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Into the wide world

“I feel as if I were in fairyland or the Arabian Nights and pens won’t tell adequately all I have seen and done …”

– Emily Hobhouse, New York, 1895

Emily had shaken the dust of St Ive off her feet and was intent on seeing the world – not just Oxford where she frequently stayed with her brother and his family, or London where Uncle Arthur and Aunt Mary, Lord and Lady Hobhouse, lived. She was not willing to wait longer than 1895 to chart her own course, albeit that it was unheard of for a woman of her social class to venture alone into the world at the age of 35.

She still had no clear idea of a career or of the path her life should take, but of two things she was sure: she wanted to see more of the world, and she wanted to help people. Many miners from Cornwall – the “Cornish Jacks”, as they were called – had emigrated to America to make a new life there, and Emily followed the same route.

English miners, with their experience of mining tin, copper and China clay, had moved to the United States in their thousands. And it stood to reason that they would have social needs. With the help of the wife of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Edward Benson, Emily made contact with Archdeacon Appleby in Minnesota with a view to doing welfare work among the Cornish miners in that area.

In July 1895 she departed by ship to New York, where she stayed for a few days. She was enthralled with what she saw and experienced there, and wrote to Maud: “I feel as if I were in fairyland or the Arabian Nights.”33 After a visit to Chicago she travelled by train to the mining town of Virginia in Minnesota, where she arrived on 14 August. She and her servant, Mary Scourney from Cornwall, found accommodation in Bodock House, a boarding house on Maple Street. Fortunately they had brought along their own bedding, as the boarding house was none too clean.

“My impulse was to run and flee,” she wrote to Maud, but they did stay there for the night.34 Determined not to stay on in the filthy boarding house, she scraped together a few pieces of furniture – two old hospital beds and some chairs – so that they could move into a cottage.35 The first evening in the cottage, with the bed cleanly made with her own bedding, an exhausted Emily looked forward to a good night’s rest. But the bed was crawling with lice!36 The cottage was infested with the bugs. She grabbed her clothes and a few personal possessions, and ran back to the boarding house in the dark – the lesser of two evils.

Miners and their wild habits were not a novelty to Emily; there were several mines near her home town in Cornwall, and because of her father’s work in the community she knew only too well how the men drank and gambled. In Virginia there were 42 saloons and 12 mines in the area. It was bitterly cold and muddy in winter, and scorchingly hot in summer. The town had a saw mill, shops, a newspaper, electricity and 5 000 inhabitants.37 Emily started working in the community, but found only 55 people who hailed from Cornwall. Well, she decided, she had given her word that she would work here, and there had to be others who needed her services. Many people just sat around idly, she wrote. With £20038 that she collected among the residents she started a library, opened a recreation hall, founded a church choir and a Sunday School.39 She opened her home to everyone, and she taught adults to read and write. In cases of need, she even allowed some of the people to sleep on the floor of her cottage.

The doctor at the hospital was actually only a dentist. Emily decided to lend a hand there as well, as the patients were often neglected. She changed their bedding and sang to the sick.40 She took a woman suffering from enteric fever to her home to care for her there, sacrificing her own bed.41

But she did not believe in only plastering wounds; she tried to uplift people through exposure to books, through singing, literacy and basic temperance programmes to lead them away from alcohol abuse. Her temperance campaign did not impress the saloon owners. “All the riff-raff, the rag-tag and bobtail of society, the dregs of population” flocked there, she wrote. The police were inefficient, and the members of the town council owed their positions to bribery. There were“four houses of ill-fame of large size”, and people gambled day and night.42

The opiniated local minister of the Episcopal Church, James McGonicle, maintained that Emily had to work only for him and confine herself to church work, but she wanted to do more. She reached out to the men in the mining camps in the woods, walking long distances with Mary on Sundays in order to preach to them.

The men received her warmly, even baked cakes for her and offered her tea in a tin mug. She sang to them, and would “see the hard icy faces melt before me”. Soon she had won the trust of the hardened miners and the affection of the townspeople. Gifts were placed outside her door, like a rabbit that had been prepared for the pot, as well as vegetables and wood.

But it was not all plain sailing, and Emily had to learn the hard way that despite her good intentions and constructive work, she readily came into conflict with people in positions of authority who experienced her as a threat. And they were nearly always men. One of the first was the Reverend McGonicle – he subjected her to an hour-long lecture about the work she was doing.

“He did not think St. Paul would approve of my holding mission services in a log camp. I said I should do it all the same.”43

The library was a great success, but the church was offended because it did not get the credit for this initiative. To Emily, it did not matter who received the praise. She wanted the library to be open on Sundays too, when the people were not at work, but was ordered to close it. Emily refused.44 She felt too strongly about education and people’s access to knowledge to let herself be dictated to in this regard.

Another point of dispute was that McGonicle wanted only people from his church to attend the temperance meetings, while Emily believed they should be open to all. In addition, she visited women who were jailed for prostitution. McGonicle also berated her because she had the nerve to hold services for the men in the mining camp. Eventually their relationship soured to such an extent that he preached against her in his church.45

Under the banner of her Virginia Temperance Union, Emily held temperance meetings on her own in halls where she attracted audiences of up to 300 men. She distributed cards on which they signed a pledge to abstain from alchohol. Here, too, she sang for the men.46

Emily received support for her work from an unexpected quarter in the person of John Carr Jackson, whom she had met earlier at the dirty boarding house. He had arrived in the town in 1893 and found employment as a clerk. Now he was the owner of Jackson & Co, a general dealer that also sold camp equipment.47 He became the deputy chairman of Emily’s library committee. One of the things that impressed her about him was that he had his eye on the United States Congress, and politics interested her. On top of that, he was elected the town’s mayor in July 1896.

John and Emily saw much of each other, and before long she was in love. “Mr Jackson consumes a great deal of my time … and I respect and admire him more every time I see him … We are sort of half engaged and expect to be wholly so in a short while,” she wrote to her aunt, Lady Hobhouse.

A few days later she informed her aunt excitedly “that I promised Mr Jackson on Sunday night that I would marry him so now we are really engaged and I feel happy over it and quite at home with him, and as he has never known a home or comfort or happiness, he is quite dazed with joy.”48 To Maud she wrote that John was very handsome, and that her pet name for him was “Caro”.49

The town, however, was experiencing tough times. There was serious conflict between the mining bosses, and one mine after the other closed down. John found himself in financial difficulties because he had extended too much credit to people who were unable to pay.

John and Emily decided to leave Virginia, but that they would depart separately. He would stay behind for a while to wind up his affairs. The townspeople were sad to take their leave of Emily in September (1896), and a crowd came to see her off – with an orchestra accompanying her down the street to the station.

The train took her to Cleveland, Ohio,50 where Emily spent some time with friends of her sister-in-law Nora (Leonard’s wife) before continuing her journey to Mexico – a trip that took five days. Emily was the one who had to explore new possibilities for her and John while he was finalising his affairs in Virginia. In the end she used her inheritance money to buy a farm in Mexico with coffee, banana, pineapple and vanilla plantations, and had a house built on the property at a cost of £80. The farm was so remote that Emily never saw it.

Days, weeks and months went by, but John failed to arrive.

Thanks to new friends Emily had made, she was offered a government contract in terms of which John could supply fresh meat to Mexico City. Emily had only 12 hours to decide whether or not to buy the concession of £1 200. With what was left of her inheritance money, she took this gamble.51

The entire winter of 1896 Emily waited for John in Mexico, learning Spanish and history, and painting occasionally. For months she kept hoping …

John was probably bankrupt by April 1897, as his shop with all its contents was sold and he left Virginia soon afterwards “without a handshake and a parting word”. According to a report in The Virginian he was on his way to Chicago to meet Emily and marry her there; from there he would go to Mexico, where a new high position was said to await him.

But the reality proved to be less rosy: the man who had bought his shop had to close it immediately on account of lawsuits, as John was insolvent. Moreover, Virginia’s coffers were empty after his year-long stint as mayor.52

Emily was still hoping to be reunited with John, and travelled to Chicago to meet him there. During her journey the train’s boiler exploded and she saw the driver’s body hurtling through the air. The burnt corpse of the stoker lay before the door of her compartment.

Was this perhaps an omen of what would follow? Emily kept believing that she and John would marry; presumably she dreamt of children of her own, but in the end nothing came of her hopes.53 Orders were issued against John to appear in court because of bad debt.54

In 1897 Emily returned to England for a while to visit her family. She had a wedding dress with her and during this period John visited her and the family in Britain, but little is known about this visit.55

Early in 1898, with the wedding dress in her suitcase, Emily returned to Mexico as she and John had arranged. Meanwhile a letter from him was on his way to inform her that she had to delay her departure, but it failed to reach her in time.56

In Mexico there was no trace of John. Within a few weeks Emily was on her way home, heading for London and the home of Uncle Arthur and Aunt Mary.

Amid all this uncertainty and to-and-fro travelling, Emily lost the farm in Mexico too. It is not clear what had gone wrong, but there is a strong suspicion that John had abused Emily financially. Maybe he never really intended to marry her. Emily, however, had been genuinely in love, had wanted to marry him and had believed the marriage would take place. She never wrote about this pain in documents that are still extant.

Yet there was one item that Emily preserved for the rest of her life: the bridal veil she never wore. It is made of the finest lace.