A Victorian Marriage: Mandell and Louise Creighton (review)

Mandell Creighton (1843-1901) and Louise von Glehn Creighton (1850-1936) are familiar to diverse Victorianists, as they circulate through many texts. Mandell, born in Carlisle, educated at Durham Grammar School and Merton College, Oxford, became an Oxford don (1867-74), a northern vicar (1874-84), Dixie Professor of Ecclesiastical History at Cambridge (1884-91), Bishop of Peterborough (1891-96), and finally Bishop of London (1897-1901); he was the first editor of the English Historical Review (1885-91) and author of, among many other books, an important six-volume History of the Papacy (1894). Louise, born in Sydenham of German and Scottish descent, held fewer august public positions, of course, but was a prolific author of popular history; she was an active figure in women's philanthropic and reform organizations, including the Girls' Friendly Society, the National Union of Women Workers, various social purity organizations, and forums discussing the role of women in the Church of England. She may remain well known to contemporary scholars less for any individual role or publication than for her presence in diverse texts, from memoirs recalling her as a young and aesthetic faculty wife in Oxford, through her years of appearances on the rosters of various organizations, through glimpses of her in the diaries of Beatrice Webb and Virginia Woolf.

Familiarity is, however, both the strength and downfall of James Covert's biography of the Creightons. Covert has, he tells us, been working on the Creightons for thirty-five years; he previously edited a useful volume of Louise Creighton's memoirs, Memoir of a Victorian Woman: Reflections of Louise Creighton, 1850-1936 (1994), and a collection of her letters, A Victorian Family as Seen Through the Letters of Louise Creighton to Her Mother, 1872-1880 (1998). It is unquestionable that he knows more about the Creightons than anyone else will do soon. However, Covert's very immersion in Creightoniana may account for the weaknesses of the current volume as a work of analytic history.

Firstly: too often, the book provides detailed information for no clear reason, especially in the form of overlengthy excerpts from Louise's diaries and letters and step- by-step accounts of the couple's every holiday. Secondly, and more seriously, the work, for the most part, only engages in meaningful placement of the Creightons in their various contexts in order to assert their superiority or rightness, frequently through loaded terms. Mandell's opponents in debates about ritual in the Church, for example, are "strident," full of "noise and agitation," "extremists," "irreverent," "mischievous," and "medieval," while he is always the site of "reason" and "good will" (274-75); Mandell never "succumbed" (191) to "the screaming sirens of the age" which include everyone from "evangelicals [to] social-Darwinians [...] [and] socialists" (300). Louise too is always "balanced," "realistic" (317), and "sensible" in contrast to those who are "polarised" (311) or strident. One unfortunate effect of such relentless loading of the dice in favor of the Creightons may be that it produces suspicion, tempting one to roll one's eyes every time one encounters yet another claim of their superior vision and virtue, thus undermining Covert's justified arguments for the thoughtfulness or intelligibility of his subjects' views or, indeed, their admirable qualities. One of Covert's strengths is his account of Mandell Creighton's historical scholarship, including his discussion of Creighton's debate with Lord Acton regarding historians' moral judgements on the past. Covert sides with Creighton's "sovereign impartiality" (167), but his own work is so concerned with conveying his admiration for the Creightons that it is routinely judgemental about others.

Thirdly, and related both to Covert's close focus on his subjects and to his partisanship: the book presents its project as examining the Creightons for the revelation of "a fascinating interplay of Victorian attitudes, values, and tensions" (xiii) but it is extremely sketchy in its use...