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The Maternal Image of God in Victorian
Literature
This book is the study of a religious metaphor: the idea of God as a mother,
in British and US literature 1850–1915. It uncovers a tradition of writers
for whom divine motherhood embodied ideals felt to be missing from the
orthodox masculine deity. Elizabeth Gaskell, Josephine Butler, George
Macdonald, Frances Hodgson Burnett and Charlotte Perkins Gilman inde-
pendently reworked their inherited faith to create a new symbol that better
met their religious needs, based on ideal Victorian notions of motherhood
and ‘Mother Nature’. Divine motherhood signified compassion, universal
salvation and a realised gospel of social reform led primarily by women
to establish sympathetic community. Connected to Victorian feminism, it
gave authority to women’s voices and to ‘feminine’ cultural values in the
public sphere. It represented divine immanence within the world, often
providing the grounds for an ecological ethic, including human–animal
fellowship.
With reference also to writers including Charlotte Brontë, Anna
Jameson, Charles Kingsley, Elizabeth Charles, Theodore Parker, Harriet
Beecher Stowe, Mary Baker Eddy and authors of literary utopias, this book
shows the extent of maternal theology in Victorian thought and explores
its cultural roots. The book reveals a new way in which Victorian writers
creatively negotiated between religious tradition and modernity.
Rebecca Styler is Associate Professor in English at the University of Lincoln,

UK. Having received her PhD from the University of Leicester, she has
published in nineteenth-century literature, religion and gender, including
a monograph Literary Theology by Women Writers of the Nineteenth
Century (2010) and numerous articles and book chapters on writers
including Anna Jameson, Anne Brontë, Josephine Butler and Elizabeth
Gaskell, as well as on feminist utopias and religious life writing.
Among the Victorians and Modernists
Edited by Dennis Denisoff
This series publishes monographs and essay collections on literature,

art, and culture in the context of the diverse aesthetic, political, social,
technological, and scientific innovations that arose among the Victorians
and Modernists. Viable topics include, but are not limited to, artistic and
cultural debates and movements; influential figures and communities; and
agitations and developments regarding subjects such as animals, com-
modification, decadence, degeneracy, democracy, desire, ecology, gender,
nationalism, the paranormal, performance, public art, sex, socialism, spir-
itualities, transnationalism, and the urban. Studies that address continu-
ities between the Victorians and Modernists are welcome. Work on recent
responses to the periods such as Neo-Victorian novels, graphic novels, and
film will also be considered.Titles include:
Hotel Modernisms
Edited by Anna Despotopoulou, Vassiliki Kolocotroni, and Efterpi Mitsi
Legal Narratives in Victorian Fiction

Joanne Bridget Simpson
A Space of Their Own

Women, Writing and Place 1850–1950
Edited by Katie Baker and Naomi Walker
The Maternal Image of God in Victorian Literature

Rebecca Styler
For a full list of titles and more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/
Among-the-Victorians-and-Modernists/book-series/ASHSER4035
Demeter Mourning Persephone
By Evelyn De Morgan (1906)
© De Morgan Foundation
www.demorgan.org.uk
The Maternal Image of
God in Victorian Literature
Rebecca Styler
First published 2024
by Routledge
605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158
and by Routledge
4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2024 Rebecca Styler
The right of Rebecca Styler to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in
accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised
in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or
hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks,
and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Styler, Rebecca, author.
Title: The maternal image of God in Victorian literature / Rebecca Styler.
Description: New York, NY: Routledge, 2023. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022060297 (print) | LCCN 2022060298 (ebook) |
century–History and criticism. |
American literature–19th century–History and criticism. |
Femininity of God in literature. | God–Motherhood. |
LCGFT: Literary criticism.
Classification: LCC PR468.G55 S79 2023 (print) |
LCC PR468.G55 (ebook) | DDC 820.9/382–dc23/eng/20230404
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022060297
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022060298
ISBN: 978-0-367-47363-1 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-50993-8 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-03512-1 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003035121
Typeset in Sabon
by Newgen Publishing UK
Contents
Acknowledgements viii
1 The idea of God as a mother in Victorian

culture: sympathy, prophecy, nature 1
2 Faces of the Madonna in Elizabeth Gaskell’s

fiction: feminist justice and the matriarchal divine 34
3 George Macdonald’s fairy god mothers: Romantic

religion, female vocation and maternalist communities 67
4 Josephine Butler, esoteric Christianity and the biblical

motherhood of God 102
5 ‘The Big Good Thing’: Frances Hodgson Burnett’s

maternal gospel of optimism, immanence and
Demetrian utopia 130
6 Charlotte Perkins Gilman and ‘maternal

pantheism’: religion in utopian motherlands
1889–1915 159
Bibliography 190
Index 209
Acknowledgements
This book has been a long time in the making. It is my pleasure to thank
colleagues and other scholars who have commented on parts of it at draft
stage –Owen Clayton, Amy Culley, Ella Dzelzainis, Mark Knight and
Christopher Marlow, as well as the anonymous readers for the journal
Religion and Literature who peer-reviewed an earlier version of Chapter 4,
and the anonymous reviewer of my original book proposal to Routledge
whose feedback was invaluable. Others in the fields of Victorian Studies
and of nineteenth-century religion and literature to whom I owe a debt of
influence in a broader sense are Joanne Shattock, Valerie Sanders, Emma
Mason and Naomi Hetherington.
I am grateful to those who patiently heard elements of this research in
presentation form, and whose comments and questions have shaped the
written study in innumerable ways. This includes events held by Lincoln
University’s Nineteenth Century Studies Research Group, the Midlands
Interdisciplinary Victorian Studies Seminar, the British Association for
Victorian Studies, the Elizabeth Gaskell Society and Leicester Secular
Society. I am also grateful to the organisers who invited or allowed me to
present my work –particularly Michael Gerard.
I thank Lincoln University for allowing me two periods of research leave
to work on the book, for funding archive and library trips when needed and
for supplying me with a generous allowance of interlibrary loans. I would
also like to thank helpful staff at the Women’s Library (London School of
Economics), the British Library and the Gladstone Library in Hawarden
for locating sources and sometimes supplying awkward references. I am
very grateful to Dr Helen Mathers who generously shared with me her
own typescript of Josephine Butler’s ‘Private Thoughts’ whose manuscript
is kept at Northumberland Record Office.
Some of this book has been published before. Elements of Chapter 2
have appeared in ‘Elizabeth Gaskell and the Madonna: Metaphors of the
Maternal Divine’ in the Gaskell Journal 27 (2013), 68–87. An earlier
newgenprepdf
Acknowledgements ix
version of Chapter 4 can be found in the journal Religion and Literature

49:2 (2017), 93–122, and is here reproduced, with adaptations, with kind
permission.
Parts of this book became more about inter-species community than I had
expected: these have inevitably been shaped by my own happy experience
of living in one and are dedicated to Scott and Molly. The rest is dedicated
to those who in various ways have parented me: Grace and John Styler,
Auntie Marje (in memoriam) and sister Ruth.
1 The idea of God as a mother in
Victorian culture
Sympathy, prophecy, nature
In a letter to her friend Catherine Winkworth in 1855, novelist Elizabeth

Gaskell voiced her private sense of God ‘being above all in His great
peace and wisdom, yet loving me with an individual love tenderer than
any mother’s’.1 To think of God in maternal terms signified very different
divine qualities than those embodied by the orthodox lord and father,
which Gaskell yearned for: patience, intimacy and care. By voices from
within various currents of religious thought in both Britain and the United
States, and by means of many literary forms, the motherhood of God was
proclaimed through the second half of the nineteenth and the early twen-
tieth centuries, to fill a felt absence in mainstream religion.
Some stated their belief boldly. Some liberal Protestants, such as Frances
Power Cobbe, welcomed the image of the Madonna Immacolata as a new
symbol of ‘Feminine Divinity’ based on ‘Maternal Tenderness’, while Harriet
Beecher Stowe appreciated the same figure as ‘the Goddess of Poverty and
Sorrow, of Pity and Mercy’ and scandalised her New England neighbours
by hanging an image of Mary on her bedroom wall.2 Transcendentalist
Theodore Parker declared that the God immanent in nature and human
consciousness was ‘not a King, but a Father and a Mother, infinite in power,
wisdom and love’, a perspective shared by others in his intellectual circle.3
Other writers took a more metaphorical approach, with authors including
Gaskell, George Macdonald and Frances Hodgson Burnett using their
fiction to suggest the maternal nature of divinity through ideal symbolic
mother figures, often associated with spiritually animate ‘mother’ nature.
Towards the end of the century, the idea of God as a mother was
becoming normalised. In a devotional work of 1894, Evangelical feminist
campaigner Josephine Butler called the biblical Christian deity ‘the Great
Father-Mother’ and compared the work of redemption with the ‘travail’
of childbirth.4 Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland is one of several fem-
inist utopias published during the era of first-wave feminism whose revised
spiritual ethos is ‘maternal pantheism’, a theology of divine immanence
infused with the values of socialist feminism.5 In the more politicised con-
text of the suffrage debates of the same era, a number of feminists asserted
DOI: 10.4324/9781003035121-1
2 The idea of God as a mother in Victorian culture
that the corollary –even condition –of women’s emancipation was the
‘revelation of the hitherto fact that in God exists the Divine Woman, One
with the everlasting Father, both equal’; they claimed that the very notion
of ‘God as a single Being Masculine’ was increasingly being recognised as
‘an error’.6 By the early decades of the twentieth century, the motherhood
of God was a familiar current within the stream of liberal Christian and
post-Christian religious thought.
This book is a study of this tradition. It explores writings by British
and North American authors from 1850 to 1915 who imagined God as
a divine mother, based on the character of the idealised human mother
blended with numinous ‘Mother Nature’. Elizabeth Gaskell, Josephine
Butler, George Macdonald, Frances Hodgson Burnett and Charlotte
Perkins Gilman –as well as a number of their contemporaries –found that
a maternal model of deity gave sacred symbolism to their most pressing
religious needs, whether to supplement or even supersede the masculine
sacred persona. The maternal divine image signified themes felt to be
under-represented in the prevailing image of God, namely ‘sympathy’ in
both its ethical and ontological sense. For these writers, divine mother-
hood emphasised compassion at the heart of the godhead and as an eth-
ical ideal for humanity. It embodied a theology of universal salvation, and
a social gospel whereby redemption was realised in this world as much
as in heaven itself, through the creation of loving community. It signified
divine immanence in the world, re-enchanting earthly life and often pro-
viding the grounds for an ecological ethic, as well as a sense of the spir-
itual ‘personhood’ of non-human life forms. The maternal image of God
was connected with nineteenth-century feminism, which sought to expand
women’s role and extend ‘feminine’ values of nurturant sympathy to the
public sphere. This maternal model of the sacred, while never mainstream,
was far more widespread than has been recognised and appears in currents
of nineteenth-century religious thought ranging from the radically esoteric
to the relatively orthodox.
This maternal theological model was created through a reaction against
all that the prevailing masculine divine image had come to represent for the
disenchanted: punitive authority, and an alienating remoteness from ‘nat-
ural’ human concerns. By writers strikingly disillusioned with orthodoxy,
however far they departed or not from a Christian base, the idea of divine
motherhood was born out of a shared passion to reanimate religion with
present-day relevance, based on a new appreciation of the qualities deemed
feminine according to prevailing constructions of gender. A new relativism
regarding religious language rendered it permissible for the more liberal-
minded to rewrite the sacred metaphor in order to revive religion’s exist-
ential vitality and social relevance. This was achieved primarily through a
feminising of the monotheistic deity inherited through Christian culture,
The idea of God as a mother in Victorian culture 3
but increasingly through the location of God in nature, through the trope
of ‘Mother Nature’ as an indwelling nurturing and progressive power.
Figures such as the Roman Catholic Madonna, and ancient goddesses like
Demeter and Isis, provided ready-made images of sacred female power
which became reinvested with nineteenth-century concerns, along with
maternal metaphors rediscovered in the Bible that had been suppressed
through translation or liturgical selection. The result was a feminised pan-
entheism, or occasionally pantheism whereby the transcendent dimension
is entirely absorbed, the vision of an immanent sacred life force that bears
the character of the idealised human mother.
Scholarship on the religious history of female sacred metaphor regu-
larly refers to the ‘divine feminine’. In the context of the nineteenth cen-
tury, the ideal construction of femininity was inescapably maternal, given
that marriage and motherhood constituted the expected destiny, and social
reality, of most women. Motherhood was exalted through literature of
all forms as women’s primary contribution to society, especially in the
middle-class milieu to which the authors addressed in this study generally
belonged. When women took on roles beyond the home, this was often
supported by a rhetoric of extending their maternal care to the public
sphere, as ‘mothers in heart’ with a passion ‘to foster, to cherish, to take
the part of the weak, to train, to guide’ individuals in society at large.7 In
Victorian essentialist gender discourse, for many motherhood symbolised
the highest ethical ideal that humanity could attain.
A religious model based on this ideal serves the agendas of nineteenth-
century feminism, which combined liberal aspirations to extend women’s
sphere of activity with deeply ingrained faith in essential gender differences
that made women distinctive from, and often morally superior to, their
male counterparts.8 Re-gendering the sacred image female on the one hand
affirmed individual women’s full human status and redressed at symbolic
level the problem feminist theologian Mary Daly pithily diagnosed in her
announcement: ‘[i]f God is male, then the male is god’, faced with which
‘truth’ a woman experiences herself ‘as an outsider, as an alienated person,
not a daughter who belongs or who is appointed to a marvellous destiny’.9
But female divine images were also icons of the cultural feminine, granting
absolute status to the sympathetic and relational qualities believed to be ‘a
fount of public regeneration’.10 Many pro-active Victorian women sought
opportunities of action in the wider social sphere in order to ‘feminise’
it.11 Of course, as numerous feminist religious historians and theologians
have pointed out, a maternal divine image affirms women only as mothers
(whether in the personal or social sense), an act which itself can be exclu-
sionary, biologically reductive and misandrist.12 These implications are
sometimes present in the writers considered in this book, who are gender
essentialists to a high degree and hold exalted ideas of the redeeming power
of the cultural feminine which is applied to various social and theological

agendas.
This is not the first substantial study of ‘the divine feminine’ in nine-
teenth and early twentieth- century literature. Historians have shown
how female divine symbols were venerated in popular radical millenarian
movements during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.13 Joy
Dixon has demonstrated how a similar utopian spirit inspired images of the
divine hermaphrodite in strands of esoteric religious thought present in the
women’s movement around the turn of the twentieth century.14 There are
three important monograph studies of metaphorical representations of the
divine feminine in literature (encompassing fiction, life writing, social com-
mentary and devotional works) from the 1840s to the 1920s. Kimberley
Van Esveld Adams, Gail Turley Houston and John Gatta have discussed
ways in which authors of Protestant backgrounds from Britain and North
America elevated female divine symbols to represent spiritual values felt to
be lacking in mainstream religious culture. They collectively show George
Eliot, Anna Jameson, Charlotte Brontë, Florence Nightingale, Elizabeth
Barrett Browning, Margaret Fuller, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Nathaniel
Hawthorne, Harold Frederic, Henry Adams and T.S. Eliot to be engaged
in literary expressions of what Houston calls ‘mother-god-want’.15 While
Adams and Gatta focus exclusively on engagements with the Madonna,
Houston shows that creative images of divine motherhood were not only
about Mary, but drew also on biblical and pre-Christian sources, as well as
the authors’ mystical experiences. Like these works, I avoid any implications
of an eternal goddess ‘archetype’ which applies a predetermined meaning
to all female divine personifications regardless of time and location, but
instead recognise the historical specificity of what these nineteenth-century
images signify.16
Adams and Houston emphasise the use of the female divine image by
women writers as a tool for feminist self-empowerment in a patriarchal
society underwritten by androcentric religion. They show how female
sacred symbols were deployed to ‘subversively critique nineteenth-century
gender politics’ and to authenticate ‘the divine potentiality’ of women, or
‘the self-perfection and completion that ordinary women would achieve
when freed from social restraints’.17 In these studies, the female divine is
the heavenly patron of women on a quest for full personhood, authorising
their social equality and literary authority. While Houston and Adams rec-
ognise in the female divine image a mandate for social renewal in terms of
revised gender relations, they do not consider it as representing a broader
structure of the ‘cultural feminine’ which demands other social, theological
and sometimes ecological reforms. Class attitudes are absent from Adams’
discussion, and addressed only briefly by Houston.18 Gatta considers an
aspect of the cultural feminine in his study of the Madonna as a semi-divine
‘symbolic compensation’ for deficiencies in North American Protestant

commercial culture –intuition, creativity and relationality.19 He usefully
recognises that this consolatory symbolism can be, but is not inevitably,
feminist in terms of ‘enhanc[ing] the social possibilities and autonomy of
women in the empirical world’, more often a symbol of personal solace
rather than of social protest or reform.20 Ecological concerns are absent
from all three studies.
This book builds on Gatta’s, Houston’s and Adams’s insights to address
the implications of divine motherhood for British and US authors in terms
of theology, a range of socio-political significations, and relations between
humans and the non-human world. The writers I give most attention to
connect the revelation of divine motherhood with a realised eschatology
achieved through the creation of maternal, and maternalist, communities,
in the spirit of liberal progress or a form of socialism. All believe that
salvation will ultimately be universal, rejecting the doctrine of everlasting
punishment in favour of reform and a progress towards perfection begun
in this world but usually completed in the next. Three of the five authors
under focus include animals as spiritual fellows in the redeemed commu-
nity, while some bring other aspects of environmental responsibility into
the work of cosmic housekeeping. I show the Victorian divine maternal
image to be a public symbol which challenges the status quo regarding doc-
trine, social reform and ecology, while empowering women in the spirit of
‘difference’ feminism.
This monograph sets in a broader context the handful of isolated studies
on ‘God as mother’ in the works of individual writers, such as Claudia
Stokes’ chapter on Mormon Eliza Snow, and Jacqueline Labbe’s discus-
sion of children’s literature.21 These are here shown to be part of a wider
cultural project of religious revision. George Macdonald’s works, which
uniquely among my major examples have already received considerable
attention in relation to its divine mother symbols, have been overwhelm-
ingly subjected to an archetypal approach based on an ahistorical Jungian
notion of the ‘eternal feminine’.22 Here they are instead given a histori-
cist treatment which places Macdonald in dialogue with his contempor-
aries, particularly with women writers. In longer histories of ‘goddess’
symbolism, the nineteenth century is represented almost exclusively with
reference to anthropological writings rather than to theological debates or
literary representations, a gap this work seeks to fill.23
More broadly, this book contributes to a rich literature on feminised,
and feminist, religion in the nineteenth century. Christine Krueger,
Anne Mellor and Ruth Jenkins among others have shown how women
preachers, poets and novelists of social protest in Britain claimed spiritual
authority for women’s voices in the public sphere to preach a gospel of
‘feminine’ values.24 Jane Tompkins and Claudia Stokes vigorously oppose
Ann Douglas’s seminal argument that feminised religion in the mid-century

US equated to enervating sentiment, in order to show women’s religion to
be experiential, practical and justice-oriented, themes developed also in
Mary McCartin Wearn’s essay collection on American women writers.25
Historians such as Eileen Janes Yeo have shown how spiritual womanhood
could be interpreted radically to shape controversial public identities.26
Chapters by Emma Mason, Elizabeth Ludlow and Jo Carruthers in The
Figure of Christ in the Long Nineteenth Century show women Christ fig-
ures in poetry and fiction –potent exemplars and saviours, not the ‘mighty
victims’ delineated in Julie Melnyk’s earlier study.27 This book draws
attention to another significant aspect of the ‘feminisation’ of nineteenth-
century religion focused on re-gendering the godhead itself, where femin-
inity is endowed with power.
The writers focused on in this book include some fairly well-known
names whose theological concerns have not had detailed treatment –such
as Gaskell, Gilman and Burnett –as well as authors whose works on reli-
gion and gender merit a fresh approach –such as Macdonald and Butler.
To contextualise these, less known writers are brought to light, such as
contributors to the feminist journal Shafts, and authors of late-century
feminist utopias. Authors from Britain and the USA are considered along-
side each other, since the maternal religious metaphor is shared across these
national contexts and draws on transatlantic cross-currents of thought
relating to religion, gender, nature and social progress. Many of the writers
themselves engaged in trans-Atlantic intellectual exchange and several had
both British and US readerships. This combined attention to British and
North American contexts is typical of some recent studies in the field of
nineteenth-century literature, religion and gender, although not yet com-
monplace.28 Denominationally speaking, these writers hail from liberal
Protestant backgrounds, or from a confluence of post-Christian religious
thought that flourished in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
particularly in the movements of Transcendentalism and Theosophy. All
share a common reaction against the orthodox transcendent male div-
inity, whom they caricature as a Puritan patriarch. Given the range of
denominations and movements that rendered Christianity itself a contested
phenomenon, the term ‘orthodoxy’ serves as a crude shorthand for the
religious system against which these writers rhetorically construct their
‘maternal’ theology. This book shows another way in which Victorian
writers formed creative negotiations between faith and modernity, adding
to the complication of the once-popular simplistic thesis of progressive
secularisation.
The literary focus of this book assumes a regard for literature as a means
by which to ‘do’ theology, and for metaphor as ‘a unique cognitive vehicle’
through which new understandings of the ineffable can be given form,
beyond the language of dogmatic statement.29 Literary theology, as Sallie

McFague argues, follows the method of the Bible which does not present
‘a theology of the kingdom’ of heaven so much as stories and metaphors
‘which image it forth’.30 This is not just an insight of modern theologians,
but a perception that was taking hold in the nineteenth century itself, when
religious language was increasingly regarded as having ‘only relative and
provisional value’ which must necessarily adapt to changing sensibilities.31
As the Bible was coming to be understood as a work of literature through
the influence of Higher Criticism, so the spiritual status of ‘secular’ lit-
erature rose, embodying ‘creative and original engagements with religious
text and theology’ in which the nature of the divine, and divine–human
relations, were reinterpreted.32 Furthermore, the meritocratic spirit was
democratising religious discourse as the work of authors in the literary
marketplace rather than religious ‘experts’. Thomas Carlyle proclaimed
that ‘the writers of Newspapers, Pamphlets, Poems, Books, these are the
real working effective Church of a modern country’.33 Journalist and cul-
tural commentator Walter Bagehot observed how religious amateurs had
broken the professionals’ monopoly on religious discourse through their
greater empathy with the spiritual anxieties of their readership:
In religion the appeal now is not to the technicalities of scholars, or the

fiction of recluse schoolmen, but to the deep feelings, the sure sentiments,
the painful strivings of all who think and hope.34
Their authority was enhanced by a post-Romantic emphasis on feeling

as the basis for spiritual truth, a more meritocratic source than specialist
theological education or clerical authority.35 Another writer put it more
bluntly: ‘theology is everyone’s business. We cannot afford to leave it to
experts’.36 So writers who were not among the ordained, including women,
and men such as Macdonald expelled from the pulpit for heresy, held all
the tools necessary in their hands to forge new religious ideas and images
for their times, and to communicate them to a wide audience beyond the
strictures of organised religion.
This book is unusual for addressing writings purportedly ‘for children’
alongside texts oriented towards adults, with the sense that the bound-
aries between these two are more porous than might at first appear. Writers
of children’s fiction such as Burnett and Macdonald did not believe they
were exclusively addressing the young –partly because the notion of a sep-
arate literature intended exclusively for children is a preoccupation of the
children’s literature ‘industry’ in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries
more than a reality in the nineteenth.37 And as Peter Hunt explains, litera-
ture is rarely ‘for children’ in any straightforward or clearly defined way,
given the instability of age as a category of taste, opinion, or literacy level,
and that a book’s mode of address is rarely stable in terms of its implied
readership.38 Even books purportedly written for children often betray a
dual sense of audience with (as is the case with Burnett) messages built in
for parents and educators. More importantly, she, and Macdonald, wrote
with the Romantic faith that adults contained the child still within, so that
the imagined ‘child’ reader or character was in fact the adult’s authentic self,
being recalled into existence: Macdonald claimed to write for ‘the childlike’
of all ages, kindling a sensibility that transcended age distinctions.39 In the
era between Wordsworth and Freud, the Romantic child was used as a sym-
pathetic vehicle of protest by writers disenchanted with reductive utilitar-
ianism, religious dogma and (especially for female authors) restrictive codes
of femininity.40 Given the more central figure of the mother in a child’s
social reality –at least when young –the choice of a child protagonist lent
itself to representing a world with a maternal cosmic governor, and with
a greater sense of impunity than if voiced through the perspective of an
adult.41 And whatever a reader’s age, in religious terms they were still a
‘child of God’ relating to a universal parent, so that a child character in lit-
erature metonymically suggests a potentially universal religious experience.
The period addressed by this book, 1850–1915, was the heyday of lit-
erary expressions of divine motherhood in the modern era, prior to the
emergence of the ‘goddess’ movement in the context of late-twentieth-
century ecofeminism. As Houston has shown, this literary tradition can be
seen in part as an indirect legacy of the female divine symbols venerated in
popular millenarian sects of the Romantic era,42 albeit in bourgeois mode.
More broadly, it drew on the cultural currents that made such heretical
ideas possible, when maternity was idealised and provided a powerful rhet-
oric for theological and social reform, and when ‘Mother Nature’ appeared
both spiritually potent and benign. From the mid-nineteenth century to the
era of the first organised women’s movement, the idea of divine mother-
hood flourished among cultural conditions which did not survive long into
the twentieth century. In a more egalitarian, sceptical and secular atmos-
phere the religious model of divine motherhood lost relevance. When the
idea of a divine earth-goddess came again to the fore in the 1970s, it drew
on some of the same nineteenth-century anthropological myths and gender
stereotypes (regressively, for its critics), but was far more radically green,
pagan and sexualised –and seemingly unaware of its Victorian literary
forerunners.43
The rest of this chapter sets out the cultural contexts informing the model
of divine motherhood from 1850 to 1915, referring to a wide range of
writers to demonstrate the popularity of maternal theology, and the varied
currents of religious thought in which it emerged. I begin by showing the
feminisation of God through the ‘cult’ of motherhood and simultaneous
doctrinal developments, and the empowerment of the cultural feminine as
a force for utopian social reform through the ethos of women’s prophecy.
I show how the trope of ‘Mother Nature’, expanded by Romanticism and
anthropology into a theological model and read as the cosmic parallel to
ideal human motherhood, was united by some with the prophetic ethos of
the Mother in Israel and the cause of Victorian feminism. The chapter then
traces the fate of this sentimental myth of feminised nature through the
revelations of evolutionary science, which for some gave maternal divinity
a basis in natural law and aligned humanity’s physiological development
with millenarian ideals of female-led social progress. The connections are
shown between this theology of maternal divine immanence and the nas-
cent ecological movement, as well as sometimes with eugenicist ideolo-
gies of a divinely ‘perfected’ humanity. The chapter concludes with some
explanation for the demise of the image of God as a mother in the new
cultural conditions of the early twentieth century.
Thereafter, the author-focused chapters proceed roughly chronologically.
In Chapter 2, I argue that Elizabeth Gaskell’s maternal theology, shaped by
distinctive perspectives drawn from her Unitarian heritage, is articulated
chiefly through her engagement with the Madonna symbol, resonant in the
wake of the Immaculate Conception debates and Anna Jameson’s influ-
ential Legends of the Madonna. Different facets of the Madonna –for
example as Mater Dolorosa, the Madonna di Misericordia, and the more
pagan Theotokos or god-bearer –resonate in Gaskell’s representation of
women’s cultic practice and in her protagonists’ characterisations. Through
her short stories ‘Lizzie Leigh’ (1850) and ‘The Poor Clare’ (1856), an
episode of Cranford (1852–53), and her infamous fallen-woman novel
Ruth (1853), Gaskell both celebrates but sometimes questions human
motherhood as the basis of understanding the divine character. Gaskell’s
integration of earth mother imagery in Ruth sets her apart from her con-
temporaries who take the Madonna purely as a symbol of social morality,
with radically matriarchal and amoral implications for the status of the
female reproductive body.
Chapter 3 considers George Macdonald’s fairy-tale representations of
powerful maternal governors in relation to his ideas of the divine fem-
inine, women’s prophecy and a maternalistic social gospel as expressed in
some of his poetry, realist novels such as Robert Falconer and The Vicar’s
Daughter, and in his Unspoken Sermons. In place of prevalent archetypal
readings, I set his images of divine motherhood alongside those of his con-
temporaries to consider their significations of divine intimacy, universal
salvation and women’s liberation into the public realm to form mater-
nalistic communities. These redeemed communities are shown to include
animals, in a fellowship that is enlightened by Macdonald’s beliefs about
their spiritual status. The stories under focus are The Princess and the
Goblin (1872), ‘The Wise Woman’ (1875) and the critically neglected story
‘The History of Photogen and Nycteris’ (1879), which collectively show

Macdonald’s interest in divine motherhood to be strongest in this middle
decade of his literary career.
While Gaskell and Macdonald went beyond the bounds of their scrip-
ture to seek potent images of the divine feminine, Josephine Butler’s striking
achievement was to base hers entirely on the Bible. Chapter 4 focuses on the
feminist Evangelical’s revelation of the biblical God as a mother in her late
life writings and scripture commentaries: Recollections of George Butler
(1894), The Lady of Shunem (1894), The Morning Cometh (1906) and
correspondence to supporters of her social campaigns against the legalised
sexual exploitation and abuse of women and girls. For Butler, the discovery
of divine motherhood symbolises the dawn of a woman-led millennium of
reconstructed social relations, and the promise of salvation for all human
beings and for animals that love them, along with the apocalyptic renewal
of the earth. I suggest that Butler drew on Bible-reading strategies, and to
an extent ideas, common in late-nineteenth-century esoteric Christianity
(such as by Christian Theosophist Anna Kingsford and the feminist journal
Shafts) which bled into more orthodox writings beyond just her own,
including those of the Anglican Elizabeth Charles.
Chapters 5 and 6 take the maternal divine image into more post-Christian
territory, through the influence of new religious movements, although
some Christian roots remain. I turn first to the transatlantic author Frances
Hodgson Burnett, whose novel The Secret Garden (1911) counters sterile,
patriarchal religion with a maternal force vital in all life, a personification
shaped by Burnett’s syncretic religious influences including Spiritualism,
New Thought and the connected movement of Christian Science. I explore
Burnett’s depiction of the spiritual feminine as a force of optimism and the
social gospel, in fictional works such as That Lass O’Lowrie’s (1877), The
Dawn of a Tomorrow (1906) and her autobiography The One I Knew Best
of All (1893). The Secret Garden is then read as a maternalist utopia of
reformed relations which deconstruct class, gender and species boundaries,
as well as embodying a maternal cosmic force that powerfully connects its
children to immortality. How far the prophetic potential of this utopian
space is realised in the novel’s ‘real’ world is a matter for discussion.
Finally, Chapter 6 extends the North American focus through a con-
sideration of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s underrated religious thought
which was filtered entirely through the sociological category of gender,
albeit in terms of ideals about women’s maternal natures that were by then
becoming old-fashioned. Writings including A Woman’s Utopia (1907) and
His Religion and Hers (1923) are drawn on to contextualise and interpret
the ‘maternal pantheism’ of Gilman’s most radical literary utopia Herland
(1915) which locates the divine entirely in the natural, temporal world.
This earth-bound philosophy redefines the human as a radically collective
‘post-human’ entity, and nature as a resource for maternalistic subjuga-

tion from which perfection is wrought, with ambiguous implications for
ecological ethics and problematic eugenistic ideals of ‘perfection’. Herland
is also contextualised among a number of feminist literary utopias of the
1880s, 1890s and 1900s, whose reconstituted societies venerate a divine
mother, showing that first-wave feminist utopias were as much concerned
with religious as with political reform, regarding the two as intrinsically
connected.
Ideal motherhood and the feminisation of God

Much has been written of the nineteenth-century ‘cult’ of motherhood, and
it was on this rhetorical exaltation of women’s traditional parenting role
that ideas of the maternal divine were built. By the mid-century, the image
of the ‘ideal, ever-present, ever-loving, all-responsible mother’ pervaded
advice books, periodical articles, medical discourse and fiction, in which
the primary carer was frequently likened to God in her sacred mission.44
Modern analysis of the cult of motherhood has tended to focus on its
implications for the rhetorical policing of women’s social role, but little has
been said about its theological significance. Likening mothers so closely to
God implied new understandings of the divine as itself maternal. As Janet
Soskice has explained, the ‘interanimation theory’ of metaphor involves a
partial collapse of the distinction between vehicle and tenor, so that not
only do we see the tenor in a new light (mothers are like God), but the
vehicle itself becomes ‘animated’ by the new associations evoked through
the analogy (God is therefore like a mother).45 So, while mothers were
being semi-apotheosised as divine agents on earth, purportedly to develop
women’s understanding of their parenting responsibilities, the image of
God was itself being redrawn with a woman’s face.
Mothers were frequently compared with the deity in their attributed
capacity for enduring, inexhaustible love. For Sarah Stickney Ellis, author
of the advice work Mothers of England, maternal affection was a foretaste
of heaven, a ‘sanctuary’ of ‘meekness, charity, and peace’ which countered
the selfish spirit of the world.46 Others concurred that maternal love was a
‘holy passion’, ‘a sacred flame on the altar of the heart’ by which a mother
was no less than ‘the first likeness on earth of God himself’.47 The uncon-
ditionality of mother-love was championed in contrast with more merit-
based paternal affection. Ellis argues that a mother’s indulgent affection is
a tender reminder of the love of the ‘merciful and gracious Father’ towards
sinners,48 while Sarah Lewis claims that a woman yearning after her errant
child ‘even when the father’s heart was turned to stone’ is ‘typical of the
divine love’ which redeems: God ‘has deigned to put into woman’s heart
the only feeling … which affords us the faintest representation of his most
inextinguishable love to us, his erring and strayed children’.49 This contrast
was exploited by many writers for whom the maternal divine image was
taken to signify universal salvation, in contrast with a more punishing patri-
arch, a theme that recurs even for writers as late as Burnett and Gilman.
The literature of exalted motherhood emphasised women’s power to
shape not only her children’s characters but also their immortal destinies.
While ‘as companion and soother of man’ she was expected to be ‘weak
and gentle’, as a mother she became ‘the source of all human power and
dignity’.50 Through Enlightenment theories of the pliability and perfect-
ibility of human nature, mothers were credited with the power to rec-
reate humanity: ‘what might not be hoped from the labours of a race of
enlightened mothers, who would early impress on their children’s minds
lessons of piety and wisdom, and who would make the first sentiments of
their souls noble and enlarged?’51 From a contrasting philosophical perspec-
tive, the Evangelical movement intensified the Christian sense of original
sin, but pressed upon mothers their vital responsibility to train their children
in the ways of holiness and prepare them to receive God more fully through
conversion.52 Like the sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit, mother-love is a
‘wonder-working principle’ which brings unregenerate souls to God, effect-
ively a co-progenitor of born-again souls.53 Mothers were divine ministers
within the home, shunning the clumsy forms of masculine power –instruc-
tion and command –to embrace the subtler strategy of sympathetic influ-
ence through almost omniscient insight into her child’s motivations and
weaknesses.54 Even in the mother’s absence she is powerful, internalised as
kind of guardian spirit (or constraining super-ego) to prompt her children
to virtue even after her physical death.55 Whether in heaven or on earth
mothers were saviours whose work was to restore the divine image in the
human soul, no less than the prime instruments of ‘regeneration’ in a fallen
world.56 While such idealisations of women were at their peak from the
1830s to the 1860s, they lingered in a late-century form of feminism that
rested on a similar exaltation of ‘woman’ as powerful redeemer conspiring
with God to bring about salvation.
This alignment of divine and maternal natures was all the more possible
because of parallel religious developments that in a sense ‘feminised’ the
character of God. Evangelicalism brought a new personal intensity to faith,
while Romanticism and Transcendentalism emphasised feeling as the basis
for spiritual experience, intuiting a God who was readily available through
poetic perception of the world around.57 Christian virtues –moral purity,
love and self-denial –were widely thought to be ‘more easily practised
by women than by men’, a connection which the discourse of ‘Christian
manliness’ had to work hard to undo.58 The ‘sentimental’ emphasis in
American Protestantism was regarded as a (sometimes unwelcome) fem-
inisation which foregrounded the experiential over the intellectual, and
which was often embodied by mother characters in fiction whose wisdom

is superior to that of religious authorities.59
As well as this emphasis on emotion and intimacy, mercy was a growing
theme in liberal salvation theology which arose from a growing revul-
sion against the doctrine of everlasting post- mortal punishment. The
radical universalist hope that ultimately all would be saved, voiced first
by Unitarians, was increasingly adopted by liberal-leaning Christians from
the 1840s onwards, and was taken for granted in new religious movements
such as Transcendentalism and Theosophy.60 Frances Power Cobbe, who
broke from her Evangelical background to embrace Theism, argued that a
‘Feminine Divinity’ would embody ‘the modern idea of Divine Goodness,
that is, of a Goodness which must exclude the existence of Hell’.61 In the
last quarter of the century a flurry of books such as William Dorking’s The
Larger Hope for the Future of the Human Race (1875), and Samuel Cox’s
Salvator Mundi (1877) and its sequel The Larger Hope (1883), argued that
universal salvation was in fact a thoroughly biblical doctrine, encouraging
news to Evangelicals like Josephine Butler. For writers including Butler,
Macdonald, Gilman and others this hope was frequently grounded in the
model of mother-love, more merciful but also committed to the education
of her offspring, salvation not an instantaneous event but a slow perfecting
begun on earth and continued in heaven.
In light of these ideas, Theodore Parker draws an emphatic gendered
binary across competing models of the divine nature, protesting that ‘the
popular theology’ (by which he means the most ascetic form of Calvinism)
‘leaves us nothing feminine in the character of God’. As part of his argu-
ment that the expansion of women’s sphere of action would be a public
good, he asserts ‘[i]‌f women had been consulted, it seems to me theology
would have been in a vastly better state than it is now’, free of the doctrines
of ‘infinite wrath, of eternal damnation, and total depravity’.62 Such beliefs
he attributes to the diseased imaginations of a celibate priesthood, who
were never fully humanised (he implies) through marriage or fatherhood,
a fact he blames for the Christian tolerance of gender injustice and brutal
social policies. Parker’s ideas, disseminated further through Frances Power
Cobbe’s British edition of his works, shaped the Transcendentalist trad-
ition inherited by writers such as Burnett and Gilman, and consolidated the
more implicit gendered schema of liberal versus Calvinist theology that is
also visible in Gaskell’s and Macdonald’s writings.
Of course, these softer qualities were not excluded from the social reality
of nineteenth-century fatherhood which, contrary to popular stereotypes of
remote authoritarianism, often involved deep attachment and tenderness.63
F.D. Maurice and others (including, much of the time, George Macdonald)
encapsulated intimacy and even universal salvation in their idea of God as
a loving father, not a warrior lord or a domineering patriarch, a distinction
Theodore Parker makes when he declares that ‘God is not a king, but a
father and a mother’.64 But the ideal, and to some degree the reality, of
the middle-class breadwinner and paterfamilias made paternal intimacy
often difficult to achieve, or at least to demonstrate, so that mothers of
the middle classes could more easily claim superior parenting capacities
given the new emphasis on parenting as an emotional and moral, not just
economic, role.65 While, as historians show, the social reality of male and
female parenting was more nuanced than the notion of ‘separate spheres’
suggests, gender provided a convenient if oversimplified schema to signify
contrasting interpretations of the divine character, and of its relationship
with human beings and with the earth in which they spend their mortal
existence.
Rethinking God in terms of motherhood was not confined to writers
of Protestant Christian heritage, although it seems that the idea was most
widespread among them. Claudia Stokes has shown how Eliza Snow, later
wife to Joseph Smith and designated a prophetess as well as poet laureate
of the Latter-Day Saints, invoked the Heavenly Mother which, while con-
troversial to many, was accepted by some into Mormon doctrine.66 As is
shown in Chapter 5, Mary Baker Eddy, founder of the Christian Science
movement, likened God more to a mother than a father on the basis of
women’s higher capacity to love. Although in Roman Catholicism Mary
was not divine, but a mediator between God and humanity, convert
Adelaide Procter evades this nicety by making Mary the sole deity to whom
a charity-focused convent community pays homage in her medieval poetic
narrative ‘A Legend of Provence’ (1862). Mary appears in a vision not only
to grant forgiveness to a fallen nun, but to wipe the community’s memory
of her error, in order to allow her full rehabilitation without condescen-
sion.67 As well as being a reposte to the many fallen woman narratives
which resolve in obligatory penitence and often death, the poem is a par-
able of divine mercy in autonomous female form.
Grace Aguilar, ‘the most important Jewish writer in nineteenth-century
England’,68 also made moves towards a maternal theology, combining
the resources of her tradition with her own independent interpretations.
While not questioning the ideology of separate spheres, she is credited with
‘feminiz[ing]’ Judaism by reversing the hierarchy which valued public col-
lective practice (in which women were largely passive) over private and
domestic religious experience.69 Emphasising ‘the private sphere as the
essential realm of true Jewish practice’, Aguilar elevated women’s spiritual
wisdom and emphasised intimacy and mercy as the heart of her faith.70 As
Nadia Valman has argued, the idea of God as a mother is implicit in some
of Aguilar’s works, modelled in the patient and compassionate woman
protagonist who becomes a conduit of salvation to all who dwell with
her or pass through her house.71 In The Women of Israel, Aguilar, keen
to dispel the cultural myth that only in Christianity were women extolled,
reminds readers that God was often depicted in Hebrew scripture through
maternal metaphor.72 These works by Snow, Eddy, Procter and Aguilar
show that the discourse of exalted maternity prompted revisionary ideas of
the divine image from writers of a variety of religious backgrounds, who
felt that God’s ‘feminine’ aspect, and women’s spiritual experience, had
been suppressed to humanity’s detriment.
Millenarian feminism and ‘Mothers in Israel’: the feminine

social gospel
As Rosemary Radford Ruether has shown, symbols of the ‘spiritual fem-
inine’ which linger in the margins of patriarchal religious systems often
serve consolatory and compensatory functions, but lack power to challenge
or change the status quo.73 The nineteenth-century exalted feminine often
served as such, celebrating the counter-cultural qualities of mother-love
while reinscribing female passivity. To Ellis, maternal love stands in ‘right-
eous indignation’ towards ‘injustice, oppression, and cruelty of every kind’,
yet only through domestic influence,74 while fictional female saviours often
imitate Christ through self- sacrifice rather than triumph over worldly
powers.75 But the ethos of women’s prophecy, alive in popular millennialist
movements and in some traditions of religious dissent, and still an influ-
ence at the turn of the twentieth century, provided an empowering rhetoric
that endowed sympathy with power, which breathes through nineteenth-
century images of female divinity.
Utopian socialist-feminist movements of the Romantic era aspired to no
less than the regeneration of society through the emancipation of women
and the extension of sympathy through the public sphere. This millenarian
or apocalyptic feminism sought a world-focused redemption that would
usher in ‘a new era of community and love’, whereby heaven would be
realised on earth.76 This vision was profoundly immanentist, inspired by
post-millennial beliefs that the golden age would be brought about by
human agency before the messiah’s final return, as well as by more secular
notions of the ‘divine’ manifest in a perfected humanity. Many of these
utopian movements believed this mission would be furthered by veneration
of a female sacred symbol, such as Eliza Sharples who proclaimed:
This is the time, when woman shall reign, and the kingdom of man
shall be no more. The man and the woman are the two Messiahs of
the Bible. … Woman is the bride –the lamb’s wife, and the Bible says
that she comes, when the millennium begins.77
By Sharples and her like, figures such as Eve, Isis, the Madonna and the
Holy Spirit were recuperated in composite symbols of the divine feminine
that would herald the new era for humanity. Barbara Taylor discusses
more secular examples of this ethos such as the Saint-Simonians whose
spokesman James Smith declared that ‘Hitherto God has been worshipped
as a man; let us now worship the female God’,78 and John Goodwyn
Barmby of the Communist Church who addressed ‘the Woman-Power’
in hymns to ‘Incarnate Love’ and the ‘Human Goddess’.79 Some of these
were influenced by French utopian writer Auguste Comte who believed
humanity was ‘more ideal’ in its ‘feminine type’ and celebrated women as
its ‘spontaneous priestesses’; churches of his ‘religion of humanity’ took
for their central devotional image the Sistine Madonna, sacred icon of the
mother–child bond.80 In these examples, the divine feminine represented
the utopian hopes of realising the kingdom of heaven on earth through
reformed social relations.
A less heretical model of women’s prophecy emerged from religious
dissent, based on biblical examples of the prophet as charismatic leader
appointed directly by God to challenge the authorities of the day and call
them back to piety and justice. Women were included in this vocation,
as examples like Deborah, Miriam and Mary the mother of Jesus dem-
onstrate, as well as injunctions such as Joel 2:28–9: ‘I will pour out my
Spirit on all people. Your sons and daughters will prophesy … ’. Women
preachers in early Methodism drew on this authority, and especially the
title ‘Mother in Israel’ in imitation of the biblical judge Deborah (Judges
4–5) who claimed it for herself and other national saviours.81 The title was
celebrated by Victorian women writers as a distinctly motherly model of
leadership, both affectionate and pacific, as Clara Lucas Balfour emphasised
in her account of Deborah’s peaceable rule of God’s people for 40 years.82
The title ‘Mother in Israel’ was widely applied to women leaders connected
with dissent, claimed by Methodist preachers Mary Bosanquet Fletcher
and Mary Taft (who described their preaching and mentoring activities as
‘travail’), and bestowed by Anglican Hannah More upon Quaker Elizabeth
Fry in recognition of her prison reforms.83 It was still in use at the end of the
century when Josephine Butler applied it to Quaker supporters of her cam-
paign against the organised sexual abuse of children, while at her funeral
in 1887 Mormon Eliza R. Snow was credited as having been ‘Mother in
Israel’ to tens of thousands.84 Gaskell, Macdonald and Burnett feature
such prophetic women in their fictional writings, to empower a feminised
message of the social gospel with direct divine power. The Mother in Israel
authorised women’s spiritual voice and agency and defied the status quo in
the name of compassion and justice.
As several scholars have shown, the ethos of women’s prophecy echoes
through the writings of women poets, novelists and social commentators
through the nineteenth century who boldly judged society’s oppressions

to preach ‘an ethic of love, compassion, peace, and liberty’.85 Houston
rightly claims that these early prophets and Mothers in Israel continued to
inspire literary depictions of the divine feminine,86 albeit with more bour-
geois agendas than their Romantic-era forebears. As Joy Dixon shows, the
revived millenarian spirit of late-century feminist movements in Britain
and North America led some to find the revelation of God’s motherhood
in esoteric forms of religion, in order to support their claims for women’s
full recognition as citizens.87 Subsequent chapters will explore authors
who in a sense form the missing link between these early and late-century
manifestations of apocalyptic feminism, for the metaphor of God as a
mother is throughout connected to utopian hopes of social regeneration.
Crossing the boundaries between orthodox, esoteric and new religious
thinking, these literary images of divine motherhood lead to the creation
of Edens on earth, in the liberal and often maternalist visions of their
makers.
In the last decade or so of the nineteenth century, when the prospect of
women’s emancipation into full citizenly rights was in sight, an argument
emerged for the need of a female divine image in terms of an identity pol-
itics that anticipated some of the fundamental assumptions of theology in
second-wave feminism. In 1979 Carol Christ argued the political need for a
female divine image on the basis of sacred imagery’s power to form psyches
and social norms:
[R]‌eligions centred on the worship of a male God create ‘moods’ and

‘motivations’ that keep women in a state of psychological dependence
on men and male authority, while at the same time legitimating the
political and social authority of fathers and sons in the institutions of
society. … Religious symbol systems focused around exclusively male
images of divinity create the impression that female power can never be
fully legitimate or wholly beneficent.
The solely masculine image of deity is condemned as a source of women’s

oppression, too tainted with patriarchal ‘moods’ and ‘motivations’ to offer
anything of value to women seeking emancipation.
From the 1880s onwards women on both sides of the Atlantic presented
a similarly politicised reading of religious iconography and forcefully
argued the need to recognise God as a divine mother, as well as father, in
order to authorise women’s full civic personhood and equality with men.
This was aided by an increasingly sociological analysis of religion as ‘the
transcendental image of the condition of society at any given period’, even
while many still believed that this construction referred indirectly to an
ultimate spiritual reality beyond forms.88 So American Theosophist Helen
Knothe spoke of the need to ‘look for and find the divine aspect of woman’
and ‘at the same time … prove the essential woman aspect of Deity … .
When women realize their own inherent Divinity, then shall they occupy
the place which is rightfully theirs in the full light of Her love’.89 In the
British feminist journal Shafts, Alice Major complained that ‘the Supreme
is habitually spoken of in the masculine gender, so that the bulk of the race
are firmly convinced that, if there be a God, that God is a sort of magnified
man’. The result was, she claimed, that ‘the male half of the human race has
been comporting itself as though it imagined that it represented mankind,
and that woman was a sort of afterthought considerately provided for man
and for the perpetuation of the race’.90 Major, as well as others including
Elizabeth Cady Stanton in The Woman’s Bible (1895–98), argued that the
sole masculinity of God was not even biblical, since they interpreted the
plural ‘Elohim’, and God’s instruction to make humanity ‘in our image’, to
signify divine gender-duality. These writers are optimistic that once women
rewrite religion, God can be rescued from androcentrism and women from
subjection. As Chapter 6 in particular will show, a number of women
writers between 1880 and 1915 created utopian visions of reformed soci-
eties with reformed religions focused on a divine mother who authorises
social sympathy and cooperation and undoes women’s marginal status.
The ethos of prophecy, which claimed an ex-centric authority, morphed
into the language of rights as women claimed their position at their centre,
not the margins, of social and religious discourse.
Divine ‘Mother Nature’

As well as the example of ideal womanhood, the Victorian maternal divine
image was influenced by Romantic ideas of ‘Mother Nature’, which as
the century progressed came increasingly to the fore and accumulated new
significance. Inheriting Calvinist and Deist visions of God as radically sep-
arate from, and other to, earthly existence, Romanticism re-enchanted the
organic environment with intimations of divine indwelling, bringing God
back to earth as a divine power ‘immediately present in nature, in society,
and in each man’s [sic] heart’.91 Liberal and new religious developments,
including Transcendentalism, Christian Socialism and Theosophy, were
similarly characterised by ‘disillusionment with the idea of a God set apart
from humanity and the world’, and instead emphasised material and social
life as the site of divine indwelling and the focus of redemptive attention.92
The trope of ‘mother’ nature helped further this immanentist emphasis,
which in the nineteenth century rose to the status of a theological model
as nature was perceived to be inhabited by a nurturing divine intelligence.
For William Wordsworth, an extensive influence on British and US liberal
religious developments, nature was a feminine moral power (‘The anchor
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keep out of danger in the future. If you do not, I’ll have to call this
tour off and take you all home.”
“We’ll be as good as mice watched by a cat,” put in Frank, and this
caused another laugh; and then the subject was changed and soon
the group separated, each person bent on making himself
comfortable in his own way.
But the Chester was not a comfortable ship, as Mark and Frank soon
learned by a tour from stem to stern. And they also learned another
thing,—that the captain, Jason Sudlip, was anything but an
agreeable man.
“Hi, you, I don’t allow passengers in there,” they heard the captain
cry, while they were peering into the chart room. “You boys must stay
where you belong while you are on this ship.”
“We weren’t going to touch anything, Captain,” replied Mark,
pleasantly, although he did not like the way in which he was being
addressed.
“Oh, I know boys—into everything they have no business in,”
retorted Captain Sudlip. “I’ve had them on board before. You’ll have
to stay where you belong.” And he slammed and locked the door of
the chart room in their faces.
“He’s real sweet, isn’t he?” said Frank, as they walked to the saloon
deck. “I’m glad I don’t work under him. I wouldn’t be a hand on this
steamer for ten dollars a day. I’ll be glad when our trip on her is
ended.”
Professor Strong had noticed the captain’s harsh manner to those
under him, but he said nothing, for in his travels he had met many a
captain just as harsh and some of them had been positively brutal.
Dinner was served at five o’clock, and when the boys came to the
table with their hearty appetites—nobody had as yet had a chance to
get seasick,—they looked at what was set before them by January
Jones with dismay.
“This is awful!” whispered Darry to Sam. “This soup is regular dish-
water.”
“I can’t eat such soup,” returned Sam. “I hope the meat and
vegetables are better.”
“Sorry, sah, but it’s de best de ship affords, sah,” said January
Jones, who saw that they were not suited. “De cap’n am a werry
close buyer, sah,” he added, in a lower voice. “Can’t git nuffin cheap
enough.”
The meat was tough and there was hardly sufficient to go around,
while the vegetables, brought on board the day before, were far from
fresh. The bread was also poor, and the coffee of the lowest grade.
For dessert there was a rice pudding which, according to Darry, “was
just like a chunk of dirty rubber.”
Professor Strong saw that the boys were on the point of open
rebellion, but he shook his head at them.
“Make the best of it,” he said. “I will see the captain about it later and
find out if the service cannot be improved.”
January Jones heard the words, and they made the solemn-looking
colored man grin. “Dat’s right, sah,” he whispered. “I hopes yo’ do
kick, sah. But yo’ wants to be careful, sah. De man wot kicked on de
las’ trip got it hot an’ heaby from de cap’n, sah.”
“So there has been trouble before?”
“Yes, sah, lots ob trouble. But please don’t say I tole yo’, sah. De
cap’n would mos’ kill me if he found it out,” went on January Jones.
“De cap’n am a hard one, an——”
The colored man did not finish, for he had turned to leave the table,
and now he found Captain Sudlip close behind him. He gave one
startled look and dove for the door leading to the cook’s galley. The
captain followed, and one disappeared directly after the other.
CHAPTER IV
A TALK ABOUT A MEAL
“There’ll be music now,” whispered Frank to Darry. “That captain is

a tartar if ever there was one.”
The dessert had already been brought on, so January Jones was not
called on to do additional waiting and he did not re-appear. The boys
were soon finished and went again to the deck, leaving Professor
Strong to interview the master of the steamer.
It was a disagreeable duty he had to perform, but Amos Strong was
too old a traveler, and had seen too much of life, to hesitate
concerning his course of action. Being unable to find the captain, he
hailed the first mate.
“I wish to see the captain at once,” he said. “Where is he?”
The mate did not know, and sent a deck hand to hunt him up. It was
a good quarter of an hour before the master of the Chester put in an
appearance.
“What is it you want?” demanded Jason Sudlip, harshly and there
was a gleam in his eyes which was far from pleasant.
“I wish to complain to you, Captain Sudlip, of the food furnished to
our party.”
“What’s the matter with it?”
“Everything is the matter with it. In the first place it is very poor in
itself and in the second place it is miserably cooked. To-day’s dinner
is the poorest which has been served to our party since we left the
United States, and that is several months ago.”
“Humph! I heard you trying to raise a row at the table. According to
my way of thinking the food is all right, and so is the cooking. Is that
all you want to see me about?”
“That is all, and it is quite enough. I do not propose to stand it. I paid
for first-class accommodations for myself and for those with me, and
I shall expect such accommodations in the future. If they are not
forthcoming as soon as we get to Kingston I shall lodge a complaint
against you and sue to recover, even if I have to hold myself and
your ship there to do it.”
At this announcement Captain Sudlip’s eyes almost bulged out of his
head with rage.
“Ha! do you threaten me?” he roared. “That’s the way of all Yankees
—think they can ride right over everybody that comes along. You
can’t ride over me!”
“I won’t argue the point,” returned Professor Strong, calmly. “You
heard what I said, and I am a man who always keeps his word. I
once met a fellow of your stripe at Nassau—Captain Renfaw, of the
Queen Mary—perhaps you know him. He tried the same game of
poor food and it cost the owners of the ship about sixty pounds in
court—and the money came out of Captain Renfaw’s salary. Unless
there is a better service I shall treat you exactly as I did Renfaw.”
With this remark Amos Strong swung around on his heel and
sauntered off. Captain Sudlip stood for a second glaring at him, and
seemed on the point of talking back. Then he drew his lips tightly
together and walked to his private cabin.
The professor said nothing to the boys about what had taken place,
but they all knew that he had “laid down the law” by the way the
captain acted whenever he came near them. They saw nothing of
January Jones until the day following.
By nightfall Hockley was taken seasick, and a little later Sam and
Mark were also suffering. None of the attacks, however, was severe,
and Frank and Darry escaped entirely.
“We got cleaned out when we came down here,” said Darry, with a
grin. “My! but I’ll never forget that dose. I thought sure I was going to
turn inside out!”
“Poor Hockley didn’t get a chance to boast this trip,” replied Frank.
“He was the first one taken.”
By morning all felt fairly well, and everybody appeared at the table
but Hockley, who was suffering from a headache.
“Now we’ll see what’s what!” whispered Frank. “This certainly looks
encouraging,” and he pointed to the clean tablecloth and the neat
piles of bread and pats of butter.
Breakfast seemed a long time in coming, but when at last it did arrive
it was quite a fair meal. The quantity was not extravagant, but what
there was of it was fairly well cooked, and the coffee proved of a
much better grade, greatly to the professor’s satisfaction, for like
many old-time travelers, he was a great coffee drinker. Nothing was
said about the improvement in the food, but many a sly wink was
given and returned across the board.
While the boys were eating they saw that January Jones was
unusually silent. The negro had a bit of court-plaster on his forehead
and one side of his jaw seemed slightly swollen.
“It looks to me as if January had been in a fight,” remarked Sam,
when the crowd found itself on deck. “Do you imagine that brute of a
captain attacked him?”
“I shouldn’t be surprised,” returned Mark. “He is a very easy-going,
mild-mannered darkey, and a fellow like Captain Sudlip would just
take pleasure in brow-beating him.”
“But isn’t it against the marine rules to strike a man like that?”
questioned Frank.
“I guess captains often take the law into their own hands,” said
Darry. “They can put in a complaint of mutiny, or something like that,
and a sailor, or other ship’s hand, has no show.”
The day had started in bright and clear, but by ten o’clock it began to
grow misty, and soon a drizzling rain was falling and they were
compelled to seek the shelter of the cabin.
“I think we may as well improve our time by having a talk about
Jamaica,” said Professor Strong. “We shall only stop for one day at
Kingston—unless something unforeseen happens—but it won’t hurt
to know something of this English possession.”
He had his map handy, and placing it on the wall he sat down in front
of it, and the boys ranged close alongside.
“As you can readily see,” began the professor, “Jamaica is an island
located in the Caribbean Sea directly north of Colombia in South
America and south of the island of Cuba. It is oval in shape and is
about one hundred and fifty miles long by fifty miles wide. Can any of
you name a State at home of about that size?”
There was a few seconds of silence.
“If I am not mistaken New Jersey is just a little larger than that,”
answered Mark.
“You are right Robertson, the general length and the general width
are about the same, although New Jersey contains more square
miles than Jamaica. The island has a ridge of high hills running east
and west, called the Blue Mountains, and from these hills spring over
half a dozen small streams which flow into the sea.”
“Can you sail on the rivers?” came from Darry.
“On only a few, Crane, the others contain too many rapids and
waterfalls. The deepest stream is the Black River, which is used by
small boats for perhaps twenty-five or thirty miles. I once had an
adventure on that river, so I am not likely to forget it.”
“Oh, tell us the story!” cried Frank, eagerly. He always thought a
“geography lesson” awfully dry.
“It is soon told,” answered Professor Strong, with a good natured
smile. “I had been out hunting and had slipped on a steep rock and
twisted my ankle. I went down to the river and there discovered a
rowboat. No one was at hand from whom I could hire the boat and I
could not walk around looking up the owner. So I determined to risk
taking the boat, and jumping in I shoved off and began to row down
to the town, two miles away. I had hardly gotten quarter of a mile
when I heard a shouting and two old Englishmen came running
down the river bank, yelling wildly. They, too, had been out gunning,
and before I could come back and explain one of them aimed his
gun at me and fired.”
“And were you hit?” asked several of the boys together.
“No, fortunately his aim was poor and the charge passed over my
head. Then I rowed to shore in a hurry, and after a good deal of
trouble explained matters. They told me that they had had their boat
stolen by negroes three days before and in the darkness took me for
one of the negroes. I felt like giving them a piece of my mind for
shooting at me, but as it was their boat I let the matter drop. But I
never borrowed another boat without permission.”
“I’d had ’em locked up,” came from Hockley, who had just joined the
group.
“Well, I did not. Now to get back to Jamaica. The mouths of the
numerous rivers afford good harbors, but the best of the shelters for
ships is the bay toward the south-east, upon which is situated
Kingston, the capital. The total population of the island is about six
hundred and fifty thousand, only a very small part of that being white
people.”
“It’s the best of the West Indies belonging to England, isn’t it?”
questioned Sam.
“Yes. It used to belong to Spain. It was discovered by Columbus, on
his second voyage, in 1494, and it was taken under Spanish rule
fifteen years later. In 1655 Oliver Cromwell sent out an expedition
which captured the island, and it was ceded to England later on.
Since that time there has been more or less trouble with the
negroes, but at present the island is at rest.”
“And what do the people do for a living?” asked Darry.
“They raise sugar and coffee principally, and also some fruit. The
country is also becoming something of a health resort, the climate,
especially among the hills, being fine.”
“I’ve often heard of Jamaica rum,” said Hockley.
“Yes, the island produces more of that than is good for the people at
large,” answered the professor. “It also exports large quantities of
log-wood, and the price received is, at present, very good.”
“Tell us about your hunting trips in Jamaica,” said Frank, after a
pause, during which Amos Strong pointed out several of the
important towns on the map; and a long talk on hunting followed
which did not come to an end until the gong rang for dinner. Nothing
had been brought down in the forests of Jamaica but birds—for there
are no wild animals worth mentioning—but the professor had a
manner of telling his “yarns” which was exceedingly captivating.
The midday meal served was about on a par with the breakfast.
There was no more than was absolutely necessary, but the quality
was far above that of the day previous and the cook had taken pains
with the preparation of the food. The captain did not show himself,
and even January Jones hardly spoke a word.
“I hope you didn’t get into trouble on our account, January,” observed
Sam, when he got the chance.
“De cap’n am a werry hard man, sah,” replied the negro, and that
was all he would say.
“Angry, is he?”
The negro nodded solemnly and walked away.
“I think we’ll hear more of this,” said Darry, and he was right.
It grew dark early in the afternoon and the rain kept them in the
cabin, where the boys started in to amuse themselves in various
ways.
“It’s small fun on board of a ship in a storm,” said Sam. “Makes me
feel like a chicken boxed up in a hen-house.”
“Really?” returned Darry, dryly. “Now I never was a chicken in a hen-
house, so I don’t know how——” and then he broke off short and
dodged, as Sam moved as if to throw a book at his head.
“It certainly is dead slow——” remarked Frank, when a sudden
hissing stopped him. The hissing was followed by a roar as of an
explosion and before they could realize it the cabin began to fill with
steam.
“Gracious, the boiler must have burst!” ejaculated Mark.
“Boiler burst!” came from the others.
“We had better get out on deck, boys!” called Professor Strong.
“Something is certainly very much wrong.”
He had scarcely spoken when there came another roar and worse
hissing. A yell went up from some other passengers and immediately
there was wild confusion on all sides.
“Oh, Professor, are we going down?” cried Hockley in terror, as he
clutched Professor Strong’s arm.
“I hope not, Jacob,” was the reply. “Come, we will get to the deck
and provide ourselves with life preservers.”
But to reach the deck through that cloud of steam was by no means
easy. Hockley was frantic and began to yell for help. In the meantime
Professor Strong and Frank reached a number of life preservers and
passed some to the others. At last they found themselves outside on
the wet and dark deck, wondering what was going to happen next.
CHAPTER V
THE DEFENSE OF JANUARY JONES
“We’ll all be drowned, I know we will!”

The remark came from Hockley. His teeth chattered so that he could
scarcely speak.
“If there is any real danger I should think the captain would have the
boats lowered,” said Mark, who, now that the first scare was over,
was more calm than any of the other boys.
“Perhaps it is not as bad as we anticipated,” said the professor.
“Tie this life preserver on me, will you?” asked Hockley of Sam. He
already had one preserver around his waist and now wanted this on
his breast.
“All right,” replied Sam, and did as requested.
In the meantime all listened for the sound of another explosion.
Would it come, and if it did, would it send them skyhigh? Certainly it
was a moment of terrible suspense.
“I—I know we’ll go up,” chattered Hockley. “And we’re ever so far
from land too!”
But they did not go up, nor did anything more in the nature of an
explosion occur. The hissing of steam continued for fully five minutes
and then stopped as suddenly as it had begun.
“I imagine the worst is over,” said Professor Strong, after a painful
silence. “Unless I am mistaken that accident was nothing worse than
the ripping open of some steam pipes. But it may have cost the life
of a fireman, coal heaver, or engineer. If you will all remain here I will
investigate.”
They promised to stay where they were and he left them, to be gone
the best part of quarter of an hour. In the meantime quietness was
restored on board, and some of the passengers went back to the
cabin, which was now free of steam.
“It was as I surmised,” said the professor. “Two pipes burst and let
out an immense amount of steam. One of the firemen had his leg
scalded and an engineer had his left hand badly lacerated. They are
now repairing the damage done, and they say that by morning we
will be able to steam along the same as usual.”
“I’m glad to know it’s no worse,” observed Frank, while Hockley
wiped the cold perspiration from his forehead. “But it’s queer the
pipes should burst. They must be old.”
“The engineer says he told Captain Sudlip about the pipes needing
repairs before we left La Guayra. But the captain put him off and told
him that he would have the repairs made at Havana.”
“If that’s the case then that fireman and that engineer will have it in
for him,” was Mark’s comment.
“And they ought to have it in for him,” came from Frank. “Those men
might have been steamed to death, and we might have been blown
up in the bargain.”
“Just what I say,” added Sam.
The rain soon cleared off and that evening the countless stars came
out to brighten up the view of the sea. The boys made themselves
easy on the deck, taking in the scene, the single exception being
Hockley, who sat close to a cabin light, reading a novel he had
picked up at a bookstall in La Guayra.
“Did you see that novel Glummy is reading?” said Sam to Frank, as
he drew up his chair.
“I didn’t notice particularly. What is it, something deep?” And Frank
smiled.
“Very deep,” went on Sam, disgustedly. “The title is ‘Pete Prankley,
the Sassiest Boy in Sawtown; Or, Out for a Hundred Laughs a Day.’
Did you ever hear of such rot? I don’t see how Jake can read it.”
“That’s on a level with another book he was reading—at the hotel in
Caracas. That was called ‘Gold Nose Hank, the Mine Discoverer; Or,
The Whoop-Up at Stampede Hollow.’ Just for fun I looked through
the book and made a note of the things that happened. Gold Nose
Hank shot down three Indians, two road robbers and one
government detective. His enemies fired forty-six shots at him but
never touched him. He located nine gold mines, said to be worth
fifteen million dollars, and saved the life of the girl five times, once
from a stampede of cattle, once from the Indians, once from a road
robber, and twice from drowning in a river which he afterward forded
without getting his cartridge belt wet. And all that for ten cents.”
At this Sam burst into a merry laugh. “That author believed in giving
his reader his money’s worth, didn’t he?”
“Glummy seems to have got a mania for that sort of a story lately.
The professor once took a book away from him and burnt it up. But
now Glummy puts the books out of sight as soon as he sees the
professor coming.”
“If he keeps on he’ll be wanting to follow in the footsteps of Gold
Nose Hank or Pete Prankley,” said Mark, who had listened to the
talk. “If he does it will get him into trouble. He will find—listen!”
Mark stopped short, and all of the boys listened. From the forward
deck of the steamer came a cry, as of sudden alarm. Silence
followed.
“That was queer,” said Sam. “It sounded to me like January Jones’
voice.”
“It was January,” returned Frank. “He’s in some sort of trouble. Come
on and see what it is.”
The three boys rushed forward, followed by Darry, the professor
having gone to his stateroom to change his coat. At first they could
not find the colored man, but presently located him near the
forecastle. Beside him stood Captain Sudlip, a bit of an iron chain in
his hand.
“That will teach you a lesson,” the captain of the Chester was saying.
“You’ve needed it ever since you came on board.”
To this January Jones made no answer. He was wiping the blood
from his nose and from a cut on his left hand.
“The captain has been striking that negro,” whispered Sam. “It is an
outrage and I mean to tell him so.”
“Don’t do it, Beans,” cried Mark, catching him by the arm. “You’ll only
get yourself into trouble.”
But Sam would not listen. He was ordinarily a quiet, studious boy,
but now his stern New England sense of justice was aroused, and
tearing himself loose he hurried up and confronted the master of the
steamer.
“I think it’s a shame for you to strike this man,” he said, in a loud,
clear voice. “I know you are the captain but I don’t think you have a
right to abuse any of your crew.”
At this frank speech Jason Sudlip stared in open-mouthed
astonishment. For the moment he fancied he had not heard aright.
“Why—er—what——” he began, and then his eyes blazed with
sudden fury. “Get out of here!” he roared. “Get out, I say! If you don’t
I’ll knock you down!”
His advance was so threatening that Sam put up his hands to defend
himself. But he did not back away, and Captain Sudlip stopped when
directly in front of the lad.
“Did you hear me?” he stormed. “I want you to get where you belong.
I’ll treat this nigger as I please. By Jove, I think you need a good
licking too!” And he raised the chain as if to strike.
But now Darry ranged up alongside of Sam. “If you fight, you’ll have
to fight me too,” he declared. “He said it was a shame for you to
abuse January Jones and it is. No decent captain would act as you
are acting on this trip.”
If possible this declaration made Jason Sudlip more furious than
ever. He was naturally of a vindictive nature and he glared at the
boys as if he would like to “chew ’em” up.
Mark and Frank were not long in advancing as Darry had done, and
the sight of the four boys, with their determined faces, caused
Captain Sudlip to pause again. He glanced around, but in the semi-
darkness of that portion of the deck no one was visible but the boys,
January Jones and himself.
“Don’t you know you are carrying matters with a high hand, dictating
to me on my own ship?” he demanded, in a slightly milder tone.
“I am not dictating to you,” replied Sam. “But if this man needs
protection and I can aid him I will, that’s as sure as you stand there. I
don’t know much about the sea, but I think the time has gone by
when a captain can treat his crew like a lot of slaves.”
“Dat’s right, I ain’t no slabe no moah,” came from January Jones,
who was beginning to pick up a little courage, now he saw he had so
many to side with him.
“You keep quiet!” stormed the captain, shaking his fist at the colored
man. “I’ll settle this with you at another time,” and then January
Jones slunk back, fearful that he had “put his foot into it” worse than
ever.
“Captain, I can’t see why we can’t settle this little affair in a friendly
way,” said Mark, after an awkward pause. “We don’t want any
trouble. If you’ll only treat that colored fellow as he should be treated,
and continue to serve us with decent meals, there won’t be any
cause for——”
“I don’t want any preaching from a boy!” interrupted the captain. “I
know my business and I want you to mind yours.”
“All right, we will,” came from Darry. “But just the same, we are going
to keep an eye on you so long as we remain on board. And if you do
anything more that the law doesn’t allow you’ll hear from us; isn’t that
so, fellows?”
A chorus of assent followed.
“I won’t talk to you further,” growled Captain Sudlip, and turning on
his heel he started off. His direction was toward January Jones, and
that individual lost no time in getting out ahead and disappearing to
parts unknown.
“He is a brute and no mistake,” was Sam’s comment, when they
were once more left to themselves. “I believe he would have half
killed that darkey if we hadn’t come up.”
“Don’t worry but that the captain has it in for you,” came from Frank.
“And in for Darry, too.”
“I guess he’d have it in for all of us—if he got the chance,” said Mark.
“But we mustn’t give him the chance. In the future, while on
shipboard, we had better keep together.” And on this the boys
agreed.
When they returned to where the professor was sitting he asked
them where they had gone so suddenly.
“Oh, we took a walk forward,” said Sam, carelessly, and then to stop
further questioning asked Professor Strong how far he thought they
were on their journey and when they would arrive at Kingston.
Hockley had finished his so-styled humorous book, and now came
out to listen to what the crowd might have to say. But he was not
interested and soon began to yawn.
“I’d rather sleep than sit out here gazing at nothing but stars and
water,” he said, and shuffled off to his stateroom.
It was about an hour later when the professor and the boys also
retired. Mark and Frank who, as told before, roomed together, had
just undressed when there came a slight knock on the door.
“Who is it?” asked Mark.
“It’s me, sah,” came in the low voice of January Jones. “I dun stole
down heah widout de cap’n knowing it.”
“Oh!” Mark opened the door several inches. “What can we do for you
now, January?”
“Nuffin, sah, thank yo’, sah. I jess come down heah to thank yo’ fo’
what yo’ done fo’ me, sah. It was werry kind, dat was, sah. An’ I
thought I’d tell you dat I ain’t a-gwine to stay on dis ship no longer
dan I can help, sah. It ain’t good fo’ my constitution, sah, no, sah!”
“That’s right, it isn’t,” laughed Frank. “But you’ll have to stay on board
until you strike land. Is that all?”
“Yes, sah. Thought I couldn’t go to sleep widout thankin’ yo’ sah,
nohow. Please tell dem other gents, will yo’, sah?”
“We will.”
“Thank yo’, sah, much obliged, sah!”
And with these words January Jones sneaked off as noiselessly as
he had come.
CHAPTER VI
AN INTERRUPTION TO SIGHT-SEEING
Two days later the Chester slipped into the fine harbor at Kingston
and dropped anchor. It was cloudy, but by noon the sun broke forth
and the boys had a chance to look at the shipping, which is fairly
extensive. As usual in West Indian ports, the flags of many
nationalities were flying, and the scene was full of interest.
Since the boys had stood up so bravely in defense of January Jones
they had seen but little of Captain Sudlip, he evidently making it a
point to avoid them. And they also saw but little of January Jones, for
the negro was assigned to other work and a strange hand placed to
wait on the table and care for their rooms. The service all around
was fairly good, but, as Darry expressed it, “nothing to brag about.”
“Are we going to get a chance to stretch our legs on shore?”
questioned Sam, as he gazed over the rail at the narrow and
crowded streets of the town.
“The professor has got to find that out,” said Frank, who had just
been speaking to Amos Strong. “He says he paid our passage right
through to Havana, so we can’t bid good-bye to Captain Sudlip just
yet.”
A little later Professor Strong joined them with the information that
the Chester would remain in Kingston harbor until the following day
until three o’clock.
“Then we can take quite a look around,” said Mark. “Are there any
points of interest to visit?”
“A few only. You see, England has tried hard to make something of
the island, but as yet there are too many negroes here to suit
Americans. But we will take it in for what it is worth.”
It was decided that they should put up at the Queen’s Hotel over
night and they so notified Captain Sudlip.
“All right, do as you please,” he growled. “But it won’t take anything
off your passage money.”
“I did not expect it would,” replied Professor Strong, coldly.
They were soon ashore and walking up the narrow and dirty street
leading from the quay. On either side were big warehouses with here
and there a low drinking resort, around which hung sailors of many
nationalities and crowds of negroes.
“This is not very inviting,” was Sam’s comment. “It smells almost as
bad as at La Guayra.”
“It is not so bad further away from the docks.”
They soon reached the hotel, a comfortable resort with large shade
trees in the courtyard and a fountain, and here Professor Strong
secured accommodations for all.
“Kingston contains about fifty thousand inhabitants,” said the
professor, after they had secured a large carriage in which to drive
around. “It was established about two hundred years ago, after the
neighboring town of Port Royal had been destroyed by earthquake.
Now Port Royal has been rebuilt. It lies on the other side of the
harbor, but Kingston is the main city, and nearly all the foreign
commerce passes through this port.”
“Have they any railroads?”
“When I was here last they had a railroad about ten miles long,
running from here to Spanish Town, in the interior. The lay of the
land is not favorable to railroads.”
“I knew some sick folks who came to Jamaica for their health,” said
Hockley. “A man and his son. Both had consumption.”
“Yes, invalids come here in plenty, and there are several hotels up in
the hills built especially for their benefit.”
They were soon at the principal square of the city, called the Parade.
Here were numerous shops, as well as a barracks for the soldiers, a
church, theater, and other public buildings. The Parade was well
kept, quite in contrast to the streets through which they had been
passing.
It was a relief, when they returned to the hotel, to find a first-class
meal awaiting them, something that “topped clean over old Sudlip’s
lobscouse,” as Darry put it, borrowing a favorite sailor’s expression.
It was decided to take a run up to Spanish Town the next morning.
They could get a train about ten o’clock, and that would give them
ample time to look around and get back before three, the time when
the Chester would set sail.
All of the boys were up bright and early on the following morning with
the exception of Hockley, who snored away until Professor Strong
called him.
“I don’t want to get up,” he grumbled. “Nothing to see in this dead
hole.” Yet when dressed he joined the others in a trip to several
public buildings, where an English official kindly showed them
around.
Ten o’clock found them at the depot, waiting for the train which was
to take them to Spanish Town, and here they discovered that the
time table had been changed and the train would not leave until half
an hour later.
“But we can get back before three even so,” announced Amos
Strong, after studying the schedule. “I fancy none of you want to
return to the Chester until it’s necessary.”
They waited around and at last the little locomotive, with its three
coaches rolled in. As it came to a stop they heard a yell, and looking
around, saw January Jones coming toward them on a dead run.
“Hello! what does he want?” exclaimed Mark. “Something is up,
that’s certain.”
“Stop! stop!” called out the negro, as soon as he was within speaking
distance. “Doan yo’ go fo’ to take dat train, less yo’ want to lose de
ship!”
“Lose the ship?” queried Professor Strong. “What do you mean? We
expect to be back before three o’clock.”
“De ship am gwine to sail at one o’clock, sah.”
“One o’clock!” came from all of the others. And then the boys looked
at the professor inquiringly.
“Captain Sudlip told me he would sail at three o’clock,” said
Professor Strong. “I asked him twice to make sure.”
“I ’spect he did, sah, but I heard him tell de mate dat dey must sail
promptly at one o’clock, sah—dat he wouldn’t wait fo’ nobody, sah.”
“It’s a trick to leave us behind!” burst out Mark. “He has our money
and that is all he cares.”
“But he told me three o’clock,” persisted the professor. “Although I
have no witness to that fact!” he added, suddenly, a light breaking in
on him.
“Then that is where he has us foul!” came from Frank. “It’s a good
thing January told us this,” he continued, and gave the negro a
grateful look.
“Tole yo’ I would do sumt’ing if I got de chance,” said the negro, with
a grin.
“All aboard!” called the train porter.
“We are not going,” answered Professor Strong; and a minute later
the train was off.
“Yo’ see it was dis way,” continued January Jones, as they walked
away from the station. “I heard one ob yo’ young gen’men tell de
udder ’bout gitting back befo’ three o’clock. Den when I heard what
Cap’n Sudlip said to de mate I knowed sumt’ing was wrong. So I
made up my mind to dun tole yo’. I went to de hotel fust an’ dey tole
me to come heah.”
“We’ll not forget your kindness,” said Professor Strong. “It was
certainly a mean trick on Captain Sudlip’s part and I shall tell him so.
Of course if we had been left I could not have brought suit against
him for damages, since I have no witness to prove that he said he
would sail at three o’clock.”
“Tell yo’, sah, I’se mighty sick ob workin’ fo’ dat man, sah,” observed
January, with a shake of his woolly head. “I’d leave de ship heah,
only dis ain’t much ob a place.”
“No, I would advise you to remain until you reach Havana,”
answered Professor Strong. “I have a number of friends in that city
and perhaps I can get you something to do there.”
This pleased January Jones greatly, and he promised to do what he
could for them so long as they were together.
As there was nothing much to do at present, they walked back to the
hotel, where they procured dinner. In the meantime the negro, who
had been sent ashore on an errand, hurried back to the steamer with
all speed.
At quarter to one o’clock Captain Sudlip came on deck and looked
around him anxiously. He was all ready to sail and so far had seen
nothing of his five passengers. He gazed ashore but not one of them
was in sight.
“I’ve won the game this time,” he muttered to himself. “And they can’t
prove anything either. It was as slick as any Yankee move. They’ll be
mad enough when they realize how I have outwitted them. And I’ve
got the passage money safe in the cabin. Let me see, by dropping
them behind I clear just about twenty pounds. I can tell the owners
that they paid their way only as far as Kingston and they will never
know differently.”
As the minutes went by he looked at his watch nervously. Ten
minutes to one and no one in sight—five minutes. He called to the
first mate.
“All ready to sail?”
“Aye, aye, sir,” was the answer. “But I haven’t seen anything of those
Americans.”
“Well, it’s their own fault if they don’t come aboard in time. I shall not
wait for them.”
“Didn’t think you would, sir,” answered the mate, but in such a low
voice that Captain Sudlip did not hear him.
At one minute to one the lines were cast off and as a distant bell
tolled the hour the Chester began to move from the harbor. Standing
near the pilot house Captain Sudlip continued to gaze ashore. But
those he was fearful of seeing did not show themselves and
presently he heaved a sigh of relief and satisfaction. Half an hour
later Kingston Harbor and Jamaica itself were left behind and the
Chester stood boldly out into the Caribbean Sea.
“Dumped ’em!” said the captain to himself, with a smile of intense
satisfaction. “That will teach ’em a lesson. They can’t ride over me!”
And then he added, after a pause, “Now I’ve got that nigger to
myself, won’t I just teach him a lesson? He won’t be able to stand
when I get through with him!”
CHAPTER VII
THE JOKE ON CAPTAIN SUDLIP
But were our friends left behind, as Captain Sudlip so fondly hoped?
Let us go back and see.
It was light-hearted Darry, always ready for a joke, who offered the
suggestion, while they were eating dinner at the Queen’s Hotel.
“Say!” he exclaimed, suddenly, thumping the table in his excitement.
“I’ve got a scheme for paying Captain Sudlip off for his meanness.”
“Have you?” came from Professor Strong. “Even so, please don’t
pound the dishes from the table, Darry.”
“Oh, excuse me, I forgot, sir. But really, the scheme is just the thing,”
went on Darry, earnestly.
“Then let us have it by all means,” put in Frank. “I’m ready to do
anything to get square with that man.”
“My scheme is this: Let us try to get on board of the Chester on the
sly. Then, when he is congratulating himself on leaving us behind we
can suddenly appear. I’ll wager that will knock him silly.”
“Hurrah; that’s a go!” shouted Frank.
“A splendid plan,” came from Sam.
“We’ll have a tough job of it, getting on board without being seen,”
remarked Hockley, who was envious because he had not made the
suggestion. “There is always somebody on deck, and that somebody
will let the captain know of our coming.”
“We must watch our chance,” said Darry. “Anyway, it’s worth trying,
isn’t it?”
All the boys agreed that it was, and Professor Strong could not help
but smile at their enthusiasm. At once they made him promise to
come into the plan, and he finally consented.
“But I am not going to sneak on board like a criminal,” he said.
Soon they were down at the docks and here they met January
Jones, who had just completed his errand. They took the negro into
their confidence and he promised to come on deck and wave his big
red bandanna handkerchief when the coast was clear.
Fortunately the plan worked with ease. Captain Sudlip was not
dreaming of their return by half-past twelve and they came on board
seen only by January and one of the deck hands. This deck hand
loved the captain no more than did the negro and he readily
consented to remain silent concerning the American passengers.
Once on the steamer the party did not go to their staterooms but to a
storeroom which January pointed out to them. It was a fairly
comfortable spot, and here they remained until the steamer was
under way. While sitting here the boys completed their plan, which
made even Professor Strong smile broadly.
It was Darry who ventured forth first, showing himself when the
harbor had been left many miles behind. He strolled on deck as
coolly as possible, passing the captain without appearing to notice
the latter.
Captain Sudlip was nearly dumfounded and stared as if he was
looking at a ghost.
“Why—er—er,” he stammered. “When—er—when did you come on
board?”
“Not very long ago,” answered Darry, coolly.
“Hum! Did you—er know—I mean, did you have a nice time?”
“First-class, although I should have liked to have seen more.” And
then Darry added, before the captain could speak again: “Seen
anything of the rest of our crowd?”
“No.”
“Queer. They must be somewhere,” and then Darry walked away,
leaving Captain Sudlip staring after him.
“He must have left the others of his party,” mused the master of the
Chester. “Humph! Well, I won’t treat him any too good. He’ll find out
that he can’t boss me as the whole crowd did. If he gives me any lip
I’ll lock him in the brig.”
Darry lost no time in retreating to the storeroom, where he told his
story. Then Mark sauntered forth and passed the captain as the
latter was entering the cabin.
This time Captain Sudlip’s jaw dropped in chagrin as well as
amazement. He was about to back away without a word, but Mark
did not allow this.
“Well, Captain, I see you got away on time,” he said, pleasantly.
“Nothing like being prompt, eh?”
“Hum! Why—er—yes, I always sail on time,” came back, in snappy
tones. “I—er—when did you come aboard?”
“Not very long ago,” and then Mark added, as Darry had done: “Seen
anything of the rest of our crowd?”
“Saw one,” was the short answer, and then Captain Sudlip passed
on, his face full of perplexity and chagrin.
It was Frank he met next. The boy had a book in his hand and
pretended to be reading. But on catching sight of the captain he
sang out cheerily: “Hi, Captain Sudlip, have you seen anything of the
rest of our crowd?”
“Some of ’em,” growled the master of the steamer, and walked in
another direction, to encounter Sam, who came up to him with a
handkerchief to his eyes.
“Oh, Captain, Captain Sudlip!” he exclaimed tearfully. “I—I’m in
trouble.”
“Trouble?” demanded the captain, wrathfully. “What’s wrong?”
“Have you—have you seen anything—of—the—rest—of—our
crowd?”
“Find out for yourself!” roared Captain Sudlip. “If this is a joke let me
say I don’t stand for it!” And he rushed off for his private cabin.
Here he met Hockley, who had been waiting several minutes to
interview him. But he was no longer surprised and was on the point
of passing when the youth held him up.
“I say, Captain,” he began, “have you seen anything of the rest——”
“So you think you’re going to make a monkey of me?” exploded
Captain Sudlip, in a fury. “Think you are going to make laughing
stock of me, do you? I won’t stand it. How do you like that, you
impudent rascal!”
“That” was a slap from his broad palm, which took poor Hockley
fairly and squarely in the mouth and sent him on his back. The
captain would have followed it up with more violence, but just then
Professor Strong appeared.
“Stop that!” he commanded, sternly. “What right have you to touch
this young man, sir?”
“He insulted me,” answered the captain, but turned somewhat pale.
“I won’t be insulted on my own ship!” he added, doggedly.
“How did he insult you?”
“Didn’t insult him,” spluttered Hockley, rising. “I just asked him the
question we agreed on,—if he had seen any of the rest of our crowd,
—when he up and knocked me down.”
“I—I won’t argue the matter,” interrupted Captain Sudlip. “I know your
game. After this you can mind your own business and leave me
alone.”
“We will leave you alone,” answered Professor Strong, as calmly as
ever. “But first I am going to have my say. I know of your trick to
leave us behind. You told me you would sail at three o’clock and
then you changed the time to one o’clock.”
“I did not, I——”
“We won’t argue that matter. Fortunately we got back before one
o’clock, so your little plan was nipped in the bud. We are going to sail
with you as far as Havana, and you must treat us fairly while we are
on board, otherwise I shall enter a complaint with the owners of this
ship. And as for hitting this young man, you must apologize or I will
back him up in having you arrested as soon as we reach port.”
At these final words from Amos Strong the captain’s face became a
study. There was a look of rage and hate there, mingled with that of
baffled cunning. He had gotten himself in a tight corner and he knew
it. Two other passengers had seen the assault on Hockley, so there
were witnesses enough to his misdeed. The talk had collected quite
a crowd, including all the boys.
“So you think I ought to apologize?” he said, slowly.
“Yes, and you’ve got to do it, too!” put in Hockley, growing bolder,
now he saw that Professor Strong was, for once, backing him up.
“You had no right to play a joke on me.”
“I was only asking you a simple question.”
“Hum! I know you! But I may have—er—been hasty in hitting you,”
went on Captain Sudlip, lamely. “And if I was I—er—apologize.”
And with this he walked off, and did not show himself again until the
next day.
“I reckon we got square,” said Darry, later on, when they talked the
matter over. “He’ll be mad over this affair every time he thinks about
it.”
“It was all right enough for you fellows,” grumbled Hockley, who was
nursing a swollen lip. “You didn’t catch what I got.”
“Why didn’t you strike back, Glummy?” asked Mark.
“I didn’t get the chance, the professor came up so quickly. Otherwise
I would have wiped up the deck with him,” blustered the would-be
bully.
All of the others had their opinion about Hockley’s ability to “wipe up
the deck” with anybody, but they said nothing on that point, for
certainly he had caught the bitter end of the joke.
“And now we’ve got to wait and see how Captain Sudlip treats us for
the rest of the trip,” said Mark, when the meeting broke up.
“And how he treats January Jones,” said Darry. “Don’t forget that
poor fellow. My! what would Captain Sudlip do to him if he knew he
was the one who had brought us the news?”
As might be expected, Jason Sudlip was in anything but a sweet
temper during the days spent in making the run around the western
end of Cuba to Havana. But he managed to steer clear of Professor
Strong and his party, and the meals furnished, while not particularly
good, were still such as to be above complaint.
It was on his crew that Captain Sudlip emptied his vials of wrath, and
everybody caught it from the first mate down to January Jones and
the cabin boy. This led to more than one quarrel, and before the
Chester reached Havana half the help on board were on the verge of
mutiny.
“I won’t stand this,” said the second mate. “If the first mate won’t
make a complaint to the owners I will!”
“I do not blame you,” answered Professor Strong, to whom he was
speaking. “I think you have a clear case. If you wish it, I will write out
a letter stating such facts as I know, and I will sign it, and so can the
young men with me.”
This offer was readily accepted, and when the Chester reached the
harbor at Havana the second mate had the paper safe in his
possession. He had talked the matter over with the others on the
steamer and five men joined in making a complaint, not alone to the
owners but also to the authorities. As a result Captain Sudlip was
discharged by the owners of the steamer and the first mate became
the commander, and the second mate became first. The mate was
willing to keep January Jones, but the colored man remembered
what Professor Strong had promised and went ashore to stay there.
CHAPTER VIII
SIGHT-SEEING IN HAVANA
The boys watched the entrance into the harbor of Havana with
interest, and as they approached the shore Professor Strong pointed
out the various objects to which he wished to draw their attention.
“As you doubtless remember,” he said, “during the War with Spain, in
1898, the city of Havana and several other cities in this
neighborhood were blockaded for many months, so that it was next
to impossible for the Spaniards to get any supplies from outside or to
send any goods away from these ports. A number of vessels tried to
run the blockade but nearly every one was captured, so that when
the war was over our sailors had quite a lot of prize money coming to
them.”
“Is that Morro Castle?” asked Mark, pointing to a high fortification to
the left of the harbor entrance.
“Yes, that is old Morro, and over on the right is Punta Castle, and
beyond that is the Queen’s battery, a long fortification, which, as you
can see, shelters the city itself from the sea. It was these
fortifications, Morro, Punta, and the batteries to the west, that kept
our ships at a distance during the blockade.”
“I should like to visit Morro Castle,” came from Sam.
“I think there will be no difficulty, although, you must remember, the
American troops have now been withdrawn from the city and all of
Cuba is now in the sole possession of the Cubans.”
“Well, I guess they have a friendly feeling towards Yankees,” came
from Frank. “At least, they ought to have—we did so much to help
them establish their freedom.”
“The entrance to the harbor is about a mile from the harbor itself,”
went on Professor Strong, “and the city lies entirely on the west
shore. Roughly speaking it is about a mile and a quarter square and
contains about two hundred and forty thousand inhabitants. It is
divided into the old city and the new, the former being within the old
walls and being very much cluttered-up, and the latter being on the
outskirts, where there are many fine buildings and summer
residences. The harbor of Havana is a place that no real American is
likely to forget. Can you tell me why?”
“Because the battleship Maine was blown up here,” came from one
and another.
“Exactly, lads, and the blowing up of the Maine hastened on the war
which resulted in Cuban liberty. I think we shall be able to see the
spot where she sank, although the wreckage has been cleared
away.”
“I will show you the place,” said one of the other passengers, and he
pointed it out, not many rods from the shore. “I was here at the time,”
he went on. “The explosion was a very terrifying one, and broke a
good deal of the glassware in the hotel at which I was stopping.”
It was not until several hours later that they were allowed to land,
after a Cuban Custom House official had passed their baggage.
Professor Strong knew exactly where he wished to go, so there was
no hesitation on that score.
“What narrow streets!” exclaimed Frank, as they passed along, the
boys having elected to walk, in order to see the sights more fully.
“Why they are no better than alleyways. This sidewalk is barely two
feet wide.”
“That is the way they used to build the streets,” answered the
professor with a laugh. “They know better now, and the new part of
the city has some very broad and well-shaded highways, and also a
great number of beautiful fountains.”
“I don’t see how wagons can pass each other—especially those long
things they call volantes,” came from Hockley.
“There used to be a regulation that carriages and carts could only
pass through a street in one direction. I presume that is still in force
in the old part of the town.”

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The Maternal Image of God in Victorian

Literature Rebecca Styler

Women, Literature and Finance in Victorian Britain:

Syphilis in Victorian Literature and Culture 1st

Representing Realists in Victorian Literature and

Animals in Victorian Literature and Culture: Contexts

The Idea of Music in Victorian Fiction Fuller

Neo-Victorian Madness: Rediagnosing Nineteenth-Century

Finding Favour in the Sight of God A Theology of Wisdom

History of English Literature Volume 4 Early and Mid

Rebecca Styler is Associate Professor in English at the University of Lincoln,

This series publishes monographs and essay collections on literature,

Legal Narratives in Victorian Fiction

A Space of Their Own

The Maternal Image of God in Victorian Literature

1 The idea of God as a mother in Victorian

2 Faces of the Madonna in Elizabeth Gaskell’s

3 George Macdonald’s fairy god mothers: Romantic

4 Josephine Butler, esoteric Christianity and the biblical

5 ‘The Big Good Thing’: Frances Hodgson Burnett’s

6 Charlotte Perkins Gilman and ‘maternal

version of Chapter 4 can be found in the journal Religion and Literature

In a letter to her friend Catherine Winkworth in 1855, novelist Elizabeth

of the cultural feminine which is applied to various social and theological

‘symbolic compensation’ for deficiencies in North American Protestant

Ann Douglas’s seminal argument that feminised religion in the mid-​century

beyond the language of dogmatic statement.29 Literary theology, as Sallie

In religion the appeal now is not to the technicalities of scholars, or the

Their authority was enhanced by a post-​Romantic emphasis on feeling

‘The History of Photogen and Nycteris’ (1879), which collectively show

‘post-​human’ entity, and nature as a resource for maternalistic subjuga-

Ideal motherhood and the feminisation of God

which was often embodied by mother characters in fiction whose wisdom

Millenarian feminism and ‘Mothers in Israel’: the feminine

through the nineteenth century who boldly judged society’s oppressions

[R]‌eligions centred on the worship of a male God create ‘moods’ and

The solely masculine image of deity is condemned as a source of women’s

Divine ‘Mother Nature’

“There’ll be music now,” whispered Frank to Darry. “That captain is

“We’ll all be drowned, I know we will!”

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Ann Douglas’s seminal argument that feminised religion in the mid-century

Their authority was enhanced by a post-Romantic emphasis on feeling

‘post-human’ entity, and nature as a resource for maternalistic subjuga-