Prefatory Biographical Note

A very charming Autobiographical Memoir of Mrs. Butler has been edited by George W. and Lucy A. Johnson, and may be obtained for 6s. through any bookseller, or from the publishers, Arrowsmiths of Bristol, or Simpkin Marshall of London. This memoir consists mainly of extracts from Mrs. Butler’s published works. We are indebted to it for the following facts:—

In an introduction to the Memoir in question, the Rt. Hon. James Stuart, her warm personal friend, and fellow-worker for many years, thus describes her personality: “She was at home in every class of society. She was very beautiful, and of a very gracious presence, and the impression made by first seeing her and hearing her voice has, I expect, been forgotten by none who ever met her. She was of a very artistic temperament. She was a good painter, an extremely good musician. She was a bold rider, and active, though always of a somewhat weak health. Her industry and application were unbounded. She was very full of humour, and, while deeply in earnest, had the faculty of being at times charmingly gay. She dressed with great taste and simplicity. She, above all things, loved her home and her husband, and that love was wholly returned. She was extremely cosmopolitan. At the same time she was a great lover of her own country, and particularly of the borderland between England and Scotland, where she was born, and where she now lies buried in the churchyard of Kirknewton, where many of her ancestors lie. For she came of an old Border family; and bravery, and the alertness of battle, and the power of self-sacrifice, and the indignation against wrong which characterized her, came to her, perhaps, partly through her descent. She was a great reader of the Bible, and a humble suppliant before the throne viof God. But, while her own beliefs were clear and definite, she had no narrowness in her views, and the very names of those who have been her foremost supporters show how wide her sympathies were, and how acceptable she was to people of all creeds, as well as of all politics and all climes.”

Josephine Elizabeth Grey was born at Milfield Hill, in the county of Northumberland, on April 13, 1828. She was the fourth daughter of John Grey, and of his wife Hannah Annett. John Grey’s ancestors were wardens of the East Marches, and Governors of Norham, Morpeth, Wark, and Berwick Castles in the old Border days, from whom are also descended the Tankervilles and the Greys in the House of Lords.

John Grey was appointed to the charge of the great Greenwich Hospital Estates in Northumberland in 1833, and as a pioneer in the scientific improvement of waste lands, turned it into a very valuable property. Mrs. Butler says of this period, “Our home at Dilston was a very beautiful one. Its romantic historical associations, the wild informal beauty all round its doors, the bright, large family circle, and the kind and hospitable character of its master and mistress, made it an attractive place to many friends and guests. Among our pleasantest visitors there were Swedes, Russians, and French, who came to England on missions of agricultural or other enquiry, and who sometimes spent weeks with us. It was a house the door of which stood wide open, as if to welcome all comers, through the livelong summer day. It was a place where one could glide out of a lower window and be hidden in a moment, plunging straight amongst wild wood paths and beds of fern, or find one’s self quickly in some cool concealment, beneath slender birch trees, or by the dry bed of a mountain stream. It was a place where the sweet hushing sound of waterfalls, and clear streams murmuring over shallows, were heard all day and night, though winter storms turned those sweet sounds into an angry roar.”

John Grey was a man of wide and deep sympathies, and viibesides being a great influence for good in his own immediate neighbourhood, was a personal friend and fellow-worker of Clarkson in the Abolition of the Slave Trade. His daughter speaks of “his large benevolence, his tender compassionateness, and his respect for the lights and liberties of the individual man. His life,” she says, “was a sustained effort for the good of others, flowing from these affections. He had no grudge against rank or wealth, no restless desire for change for its own sake, still less any rude love of demolition; but he could not endure to see oppression or wrong of any kind inflicted on man, woman, or child. ‘You cannot treat men and women exactly as you do one-pound notes, to be used or rejected as you think proper,’ he said in a letter to The Times, when that paper was advocating some ill-considered changes, beneficial to one class, but leaving out of account a residue of humble folk upon whom they would entail great suffering. In the cause of any maltreated or neglected creature he was uncompromising to the last, and when brought into opposition with the perpetrators of any social injustice he became an enemy to be feared.”

Mrs. Butler’s mother was also a fine character, and warmly seconded the efforts of her husband for the general good. She was descended from a Huguenot family.

As Mrs. Butler grew into young womanhood the sad and tragical recitals which came to the family from first sources of the wrongs inflicted by slavery on negro men and women “broke,” she says, “her young heart,” and keenly awakened her feelings, especially “concerning the injustice to women through this conspiracy of greed and gold, and lust of the flesh, a conspiracy which has its counterpart in the white slave-owning in Europe.”

“For one long year of darkness,” she says, “the trouble of heart and brain urged me to lay all this at the door of the God, whose name I had learned was Love. I dreaded Him, I fled from Him, until grace was given me to arise and wrestle, as Jacob did, with the mysterious Presence, who must either viiislay or pronounce deliverance. And then the great questioning again went up from earth to heaven, ‘God! Who art Thou? Where art Thou? Why is it thus with the creatures of Thy hand?’ I fought the battle alone, in deep recesses of the beautiful woods and pine forests around our home, or on some lonely hill-side, among wild thyme and heather, a silent temple where the only sounds were the plaintive cry of the curlew, or the hum of a summer bee, or the distant bleating of sheep. For hours and days and weeks in these retreats I sought the answer to my soul’s trouble and the solution of its dark questionings. Looking back, it seems to me the end must have been defeat and death had not the Saviour imparted to the child-wrestler something of the virtue of His own midnight agony, when in Gethsemane His sweat fell like great drops of blood to the ground.”

The next stage in the preparation of Mrs. Butler for her great world-wide work was her marriage in 1852 to a man of singularly noble character, George Butler, son of the Dean of Peterborough. It was in this year that the portrait was taken which appears on the cover of this work. The first five years of their married life were spent at Oxford, where Mr. Butler did important work in the University, as tutor, examiner and lecturer. Here they met many leading people, and Mrs. Butler says, “In the frequent social gatherings in our drawing-room in the evenings there was much talk, sometimes serious and weighty, sometimes light, interesting, critical, witty, and brilliant, ranging over many subjects. It was then that I sat silent, the only woman in the company, and listened, sometimes with a sore heart, for these men would speak of things which I had already revolved deeply in my own mind, things of which I was convinced, which I knew, though I had no dialectics at command with which to defend their truth.

“Every instinct of womanhood within me was already in revolt against certain accepted theories in society, and I suffered as only God and the faithful companion of my life ixcould ever know. Incidents occurred which brought their contribution to the lessons then sinking into our hearts. A young mother was in Newgate for the murder of her infant, whose father, under cover of the deathlike silence prescribed by Oxford philosophers, a silence which is in fact a permanent endorsement of injustice, had perjured himself to her, had forsaken and forgotten her, and fallen back, with no accusing conscience, on his easy social life, and possibly his academic honours. I wished to go and speak to her in the prison of the God who saw the injustice done, and who cared for her. My husband suggested that we should write to the chaplain of Newgate, and ask him to send her to us when her sentence had expired. We wanted a servant, and he thought that she might be able to fill that place. She came to us. I think she was the first of the world of unhappy women of a humble class whom he welcomed to his own home. She was not the last.”

In 1857 Mr. Butler accepted the post of Vice-Principal of Cheltenham College. Here Mrs. Butler met with a terrible trial in the sudden death by accident, of her only little daughter Evangeline, in the year 1864. This was followed by a long period of darkness and intense depression of spirits, which was only dispelled by visiting amongst the four thousand poor women in the jails and workhouses of Liverpool, where she sat amongst them and picked oakum, until she gained their confidence. Her husband had previously taken the Principalship of Liverpool College, following the celebrated Dr. Howson, who vacated it to take the position of Dean of Chester. The result of her work here was, she says, “to draw down upon my head an avalanche of miserable, but grateful womanhood.” She first of all filled the basement and attics of her house with “as many as possible of the most friendless girls who were anxious to make a fresh start.” This becoming inconvenient, a “House of Rest” was started, which continued for many years, and was finally taken over by the town as a municipal institution.

x1864 was the date of the commencement of the last stage of the preparation of Mrs. Butler for her great life-work of attacking and undermining the world-wide evil of State regulated vice. 1864 was likewise the date of the introduction of State regulated vice into England, which was the last of the countries of Europe to adopt it, as it was also the first, in 1886, to abolish it. Mrs. Butler’s part in the great Abolitionist Struggle is detailed in the following pages in her own words.

Mrs. Butler lived the last few years of her life at Wooler, near Milfield, the place of her birth. There she died peacefully in her sleep, on December 30, 1906, and was buried in the churchyard at Kirknewton, where many of her ancestors had been buried.

The editors of her biography conclude, “Surely we may say of her, but very slightly altering the words of Bunyan: As she drew nigh unto the beautiful gate of the City, she asked, ‘What must I do in the Holy Place?’ and the shining ones answered, ‘Thou must there receive the comfort of all thy toil, and have joy for all thy sorrow; thou must reap what thou hast sown, even the fruit of all thy prayers and tears, and suffering for the King by the way. There also thou shalt serve Him continually, whom thou desiredst to serve in the world, though with much difficulty because of the infirmity of thy flesh. There thine eyes shall be delighted with seeing, and thine ears with hearing, the pleasant voice of the Mighty One. There thou shalt enjoy thy friends again, that are gone thither before thee; and there thou shalt with joy receive even every one that follows into the Holy Place after thee.’ As she entered in at the gate, then I heard in my dream that all the bells in the City rang again for joy, and that it was said unto her, ‘Enter thou into the joy of thy Lord.’”

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