Searching | Julia Wedgwood

Searching for Hidden Writings

We know Wedgwood published lots in the Spectator, especially in the 1870s to early 1880s, but what exactly? How can we find out?

Obviously one method is looking at her correspondence. Sue Brown has already done work on this and has identified:

‘Mr Darwin’s Descent of Man [second notice]’ (1871), ‘Christianity and Positivism’ (1871), ‘The Natural and the Supernatural’ (1871), ‘Christianity as a System’ (1872), ‘The First Opponent of Christianity’ (1878), and ‘Charles Darwin [third notice]’ (1887)

I have spotted references in correspondence to 'Books on Free-Will and Necessity' (1864), 'The Secret of Hegel' and 'Hegel's Dead Secret' (1865), 'Science and Faith' (1879), 'A Botanist on Evolution' (1882), and ‘The Treatment of the Insane’ (1884).

What else might be out there?

Low-hanging fruit

Wedgwood published several writings with her initials ‘J. W.’:

‘Eternal Punishment and Eternal Hope’ (1878)

Two-part ‘Dialogue on Fate and Free-Will’ (1879),

as well as a few letters.

(But are there other ‘J. W.’s? I checked the Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals (a.k.a the Bible), and only one other author went by ‘J. W.’, William Jerdan – and he had passed away in 1869.

Plus, one letter signed ‘J. W.’, ‘In Memoriam’ (1881), was a personal reminiscence of Erasmus Darwin (Charles’s elder brother) and is mentioned in family letters.

Another initialled letter defended ‘Mr Browning’s Dramatic Idyls’ (1879), a subject close to her heart.

The initialled ‘Dialogue on Fate and Free-Will’ duplicated the format and style of her earlier two-part dialogue ‘The Boundaries of Science’. In both, the interlocutors have Greek names that reflect their views (after George Berkeley’s Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous).

A few more letters were initialled ‘J. W. F’. No-one in Wellesley used these initials, which reorder Wedgwood’s full initials, F. (Frances) J. W. One ‘J. W. F.’ letter was on Thomas Erskine’s theology, with which we know she was keenly engaged, and her correspondence with Emelia Gurney confirms that she published a letter on this topic in the Spectator at this time, October 1871.

The Purloined Letter

Then I stumbled on a two-part essay from December 1879 on ‘The Moral Ideal’. This really was a purloined letter hanging so plainly in view that the detective fails to spot it (as in Edgar Allan Poe’s famous story. ‘The solution can’t be that easy!’). To be sure, someone else could have written on ‘The Moral Ideal’. But these essays contain first sketches of many themes later developed more fully in her book The Moral Ideal, and some identical sentences. Here's two indicative examples:

"That men have at all times meant much the same thing by goodness is what no one—not even one who thinks they always will mean the same thing by it—will assert. The moral ideal of the classical world is unquestionably different from the ideal of Christianity. … The very word ‘virtue’ embodies the change which that ideal has undergone. How rarely do we use the expression ‘a virtuous man.’ How unnatural would it have appeared to a Roman to speak of a woman as distinguished by ‘virtus.’"

And in The Moral Ideal:

"When we turn from human desire to human admiration, this change of feeling becomes yet more evident. … What speaks most of the change is the fact that virtue has even altered its sex; the Roman would have found it difficult to associate virtus with any possible feminine excellence; the Englishman rarely uses the word except with reference to women. … In the case of Virtue, modern association has changed manliness to womanliness."

'The Moral Ideal’ says:

"Another source of confusion is to be found in the fact that the antithesis we imagine between pleasure and pain is a fiction of the logical intellect. There is no equivalence between our recoil from evil and our attraction towards good. We have one absolutely common point of recoil,—every sentient being dreads physical pain. But this pole of repulsion has no corresponding pole of attraction."

Compare her known essay on Carlyle:

"No source of error is commoner than the fallacy of antithesis. We cannot say that the effect of cold is always the reverse of the effect of heat, nor is there any department in physical investigation in which it could be safely assumed that if you reverse the cause you would simply reverse the effect. Though no one can love good who does not hate evil, we should greatly err if we endeavoured to measure the love of good, in our own hearts or in those of others, by our hatred of evil."

Following the Thread

This two-part essay (‘The Moral Ideal’) overlapped heavily with several others: first, ‘Pleasure and Pain’ (1882).

Both this piece and ‘The Moral Ideal’ argue:

(i) pleasure and pain are not symmetrical opposites, but that pain has a positive reality from which we recoil, while there is no single object of all aspirations corresponding to the term ‘pleasure’;

(ii) the direct antithesis between pleasure and pain is a logical fiction, stemming from a logical fallacy of arranging ethical phenomena into symmetrical antitheses, the ‘fallacy of antithesis’;

and (iii) both use the same quotation from Newman on ‘entering into the joy of the Lord’.

The ‘Moral Ideal’ overlaps, too, with 'The Misleading Character of Law as an Index to Morals' (1883), which again protests against the logical mind's tendency to line up antitheses like rows of dominoes, when really ‘The antithesis between what is right and wrong is quite unlike the antithesis between what is legal and illegal’. On the same theme, ‘Misleading’ holds that the antithesis of praise is not blame, nor vice versa; and that telling truth and telling lies are not antitheses either, as also argued in ‘The Moral Ideal–II’.

‘Misleading Character’ opens by proposing to continue responding to the new work Natural Religion to which the author has ‘recently adverted’. John Robert Seeley’s 1882 book Natural Religion had been discussed by Hutton in the Spectator a year earlier but on Spectator timescales, with 52 issues a year, this was not recent. However just two months before ‘Misleading’ (September 1883), there had been a Spectator essay responding to a letter from the preceding month by Seeley. That essay was ‘The Future Life’ = the ‘recent adversion’.

Two others could be identified by cross-referrals:

‘Moral Purpose in Fiction’ (1882) began by stating it replied to the charge of having slandered contemporary fiction in ‘Youth and Age’ (1881), an essay Wedgwood included in Teachers under the new title ‘De Senectute’.

'Gratitude' (1883) began by referring back to the discussion of praise and blame in 'Moral Purpose in Fiction'.

Click here to read how I found more items using digital + textual methods.

Click here to read indicative evidence for the rest of the attributions.