Professor Seth Koven of Rutgers University researches and teaches the social, economic and cultural history of Britain and Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His award-winning book, Slumming: Social and Sexual Politics in Victorian London (Princeton University Press, 2004) analyzed the relationship between eros and altruism in shaping social welfare in modern Britain.

In Episode 11 of ‘Five Hundred Years of Friendship’ Professor Koven speaks about the unusual friendship between Muriel Lester and Nellie Dowell – the subject of his forthcoming book, The Match Girl and the Heiress (Princeton University Press, 2015). This post for the History of Emotions Blog is an edited extract from the introduction to that book, reproduced here with the kind permission of the publisher. 

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I cannot say with certainty how and when they met, but I do know that Muriel Lester and Nellie Dowell loved one another. That they ever met seems improbable, more the stuff of moralizing fiction than history. Muriel was the cherished daughter of a wealthy Baptist shipbuilder, reared in the virtuous abundance of the Lester family’s gracious Essex homes. A half-orphaned Cockney toiling in the match industry by age twelve, Nellie spent her earliest years in east London’s mean streets and cramped tenements, and her girlhood as a pauper ward of the state confined to poor law hospitals and barrack schools. During the first decades of the twentieth century, they were “loving mates” who shared their fears, cares, and hopes. Their love allowed them to glimpse the possibility of remaking the world according to their own idealistic vision of Christ’s teachings. They claimed social rights, not philanthropic doles, for their slum neighbors. They struggled for peace in war-intoxicated communities grieving for brothers, fathers, and husbands lost to the Western front. Nellie dreamed of ladies’ clean white hands. Muriel yearned to free herself from the burden of wealth. Together, they sought to create a society based on radically egalitarian principles, which knew no divisions based on class, gender, race, and nation.

Muriel Lester in 1938

The Match Girl and the Heiress is about Muriel and Nellie, the worlds of wealth and want into which they were born, the historical forces that brought them together, and the “New Jerusalem” they tried to build in their London slum neighborhood of Bow. Their friendship was one terrain on which they used Christian love to repair their fractured world. The surviving fragments of their relationship disclose an all but forgotten project of radical Christian idealism tempered by an acute pragmatism born of the exigencies of slum life. They explored what it meant to be rights-bearing citizens, not subjects, in a democratic polity. Convinced that even the smallest gestures – downcast eyes or a deferential nod of the head –perpetuated the burdened histories of class, race, and gender oppression, Nellie and Muriel believed that they could begin to unmake and remake these formations – and hence the world — through how they lived their own lives. The local and the global, the everyday and the utopian, the private and the public existed in fruitful tension as distinct but connected realms of thought, action, and feeling.

Their story is part of a much broader impulse among thousands of well-to-do women and men in late-19^th and early 20^th century Europe and the United States to traverse cultural and class boundaries in seeking “friendship” with the outcast.  A few like Muriel self-consciously “unclassed” themselves by entering into voluntary poverty to model a society liberated from the constraints and inequalities of class. Nellie could not afford to “unclass” herself.  She lived and died a very poor woman. She, like Muriel, crossed borders into a place of their own making, one committed to the unfinished business of reimagining gender, class and nation by breaking down the hierarchies upholding them.

That place was Kingsley Hall, Britain’s first Christian revolutionary “People’s House” and the institutional incarnation of Nellie and Muriel’s friendship where they tried to translate ideals of fellowship into the stuff of everyday life.  Founded in February 1915 in an abandoned hell-fire Zion Baptist chapel amid the furies unleashed by the world at war, it was an outpost of pacifism, feminism, and socialism committed to radical social sharing. Muriel and Kingsley Hall’s original residents established East London’s chapter of the pan-denominational Brethren of the Common Table whose members satisfied their minimal weekly needs for food, shelter, and clothing and then placed whatever excess remained from their earnings on the communion table for others to take. They asked no questions and accepted no thanks. A special London correspondent from the United States witnessed the earnest Brethren in conversation at Kingsley Hall. He gleefully reported that the involuntarily poor among them upbraided their well-born friends for excessive self-denial. “It drives me wild to see these people going short of things they want,” one widowed mother of four complained. “They ain’t used to it. It’s going too far.” At times comically self-serious, residents of Kingsley Hall decided it was too risky to leave fun to chance:  they held temperance “Joy Nights” where men and women could laugh, dance and socialize.

My first day at Kingsley Hall Dagenham, I read Nellie’s witty warm letters to Muriel. I was instantly struck by her humor and intellect as well as her evident discomfort with letter writing and the conventions of Standard English. Full of mundane chat, her longing for Muriel, and events so inconsequential that she probably forgot them the next day, Nellie’s letters invite listening to her talk as much as reading what she wrote. They retain the rhythms and freshness of speech as thoughts take flight without regard to formal punctuation. Nellie’s letters baffled, delighted, and intrigued me. Who was Nellie? Why did she write these letters, what did they signify, and why did Muriel save them?

Matchworkers at the Bryant and May factory, 1888 (c) TUC Library Collections

Nellie, I came to learn, had a remarkable global life as a proletarian match factory worker and Cockney cosmopolitan before she met Muriel. When her sailmaker father died at sea in 1881, poverty compelled her devoted mother Harriet Dowell to give her up to Poor Law officials who sent her to late-Victorian Britain’s most controversial Poor Law “barrack” school and orphanage. Nellie entered the match industry in the year of the world famous “Match Girls’ Strike” of 1888. Labor conflicts dogged her everywhere she went. Her arrival in Wellington in June 1900 was fiercely debated in the New Zealand parliament and sparked a political crisis for the Liberal ministry.

Proletarian spinsters don’t have literary executors; their family members rarely enjoy material circumstances to enable them to save letters and papers. If Nellie’s papers do exist, I have not found them. The most important sources about her survived because Muriel preserved them.  Nellie and her letters mattered to Muriel.  She made no secret of how much she loved, admired, and depended on Nellie, with her “broad commonsense outlook on life,” “staggering generosity” and “genius” for solving problems. In a collection full of missives from major and minor figures in modern history – heads of state, activists and reformers, Nobel laureates – Muriel herself put Nellie’s eleven letters in a manila envelope. In the distinctive unsteady hand of her old age, she wrote “Nell” on it.  No other documents in her papers bore such indisputable marks of Muriel’s self-archiving, at least when I first touched and read her papers.

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Return to: Five Hundred Years of Friendship at the History of Emotions Blog

Paul Reed is a military historian with particular expertise in the battlefields of the Western Front. He is the author of several books, including Great War Lives and Walking the Somme. In this blog post he discusses how to interpret the discovery in Arras in 2001 of what appears to have been the bodies of members of the Grimsby Chums, arm in arm, but with one of their number buried at arm’s length …

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The Point du Jour is a piece of high ground north-east of Arras which formed part of the Brown Line objectives of 34th Division on 9th April 1917, the opening day of the Battle of Arras. It was captured that day by units of 101st Brigade; 10th Lincolns (Grimsby Chums) and 15th Royal Scots among them. The position was consolidated, and overlooked the neighbouring village of Gavrelle. Fighting for that area was conducted by the 63rd (Royal Naval) Division in late April, then the Pals battalions of 31st Division in May. Although Gavrelle was captured, the line never moved much beyond here that year, and fighting returned in March 1918 when the German breakthrough was stopped by 56th (London) Division only a few hundred yards short of Point du Jour. There was further action in August when Gavrelle was retaken.

It can be seen that even in this tiny part of the Arras battlefield there was a great deal of fighting, and a large number of units which served here. Common to most parts of this battlefield, there are few cemeteries – the majority of soldiers who fell at Arras are commemorated on the Arras Memorial and have no known grave. Following the war the land was reclaimed, trenches filled in and it returned to its pre-war use as farmland. the 9th (Scottish) Division who fought in the area to the south on 9th April erected their divisional memorial here, and many years later, in the 1980s, the main Arras-Douai road was expanded to act as a feeder to the nearby A1 motorway. The memorial was placed in an island, and the nearby Point du Jour CWGC Cemetery (made permanent in the 1920s) was built round, and now stood back from the road. Sometime in 2000, the farmland north of the Douai road was sold to developers and the BWM car company proposed to build a large factory on the site. Work for the foundations of this began in the Spring of 2001, and it was during this that the Arras Archeological Service was called in following the discovery of human remains.

The grave at Point du Jour (©Daily Mirror Newspapers)

Alain Jacques and his colleagues probably thought they might find a few bodies, but work un-earthed a complete mass grave of twenty soldiers, buried in a line (see photo above). They had all been properly buried, and as was common practice equipment and helmets had been removed; with a couple of exceptions. Jacques later said,

Can you imagine the friendship and dedication of those who went about laying down the remains in this way? To go and get a leg and position it in the line – what a remarkable act. They must have died within hours of each other.(1)

A lot was made of the fact that they had died ‘with their boots on’, but again it was common practice to do this – at least it appears so from interviews with veterans and other first hand accounts. While battle injuries are obvious on some bodies, on others there appears little sign of how they died. Some unit insignia was discovered with the remains, three or four shoulder titles of the Lincolnshire Regiment. No identification disks were found; official ones, made of compressed fibre, would have perished anyway and while wearing the aluminium ‘French’ style was common in 1917, none were discovered.

Research immediately showed that it was the 10th Lincolns (Grimsby Chums) who had served here, and press speculation concluded that this was a mass grave from that unit. This was further enforced by the statement in some papers that twenty-four men from the unit had died on 9th April, and that this twenty accounted for those missing. We shall look at that statement in due course. What is clear is that the association with 10th Lincolns is speculation. As we have seen a large number of units served in this area, and as only a small number of unit titles were found, it is impossible to be conclusive about the bodies with nothing. However, having said that Operation Orders for Arras often demanded that regimental titles be removed before the attack, in some cases along with ID or ‘dog’ tags(2). At best the connection with the Lincolns could be called circumstantial, but that there is such a connection might be supported by further research.

Assuming that this is a grave of 10th Lincolns, what might we make of the statement that these burials account for the missing of that unit? It is certainly true that according to Soldiers Died in the Great War (SWD), twenty-four men died on 9th April 1917. However, what is often overlooked, and is confirmed in Peter Bryant’s history of the battalion (3), is that following the capture of this position, 10th Lincolns remained here until April 14th, and that during this period in fact the battalion lost forty men killed according to SWD. Another factor overlooked is that not only did forty Other Ranks die, but in addition there was one fatal officer casualty. This was Lieutenant Wynard Fleetwood Cocks. Cocks was originally commissioned in the 3rd Lincolns, and attached to the 10th. In fact he is recorded on the CWGC Debt of Honour register as 3rd, which is why I suspect even MOD have overlooked him. However, his death is confirmed in Bryant and the unit’s War Diary. One officer later wrote,

… a zig-zag pathway through the wire was found. It was here that Cocks was mortally wounded, and he died propped up against the enemy wire pickets while trying to smoke his pipe, and encouraging his men to push on – a very fitting death for a very gallant gentleman, beloved by all who knew him.(4)

Wynard Cocks was the son of Mrs F.A.Cocks of Jesmond, Ryde, Isle of Wight. He was age 25 when he died of wounds on 9th April 1917. He has no known grave and is commemorated on the Arras Memorial.

Given this evidence – look again at the photo above. While the majority of burials are close together – Alain Jacques felt they were actually ‘arm in arm’ – the one on the extreme right is slightly apart from the others, with his arms by his side. This distance, although slight, might perhaps be intentional. Could it indicate that this soldier was something apart from the others – perhaps an officer? If so, and if this is the Lincolns, he must be Lieutenant Cocks. Nothing in any of the reports I have seen so far, or in the BBC programme made even a hint at this. Cocks seems to have been overlooked. Forensic evidence might also confirm the age, and given his social background, one might not suspect the same level of under-nourishment, or bone changes due to physical labour, that one could expect to see with a working class soldier.

As previously stated, the 10th Lincolns lost 40 Other Ranks up to 14th April, 24 of them on the 9th. Of these 11 have graves, and 28 are on the Arras Memorial. For one man, there is no trace: Private George Bedgood, who died on the 9th (he does not appear in the CWGC Debt of Honour register). For the casualties on 9th April 1917, 19 are on the Arras Memorial and four have graves.

Weather conditions during the battle were harsh, and Bryant’s history records that several men died of exposure. At one point they came under a gas attack, and several were killed in this. These statements seem to further support that these burials are from 10th Lincolns; the lack of physical damage to the bodies would be consistent with gas and weather related deaths, and perhaps there might be some trace of this from a forensic point of view? This appears to be another factor overlooked by MOD.

In conclusion, there is a weight of circumstantial evidence to suggest that the remains found at the Point du Jour are of men from 10th Lincolns, including one of their officers. The CWGC will rebury them all at Point du Jour cemetery sometime in 2002. A MOD case conference, filmed for the ‘Body Hunt’ programme, indicated that they felt there was nothing to ensure anything more than an ‘unknown soldier’ headstone would be erected for each man. No names it seems; but no regimental details? For a unit like the Chums that seems a sad ending to a tragic tale.

Sources

(1) From ‘Grimsby Chums are found in war grave’, The Times 20th June 2001.
(2) I have seen such orders in the 14th (Light) Division war diaries, for example, in PRO WO95.
(3) Bryant, Peter – Grimsby Chums: The Story of the 10th Lincolnshires in the Great War (Humberside County Council 1990)
(4) ibid. p.92-94.

Other Sources

Chapman, Peter – Grimsby’s Own: The Story of the Chums (Grimsby Evening Telegraph 1991)
Falls, Cyril – Military Operations France & Flanders 1917 Vol I (HMSO 1940, reptrinted 1992)
Simpson, C.R. (Ed) – The History of the Lincolnshire Regiment 1914-1918 (Medici Society 1931)

[This post first appeared on Paul Reed’s ‘Battlefields of WW1’ website in 2002 and is reproduced here with permission.]

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Follow Paul Reed on Twitter: @sommecourt

Return to: Five Hundred Years of Friendship at the History of Emotions Blog

Dr Angharad Eyre is an expert on religion in Victorian Britain, including its impact on women’s lives, education, and careers. In this blog post she describes the emotional life of Westfield College Principal Constance Maynard, and the unusual friendship network she maintained, via correspondence, among her former students.  It provides an insight into the combination of intimacy, improvement and inspiration that made up Victorian friendships, and a comparison with other female friendship networks explored in ‘Five Hundred Years of Friendship‘.

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Like many of the first women’s college principals, Constance Maynard (Westfield College 1882-1913) found her work all too often unrewarding and lonely. She had refused an offer of marriage soon before starting as principal and she remained unmarried for life. As scholars have noted, her relationships with the women in her college were often fraught; she became involved in love triangles among the staff, and developed troubling relationships with students. In her diaries she often admitted to being deeply unhappy and this, combined with the stresses of managing a college, led to depression and at least two bouts of long-term illness. She countered these conditions with holidays, cycling, vegetarianism, and, most importantly, friendship. It was in letters to her alumnae, whom she saw and addressed as her ‘dear friends’, that she could admit to her feelings of despair and receive the comfort of their support.

Maynard initiated a unique form of correspondence with her alumnae, which is most easily understood as a kind of chain letter. Maynard would write a letter to the first student on the list, who read it and sent it on with one of her own to the next person on the list, who then added hers, and so on. When the bundle came back to the original authors, they replaced their initial letters with new ones and continued to send the bundle round. In this way all were involved in a correspondence ‘ring’, receiving each other’s news along with the news of Westfield. This method was perfect for busy, professional women, wishing to maintain contact with each other but having no time to copy whole letters to numerous correspondents – as in traditional correspondence circles. The old letters were then sent back to Westfield for safe-keeping and were later disseminated to new generations of correspondents in separate ‘rings’, as more students graduated and became alumnae. By the time Constance Maynard retired there were eight rings of letters circulating. Unfortunately, the early secretaries of Westfield only preserved Constance Maynard’s side of the correspondence, and between 1887 and 1903 only two letters remain written by other authors. Conclusions as to the nature of the students’ letters can, however, be drawn from Maynard’s responses.

Importantly, the form of the correspondence enabled Maynard and her friends to maintain a virtual female community, following on from the actual community that had been developed at college. The correspondence therefore reflected a new idea of a female group identity, with all the young women corresponding equally with each other rather than with particular friends. And it reflected the new experience for women of being part of a corporate whole, and responsible for upholding the college’s ethos and traditions. Maynard described the correspondence to her students as working ‘on the time honoured principle of the Irishman’s knife’, meaning that it would be maintained and passed on, from one generation to another, as their college inheritance. What was being passed on was the college’s core moral discourse, in the form of useful information, exemplars and a network of contacts in the professions, as Maynard described:

How many of you would like to join a Correspondence Society? I have no name for it but the thing I understand very clearly, and I for one want to belong to it. There is quite a long list of you now out in the world […] Now and then, especially when any change takes place, we want to have a little picture of what you are saying and doing and experiencing and striving after! (letter, June 1887)

Maynard implies here that she will belong equally with the alumnae. She also creates the expectation that it is not just she who needs to be kept informed of her alumnae’s work, but that it will be the desire of the entire college collective.

Certainly, Maynard had her own reasons for hearing her alumnae’s news. Her ambition was for her college to create serious women, who would go on to work for social and moral reform. She hoped especially that they would become missionaries, or at least would carry on their social work in a religious manner. In early letters to each ring, Maynard’s friendship is that of an ex-principal, still informing her alumnae of their duty to the college. In the very first letter she demands: ‘What is the use of our College if it does not turn out “soldiers and servants” waiting and working and living first of all for this end?’ (letter, June 1887), and at times she scolded them for not writing enough about their work, saying: ‘You are altogether too diffident!’ (letter, January 1894).

Though at times Maynard was disappointed with the slow pace of her alumnae’s progress, many of the students, like women graduates of other colleges at this time, did go on to work for the temperance movement, University Settlements and foreign missions, as well as going on to work as teachers and principals in girls’ schools and colleges. There is evidence that they found much-needed encouragement and sympathy in the correspondence ring. From the tone of one of Maynard’s letters, it is apparent that one of the students had been writing rather despondently about her work. Maynard replied:

Pioneer work seems to creep from point to point till one is tempted to think that nothing has been done and it needs a brave spirit to go on in the face of such reflections. But cheer up! Such progress follows the law of a falling stone, it goes on, not with equal, but with increasing energy with the lapse of time. (letter, January 1894)

Maynard communicates a good deal in these two sentences. She legitimates her friend’s feelings of dejection, sympathising with her in their shared experience of the frustrations of ‘pioneer work’. She also suggests a respect for her friend’s bravery in continuing her work. Finally she attempts to cheer her friend with a jolly ‘cheer up!’, and communicates her own faith in eventual success to bolster that of her friend.

Constance Maynard with a group of fellow students at Girton College, Cambridge

In the late 1890s, when Maynard’s health and spirits were failing, her letters reveal that the correspondence rings, rather than being simply opportunities to influence her students, became more important to her for their emotional value. She wrote on a number of occasions that the letters were: ‘like a long row of your faces, and I am very glad indeed to think I can have a word with you every one’ (letter, June 1899). To some of the rings she felt able to admit to her depressive tendencies: ‘I confess I do sometimes get disappointed with the students in college, each generation as it comes. So very much is given them, and the spontaneous response seems so small’, and implies that, though she is temporarily cheered, she fears the ‘duller, damper feelings’ will come again (letter, January 1899).

Dear friends, we are one family, one circle, and we can sorrow together and also trust and give thanks together. (letter, October 1897)Though we cannot know exactly how her students responded to these confessions, Maynard had set the tone for a sympathetic response a year or so earlier, when writing of the death of one of her students’ children:

This was the nature of the friendship Maynard’s correspondence ring was to foster among women. Made possible by the new women’s colleges, it proved an invaluable support to the first generations of women college graduates.

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Read more about religion, love, and Constance Maynard

Follow Angharad Eyre on Twitter: @AngharadEyre

Return to: Five Hundred Years of Friendship at the History of Emotions Blog

Emma Townshend is a writer and journalist, and the author of Darwin’s Dogs: How Darwin’s Pets Helped Form a World-Changing Theory of Evolution. In this post for the History of Emotions blog she writes about new research she has been doing into the representation of dogs in nineteenth-century fiction, arising from her contribution to Episode 8 of ‘Five Hundred Years of Friendship’.

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“A dog’s devotion is unquestioning, undemanding and undiminishing… If living without the lunatic companionship of dogs is proof of sanity, please God, let me be mad.”

Brian Sewell, Sleeping with Dogs (2013)

It won’t come as any surprise to dog-lovers in the early years of the twenty-first century, that there are still people like Brian Sewell in the world, much preferring to share his bed with his dogs than with another human. Charles Darwin was not quite such a Sewell-ite soft touch as a pet-owner – his most indulgent trait seems to have been throwing his dogs bits of biscuit between meals – but his letters nevertheless reveal a tender sense of love for his canine companions.

Darwin’s dog-owning began with Spark, which he owned as a teenager. “I hope you will send me many more nice affecting letters about dear little black nose,” he wrote in one scrawled message home from university. It progressed through Shelah, Czar, hunting dogs Sappho, Fan and Dash, Pincher, Nina, and family pets Bob, Bran; adoptive animals Tony, Quiz, Tartar, Pepper and Butterton; and the last dog of his life, Polly, whom his daughters felt was the most beloved of all, and who appears in the illustrations to his 1872 book, on The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals.

Darwin’s interest in dogs focused on the question of how much the ‘higher animals’ were really like us. The problem was an important one: it held the key, Darwin thought, to establishing that all life on earth evolved from one distant, common ancestor. In argument, Darwin’s opponents often evoked  ‘unique’ human qualities such as altruism, loyalty and love, to ‘prove’ that Homo sapiens was on an entirely different level of creation to all other animals on earth. Darwin argued that a deeper examination of zoological behaviour would find all those ‘noble’ qualities in animals themselves. That we were all on a continuum.

The mid-nineteenth century saw a massive shift in general in attitudes towards animals. It marks the foundation of the first animal welfare organisations, such as the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (later acquiring ‘Royal’ status to become the RSPCA) in 1824, and the passing soon afterwards of the first legislation to protect animals.  But it also witnessed another interesting change, which I found out more about whilst researching for my contribution to Episode 8 of ‘Five Hundred Years of Friendship’. This is the increasing interest of fiction writers in the mental world of animals, and in particular, dogs.

When I first began to look at dogs as characters in fiction, I thought it might be a short list. Certainly White Fang & Call of the Wild, by Jack London, about working dogs in the American west; and Virginia Woolf’s biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning from the point of view of her cocker spaniel, Flush. In fact, since I’ve been researching, the list grows longer and longer, and I haven’t stopped finding examples.

Of course, it isn’t an exclusively modern phenomenon to make a dog a character. Think of Homer, where Odysseus’s dog is the sole friend on Ithaca to recognise delightedly the returning, war-grizzled hero. Bruce Thomas Boehrer has argued in his recent book, Animal Characters, Nonhuman Beings in Early Modern Literature, that pre-modern writing contained plenty of thinking and even talking animals, appearing in beast fables, travel writing, and supernatural tales (you can read more about Bruce’s book in this article). But by the 1600s, this view was seen as out-of-date and whimsical; Shakespeare and Cervantes even made fun of it. Then Descartes put the final boot in by proposing a philosophical view of the world that ruled out animals being anything other than complicated machines.

It was the mid-nineteenth century before animals returned as central characters to story. At the exact moment when Darwin was looking at his own dogs (and ascribing to them intention, moral scruples, altruism, planning, memory, and love) some of Europe’s greatest writers were doing the same. Turgenev in 1854 published ‘Mumu’, a story of friendship between a poor man and a dog, so moving that the RSPCA sent a wreath to the author’s grave when he died.

Tolstoy, in Anna Karenina (published 1873-7) has a whole chapter – where Levin goes hunting in the Russian countryside – written from the point of view of Laska, Levin’s dog.

‘Well, if that’s what he wishes, I’ll do it, but I can’t answer for myself now,’ she thought, and darted forward as fast as her legs would carry her between the thick bushes. She scented nothing now; she could only see and hear, without understanding anything.

Or there is Chekhov, in the long story Kashtanka, published first in 1887, written entirely from the point of view of a dog who runs away to the circus, eventually returning to its owner.

There are also more conventionally telling attempts by writers to capture friendly human relationships with dogs. Thomas Mann, Nobel Prize winner, narrated the tale of Bashan, his own dog, in great detail; so much detail, in fact, that we learn more about Thomas Mann’s egocentric delight in his dog’s devotion than we do about the dog. Kafka in contrast wrote a tale, left unfinished at his death, of a bachelor called Blumenfeld who is dithering about whether to get a dog or not. Blumenfeld pines for the company but lists all the impracticalities of dog ownership, in a way that leaves us completely pitying him, and possibly also the tale’s author. Kipling and PG Wodehouse, in a third strand, tell comic stories entirely from the point of view of mischievous dogs, depicted with enormous fictional skill.

It seemed to me as I read these stories, that these great writers were doing exactly the same thing as Darwin. They were questioning the borders of animal and human; they were asking whether animals think, love and dream; and they were working out how to set their conclusions down on paper. Tolstoy wrote fiction; Darwin wrote scientific prose, but in the end, both men believed in dogs as beings with many similarities to ourselves, worth paying attention to and setting down in print. We are all cut from the same animal pattern, they argued; we all love, we all dream, we all fear, we all plan, we all act with kindness, compassion and grace, on occasion. And in extending this compassionate gaze to animals, we become friends with them, in a slightly strange way, but nonetheless, we do. Which leaves Brian Sewell slightly less bonkers than he might first appear.

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Return to: Five Hundred Years of Friendship at the History of Emotions Blog

Dr Helen Rogers is Reader in Nineteenth-Century Studies at Liverpool John Moores University. With her undergraduate students she has created Writing Lives: A Collaborative Research Project on Working-Class Autobiography. This blog post, written by Helen with Cleo Chalk, Steve Clark, John England and Victoria Hoffman, draws on the riches of working-class memoirs to explore friendship and improvement in the nineteenth century – the central theme of the second week of episodes of ‘Five Hundred Years of Friendship‘.

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Friendships are among our fiercest and most enduring relationships. They can be fraught and fleeting too. We so easily take them for granted, putting families and partners first. Historians have been similarly neglectful, mentioning friendship only in passing while studying family, household and sexual relationships, or networks around work, religion and politics. Personal memories reveal, however, that friendship is integral to all these aspects of social life and to our deeply-felt sense of self, both personal and collective.

While researching autobiographies by working-class people for the Writing Lives website, we decided to look at what friendship meant to our authors and what these relationships can tell us about working-class culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.[1]

Friendships helped many authors establish their identity outside the family. Friends could be especially important to children who experienced bereavement. Lottie Martin, born 1899, lost her mother at ten and left school at thirteen to look after her siblings. Her family were ‘close and good-humoured’ but ‘Withdrawn and shy, causing many of our associates to think we were “stuck up”’.[2] Meeting with former school friends gave Lottie freedom from domestic responsibility and from her family’s claustrophobic respectability.

From Paula Hill Never Let Anyone Draw the Blinds by Lottie Martin (Nottingham: 125 Bramcote Lane, 1985)

With her girlfriends, Lottie discovered the courting rituals of walking out. About a dozen girls would meet with boys from the neighbouring village and ‘pair off to stroll along the river side or walk over the fields’. This was a safe and companionable way of encountering the other sex: ‘Everything was so lovely and innocent’. 

Friendships could provoke disapproval and family tension, as Lottie found to her cost.  Her ‘favourite’ was Flo:

a happy carefree girl always smiling and full of fun and jokes. The boys loved her and because she would do all those things I longed to do, but dare not I loved her too. But oh the trouble she would get me into.

Free-and-easy girls like Flo were looked down upon by ‘respectable’ families. In defying her elder sister, who tried to stop the friendship, Lottie struck out for her own independence and alternative values.

Respectability could make and break friendships, as Jack Goring, born 1861, discovered. In his teens, Jack grabbed the opportunity to learn history, drawing and elocution at the Youth Institute. This meant giving up the variety shows he used to watch with an old friend who did not share his passion for ‘improvement’. Faced with a choice, Jack ‘let him go’ in favour of the Institute.[3] Later generations of scholarship boys and girls often lost the friends they ‘left behind’ when they went to grammar school and university, yet felt uneasy among companions from a different class. Friendships can be the first casualties of social mobility.

For the Victorian working classes, self-education and ‘mutual improvement’ brought together like-minded people and forged networks which sustained people through their working life. At the Youth Institute, Jack made life-long friends who later moved with him in freethinking, radical and bohemian circles. They helped him establish his business in advertising and encouraged him as a writer. Sixty years on, Jack described four surviving members of the Institute as ‘my very dear friends of whom I have had good cause for affectionate and lasting remembrance.’

Men often wrote significantly more about friendships than their relationships with wives and children. Their experience as husbands and fathers was a ‘personal’ matter that did not belong in their memoir. By contrast, writing about their intellectual companions, acquaintances at work, and political associates all helped to illustrate the men they had become.[4]

Born in 1880, Harry West revealed little of his marriage but showed how friendships supported his intellectual development when he left school because of poverty. When working in an office as a young man, his workmate Perry Mayer passed on his Grammar School learning. Yet, Harry liked him precisely because ‘He was a character entirely opposite to myself. He was a rugby player, a boxer, hot-tempered impulsive and hated office life.’ Accepting the nickname ‘Westy’, Harry called his friend ‘Mary’ in return, ‘although there was nothing feminine about him’.[5]

In their pet names, ‘Westy’ and ‘Mary’ jovially adopted a marital persona for their friendship. Historians have noted how friends in the Victorian period, especially women, often wrote to and about each other using the language of romantic love. Some have speculated that such ‘romantic friendships’ expressed same-sex desire.[6] Perhaps these relationships also suggest a culture more at ease with intimate friendship than subsequent generations. As policing of homosexuality increased and homophobia became more pronounced, same-sex friendships came under closer scrutiny. It’s striking that in the 1950s, when writing his memoir, Harry felt the need to emphasise there was nothing effeminate about his friend or untoward in their relationship.

Syd Clark, One Speck of Humanity (Charnwood, 2000)

While writing sympathetically about homosexuals he knew in the army, Syd Metcalfe, born 1910, exhibited this growing self-consciousness and nervousness around same-sex friendships when trying to describe closeness between heterosexual men. Losing contact with his father in childhood and then estranged from his flighty mother, Syd found security and companionship when he joined the forces in the 1930s. There he became ‘inseparable’ from his friend Jack:

We became known as ‘The Twins’ and I can remember I actually missed him if he weren’t there. This is a relationship, perfectly decent, akin to the love of a man for a woman. There is in it an affinity that makes one almost part of the other. Certainly there is a mental need of one for the other. . . If one carried this comparison further I suppose it is a form of love.

Let us forget for a moment today’s obsession with everything having a sexual basis, for this oneness that Jack and I felt in each other’s company had nothing to do with sex. And I’m equally sure that the early, young love that most of us have experienced at some time or another for a girl also has no foundation in sex. Can’t you remember loving a girl beyond that?[7]

Despite their closeness, when Syd left the army after eight years, the two men lost contact.

While friendships can outlive partnerships, be stronger than family relationships, last almost a lifetime, they are also vulnerable to changing circumstances and other loyalties and obligations. What breaks them may tell us as much about the history of friendship as what binds them.

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Visit ‘Writing Lives’: A collaborative research project on working-class autobiography

Return to: Five Hundred Years of Friendship at the History of Emotions Blog

Mark Vernon writes on the application of philosophical wisdom to modern life, and teaches at The Idler Academy and The School of Life in London. His many books on philosophical topics include The Meaning of Friendship. Here he asks what philosophy can tell us about the ancient art of friendship.

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What exactly is friendship? What is its nature, its rules, its promise? How can one differentiate between its many forms? How does it compare to, and mix with, the connections shared between lovers and within families? If at least a kind of friendship is elastic enough to survive the relational stresses and strains of our flexible ways of life, is that friendship also strong enough to bear the burden of the human need to belong, to be connected, to be loved?

These questions are trickier to answer than it might first seem because friendship is hugely diverse. Although it is relatively easy to come up with definitions that account for part of it, it is much harder to find one that does not exclude any of its facets. Aristotle, whose writing on friendship still sets the philosophical agenda to this day, found as much 2,500 years ago. Friendship, he proposed, is at the very least a relationship of goodwill between individuals who reciprocate that goodwill. A reasonable starter for ten. However, as soon as he tried to expand it, the definition seemed to unravel.

He looked around him and saw three broad groupings of relationships people called friendship. The first group are friends primarily because they are useful to each other – like the friendship between an employee and a boss, or a doctor and a patient, or a politician and an ally; they share goodwill because they get something out of the relationship. The second group are friends primarily because some pleasure is enjoyed by being together; it may be the football, the shopping, the gossip or sexual intimacy, but the friendship thrives insofar, and possibly only insofar, as the thing that gives the pleasure continues to exist between them. Aristotle noted that these first two groups are therefore like each other because if you take the utility or the pleasure away, then the chances are the friendship will fade.

This, though, is not true of the third group. These are people who love each other because of who they are in themselves. It may be their depth of character, their innate goodness, their intensity of passion or their simple joie de vivre, but once established on such a basis these friendships are ones that tend to last. Undoubtedly much will be given and much taken too but the friendship itself is independent of external factors and immensely more valuable than the friendships that fall into the first two groups.

That there are better or higher friendships – different people may call them soul friends, close or old friends, or best friends – as opposed to instrumental and casual friendships, or mere friendliness, is surely right. But to say that great friendship is defined solely by its goodwill seems to miss its essence. Goodwill exists in these best kinds of friendship, but, unlike the lesser types, best friendship – arguably the quintessential sort – is based on something far more profound. In other words, a definitional approach to friendship has its limits.

This ambiguity as to what friendship is reflects, then, the ambiguity that appears to be part and parcel of friendship in life. Try listing some of the friends you have – your partner, oldest friend, mates or girlfriends, one or two family members, work colleagues, neighbours, friends from online chat rooms, family friends, a boss perhaps, therapist, teacher, personal trainer – whoever you might at some time think of as a friend. A look at such a list puts your friends in front of you, as it were, and highlights the vast differences. For example, the friendship with your partner will in certain key respects be unlike that of your oldest friend, though you may be very close to both. Conversely, although friendship is for the most part a far less strong tie than say the connection to family, you may feel less close to members of your family in terms of friendship than others with whom you have no genetic or legal bond. Then again, lovers might make you blush and families can make you scream, but friendship – even soul friendship – is usually cool in comparison.

As you continue further down the list to the friends who are in many ways little more than acquaintances, associates or individuals for whom you have merely a sense of friendliness, it is obvious that friendship stretches from a love you could scarcely do without to an affection that you’d barely miss if it ended. Some people would say there is some minimal quality which means that it makes sense to call all of them friends perhaps Aristotle’s goodwill. Others would disagree: they are the sort who say they have a handful of friends and that others are people they only know. In other words, the ambiguity of friendship extends to the very possibility of prolific and profound friendship-making.

Personally, I think that Aristotle is on to something in his belief that the closest kind of friendship is only possible with a handful of individuals, such is the investment of time and self that it takes. ‘Host not many but host not none’, was his formula. He would argue that less is more and it is easy to substitute mere networking for the friendships it is supposed to yield. He actually went so far as to express a fear of having too many friends, ‘polyphilia’ as it might be called. There is an expression attributed to Aristotle that captures the concern: ‘Oh my friends, there is no friend.’

One of the things I think the philosophy of friendship tells us is that life produces personal relationships of many types, but out of these connections good friendship may or may not grow. Certain associations or institutions like work or marriage can foster friendship but those same associations or institutions need not necessarily be characterised by deep friendship themselves; friendship emerges, as it were, from below up. It is a fluid concept.

Another dimension to the ambiguity of friendship is its apparent open-endedness. Unlike institutions of belonging such as marriage which is supported and shaped by social norms, or work where individuals have contractually defined roles, friendship has no predetermined instructions for assembly or project for growth. People have to create their friendships mostly out of who they are, their interests and needs, without any universally applicable framework. On the one hand, this is a potential weakness, because a friendship may ‘go nowhere’ or ‘run out of steam’. On the other, it is a potential strength because there is also a freedom in this that is crucial to friendship’s appeal: it is part of the reason for the diversity within the family of relationships called friendship.

In summary, then, it seems that it is not possible to say unequivocally what friendship is. Sometimes it is intense, sometimes it is thin. Sometimes it appears to embrace many, sometimes only a few. This might seem to be a bit of a blow if the question is what is friendship. However, far from ambiguity automatically leading to philosophical impasse, an exploration of the very ambiguities of friendship is actually a very good way forward. After all, is not mistaking relationships for what they are not – that is being blind to their ambiguity – arguably the greatest cause of disappointment and failure? A married couple may assume they are friends in some deep sense when really they only have goodwill for each other because of the kids; unless they realise that, when the kids leave home, the marriage may falter too. An employee and a boss may think they are good friends after all the late nights, trips abroad and hours spent together: but when the day arrives for the appraisal or pay rise, and both turn out to be modest, the friendship stumbles and falls.

Honesty about any relationship is likely to improve it, even if the honest thing to do is not put too much hope in it! The mistakes that people can make in friendship are also exemplified in some of the things people commonly say about it. For example, many would say that the test of good friendship is being able to pick up immediately where you left off even if you haven’t seen the friend for some time. Aristotle, though, thought that good friendship depends on shared living and spending substantial, regular, quality time together. ‘Cut off the talk, and many a time you cut off the friendship,’ he said. The question is how much time, how much talk is needed?

And yet, if it is really quite easy to make mistakes by thinking the relationship is something other that what it is, the best kinds of friendship (however that is judged) are essential for a happy life: human beings need people they can call friends and not just people who are relatives, partners, acquaintances, colleagues or associates. In other words, the corollary of friendship’s ambiguity is that it is packed with promise and strewn with perils.

Philosophy is frequently overlooked as a resource for thinking through friendship in this way. This has much to do with the fact that only a relatively small number of philosophers have written on the subject at any length. What is more, those who have, although generally agreeing that friendship is essential for a happy life, also say that it provides no automatic satisfaction of human desires for deeper relationships or society’s need for connection. Friendship is ‘a problem worthy of a solution’, as Nietzsche gnomically put it. Or as Aristotle wrote: ‘The desire for friendship comes quickly. Friendship does not.’ The implication is that the best kinds of friendships are only possible between people who properly value it and who understand how many things from the personal to the political can compromise, undermine and destroy it. There is an art to friendship. Philosophy can teach us something about it.

[This post is an edited extract from the Introduction of The Meaning of Friendship by Mark Vernon (Palgrave Macmillan).]

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Return to: Five Hundred Years of Friendship at the History of Emotions Blog

Naomi Pullin is a social and religious historian in the third year of her PhD at the University of Warwick.She researches and writes about the everyday lives and experiences of Quaker women in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In this post she explores the extraordinary friendship between Katharine Evans and Sarah Cheevers (featured in Episode 3 of Five Hundred Years of Friendship) and places it in the religious and social context of its time.

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In the autumn of 1658, two Quaker women, Katharine Evans and Sarah Cheevers, set sail for Alexandria on an extraordinary missionary voyage, which they believed was inspired by God. Their plans, however, were foiled after their ship reached Catholic Malta. Here they were detained by the Maltese Inquisition on the charge of blasphemy and were not released until the summer of 1662.

Female cell in the Inquisitor’s Palace in Birgu (Vittoriosa), Malta. This was the prison where Katharine Evans and Sarah Cheevers were held captive. © Mike Fitzpatrick, Annapolis, Maryland

During these three and a half years of brutal persecution, which tested the very foundation of their religious principles, the two women formed an astonishing friendship. It is almost certain that without one another’s spiritual, material and emotional support they would not have survived such a prolonged period of detention in a foreign land. One instance that was particularly telling occurred after one of their captors first attempted to separate them. In an act of defiance, Katharine Evans, took her companion by the arm declared that: ‘The Lord hath joined us together, and woe be to them that should part us […] I rather chuse to dye there with my friend, than to part from her’.[1]

Katharine Evans’s powerful warning to her captors should they part the two friends whom ‘the Lord hath joined together’ was truly symbolic. The two women had never met before their journey to Mediterranean. Katharine Evans was from Bristol and Sarah Cheevers from Slaughterford, in Wiltshire. Yet, after a chance meeting in London in 1657, both women described how they had simultaneously experienced the same God-given calling to travel to Alexandria. The role of the Lord in shaping their alliance was fundamental. It was also an aspect of Quaker understandings of friendship that differed markedly from the rest of seventeenth-century society. This was owing to the fact that writers believed that friendship should be a rational decision entered into by both parties. In a culture founded on credit and personal connections, it was also expected to have a practical or material outcome. Quaker friendship, on the other hand, was almost completely determined by a shared spiritual affinity.

Female ministers modelled their missionary activities on the work of the Apostles and believed that the physical torments and spiritual trials that they underwent identified them as Christ’s true followers. The many trials faced by these sufferers were therefore mitigated through their supportive partnership. The conditions that they were confronted with in the Maltese prison were brutal to say the least. They were confined to a tiny airless cell without access to light, water, or regular supplies of food. It would be something akin to the women’s cell pictured above in the Inquisitor’s Palace in Birgu, where Evans and Cheevers were held captive for some time. The women note in their account how their skin was parched and their hair fell out from the intense heat, which naturally caused them much emotional and physical anxiety. At one point, Katharine Evans poignantly stated that ‘we sought death, but could not find it; We desired to die, but death fled from us’.[2] It was the support and companionship that they had from one another which sustained them. When Katharine Evans fell very ill and nearly died, it was Sarah who struck a deal with their captors to get her friend hot food and to wash her linen. Without any money of her own, or the physical strength to source food, it is likely that Katharine would have died without the support and sustenance that her companion provided for her.

One of the other ‘crosses’ or trials that they had to bear included long-term separation from their families. Both women were the mothers of several young children, who they left in the care of their husbands and relatives in order to undertake their service. From their surviving correspondence, it is clear that their forced separation from their families was a matter of much distress for both women. For Sarah, this was made all the more harder, because her husband had not converted to Quakerism and did not support her decision to travel. However, it is likely that this also heightened their experience of friendship with one another, which served as a means of countering the effects of isolation and separation. Like many Quakers, they referred to one another as a ‘Sister in Christ Jesus’, which suggested a deeper connection than mere friendship.

The Biblical Friendship of Jonathan and David. © Trustees of the British Museum

The spiritual friendship expressed between the two women also had scriptural undertones, which was reminiscent of the friendship of David and Jonathan, whose souls were described as being ‘knit together’ (1 Samuel 18: 1). This was evidenced when the two women were physically separated and interrogated, yet ‘were guided by one Spirit’. Their captors tried to turn the women against one another in an attempt to encourage them to relinquish their beliefs. Yet, something miraculous happened whereby both friends spoke ‘one and the same thing in effect, so that they had not a jot nor tittle against us’.[3] In preaching the same message to their captors, the spiritual foundation of their friendship was at its strongest: they were united as one, like David and Jonathan.

Owing to the intensity of their relationship, the account of Jonathan and David has often been mistaken as a story of two lovers. Similarly, Katharine Evans and Sarah Cheevers’ account of friendship has repeatedly been cast as an eroticised or sexual relationship. It would be wrong to assume that these women would envisage their alliance in these terms. Nevertheless, the language which they used to describe their relationship was highly unusual. Like many other female ministers, they called each other ‘yokemates’ or ‘helpmeets’. It is an interesting choice of expression, as these terms were traditionally used to describe the husband-wife relationship. Indeed, sixteenth and seventeenth-century writers believed that true friendship was only attainable within marriage, because husband and wife shared one body as well as one soul. It was an image that was reminiscent of domestic harmony, but it also suggested a relationship of long-term devotion. Thus when Katharine Evans described her companion as ‘My dear and faithful Yoke-fellow, Sister and Friend’, she was drawing upon a whole repertoire of images that suggested a powerfully enduring emotional, as well as spiritual connection.[4]

The story of Katharine Evans and Sarah Cheevers’ capture and imprisonment in Malta is an important example of Quaker female friendship at its most powerful.  Despite the fact that they had never met before undertaking their voyage, these women formed a sympathetic companionship with one another, sharing the physical, social and emotional burdens of travelling ministry. Moreover, the spiritual union that they experienced during their missionary work served to heighten their relationship with both God and with one another. ‘Their mutuality’, as their biographers have written, ‘confirmed and generated the emotional and spiritual strength which, along with their belief, allowed them to endure physical suffering and spiritual attack’.[5] It is worth remembering that women like Katharine Evans and Sarah Cheevers formed part of a global network of ‘Friends’. Whilst, members of the Society were urged to relinquish all worldly attachments, in order to better achieve a personal relationship with God, they shared an important spiritual bond or connection. As the alliance of Evans and Cheevers demonstrates, this intense spirituality could sustain them through extraordinary trials and life-threatening situations

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Follow Naomi Pullin on Twitter: @naomipullin

Professor Mark Knights of the University of Warwick and Dr Tessa Whitehouse of Queen Mary, University of London are the convenors of a project exploring the meaning and history of friendship. In this blog post they explain their research findings and future plans.

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“The Mind never unbends it self so agreeably as in the Conversation of a well chosen Friend”
(Addison, Spectator 93, 16 June 1711)

How can we study a subject such as friendship — something so familiar, with such loose boundaries and touching on almost every aspect of life? That question lay at the heart of two workshops held in 2013 at the universities of Warwick and Queen Mary, before the BBC Radio 4 series ‘Five Hundred Years of Friendship’ was conceived. In them, a group of scholars from across the humanities explored friendship in theory and practice, focusing  on the eighteenth century.

Friendship, we found, came in many guises, and the word ‘friendship’ was used to define a multiplicity of relationships. Our discussions first sought to categorise the multiple varieties of friendship that were recorded in a century often characterised by sociability. We talked about literary, political, religious, scientific, economic, transnational friendships and also thought about enmity, for we found that looking at the opposite of the thing in which you are interested can shed light on it. After all, friendships can go badly wrong, creating dramatic breaches and enduring hostilities. The more we talked, the more we realised that the ‘rules’ and boundaries of friendship were often uncertain and shifting. That made it even more important to try to find suitable ways of approaching the topic. So here are the four themes that we think might be useful ways forward:

1. Time. It would make sense to study friendship from the Renaissance to the end of the eighteenth century in order to chart certain key shifts and developments as well as enduring characteristics. This would enable us to explore intellectual friendships between humanist scholars in the Renaissance as well as the ‘republic of letters’ that characterised the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Taking ‘early modernity’ as our focus would also highlight the way in which Reformation religious teachings influenced ideas about friendship, imbuing it with godly piety, and chart how more secular and commercialised forms of friendship were also fostered in the eighteenth century. But thinking about ‘early modernity’ also raises interesting questions about continuities, both within the period and either side, from the medieval period and into the Victorian.

Mirth and Friendship (1768-1772) © Trustees of the British Museum

2. Space. Intellectual, scientific and commercial friendships often expanded beyond national boundaries; sometimes groups of friends found themselves in voluntary or forced exile, as a result of war or state repression, or separated by the expansion of Britain’s overseas empire. Even within a country, different spaces facilitated friendship in different ways: clubs, coffee houses, alehouses, assembly rooms, bookshops, market places, leisure resorts, churches and new urban spaces all enabled friendships but also shaped how they worked. Different customs or necessities in colonial contexts could also shape how friendships formed and operated. One way of thinking about space is with the help of network analysis: examining how networks of friends were created and who were key ‘nodes’ in these networks, linchpins around whom they revolved. Some friendships within these networks were stronger or weaker than others; and some were advanced or hindered by geography.

3. Text. Not all friendship operated in a face-to-face manner. Indeed, many of the networks of friends operated with the aid of letters or print. Both media boomed in the early modern period in new and interesting ways. Improvements in transport and infrastructure, as well as in the cost of paper and the rise of literacy rates, meant that letter-writing became easier, cheaper and more widespread. Similarly the development of print in the late fifteenth century and its proliferation from the mid seventeenth century onwards enabled people not only to publish books, pamphlets and periodicals that discussed friendship and offered advice about how to conduct it, but also meant that friends could interact in different ways, singing a printed ballad together, for example, or creating ‘print communities’ that gathered and even created groups of friends with shared interests. Moreover, those texts – whether printed or manuscript – can help us understand the practice of friendship: the collecting of letters, or the speed of response, or the style in which something was written can tell us about the nature of the friendship.

Jean Adam, Friendship, c. 1795 © Trustees of the British Museum

4. Object. Letters and print about or from friends were precious objects, saved in family, state and commercial archives. But objects are also important in other ways. The exchange of gifts between friends was one way of strengthening friendship, but there was an art to this: a present had to be carefully judged and the giver had to avoid the excessive and corrupt on the one hand, and the inadequate and insulting on the other. Objects were also specially created to be exchanged between friends. Sometimes these were works of art, such as portraits, that could in turn also depict friendship or provide talking points about friendship. There is thus a material culture associated with friendship. Some of that was ephemeral  (the elaborate dinner cooked for friends has been consumed long ago) but some of it survives – thetableware associated with such entertainments, pictures, sculptures, architecture and other material traces. Collaboration with archives, galleries and museums would help us to recover this important but often neglected aspect of friendship.

Our group plans to widen our discussions in the near future to include scholars working in institutions beyond ours who share interest in the themes outlined. We also intend to engage with the wider public through a website. It is worth remembering that our word ‘social’ comes from the Latin word for friend, ‘socius’, so social media seems a particularly appropriate way of creating a network of friends talking sociably about friendship! If you would like to be put on our mailing list please register you details here.

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Register your interest in the Warwick-Queen Mary Friendship Project

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Laura Gowing is Professor of Early Modern British History at King’s College London. Here she reflects on the meaning of friendship in the early modern era, and the challenge of interpreting the records, objects, and gestures through which historians can learn about it. 

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Friendship in the early modern era  – c. 1500-1750 – poses two great challenges to us: how to imagine it, and how to find it. So much of the household, the community, and the economy was explicitly structured around the patriarchal family that the wider bonds of sociability left fewer records; while everyone was taught how to be a good son, father, wife, mother, or child, only a few elite men seem to have contemplated the art of friendship.

For noblemen and gentry, friendship carried great political weight. Courtiers practiced how to admire the king’s favourite, in the hope of gaining some clout. The whole weighty system of patronage in state and church depended on networks of friends. For people like this, it’s easy to see how friendship was at once instrumental and emotional. For women at this level, too, the bonds of friendship could embody political advantage: when Lady Anne Clifford was a young woman at court in the early 17^th century, her mother urged her to sleep in the room with Arbella Stuart, the woman she considered most likely to gain their family a foothold in the new queen’s household. When Anne failed, she wrote an apologetic letter home.

But what of those for whom friendship brought less obvious gains – plebeian men, and most women? One way round this has been the examination of legal documents, and particularly wills. It’s possible to trace the networks of people who witness each other’s wills, or who appear in litigation together – although the high mobility of many early modern societies militates against this. Digitisation of records is making this much easier, too. And from these kind of records, some sense of how people were connected can be built up.

What we’ve learnt has been quite suprising. Firstly, despite the distances people regularly put between themselves and their birthplaces, often ties were retained, not just with family but with local friends and connections. London, the end point of so many migratory journeys, ended up containing little hubs of Yorkshire, Wales or Essex – or Paris. Those old ties from home were the foundation of marriage, apprenticeships, and financial credit.  Secondly, looking at family documents has reaffirmed the importance of wider kin. This was a world of nuclear families, with households staying surprisingly small and confined to two generations; yet those families,  locally or across many miles, maintained links with their siblings, parents, cousins, old neighbours, and a whole host of others. Frequent early deaths and remarriages extended those networks even more. Some used letters, but many more depended on unplanned visits and word of mouth.

Gold posy ring made in C17-C18 England (British Museum)

What, then, did a friend mean to the villagers and townspeople of early modern England? Its most familiar meaning was indeed an instrumental one, one that carried value: it meant those people who had an interest in your future, and specifically, your marriage. We think of marriages as private, personal unions, but for early modern people, they were public.  Peaceful households meant a functional community and an orderly nation. Friends helped link the intimate to the wider world. Friends in marriage were sometimes relatives, sometimes not; one 16^th century London woman found that the relatives of her dead fiancé became the friends of her next marriage, having financial entanglements with her already. Friends might provide a marriage portion, lend money, or find apprenticeships or service; and when things went wrong, they were ready to speak a warning word in an errant husband or wife’s ear.  The same was true at childbirth, which was one of the few times and places which was largely single-sex. In this women’s world, the choice of who to invite to the ritual of lying-in could have implications for neighbourhood life for years to come.  The results ranged from bad dreams to accusations of witchcraft.

Gossips feasting and women helping a newly delivered mother. Detail from the frontispiece for Jacob Rueff, De conceptu et generatione hominis (Zurich, 1554). Copyrighted work available under Creative Commons Attribution only licence CC BY 4.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

So the term ‘friend’ had meanings a good deal wider than it does today; it encompassed financial investment and value in a way we would, perhaps, be less happy with. But in this world of high mobility and limited literacy, the value of friendship was truly inestimable. A good friend would guarantee your reputation, or preserve your ‘credit’: a measure not only of who believed in you, but how much you were worth. And that creditworthiness was necessary to ordinary people and to women as well as to those in the inner circles of political power.

Most recently, historians have started to try to recapture the physical dimensions of friendship. Gestures are often as transient as emotions, yet history has preserved something of the meaning of the friendly kiss, the handshake, the doffing of the hat with respect, if only through the attacks on people who did it wrong.  In those gestures, imbalances of power were displayed, and sometimes transcended, through ritual.  The archives of lawsuits over marriage, property and verbal insult have turned out to be an excellent source for details like this. In the background of disputes, we can see, for example: a man taking his friend to visit a young woman he is interested in courting, and staying in a bed with him at her home; a woman testifying to her close friend’s misery over a planned marriage; women pushing against each other and hissing insults as they settle into a pew for Sunday service.

Historians of the self have imagined early modern selfhood to be best understood in the context of ‘embeddedness’, whereby every person saw their individual identity through the lens of family, friends and community. In densely-populated houses, shared beds and crowded marketplaces, in a world where privacy was a protean concept, this had a physical meaning as well as a conceptual one. Emotions had strong physical corollaries in early modern culture; broken hearts were understood as truly damaged; alongside tracking down the actual words people used about their friends, we need their gestures of friendship.

Further reading

Karen Harvey (ed), The Kiss in History (Manchester University Press, 2005)

Laura Gowing, Common Bodies: Women, Touch and Power in 17^th Century England (Yale University Press, 2003)

Alan Bray, The Friend (University of Chicago Press, 2003)

Amanda E. Herbert, Female Alliances: Gender, Identity, and Friendship in Early Modern Britain (Yale University Press, 2014)

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 Follow Laura Gowing on Twitter @LauraGowing

Return to: Five Hundred Years of Friendship at the History of Emotions Blog

Dr Antonella Liuzzo Scorpo of the University of Lincoln is a medieval historian with expertise in the histories of emotion, faith and friendship.

She is the author of a new book on Friendship in Medieval Iberia. Here she explores the meanings of friendship in the medieval world.

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As a cultural historian interested in friendship and social networks, I was pleased and excited when I heard about the new BBC Radio series exploring friendship since the sixteenth century. The influence of classical thought – especially Aristotle and Cicero– persisted throughout the early modern period, but what happened between these two periods? How did the Middle Ages shape, transform and challenge ideas of friendships which would pass onto modernity?

Scholarship on friendship in the Middle Ages suggests that interpersonal relationships in Western Europewere mostly based on a shared sense of belonging to the same local, religious, professional or ethnic communities. In most cases these communities coexisted and overlapped, thereby helping to shape a complex set of multiple identities.^[1] Friendships were not restricted to exclusively civic and political fields, as most of the ancient Greek philosophers believed, but instead, influenced by the predominant Christian mentality, they also acquired spiritual and in some cases mystical connotations.

In the early Middle Ages, amicitia (friendship) was mainly regarded as a contractual link with utilitarian goals, which included economic and military support. It was seen as a permanent agreement, which in some instances was even transmitted as an inheritance. Amicable relationships were equalled only by kinship, blood ties, godfatherhood and vassalic networks. Moreover, while some friendships were legitimized on the basis of religious agency, as with the crusaders and the military orders, others were accepted as beneficial purely for the pleasure that they could generate.^[2]

Facsimile of Cantigas de Santa Maria. Ms. T.j.I (“E2”). Real Biblioteca del Monasterio de San Lorenzo de El Escorial (San Lorenzo de El Escorial, Spain).

In different types of sources produced in Western Europe throughout the medieval period, the lexicon of friendship defined a wide and varied range of relationships, including amorous and sexual bonds; tutorship and patronage; diplomatic agreements; companionships of arms and monastic brotherhoods, among others.^[3] There were also cases of ‘friendships in absence’ in which those involved did not know each other in person and yet they addressed each other as friends. The epistolary exchanges of Peter of Celle, Pope Gregory VII and John of Salisbury, St. Anselm and Bernard de Clairvaux, are significant examples, even if the language of friendship was mostly used as a rhetorical device with broader social and political implications.^[4]

Anthropological approaches have led historians to argue that friendship was often dependent on other types of bonds and frequently used as an ennobling rhetorical tool. However, more recent studies have challenged those ideas to consider, instead, friendship as a distinct category of political and social networks.[5] This multi-layered panorama becomes more intricate when considering regional peculiarities. A particularly fascinating, and yet understudied, case is that of medievalIberia, which was geographically and politically a fringe of Europe, while occupying a pivotal role within theWestern Mediterranean world.

Amicitia, in Latin, means friendship in Castilian, and friendship, according to Aristotle, is a virtue which is intrinsically good in itself and profitable to human life and that, properly speaking, it arises when one person who loves another is beloved by him, for, under other circumstances, true friendship could not exist; and therefore he stated that there is a great difference between friendship, love, benevolence and concord.[6]

One might be surprised to discover that the definition given above appears in the Siete Partidas, a thirteenth-century Iberian law code aimed at regulating public and private lives of all the subjects under Castilian authority. The law explained the classical origins of friendship; it also defined its categories and warned about the necessary proofs and required norms to establish and preserve it. What is noteworthy is that friendship occupied a central role in the legal, historiographical and literary production of a growing political reality – theKingdom ofCastile – the stability of which required multiple means of legitimization.

Drawing on some of the encyclopaedic masterpieces produced in the scriptorium of ‘The Wise’ and ‘The Learned’ King, Alfonso X of Castile (1252-84) in a period later labelled the ‘Thirteenth-Century Renaissance’, my forthcoming book, Friendship in Medieval Iberia: Legal, Historical and Literary Perspectives discusses precisely how friendship was conceptualized, experienced and represented in the cultural melting-pot of such a vibrant enclave in which ‘emotional communities’ – to adopt Rosenwein’s definition – were structured around perceived similarities, as well as around costumes and practices dictated by habits, acculturation and pragmatic choices.[7]

There were frequent overlaps between categories and typologies such as friends, counsellors and companions; cases of religious, political and military friendships; inter-faith and gender relationships. Nonetheless, their constitutive elements – loyalty, trust and keeping secrets – and the threats which could undermine them remained the same in time and across geographical and cultural frontiers. Emotional connections co-existed with economic, political and legal structures within which individuals and communities found protection, as well as material, spiritual and personal support. Moreover, while norms and rituals such as banquets, vows, kisses and public celebrations were commonly recognized as tokens of friendship, the boundaries between individual and public experiences of friendship were often blurred.^[8] The case of medieval Iberia – a receptacle of classical ideas, near-Eastern traditions, past and contemporary trans-Pyrenean trends – provides an invaluable contribution to the study of the much more complex political, social and cultural world of the Western Mediterranean and its distinctive, and yet very recognizable, social networks.

Today, as with the past five hundred years and before, networks of friendships have supported the development of individual and group identities; they have helped men and women to pursue their spiritual and emotional quests; to work towards political and social goals; to overcome difficulties and desolation; and to develop their own selves either by mirroring themselves into an Aristotelian “other self” or by framing distinct spaces of ‘otherness’. Even though meanings and experiences of friendship have evolved and transformed over the centuries, their focal position in the construction of both individuals and societies has never been challenged.