Biography
Excellence in Scholarship and Learning
Excellence in Scholarship and Learning
Jeanie, an ‘Army of One’
Mrs Nassau Senior, 1828-1877, the First Woman in Whitehall
Sybil Oldfield is Research Reader in English, University of Sussex. Her books include Spinsters of this Parish – F. M. Mayor and Mary Sheepshanks (1984); Women Against the Iron Fist – Anti-militarist thinking 1900–1989 (1989); Doers of the Word: British Women Humanitarians, 1900–1950: a Biographical Dictionary (2001 and 2007); and, with Gwenyth Shaw, ed., The Old Familiar Faces, Poems on the Experience of Ageing (2007).
The rediscovery of a Victorian heroine – ‘the missing link’ between Josephine Butler and Octavia Hill
A significant addition to Victorian socio-cultural history and to Women’s Studies
This first full biography of Mrs. Nassau Senior, 1822–1877,
tells how an extraordinary woman escaped from the constraints of
Victorian domesticity to become the first woman in Whitehall and
one of Britain’s great social reformers. An ardent Christian
Socialist radical, like her brother Thomas Hughes (author of Tom
Brown’s Schooldays), Jeanie Senior pioneered social work
with Octavia Hill, co-founded the British Red Cross in the Franco-Prussian
war and battled as ‘Government Inspector’ on behalf
of exploited Workhouse girls. She was ferociously attacked for advocating
the fostering of all pauper orphans rather than their incarceration
and for indicting Workhouse ‘Barrack’ schools for producing
prostitution fodder. Her fight to defend her findings against male
hostility politicized her and she became an icon for the late 19th
century women’s movement.
Jeanie Senior was also a significant
figure in the worlds of art, music and literature, even being, it
is argued here, the vital inspiration for her friend George Eliot
in creating Dorothea, heroine of Middlemarch. Her life
was a great ‘human story’ as she struggled in the teeth
of multiple bereavement, an unhappy marriage and cancer in order
to rescue others more desperate and vulnerable still. Florence Nightingale
told her she had been ‘a noble Army of one’ and later
grieved that her ‘premature death was a national and irreparable
loss’.
| Hardback ISBN: | 978-1-84519-253-2 |
| Hardback Price: | £55.00 / $79.50 |
| Release Date: | December 2007 |
| Paperback ISBN: | 978-1-84519-254-9 |
| Paperback Price: | £17.95 / $35.00 |
| Release Date: | December 2007 |
| Page Extent / Format: | 360 pp. / 229 x 152 mm |
| Illustrated: | Yes |
List of Illustrations
Foreword by Graham Senior-Milne
Acknowledgements
INTRODUCTION 1
CHAPTER ONE Tom Brown’s Sister – Jeanie Hughes
CHAPTER TWO Being ‘Mrs. Nassau Senior’, 1848–1853
CHAPTER THREE Enter Watts and Mérimée, 1852–1856
CHAPTER FOUR Surviving Four Hard Years, 1856–1860
CHAPTER FIVE Life at Elm House, 1861–1864 – ‘Come
to us!’
CHAPTER SIX Father and Son
CHAPTER SEVEN Politics and Society in the Late 1860s
CHAPTER EIGHT Interlude: Music and Friendships
CHAPTER NINE George Eliot’s Dorothea?
CHAPTER TEN War on Two Fronts
CHAPTER ELEVEN The First Woman Civil Servant
CHAPTER TWELVE The Government Inspector Goes on a Girl Hunt
CHAPTER THIRTEEN Mrs. Senior’s Report
CHAPTER FOURTEEN Reception of the Report
CHAPTER FIFTEEN Birth of a New Woman, 1875–1876
CHAPTER SIXTEEN A Bonny Fighter
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN Afterwards
CONCLUSION
APPENDIX I: What Happened to the Others in the Story?
APPENDIX II: Checklist of Reviews and Notices of Mrs. Senior’s
Report, 1874
APPENDIX III: The Times Obituary, 29 March 1877
APPENDIX IV: References to ‘Mrs. Nassau Senior’,
1877–2007
Notes
Bibliography and Further Reading
Index
This absorbing book is the first full-length
biography of Mrs. Nassau Senior, as she was commonly known, the
first woman to be appointed a civil servant in Britain. Her name
is rarely remembered these days, often merely footnoted in biographies
of Victorian male contemporaries, including her famous brother Thomas
Hughes, the author of the popular novel Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857). But drawing upon previously untapped sources – especially
letters written between Jeanie Nassau Senior and her only child
Walter, and a network of friends, including George Eliot, Octavia
Hill, Jenny Lind, Julia Margaret Cameron, and George Frederick Watts
– Sybil Oldfield presents a poignant picture of the private
and public struggles of a woman deserving attention.
... Through her friendship with Octavia Hill, she became involved
in housing reform for the working classes, as well as interested
in the schooling of poor girls. But philanthropy did not pay the
bills, and Jeanie supplemented her small income by becoming a professional
voice teacher. Her extensive circle of musical and literary friends
included Eliot who, Oldfield claims, based the character of Dorothea
in Middlemarch (1871–72) on Jeanie. But unlike Dorothea, Jeanie
became the first woman civil servant in Britain when, in 1872, she
was offered the post of Poor Law Inspector, with responsibility
to investigate the ins and out of the fostering (“boarding
out”) of pauper girls.
... The story is sympathetically told, with a wealth of fascinating
historical detail. It adds considerably to our knowledge about the
struggles that women faced in the past, not only when entering the
public sphere of employment but also when trapped in unhappy marriages.
Victorian Studies
The fascinating biography of a Victorian who should never
have been forgotten. Both the poignant private life and the heroic
public life of ‘Mrs Nassau Senior’ here find an ebullient,
witty and passionate chronicler.
Barbara Hardy, Professor
Emeritus, University of London, author of Forms of Feeling in Victorian
Fiction and George Eliot, A Critic’s Biography
This wise, tender and engaging portrait
of Jeanie Senior, champion of the workhouse girl, reveals not just
that she was admired by the great and good of Victorian Britain,
but that now we must count her as one of them. A wonderful book.
Seth Koven, Rutgers University, author of Slumming: Sexual and
Social Politics in Victorian London
The best outcome of gender studies has been the
uncovering of neglected woman pioneers of the past ... [In] this
meticulously researched and beautifully written book, Oldfield has
brought one of these stalwarts back to life ... Anyone interested
in the Victorian period will find this account of Jeanie Senior’s
struggles informative, absorbing - and intensely moving.
Jacqueline Bannerjee, Contributing Editor, Victorian Web
Biographies post-Lytton Strachey that continue
to insist on the essential goodness of their Victorian main subject
are hard to find.... [Hence] to read about someone so intelligently
humane who was also possessed with an unstoppable drive to do the
right thing, even when she was dying, is like taking a mental holiday.
Nicholas Tucker, The Tablet
An important contribution
to Victorian studies, a life style told with admiration, sympathy
and style, as cramful of character and emotion as a novel, and of
great interest to George Eliot scholars. George
Eliot is only one amongst many Victorian characters in an excellent
biography of a very different woman, whose family life, love problems,
sufferings, creativity, zeal and remarkable social vision have been
triumphantly brought to light after a century’s eclipse.
The George Eliot Review
Jeanie Hughes Senior was, until recently, largely forgotten
among the number of women in nineteenth-century Britain who blazed
the path that the Suffragists would follow a generation later. Despite
a sad marriage, the deaths of many people she loved, and the demands
for care of others, Senior campaigned for better treatment of the
poor and became the first female civil servant in England, in charge
of the fate of young girls in workhouses and those who had been
put out to domestic service. Her report on the horrible conditions
of living for these children caused a furore. Oldfield was approved
by the Senior family to have access to Jeanie’s papers, which
her son had ordered closed until 2000. Therefore this study provides
new information on Senior as well as her many friends: George Eliot,
Tennyson, Florence Nightingale and many others. This is a welcome
addition to the history of the women’s movement in Britain.
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