The Children's Book - A. S. Byatt [16]
The Wellwoods appeared to be one of these open and pleasantly complicated families. Humphry Wellwood was the second son of a Quaker wool merchant, himself the younger brother of a Quaker banker. The family home was in the North of England, where Yorkshire meets Lancashire, south of Cumberland. Humphry was born in 1856 and his brother, Basil, was two years older. Basil was sent into an uncle’s broking business, in 1873, as a stockbroker’s clerk. He did well in the City, moving to an Anglo-German bank, Wildvogel & Quick, and marrying, in 1879, a Wildvogel daughter, Katharina, when he was twenty-five and she was twenty-seven.
Humphry was a very bright schoolboy, and the masters at his Quaker school persuaded George Wellwood to send him to Oxford. He entered Balliol in 1874, and came under the influence of Benjamin Jowett and T. H. Green, who believed that they were educating leaders of men, but also felt strongly what Beatrice Webb, as a young woman, described as a growing “class consciousness of sin” or guilt. This sense of sin led this generation of young men and women to go out and do good to the poor, in person. They went to the East End and managed tenement buildings. They conducted university extension classes for workers. H. R. Hyndman, who founded the Social Democratic Federation in 1882, was sceptical about the motives of these high-minded people. They came in waves of fashionable concern, he said, having discovered that there was a brick and mortar wilderness just beyond the Bank of England with two or three million inhabitants, many of them in woeful distress. Hyndman was a cynic. He remarked that “many a marriage in high life was the outcome of these exciting excursions into the unknown haunts of the poor.”
Humphry graduated in 1877, two years after the Christian Arnold Toynbee, whose devotion to the needy, and early death, were commemorated by Canon Barnett’s founding of Toynbee Hall, designed as a community of graduates, who would, themselves, live and teach amongst the poor. Humphry, full of excitement, gravitated naturally to the East End, and lived in two rooms in College Buildings, a model tenement. He gave classes in all sorts of places on all sorts of things: the English, the Ideals of Democracy, Sanitation, Henry V, the Gold Standard, and English Literature. At Oxford, like everyone else, he had studied dead languages and maths. Literature excited him greatly. He taught Shakespeare and Ruskin, Chaucer and Jonathan Swift, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Keats. He was good at it. He acquired a following of students of all ages. He read aloud, with fire and clarity. He was helpful to eager women, after the class was over.
In 1879 he put on A Midsummer Night’s Dream in a church hall in Whitechapel. The cast was a daring mixture of real workers and idealistic visitors. It was also a daring mixture of men and women. Humphry thought almost constantly about women, whatever else he was thinking of. He dreamed waists and ankles, unwound hair and the haunches that moved under the staid skirts. The Dream is a good play for women, but this project was (he knew it) entirely inspired by two particular young women who came to all his classes and sat at the front, asking clever questions. They were out of place amongst the Cockneys, Irish, Polish and German Jews. They spoke broad Yorkshire. Humphry’s own accent was educated Yorkshire, with some flat vowels. They wore plain, well-cut dark dresses, with very pretty little hats, decorated with gay silk flowers, anemones and pansies, poppies and violets. The elder was strikingly lovely, with huge brown eyes and coiled mahogany hair. The younger had the brown eyes, but lesser, and usually cast down, and nut-brown hair scraped subtly tighter. They were certainly not condescending lady visitors. They were the deserving poor—their gloves were threadbare, their shoes creased and worn—but there was something loose and wild about them under the respectability, that appealed to something wild in