10 Gender, Age, and Authority: The Case of Anne, William Ewart, and Helen Gladstone

Such indeed is the force of prejudice that what was called spirit and wit in him [her brother] was cruelly repressed as forwardness in me.

Mary Wollstonecraft

Friendships with women have constituted no small portion of my existence. I know the meaning of the words ‘weakness is power; real weakness is real power’.

William Ewart Gladstone

From the last decades of the twentieth century much effort has been spent in detailing multiple forms of masculinity. The focus has been on the contradictions within what it is to be a man or the power confirmed on some men over other men, often in class and racial terms. Although this has been a welcome development, there is no substitute for an interactive history of gender that encompasses the way men have utilized their position, what this has meant for them, and the consequences for women's life chances and their responses in terms of acceptance, accommodation, rebellion, or retaliation.¹Close

The material in Part II indicates how a historical study of relations between brothers and sisters may assist understanding at both individual and societal levels. Since siblings usually start from the same milieu, their differing life trajectories may illustrate aspects of what has been called the gender order of a specific time, place, and social group. However, within a particular family, birth order, personality, and life events may have cross-cut masculine advantage. The anomalous position of an elder sister with a younger brother had to be negotiated within accepted cultural expectations. The primacy of an older brother increased dominance over a younger sister. This chapter investigates these issues in the story of Anne, William, and Helen Gladstone, where a brother's public life made stark contrast to his sisters’ incognito existence.²Close

As discussed in Part II, among the upper middle classes with their highly differentiated gender constructions, identity was often first awakened via treatment meted out to boys and girls within the family. In adulthood a man's appearance of physical vigour and bodily hardiness was highly valued, but it was more likely that the wielding of authority, professional reputation, skills in oratory and writing, a healthy bank balance, ownership of property, and the accoutrements of his home defined his status as a man, if not a gentleman. The potential tension between physical and mental attributes of manhood was partially resolved through covertly accepting young men's perceived need to splash out—in sport, adventurous travel, attempts at sexual conquest—before settling down to a serious vocation or the funding and heading of a domestic establishment.

Conflicts and slippages simmered within the valued achievement of that complex characteristic, manliness.  ³Close Adolescents and young men measured themselves against their peers in terms of its quixotic demands. But manliness also implied seeking the opposite attributes in their sisters.⁴Close Women's lifelong childish status was equated to physical and mental weakness, lack of sensuous, erotic desires, and natural submission to authority. These idealized constructions were reinforced—although in sometimes paradoxical ways—within the Evangelical religious movement, which was at its height for the generations of the early nineteenth century. The call for submission of the self to God implied constant examination of thoughts and behaviour against a rigid moral code.

For men brought up in the Evangelical tradition, the heightened emotional concentration on one's inward state and self abnegation to a higher authority ran counter to the demands of active, independent manliness. These tensions were ratcheted further in the full flush of youthful physical and sexual energy. Guilt at not controlling and directing the passions away from sinful desires could wreak havoc for those who took such dictates seriously. The overpowering of what they regarded as baser elements became a heroic struggle. In these households, guilt at facing unacceptable emotions featured largely for both genders, but the tension inherent in adult masculinity seems to have been heightened for men who had been raised by exceptionally religious mothers.⁵Close These feelings fed men's perceived need for the pure, genteel lady of their own class to act as moral arbiter, as opposed to the servants, factory girls, or in some cases prostitutes, whose function was to soak up polluting, sinful elements; or the homoerotic lure of the young worker or soldier. In Freud's well-known phrase: ‘where they love they do not desire and where they desire they cannot love’.⁶Close

Submission of self should have come more easily for the Christian, gently brought up girl and woman, given its congruity with the feminine ideal. But how these strictures worked in individual lives depended on the temperament as well as possibilities available within a woman's domestic milieu. The denial of autonomy, of physical activity, the lack of opportunities for intervention in a larger world, and the lack of acknowledgement of erotic or sexual feelings could create its own kind of torment.

Such cultural artefacts and mental constructions overlay the messy, conflict-ridden real world of embodied boys and girls, men and women. Recent scholarship has emphasized how often attitudes and behaviour deviated from prescriptive portrayals.⁷Close Nevertheless, the power of normative expectations should not be lightly dismissed. Those who obviously stood out against the prevailing codes risked not only social ostracism or even material and financial deprivation, but were also deemed guilty of dereliction of a duty to family, community, and class. For both young men and women the disparaging of a person's looks and other personal attributes through gossip and ridicule were often employed to enforce gender norms. Even such seemingly light-hearted sanctions could have long-term, pernicious psychic effects on self-confidence, especially for women.

As examples in Part II have shown, many girls and young women took willingly, if not enthusiastically, to domestic concerns as helpmates to, or substitutes for, a mother.  They might throw themselves into the social round, where their contacts through kin and friends offered considerable opportunities. Or these might be combined with involvement in church-related and philanthropic activities. At this level the family's wealth and social position discouraged commercial or professional income-producing activity for its women. The differing trajectories of the talented brother and sister, Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn, are instructive. From early childhood Fanny, elder by a few years, showed musical promise equal to Felix in both performance and composition. However, when she was 14 her father had written to her:

Music will perhaps become his [Felix's] profession while for you it can and must only be an ornament, never the root of your being and doing . . . and your very joy at the praise he earns proves that you might, in his place, have merited equal approval. Remain true to these sentiments and to this line of conduct; they are feminine, and only what is truly feminine is an ornament to your sex.

Although Felix encouraged her music making, he forbade Fanny to play or publish her compositions in public. She confined herself to writing songs and small chamber works, a few of these appearing under Felix's name.⁸Close

Where opportunities were restricted through family pressures, personal shyness, lack of social skills, or geographical isolation, even materially well-off young women could wilt into indeterminate mental as well as physical health. It was assumed that their femininity already placed them at the mercy of their emotions, making them vulnerable to such an outcome.⁹Close The contrast to a young man's experience is illustrated in the lives of the Scott brother and sister twins born in 1824, whose provincial family owned a prosperous timber merchant business.¹⁰Close In his late teens Samuel Scott—whether willingly or under duress is not recorded—entered the firm as a junior to his uncle, who was head of both enterprise and family. His twin, Charlotte, after a few years at boarding school returned to live at home, where she developed a serious interest in botany, spending much time in her greenhouse. At the age of 21 Samuel was offered a partnership by his uncle with the prospect of eventually becoming head of the firm.

Charlotte lived as a daughter at home in the isolation of a rural area with little chance of joining the all-male natural history societies that were the breeding ground for many nascent scientists. In her early twenties she had been overtaken by a mysterious illness described as ‘a nervous complaint’ accompanied by headaches, rigor, tremor, weakness, and feelings of oppression. Her twin brother, their uncle, and others in their circle were sympathetic, discussing her condition that one specialist had described as being ‘out of tune but no wires broken’.¹¹Close A range of medications and regimes were tried but without much success. Whether Samuel felt guilt—or irritation—at Charlotte's invalid state or how Charlotte felt about Samuel's advancement in the business and later recognition in the community, what impact their external situations had on deeper levels of their psychic landscape remains unknown.

The recognition of one's own tendencies and ambivalent feelings in a sibling may rouse deep anxiety or even furious antagonism at the same time as eliciting empathy and identification. The strong emphasis on gender difference in upper-middle-class culture at this time emphasized brotherly–sisterly devotion and mutual support. Unacknowledged similarities in personal qualities that ran counter to the approved prototypes could stir up anxieties. The brother or sister who was defined in mirror opposition to one's self precluded the need to deal with unwanted feelings and desires, which could then be projected onto the other. Siblings thus could become tied together in a kind of hostile dependence.¹²Close In some cases, these relationships were marked by a crescendo of erotically tinged yearning for elements in the perceived ‘other’.¹³Close

Men's culturally and legally sanctioned monopoly of resources and opportunities presented particular obstacles to allowing sisters to admit to their own ‘masculine’ ambitions akin to those of their brothers or to overtly resist a brother's dictates. Some girls and young women coped by submerging their own identity in that of their brothers. With pride, sisters aided and supported their brothers’ lives and careers, smoothing over or denying their peccadilloes. To gain leverage a sister might invoke the nature of the sibling tie itself or call on her expressed love for her brother to bring the errant to heel. They might try to manipulate a special relationship with a parent and/or other family member in an attempt to control or counteract a brother's influence. Or they could employ the common device of the less powerful: delaying response to directions and requests or simply withdrawing into silence.

For those in positions of power given by gender, age, or sheer personality, to care for and about a sister—or brother—combined uneasily with desire to control. In the atmosphere of intensely religious circles such negative feelings between family members had to be translated into an acceptable form. For, as the historian William Reddy has noted, a particular culture and its language moulds which emotions may rise to the surface as well as the way they are expressed in words and behaviour.¹⁴Close

In the voluminous body of writing about the career and personality of William Ewart Gladstone, four times Prime Minister and one of Britain's most influential, controversial politicians, two elements have consistently puzzled commentators: his habit of nocturnal wanderings in a search to ‘redeem’ high-class prostitutes and his uncharacteristically bullying, even hostile, attitude to his younger sister, Helen. There appears to have been gentle charity to the former and harsh lack of understanding to the latter.¹⁵Close Neither of these issues looms large in the Gladstone corpus, but they make for uneasy assessment of the man.¹⁶Close Inability to acknowledge the role of creating and maintaining a masculine character within the culture of his time has largely contributed to incomprehension about this very public man.¹⁷Close

What can be resurrected from the lives of William, Anne, and Helen, and their brothers depends on the way knowledge has been not only recorded, but also understood along class and gender lines. Starting in his own lifetime, William Gladstone's character has been minutely documented. In addition to his lifelong diary entries now in print, there are innumerable biographies and visual representations.¹⁸Close The sisters, Anne and Helen, remain forgotten, shadowy figures. For them only a couple of portraits and a scattering of private papers remain. In this chapter, the best that can be done is to bring together these exceedingly uneven bodies of evidence while keeping in mind the inevitable gaps and silences.

The Gladstone family was part of the aspiring upper middle strata deeply imbued with the language and beliefs of their intensely felt Anglican Evangelical religion. The father, John Gladstone, son of a modest Scottish tradesman, became a Liverpool merchant whose fortunes were based on trade in grain, sugar, cotton, and slaves, with substantial West Indian properties. Increasing wealth led to his political ambitions, mainly at the local level, although he eventually gained a baronetcy in old age. His position was socially enhanced by his marriage at 34 to the 28-year-old Anne Mackenzie Robertson from a prosperous Scots family with gentry connections.¹⁹Close The next generation of the Gladstone children was raised in this atmosphere amidst the wealth of commercial Liverpool. Their milieu was typical of second-generation high bourgeoisie. They were brought up taking for granted a lifestyle surrounded by luxury and cared for by servants, yet as adults leaving them never quite sure of their social position.

[Sir] John Gladstone (1764–1851) m. Anne Mackenzie Robertson (1771–1835)

Anne Mackenzie, 1802–27

Thomas, 1804–89

Robertson, 1805–75

John Neilson, 1807–63

William Ewart, 1809–98

Helen Jane, 1814–80

In this period of unlimited births there might well have been more children save for their mother having begun childbearing at the age of 30 and her subsequent weakened condition after producing the six children within the next twelve years. The family was dominated by John Gladstone, who was 51 at the time of his last child's birth. As a virtually self-made man, he made sure that his children felt the full weight of his authority, backed by God's commands (he had been known as ‘the Juggernaut’ by some of his nieces and nephews).²⁰Close At least consciously, anger and rebellion could not be turned against the all-powerful God and His earthly representative, Father. The gentler, often-ailing mother put guilt high on the list of parental control, allied as it was to a deeply held belief in sin and the necessity to constantly be aware of temptation.

Here was a household whose everyday life was steeped in God's immediate presence, its inmates constantly yearning for signs of redemption. Self-control and discipline over one's inherently sinful nature defined ultimate virtue. The Gladstone offspring were cushioned by wealth, their social position well advanced within regional if not national circles. Thus they absorbed a paradoxical sense of self at once steeped in feelings of personal unworthiness, together with a highly developed self-righteousness. According to a recent study of William Gladstone, this potent combination could feed ‘a pooled reservoir of rage’, where issues of anger, restraint, and authority remained problematic through much of his life.²¹Close

The configuration of the family meant that as eldest child as well as eldest daughter, Anne was close to her mother. The three middle sons, Thomas, Robertson, and John, formed a masculine sub-group, leaving William somewhat on his own. Helen played the typical youngest child's role as ‘pet’. Anne, seven years William's senior, had a semi-maternal relationship to her younger brother. When she was 8, she had become William's godmother. Anne took her duties for her brother's intellectual and religious development seriously, an attention beyond the capacity of their mother and outside the interests of the father.

Brother and sister shared their deeply felt religious world. For William, Anne was the embodiment of the Evangelical view of life. He always remembered her telling him as a small boy that when he arrived in heaven St Peter would ask him to give an account of how he had spent every minute in his life.²²Close Although Anne instilled a lifelong sense of guilt in William, she was deeply sympathetic to his struggling efforts to live up to the Evangelical moral order. Above all, she listened to and soothed his doubts—about his faith, his view of the world, his capacities, and his attraction to a life in the Church as opposed to his father's more worldly ambitions for him.

The boys when young all attended a small school funded and directed by their father and run by an Evangelical clergyman of his choosing. As they grew older, John Gladstone's keen social ambitions led him to send all his sons to Eton, the most aristocratic of public schools, whatever their talents and inclinations. Robertson left Eton early to join the family firm, but Thomas struggled to stay the course. In his turn, at the age of 11 William left his sheltered and puritanical home milieu for Eton's large and alien world. Quite aside from the formal teaching, the boy had to face the roughhousing of everyday life in an institution that was still often chaotic and brutal. Physical conditions were harsh; the regime among both boys and masters punitive, even violent, and rivalry was endemic.²³Close William had to go through the subservient, bullying experience of being a ‘fag’ to an older boy before gaining a fag for himself. Early letters home boast that ‘fighting is a favourite diversion, hardly a day passing without one, two, three or even four more or less mortal combats’. He also took his turn at the public and ritualistic flogging that many considered a rite of passage.²⁴Close Later he described playing a leading part in the debating society, where ‘the atmosphere was both friendly and competitive, with an especial emphasis on prowess of presentation and argument’. As later with politics, ‘both a game and a high art’.  ²⁵Close

William felt Anne's values and warm personality a bulwark against the aggressive, lewd atmosphere of the public school. He took for granted her interest in all his doings, his friends, trials, and accomplishments.²⁶Close After hearing about the success of William's first debate at the age of 15 Anne wrote: ‘we all congratulate you on the happy commencement of your oratorical career! You may be assured of our best wishes.’²⁷Close For boys like William, sisterly adoration was welcome, but could also mean strong pressures to live up to expectations.

Anne was educated completely at home. She relayed family news and kept all her brothers up to date on each other's comings and goings. Despite her serious religious and moral outlook, Anne comes across as an attractive and sprightly personality. In his letters William affectionately referred to Anne as ‘little witch’ and the family's ‘Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Home and Colonial Department’.²⁸Close As with many sisters with brothers away at school, it was Anne who listened, advised, admonished, for example warning her young brother against being ensnared by the theatre. She was instrumental in William's spiritual development as he prepared for Confirmation. At that time he recorded in his diary that he had received a ‘long and most excellent and pious letter from my beloved sister—unworthy am I of such an one’.²⁹Close Sister and brother had long conversations when William was home for the holidays.

By this time Thomas, as oldest son, was being groomed to inherit the family estate, Robertson had been destined for the family's mercantile firm, and John Neilson chose to go to sea. Young William was left to carve out a place for himself. Above all it was Anne whose firm belief in her younger brother's destiny and future greatness helped William through difficult decisions about a future public life course. But by the time such career choices became imminent, Anne, who had been ill for several years with what may have been tuberculosis, was dead. In 1827, just after William had begun his first term at Oxford, he was summoned home to attend her deathbed and funeral. For William Ewart Gladstone this beloved sister remained an icon of all that women could mean; a femininity coloured by suffering experienced in an atmosphere of moral purity, especially in illness bravely borne. Anne's ideals of unworldly grace set demanding standards that William strove to meet throughout his life. A few days after her death he recorded that he felt apathetic, blaming himself for torpor of mind and habitual selfishness. ‘how unworthy I had been of the love and attention which the departed saint had honoured me’.³⁰Close Into his sixties he was still remembering Anne's birthday in his diary; all the more significant as falling on Christmas Eve (for the lasting effects of sibling death, see Chapter 12).³¹Close

William's—and to a lesser extent Thomas's and Robertson's—relationship with the baby of the family, Helen Jane, was a complete contrast. Five years younger than William and a dozen years Anne's junior, she was in many ways of a different generation. She had been a bright and spirited, sometimes wilful youngster. After being the petted youngest for almost five years, William's fate had been to be displaced by this engaging baby. Yet he had grown fond of Helen as an agreeable playmate and enjoyed having someone to look up to him as he had looked up to his elder siblings.

As the eldest daughter with an invalid mother, from her early days Anne had often been responsible for the welfare of her young sister. When Anne was 12 and Helen only a year old her mother wrote to her that ‘it is no small comfort to me to know my little pet has one who will pay every kindness and who so well apprehends all her wants’.³²Close It was Anne who supervised Helen's home-based education, recognizing that her young sister had ‘no common share of talent and apprehension which it has pleased God to gift her with’.³³Close But with her increasing frailty Anne could no longer cope, and Helen, in her mid-teens, was left without formal instructors, guidance, or duties. Given these circumstances, Helen's situation is a dramatic illustration of the contrast between William's informal as well as formal educational experience and the stay-at home sister's lack of personal supervision, external demands, or competitors with which to test herself intellectually, socially, or physically.

While William's deep distress and melancholy at Anne's death is recorded in detail, the young teenage Helen's loss has to be imagined. Along with Anne's clothes, her sister had inherited her position as daughter at home, aid to the timid invalid mother, companion and little housekeeper to her father. Her sense of desolation was compounded by measuring herself against the much older and universally admired sister, now haloed in death, a comparison that only emphasized her own sense of inadequacy.

As she wrote: ‘Each day teaches me how weak, how powerless I am and how sweetly bright my sister shone.’³⁴Close At this period in their lives William's relationship to Helen mirrored what Anne's had been to him, but with a superiority enhanced by masculine status. William had long had the satisfaction of Helen's childhood worship of her older brother as her companion while home on holiday. When he returned to Eton she missed him sorely, even calling her canary ‘William’ after him.³⁵Close He took his elder brother duties seriously. For example, when he was 13 and Helen 9 he wrote from Eton criticizing her handwriting and questioning whether she should make better use of her time than writing to him.³⁶Close During the dark days of Anne's final illness the two drew even closer. Anticipating her sister's death, Helen wrote to William that ‘my earliest recollection of you . . . is as loving you almost more than any other and now cannot avoid looking to you as my principal friend, one day, perhaps my stay’.³⁷Close

In the autumn following Anne's death, when Helen was 14 and William going on 20, he proposed a covenant between himself and his young sister: ‘we have agreed to tell one another's faults, small and great, without fear or favour’.  But it was William who took by far the major role, pointing out that it was his duty as the elder to make the first move. This took the form of a ten-page letter, steeped in their mutual religious language, in which he especially addresses Helen's dress, and her use of time and of money, first cautioning her generally: ‘may you carry through all your dealings with all men the blessed principle of subordination and resignation of your own desires, and unqualified disregard of your own conventions; when they come into collision with duty’ (his italics). He ends by recommending again his ‘old nostrum’ of ‘appropriating specific seasons to specific purposes’.³⁸Close In fact, this was a dictum almost impossible for a young girl to carry out without supervision, aim, or a programme of work and study.

Nevertheless, Helen, overcoming her ‘natural pride’, responded by feeling thankful to this adored elder brother that ‘I was not left alone and suffered to stray further without being warned’. Aside from her Heavenly Father her darling brother is ‘her support, comfort and guide, from whom she can never fear anything but kindness’.  ³⁹Close She felt she owed her ‘friend, my own dear William’ a great deal, not only for his advice, but his example. In turn, as he had with Anne, William confided in Helen his attraction to a religious and scholarly path and a possible clerical career, using the youngster as a sounding board, which aroused the hurt and anger of his elder brothers by not consulting them.

The roots of William's determination to guide and control Helen's worldly as well as spiritual and moral development are complicated. His political coming of age had coincided with the radical questioning of established order in the agitation over the 1830s reform movement. While still at Oxford he had taken part in raucous election processions and vigorous debate defending both Church and state. He felt that the ‘subversion of ancient principles of political union’ was particularly pernicious as it freed ‘ungoverned and uninstructed self-will’. From his school days, for William order and tradition represented stability, control, and the maintenance of a personal coherence, an issue central to his emotional as well as intellectual equilibrium throughout his life.⁴⁰Close

In later life,  William acknowledged that he saw in Helen many of his own uncomfortable traits of sensuous passion and difficulty of self-control. Given his own adolescent preoccupations, as his sister developed physically as well as emotionally, William may have felt disturbed by her burgeoning sexuality.⁴¹Close Something of this is reflected in his opinion that she was becoming too forward in dress and behaviour. The intensity of William's absorption with his sister's state of mind had grown to the point where his parents became concerned and asked Tom to write to William to desist from ‘religious speculations’ with Helen.⁴²Close

It is clear that William found the combination of what he saw in women as misfortune and suffering combined with attractive appearance dangerously enticing. While still at Oxford he had become drawn to rescue work with ‘fallen women’, whom he would accost in the streets.⁴³Close Undoubtedly some of his fascination with the sexual underworld was motivated by a genuine desire to ‘uplift’ these women. However, the fascination went deeper. In his diary he admits that while ostensibly looking in bookshops for political volumes he would clandestinely pore over salacious material, which led to guilt-ridden anguish over feelings of sexual desire. This possibly was accompanied by masturbation, at the time a practice deeply imbued with religiously inspired notions of sin and the fear of causing impotence.⁴⁴Close

These tussles bedevilled a young man whose sense of manhood was already divided between a spiritual, intellectual tendency and his budding career as politician and statesman. As one commentator put it: ‘there was a kind of languor and melancholy . . . of scholarly, poetic temperament’ in William Gladstone that did not serve him well in his public life.⁴⁵Close Yet others sensed in him ‘repressed aggression, private torments underlying restlessness and guilt’. Even in repose, Gladstone hummed with a kind of ‘restrained violence’.⁴⁶Close These have been seen as opposing aspects of his character—the intellectual as opposed to the practical. But they also represent two shifting facets of masculine identity of the period, as witnessed in the almost effeminate averted eyes, delicate white hands, and sensuous mouth of an early portrait as contrasted with the massive head and shoulders, thin-lipped authoritarian mouth, and intense gaze of later paintings, as well as the notorious photographs of the erstwhile politician coatless with his axe attacking trees on his estate.⁴⁷Close

To twenty-first-century sensibilities, men like William Gladstone's attitude towards women seems naive to a degree. He appears to have taken at face value the belief that genteel women were a different species: pure, noble, and without erotic feelings or desires. With the image of Anne always before him in his quest for a wife, he sought for a woman whom God should appoint to be the guardian angel of his soul. In fact in his wife, Catherine Glynne, he eventually found a down-to-earth, healthy, and competent partner very different from his sisters. Yet long after his marriage he continued his nocturnal pursuit of high-class prostitutes in the streets and even in their rooms, to the chagrin of his political friends and delight of his enemies. The mixture of sexual attraction and the appeal of feminine suffering contributed to his inability to view women as full-bodied human beings. This reached a crescendo in his relationship with the ex-courtesan Laura Thistlethwayte, with whom he was involved late in life. She titillated him by slowly releasing instalments of her so-called autobiography detailing the many personal sufferings, slights, and adventures she had supposedly overcome.

William's career through Oxford continued to flourish, and beyond to his election as an MP, while Helen's early adulthood was spent at home as companion to her invalid mother and now elderly father. After her mother's death, when Helen was 21, she became her father's companion, seeing him through critical eye surgery. Whether or not she had found the role of daughter at home congenial, this had given her a function within the household. Nevertheless, her father's uncertain health and temperament combined with the family's intense religiosity limited Helen's social contacts. Throughout Helen's twenties, William continued to exhort and instruct her, but with less and less effect. Helen—intelligent, high-spirited, and well read in several languages—had become deeply religious, spending any energy and time that could be spared in furthering Anglican causes. For many young women the world of Evangelical religion provided an abiding belief in their direct relationship to a Divine Power. Submission and obedience to earthly male family members could be bypassed if seen as contradicted by duty to the heavenly Father and His Son.⁴⁸Close Increasingly, this seems to have been the case for Helen Gladstone, although mainly inferred from her actions.

It is difficult to glean a specific picture of Helen's condition from existing sources, covered as they are in Victorian reticence and euphemism. What is clear is that in the Gladstone household the example of the invalid mother and saintly departed Anne left the men convinced that weakness and affliction bravely borne made for the most rarefied and lovely form of womanhood. All the brothers took an intense interest in their young sister, mainly in the form of anxieties about her health. Helen was beginning to replicate the model of her sister, as when their mother wrote, in commenting on her younger daughter's health: ‘I must not be too sanguine . . . this morning she [Helen] looked so like our departed Angel whose voice and manner she recalled.’⁴⁹Close The family's illness–suffering–womanhood connection must have appeared in a positive light to Helen. For example, at one point her mother proclaimed that although she feared her daughter suffered a great deal, ‘they that suffer and support suffering are far happier than those who do neither’.⁵⁰Close Yet no amount of affliction seems to have been enough to make up to her mother for the lost sister. What must it have felt like for Helen to hear her mother's reported deathbed cry: ‘Oh my first—dearest—beloved—precious—she was blessed’?⁵¹Close Unlike her sister and mother, Helen showed no signs of having tuberculosis. Like her brother, William, she appears to have been potentially a healthy, active, and sensuous young woman with a strongly passionate nature. In the guilt-ridden culture of their home, as with William, erotic desire had to be repressed. For a woman, could it even be acknowledged as such when her whole being was defined by her reproductive cycles and these were equated with illness?

Helen would have had a similar orientation as William in seeing self-control, bolstered through faith, as a way of overcoming feelings and desires defined as sinful. In her case, these became focused on physical and mental health. As in the case of the twin, Charlotte Scott, many believed that genteel women had a potential for an invalid role.⁵²Close Around the age of puberty Helen seems to have begun experiencing a variety of physical and mental problems, including what William perceived as her ‘gluttony’ but which now would be considered as an eating disorder. As with almost all ailments at this time, she was treated with laudanum, a concoction of opium steeped in alcohol, possibly first used as a remedy for period pains. Helen's experience is in contrast to the way the frequent illnesses of her brother, the youthful Thomas, had been treated. As soon as he had sufficiently recovered at home he was ‘toughened’ by being sent back to another rather miserable spell at Eton.

Undoubtedly Helen's condition was exacerbated by grief over Anne's death and feeling that she could never live up to her sister's standards. But it was also a function of her isolation, mostly at Fasque, the large house in Scotland John Gladstone had built as his family's seat. Here, unusually for this type of family, female friends, aunts, and cousins seem to have been absent or kept at bay. Helen's temperament does not seem as well suited to a domestic routine as had Anne's. As with many upper-middle-class young women at this time, her yearning for more intellectually stimulating opportunities was trivialized.⁵³Close From early on, William had put aside Helen's attempts to learn further than her ad hoc situation afforded. When she wanted to study Latin, he wrote to her: ‘I do not see learning them [classical languages] at all necessary for women.’⁵⁴Close

Reading between the lines, Helen's increasing reliance on drugs may have been connected to intense religious guilt punctuated by bouts of frustration and rage leading to the outbursts that so irritated and frightened William as evidence of loss of self-control mirroring his own culpable shadows. His acknowledged resemblance to Helen elicited some sympathy with what he interpreted as her moral weakness. Yet he had little understanding of the fact that while he was able to channel some of his immense restless energy into physical, social, and political activities, these were closed to her. From his entering Eton at the age of 11, William had multiple opportunities to enlarge his life through friendship and the challenge of manoeuvring in the world outside the hothouse family atmosphere. Helen's youth was spent quietly at home with little external stimulation.

From his teenage years at Eton, William had begun to make friends with a variety of boys, some from gentry and aristocratic background above his own status. A few of these relationships made an immense emotional as well as intellectual impact, in particular his friendship with Arthur Hallam, the golden youth immortalized in Tennyson's poem In Memoriam. William and Arthur's fellowship blossomed in almost daily meals and walks together, their constant talks described as endlessly exercising their razor-sharp intellects around philosophical and political questions of the day. William's early biographer,  John Morley, described these friendships as giving him ‘the blithe and congenial companionship through which his mind was stimulated, opened and strengthened’.⁵⁵Close

William left Eton with fond memories as he moved on to Oxford. There he was surrounded by friends from schooldays, extended through membership in numerous clubs and activities where he rubbed against a range of people, ideas, and values. Most notable was the religious ‘Oriel College set’ including Newman, Keble, and Pusey. These men were the core of what became the Oxford Movement, keen to revive ritual practice within the established Church. William's first two years at Oxford were spent in such a welter of busy occupation that his studies were somewhat neglected. The ensuing scramble to prepare for final examinations was a challenge that taught him a lifelong lesson in applying himself without stint to an external deadline and produced the reward of a double first class degree in classics and mathematics. Yet none of this prevented him from relaxing on long walks and sculling five miles or so on the river, for by this time he had acquired a boat of his own.

After his triumph at Oxford, William set out on a Continental tour with his brother John, financed by their father. On his return, through the father of a friend as well as Sir John's contacts, William was offered the chance to stand for a seat in the House of Commons. This he duly won and gave a triumphant maiden speech at the age of 24.

Meanwhile, Helen continued to move between Fasque and the Glad-stones’ London house. Helen's mother's ill health and diffident personality made her ever more dependent on her daughter.  This, combined with the family's strict Evangelical code, meant limited entry into social life at either place. In such a wealthy family with its full complement of servants her duties would not have been onerous, for her father kept the effective running of the household in his hands. Unlike Anne, Helen had no troop of younger siblings to care about and direct. No weekly, monthly, or annual external deadlines were imposed to challenge her mind or engage her energy aside from regular attendance at religious occasions, of which she took full advantage. At this period most types of rigorous physical activity or sport (save walking) that would have absorbed youthful restiveness and lifted her sprits were discouraged for a young lady. Outdoor activity would be confined to sedate strolls in the grounds of the house or gentle ‘carriage exercise’—that is, being driven out for an hour or two—appropriate to her perceived semi-invalid condition.

From the attractive, talented child and early adolescent, Helen intermittently descended into what can only be termed a private hell. She paid a bitter price for the fact that control of her life was totally in the hands of a loving, but blinkered father and fond but striving, successful brothers. In the terms of her period and class, only marriage could have radically altered this situation. For William, marriage had been a pressing necessity in terms of his political, sexual, and emotional life (it is speculated that he remained technically a virgin until he married at the age of 30).⁵⁶Close His two unsuccessful attempts at courting had involved higher-status women met through his Eton friends. He finally succeeded in marriage to Catherine Glynne, who brought with her a gentry background and aristocratic social circle.

However precipitously William had rushed into action in his three attempts to secure a wife, no such remedy was an option for Helen when it was expected that the man would instigate a proposal. She was also unlucky in being left without mother, sisters, or female friends to expedite any potential wooing. Helen may never have known that for several years she had been courted by the son of a neighbouring business associate of her father. The now elderly Sir John Gladstone had been approached by the suitor for his approval of the match. However, he had no intention of losing the company of his young daughter and dismissed the idea as ridiculous, filing the correspondence as ‘T.K. Finlay's foolish letters and my answers to them’.⁵⁷Close

It is significant that the periods of Helen's partially recovered health coincided with the necessity for her to take some specific role in the household. The family had considered her a rock during her mother's decline and death and even William had been impressed by her ‘nerve and fortitude’.⁵⁸Close For most of her twenties Helen remained mistress of her father's household and his companion, mainly at Fasque. Of her intellectual, emotional, and sexual development we know nothing except what can be garnered from letters exchanged among her mainly male relatives and wholly male physicians.

There is no doubt that somewhere along the way, Helen Gladstone became addicted to opium and probably alcohol as well, although when she had occupation and a stable supply of the drug she seems to have been capable of behaving normally and her relations with her brothers, including William, were on a more even keel.⁵⁹Close Even so, their concerns over her medical condition reinforced the default position for Gladstone women as suffering poor health and weakness. What we know of Helen's life during her twenties and thirties was spent travelling to be under the care of one physician or another in search of some vaguely defined well-being. Rigorous medical regimes such as daily cold showers, warm foot baths, rest and exercise periods were time-consuming and constraining. The laudanum she was being treated with, and subsequent attempts at its withdrawal, increasingly became one of the principal cause of her physical and mental problems.

In 1838, William was out office and his two attempted marriage proposals to aristocratic women had been rejected. In a state of some distress he accompanied Helen to the Continent, leaving her in a German spa under the care of family friends. Although diary entries show his guilt at thus abandoning his sister, he went on to join the Glynne party in Italy to continue his nascent wooing of Catherine. Released from the direct presence of father and brothers, Helen, now 24, seems to have at least partially recovered. She met and became engaged to a Polish aristocrat, significantly described by her as a stouter edition of William. The marriage would have entirely removed Helen from her family's reach.⁶⁰Close At one level William was pleased for his sister, but he was suspicious of the Count's motives and deeply disturbed at the thought of Helen moving so far away to such an alien culture. And why had he not been the first to be told, having only learned about the affair through friends: ‘a line from her would I think have done everything’? ⁶¹Close

William need not have worried, for the Count's family refused to sanction the match and as the potential marriage plans petered out Helen was forced to return to Fasque. Meanwhile William had wed in a double ceremony with his close friend, the aristocratic George Lyttelton, who had chosen Catherine Glynne's sister, Mary, as his wife. The elder Gladstone brothers were now on the way to successful careers: Thomas, in line for the family estate, was an MP, as was the rising naval officer,  John Neilson. Robertson, in the family business, flourished in Liverpool's political circles. All were now married, although both William and Helen had been censorious about Thomas's Unitarian wife. None of the Gladstone brothers’ wives seem to have welcomed what most considered their irksome sister-in-law. Catherine Glynne was exceptionally close to her own sister, Mary. In their wifely and maternal roles (between them they eventually produced twenty-four children) they had little patience with Helen's preoccupations. Catherine, perhaps sensing the intense nature of Helen and William's relationship, showed scant compassion for the young woman she considered tiresomely hysterical.

Left back at Fasque Helen's condition deteriorated and she was sent once more to try the ministrations of a variety of medical men. Unmarried Aunt Johanna Robertson, her mother's sister, who had always been fond of her niece, was assigned to be her companion and relay regular bulletins about Helen's condition. The young woman was now under constant surveillance. Every item of her diet and minute of her day was overseen and reported on by doctors and carers. Her attempts at fasting and her preference to slip out for early morning worship as part of her intense religious commitment were negated on medical grounds.

There is no doubt that Helen's condition deeply disturbed William. It is believed that his passionate performance in the Parliamentary debate over the Chinese Opium Wars was fuelled by personal experience of her addiction. He was also increasingly uneasy about reports reaching him of his sister's attendance at the ‘Romish’ chapels in London now flourishing in this period of Roman Catholic expansion. He warned Helen of the danger, not least to his political career, if these had substance. She did not deny her increasing involvement with Roman Catholicism, but refused to discuss the subject with him.

Unprepared by the rumours, the spring of 1842 brought William a bombshell. Helen, now in her late twenties, had been received into the Roman Catholic Church. The attraction of an alternative community, together with the Catholic concept of salvation as a personal invitation from God to live a holy and spiritual life, more compelling than any duty to an earthly family, is understandable to a woman in Helen's position.⁶²Close But it was a move that made her brother incandescent with outrage, particularly as he only heard the news from his father. William's views and feelings about Roman Catholicism were deep-seated but complicated. Quite aside from the damage to his political prospects by the taint of popery, the move was anathema to his Evangelical soul. His beloved sister Anne, like her mother, had been bitterly opposed to Catholic emancipation in the 1830s and considered Catholicism despicable. William had gone deeply into the relation of Catholicism to the Anglican Church in his recently published book, The State in Relation to the Church. He had recoiled at the idea of papal authority over and above the English nation and totally rejected an institution whose altars were in rivalry to his beloved Church of England.⁶³Close In addition, William felt deeply hurt that Helen had not even consulted him or deigned to discuss the subject. Like many deeply committed Protestant Evangelicals with a central commitment to domesticity and motherhood, he may also have been suspicious of the putative independence and agency of celibate, convent-based women.⁶⁴Close Yet William was ambivalent about the formalistic Anglican Church services and had found himself drawn to the ritual and beauty of the Roman Church he had encountered in Italy.

An announcement in the press heralded Helen's conversion, allowing the world to ‘read the record of our shame’, as William bitterly remarked.⁶⁵Close His anger at Helen's move was accentuated by his awareness of many high-profile Anglicans’ increasing sympathy for Catholic ritual and dogma, including some of his close friends from Oxford days. His sister's conversion also coincided with a period of uncertainly in his career, as he had been voted out of Parliament and his financial affairs were going badly. His mood is expressed in a ten-page letter to Helen that indicates his fury, hurt, and feeling of abandonment:

The recollection that there was a time—although many years back—when we had, or seemed to have, religious union and communication, makes me feel that the event announced yesterday demands from me a few words. I AM STUNNED BY THE MAGNITUDE OF THE JUDGEMENT WHICH IT HAS PLEASED God to send upon you, and upon us: stunned but not surprised, for causes which have been very long in operation . . . That which I have to testify solemnly to you, to you the fruit of my mother's womb, and the beloved associate of my earliest years is this: you have not been an inquirer: you have not endeavoured to inform and discipline yourself respecting the immense issue upon which you have found what you think to be a judgement . . . Have you yet to learn, that it is along the path of obedience and docility, of self denial and self subjugation, that God leads His children into truth? [his punctuation and italics]

William went on to query where his sister derived the authority to make such a decision: ‘You have, as it seems by some marvellous Divine ordering, been led to confess that the act you meditate is one of private judgement. But I say it is even less than this. It is one of private will. You have followed instinct and bias . . .’. He rhetorically admits that she will ask what right he has to dogmatize, and answers himself that his smattering of enquiry, although narrow, is wide compared to hers. Although he knows she has acted sincerely, this very fact is the proof of her deep delusion:

Mark again my words. This delusion is not your first. It is the completion of a web, which for many years you have been weaving around you, and which by progressive degrees has enveloped all your faculties and deprived you of true vision. Not in religion alone, This last step was not needed to prove, but merely illustrates the fact, that you are living, and have long been living, a life of utter self deception. Not in religion alone—but in all bodily, in all mental habits—in all personal and in all social relations . . . For a very long time you have not known what study is; the whole action of your naturally powerful mind has been dissipated and relaxed . . . of the subtle and wayward will which has for so long distorted your life and destroyed its liberty, its peace and usefulness—alas! . . . is the latest [delusion] born of a whole family of delusions, pervading your life from the highest concerns of your soul down to your very diet and clothing. [his italics]

He will now open to her the ‘sealed book’ of his opinion of her, that is ‘that five years have now elapsed since, in discussing matters relating to your health, I told my Father that I regarded you as morally beside yourself, and urged upon him that the only way to restore you to yourself . . . was to put constraint and coercion upon you’.⁶⁶Close

Frustration at his inability to reach, much less influence Helen may have enhanced fears about his own efforts at self-control. The tone of his diary entry for the day after writing the letter is suggestive: ‘I write, as one would drag a woman by the hair, to save her from drowning. The best I can hope for is that she should find the words keen and piercing; such ills as these are not curable except by searching pain.’⁶⁷CloseFortunately for Helen, her father, although anxious about her condition and autocratic in his authority, took her conversion seriously. He refused William's demands that Helen should be banished from the family home and allowed her to receive priests at the house on condition that he oversee all her temporal arrangements.⁶⁸Close Three years later Helen, now aged 31, once again left for Germany, but was followed by William, despite the fact that his political career needed nursing and Catherine had recently given birth to another daughter. There he trailed after his sister, settling in the spa town of Baden.

This was a time when William's rescue work took a more disturbing turn. As political and financial pressures mounted, a pattern emerged whereby he would descend into what he regarded as moral weakness in susceptibility to pornography and to his enticing chosen cases of fallen women. William had been beset by a similar period when he admitted being ‘lacerated and I may say barely conscious morally’ in pursuing prostitutes and looking at pornography in the early 1850s when he was cut off from two of his closest friends and advisers, James Hope and Henry Manning, who had left the Anglican Church for Roman Catholicism.⁶⁹Close It was after such episodes that he began to scourge himself with a small whip, following the example of his Anglo-Catholic friends. Finding Helen sunk into such a desperate state that he witnessed her having to be held down must have inflamed his own anxieties about falling into an abyss of unrestrained appetites. Like most educated people, including physicians, he believed that regaining self-discipline under a regime of moral management was the only cure for such behaviour, even for the insane.

Self-discipline was a weak reed to rely on given the intense individualism of the Evangelical tradition.⁷⁰Close The support that Helen had sought in Roman Catholicism, William found in the companionship of like-minded ex-Oxon-ian High Church Anglicans, mainly young men moving in elite society. To counteract their worldly surroundings, they had come together in concern for good works among the needy in a group self-titled ‘The Engagement’. They gave William an external ratification for his contacts with prostitutes, for he admitted that on his own his conscience was too weak to limit the impact of such an activity. It was in this heightened state, when William was with Helen in Germany and keenly aware of her distress, that he drew up what he called the Baden Rules for his future conduct. The ‘Rules’, characteristically, included meticulous listing of the conditions in which temptations for his ‘chief besetting sin’ might arise. The following list of remedies included prayer, immediate pain, self-examination, and injunctions not to look at images, for example in shop windows, a prime site for the pornography flooding in with novel forms of print and visual reproduction.⁷¹Close

To an extent William's heavy-handed concern about his sister can be understood as Helen's addiction to opium was growing, but the intensity of his punitive hostility still seems out of proportion. In his pursuit of his sister on the Continent William had now been joined by their brother, Thomas. They had extracted a letter from their father giving authority to fetch her home and another from her English priest telling her to obey her father's wishes and threatening to cut off her funds.⁷²Close For days Helen locked her door against the brothers and the doctor, drinking any opiates she could get hold of. If William forced his way in he might find her paralysed in both arms and speechless. While in this extremity her father pleaded with William to treat her with ‘mildness and consideration’. But William was writing to Catherine that nothing ‘except the expedient we have so often talked of—an engagement to universal obedience’ would be of any use and that ‘the channels of common interest and feeling between a brother and sister are frozen up’.⁷³Close

During this time abroad Thomas kept a record of Helen's condition. Clearly she was in a state of breakdown. Once he found her squatted on the ground with nothing on but her night shift, eating on the floor. Pitifully she had told the doctor that she feared people would think she was going mad. She gave a letter to her German doctor giving him full power to restrain her even against her own will, but she hoped he would not submit her to force from others (most likely William, if not Thomas). The doctor gave her an ultimatum that she see her brothers and return home or go to Italy under his supervision. At this, Helen effectively dismissed him. Thomas felt that she ‘will dislike anyone whom she cannot influence and rule over’. A note from Helen in January 1846 states lucidly and firmly: ‘My dear Tom—my answer is given, and to my father directly. I must beg to decline any personal discussion with yourself or with William and I do so from no want of right feeling to either you or him.’⁷⁴Close

By December, doctors were advising against the proposal that Helen be given a limited income from her father and left to her own devices. She should be ‘committed to the command of herself entirely to others appointed by her father’. If not she might get into debt and into ‘a great many misfortunes’ if she was allowed to act independently. Pushed to extremes, Helen made a bid to escape. The exact order of events is not clear, but it seems that she tried to go to some of her Catholic friends. Thomas discovered that Helen was trying to sell jewellery via her maid to finance this plan and he immediately took steps to dismiss the woman. The bewildered elder brother noted that Helen ‘says it would be death for her to stay where she is but where will she go . . . she is fierce against all of us—told Estelle [the maid] that she would bring her brothers to their knees to her before a month’. The brothers continued to regard this 32-year-old woman rather like a wayward child, chiding her for going out alone and for staying out late. Helen continued to resist through silence and visiting the Catholic friends who had become her alternative world.

By mid-January 1846, now firmly back in England, Helen had been confessed by her English priest, who, the brothers disgustedly learned, was backing her present course. And she was meeting Estelle at the home of a Catholic lawyer. At this point Helen seems to have had several doctors on her side, whom the brothers believed had been completely taken in by her. They also suspected she had sold their mother's jewellery, the proceeds being lost to Roman Catholic causes. At last Thomas heard that Helen had written to their father—but only ‘with sheets of grievances’. William had also had a note announcing her departure, having said again that she could not endure life in the London family home.⁷⁵Close

Eventually some compromise was reached and Helen agreed to go back with her father. Gradually her health and peace of mind began to return. At the end of the following year Helen wrote to William begging for forgiveness for her past conduct and reaffirming her unmixed respect for him in the past and future, with anxious wishes that he know how she valued his love and esteem: ‘from the depths of my heart . . . I feel that I have no other claim upon you, than that of our common blood and of your charity and if these may so far avail I ask you to try and not regret my father's great and unhoped for fondness towards me . . . If my father, who has so much to forgive, can pardon, may I not hope from you?’⁷⁶Close

Despite such approaches, William remained convinced that Helen's whole life commitment via her conversion was not genuine. He told their father that she was not a convinced Roman Catholic but that her feelings were ‘emotional and superficial’ and he begged that priests be kept away. However, matters threatened to go beyond the troubled waters of the Gladstone family when the Commissioners in Lunacy met to consider a report alleging that Helen Gladstone had been illegally confined on the top floor of the family's London house. By this time Helen had made friends with the Catholic lawyer Henry Bagshawe and his wife, whose son became her godchild and eventual heir. It was Bagshawe who took up Helen's case with the Commissioners. The Gladstone men vigorously refuted the accusation and the case was dropped, but not before William and Thomas had privately met the chairman of the Commissioners, Lord Ashley, at the Carleton Club to arrange matters with him.⁷⁷Close

Notwithstanding the Commissioner's withdrawal of the charge, Helen's father and brothers’ methods of control appear draconian. Her father had replaced her one ally—her maid Estelle—by Mary, the head housemaid from Fasque. She had been detailed to keep a constant watch and report back directly to Sir John. To this end he instructed William that in the London house there would be only one approach, and that through the dressing room where Mary was to sleep. That nothing whatsoever or person of any description was to have access to Helen without either William or Tom's permission and no one else.⁷⁸Close In fact Helen managed to leave for Bath with Catholic friends, only to be returned to Fasque, where a similar regime was instituted. She was reminded by her father, on whom she was financially dependent, that he had only consented to her religious conversion on condition that she abide by his advice and direction. Everything from clothing to the state of her teeth was to be open to inspection and governance by caretakers, father, and brothers. Yet Helen held fast to her Catholic religious commitment. She continued as an invalid struggling with what seem to have been several suicide attempts. Helen was now in her mid-thirties in a life dominated by the men around her: father, brothers, doctors, priests.

When confinement at home did not seem to produce results she was sent to Leamington Spa, under a female minder, Mrs Elliott, appointed by the eminent physician Dr Jephson, who was known as a specialist in such cases. A clergyman's wife, Elizabeth Rawson, a friend of the Gladstones, was to oversee Helen's welfare. What exactly went on under Dr Jephson's ministrations is not possible to disentangle from the records, partly due to Victorian reticence about detailing intimate details. At one point Mrs Elliott had taken Elizabeth Rawson to Helen's rooms to show her some ‘surgical instruments’ used by Jephson, but it is not clear for what purpose. Jephson had reported to her father that aside from the opium addiction there was ‘another cause’ for Helen's problems so delicate as to be only discussed privately with him. Hints and innuendo make it probable that this was some expression of sexual behaviour and the ‘instruments’ referred to the vaginal speculum.⁷⁹Close Even Mrs Elliott complained on Helen's behalf about the absence of any companions or pocket money and insisted that Dr Jephson displayed no sympathy for his patient. He had called her ‘wicked, the worst case I have ever seen’, in contrast to the tone of his bland letters to her father.⁸⁰Close Jephson, known locally as a miniature martinet, even forbade access to Helen by her supportive maternal aunt Johanna Robertson: ‘she shall not see her niece as I am sure it would do much serious permanent mischief ’.⁸¹Close

With no improvement forthcoming in Leamington, Helen was moved to Edinburgh under a Dr Miller. Like Jephson, he was annoyed at the behaviour of what he regarded as such a recalcitrant patient. He reported that he had called on Helen at midday and found that she had left home at 7 a.m. for the nunnery and had not returned. ‘This is so flagrant an infraction of everything like medical subordination’ that he would not continue attendance ‘without a distinct understanding on the part of Miss Gladstone that she will be at least somewhat obedient to my advice’ (his italics). He suggested that ‘measures be taken, as soon as convenient to remove her to Fasque away from temptation to such imprudence’.⁸²Close

Eventually Helen was allowed into the care of Aunt Johanna. Her most distressing symptoms had been the clenched hands and locked jaws associated with opium addiction but which might also be interpreted as symbolic of her lack of action and voice. Suddenly they miraculously disappeared with the intervention of a Catholic Cardinal using a relic of a saint, backed by prayers from Catholic supporters. As can be imagined, these events and the publicity surrounding them did not go down well with the Gladstone men. Helen did return to Fasque, and in attending her father's decline into old age seems to have acquired some purpose in her life congruent with her religious practice that eased her partial recovery from both her symptoms and use of opiates. Her loneliness was alleviated by the appointment of a personal maid, Ann Watkins, who stayed devoted to her for the rest of her life.

After their father's death, Helen, now 38, refused provision given her to stay at Fasque and left for the Continent. From then on the main contact between her and the brothers was over business affairs as they had control over her finances. She especially resented that she had been given only a life interest in her inheritance, which would go to her brothers after her death.⁸³Close She was convinced that because she had never married she should have received the equivalent to their marriage portions but that William had persuaded their father to only allow her half. In the struggles over this issue the brothers were particularly annoyed at Helen's delay in answering queries or signing documents, invoking yet again the silence and evasions that had been one of the few tactics available to her in dealing with them.

The fundamental issue at stake was their recognition of her as an adult woman able to make her own choices. Her dilemma was that in the ethos of her time and class, this could only be fully claimed if she had married and had children. With dignity she put her case, centred on a plea for fairness and autonomy:

I do not seek to increase my own wealth from any wish to possess or enjoy it; I have wished simply to act on what I was told was justice. I should be perfectly willing to waive all rights that I have been informed are mine at once and forever if it were agreed to place me in something like the position which marriage would place me . . . leaving me free to follow what my conscience might dictate, and with regard to the capital at my death, giving me that control over it which children of mine would, unhesitatingly enjoy.⁸⁴Close

Helen spent most of the rest of her life in various convents, eventually becoming a lay member of the Order of St Dominic in the Isle of Wight, where she adopted nun's clothing. Although never free from her addiction, in this atmosphere she seems to have found some calm and opportunities for rewarding work, but inevitably her activities remain mainly anonymous.⁸⁵Close From this base relations with her family were restored to the point where she visited William's home and came to be familiar with his and Catherine's seven surviving children. Nevertheless she remained unconvinced of her brothers’ affection. William had refused to name one of his daughters after her until their father had chided him that Helen's religion was her own affair. Her brother only relented by saying he would use the name Helen after an elderly aunt who had just died, not for his sister.⁸⁶Close

Tensions between the brothers and Helen were eased after Sir John's death, for, like many siblings, they had vied over attention and favours from their parent. (In his diary, William noted that the only time he had kissed his father was on his deathbed.)⁸⁷Close William in particular may have resented his sister's special relationship with their father, although in part that had been obligatory in her role as the only unmarried daughter. Aside from her duty to her father and the love she may have felt for him, unlike her brothers she was also financially dependent on paternal good will. It had also irked William that his father's authoritative intervention hindered his own elder-brother dominance over this wayward younger sister.

Over the years, William continued to carp at Helen in his correspondence. Once again, in 1874, on a visit to Germany and determined to bring his sister back into the fold, he tried to persuade Helen to give up Roman Catholicism and return with him to Hawarden, the country seat he had acquired through his marriage into the Glynne family. He warned her of the ‘paralysing effects of inertia’, although in fact she led an active life of good works within the convent community. During the visit he even asked for her help in writing a pamphlet against the Roman Catholic Church. Helen no longer feared her brother, but his visit worried her until she felt ill. Upon which William, rather spitefully, wrote to his wife that the day following the interview Helen was fine and able to walk for miles in the mountains. Catherine, again bemused and possibly somewhat jealous, begged William to leave Helen alone and come home.⁸⁸Close

As late as 1878, when Helen had failed to repay a loan of £20 and to send a promised £50 for a charity, William wrote: ‘A parcel arrived from you a few days ago. It contains I have no doubt a gift or gifts kindly intended by you for me, or for us.’  But, he informs her, it would remain unopened. ‘I can have no other concern with it while matters remain as they are . . .’.⁸⁹Close These complicated feelings are illustrated in one tragicomic episode in 1848 towards the end of the period of Helen's most severe breakdown and struggles with the family. It also coincided with the time when William was under both public pressure and emotional/sexual angst. On a visit when Helen was back living with her father at Fasque, William discovered some Protestant texts from the family library with pages torn out in the water closet next to Helen's bedroom. (Why he had been in her most private of spaces only accessible through her bedroom raises some questions.) He told her he had found the mutilated books ‘under circumstances which admit of no doubt as to the shameful use to which they were put . . . You have no right to perpetrate these indignities against any religion sincerely held.’ He threatened to tell their father unless she promised never again to tear up the works of Protestant theologians for use as toilet paper.⁹⁰Close Twice she refused to reply to William's threats, again using silence and defiant covert behaviour to express stifled feelings.

Helen had slipped away from the control of her male relatives, especially William, yet at a formidable personal cost. Her life in the convent appears to have been peaceful and she was intermittently able to partially give up dependency on opiates; nevertheless, her death was most likely connected to their lifelong use. In a final attempt to draw his sister back into the fold, after her death William insisted on bringing her body back to England to be buried in the family vault according to the rites of the Church of Scotland, stating: ‘It is my conviction that in loyalty to her we are absolutely bound, when we take her remains to England to exclude any interposition by a Roman Catholic.’ His self-delusion on this matter is expressed in almost wistful terms: ‘Is not all this most extraordinary and a perfect and substantial proof that she lived and died in unity with us?’⁹¹Close

As in so many of these struggles between family members, issues over control and recognition fuelled by profound emotions going back to childhood lay at the root of Helen's relationships with her brothers, especially William. His angry, punitive attempts to dominate her display a side of his character that many have found troubling. Yet the brother and sister's intense interaction is characteristic of close sibling bonds generally, although here moulded by their particular historical world and expressed through a deeply religious, highly moralized idiom.

In his early twenties, in a letter to Helen, William was disarmingly frank about the characteristics in himself that he later excoriated in her. ‘The one thing I dread is the fierceness of internal excitement, and that from experience as well as anticipation, I do dread. May God pour on it his tranquillising influence. It is very painful to feel myself mastered by turbulent emotions which one can condemn but not control’ (his italics).⁹²Close His wife Catherine, recognized that for all his formidable controlled energy, sense of purpose, and high-minded morality, William had a darker side. She perceptively described his duality: ‘impetuous, impatient, irrestrainable, the other all self-control—able to dismiss all but the great central aim. Able to put aside what is weakening or disturbing—self-mastery achieved with great struggle, partly through prayer.’⁹³Close Alas, for Helen, circumstances, especially her gender, deprived her of any such great central aim.

From his days at Eton William had been able to discuss and argue with friends, colleagues, and rivals, to declare his opinions in public through political oratory and a flood of books and pamphlets on both spiritual and temporal issues. The extraordinary heights to which his political career had raised him transferred his private religious and moral convictions into the public realm. As Patrick Joyce has argued, a rich religious resource was the subtext of much of Gladstone's appeal, to the point where he was revered by many as almost of divine status.⁹⁴Close Only after her conversion did Helen find a voice to express similar struggles or a place to exchange views within the private confines of the Roman Church.⁹⁵Close Eventually she was able to live out her religious impulse in an active realm, if mainly within the anonymous and cloistered convent walls.

For William, as for many Victorian middle- and upper-class men, it was a good woman's role in life to be the helpmeet of flawed masculinity in keeping disturbing urges and passions within the bounds of prescribed morality. For him all women were moral, but were also weak. They should use their moral courage to overcome this weakness. His mother and to an even greater extent his sister, Anne, were the prototypes of this vision. These expectations were compounded by age and position in the family: Anne as the elder was guide and protector; Helen, as the younger, should have been dependent and submissive. However Helen, independent of spirit, but driven to a frenzy by frustration and lack of opportunity for action, failed to comply and kept her brother at arms’ length. Her openly expressed appetites represented the other side of the equation, too close not only to his own weaknesses but also to what he saw in the ‘fallen women’ who so fascinated as well as repelled upright citizens.

The detailed and numerous studies of   William Ewart Gladstone's life and character have given scant attention to the sisters’ possible influence on his political career, including his hostile stance on women's suffrage. A case study such as this, set in historical context, could give voice to such silences in the record. However, the purpose here has been rather to focus on the material life chances, emotional and psychic development of sisters as well as brothers and the way gender and seniority were played out in the crucible of one particular familial setting.