Notions of Duty

Concluding his review of Anthony Kenny's edition of the Oxford Diaries of Arthur Hugh Clough in 1992, Alan Hill observed that 'it is surely one of the greatest sources of interest that even the most cryptic of references [in Clough's diary] can often be related to some of the central issues of his time'.¹ Two substantial new biographical studies by Anthony Kenny and Gillian Sutherland amply bear this out. They reveal that it is true not only of Arthur Hugh (1819–61), but also of his sister, Anne Jemima (1820–92), promoter of women's education and co-founder of Newnham College, Cambridge, and of his daughter Blanche Athena (1861–1960) vice-principal and principal of Newnham College. The Cloughs were connected through family ties, friendship, and shared interests to an extraordinary number of those whom Matthew Arnold would describe as 'the lights of Liberalism'.² Exploring the lives of different members of the family offers insights into developments in the public schools and the history of secondary education, into the history of the Church of England, into changing patterns of faith and belief and the intellectual history of the nineteenth century, and into the history of higher education. At the same time, as Sutherland demonstrates, tracing the experiences of the Clough women 'leads us deep into the moral, mental and material world of a key stratum of the English middle class, those who sustained gentility through the practice of a profession' (Sutherland, p. 2).

The difficulties of 'sustaining gentility', in the face of economic uncertainty, must have been abundantly clear to the Clough siblings from an early age. Born in Liverpool, Arthur Hugh and Anne Jemima Clough (known as Annie) were the children of Anne Perfect and Liverpool cotton merchant James Butler Clough, whose success in business was limited. Nevertheless, their education was carefully attended to. Arthur was sent to Rugby School, where his encounter with Thomas Arnold had a lasting influence. Some of his early poems were published in the school magazine that he had a hand in editing. Annie was largely educated at home, and pursued a vigorous programme of self-improvement. In the 1840s her diary records her, amongst other things, translating Schiller and Kant, attempting problems in Euclidean geometry, and attempting to learn Greek. But as is evident from Kenny's brisk account of Arthur's boyhood, noting journeys across the Atlantic, and toing and froing between relatives, the vagaries of their father's business dealings meant that their childhood was turbulent. The practical implications of James Clough's financial difficulties are more fully explored in Sutherland's account – perhaps partly because of the greater cost to women, their opportunities being limited, of failure in business in this period. And yet in many ways for Annie, her father's second bankruptcy in 1841 was an opportunity, as similar events were for other middle-class women in the period. Keen to contribute to the family income, Annie moved from teaching in charity schools to taking in pupils. In James's eyes, Annie's school was an enterprise undertaken to supplement the family income. To Annie, however, it quickly became more than this, and in 1846 she was discussing with Arthur 'the necessity, or rather the great benefit of women finding work and considering it a duty to do so, and also whether they are at liberty to choose their own paths in some cases' (quoted in Sutherland, p. 40).

From Rugby, Arthur had moved in 1836 to Oxford to take up a scholarship at Balliol College. Kenny underlines the pressure that Arthur felt to do well in his Schools examinations, given the parlous state of the family finances, and the need to find pupils to supplement his income is a constant theme of Kenny's account of Arthur's Oxford years. In spite of (or thanks to?) this...