The Booles and the Hintons by Kennedy Gerry;

Author:Kennedy, Gerry;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 4593143
Publisher: Cork University Press
Published: 2016-05-19T04:00:00+00:00

Mary Ellen Boole (1856–1908), the eldest Boole daughter.

On 26 April 1908 her youngest son ‘Ted’ wrote to a friend, ‘Mamma is well and flourishing – at least physically,’ but adds, ‘she is beginning to be rather despondent.’ A month later, Mary Ellen Boole Hinton killed herself. The Washington Times of 28 May wrote that she was, ‘found dead in bed with a rubber tube connected with the [gas] chandelier between her lips’. Only recently she had written, ‘Life is something we have the privilege of ending when we choose. When I think it is time to die I shall end it all.’

Charles Howard Hinton’s sudden death must have hit Mary Ellen like a hammer blow. The Japanese letters reveal a period of consolidation in their lives, attracted by sharing its novel and exotic culture. Her Boole creativity found a spur there to poetry, some of which was published in Nature’s Notes (1901), a book of fifty poems dedicated to Charles Howard. Some of them appeared in magazines in the US including Harper’s. They tend to the mournful.

Perhaps the tenor is unsurprising; as the eldest of the Boole daughters she would have felt most keenly the equally premature death of their father, George. The girls’ subsequent early upbringing in poverty at Queen’s College, London and the unpredictability of their mother, Mary Everest, must have all added to a lifelong despondency. The other creative salve seems to be her love of music, although even here there is a sense of disappointment and being cheated. Like her youngest sister Ethel’s petulant complaint about the tempered scale she asks, ‘out of an infinity of possible notes why has God limited them to twelve?’ Mary may well have been frustrated at not pursuing the musical talent that her Queen’s College reports recognised. In Credo she, however, affirms her devotion: ‘Thought-wise my soul’s agnostic to the end / But music-wise, is mystic to the end’.

Her poem entitled ‘Nature’s Notes’ finds her singing praises to the lilt of falling water, the trill of bird musicians, ‘when my soul goes exploring / All the heights and deeps of tone’. Had both of her artistic talents been more recognised perhaps her life would have been more fulfilled. Without Charles Howard, cut off from her sisters and her sons at that time dispersing from the family home, she must have felt that she had nothing more to contribute. Not even her ‘piece of sunshine’, her youngest son, ‘Ted’, seemed to sustain her will to live. ‘A Last Confession’ runs presciently, ‘but now / My husband’s spirit with my God’s is blent / And that is well – death dews creep o’er my brow / my length of days is spent’.

Alice Boole had moved to Liverpool sometime in the 1880s to work as a secretary to the merchant, John Falk, with whom she collaborated on Hinton’s New Era. In Lancashire she met and married Walter Stott, an actuary. They had two children, Mary and Leonard, 1892.2 Despite his apparent insistence that

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