This is, however, a letter written in surprising bitterness of spirit, full of irritation with some of her Scottish acquaintance and also, alas, with the family of her son’s bride. She quotes her brother Henry as saying that the gentlemen of the new generation are not fit society for Martha and Mary, as feeling that Woronzow’s imminent marriage to Agnes Graham will not bring a good ‘connexion’ and that Woronzow might have done much better. Mary Somerville agrees that her brother is the only gentleman and his wife and her sister the only ladies she has seen since she came, but she believes that Woronzow’s happiness is most important and everyone speaks well of Agnes. There is an uncharacteristic coarseness about this which can perhaps only come out of encounters with our nearest and dearest. The oppressiveness of provincial society is hardly a peculiarly Scottish problem.
Her local places were certainly proud of her. The Kelso Chronicle reviewed her Personal Recollections, entirely unresentful of the occasional slight to Scotland, justly recognising that ‘Mary Somerville lived so as to get the greatest possible amount of happiness out of her long life’ (n.d. after 18 Dec. 1873) and the Kelso Mail (25 March 1874), in its laudatory review, tells a doubtless apocryphal but charming story about Mary Somerville after the planting of a cedar at the residence of the Misses Ramsay, friends of her mother:
One of the Miss Ramsays said, ‘May we again all meet around it.’ ‘May we all meet under it’ was the wish of her sister; and ‘May we all meet above it’ was the characteristic wish of Mrs Somerville.
DAUGHTER, WIFE AND MOTHER:
Although Mary Somerville had to contend with her parents’ disapproval of her studies, and although her father worried, probably half in jest, about her ending up in a straitjacket, she obviously enjoyed close relationships with both of them in her later life and much regretted their deaths. She enjoyed a quiet domestic life with her parents after the death of her first husband and there is no doubt that her mother was later extremely proud of her daughter’s scholarly achievements and delighted by the publication of her books. She writes twice in 1831 expressing her anxiety to hear about the reception of her daughter’s book – ‘I am […] anxious to know how your book is received by the public – write me soon, my dearest Mary.’ Early in the next year she is expressing her pleasure at the book’s success and her daughter’s good health.18 As for her father, Vice-Admiral of the Red, Mary Somerville was extremely proud of him and nothing in his illiberal Tory opinions could obliterate this; she always admired those who, like him, faced the hardships of the sea.
With her siblings and with her children, Mary Somerville suffered, as did most people at the time, from the frequency of infantile and premature deaths. The death of her elder brother, Sam, in India at 21, greatly affected her and the first draft of the autobiography has a double row of dots across the page after the description of his death, as if to signal an irreversible difference in her life. Like so many women of the time, she also had to suffer the pain of the deaths of her children. The most affecting childhood death certainly was that of her eldest daughter, Margaret, who died in 1823 before her eleventh birthday. The Somervilles had obviously invested a great deal in this young girl: ‘She was,’ Mary Somerville says, ‘a child of intelligence and acquirements far beyond her tender age’ (p. 124); indeed, made unscientific perhaps by grief, she feared that she may have overtaxed Margaret’s young mind:
I felt her loss the more acutely because I feared I had strained her young mind too much. My only reason for mentioning this family affliction is to warn mothers against the fatal error I have made.19
Mary Somerville also suffered the sorrow of having her son, Woronzow, predecease her. Of course, her longevity made this the less remarkable: Woronzow was, after all, 60 when he died. Neither of her daughters married and both lived only a few years after their mother’s death. Woronzow Greig had a public life and so it is possible to know more about him than the Recollections reveal,20 but Martha and Mary remain rather shadowy figures in spite of their firmer presence in the Recollections. Going to the letters does give the two girls clearer individual presences. Their own letters reveal quite spirited responses to the wise and the great of their mother’s acquaintance; and they were educated and active women – they sailed their own boat, rode in the Roman Campagna, played instruments, sang and painted. Yet, in the letters of their parents and their friends, they are almost always ‘the girls’ or ‘Martha and Mary’, as if a kind of unit, and it is hard not to feel that they lived their lives mainly for their mother. Martha has her strongest presence as an editor of her mother’s autobiography. Frances Power Cobbe confirms this in her obituary in the Echo: ‘her husband “rose up and called her blessed”, her children devoted their lives to her comfort’ (3 Dec. 1872). It is a commonplace that it is difficult to be the children of famous parents and Mary Somerville’s girls seem to have suffered in this way. There is no shade of resentment about this, either in or out of the published work, and it is quite clear that Mary Somerville wanted her children to be happy and independent. But could she perhaps have tried harder to detach them from her, was she too glad in the end to have them ‘support her tottering steps’ (p. 299)? I do not know; she herself would need to have said more, and more openly, for judgment to be passed and she does refuse openness about intimate family affairs.
In revealing the contents of Mary Somerville’s rather sour letter to her daughters about Scotland and some Scots, I have already violated her insistence on the privacy of correspondence but, since the violation helps us to come closer to her feelings about her country and its people, I cannot summon a great deal of guilt. And we may slightly regret Mary Somerville’s faithfulness to her decision to avoid the intimate details of her family life. Or, at least, we may feel that she regards as intimate much that we might now feel is merely everyday and that we should like to have been told. The early section of the Recollections remains the most delightful because the details of daily life are so sharp and because Mary Somerville’s love for her father and mother and her future father-in-law emerges so clearly at this point. But some silences are verging on the obsessive in their insistence on privacy, and the silences seem to be Mary Somerville’s, not Martha’s. She never mentions, for example, that her mother was William Fairfax’s second wife, his first wife also being from Burntisland (EP, 1). More understandably, perhaps, she fails to mention that William Somerville had been married before, and that he also had a natural child (EP, 7). Yet the existence of James Craig Somerville was never repudiated. William Somerville acknowledged his son and brought him back with him from South Africa, naming him after Sir James Craig and educating him until he graduated as a doctor of medicine from Edinburgh University. Nor did he exclude this son from his life with Mary Somerville: indeed, James Craig Somerville was fairly close to Woronzow Greig, Mary Somerville’s surviving son from her first marriage. Mary Somerville’s mother, writing in July 1831, asks that her ‘kindest love be given to Dr James and his pretty wife’.21
Dr James Craig had certainly been privy to the skeleton in Woronzow’s cupboard that his mother also hides from public view: it came to light at Woronzow’s death that he too had had an illegitimate child, fathered when he was 19 or 20, a daughter to whom he had given financial support but whose existence he kept secret from his wife, Agnes. This obviously caused a fair amount of family commotion. Mary Somerville seems to have been a little tactless, but there was no breach of relations between mother and daughter-in-law. Nor was Mary Somerville particularly shocked, consistent with her principle that charity was to be preferred to chastity; Woronzow had lived a decent Christian life and had helped his natural daughter and her family.22
It does not take a very percipient reader to guess that all was not