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Havelock Ellis
Published by Good Press, 2021
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The Olivers stand apart among these Suffolk families, the most recent and the most apt for worldly success. If, however, they knew how to make money, some of them knew how to waste it. They were often, it seems, self-willed, reckless people, intolerant of restraint. They sometimes met tragic ends; I vaguely recall hearing of one, an officer in the army, who narrowly escaped being buried alive on the West coast of Africa by the happy thought of someone who before the burial rubbed him with cayenne pepper, but who was shortly after blown up in an explosion at a fort in Jamaica. They were high-spirited, perhaps a little insolent as well as reckless. An Oliver, a young officer, once waited on Lord Cornwallis, himself a Suffolk man, and then Commander-in-Chief, to beg his favour in obtaining a commission. "You look as if you had come to confer a favour rather than ask for it," Cornwallis observed. Physically they tended to be large, imposing, portly people, not handsome—with a mouth too long in upper lip—but with deliberate vigour, with the air of grave responsibility which sometimes marks the man of large and imperious physical organism. It is a variety of the John Bull type. In their portraits they stand with figures well drawn up and seeming to demand a certain amount of space around them, by no means inviting approach. There is a certain anxiety in their countenances, a certain physiological discomfort, the expression of a massive restless organism, too conscious of itself, which cannot but assert: I am I, in the spirit of Marcus Aurelius's words: "As though the emerald should say: Whatever happens I must be emerald," words I have so often found myself murmuring through life, by no means necessarily in the spirit of one who would preserve some immaculate purity, but in the conviction that one's own peculiar instincts, good or bad, cannot be violated. I recall my mother's only surviving uncle who was completely of this type. He lived in Chelsea, having occupied an official position at the Chelsea Hospital. He had formed a relationship with his housekeeper, whom he never married but openly had two sons by her. My mother, inflexible as were her own moral standards, seems to have accepted this situation, and I never heard her criticise it. I remember her taking me to Chelsea, and I remember Uncle Oliver visiting us with his older son.
My grandmother, Susannah Oliver (afterwards Wheatley), was born in 1788, the eldest child and only girl in a large family of brothers who idolised her. In a miniature and two pencil portraits she appears a woman of energy and intelligence and vivacity, with a touch of melancholy in the eyes, but a witty and sensitive curve of the lips, not formally beautiful but with the attraction that comes of vitality and spirit. Her chief beauty was considered to be her long and abundant hair, worn in clustered curls at the front and a large mass on the top of the head, of auburn colour in the miniature, but a soft mousy brown in the bracelet made of it which I now possess. (The women of the Oliver family of to-day, I am told, are still noted for their beautiful hair.) She was a capable woman, and had a high-class school for girls she had set up in a large old house at Leyton, then a rural suburb of London. I cannot easily imagine her at the head of the prim academy for young ladies we hear of as typical of these days, but I am not surprised at her success. I recall the great gateway and the avenue of trees leading to Suffolk House, as it was called, where my mother once took me as a child to see her birthplace; it was pulled down a few years ago to give place to rows of workmen's houses, but it still figures with other large old vanished houses in the local Histories. Susannah Oliver was a woman of culture and accomplishments. She painted flowers in the delicate and commonplace Dutch manner of her day; she played the harp, on which occasions her beautiful arms aroused much admiration. Her tastes in literature especially were fine and wide, ranging over many fields, scientific and artistic; she seems to have bought the best literature of her day, and many of the books that fed or aroused my own early thirst for knowledge had her bookplate in them. Of these I note especially Rowlandson's Doctor Syntax, on which I pored with concentrated interest, Rousseau's Reveries, the first French book I ever read out of school for my own pleasure, Maria Edgeworth's Harry and Lucy, a cleverly written popularisation of science in story form which I still vividly recall, and Nature Displayed, a more technical, well illustrated but too concise summary of scientific knowledge in numerous volumes, not excluding human anatomy. I know it was too concise, for there, at the age of twelve, I sought to satisfy my nascent curiosity concerning the sexual organs of woman, but intently as I studied the brief account given I was baffled, for I could not understand how a region which, so far as I knew anything of it, was so bare could yet harbour so many different objects with definite Latin names. My grandmother was a friend of Miss Sarah Stickney, afterwards the wife of William Ellis, the missionary whose books on Polynesia are still an ethnological treasure-house, and herself one of the most influential writers of the time. I doubt, however, if she could have influenced my grandmother, for she was eleven years her junior and had scarcely began to publish when my grandmother died. The Stickneys were a Yorkshire Quaker family, but had relatives in Suffolk, which doubtless accounts for my grandmother's association with Sarah. Her mother, Esther Stickney, described in her daughter's biography as "a refined and intellectual woman," died when Susannah Wheatley was a girl of thirteen, but a miniature, said to be of Mrs. Stickney, has descended to me, an attractive, good-looking, mature woman, with calm, observant, self-possessed eye, and softly rounded full chin. The Stickneys were Quakers of the best type. My grandmother was anything but a Quaker; she was something of a woman of fashion; she wore coal-scuttle bonnets of the largest size, whence once an embarrassing difficulty in entering a carriage; and on the eve of her wedding-day, being obliged to have her hair dressed by the hairdresser the day before, she sat up all night; she impressed her neighbours by appearing at church every Sunday with a new pair of gloves, and it was known that she tight-laced by fastening the laces to the bed-post; this, indeed, it was said, conduced to her death in child-bed on the birth of her third child at the age of a little over forty. This child died young, and another, a boy, went to sea in a ship that was never again heard of, so that my mother was the only surviving child.
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