An Unconventional Wife by Mary Hoban

Author:Mary Hoban
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIO026000, BIO006000, BIO022000, HIS054000, SOC010000
Publisher: Scribe Publications Pty Ltd
Published: 2019-04-01T16:00:00+00:00

If the arguments between them had a remarkable intensity, so too did their reconciliations. By the beginning of 1867 Julia was pregnant again — her tenth pregnancy in fifteen years — but she faced this one with more equilibrium than previously. Tom’s tutoring scheme appeared to be prospering, the house-building was progressing, the children seemed settled, and there was much to occupy her in the last months before the birth. When misfortune struck, it was not Tom’s conscience that caused it, but one of his pupils, who had contracted scarlet fever. Fearful for her unborn child, Julia fled immediately to her friend Emily Tyndall in Birmingham, but it was too late. The baby died at birth. Julia was desperately ill and, for a time, near death. Somehow, she survived, but her battered body would carry no more children. She now had another date to remember alongside that of little Arthur whose body was buried on the other side of the globe.

While Julia was absent, Theodore returned home in disgrace from his school, and Polly took on the task of tutoring him. Julia was away when the family was plunged into further grief with the sudden death of Matthew’s twenty-month-old son, Basil, in January 1868. She was away, too, for the final move into Laleham, further marking the house as Tom’s project rather than a joint one.

Months later, when she finally packed up her grief and returned home to Oxford, Julia walked into a storm. Laleham had become another of Tom’s ill-fated schemes, the debt so large that it now appeared there was no alternative than to sell it. She was both devastated and mortified. Unable to extract any more money from his father’s estate and feeling he could not turn to his mother or to Matthew for assistance, Tom did as he had done so often before and sought help from his brother-in-law.

When William Forster examined Tom’s finances, it became immediately apparent that Tom was incapable of managing his tutoring business. He had not even instituted a payment system, simply content that his students pay if they could and when they could. It was inconceivable and unacceptable to Forster that Tom could be so cavalier with a wife and eight children to support, a large house under mortgage, and servants to pay. Sympathetic towards him, but determined that his brother-in-law should better manage his affairs, William Forster only agreed to organise a second mortgage on the house when a student payment system was established. The family was able to stay in Laleham.

Before the year was finished, death once again visited the Arnolds — this time taking Julia’s grandfather Anthony Fenn Kemp and another of Matthew’s sons, his eldest and Tom’s namesake, only sixteen years of age. Young Tom’s death was particularly tragic for the Arnold’s coming as it did only months after little Basil’s death. Delicate from birth, young Tom had become more so after he had fallen from a horse whilst staying at Fox How in the summer of 1868.

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