Alternative Histories of the Self by Anna Clark

Author:Anna Clark
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

Hinton and the family

In his early writings, Hinton saw marriage in rather mystical terms, as the union of the two opposite principles of male and female into one, which could produce a higher, spiritual form of life. As so often with Hinton, he intensified the conventional Victorian focus on romantic love—and brought out its contradictions. While Evangelicals saw marriage and family as a religious calling, Luke 14:26 quotes Jesus as admonishing his followers to leave their families, even to hate their families, for family life could distract from God. While Evangelical, middle-class Victorians valued family life above all, Hinton’s father warned that because “the time is short,” death would soon vanquish the precious affections of husband and wife and parent and child; therefore, the believer should focus on God.27 Hinton junior took this even further to consistently criticize marriage and the family. In 1856, he wrote in his private Selections from Manuscripts that the love of a mother for child, or love in marriage, could still be seen as love of self; true divine love, by contrast, required giving up the self to God.28 In his 1861 book, Man in His Dwelling Place, he wrote that while marital affection was God’s own gift, it “fills our hearts with passions, and burns us up with the fire of insatiable desires.”29

Hinton’s turn from the practice of medicine to philosophical writing troubled his own marriage, since it necessitated a move for a few years from their large comfortable home to a small terraced house in Tottenham, where his wife Margaret had to keep the house clean with one servant. When she pled for money for the children’s clothes and school, Hinton declared it was a “superstition … that people ‘ought’ to live according to their income; … that a man’s duty is to give all luxury to wife, all advantages to child and so on.”30 As usual with Hinton, he elevated his petty marital complaints to a philosophical level. When Margaret asked that he pay to replace a ragged carpet, he wrote in his manuscripts that “we see the utmost evils but attend more to our own trifling pleasures.”31 He rebuked his wife for spending so much time on housekeeping instead of higher pursuits: “The sensitiveness of your senses to dirt makes you blind.”32 Of course, she was cleaning for him instead of pursuing her own vocation of nature painting.

Like some other Victorian men, Hinton chafed against domestic obligations.33 James Fitzjames Stephen, a fellow member of the Metaphysical Society, denounced the luxuries of the home for sapping the energy men needed to rule authoritatively.34 In contrast, Hinton linked this flight from domesticity to social justice. He thought that men, urged on by their wives, selfishly concentrated too much on the domestic pleasures of the home; people should recognize that their own domestic comfort depended on the misery of others. This notion that domesticity was selfish even influenced Hinton’s friend, social purity activist Ellice Hopkins, who criticized middle-class Victorian families for refusing to let their daughters leave home to engage in philanthropy.

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