9 January: Boreham on Caroline Herschel

The First Mate
Caroline Herschel, the anniversary of whose death we mark today, represents a very valuable class of human benefactors. She was not a great astronomer, yet, but for her unfailing sympathy and ready cooperation, her illustrious brother William Herschel, could never have achieved his lifework.[1] She is one of the world's first mates.

First mates, according to Mr. W. W. Jacobs' redoubtable nightwatchman, are much worse than skippers. "To begin with," he explained, "they know they ain't skippers, and that's enough to put them in a bad temper, especially if they've had their certificate a good many years and can't get a ship!" The principle thus elaborated between the puffs of the philosophical nightwatchman's stubby clay pipe may or may not hold true of that nautical realm to which they so pointedly applied it. It may or may not hold true of other realms in which men are first mates. But what of women? Has not history demonstrated, beyond the possibility of doubt, that women possess an extraordinary genius for discharging the duties of first mate not only with superb efficiency but with exquisite charm?

Should we ever have heard of William Blake, for example, if it had not been for Catherine? She was only a servant girl, married to a man whom most women would have deemed utterly impossible. An incorrigible dreamer, Blake seldom returned from a stroll in the park without telling her of the angels clustered round the lake, or the prophets with whom he had conversed on the grassy bank. The men with whom he had business relationships complained that he was absent-minded, inscrutable, otherworldly. But, with uncanny instinct, Catherine always knew how to deal with him, and, as a natural consequence, she always elicited the best that was in him. Keeping their little cottage scrupulously clean, and, true to the best traditions of her sex, keeping herself trim and tidy and attractive, she went to infinite pains to see things as her husband saw them. With a smile on her face and a song on her lips she would sit up all night to assist her strange husband in tasks that were hopelessly beyond her comprehension. By her sympathy his best work was inspired and on her devotion his great renown very largely rests.

An Idyll Of Poesy And A Tragedy Of Prose
In the days of his restless youth, when Wordsworth was in danger of entangling himself in the political and military tumults of the time, it was his sister who recalled him to his desk and pointed him along the road that led to destiny. She soothed his soul, Rosaline Masson tells us, and, sweeping from his mind the froth of politics and the mist of doubt, she led him into the love of beauty and the serenity of faith. Dorothy accompanied her brother on most of his gipsyings; pointed out to him much of the loveliness that he embalmed in his verses; and suggested to him many of his themes. Happily the laureate recognised his debt, just as Blake realised all that he owed to his Catherine. Thousands of feminine hearts have been touched by Wordsworth's tribute to his sister:-

She gave me eyes; she gave me ears;
And humble cares and delicate fears;
A heart, the fountain of sweet tears,
And love, and thought and joy.

One trembles to contemplate the loss to our literature that the absence of Dorothy Wordsworth would have represented.

In a very different mood, we recall that perfect spring day in 1866 when a lady, driving through Hyde Park to admire the beauty of the snowdrops and the crocuses, was seen to lurch suddenly forward in her carriage and was found to be dead. It was a devastating blow for Carlyle, although unlike Blake and Wordsworth, he had never until that moment grasped the immensity of his debt to Jeanie. Later on, Carlyle often shook his shaggy old head, and brushed a suspicion of moisture from his steel-grey eyes, as he reflected on all the help that, without a word of thanks, his wife had given him. "In the ruined nave of the old Abbey Kirk," he says, "with the skies looking down on her, there sleeps my little Jeanie. The light of her face will shine on me no more; but her part in the stern battle that we fought together was brighter and braver than my own." The skipper's tribute to his first mate was nobly, if tardily, paid.


Those Who Make Possible Another's Greatness
But the outstanding case of a captain's obligation to his officers is Robert Louis Stevenson's. "What a debt he owed to women!" exclaims his biographer. At every stage of his strange and brittle career, a woman was at hand to inspire, console, or direct him. And all these gracious and tender ministries reached their climax when he married the lady who became his most loyal comrade, his most faithful critic, and his devoted nurse. Sir Sidney Colvin declares that we owe all that is best in Stevenson's work to the presence at his side of a wife who exhibited a character as strong, as captivating, and as romantic as his own. One of these days the worth of the world's workers will be justly and accurately assessed. It will be a day of the most startling and sensational surprises; and not least among its astonishments will be the disclosure of the immensity of the debt that the world owes to its first mates.

The skipper, in all the glory of his gold braid, stands upon the bridge, the cynosure of all eyes and the object of universal admiration; but in his hearts of hearts he knows how much he owes to those upon whom the limelight seldom falls. Emerson used to say that a man is entitled to credit, not only for what he himself does, but for all that he moves others to do. Ladies like Caroline Herschel, Catherine Blake, Dorothy Wordsworth, Jane Carlyle, and Fanny Stevenson are the choice representatives of a vast host of brave and brilliant, though unselfish and unostentatious, women without whom our literature would be poor indeed. Some day we shall open a pantheon in which we shall find a place, not only for our great men, but for those who made our great men great. At present we erect our stately monuments only to skippers. But injustice cannot last for ever. Some day the world will ask the secret of the skipper's skill; and when the world asks that penetrating question, the day of the first mate will at last have dawned.

F W Boreham

Image: Caroline Herschel

[1] The story of William Herschel is described in the essay that appears in this book on 27 August.