‘The quick-witted champion, with a convenient appetite for combat, at once capable and ready to be captain or scapegoat. She is the sort of person of whom it is safe to prophesy she will give rise to a myth, though whether a future generation of women Liberals will explain her as a comet or the north wind I dare not conjecture’. The article went on to sketch in a little of Orme’s background, and then highlighted her skill as a debater and reinforced her practical nature: ‘Rhetoric and fine language are abhorrent to her. The pathos of facts seems to her more effective than that of mere words, and humour a healthier instrument, as a rule, for the handling of an audience than sentiment’.

As for the British Weekly writer (who might have been William Robertson Nicoll), his description was quite accurate, but not his prophecy: Orme died over forty years later, when the causes she cared about had changed beyond recognition and long after her moment in the public eye. Many of the people who wrote the first histories of those causes were busy making myths of other leaders, some of whom had indeed regarded her as a malignant schemer. When I first wrote about her myself, I knew only the bare bones of the schism in the Women’s Liberal Federation and nothing about Orme’s interactions with either her allies or her antagonists.

Still less did I know anything about the private Eliza’s personal relationships. The second bit of evidence is a letter, written in 1888 by Orme herself to her young friend Sam Alexander. Very few of her letters have survived—at one time, I thought that nothing like this would ever surface. It still exists because Samuel Alexander (1859–1938) happened to become a distinguished philosopher of Manchester University, where his papers are carefully preserved in an archive. The handlist to the collection is online, which is how Google helped me find a bundle of eighteen letters written to Alexander by Eliza Orme. He was ten years her junior, and a friend (or possibly a relative) of the family of Reina Emily Lawrence. There is a lot of variety in the correspondence—advice about handling a delicate situation; affectionate praise for his first book; counsel about how to draft his will; news about her visits to Ireland on business, first for the Liberals and later for employers. On this particular occasion she refused to take Sam’s ‘no’ for an answer to an invitation to a social gathering in a fashionable London suburb. ‘Besides you ought to want to’, she wrote. ‘It is pleasure of a very high kind to listen to beautiful music and recitations and refined conversation surrounded with pictures and clever Cambridge students with exceedingly classic profiles. And even the eating and drinking will be of an ennobling kind—for bananas are very cultured food and iced lemonade Oscary Wildey’. The teasing, almost giggly, tone of this letter is extraordinary, and such a far cry from both the arch-villain scheming to bring down the Women’s Liberal Federation and the quick-witted champion of worthwhile causes. In the context of all the other letters to Alexander, I can confirm that this missive is not at all flirtatious. But it is intimate. And it gives a voice to someone who felt at home among bohemian artists, writers, publishers, and journalists, someone who was not afraid to allude to decadence. We will see that she lived among people like that too, in the west-London neighbourhood known as Bedford Park. But her work was in Chancery Lane, where the barristers had their chambers.

Both of these illuminating scraps of evidence about Eliza Orme as public politician and private friend came to light only recently with the help of search engines. For most of the last four decades, her life was not much more than a shadowy sketch that did not fit its background.

Readers who want to read the British Weekly article and the Alexander letters for themselves will look in vain, at this point, for a footnote to guide their research. Even though the other books and articles I have written are conventionally documented, I came to understand this one would have to be different. There is, of course, a list of sources in an appendix, for those scholars and students who want to pursue Eliza Orme further. But in order for that to happen, I believe my task is to show why this woman was ‘hidden from history’ for so long and thus restore to her a voice and a face that the women and men of her time might have recognized. It is not a coincidence that so many of her contemporaries have been researched and contextualized, in politics, social reform, literature, and science, while this one’s context was legal study and practice where women did not appear. Discovering and interpreting all the biographical and genealogical information, sorting out which contemporary networks she joined and which she evaded, and speculating about what those facts and connections convey—all that research happened over decades, as my own assumptions and judgments changed alongside changing technologies and methodologies.

When I first encountered Miss Orme, all I knew was that she helped George Gissing, the novelist, when he was in a tight spot. Back in those days, the mid-to-late 1980s, I was enrolled in a graduate Victorian Studies program, mostly concerned with British social history but required to take an interdisciplinary seminar and one course on literature. In the latter I learned about Gissing, who was into neither feminist activism nor aestheticism, being the rather unhappy writer of novels like New Grub Street and The Odd Women. He modelled no characters on Orme. But after he met her through the publisher they shared, he came to depend on her for legal advice and hands-on practical assistance in the breakdown of his second marriage. I was beginning to enjoy research challenges, especially this one after I discovered that Gissing’s ‘Miss Orme’ had the letters LL.B. after her name. There were no search engines in those days, but if a person in the past had published books or journalism to their credit, they had left a trace in card catalogues and periodical indexes that could be pursued on library shelves. Later there would be deeper explorations, in archives and record offices in London. A professor of literature encouraged my efforts, not least because they might offer him ammunition in a scholarly spat with a rival academic interested in the same novelist. For those two men, Eliza Orme was an adjunct to Gissing; and for Gissing himself, she was ‘a very strong-minded woman, who has been a good friend to me’. If the novelist knew she was trained in law and prominent in politics, he never mentioned that fact in his letters or diary. In that sense, my Eliza Orme has been the one I rescued from the indignity of being a minor character in someone else’s life. But to be fair to Gissing, neither he nor anyone else in the 1890s had a way to think about her education and experience. And to be fair to the Gissing scholars, and to me, in the 1980s we were just beginning to learn how to think about such things ourselves.

1. An Unthinkable Job for a Woman

©2024 Leslie Howsam, CC BY-NC 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0392.01

The challenge of trying to explain what it meant that women could not be lawyers in Victorian Britain reminds me of a novel I read many years ago. P. D. James’s An Unsuitable Job for a Woman is about a female private detective, Cordelia Gray, whose professional activities raised eyebrows. But 1972, when that book was set and published, was well into the second wave of the feminist movement in Britain. Eliza Orme lived at the time of the first wave, which extended from the moderate ‘suffragist’ campaigns of the 1860s to the militant ‘suffragettes’ of the 1910s. The key issue of those years was to get the law changed to permit women to vote in parliamentary elections on the same basis as men. That generation also sought to create a range of suitable jobs for women—occupational work in shops and offices, professional careers in teaching and medicine, even a few private detectives. Feminists of the 1860s and 70s worked to change the law, around issues like married women’s property and appropriate working conditions as well as women’s suffrage, but they did not devote their collective energy to breaking into the legal profession. That was beyond unsuitable: it was unthinkable.

Orme has been accorded a modest place in the history of women’s professional work in law on the strength of her 1888 degree, the Bachelor of Laws (LL.B.) from University College London, the first ever in England. That was remarkable, but not unthinkable; it was regarded by contemporaries as a notable achievement, but one that had nothing to do with the realities of professional accreditation in a patriarchal society. Indeed, Letitia Walkington earned the same degree at the Royal University of Ireland a few months later. But as women, Letitia and Eliza could no more be full-fledged lawyers than they could be clergy or soldiers or sit on juries, because they were not regarded as equal to men. Thirty years went by, encompassing the turn of a new century and a world war, before the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act of 1919 allowed the first women to qualify as barristers and solicitors. Or to put it another way, Eliza Orme’s best years for work and achievement were long behind her before the notion of licensed women practitioners in the legal profession stopped being unthinkable.

I put it that way because, while it is impossible not to say that Orme was the first woman in England to earn a law degree, it is also inherently misleading. She was never allowed to use the academic training of her discipline, the rigorous lectures and examinations in jurisprudence, legal history, political economy and other subjects. Not directly, not to be a barrister or solicitor. And yet she had a life to live and a living to make, both before and after earning that academic qualification. It is even more misleading to assert that she failed to be called to the bar or to join the Law Society. To say that is to fall into what historians call ‘presentism’, which means projecting contemporary social assumptions backwards onto the past. It is very difficult to think ourselves back to the 1870s (even the 1970s seem impossibly long ago!) to a time when women’s full equality meant something, but not what it does now. Then, full equality meant the vote, and protection for married women’s property, but almost nobody could imagine a worldview built on assumptions about reliable contraception and socially-sanctioned childcare. It also meant that women should struggle (and it was a struggle) to become doctors, because medicine was a caring profession and there were situations where treatment from someone of the same sex was desirable. None of these visions of equality, however, suggested that women should be licenced to practice law. They did not stretch to a challenge, on the basis of gender, to an enterprise at the heart of cultural, social, economic, and political life, a challenge to that ramshackle non-code of judgments, traditions, assumptions, and interpretations that kept Britain’s whole patriarchal machine going. Ladies scarcely belonged in the courtroom as witnesses, most people believed, and certainly not as prosecutors, jurors, or judges. Not when subjects might arise that were deemed inappropriate for ladies to hear, especially unmarried ones. To allow women to be lawyers would have been to upset a whole lot of assumptions better left unquestioned. The prestige of the profession might diminish if women were allowed to participate. And at a more mundane economic level, the innovation would create a body of competent, disciplined competitors for male lawyers in the marketplace. Into this impossible situation, the young Eliza Orme calmly proposed to insert herself.

She might even have had a further goal in mind. Let us consider the way an ambitious young man of the late-Victorian decades prepared himself for a career in public life. Not necessarily, but quite often, he began with a university degree in law. He followed that up with a few years in professional practice while he went about getting acquainted with powerful people by participating in the activities of social clubs, political parties and other special-interest associations. He also, quite often, made a name for himself with occasional journalism, a name that aligned him with the political views of powerful men in the generation ahead of him while drawing their attention to his own attributes. Eliza Orme’s university mentors were providing that sort of background to her male peers, and she was smart enough to recognize how the process worked. I do not know her motivations, but having observed that she took each of those career-building steps herself, I am prepared to speculate about where she hoped they would take her.

She prepared herself for public life by getting involved with various liberal causes, notably Home Rule for Ireland, while still a student. Once she had the degree in hand, she began to manage a newspaper for a Liberal Party organization, writing editorials on political subjects and serving on the organization’s executive council. But given the time and place she lived in, that organization was a women’s auxiliary and the newspaper was their organ. And this is where the story gets complicated. She was solidly committed to women’s suffrage, but she was also prepared to strategically compromise that commitment in order not to embarrass the leadership of the Liberal Party. Part of this attitude likely came from her legal training and her pragmatic approach to life. But part of it might also have been ambition. Thwarted ambition, I have to say. She certainly had some successes, but she was not, nor ever could be, a candidate for Member of Parliament, and never elected to a position where she could contribute to changing the government’s approach to governing Ireland. That does not mean she did not think about it. Starting out as a teenage activist in the 1860s, she probably expected the vote would come to women in plenty of time for her to use law as a stepping-stone to politics. That had, after all, happened in several other jurisdictions, so why not in Britain?

But before we get to her story, it is time to tell you a bit about mine.

Eliza and Me, and the 1980s

Just before I got acquainted with Eliza Orme and began to learn about how academic feminist historians thought about women and gender, I also got acquainted with a way of thinking called the history of the book. Book history looks at a handful of things that were long taken for granted—what happens in a reader’s brain and body while they are immersed in a book; why publishers have more influence on that experience than authors might want to admit; and how a text makes its way around a community of readers in a myriad of material forms. To put it another way (and now I am quoting myself) book history means studying the way people in the past gave material form to knowledge and stories, how they made intangible texts accessible, in the form of tangible objects like books and periodicals, across the barriers created by time and space. My reputation, such as it is, is for book history rather than women’s history—just as Orme’s was for liberal politics rather than for legal practice. Now she is remembered differently, and maybe I will be too, one day. Looking back, I realize what a long time it took me to learn to be a historian. I am one, but so unconventional that I have spent a good part of my career trying to explain my discipline to my interdisciplinary colleagues, the book historians—while also interpreting book studies for my disciplinary colleagues, the historians.

I came back to studying history in 1981 at the age of thirty-five. In Jessica and Neil, I had a remarkably satisfactory daughter and a profoundly committed life partner. Behind me were a stalled career, a failed first marriage, and an undistinguished BA in history; ahead of me might have been another job, but instead I began to think about returning to school. Without any particular vocation in another direction, it made sense to enrol in some undergraduate History courses at the University of Toronto to refresh my earlier experience. This time around, the whole enterprise of historical thinking was engaging, in particular the course on Victorian Britain. New scholarship in ‘history from below’ was both intellectually challenging and compelling from the perspective of social justice. Meanwhile, my tentative start on a career had been in the publishing division of a social service organization promoting justice for people with intellectual disabilities. This was not a literary publisher, but they produced books and a magazine to advance the cause. There I had learned a bit about how books and journals were put together, and about how a voluntary society interacted with its own publishing program.

One day in the summer of 1982, Neil came home from one of his bookstore prowls with a newsstand copy of the journal Daedalus. It had an article that he thought might interest me: ‘What is the History of Books?’ by Robert Darnton. I had never heard of Darnton, but his historical approach struck a deep chord: a way of thinking about the past that hooked on to my recent experience of book-making. For the information of book historians who are reading this, I still possess that single issue of the journal, complete with a price sticker from Lichtman’s bookshop in Toronto. For the information of those who are not book historians, Darnton’s article is iconic; it is still read and taught extensively, reprinted and excerpted often, and quoted in almost every introductory essay on the subject. This item, the first material iteration of a much-cited piece of writing, now in the possession of a practitioner in the field, encapsulates almost everything you need to know about book history. It is also almost, but not quite, the last you will hear about book history in these pages.

By the time I read the article, I was preparing to begin a master’s degree at York University. In those days, York and the University of Toronto sponsored a joint Victorian Studies MA program. This entailed an interdisciplinary seminar on literature and history, and the requirement to take one full course in the discipline outside one’s specialty. The seminar was initially terrifying, but I quickly made friends with a couple of women who were fellow students. There were two professors, a historian, Albert Tucker from York, and a literary scholar, John M. (Jack) Robson from Toronto. The seminar met on the U. of T. campus, in the very room at Victoria College where Robson led the project to edit the complete works of John Stuart Mill. We all brought our own undergraduate backgrounds and graduate ambitions to a set of readings that included both novels and histories. I was even more nervous about the second obligation, not having any experience with studying English literature since those long-ago undergraduate days. One offering, from Michael Collie, seemed especially daunting, with a syllabus full of books I had never heard of and some not even by literary authors. Another looked safer, covering Dickens and Gaskell and Brontë: but that one was fully subscribed. I was signed in, perforce, to Collie’s course, and entered the room with great trepidation. That was not only where I met Eliza Orme, but also where I first found people to talk to about the history of the book.

Later, we joked that this was a course on Victorian authors named George: Borrow, Eliot, Gissing, and Meredith. My first essay was about George Eliot’s relationship with her publishers, but Gissing was inescapable. Michael Collie had recently compiled a bibliography of the novelist’s writings and was deeply enmeshed in the minutiae of that troubled life. He was also engaged in a rivalry with the preeminent Gissing scholar, based in France, Pierre Coustillas: they disagreed on almost everything and reviewed each other’s books scathingly. Gissing had needed a lot of help in the 1890s, not least to extricate himself from an unfortunate marriage. One of the women who provided aid and comfort was called Eliza Orme. The following year, I undertook to write a paper about her. Coustillas, in his edition of the novelist’s diary, had said she was kind to Gissing. Collie, perhaps only to be contrarian, suggested there might be more to her life than niceness. I went to the National Union Catalogue to see what books, if any, this paragon might have written. She had two, and her name was inscribed thus: Eliza Orme, LL.B. I asked Michael what he thought that meant, and he was unimpressed: ‘maybe an honorary degree?’ he speculated. That did not sit well with my feminist sensibilities, and it served as a research challenge.

It is difficult now, in 2024, to reconstruct how, in 1984, I went about finding out who Eliza Orme was. I have forgotten a lot, and research methods have changed so much. For that first assignment I had only York University’s Scott Library, and the occasional foray to Robarts Library at the University of Toronto, at my disposal. (And sadly I no longer possess the essay I wrote.) There was no internet, no search engine, just print catalogues and print indexes in the reference section of the libraries, and access to Inter-Library Loan for really obscure works. I suppose I asked them to borrow copies of her books, Lady Fry of Darlington and The Life of Saram Chana Pal, from other institutions. Probably the resources like Poole’s Index to Periodical Literature and the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature turned up one or two of her articles in mainstream journals like The Examiner and Longman’s Magazine. With an index reference in hand, I could find the relevant issues on the library shelves. (The fifth volume of the Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals, with its crucial index to authors, didn’t appear until several years later.) There wasn’t much information, but the fragments were intriguing. Moreover, they didn’t jigsaw together into a coherent narrative, which is perhaps why they were unsettling and ultimately unforgettable. She had written some sort of a government report, too (although I don’t think I found that until later). I itched to know more. But the English course was just a course, Victorian Studies was not a viable program for a doctorate, certainly not for a historian. Anyway, nobody in the History department was open to supervising a PhD on women in nineteenth-century Britain and why they were not allowed to be lawyers. Even in the mid-eighties, such a program of study was still pretty close to unthinkable.

As I have mentioned, John M. Robson was a leading expert on John Stuart Mill and almost from the beginning I knew that Orme knew Mill. However it never occurred to me to consult Jack about my Eliza Orme research. Had I done so, the trajectory of the project might have been very different. But despite the ideal of a Victorian Studies program integrating history and literature, the academic world operates in remarkably water-tight compartments. Jack was a wonderful mentor to me, taking an interest in my dissertation work as it evolved, and giving me opportunities to take on some academic leadership, but we never discussed this mutual interest. I also got to know his wife Ann Robson, whose research as a historian focused on Mill’s step-daughter Helen Taylor. It was not until years later that I learned Ann Robson had written a very brief article about some editorial work that Orme did for Taylor, and decades after that when the internet helped me find Mill scheming to give Eliza Orme her own opportunities in women’s movement leadership. But this is to get ahead of the story.

It was another of the Georges—not Gissing but George Borrow, the author of a Victorian best-seller in 1843 called The Bible in Spain—who helped me find a research program for a PhD. Michael Collie had spent time the previous summer in the archives of the British and Foreign Bible Society, in whose employ Borrow had found the source material for what we might now call a work of creative non-fiction but is conventionally regarded as a travel book. When I told Michael I thought I would like to do something on the history of publishing, he told me that the Bible Society still had all its nineteenth-century publishing records. To a historian, the fact that the publishing in question did not pertain to works of literature was irrelevant. What was important was that the Society worked with printers and binders to transform the technology of book production, and that I could identify the people involved, the women as well as the men, and the way the society played gender off against religion, and vice versa. My official advisor, Albert Tucker, was most impressed by the existence of the archive; he did not think of the project as book history, but rather as social history. Michael understood, though, and became my unofficial advisor. I kept in touch with Michael and his other students as we all embarked together on learning about a new way to think about the book. Together we read Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts, a radical approach to the study of the material book by a literary scholar called D. F. McKenzie. Darnton and McKenzie, between them, provided the intellectual scaffolding for the dissertation that became my first book, Cheap Bibles, and for most of the scholarship that came later. The PhD was 1989, the book came out in 1991, I started my first academic appointment, at the University of Windsor in 1993 and was tenured in 1998.

By the time I finished the doctorate, the study of women’s history was much more established than it had been when I started, and so was the history of the book. It is difficult now, in the 2020s, to describe what studies in both social history and book history were like in the 1980s. Both were hovering on the verge of radical transformation, but there was very little academic infrastructure to support the intellectual excitement. Of course, there were precursors of various kinds, especially in the study of Victorian fiction and poetry by women. In departments of history, however, people like Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall on the gender side, and people like Darnton on the books side, were just beginning to supervise their own graduate students. There was no one like them in Toronto, not for modern British history, and I was not in a position to move. Had there been a potential advisor and mentor in women’s history, my choices might have been different. We women students did some reading on our own, but the official coursework requirements were focused on issues of social class, not gender. There was no historian who specialized in book history, either, but Collie was a bibliographer and he introduced me to the other bibliographers who worked in English departments and university libraries in the city. Bibliography was yet another field that was transforming in the eighties, at that time just on the verge of its encounter with social and cultural history—D. F. McKenzie meeting Robert Darnton.

Even before my dissertation was finished and ready to defend, I started applying for appointments in modern British history in universities—mostly in Canada, but a few in the United States, too. There were not many available. For people on the job market in my discipline, the pattern has been to mark time while enriching one’s research portfolio by securing a postdoctoral fellowship. A postdoc also provides a modest income. My first application for a fellowship, in 1989, was unsuccessful; my second, in 1990, was successful. The first would have been in women’s history, a project on Eliza Orme and other women seeking to be lawyers in Victorian Britain. My article on Orme had been published in Atlantis (a Canadian women’s studies journal) the same year, and a professor at Carleton University, Deborah Gorham, was keen to supervise the postdoc. But the application was not funded and there was no explanation why not. My second attempt was in book history, a project on the archives of the publishers Henry S. King and Charles Kegan Paul (archives that were conveniently available on microfilm). The King/Paul research led to my second book, and it promised to contribute to a third, the product of an ongoing collaboration with Michael Collie in the form of a study of the International Scientific Series. King and Paul had been the British publishers of that series. But do not look for that book in the library; the collaboration ended abruptly before our work together was finished.

The Atlantis piece was called ‘Sound-Minded Women: Eliza Orme and the Study and Practice of Law in Late-Victorian England’. Before being accepted by Atlantis, the article was turned down by Victorian Studies and by Albion, the two leading journals of the time. (I still have the reports, which can be summed up as the reviewers telling me Orme really was not all that important.) The quote in my title came from one of her own articles, published in The Examiner in 1874:

We have often felt the want of a word to express the opposite of a weak-minded woman. ‘Strong-minded’ unfortunately suggests a host of weaknesses of which a very typical one is that peculiar taste which a few women have for trying to dress like men. The women who have been driven into notoriety by the refusal of just and moderate recognition, and those who try to enliven the dulness of a purposeless life by being uselessly eccentric, are generally called strong-minded. Society has adopted the word to describe the abnormal result of its own over-restrictions. How, then, can we speak of women who can take a journey by railway without an escort, who can stand by a friend through a surgical operation, and who yet wear ordinary bonnets and carry medium-sized umbrellas? The

Saturday Review

gives us exactly the right expression when it speaks of ‘sound-minded women’. The word explains itself.

Obliquely, too, Eliza Orme’s jibe at the social restrictions on independent-minded middle-class women seeking a just and moderate recognition also explained itself.

At the time I characterized Orme as ‘a prominent public figure and a prosperous spinster’. I had not found any personal papers, just some census records and entries in city directories along with a handful of references in books and periodicals about better-known contemporaries. Anxious for something of human interest to recount, I cited the intriguing possibility that George Bernard Shaw might have used Orme as a model when he created the character of Vivie Warren, the independent professional daughter in Mrs Warren’s Profession. Even better, I mentioned how George Gissing noted that she smoked a cigar with the gentlemen, ‘as a matter of course’, after a dinner-party. I had access to an interview she had given to theLaw Journal in 1903 when she was fifty-five years old, to her journalism in mainstream periodicals, and other miscellaneous evidence, some of it collected in odd moments during my dissertation research in British libraries. With this I wove together a narrative and concluded that ‘Eliza Orme would be dismayed to know that she was being represented to posterity in terms of her gender. She thought of herself as an educated person, an authoritative expert, prepared to give her opinion on subjects ranging from Home Rule in Ireland to jurisprudence in India. Even her views on women’s work and education were offered as if from a distance, as if the restrictions of contemporary society did not apply to Eliza Orme’. All these years later, I suppose I would still say most of that, though I hope I have found a better historical framework to express the ideas. Finally, though, I do have something more personal to report than about that cigar. Still, the anecdote did make a difference back then. One colleague had got hold of her views on the working conditions for barmaids and drew the conclusion that she must be teetotal: the episode of her smoking a cigar with a party of men was enough to convince him that he was wrong.

Another scholar read that article too, someone who had heard of my work on Eliza Orme and tried to make contact, initially through Michael Collie. Incredibly, she was right there on the York University campus, but not in the History Department, nor in the English Department, or anywhere in the faculty of arts or humanities—she was in the Osgoode Hall Law School. Which, as far as us getting together intellectually was concerned, might as well have been on the other side of the moon. Mary Jane Mossman’s book, The First Women Lawyers: A Comparative Study of Gender, Law and the Legal Professions (2006) had a whole chapter on Eliza Orme that leaned heavily on my 1989 article, citing it generously. But we only met much later and have since made up for lost time by becoming very good friends.

I did not really feel like a historian while doing a PhD in the subject at York University—that came later, thanks to my colleagues at the University of Windsor—but I did feel like a researcher. I discovered a passion for the archives, and a capacity to spend patient hours reading through documents written in the nineteenth century. Some of them in atrocious handwriting, though thankfully not all. The French historian Le Roy Ladurie said that historians are either truffle hunters (who search for nuggets of knowledge) or parachutists (who survey the past from a great height). I learned at York that I am the first kind of historian. A fellow student who was a parachutist—someone immersed in theoretical approaches—was rather disdainful. She waited to go to the archives until after she had worked out what questions she hoped to find answered there. Whereas I went to the archives early, eagerly, even joyfully—just to find out what was there and to display it to my readers. The comparison is too clumsy, really. All of us are both kinds of historian. But my way of approaching the Bible Society of the first half of the nineteenth century allowed me to see something that had been overlooked by other scholars, which was that they were a publisher, and not really a religious organization. (It helped that I already knew about publishing by an advocacy organization in my own time.) All that research also prepared me for a decades-long search for nuggets of information about Eliza Orme, beginning with her life before law.

2. Before Law, 1848 to 1871

©2024 Leslie Howsam, CC BY-NC 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0392.02

Eliza Orme was born into a family whose members were principled about the wise use of their wealth and privilege. The Ormes were vigorous people who appreciated artistic beauty and good design. They cultivated relationships with some of the leading painters, poets, intellectuals, and illustrators of the period. The father was a successful businessman in the liquor trade. Their London home was on Avenue Road, near Regent’s Park and his distillery was in Blackfriars, on the Thames River near St Paul’s Cathedral. Oddly enough, we know more about the mother than the father in this family, because the elder Eliza Orme brought a network of high-powered literary and political connections to her marriage, whereas Charles Orme’s interests can only be guessed at through the sort of people he entertained and the support he must have given to his wife’s political and cultural interests. (‘Must have given’, because the stereotypical nineteenth-century paterfamilias could and often did shut such interests down. But not this one.)

What follows is the result of hundreds of hours of research, none of it straightforward, much of it a matter of fruitless scrambles down rabbit holes, and a lot of it gleaned from scrutinizing census records that have only become available quite recently. All the relevant people’s names, along with birth and death dates and family connections, are listed in the ‘Major Figures, and Families’ section of the Appendix to this volume.

Eliza Andrews, known as ‘Mrs Charles Orme’ after her marriage (but I call her Eliza Orme senior) was the daughter of an intellectual clergyman. The Rev. Edward Andrews tutored John Ruskin as that young man prepared to become the polymath critic who dominated the intellectual and artistic worlds of the late nineteenth century. To his credit, the Rev. Mr. Andrews tutored his own daughters too, in Greek, Latin, and French. In fact, some of these girls have been credited with introducing Ruskin to the Pre-Raphaelite artists he later championed. Two more of the Andrews sisters married two brothers: Emily, the famous poet Coventry Patmore (which makes Emily the model for the original ‘angel in the house’ of her husband’s poem and of Victorian mythology), and Georgina, George Morgan Patmore. Georgina’s husband died in 1856, and she became a member of the Orme household. Whatever Coventry Patmore may have anticipated, this family rejected his poem’s vision of cloistered domestic femininity. Flora Masson (Eliza senior’s granddaughter and Georgina’s great-niece) wrote that ‘Among the friends who used to gather in the Avenue Road garden on summer evenings, or round the hospitable dinner-table, were the Tennyson family, the Rossetti family, and the two Pre-Raphaelites, Thomas Woolner and Holman Hunt’. Let me decode that for you: Flora was dropping several of the most distinguished names of the time, older ones like Tennyson in the same breath with some of the latest avant-garde artists.

Eliza Orme senior quickly became a sort of patron of the arts, and especially of the group who called themselves the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Because of that, I have been able to trace some descriptions of her appearance and personality, and also some references to objects associated with both her and them. The artist John Brett made the charcoal drawing that is probably her portrait (see Fig. 1). Brett described Mrs Orme as ‘highly intellectual, cultivated and fascinating.’ The writer William Rossetti described her as a ‘lady … of rich physique, with luminous dark eyes.’ William’s brother, the poet-illustrator Dante Gabriel Rossetti, noted that he and William and their sister Christina had spent several evenings with the Ormes, ‘and indeed, I think we may now consider ourselves in the circle of family friends’. Dante Gabriel Rossetti drew a sketch of the sculptor Thomas Woolner and gave it to the senior Eliza Orme because she was Woolner’s friend and patron. This sketch portrait remained in the family for decades and is now in the collections of the National Portrait Gallery. Woolner himself made and gave to her a medallion of Tennyson; he also made medallions of the mother and two of her daughters, Rosaline and Helen.

Fig. 1 Portrait of a woman, possibly Eliza Orme senior (1854–55, John Brett), ©The British Museum.

Rosaline Orme married David Masson, a rather glamorous, up-and-coming young man who brought a more intellectual and political kind of modernity into this artistic household. He was one of the first scholars of English literature (which, believe it or not, was new as a university subject in those days). He was a well-connected editor and journalist as well as an academic. Through Masson the family got to know John Stuart Mill, who later became an important influence on the younger Eliza’s political and professional choices. Thomas Carlyle, Douglas Jerrold, W. M. Thackeray, and Giuseppe Mazzini visited too, along with the Pre-Raphaelite artists already mentioned, and a host of lesser-known figures. The Massons’ first two children were born at the Regent’s Park house. Even after they moved to Scotland, for David to take up the Chair of English Literature at Edinburgh University, the family spent a month every year with their London family, and the London relatives also went north to reciprocate the visit. A few years later another Orme daughter, Julia, repeated her sister’s pattern when she married the physician and scientist Henry Charlton Bastian and remained in her parents’ home with her professional-man husband and growing family.

The influence of these two live-in brothers-in-law on the young Eliza Orme may have been profound, but this is something I have to speculate about, piecing together the evidence that exists and probing the silences. In Masson’s case it seems to have been the people he knew and perhaps his worldly demeanour, rather than his specific subject, English literature. Whereas Bastian was a physician specializing in neurology and psychology; and Eliza went on to study physics and chemistry at university, and later taught chemistry to school children. Two of her brothers were also doctors, so it is quite plausible that either they or Bastian influenced her initial decision to study science, perhaps intending to go into medicine. What we do not know is why she changed her mind and turned to law (although I have my own ideas about that). Meanwhile we do know about the influence of her mother. The elder Eliza Orme was active in the early days of the women’s suffrage movement, signing petitions and attending meetings—and sometimes taking her daughter along.

They do not seem to have been an especially religious family. The only evidence I have found on that score is the census records, which indicate that several of the children were christened at Calvinist independent chapels. But with distilled spirits as the foundation of the family’s fortunes, and such a disparate, cultured, and sophisticated circle of friends, they do not seem to have been particularly puritanical. Nor, as far as I know, were they pillars of the Church of England.

I write in more detail about each of Eliza’s parents and siblings in Chapter 4, but for now let us take a snapshot of the family in 1861, when the census generated its record of a household of seventeen people including twelve-year-old Eliza. Both parents were in their prime: Charles Orme was fifty-four years of age and the elder Eliza was forty-five. All their children were still at home. The eldest, Charles Edward Orme, was a surgeon and unmarried at twenty-seven. Rosaline Masson was twenty-five (David was thirty-eight, and their children Flora and David Orme Masson were five and three). Next in line should have been Helen Foster Orme, who would have been twenty-four, but she had died in 1857. Julia Orme (later Bastian) was twenty-one; her brother Campbell was eighteen. The three youngest sisters were Blanche, Eliza, and Beatrice at sixteen, twelve, and three years old respectively. Georgina Patmore was thirty-four. There were four servants in residence, who must have kept extremely busy taking care of this multigenerational family.

What was Eliza Orme doing and thinking in 1861, at twelve years of age? We know very little and have to speculate (responsibly) and imagine (intuitively) the rest. We do know that she and Rosaline and one other sister attended Bedford College for Women, though not exactly when. It was one of the first two secondary schools for girls in England. This already set them apart from most other girls of their class, but what made Eliza begin to think about pushing the limits of what women could do? Perhaps there were inspirational teachers whose influence has gone unrecorded. But I also wonder what her mother, her aunts Georgina and Emily and her father’s sisters Caroline and Emily Orme, had to say about Eliza’s ambitions? How much was she troubled by the death of her sister Helen? What were the rivalries and alliances among that large family of siblings and cousins? (The last-born Orme, Beatrice, was younger than the first Masson child, Flora.) Did Eliza enjoy the visits of her parents’ and David Masson’s worldly friends and colleagues, and listen in to their talk? Did she join in the conversations?

I speculate, and imagine, that there must have been a good deal of support at home for her ambitions. She faced so many obstacles and prejudices during a remarkable career that it is hard to believe such setbacks could have started at home. Especially since there is evidence of strong role models in that home, for intellectual, and even feminist, womanhood. So they were probably supportive when Eliza, at nineteen, decided to be among the first women in England to study at a university. Some of those institutions, under pressure, had begun cautiously to allow this innovation, although they generally postponed the awarding of actual degrees to women until decades later. In May of 1869 the University of London set its first examination for women students to qualify. Eliza Orme was one of nine women (later remembered as ‘the London nine’) who wrote that rigorous exam, and one of the six who passed it. Around the same time, though, she also applied to be a member of the initial class at Girton College, Cambridge, aiming to take French, Mathematics and Chemistry while politely declining studies in Scripture. So she was still considering her options. We know that she did go to University College London in 1872, first studying the sciences and later switching to law; we do not know why she chose London over Cambridge. It would have been more difficult to pursue a legal education at Cambridge, but she did not decide upon the law until after a couple of years of study.

Those years of the late 1860s and early 1870s were exhilarating ones for people with progressive ideas, about politics, about law, about women’s rights. John Stuart Mill’s The Subjection of Women was published in 1869. Sheldon Amos, writing anonymously in the Westminster Review, opined that ‘With the appearance of this work, we trust the old era of female subordination has finally passed away’ and in the next paragraph went on to comment favourably on a new edition of Barbara Bodichon’s Brief Summary in Plain Language of the most important Laws of England concerning Women. The Orme family not only knew Mill and Amos, they knew Bodichon, too, and both the elder and the younger Eliza Orme were connected to the movement centred in Langham Place of which Bodichon was a leader. In Chapter 3 of this book, I speculate that the seeds of Eliza Orme’s commitment to the study and practice of law might even have planted by Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon.