|
Various pages from “Sir John Simon and English Social
Administration” by Royston Lambert, publ.Macgibbon and Kee, 1963. Please attribute appropriately if quoted. 1853 Not the least of the attractions of the Simon household for Ruskin, with his unfortunate emotional tendencies, was its youngest member, a damsel, the now legendary ‘Boo’. To the Simons’ lifelong regret, they had been able to have no children of their own, and so, in December 1853, they had adopted John’s niece, Jane Faulkner, then aged two. Her mother, John’s younger sister Fanny Simon, had in 1839 dramatically eloped from Blackheath in a post-chaise with her lover Francis Faulkner—hotly pursued in a like vehicle by an enraged Louis Michael and his solicitor. The young couple eventually married respectably and Fanny bore seven children (of whom Jane, named after her godmother, was the youngest), and died in December 1853. What more fitting than that the childless pair should adopt their motherless godchild? And so ‘Boo’, as everybody always called her, entered the Simon household. As her subsequent troubles were going, indirectly, to affect her foster-father’s official fortunes and, more directly, to disrupt and embitter her parents’ later lives this young lady deserves a brief introduction In the 1850’s and 1860’s there seemed—at least to outside observers—no impending tragedy about Boo. She grew up precocious, independent and adored. John Ruskin showered her with affection, kisses and presents. His ageing parents marvelled at her ‘more and more brilliant appearance’, and acclaimed her, before she was nine, a very extraordinary child, John and Jane Simon lavished every attention upon her. And so—if the often repeated legend about Boo is to be believed — did someone else. For it was with the young Jane Faulkner that the poet Algernon Charles Swinburne is said to have conceived the only genuine and wholesome romance of his life. As one of the less intimate members of the Simon salon, so his biographers tell us, Swinburne encountered the ever-prominent Boo at the house in Great Cumberland Street, fell in love with her, and wrote her tender verses; while she, flattered by his advances, encouraged him by playing and singing for him and giving him favours. Thus led on, the impulsive poet, one day in 1862, suddenly and extravagantly declared his passion and proposed to his beloved—only to be met with nervous and embarrassed laughter. A scene of violent altercation ensued, and Swinburne fled from the Simon household to Northumberland where, smarting and humiliated by her mocking rejection, he poured out his sorrows in some of the noblest poetry he ever wrote. In the years which followed he never again attained a normal emotional life and she ended her days as a degenerate wreck. Now Boo must indeed have been a precocious and remarkable young lady if this story, repeated in various guises by Swinburne’s friends and biographers, is to be believed; for at the time of the melodramatic scene she was barely over ten years of age. It seems much more probable that Swinburne paid his court to one of her elder sisters who, we know, frequented the Simon household at this time, and then, later on, either mistook, or deliberately lied about her name. Nevertheless, given the extraordinary character of Swinburne, the precocity and good looks of Boo, the attention she undoubtedly attracted, and her subsequent history, the legend must always retain a faint plausibility. At least it must make us pause to examine her character a little more thoroughly. Reading between the lines and gathering together the hints and brief phrases in the few surviving documents, it is clear that Boo’s extraordinariness was somewhat ominous, and increasingly troubled her parents. Perhaps inheriting instability from her mother, over indulged by her foster-parents and their friends, damaged by an unfortunate spell at a boarding school, hankering after her own family and sisters at Folkestone, and probably never entirely reconciled to her position as a foster-child, she exhibited definite symptoms of what, in the mid-twentieth century, would be called maladjustment, but was then explained away by those who knew her as independence, wilfulness and tardy development. Of her capacities little is known, though, very much later, her worried foster-mother called her ‘scatterbrained’, and affirmed: ‘indeed the truth is that she has not quite reasonable brains and never has had. For reasons which are never made explicit, Boo was causing John Simon very marked worry by the late sixties.” But then that concern soon dispelled. Late in 1870, to her parents’ delight, Boo fell in love, not with an unstable poet, but with a rugged, athletic and musical stock-broker called John Adams—“ a thoroughly brave generous tender hearted sort of fellow, with no end of back-bone in his character and as true and simple as a man can be”, enthused John Simon. Just the sort of man, in fact, his poor dear child needed to help her “at last complete her proper development, and become a satisfactory and satisfied wife and mother”. At the end of a few months’ engagement, in May 1871, when Boo was nineteen and Adams twenty-seven, they were duly married at St. Peter’s, Kensington. John and Jane “looked on with beating hearts”, exultant in the belief that their daughter’s future happiness was at last assured. How full of promise, in ways both official and domestic, were those months of early Summer 1871 for John Simon! John Simon watched in impotence from 1874 as his friend Ruskin drifted inevitably towards mental collapse. Still more harrowing was the tragedy within the Simon family, where another promise of that happy Spring of 1871 was again shattered. In 1874, we hear for the first time of a mysterious illness suffered by the volatile and unstable Boo. In fact this was probably a euphemism for incipient dipsomania, a compulsive addiction to drink which now began to destroy Boo’s life, and to agonize that of her parents. Doubtless this first hideous manifestation of dipsomania came as a result of the newly-weds’ matrimonial difficulties. These had reached such a state that in 1875 Boo deserted her husband for another companion, and early in 1876 was divorced by John Adams for adultery. John Simon, to his great credit, stood by his foster-child in her hour of humiliation, welcomed her back to his home, and strove without long-term success to cure her of her fatal addiction to alcohol. But the stigma upon a high-ranking civil servant, moving in the most genteel circles, of a daughter publicly branded as an adulteress and known to the police as a common drunkard must have been barely endurable. The torture of Boo’s present plight and menacing future, the scandal, the dissensions within the family, must have perpetually racked his mind. What with the stresses of Whitehall and the strains of Kensington Square, little wonder Simon behaved at times with undue precipitancy, obduracy and aggressiveness. The wonder is that he did not break down more completely himself. After the disaster of the mid-seventies, Boo made something of a recovery; and, after three and a half years, in 1880 when she was twenty-eight, she finally married the co-respondent in the divorce case, Thomas Bolton, a prosperous man of business and later Liberal M.P. for N.E. Derbyshire. But once again the match failed after a few years and Boo’s dipsomania again took command of her. “You know”, Simon confided to Norton of this newest catastrophe, “what forecast it provides for the remainder of our lives.” In 1886, things became so intolerable that they were compelled to put “our poor child” away for “more than six month’s safe-keeping”. But what made the situation all the more poignant were the long spells when Boo, who was always affectionate, escaped from her compulsive addiction and regained some of her old sparkle and serenity. Her parents’ hopes would rise automatically: “For the last more than six weeks”, Simon told his half-brother (in 1888), “we have had our poor dear child with us, and have enjoyed the very great comfort of seeing her restored to her best self in a degree which we had hardly dared to hope for as possible. No-one, seeing her now, could imagine that hers had been that history of the past which even to herself now seems rather to have been nightmare than reality; and we now have every reason to believe that, when we have passed away, she will be able to keep as she is. Last night, for an hour or two after dinner, she was playing favourite pieces of Beethoven and Mozart even better than she formerly played them.” But these hopes were always dashed in the end. Boo’s dipsomania proved ineradicable and brought her into trouble with the police who, out of respect for her parents, refused to prosecute. No longer the charming kissable girl of Ruskin’s letters, or the precocious young lady who had delighted the old folk at Denmark Hill, or the romantic idol of the Swinburne legend, but now a middle-aged woman who shocked callers by her repulsive appearance and manners, Boo and her appalling prospects brought nothing but anxiety to her parents in their final days. Nevertheless, confined as they were by their ailments to Kensington Square, the Simons still kept up an interest in events and people and rejoiced “that we are still able to behold, even on this scale, the continuing life and promise of the world” Friends like the Burne-Jones’s, the Darwins and the Ritchies and generations of their own family gathered around them. Indeed, when they felt able, until the mid-nineties, they would occasionally give a party to which literary and artistic celebrities, old friends and the young folk, in whom they were ever interested, would all come. Children, whom they had always wished to have themselves, were their special delight. As the great-nieces and -nephews or the Norton children came into the room. Sir John’s self-pity would vanish, he would quote poetry at length, and become amazingly, almost grotesquely playful—and was not beyond penning a comic Valentine or two. Lady Simon, bedridden in the late nineties, also would demand to see the children, who, after lunch, duly trooped upstairs to find her, sitting immobilized by pain, with a large white face, a furry cap, and a mind “very vigorous and bright’ to the end”. After much suffering, borne with characteristic fortitude, she died aged nearly 85 on August 19th, 1901. Boo, ever fond, but ever unbridled, was left to tend her foster-father in his last days. Jane Faulkner’s life has been admirably pieced together by Mr J. S. Mayfield in Swinburne’s Boo (Washington D.C., Privately Printed) |