prepared for the pot, as well as vegetables and wood.
But it was not all plain sailing, and Emily had to learn the hard way that despite her good intentions and constructive work, she readily came into conflict with people in positions of authority who experienced her as a threat. And they were nearly always men. One of the first was the Reverend McGonicle – he subjected her to an hour-long lecture about the work she was doing.
“He did not think St. Paul would approve of my holding mission services in a log camp. I said I should do it all the same.”43
The library was a great success, but the church was offended because it did not get the credit for this initiative. To Emily, it did not matter who received the praise. She wanted the library to be open on Sundays too, when the people were not at work, but was ordered to close it. Emily refused.44 She felt too strongly about education and people’s access to knowledge to let herself be dictated to in this regard.
Another point of dispute was that McGonicle wanted only people from his church to attend the temperance meetings, while Emily believed they should be open to all. In addition, she visited women who were jailed for prostitution. McGonicle also berated her because she had the nerve to hold services for the men in the mining camp. Eventually their relationship soured to such an extent that he preached against her in his church.45
Under the banner of her Virginia Temperance Union, Emily held temperance meetings on her own in halls where she attracted audiences of up to 300 men. She distributed cards on which they signed a pledge to abstain from alchohol. Here, too, she sang for the men.46
Emily received support for her work from an unexpected quarter in the person of John Carr Jackson, whom she had met earlier at the dirty boarding house. He had arrived in the town in 1893 and found employment as a clerk. Now he was the owner of Jackson & Co, a general dealer that also sold camp equipment.47 He became the deputy chairman of Emily’s library committee. One of the things that impressed her about him was that he had his eye on the United States Congress, and politics interested her. On top of that, he was elected the town’s mayor in July 1896.
John and Emily saw much of each other, and before long she was in love. “Mr Jackson consumes a great deal of my time … and I respect and admire him more every time I see him … We are sort of half engaged and expect to be wholly so in a short while,” she wrote to her aunt, Lady Hobhouse.
A few days later she informed her aunt excitedly “that I promised Mr Jackson on Sunday night that I would marry him so now we are really engaged and I feel happy over it and quite at home with him, and as he has never known a home or comfort or happiness, he is quite dazed with joy.”48 To Maud she wrote that John was very handsome, and that her pet name for him was “Caro”.49
The town, however, was experiencing tough times. There was serious conflict between the mining bosses, and one mine after the other closed down. John found himself in financial difficulties because he had extended too much credit to people who were unable to pay.
John and Emily decided to leave Virginia, but that they would depart separately. He would stay behind for a while to wind up his affairs. The townspeople were sad to take their leave of Emily in September (1896), and a crowd came to see her off – with an orchestra accompanying her down the street to the station.
The train took her to Cleveland, Ohio,50 where Emily spent some time with friends of her sister-in-law Nora (Leonard’s wife) before continuing her journey to Mexico – a trip that took five days. Emily was the one who had to explore new possibilities for her and John while he was finalising his affairs in Virginia. In the end she used her inheritance money to buy a farm in Mexico with coffee, banana, pineapple and vanilla plantations, and had a house built on the property at a cost of £80. The farm was so remote that Emily never saw it.
Days, weeks and months went by, but John failed to arrive.
Thanks to new friends Emily had made, she was offered a government contract in terms of which John could supply fresh meat to Mexico City. Emily had only 12 hours to decide whether or not to buy the concession of £1 200. With what was left of her inheritance money, she took this gamble.51
The entire winter of 1896 Emily waited for John in Mexico, learning Spanish and history, and painting occasionally. For months she kept hoping …
John was probably bankrupt by April 1897, as his shop with all its contents was sold and he left Virginia soon afterwards “without a handshake and a parting word”. According to a report in The Virginian he was on his way to Chicago to meet Emily and marry her there; from there he would go to Mexico, where a new high position was said to await him.
But the reality proved to be less rosy: the man who had bought his shop had to close it immediately on account of lawsuits, as John was insolvent. Moreover, Virginia’s coffers were empty after his year-long stint as mayor.52
Emily was still hoping to be reunited with John, and travelled to Chicago to meet him there. During her journey the train’s boiler exploded and she saw the driver’s body hurtling through the air. The burnt corpse of the stoker lay before the door of her compartment.
Was this perhaps an omen of what would follow? Emily kept believing that she and John would marry; presumably she dreamt of children of her own, but in the end nothing came of her hopes.53 Orders were issued against John to appear in court because of bad debt.54
In 1897 Emily returned to England for a while to visit her family. She had a wedding dress with her and during this period John visited her and the family in Britain, but little is known about this visit.55
Early in 1898, with the wedding dress in her suitcase, Emily returned to Mexico as she and John had arranged. Meanwhile a letter from him was on his way to inform her that she had to delay her departure, but it failed to reach her in time.56
In Mexico there was no trace of John. Within a few weeks Emily was on her way home, heading for London and the home of Uncle Arthur and Aunt Mary.
Amid all this uncertainty and to-and-fro travelling, Emily lost the farm in Mexico too. It is not clear what had gone wrong, but there is a strong suspicion that John had abused Emily financially. Maybe he never really intended to marry her. Emily, however, had been genuinely in love, had wanted to marry him and had believed the marriage would take place. She never wrote about this pain in documents that are still extant.
Yet there was one item that Emily preserved for the rest of her life: the bridal veil she never wore. It is made of the finest lace.
3
A vision that grows like a seed
“The constantly renewed picture of women and children homeless, desperate and distressed, formed and fixed itself in my mind and never once left me.”
– Emily Hobhouse in her draft autobiography, 1900
“The case for intervention is overwhelming …”
According to a report in the morning paper from which Emily read aloud to Lord and Lady Hobhouse at the breakfast table on a summer morning in 1899, these were the words of Sir Alfred Milner, Governor of the Cape Colony and the British High Commissioner in South Africa, in a telegram to Joseph Chamberlain, the Colonial Secretary.57 “That means war in my opinion,” was Lord Hobhouse’s sombre comment. Everyone at the breakfast table was upset about the “dark cloud of war” that had been in the news in Britain throughout the summer.
While Emily found the news of an impending war “incredible”, she realised that it seemed
