MY LIFE

AND

WHAT SHALL I DO WITH IT?

CHAPTER I.

INTRODUCTORY.

OBJECT OF THIS BOOK. RELATIVE POSITION AND RELATIVE DUTIES OF GENTLEWOMEN.-DO THE POOR NEED US?-APOLOGY FOR A THREADBARE SUBJECT.-MUCH SAID, BUT LITTLE YET DONE. DIFFICULTIES IN THE WAY OF COMMONPLACE PEOPLE; AND DEFENCE OF THE COMMONPLACE. WISH TO AID THEM. WHY THIS BOOK HAS NOTHING IN IT PROFOUND.-EXAGGERATED IMPORTANCE ATTACHED TO THIS PORTION OF WOMEN'S WORK MUST LEAD TO DISAPPOINTMENT.

"Our province is virtue and religion, life and manners, the science of improving the temper, and making the heart better. This is the field assigned to us to cultivate; how much it has lain neglected is indeed astonishing."-Bishop Butler.

THE object of the following pages is to point out, especially to the younger portion of our sisterhood, the more usually practicable ways in which educated gentlewomen, who have the leisure and

* At the risk of seeming affected, I prefer using the word "gentlewomen," to the more usual one "ladies," as being one that

B

the will, may employ their own advantages in the improvement of uneducated and ungentle women, and of their social condition; and to show how they may best prepare for the work.

The class to whom I write is therefore a very limited one, and the subject on which I write is still more so; for though we are apt just now to think and speak of it as though it were the only, or at least the chief work that unmarried ladies

refers more to personal character than to social position; and as having, through its general disuse, retained more of its proper meaning than now attaches to the indiscriminately applied and therefore unmeaning word "lady." It is much more difficult to find a word that shall shortly and truly denote the other class of whom I shall have to speak so often. The working classes, if ranged according to the amount and hardness of their work, must certainly begin with the higher members of the learned professions, and include our great manufacturers and merchants, and so through our clerks, and tradesmen, and farmers, and skilled mechanics, &c., down to those who support themselves and their families by purely manual labour-the least worked and therefore the worst off of our working men. It is chiefly the mass of people below these last those I mean who do not support their families or themselves, whose condition calls so pressingly for improvement. These are what our manual workers mean by the "lower orders: " and I would have used that term, but that it is so often applied by ourselves in a much wider and less correct sense. In fact, where no real boundary line exists, too much precision in defining terms may lead rather to confusion than clearness. "Uneducated is perhaps the best, as expressing the one want, which though not the most pressing, is yet common to all the different classes of whose need of help we shall have to speak; but I must beg my readers to bear in mind that "educated" and "uneducated" are always used here in a relative, not a positive sense, unless the contrary is expressly stated.

have to do, it is, in fact, only that portion of their duty which arises out of one of several relations in which they are commonly placed: i. e. the relation in which, as educated, they stand to the uneducated, as gentle to the uncivilised; as being themselves in easy circumstances, to the suffering and poor. And as this is scarcely the whole duty of any, so I am far from supposing the work resulting from it is the proper work of all. Each one must decide this first question for herself, according to the circumstances in which she is placed. But whilst there is so general a complaint of the want of any real occupation and object in life for our unmarried gentlewomen, on the one hand, and such continual calls for such help as it is said gentlewomen could give, on the other, it cannot be justly deemed a merely sentimental inquiry, when we ask how far, and in what way, they who are asking for unpaid work can give that unpaid help which is needed.

Now, whether the want of something more in the way of occupation than society supplies us with be a matter-of-fact want, or only the result of morbid indolence, and of a desire to exchange the monotony of existing home duties for the excitement of more novel ones abroad, is a question on which great difference of opinion still seems to exist, if not amongst ourselves, yet amongst those whose consent and support is very necessary for us; and this, therefore, cannot be taken for granted. But that the uneducated do stand in

some considerable need of such help as we could give them, may I think be fairly assumed as a fact already proved and confessed.

For it is admitted on all sides that much more must be done than has yet been attempted for the untaught, unchristianised, suffering, and often degraded masses, whose numbers are certainly not decreasing in our country. Every writer on the condition of our population calls for "more agency, more immediate, more minute." Every report of our benevolent or judicial reformatories reveals to us a new mass of human misery, not yet perhaps beyond the reach of human aid, but as yet unreached by it. Nearly all the reports of our societies for social improvement or relief conclude by asking, "Are there no Christian women who could devote themselves to this or that part of our work?"

It has been shown by Mrs. Jameson in her two well-known little works, "Sisters of Charity" and "Communion of Labour," what has been done elsewhere, by persons like ourselves, in this work, especially in hospitals, reformatories, and prisons. And in the practical lectures to ladies, delivered by professional men who spoke from their own experience; and in the letters on workhouses (in the journals of the Social Improvement Society, and in the reports of the "Workhouse Visiting Society "), we have been told how far such agency as ours is needed here, to complete the work of our hospitals and workhouses, for the relief of the sick