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James Roose Evans, Augustus Hare - Slightly Foxed Issue 29

Eminently a Victorian

‘To tell the truth,’ wrote Augustus Hare, ‘had my books not been published, had The Story of My Life, and Memorials of a Quiet Life never seen the light of day, I should have missed even the most abusive things people say. One critic wrote, “What is Augustus Hare? He is neither anybody nor nobody, neither male nor female. Mr Hare’s paragraphs plump like drops of concentrated venom on the printed page.”’

Augustus Hare was the author of nineteen travel books as well as several biographies; but it was above all Memorials of a Quiet Life – the story of his adoptive mother, Maria Hare – and his six volume autobiography, published between 1896 and 1900 (the longest in the English language, running to 3,000 pages), which brought him the greatest fame. This last was especially popular in America, which resulted in a constant stream of Americans seeking him out at his home in Sussex – ‘my pilgrims’ as he called them.

Hare was born in Rome in 1834, a most unwelcome addition to an already large family. His godmother, Maria Hare, after whose lately deceased husband he was christened, wrote to Augustus’s mother asking if she might adopt the child, and received the prompt reply: ‘My dear Maria, yes, certainly the baby shall be sent to you as soon as it is weaned. And if anyone else would like one, would you kindly recollect that we have others?’ And so Augustus came to live at Lime, in Herstmontceux in Sussex. From then on, until the end of his life, he looked upon Maria Hare as ‘my real, only, mother’.

The other dominant figure in his childhood was his uncle Julius, rector of Herstmontceux, who was always sent for to whip him when he was naughty. At the age of 5, after breakfast, Augustus was made to study reading, writing, drawing, arithmetic, geography and the architecture of the Temple at Jerusalem; after lunch – almost always mutton followed by rice pudding – he would have to read aloud from Jos

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‘To tell the truth,’ wrote Augustus Hare, ‘had my books not been published, had The Story of My Life, and Memorials of a Quiet Life never seen the light of day, I should have missed even the most abusive things people say. One critic wrote, “What is Augustus Hare? He is neither anybody nor nobody, neither male nor female. Mr Hare’s paragraphs plump like drops of concentrated venom on the printed page.”’

Augustus Hare was the author of nineteen travel books as well as several biographies; but it was above all Memorials of a Quiet Life – the story of his adoptive mother, Maria Hare – and his six volume autobiography, published between 1896 and 1900 (the longest in the English language, running to 3,000 pages), which brought him the greatest fame. This last was especially popular in America, which resulted in a constant stream of Americans seeking him out at his home in Sussex – ‘my pilgrims’ as he called them. Hare was born in Rome in 1834, a most unwelcome addition to an already large family. His godmother, Maria Hare, after whose lately deceased husband he was christened, wrote to Augustus’s mother asking if she might adopt the child, and received the prompt reply: ‘My dear Maria, yes, certainly the baby shall be sent to you as soon as it is weaned. And if anyone else would like one, would you kindly recollect that we have others?’ And so Augustus came to live at Lime, in Herstmontceux in Sussex. From then on, until the end of his life, he looked upon Maria Hare as ‘my real, only, mother’. The other dominant figure in his childhood was his uncle Julius, rector of Herstmontceux, who was always sent for to whip him when he was naughty. At the age of 5, after breakfast, Augustus was made to study reading, writing, drawing, arithmetic, geography and the architecture of the Temple at Jerusalem; after lunch – almost always mutton followed by rice pudding – he would have to read aloud from Josephus and Froissart’s Chronicles. When Julius married an Esther Maurice, she made the young Augustus’s life a misery, with Maria Hare capitulating, believing it was for the child’s good to break his will. His aunt’s sadistic behaviour reached a climax when she hanged Augustus’s favourite cat. From that moment on he loathed her, but what he was forced to endure in the name of religion is worthy of a Gothic horror story. No wonder these passages in the autobiography ‘plump like drops of concentrated venom on the printed page’! Although destined for the Church, he finally found his métier when John Murray suggested he write a travel book about Sussex. He went on to write eighteen more, including books on Venice, Florence, Rome and the cities of North, South and Central Italy. His industry was indeed formidable, driven in part by the need to earn, for Maria kept him on a tight shoe-string, even when he was up at Oxford. And whenever his attentions were in danger of slackening she would fall ill. It was because of her ill health, whether real or psychosomatic (one suspects the latter) that they were forced to spend their winters abroad, chiefly in Rome. And it was here that Augustus became popular, both as a water-colourist and as a lecturer on the city. Three times a week he would escort a party of 40 ladies and their butlers (the latter carrying the luncheon baskets and camp stools) to various parts of Rome, to paint and draw. His advice on sightseeing is as sound today as it was when he wrote it: ‘One should never try to see too much, never try to “do” Rome. Better far to leave half the ruins and nine-tenths of the churches unseen and to see well the rest, to see them not once but again and again, till they have become a part of one’s life.’ Victorians loved death-bed scenes and Maria appears to have played many before her final death. But when that comes, as the first snowflakes of winter fall, Augustus writes most movingly of this, the most powerful emotional relationship in his life. In the months of desolation following her loss, although deeply grieving, he was able to quote the Chinese proverb: ‘You cannot prevent the birds of sadness from flying over you, but you may prevent them from building nests in your hair.’ He set to work to write her story, Memorials of a Quiet Life, which sold out in the first three days and was rushed into a second edition. Thomas Carlyle, on meeting Augustus, said of it, ‘I do not often cry, and am not much given to weeping, but your book is most profoundly touching.’ After Maria’s death he used the home he had shared with her not only for writing, but also to entertain many less well-off people who needed a rest or a retreat. There was also a series of young men, to whom he was platonically attracted, whom he tried to help, but almost all of them proved a bitter disappointment. Only the young Somerset Maugham, whom he took under his wing, repaid his hospitality by writing what is the best portrait we have of him, outside of his own writings, as Selina Hastings observes in her recent biography of Maugham. Mornings would begin with the guests and servants assembled in the dining-room as Augustus read prayers. Once, reading the prayer: ‘O Lord, our Heavenly Father, High and Mighty, King of Kings, Lord of Lords, the only Ruler of Princes, Who dost from Thy Throne behold all the dwellers on earth . . .’ he suddenly broke off, saying, ‘I am going to cross all that out of the Book of Common Prayer. I think all that fulsome adulation must be highly offensive to God. He is certainly a gentleman, and no gentleman cares to be praised to his face. It is tactless, impertinent and vulgar!’ A snob, a genteel, old-maidish bachelor, a frequenter of house parties, he loved hobnobbing with the gentry. Well-travelled, widely read, he was a good conversationalist and a fine water-colourist, all of which made him especially popular with the ladies. Not surprisingly the Daily Telegraph, in reviewing his autobiography, wrote, ‘Mr Hare introduces us to the best of good company and tells many excellent witty stories.’ Indeed, among the guests at one house party was Sir Henry Irving, who was so impressed by Augustus’s storytelling that he urged him to rent the Egyptian Hall in London on a nightly basis to tell his stories, guaranteeing that he could thereby earn as much as £8,000 a year. In his later years, however, Augustus would often complain that, compared with his childhood, ‘when there were many people who knew how to converse, not merely to utter . . . nowadays everyone wants to talk and no one to listen! And what funny things people would say at dinner. A very great lady once said to me, “I can assure you that the consciousness of being well-dressed gives me an inward peace which religion could never bestow!”’ He loved telling ghost stories and stories with a slightly macabre flavour. One such story is of a French officer with a wooden leg who, on coming to the shrine at Lourdes, as he lowered his legs into the holy water of the Grotto, prayed, ‘O Lord, make both my legs the same.’ And when he took them out they were both wooden. His two most celebrated books convey a vivid portrait of certain strata of Victorian upper-class life, and the writer and diplomat Shane Leslie described the autobiography as ‘the best of bedside books’. Although inevitably there are longueurs, Hare is capable of rising to remarkable passages of writing:

Every morning when I am in London I work at the Athenaeum. There is no place where Death makes a stranger impression. You become so accustomed to many men you do not know, to their comings and goings, that they become almost part of your daily life. You watch them growing older: the dapper young man becomes grizzled, first too careful and then too  neglectful of his dress; you see his face become furrowed, his hair grow grey and then white, and at last he is lame and bent. You become worried by his coughs and hems and little peculiarities. And suddenly you are aware that he is not there. For a time you miss him; he never comes. He will cough no more; no longer creak across the floor. He has passed into the unseen; gradually he is forgotten. His place knows him no more. But the wheel goes on turning; it is for others; it is for oneself, perhaps, who is waning away.

He died, quite suddenly, in 1903, of a heart attack. His life covered almost exactly the reign of Queen Victoria and, while not an Eminent Victorian, he was, as the critic Hugo Dyson observed, eminently a Victorian.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 29 © James Roose-Evans 2011


About the contributor

James Roose-Evans has recently published his memoir Opening Doors and Windows, as well as Finding Silence: 52 Meditations for Daily Living. He adapted and directed for the West End and on Broadway Helene Hanff ’s 84 Charing Cross Road, and has just completed a new play about Augustus Hare.

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