Andrea Geddes Poole. Philanthropy and the Construction of Victorian Women's Citizenship: Lady Frederick Cavendish and Miss Emma Cons.

Abstract

In this book Andrea Geddes Poole successfully pairs biographies of two influential if atypical Victorian British contemporaries, Lucy (Lady Frederick) Cavendish (1841–1925) and Emma Cons (1838–1912). Neither of them has been given a real biography and Poole's extensive and imaginative research on each figure makes up for this. The book is not intended as a double biography, however, but as an exploration of the changing scope, recruitment, and meanings of female voluntarism in the late Victorian and Edwardian years. The two figures could not have been more different. Lucy Cavendish was aristocratic and well connected: William Gladstone was her uncle by marriage; she was one of the famed Lyttelton sisters; she had been a maid of honor to the queen for a time. In her early twenties, in a real love match, she married Lord Frederick Cavendish, the Liberal politician who was assassinated in Dublin in 1882 shortly after being named chief secretary for Ireland. His death meant that the more traditional duties of an aristocratic political hostess would not be required of Lucy Cavendish, and she began to augment her efforts for the Girls Public Day School Trust and the Yorkshire Ladies Council of Education. She also became involved with several Church of England charities, including the Ladies Diocesan Association, as well as with the campaign to elect women to local government offices. The Royal Victoria Hall and Morley College would soon engross her. Emma Cons, housing activist and cultural entrepreneur, was the London-born daughter of a successful craftsman whose ill health required that his daughters would have to work for their living. Cons began her career as a beneficiary of philanthropy. As a teenager she was accepted into Caroline Hill's Ladies Art Guild, which trained girls in skills that would bring a livelihood, and this is how she met Hill's daughter Octavia. Emma Cons met John Ruskin through the Hills, worked for him for two years, and eventually worked with Octavia Hill as a (paid) rent collector. As a self-supporting housing manager, first with Hill in central London and then on her own in south London, Cons always lived modestly on the premises she managed. Cons's forthright gestures, terrible taste in clothes, and cockney accent made it obvious that, as Beatrice Webb famously observed, she was “‘not a lady by birth’” (p. 104), and she was never concerned about it. Her long-term partner from about 1882, Ethel Everest (daughter of Sir George Everest) was very wealthy, however, and the two lived part time at Everest's country home in Kent as well as at Cons's cottage in the Surrey Buildings.