“If I be I”: Mary Carpenter as Public Speaker

With these words Mary Carpenter concluded the introductory chapter of Reformatory Schools, for the children of the perishing and dangerous classes, and for juvenile offenders (1851), her second book on criminal and destitute children.Footnote ⁵ At the time of the book's publication, Carpenter was near the beginning of her career as a social reformer, teacher, and writer, testing progressive principles and theories of reform by founding and administering a group of juvenile correctional institutes and industrial schools for poor and orphaned children. In one sense, the passage above is a fairly standard type of appeal to a reader's sense of social responsibility, and is typical of much Victorian social reform discourse, a form of writing that drew heavily on the authority of the scriptures as one way of provoking readers to a sense of moral responsibility, culpability, and action. Yet such a reading in no way cancels out the possibility that for Carpenter this was no empty rhetorical gesture with which to conclude her introductory chapter, but rather it described her own understanding of social responsibility as the literal command of a heavenly voice.

Throughout her career, Carpenter was haunted and compelled by the words of several influential men, especially her father, whose embodied and spiritual voices were seemingly inextricable from Jesus Christ's. Carpenter's first biographer, her nephew Joseph Estlin Carpenter, recounts that at the age of three Carpenter had already formed a strong association between her father and Christ. In his recollection of Carpenter in his memoir, James Martineau described the figure of Mary Carpenter at age twelve listening to her father preaching to his Bristol congregation: she was “that intent young daughter, lost to herself and all around, and surrendered to the sweet pieties that flowed upon that winning voice” (qtd. in Carpenter, J. E. 10). Twelve years after her father's death in 1840, Carpenter wrote in a prose meditation that his spiritual influence over her remained strong by way of the “looks and tones” he had breathed upon her spirit (Carpenter, Voices 193).Footnote ⁶ Such recollections by Carpenter and others reveal how integral voice was to the construction of her identity. That Carpenter felt herself to be one with her father, (and hence with The Father) through the medium of voice reveals the extent to which she saw her work with children as divinely inspired. The voice of God spoke both to poor children and to lawmakers through the medium of Mary Carpenter, who, as we shall see, attributed a powerful, rehabilitative force to the “looks and tones” of the teacher/reformer. That is, voice played a significant role in her explanation of how to enlist a child's participation in his own reform.

Eleven years after her father's death and on the heels of the success of Reformatory Schools in 1851, Carpenter, by then in her mid-forties, planned a conference for specialists in juvenile crime and rehabilitation. Organized with the assistance of Matthew Davenport Hill, the conference took place in Birmingham in December 1851 and was attended by many of the experts Carpenter had quoted in her book.Footnote ⁷ Carpenter did not speak at the conference, for, in a phrase belonging to her nephew that has often been quoted, she then felt that to have spoken in an assembly of men would have been “tantamount to unsexing herself” (Carpenter, J. E. 126). But she was the driving force behind the conference, and her sense of excitement in organizing it was palpable and was the occasion for moments of self-analysis. In a letter to her friend Lucy Sanford, Carpenter wrote of her efforts to overcome her timidity and her terror of communicating with others about the conference. Thankful for the anonymity of letters, Carpenter initially appreciated and exploited the invisibility of her role as an “unseen spring” in facilitating the meeting. Even so, the experience occasioned a feeling of misrecognition and self-distance: “Sometimes I almost ask myself with wonder ‘if I be I’” (qtd. in Carpenter, J. E. 124–25).

Together with the success of Reformatory Schools, Carpenter's participation in the conference and an ensuing debate on the principles of “reform versus retribution” in the treatment of criminals led to two important developments in her career: the invitation to give evidence before an 1852 parliamentary committee on criminal and destitute children and her decision to establish her own reformatory school, conducted according to her own theories of juvenile reform. Writing in her journal of the powerful feeling that came with bearing testimony on behalf of the voiceless, Carpenter looked upon the opportunity to appear before Parliament with a mixture of fear and “profound satisfaction” (Carpenter, J. E. 132).

Carpenter appeared before a Select Committee of the House of Commons chaired by M. T. Baines in May 1852 as one of the first witnesses. Carpenter's most recent biographer, Jo Manton, describes her voice on this occasion as “low and pleasant but very clear and she spoke with the fluency of long practice as a teacher” (107), although Manton does not ascribe a source to this characterization. What seems to have distinguished Carpenter's testimony was the way she “outed” her theories of reform – revolutionary for their time – and in doing so contradicted one of the commissioners. That is, when asked to describe her own views of the disciplinary principles on which a reformatory would be based, Carpenter stated that she would “enlist the will of the child in the work,” treating him as a child and not as an adult, making him feel like a fellow worker in his own reformation. When one of the Commissioners objected that there seemed to be no provision for punishment in Carpenter's theory, she replied that society owed more to the child than vice versa: “If society leaves them knowingly in the state of utter degradation in which they are, I think it absolutely owes them reparation, far more than they can be said to owe reparation to it.” But, asked one of the commissioners, did she not think there was something “extravagant and absurd” in this theory? “I do not,” she replied (qtd. in Manton 108). Carpenter was also unsparing in her criticism of Parkhurst Prison on this occasion, a state-of-the-art juvenile reformatory built on the Isle of Wight that for Carpenter resembled a prison more than a school. Her testimony on this was discredited, however, because she had not visited the school in person.

We need to recognize how significant it was for a woman to be giving evidence to a parliamentary commission in the first place, and, secondly, how striking it must have seemed for a woman, unmarried and of Unitarian background, to disagree publicly with a commissioner. The feminist monthly, English Woman's Journal, called this moment “an epoch in social history” and went on to imagine how difficult it must have been for Carpenter to answer the summons to testify: “crossing the lobby of the House of Commons, confronting the chairman, answering methodically the interrogatories of the honorable gentleman who undertook to conduct the inquiry, and withstanding the shock of a cross-examination by members on the ‘other side,’ may have been received with a feeling more or less akin to a natural feminine shrinking from the obligation of occupying a too conspicuous position” (“Ladies’ Evidence” 406). But as the transcript from the commission demonstrates, if Carpenter had at one time equated women's public speech with a loss of femininity, by the early 1850s she had reconciled public utterance with private conviction in a way that made sense to audiences whose support she wanted to enlist, allowing her to redefine her sense of self to reconcile the male privilege of public utterance with a “natural feminine shrinking.”

Joseph Estlin Carpenter's biography of his aunt and a smattering of press reports on Carpenter's career all suggest that in the 1850s, Carpenter's increasing public visibility and vocal presence entailed a self-transformation, but one which allowed “I” to be “I.” Feminists later found Carpenter's self-remodelling all the more surprising given the late age at which she became a public figure. Edith Simcox, for instance, used Carpenter's example to criticize the position of unmarried women who were hampered by family obligations until late in life. For Carpenter, the death of her mother in 1856 contributed to her self-transformation; for the first time she was able to settle in a house of her own and devote her time exclusively to her work, occasioning a sense of freedom that caused her to reflect privately that “I feel as if – now past fifty – I were only just emerging from childhood. So this puts me back at times; but on the whole I feel more ‘myself and nobody else,’ or rather that I shall soon be so” (Carpenter, J. E. 196). Thus, Carpenter's “true” self was forged in the realm of public work and speech rather than in the private sphere, the realm that was most readily associated with women's identity construction. It is also fascinating that Carpenter here uses childhood as a metaphor for a former, less true self, since it was childhood that Carpenter was so intent on restoring to England's working poor.

By the time Carpenter began delivering papers to the SSA in 1857, she was already a highly regarded public figure whose vocal tones and speaking style were considered feminine enough that her presence seemed to confirm rather than contradict notions of proper womanhood. As Simcox noted years later, “All Miss Carpenter's letters, even on somewhat burning questions, are so unfailingly clear, courteous, and diplomatically impersonal, that we understand their freedom from offense” (664). It is worth pausing on Simcox's use of the word “impersonal” here, in order to note that Carpenter's careful repudiation of the personal in her public identity paradoxically allowed her to forge a new sense of self, of personhood, one that inoffensively reconciled a male-oriented professional expertise with a feminine propriety linked with care and moral sympathy. That is, as the Englishwoman's Review notes, Carpenter's writing and public speech combined technical detail with the language of moral and spiritual redemption, and, while guided by a palpable moral feeling, it appeared to be “free” of “flights of oratory” (“Fifteenth” 27).

Carpenter's repudiation of publicity – or at least the repudiation that others tended to attribute to her – together with the sheer number of her contributions to the SSA and the “reasoned,” “gentle” tone of her public demeanor, helped normalize and legitimate women's platform presence. The public exposure she endured was invariably framed as a sacrifice or a necessary evil for the sake of a great cause. Simcox explained the cause as something like an irresistible force that had “claimed her” (663). Carpenter herself resolved the problem of the public professional woman when she advised her readers that publicity for the sake of reform work was not a contradiction of Christian femininity, but a God-given test of it:

Carpenter regarded the legal and social barriers to women's work not as the arbitrary and artificial restraints of women's agency, nor as symbols of male power and prejudice, but as necessary tests of women's spiritual and moral strength. Thus, although Carpenter did not frame her work within the emerging discourse of women's rights, her public example held a powerful appeal for feminists who were looking for models of female agency, competence, and, at the same time, public propriety.

The public ideal that Carpenter appeared to embody was made possible by imagining that women could “raise the tone of society,” both in a literal and metaphoric sense, through a complete denial of “self.” Women like Carpenter who addressed the public were understood through metaphors of interiority and images of the heart and the shield that endorsed a divided speaking subject, one who must overcome her natural need for invisibility in the service of others who were weaker than herself. Because Carpenter seemed to speak for others, she was free from the charge of self-promotion that was often levelled at feminist speakers, even though most feminists also claimed to speak on behalf of others. When Carpenter spoke, she represented not a self seeking personal power or reputation but a voiceless class that could not speak for itself, one literally and figuratively imprisoned. Privately, however, Carpenter wrote that her work was leading to a feeling of agential power and self-definition she had not felt before.

It was perhaps this personal need to throw off shackles that most influenced her theory of reformatory and prison discipline.

Moral Environmentalism and the Voice of Love

One of the foundational oppositions in Carpenter's approach to juvenile delinquency was her pragmatic, practical faith in the power of legislation to produce material change in the lives of poor children, on one hand, and on the other her continual recourse to the invisible, the unknown, the spiritual, and the intangible yet powerful effects of a voice of love. In her writing Carpenter often claims that such agencies as “voice,” “tone,” “atmosphere,” and “spirit” are essential to the reclamation of the child, who was understood to exist outside the realm of the citizen or, in some cases, the human. The human voice of sympathy is a recurrent image in Carpenter's theory and is often figured as an animating spirit that pervades institutional settings and produces particular desired effects in children who, in Carpenter's imagination, had never heard a voice of love.

Mary Carpenter was very much a “moral environmentalist” (see Mort 13–60). In keeping with much middle-class social investigative discourse between the 1830s and 60s, Carpenter mapped physical metaphors of disease, illness, and contagion onto juvenile crime or delinquency to reproduce a specialized causal discourse about a sector of the poor and a particular species of child. Carpenter argued that basic education, accompanied by moral training – preferably in isolation from the diseased environments of poor homes and neighborhoods – would lead to the physical and moral rehabilitation of individual children and, ultimately, the progress of the state. She formulated specific proposals for the treatment of the various classes and categories of delinquency she helped identify, describing a different type of institution for each class of child, administered according to specific principles. What she most deplored was the indiscriminate mixing of adults, children, and “classes” of criminal in penal institutions, as well as the absence of personal, individualized attention within them.Footnote ⁸ Equally important to her theory, however, was a set of abstract, environmental terms drawn from religious and philanthropic discourse such as moral atmosphere, tone, voice, heart, feeling, spirit, and sympathy–agencies that would do their work invisibly, spreading contagion-like through each of the “moral hospitals” Carpenter called for and eventually administered. Carpenter was thus among that loosely-structured conglomeration of “ardent moralists” recently described by Lauren Goodlad: “devoted to character building and steeped in the language of the personal, [but] also avid record keepers, statisticians, and ambitious organizers” (23).

One of the first principles of the theory of juvenile reform in Reformatory Schools was that “Love must be the ruling sentiment of all who attempt to influence and guide these children” (74). Carpenter characterized love as “an absolute necessity” of children's nature, declaring that the absence of love made children into something other than children; the expression of love was constitutive of the state of childhood, and citizenship an impossibility for those who had not first experienced childhood. One of the most important ways of administering love was through the use of kind but firm vocal tones and gestures that would transform the poor or criminal child from what was essentially in Carpenter's view a non-being – neither child nor adult – into a human with a discernible self upon which one could work further miracles of social and physical healing. In Reformatory Schools, Carpenter writes of the feeling of power that comes with witnessing this transformation: “None can tell but those who have witnessed it, the responsive love which is awakened in the heart of one of these forsaken ones by a kind look or word, or the purifying effect of the feeling, now by many experienced for the first time, that they are ‘loved for themselves’” (74). The exercise of the speaking voice (of the teacher, not the child) was a technique that could apparently be used to bring another to know himself.

The definition of love, childhood, and citizenship that Carpenter and other reformers in this period relied on was elaborated within the uneven process of the making of the English class system.Footnote ⁹ Like that of other middle-class reformers, Carpenter's reformed child was one who resembled a very specific notion of what childhood should look and sound like; poor homes and neighborhoods could provide none of the moral pedagogy which would not only make each child into a productive citizen but, more importantly, grant the child a self and a soul. The reformatory was thus imagined as a surrogate middle-class home and family for the outlaw child, who would come to experience the pressure of law not as a set of moral strictures (as in the poorly-managed, retributive penal institutions Carpenter routinely criticized) but as a feeling of love. This feeling of love would engender a desire to obey, the result of a kind discipline soon recognized and welcomed. Dependence was key: the child must be made to recognize that the new desires he or she had been educated to feel could not be fulfilled alone but by a greater power to which he or she would be indebted. The child's ability to experience love was predicated on the teacher's; in Carpenter's pedagogy, as in her father's, the teacher was the intermediary through which the errant child would learn to express “spiritual affections toward the Heavenly Father” (Carpenter, Reformatory 75). As the child learned to feel and to know the love of a teacher “who is making a constant sacrifice to benefit him,” he would eventually learn to feel the unseen force of an “ever present spirit” of love.

Mary Carpenter's role in articulating and enforcing emergent, state-sanctioned definitions of childhood, delinquency, and criminal behavior, together with her belief in what Michel Foucault has called “the gentle way in punishment,” has not been fully examined.Footnote ¹⁰ In Discipline and Punish Foucault describes a technology of disciplinary reform that evolved in early nineteenth-century Europe, one based on the ritualized enforcement of “good habit” and the “force of sensibility and passion, not that of armed power” in the transformation of the criminal to the useful citizen within the space of the prison and the reformatory (106). Carpenter's theories of juvenile delinquency and reform clearly conform to the processes Foucault identifies. Her plan to conscript the child's participation in his or her own rehabilitation – an “extravagant and absurd” one in the eyes of the parliamentary commissioner who cross-examined her in 1852 – was in fact part of a wave of new techniques of social management and subject formation, where “work on the prisoner's soul must be carried out as often as possible” (Foucault 125): instead of punishment, healing; instead of the memory of the prisoner's crime, the prevention of its repetition.

Physical punishment and restraint were, above all, anathema to Carpenter's theory of discipline, as they were for an increasing number of reformers in England and Europe. In rejecting the shackle, Carpenter advocated the “law of love,” administered through a “kind” or “purifying” tone of voice, which seemingly had the power to subdue all unruliness (Reformatory 56, 74). Those who represented her work strove to provide the evidence for this form of gentle punishment. For example, Joseph Estlin Carpenter's biography includes several accounts of Mary Carpenter's almost Messianic power to subdue or restrain her scholars with look, accent, and tone. Her mere presence appeared to instil a needed sense of guilt and shame in the children she assumed as her moral burden. Carpenter's journal entry for 12 March 1853 describes a situation at Kingswood, a reformatory she established near Bristol in 1852. Six girls had run away from the school while Carpenter was absent and had been apprehended by police. When Carpenter went to retrieve them, she found them locked in separate cells and in states of “wild excitement.”

One of the striking features of this passage is Carpenter's preoccupation with the sounds rather than the sight of her pupils, reinforced through the order of events. She hears them before she sees them and greets the sound of their “wickedness” with a tone that has the power to subdue and manipulate their bodies. The hanging of the head – this seemingly docile body – is read as the final sign of submission and obedience to the higher authority of disciplinary love (Foucault 136).

For Carpenter, the power of the voice – both as actual speaking voice and as a metaphor for the spirit – lies in its ability to touch the heart. The voice has a restorative, transformative power, calling forth both the weak and the strong into a single, connected body held together by a vocal presence each member feels individually. That is, the power of the individual voice to link single bodies into collective identities (in this instance organized under the sign of obedience and deference) contains what Mary Poovey calls “the paradox of disciplinary individualism – a collective sense of individual responsibility” (103). The effect of Carpenter's vocal power is not to make each child the same as the next by virtue of his categorical proximity to others – as either a delinquent or one of the reformed – but to construct and reaffirm his individuality through voluntary submission to something greater than himself: God, teacher, and the state.Footnote ¹¹

Model of the Selfless

In 1889, feminist writer and activist Millicent Garrett Fawcett published a compendium of biographical sketches of noteworthy women of the nineteenth century. In her assessment of the arc of Mary Carpenter's career, Fawcett made a similar point to the one Edith Simcox had made nine years earlier. For Fawcett, Carpenter's experience was “striking proof of the change that has taken place in the sphere and social status of women”; the fear of publicity that had given Carpenter such mental anguish in the first half of her life was to Fawcett not a sign of “true womanly modesty,” as others would describe it. Rather, Carpenter's transformation was a sign that attitudes towards public women were gradually changing, thanks in no small part to Carpenter's heroic emergence into the public realm (15).

Carpenter's relevance for mid-Victorian feminism was frequently explained by her contemporaries as a self-possession borne, paradoxically, out of selflessness and sacrifice on behalf of others. As a model of the selfless,Footnote ¹² Carpenter was particularly important for feminist intellectuals who were concerned that public opinion would dismiss them as either self-promoting or non-representative of the majority of women. Because Carpenter's power was derived from the framework of a self-regulating, humane domestic practice of love and responsibility towards dependents, it was a power that seemed non-political, even as it helped inaugurate a new set of relations between different social groups (Armstrong 92). The kind of selfless self-possession Carpenter embodied is described by Nancy Armstrong as “that middle-class power which does not appear to be power because it behaves in specifically female ways” (26). Carpenter was thus a figure of desire for other public-minded women (and men) because she helped translate the qualities and ideals of female domesticity (already well established by the 1850s and 60s, as Armstrong shows) outside the home without announcing it as such. Her ability to do this depended on an unspoken consent that what she was doing was not political and was therefore unthreatening to dominant gender relations. Unconventional but also uncontroversial, Carpenter was a key figure for feminists because she challenged the assumption (still in circulation today as a stereotype of Victorian gender ideology) that to speak publicly as a woman was to present a major challenge to gendered codes of behavior.

Feminists appropriated Carpenter's career as evidence that women could be socially-engaged, public intellectuals whose exposure did not automatically unsex them. But in a sense, Carpenter did “unsex” herself through her public work, by successfully forging and occupying a space between the masculine and the feminine. Practical, pragmatic, and scientific in her thinking, she was nevertheless credited with being more “motherly” than most mothers, with a “universal mother heart,” a “special capacity for protecting love,” and a saintly patience with unruly children “such as many a real mother might envy” (Fawcett 11). The link between selflessness and (non-biological) motherhood that Carpenter seemed to embody offered a potent example for Victorian feminism because it combined a practical reason with an emotional investment in the sufferings of others, posing an alternative to the imperatives of marriage and reproduction.

Carpenter was thus an importantly embodied figure – both head and heart – whose authority seemed to issue directly “from” her speaking body. Carpenter's voice was characterized in a description of her public speaking style written by her brother Philip as having the power to physically control others in order to produce desired effects:

The real and imagined link between voice and heart, or sound and body – one that Carpenter relied on in both her pedagogy and platform appearances – has been widely acknowledged in recent feminist, psychoanalytic, linguistic and communication theory. That is, sound has often been recognized as a more bodily sense than vision, for example: “what we see is kept at a distance, but what we hear penetrates our entire body. . . . Hearing is intimate, participatory, communicative; we are always affected by what we are given to hear” (Levin 32). Part of the reason hearing is associated with intimacy is because of the interiority of sound – Walter Ong discusses the human voice as coming from somewhere “inside the human organism which provides the voice's resonances” (72). We can be enveloped and overpowered by sound, so that the boundaries between self and other seem to become less fixed.

Thus, Carpenter's full-bodied yet unsexed speech enlists the bodies of her listeners by claiming their attention and appealing to their heart, a powerful metonym for both the moral responsibility and social duty of her colleagues and the inchoate selfhood of her pupils. The disciplinary scene of reformatory classroom obedience is repeated in the venerable lecture halls of ancient universities: through the agency of her speaking voice, Carpenter unites the most exalted and the most humble audiences into a single listening body. Yet Carpenter's vocal power in both of the reformatory and the lecture hall is presented as neither charismatic nor authoritarian but as predicated on a repudiation, or perhaps more accurately, a dispersal of self among and between the bodies of listeners. Carpenter's publicly oriented female authority brought both her powerless and her influential audiences into proximity with each other through the tones of the unadorned but loving speaking voice – an agency that could be felt and heard but not seen.