Elizabeth Garrett Anderson

Jo Manton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429685620
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

First published in 1965. In 1865, a woman first obtained a legal qualification in this country as physician and surgeon. Elizabeth Garrett surprised public opinion by the calm obstinacy with which she fought for her own medical education and that of the young women who followed her.

This full biography is based largely on unpublished material from the hospitals and medical schools where Elizabeth Garrett Anderson worked, and the private papers of the Garrett and Anderson families. This title will be of great interest to history of science students.

PART ONE

The Medical Student

CHAPTER ONE

London Suffolk 1836-1841

One day in March 1841 a young man of twenty-nine named Newson Garrett brought his wife and four children by sea from London to Aldeburgh. The 200-ton Suffolk hoy had carried them a cold and comfortless journey, buffeted by the North Sea scour. Once under the high shingle bank of the River AIde, they had still to steer a nine-miles’ course through brigs, wherries, driftwood and floating sea-wrack before Aldeburgh – a sudden hill, a square embattled church tower and three windmills – appeared on the skyline. The hoy anchored off Slaughden Quay and the passengers were ferried ashore in open boats. Five-year-old Elizabeth Garrett, a Londoner born, found herself set down on a windswept jetty littered with bales and boat gear. Coastguards shouted orders which the wind snatched away. Furniture and baggage was heaved ashore and loaded into carts, the weary children following. The travellers jolted along the sandy track from the harbour, past the wmdmill, past the Martello tower and the fishermen’s huts, past the Tudor flint and timber of Aldeburgh’s Moot Hall, and up Church Hill to a new home.¹

In coming to Aldeburgh, Elizabeth Garrett was returning to the country of her ancestors. Since the early seventeenth century the Garretts had been gunsmiths and blacksmiths in East Suffolk, hard-working, independent and strong as whipcord. There had always been a pioneering strain in the family. In 1636 a Puritan ancestor, Harmon Garrett, gunsmith of Wickham Market, had emigrated to New England in a party of Suffolk people led by their minister of religion. He became one of the founders of the township of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, but returned after twenty years to his native place, where he restored the church bells. His descendants worked the Wickham Market smithy until 1818, while a younger branch of the family, which passed on for seven generations the Christian name of Richard, settled at Woodbridge as makers of edge-tools. Their scythes and sickles were so renowned that blade-smiths in Sheffield had been known to forge the Garrett mark.¹

At the end of the eighteenth century the pioneering strain reasserted itself. Richard Garrett, fourth of the name, left the old forge at Woodbridge and opened a small works at Leiston near Aldeburgh, one of the first in England to specialize in agricultural machinery. His son Richard the fifth married the daughter of a brother craftsman and inventor, John Balls.² This couple had three sons, Richard, Balls and Newson Garrett, the youngest, born in 1812.³

From the first, Newson Garrett was not the boy to be overshadowed by elder brothers. He went to school at Grundisburgh near Woodbridge for a time, but he was a restless, impatient lad unsuited to study and he acquired remarkably little book-learning. His adult writing and spelling were a joke, in which he joined with good humour. ‘What’s this?’ said an old schoolfellow, the mason Thomas Thurlow, thrusting back a scrawled letter into his hand. ‘Well, Tom,’ said Newson Garrett, after peering at it for some time, ‘if you can tell me what it is about, I may be able to read it.’⁴ Once he had left school Leiston offered little to young Newson Garrett, since his eldest brother Richard would inherit the works and his second brother was also apprenticed as an iron-founder. So, like the youngest of three brothers in a fairy tale, and with the same boundless confidence, he set out in the world to make his fortune. Like many other ambitious young men he was drawn to London. He had already a family connection there, for in 1828 his brother Richard had married Elizabeth Dunnell, the daughter of a London innkeeper of Suffolk origin.¹

Young Newson Garrett settled in Islington, and in the alien bustle of London made his way to his sister-in-law’s parents at the Beehive Inn, Crawford Street, Marylebone.² He found a cheerful, prosperous house and in the landlord, John Dunnell, a man of substance. Dunnell came from a family of smallholders at Dunwich and was one of the thirty-two freemen of that famous Rotten Borough. Although he lived in London and owned at least two public houses, he still found it worth while to travel back to the crumbling village on the Suffolk coast to record his vote at elections. He was independent, even stubborn. In 1810 he went down on purpose to vote against the Barne family who controlled the Borough.³

The Dunnell family made Newson Garrett welcome, both as a Suffolk man and as Richard’s younger brother. Newson had not come to London, however, to continue in his brother’s shade. His bold schemes for the future captured the interest of the Dunnells’ younger daughter, Louisa. Newson was twenty-two years old and exceptionally handsome, with fair hair, blazing blue eyes and a bright complexion; he had been, so an old Suffolk neighbour declared, the most beautiful child she had ever seen.⁴ Louisa Dunnell fell deeply and lastingly in love with this impetuous young man. On his side Newson grew devoted to the young girl so slight and gentle-looking, so serious in manner. Louisa was not pretty; her natural reserve was deepened by a rigidly Evangelical piety, but she had character and brains, and John Dunnell had given her the best education he could afford. Suffolk ancestry gave the young couple a common background, and Newson’s determination promised a successful future. They asked John Dunnell’s consent to their marriage and, since Louisa was still under twenty-one, this he formally gave. They were married on 5 April 1834 at the handsome classical church of St Mary, Bryanston Square, just around the corner from the Beehive Inn.¹ Newson Garrett, a vigorous competitor, thus married at the same age, in the same church, and into the same family as his brother Richard. John Dunnell and Louisa’s aunt were their witnesses, and the bride signed the register in her neat hand.²

After their wedding Newson and Louisa Garrett went to live, as their fellow-countryman the poet Crabbe had done, in Whitechapel. They settled at 1 Commercial Road, a pawnbroker’s shop belonging to John Dunnell on the corner of Whitechapel High Street where the New Road, as it was called, cut through towards the docks.³ Here, after just under a year of marriage, their first child Louisa, and sixteen months later, on 9 June 1836, their second, Elizabeth, were born. When she was three weeks old the baby was carried to Hawksmoor’s great church, St George-in-the-East, whose lofty tower, crowned with a circle of columns, soared above the crowded streets of the parish. Here she was christened, after her aunt Betsy, simply Elizabeth. The parish register records: ‘Born June 9th, baptized July 3rd 1836 Elizabeth dr. of Newson and Louisa Garrett, 1, Commercial Rd., Pawnbroker, by the curate.’⁴

In this parish and this house Elizabeth Garrett spent the first three years of her life. Outside the safety of home, the surroundings were menacing. In the 1830s London’s East End was being transformed from a series of ramshackle villages strung along the river to one dense industrial slum. Relics of a country past still remained; bales of hay were stacked in the Whitechapel High Street for the open-air market, and the nearby King’s Arms was a coaching inn, with open galleries, stables and a cobbled yard.¹ Yet all day along the smooth tramway of granite blocks in Commercial Road horses dragged dray-loads of sugar from the West India docks, with incessant grinding of iron-bound wheels on the stone.² Hogsheads of raw sugar were unloaded and boiled in the sugar bakeries, great gaunt buildings black with soot and noisome with fumes. The sulphurous smoke from their chimneys hung over the whole district; puddles underfoot were dark and scummy. The houses in Commercial Road and its side streets were long terraces of smoky brick, with a shop or two rooms opening on to the pavement and two rooms above. At the back was a close little yard, seldom larger than one of the rooms.³ 1 Commercial Road differed from the rest only in being a corner pawnbroker’s, with front door into the shop and a side door always open, as though half inviting, half repelling the visitor to the pledge office.

Louisa Garrett was a notable housekeeper, capable of creating a home even among these grim and serried rows of houses. She never feared hard work, and the first scenes which met small Elizabeth Garrett’s eyes were probably homely and neat in the local fashion, with checked curtains, whitened doorstep, and bright coke fire. In the pawnshop there was scope for Newson Garrett’s energy and ability, since the three brass balls, in Cockney slang the ‘swinging dumplings’, throve in every poor neighbourhood. Often a whole family’s clothes would turn up on Monday morning to be redeemed, with any luck, for next Saturday night. Petticoats, stays, gowns, shawls and bonnets, shirts, collars and even handkerchiefs lay in bundles on the shelves or hung in strings across the shop. Commercial Road was one of the districts where pawnshops were commonly used by thieves to dispose of swag stolen or smuggled from the river.¹ Newson Garrett was a licensed pawnbroker, carrying on a legitimate business, but he risked receiving stolen goods unawares, with a penalty of transportation.

It was not easy to bring up children in the Whitechapel of the 1830s. Where could two little girls run or play freely when the only open spaces were warehouse yards or derelict burial grounds? If Louisa took the children towards the river they would meet the Ratcliffe street women with their short skirts, high red morocco boots and brass heels.² If they played nearer home they might hear the shrill barefoot street arabs who used the name of God only as a curse. To a pious mother such thoughts were appalling. Louisa Garrett kept the children so closely by her that in after life Elizabeth seemed to remember nothing of her earliest home. Her birthplace was unknown apparently even to her children and has remained unknown until now.³

In November 1837, when Elizabeth Garrett was only seventeen months old and Louie still under three, their mother had another baby, this time a boy. On him the hopes of both families were fixed and he was proudly christened Dunnell Newson, as if to represent their joint ambitions. He lived through the winter, but died at six months in May 1838. The young mother’s grief was terrible. She tried to pray, but the only petition her heart could frame was that God would take her too.⁴ For a time even the thought of her little girls could not comfort her, and the memory of this early sorrow was still vivid when they were grown women.

To assert his own faith in the future of their family, and perhaps to cheer his wife, Newson Garrett commissioned a family portrait, an ambitious gesture for a young man in his humble position.¹ The family is posed in an oblique line, with Louie peeping out, shy and bright-eyed, round her mother’s arm. Elizabeth stands boldly on Mrs Garrett’s lap in the centre of the picture. She still has the bud-like mouth and nose of babyhood, but her fluff of hair has already a russet sheen, her brows are strongly etched and her eyes have the penetrating brightness they were to keep even when she was an old woman. One small fist clutches her mother round the neck, the other waves gaily; one foot is lifted as if she were ready to walk out of the picture and advance on the spectator.

Louie and Elizabeth were not to be exposed to the dangers of another summer in Whitechapel. By the end of 1838 the family had moved from Commercial Road. Newson took over the management of a larger pawnbroker’s shop at 142 Long Acre, three doors from the corner of St Martin’s Lane, Here the Garretts remained for two years.² It was a step up in the world in every way. Newson was no longer simply a pawnbroker but a ‘Pawnbroker and Silversmith’; the district was healthier than Whitechapel, and the street more cheerful for young children to look out on. Country carts passed every day on their way to Covent Garden; there were coach-houses and stables full of horses. The grass and trees of St James’s were near enough for the children to play, although Trafalgar Square was not cleared until 1844 and Lord Nelson was not yet on his column for them to admire. Close at hand Elizabeth could see the comings and goings at Northumberland House, the red coats of the Horse Guards, passing coachmen from the Royal Mews and the stage-coaches swaying down St Martin’s Lane on their way to unload at Charing Cross.¹

In June 1839, at St MartinVin-the-Fields, a new baby was christened in the family names of Newson Dunnell.² Next year followed Edmund, a quiet steady child, who was devoted to his sisters. From this year, 1840, dates the one con...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Part One: The Medical Student
• Part Two: The Physician
• Appendices
• Sources
• Index