chapter 3 and Natural Religion

John R. Gibbins

In Family Fortunes: Men and Women in the English Middle Class 1780–1850, Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, explore the difficult process of bring- ing the usually concealed private lives of families into the public gaze. How can authors explore the inner world of families and their members, when the dynamics of social life, demanded that most of the private sphere be con- cealed.1 Biographers and historians have to face a battery of obstacles in their efforts to locate inner thoughts and motives of individuals, the dynamics of family relationships, the intentions and reasons for displaying or concealing information, the role of ideologies of respectability and duty in the governance of public presentation, the roles of matriarchy and patriarchy in surveillance and control of information flows. But the ultimate bastion of control to be con- quered by historians, are the gatekeepers to knowledge, of the family archives. Those who manage access are able to set limits to what can be known and narrated. As the domain of the private was extended in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the power of gatekeepers to manage the status and welfare of the family became greater. Architects found ways to conceal bodies and their func- tions behind closed doors; fathers and brothers were able to manage females in space, by controlling bodily access into and out of the house. Mothers coop- erated, subjecting their children and servants to regimes of surveillance, disci- pline and control. But it is the regulation of the flow of information that is my focus here. While patriarchy demanded that men were sovereign in the home, their usual travels into the public realm meant an enhanced role for women in managing the status, standing, reputation, authority and power of the family. Within the ideology of respectability and duty that dominated George Grote’s life, the lot fell to women, mothers, wives and daughters to manage the families fortunes, both present and posthumously. Answering the question I will ask about George Grote’s life and ideas is a task handicapped by the role of the gatekeepers to his inner feelings, inten- tions and even his writings. Locating his feelings, views, arguments, statements

1 Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women in the English Middle Class 1780–1850 (London: Routledge, 2002), xxvi.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���4 | doi ��.��63/9789004280496_��5 86 Gibbins and even his writings about religion, is problematised from the first by the edi- torial influence of his mother, Selina Grote, but more by the power of his wife, Harriet Grote. Selina, we know, had every reason to conceal her eldest son’s flirtations with philosophy: materialism, scepticism, empiricism, associational psychology, utilitarianism, radicalism and atheism, were not going to enhance the families fortunes in or Henley upon Thames, while it might so do for George amongst the Philosophic Radicals in London. The indomitable Harriet, left with her husband’s manuscripts and reputa- tion in her hands, had no interest in revealing anything of substance about George’s religious leanings. Knowing via personal experience, exactly what they were, the boundary of her choices was marked by two preoccupations. As a welcomed and authoritative member of the English elite, evidenced with honours and notable roles, which took subscription to Christianity as a given, it was inconceivable that she should condone the publication of let- ters or manuscripts that revealed serious qualifications, let alone complete rejection. Her husband received a Christian burial and had been interred in a sepulchre at Westminster Abbey recently at a ceremony of great pomp, attended by such notables as John Mill, Dean Stanley, Earl’s Granville and Stanhope, Lord Overtone banker and historian, Lords Romilly and Belper, Robert Lowe, Benjamin Jowett and many others. reported, “Mill disliked his being buried in the Abbey, but of course attended the funeral. He resisted the proposal that he should be one of the pall-bearers, and gave way only under great pressure. As he and I walked out together, his remark was—‘In no very long time, I shall be laid in the ground with a very different ceremonial than that’ though a prayer was read over his own grave.”2 Dean Stanley dodged the issue of religious affiliation with the inscription, “The righteous man shall be in everlasting remembrance.” On the other boundary, being proud of her hus- band’s role in developing and implementing the agenda’s of the , she could not condone denial of his subscription to its broadly secu- lar agenda, which included the identification of the Established Church as a “Sinister Interest” and religion as a barrier to human progress. , the best contemporary intellectual historian of early English Utilitarianism, had stated the obvious, subscription to philosophical utilitarianism, “logically implied the rejection of theology.”3 The solution adopted was predictable, present George as a free thinker, a “secular apostle,” who at most flirted with

2 Alexander Bain, J.S. Mill: A Criticism with Personal Recollections (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1882), 133. 3 Leslie Stephen, The English Utilitarians, 3 vols. (London: Duckworth, 1900), vol. 2, 40.