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William Robert Grove, who had just invented the fuel cell, professed in the Blackwood’s Magazine in 1843 that scientists who sought money as a reward “have no right to look for fame; to those who sell the produce of their brains, the public owes no debt.” Grove’s words echoed the age-old scholarly virtue of altruism. While many agreed with Grove, many also realized that altruism was severely threatened by the economic realities of the modern world. First, a growing number of scientists came from the middle classes and could not afford to be indifferent about financial rewards. Second, the public was convinced that scientists who had earned renown, basked in wealth. The reality was rather different. Scientific work rarely made anyone rich because scientific publications sold poorly, and publishers offered terrible terms especially for younger scholars. Hence, only a few could share the experience of Thomas Babington Macaulay whose History of England was making him, according to his own words, “a rich man indeed.” The public, however, was ignorant about the precariousness of scholarly publishing and instead coupled esteem and wealth. This could have rather tragic consequences for scholars and scientists whom the intellectual work had not elevated to opulence.
Agnes Strickland (1796–1874) was one of the most popular (women) historians in early Victorian Britain. Together with her sister Elizabeth she wrote a series of short biographies of English queens. At the time of Victoria’s ascension, there was a high demand for an alternative narrative for the traditional masculinist way of accounting the nation’s glorious past. The impressive sales figures, though, did not make the sisters rich because Agnes Strickland had signed a “terribly poor deal” with their publisher Colburn. The mortified author had to admit that because of this, the extremely popular Lives of the Queens of England produced “much fame and no profit.” The public was wholly unaware of this and assumed that Agnes Strickland was a wealthy woman and that her wealth should have benefited her less fortunate contemporaries. Consequently, as her sister and biographer Jane Margaret Strickland later wrote less courteously, the false supposition of her affluence “subjected her to a series of petty annoyances in the shape of begging-letters from unknown individuals, papers requesting donations for building hospitals, restoring churches, and furnishing libraries.”
Strickland shared the fate with many other scholars, but it is probable that her gender gave an additional impetus to those who considered philanthropy as a form of feminine sensitivity. Indeed, she received moving solicitations that appealed to the quintessential feminine quality of compassion. This gendering of authorial charity also shows well in the numerous requests she got from widows of clergymen. According to her biographer, she received more than fifty letters from these widows: all written “in moving language” and relating a similar story of furnishing a school which did not obtain enough students to pay the bills. Strickland’s biographer had no mercy for these unknown people who “were continuously soliciting her alms.” Jane Margaret Strickland was proud of her sister who learned to suppress her naturally charitable nature and leave the absurd and folly applications unanswered. Importantly, this did not mean that Agnes Strickland would have abandoned philanthropy entirely, her sister stressed. On the contrary, she maintained the feminine virtue of charitable nature, but learnt to direct her charity to the causes which she was intimately familiar with. While philanthropy was a Victorian virtue, foolishness in finances obviously was not.
The continuous requests from “fans” were a nuisance to historians and other scholars. In addition to the standard rhetoric of begging, Agnes Strickland had to endure the pleas to her feminine “compassionate” nature. What was common for this annoying “fan mail” was the assumption that writing history was a profitable pursuit and that historians were so affluent that they could easily share part of their wealth. This was not the case at all. When Edward Freeman received from Chicago two “begging letters” asking him to donate his books to a local library over there, he was plain angry. Too many people had asked him to give them his books. “I never can tell what they mean,” he complained to his publisher Alexander Macmillan. He was infuriated with everyone who thought that he had piles of author copies waiting for anyone who dared to ask for them. No, that was not the case at all. “I have no books to give them unless I pay for them & it seems to me that they might just as well ask me to buy them a coat or a pair of boots,” he protested to Macmillan. Strickland and Freeman certainly did not shun the fame, but they were dismayed about the constant and costly demands they received from the public. That was not what they had signed up for when they had become historians. Yet, their complaints had very little influence: Victorians were convinced that scholarly fame entailed opulence and benevolence towards the less privileged ones.
Sources
Macmillan Papers. British Library, London.
*
Grove, William Robert. “Physical science in England.” Blackwood’s Magazine, 1843.
Strickland, Jane Margaret. Life of Agnes Strickland. Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1887.
Thomas, William (ed.). The Journals of Thomas Babington Macaulay, vol. 2. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2008.
Clio's footnotes 