Force and Fraud. Ellen Davitt
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was at this point that the political climate of Victoria changed, with the goldfields boom time declining to a recession. The supporters of the Denominational system in the name of cost-cutting slashed the budget of the National Board of Education.
There were thus insufficient funds to run the Model School in the style to which it had been accustomed. The Board chose to abolish teacher training at the school and also the positions of the Davitts. They were given the option of continuing at the school for one final year, at reduced salary, or being discharged with the sum of £500. The couple chose the latter, although they felt a proper compensation would have been double that amount.19
Ellen Davitt’s response to the dismissal was energetic and combatant. She signed the discharge form under protest, asserting her ‘right of appeal to another and a higher tribunal’. The retort was sent from Granite Terrace, Carlton Gardens; where she opened, several months after the dismissal, the grandly titled Ladies’ Institute of Victoria. This school was advertised in Melbourne papers of 1859, as open for boarders and day pupils, and also offering evening classes, and training for governesses.
Girls’ schools might have been Ellen’s employment, but she could also poke fun at them. A character in her novel The Wreck of the Atalanta complained that a Ladies Seminary meant: “Weak tea, and bread and butter, and girls in short frocks making curtsies when they enter the room, and a piano always stunning one to death.”20
The private education market in Melbourne was highly competitive, and similar establishments included the Ladies’ College, run by Mr and Mrs Vieusseux. Ellen Davitt and Julie Vieusseux had coincided before, in the world of art. In 1857, both had work hung in the Victorian Society of Fine Arts’s first exhibition; amongst a stellar gathering including Strutt, Von Guerard and Chevalier. The only other woman exhibiting was Georgiana McCrae, better known as a diarist. Ellen submitted a Saint Cecilia, for which it is recorded several girls at the Model School posed.
It was clearly large – the price was £105 – but also over-ambitious. The critics were merciless: “a tremendous thing for a lady to do, but it had much better have been undone.”21 Vieusseux and McCrae had kinder treatment, although their submissions, being a copy and miniatures respectively, would have more suited the conventional view of women’s abilities.
Ellen Davitt had no luck as an artist, nor with her Institute. The private school market was overstocked and, as Marjorie Theobald has observed, Ellen’s Catholicism would have been a disadvantage. It seems that it rapidly failed, taking with it the Davitt’s severance pay.22
Arthur was apparently too ill to be involved in the venture. He had gone to Geelong for the sea air, where he died, on 24 January 1860. Fifteen years later, the memory still enraged Ellen enough for her to refer to her husband’s ‘murder’. She alleged:
I will boldly say that from the moment that notorious bigot, Sir James Palmer, knew that my husband was a Catholic, he made every attempt to deprive him of his office [...] and being unable to find a fault – the office was abolished.23
Sir James Palmer was the Chairman of the National Board of Education, and a prominent Anglican layman. That he was anti-Catholic is not elsewhere stated and would seem to be disproved by the fact that Patrick Whyte, who like Davitt was a Catholic, became headmaster of the Model School in 1863. However, Whyte’s practice of his religion was pragmatic; he married twice outside the church and his daughters were reared as Presbyterians. The fervency or otherwise of Arthur Davitt’s religious beliefs is not known.
Davitt was buried in the Catholic section of the Eastern Cemetery, Geelong, in a handsome monument whose design is attributed to Ellen. Two months later she appealed to her ‘higher tribunal’, aided by the politician James Grant, known for his gratis representation of the Eureka stockade defendants. She even put forward a motion to address the Victorian Parliament, another extraordinary move for a woman, which was “considered in Committee”. This bold and unusual move was declined, and she did not gain extra compensation.24
What she did do was take up public speaking, with a lecture at the Melbourne Mechanics Institute in April 1861. The topic, ‘The Rise and Progress of the Fine Arts in Spain’, was the first of an occasional series over the following year. The Examiner described her as “a lady whose name will doubtless be familiar to many of our readers”, indicating she was a public figure. The lecture was well-received, a vote of thanks being proposed by the writer Richard Hengist Horne. Nobody commented that her speaking in public contravened the prevailing ideal of feminine modesty. Anthony Trollope himself wrote: “oratory is connected chiefly with forensic, parliamentary and pulpit pursuits for which women are unfitted…”25
In Australia Ellen had precursors, with Caroline Harper Dexter and Cora Ann Weekes lecturing at the Sydney School of Arts in 1855 and 1859 respectively. Harper Dexter is believed to have been the first woman public speaker in Australia. All three chose to talk on women’s role, as if justifying their public display. Davitt’s lecture was described as an ‘essay in female heroism’ – something applicable not only to the subject matter, but the performance itself.26
Dexter wore a Bloomer outfit, of short dress and trousers (in 1851 she had lectured on and in this radical costume in Britain, and sparked outrage). She argued for better female education and a role beyond the domestic sphere.
Davitt’s lecture made similar points, while excluding “the pulpit, the bar, and the healing art […] such matters might well be left to man”.
The Age reported her lecture as an “exposition of the capabilities of the sex not only to perform their domestic and lowly works, but also, when called upon, to play a conspicuous part in the world’s history, as shown by the high position they had taken in literary, artistic, and even political life”.27
The newspaper reports on her public speaking were generally favourable:
Mrs. Davitt’s lecture […] is a literary work of great ability, displaying a large acquaintance with history and both English and foreign literature. The style of composition too is both easy and pleasing, and the extracts remarkably well chosen. The lecturer whose delivery is effective and pleasing was repeatedly applauded in the course of the evening and, as far as we could gather, the audience were generally well pleased, both with the subject and the manner in which it was treated.28
The titles of her lectures – ‘The Influence of Art’, ‘Colonisation v. Convictism’, ‘The Vixens of Shakespeare’ – indicate she was positioning herself as what we would now term a public intellectual. Such was extraordinary, given her gender, the contemporary bias against women orators, and the frontier society of colonial Australia.
Probably in need of funds, Ellen returned to teaching, in country Victoria. For a year, from August 1862 to September 1863, she taught in Portland, at Common School 510, formerly a Catholic school, but from 1862-71 under the Board of Education. Her successor at the school was another remarkable Catholic woman, Mary MacKillop.29
Ellen left for a new career as a public speaker, touring through country Victoria. Such lecture tours were frequently advertised in colonial newspapers; but no other contemporary woman in Australia is known to have attempted the feat. It was here that she revealed the Trollope connection. Fortunately Anthony Trollope had yet to write his He Knew He Was Right (1868), which includes a most unflattering depiction of a female lecturer. Ellen also told journalists she planned to return to England as a lecturer to prospective emigrants; something that did not occur. Instead, she turned to literature.30
It is not known when she started writing, but certainly she had the example of the Trollope in-laws. The chief inspiration would not have been Anthony, but his famous mother Frances. She also was an independent-minded woman, who began a family writing trade with a bestselling travelogue. Her novels significantly contain crime elements, notably the mystery Hargrave (1843), which also includes a romance. Other women drawn into the Trollope circle by marriage took to writing, notably the two Ternan sisters, Maria and Frances (sisters of Dickens’ mistress Ellen), the latter of whom married Anthony’s brother Tom. Anthony wrote, in his short story ‘Mrs Brumby’,