Friend Beloved: Marie Stopes, Gordon Hewitt, and an Ecology of Letters 9780228007135

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FRIEND BELOVED

Marie Carmichael Stopes and Charles Gordon Hewitt, ca 1909.

FRIEND BELOVED Marie Stopes, Gordon Hewitt, and an Ecology of Letters

Edited by Laura Jean Cameron

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston

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London

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Chicago

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2021 © McGill-Queen’s University Press 2020

isbn I SBN 978-0-2280-0527-8 978-0-2280-0376-2(cloth) (cloth) isbn I S BN 978-0-2280-0713-5 978-0-2280-0377-9(epdf) (paper) I S BN 978-0-2280-0461-5 (eP D F ) I S BN deposit 978-0-2280-0462-2 (eP U2021 B) Legal second quarter Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Legal deposit fourth quarter 2020 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec

Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free Printed post-consumer in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient (100% recycled), processed chlorine freeforest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free

This book book has has been beenpublished publishedwith withthe thehelp helpofofa grant a grant from Canadian from thethe Canadian Federation for through thethe Awards to to Federation forthe theHumanities Humanitiesand andSocial SocialSciences, Sciences, through Awards Scholarly Publications provided by by thethe Social Sciences Scholarly PublicationsProgram, Program,using usingfunds funds provided Social and Humanities Research Council Canada.ofFunding was also received Sciences and Humanities ResearchofCouncil Canada. from Associated Medical Services.

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts.

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien.

Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien. Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Title: Without compassion, there is no healthcare: compassionate care in a technological age / edited by Brian D. Hodges, Gail Paech, and Jocelyn Bennett.

Title: Friend beloved Marie Stopes, Gordon Hewitt, and an ecology Names: Hodges, Brian: David, 1964– editor. | Paech, Gail, 1947– editor. | Bennett, of letters / edited by Laura Jean Cameron. Jocelyn, 1958– editor. Names: Cameron, Laura, 1966- editor. | Stopes,and Marie Carmichael, 1880Description: Includes bibliographical references index. 1958. Works. Selections. | Hewitt, C. Gordon (Charles Gordon), 1885Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20200279254 | Canadiana (ebook) 20200279424 | 1920. Works. Selections. I S B N 9780228003779 (paper) | I S B N 9780228003762 (cloth) | I S B N Description: Includes references(eP and 9780228004615 (eP D Fbibliographical ) | I S B N 9780228004622 U Bindex. ) Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20200401815 | Canadiana (ebook) Subjects: LCSH : Medical technology. | LCSH : Medical care. | LCSH : Compassion. 20200401866 | isbn 9780228005278 (hardcover) | isbn 9780228007135 Classification: L C C r 855.3 .w 58 2020 | D D C 610—dc23 (pdf) Subjects: lcsh: Stopes, Marie Carmichael, 1880-1958—Correspondence. | lcsh: Hewitt, C. Gordon (Charles Gordon), 1885-1920—CorresponThis book| lcsh: was typeset byMarie Marquis Interscript1880-1958—Friends in 10.5 / 13 Sabon. and dence. Stopes, Carmichael, associates. | lcsh: Hewitt, C. Gordon (Charles Gordon), 1885-1920— Friends and associates. | lcsh: Ecology—History. | lcsh: Botanists— Great Britain—Correspondence. | lcsh: Sex educators—Great Britain—Correspondence. | lcsh: Entomologists—Canada— Correspondence. | lcgft: Personal correspondence. Classification: lcc qh26 .f75 2021 | ddc 577.092/2—dc23 This book was designed and typeset by studio oneonone in 11/14 Minion

Contents Figures vii Acknowledgments xi 1 Reopenings 3 2 Pleasant Friday Afternoons 14 3 Insects from Japan 27 4 A Kiss in Canada 55 5 The One Little Sin 72 6 Love’s Comedy 87 7 Rereading the Rocks 116 8 Epilogue 136 Appendices 1 “Ordinary Meeting, 20 October 1908.” Memoirs and Proceedings of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society 53 (1908): iv–v. 157 2 Marie C. Stopes, PhD, DSc, and C. Gordon Hewitt. “On the Tentbuilding of the Ant Lasius niger Linn. in Japan.” Memoirs and Proceedings of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society 53, 20 (1909): 1–7. 161 3 Chapter VIII, “friends,” excerpted from “A Man’s Mate,” ca 1910, an unpublished novel by Mortlake (pseudonym of Marie Stopes). 169 Notes 177 Bibliography 205 Index 215

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Figures Frontispiece. Marie Carmichael Stopes, ca 1909. © The Royal Society (RS.11414). Charles Gordon Hewitt, first Dominion Entomologist, Ottawa, Ont., ca 1909. Library and Archives Canada, Department of Agriculture fonds, pa-143057. ii 1.1 Gordon Hewitt to Marie Stopes, handwriting facsimile. By permission of the British Library, Stopes Papers, Add. ms 58473, f.39. 12 1.2a & 1.2b Marie Stopes to Gordon Hewitt, handwriting facsimile. By permission of the British Library, Stopes Papers, Add. ms 58473, ff.35,36. 13 2.1 Marie Stopes with microscope, Manchester University, ca 1906. By permission of msi Reproductive Choices. 20 2.2 Gordon Hewitt on St Kilda, 1906. By permission of the Julia Leslie Mackay Collection. 23 2.3 Gordon Hewitt’s sketch of St Kilda, 1906. By permission of the Julia Leslie Mackay Collection. 24 2.4 Gordon Hewitt’s rsvp to a “Cinderella” dance, 1906. By permission of the British Library, Stopes Papers, Add. ms 58680, f.142. 25 3.1 Mary (“Molly”) McNicol and Gordon Hewitt, ca 1907. By permission of the Stopes-Roe Collection. 29 3.2 Kenjiro Fujii up Pinus sylvestris in Delamere Forest, ca February 1905; Photograph by Gordon Hewitt. By permission of the Stopes-Roe Collection. 49 4.1 Marie Stopes with Baron Sakurai and Professor Kenjiro Fujii on board the Empress of Japan, January 1909. By permission of the StopesRoe Collection. 56

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4.2 Dr Helen MacMurchy, 1901. By permission of the Museum of Health Care, Kingston, Ontario. 58 5.1 “The Human Fraud & his dog!” By permission of the British Library, Stopes Papers, Add. ms 58473, f.40. 85 6.1 Gordon Hewitt, photograph kept in the private collection of Marie Stopes, undated but probably ca 1909–10. By permission of the StopesRoe Collection. 88 6.2 The House-fly, Musca Domestica. Female. © Cambridge University Press. Reproduced with permission of The Licensor through plsclear. 91 6.3 New Year’s greeting card. By permission of the Stopes-Roe Collection. 97 6.4 Stopes’s hand-drawn frontispiece for her unpublished book “A Man’s Mate.” By permission of the Stopes-Roe Collection. 99 7.1 Site of the Fern Ledges, Saint John, New Brunswick, 2 June 2016. Photograph by L.J. Cameron. 117 7.2 Dawson’s specimen of Calamites from the Fern Ledges. By permission of the Redpath Museum, McGill University. 123 7.3 Fern Ledges specimen held by Peta Hayes, Curator of Palaeobotany, Natural History Museum, London, 9 May 2016. Photograph by L.J. Cameron. 124 7.4 Entomological laboratory at the Agassiz Experimental Farm, 24 May 1913. Photograph by Gordon Hewitt. Copyright of the University of Manchester, dzo/5/2. 127 7.5 Marie Stopes with cat, 1914. By permission of msi Reproductive Choices. 128 7.6 Portrait of Gordon Hewitt, undated. By permission of the Stopes-Roe Collection. 129 8.1 Fungus gnat fossil from Shiobara, Japan. Image courtesy of Manchester Museum, the University of Manchester: manch: L.8042.a. 137 8.2.a & 8.2b The Borden Family plot in Canning, Nova Scotia. Photographs by Gordon J. Callon, Professor Emeritus, Acadia University. By permission. 139 8.3 Chart I. From Stopes, Married Love, 43. © Galton Institute London. 151

fig ure s 8.4 Chart II. From Stopes, Married Love, 44. © Galton Institute London. 151 8.5 Periodic Fluctuations of Rabbit, Lynx, and Wolverine in Canada. From Hewitt, The Conservation of the Wild Life of Canada, 217. 151 The cover images of the fungus gnat and mosquito, as well as the housefly, dogwood flower, mink, and paintbrush icons that introduce the letters, were created by Cecily Taylor. Used with permission.

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Acknowledgments This book explores the nature of interrelationships. At the same time, it exists only because of them. From mosquito bite reminders to the joy of making new friends – it has come together through innumerable, often wild, connections along with many acts of kindness. The project began in the British Library with a fortuitous moment of serendipity in the fall of 2015. I am grateful especially to the library’s Eccles Centre for American Studies and its Visiting Canadian Fellow Award. My official business in the British Library was to research the history of Canadian field recording. I am thus indebted to Dr Christine Grossutti, my PhD student at the time, whose thesis-related query about a letter that Julian Huxley wrote to Marie Stopes allowed me to chance upon the Hewitt letters. The subsequent archival adventures were possible thanks to the talents of many archivists and curators as well as the generosity of family record keepers. Zoe Stansell of the British Library’s Manuscripts Reference Service was the first person to assist in my initial flush of excitement; she, along with Christopher Hilton of the Wellcome Library, helped me to understand the context of the Hewitt-Stopes letters within the larger collections and advised on associated copyright issues. Stopes’s daughter-in-law, the late Mary Stopes-Roe, welcomed me to her home and answered my questions with patient grace and good humour; the Stopes-Roe attic archive proved to be full of revelation. For maintaining the archive and giving me permission to access and copy materials, I am grateful to her as well as her husband, the late Harry Stopes-Roe, and their four children: Jonathan, Catherine, Helena, and Christopher. Gordon Hewitt’s great-niece, Julia Leslie Mackay,

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kindly entrusted me with a box of Hewitt’s papers, including his photograph albums, and shared with me her knowledge of Hewitt’s place in her family history. For help with materials from the Natural History Museum in London, I thank Sarah Sworder, who connected me with the key boxes and the expertise of her colleagues Claire Mellish, Curator of the Fossil Arthropod collections, and Peta Hayes, Curator of Palaeobotany. Peta introduced me to the wonders of fossil collections in an afternoon shared with plant specimens exposed by Stopes’s hammer. For assistance in navigating the collections of the Redpath Museum at McGill University – as well as teaching me about the history of geology – I am grateful to Ingrid Birker, Science Outreach Administrator, and Anthony Howell, Manager of the Natural History Collections. The generous detective work of David Gelsthorpe, Curator of Earth Sciences Collections at the Manchester Museum, has assisted in numerous ways over the years, and this book is indebted to him and his colleague Dmitri Logunov, Curator of Entomology. James Peters, archivist extraordinaire at the University of Manchester, pointed me to the meetings of the “Pleasant Friday Afternoons” and helped me solve dozens of mysteries, especially in working out the identities and relationships of many of the people who appear in this book. My visit to the Fern Ledges was guided by the energetic and knowledgeable Randy Miller, Curator and Head of the Geology and Palaeontology Section of the Natural Science Department, New Brunswick Museum, who also helped me find traces of Marie Stopes’s fieldwork in the museum’s collections. For assistance in navigating other repositories and answering related research questions, I also am grateful to: Mark Badham, Miller Museum of Queen’s University; Kira Baker, City of Vancouver Archives; Kimberley Bell, Jordan Rare Books and Special Collections; Candice Bjur, University of British Columbia Archives; Jason Cashin and June Brown Granger of the Fieldwood Heritage Society and Canning Heritage Centre; Michelle Coyne, Geological Survey of Canada; Kathryn Jennings, Cambridge University Library; Christine LeBeau, American Museum of Natural History; Owen Lonsdale, Canadian National Collection of Insects, Arachnids and Nematodes; Crystal Maier, Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University; Carolina Miranda, Canadian Club of Vancouver; Suzanne Miranda,

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Bracken Health Sciences Library; Sue Plouffe of Special Collections & Archives at the University of Waterloo; Eleanor Roberts, Hallé Concerts Society; and Kieran Shepherd, Canadian Museum of Nature. Many friends, both new and old, accompanied me on fieldtrips and helped me to understand history in place. Thanks to Hannah and Patrick Lanaway, who joined me at Portland Bill, and to Fran Lockyer of the Old Lighthouse, who showed me around the Portland Island Museum, founded by Marie Stopes. Gisele Pharand along with Vicki Ann Westgate (who later commented on a draft of this book) joined me on an adventure to the former Windsor Hotel in Montreal, where Stopes was married. In Canning, Nova Scotia, Elizabeth Gibson gave my family a tour of “The Old Place,” the Bordens’ former residence. Gary Long, the Town Crier since 1984, helped us find Hewitt’s gravesite in the snow. For other research assistance, I am sincerely grateful for exchanges with Lisa Cadue, Heather Cameron, Claire Debenham, Elizabeth Dougherty, Howard Falcon-Lang, Andreus Kahre, Tim Lyon, Carmen Miller, Kyoko Ogoda, Deryn Rees-Jones, John Vissers, as well as Robin Westland and her rock circles. Chris Miner shared his expertise on historical photography: Meghan North provided excellent reconnaissance for me in Manchester. I am thankful also for the kindness of the late Daniel David Moses, who addressed my questions about the history of Six Nations during a fortuitous meeting on a train. A special thank you to Jim Strachan, whose eye for reading Helen MacMurchy’s handwriting was better than mine. I was inspired by two books in particular, even though this one ended up being quite different: Parallel Lives by Phyllis Rose and Bloomsbury/ Freud: The Letters of James and Alix Strachey 1924–1925, edited by Perry Meisel and the late Walter Kendrick. Other remarkable imaginations have also infused this project since its beginning. Mark Abley is many things: I am very fortunate that, as both a commissioning editor at McGill-Queen’s University Press and an author with a wonderfully creative approach to history, he has been this book’s caretaker. Working with Mark has been a delight and an honour. The artwork of Cecily Taylor and the fossil-inspired music of her band, Greta Gargoyle, have kept me mindful of the beauties of deep time. I am so happy that she read a draft manuscript and created several lino prints for this publication.

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Encouragement to keep going on this project has come from many sources. The editors James McNevin and Michel Pharand offered their enthusiasm and reassurances of its viability early on. All-too-brief exchanges with Lisa Appignanesi, Stéphane Castonguay, Felix Driver, Jackie Duffin, Sally Eales, Jane Errington, Helen Humphreys, David Matless, Bronwyn Parry, Lynne Quarmby, Ruth Sandwell, and Rusty Shteir provided muchneeded energy along the way. I am grateful to the Queen’s University Department of Geography and Planning, especially for the sabbatical time to work on the project. For discussion and support that contributed to the book in some way, I am particularly thankful to my Queen’s colleagues: Jacqueline Davies, Betsy Donald, Anne Godlewska, Elizabeth Hanson, Jenna Healey, Heather Home, Adrian Kelly, Audrey Kobayashi, George Lovell, Warren Mabee, Clarke Mackey, Allison Morehead, Beverley Mullings, Laura Murray, Dorit Naaman, Carolyn Prouse, Dylan Robinson, and Joan Schwartz. Hope and inspiration flow from my PhD students (half of them now “former”), whom I have had the pleasure of working with during the last five years: Peter Anderson, Rye Barberstock, Sinead Earley, Sophie Edwards, Christine Grossutti, Katie Hemsworth, Claudia Hirtenfelder, Hannah Hunter, Elizabeth Nelson, Mitch Patterson, and Robin Westland. Other relationships have helped sustain the work over the long haul, and here I extend my deep thanks to Daryl Andre, Hilbert Buist, Emilie Cameron, Annie Clifford, Meredith Dault, Joyce Davidson, Rebecca DraiseyCollishaw, Jill Dunkley, Andy Fisher, the late John Forrester, Kirsten Greer, Sarah Griffin, Wendy Kelen, Sarah Knight, Jenny and Tim Lapp, Sarah Loten, Susie Osler, Anita de Gaia Payne, Amber Percival, Lara Perry, Marla Pollock, Lib Spry, Jenni Tipper and Gillian Woodruff. Thirty years ago, the late Steve Straker taught me that we grow each other: Dianne Newell trusted what I meant by “messy history” from the get-go. All of these people are gifted and loving teachers from whom I never cease to keep learning. This book was completed during the covid-19 pandemic, a reminder of the fragility of life. It reminds us too of earlier pandemics: the viruses unleashed on Indigenous peoples in the Americas after Columbus, and the Spanish flu that followed the Great War. Gordon Hewitt’s death from the latter was one among millions. Countless generous and tireless workers around the world are now striving to keep spirits up and people safe. I am particularly grateful to Sandra Powlette of the British Library, who cap-

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tained the ship from her kitchen, and to the many other individuals who helped me to obtain permissions and reproductions during this most difficult time. In helping us to recognize our profound interdependence, the “great pause” also has been an opportunity to acknowledge our most fundamental relations and open our senses to more compassionate ways of living. Much of my writing took place on the territories of the Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee, as well as those of the Snuneymuxw First Nation. I am humbled by the generosity of the people, lands, and waters that made my work possible. Miigwech. Niá:wen. Huy ch q’u. Maple and pine trees, along with sweet grass and cattails, mosquitoes and fireflies, keep us alive to the possibilities and responsibilities of friendship. I have become ever more thankful for them. Finally, I am sincerely grateful to mqup’s anonymous readers for their constructive feedback and suggestions for improvements, and to copy editor Jane McWhinney for applying her skill and wisdom to this manuscript. I also am blessed to have three people in my family who are happy to read my drafts and tell me frankly what they think. Thanks first to my mother, the astonishing Jody Cameron, who read an early version. Matt Rogalsky, my beloved partner for thirty-five years now, gave feedback on another; in preparing my final submission, it was our son, Arden Rogalsky, whose many thoughtful edits helped me to offer a better story. I take full responsibility for any remaining errors and omissions and I am endlessly thankful to have these beautiful beings in my world.

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Reopenings The man and woman who are true friends give each other of their very best. Marie Stopes, A Journal from Japan, 1910, xiv. The connection of two (or more) different positions in a common cause – one that remains full of contradictions – is perhaps the most general definition of an ecosystem. It is also the precise description of a loving attachment. Andreas Weber, Matter and Desire, 2014, xiii. I want to have my chance of being reborn in some bamboo flower-cup, or mizutamé, whence I might issue softly, singing my thin and pungent song, to bite some people that I know. Lafcadio Hearn, “Mosquitoes,” Kwaidan, 1904.

The letters opened in this book tell a story about attachments: love, collaboration, and friendship. They were written in England, Japan, and Canada in the decade before the First World War, and travelled in envelopes by ship, train, and bicycle. The central correspondents are young and ambitious, shooting stars of natural science: a woman, Marie Charlotte Carmichael Stopes, and a man, Charles Gordon Hewitt. The letters give some sense of the nature of their relationship, but they also address a different sort of curiosity; what was the nature in that relationship? A palaeobotanist and an economic zoologist, both embraced perspectives from ecology, the new science of interconnection, and their interests went far beyond their subdisciplines.

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Although Dr Stopes’s work in palaeobotany was significant and acclaimed, she is now most widely remembered as the pioneering British campaigner for birth control and author of Married Love: A New Contribution to the Solution of Sex Difficulties, the scandalizing best-seller published in 1918. Despite being banned for two decades in the United States, by 1938 it had sold 800,000 copies worldwide1 and was the go-to book for women and men who wanted to free themselves from sexual ignorance. The name of Dr Charles Gordon Hewitt, Canada’s Dominion Entomologist and Consulting Zoologist, is almost certainly more mysterious. While Stopes lived into her seventies (though she had planned to live until 120), Hewitt died in 1920 at only thirty-five, a victim of the Spanish flu pandemic that killed millions of people following the First World War. Hewitt had moved from Manchester to Ottawa in 1909 and, in the remaining eleven years of his life, became particularly notable not only for being one of the world’s leading entomologists but also for introducing Canadians to the idea of conservation and their special responsibilities as guardians of nature for generations to come. He was also the driving force behind several pieces of key conservation legislation, including the Migratory Bird Treaty of 1916, an international agreement that made North America the only place in the world where birds had protection on a continental scale. These “beloved” friends would each have a major impact on conceptions of twentieth-century nature: for Hewitt it was mainly outdoors in the world of wild things, while Stopes made her most radical mark in the intimate realm. At a time when it was becoming clear that human activity was having a significant impact on the Earth, he, along with Stopes, would offer up intensive management strategies for Life, writ large and small, both public and personal. Ecology concerns the study of life as it exists in its home: the term itself comes from oikos, “the Greek word for home,” as Stopes explained in her 1912 textbook, Botany: The Modern Study of Plants. Although ecology has been understood in diverse ways since the nineteenth century, when it was first named by Ernst Haeckel, from “scientific natural history” (Charles Elton) to, more recently, a “practice of love” (Andreas Weber), there has been a historical neglect of its root meaning – home – and its resonance for a revolutionary domestic politics. Although it is my twenty-first-century perspective that sees the issue as “ecological,” it may seem that, in seeking

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equality and respect in both professional life and private love, an ecologically minded person might register a profound interconnection between home life and the scientific study of home life. How can a woman be a serious scientist if her first (or only) job, once married, is to look after a man’s home? What is involved in allowing men and women to learn in common and to work together? What constitutes “the home”? The letters between Hewitt and Stopes give us a glimpse of their ideals in respect to oikos and how the practices and possibilities of friendship between men and women were being created, risked, advanced, and transformed in the early twentieth century, as women began stepping into new roles at British scientific institutions – as students, teachers, collaborators, and leaders. In annotating these letters and researching their context, I have sought to honour a friendship that has yet to be fully recognized. In doing so I also seek to unearth different visions of the oikos, and how they mattered and manifested both in personal affairs and in scientific research. For Stopes, human relationships were not just private matters but, like her other research, allowed fieldwork opportunities for expanding knowledge. Increased equality between men and women was, for her, another of nature’s laws. In December 1909, she wrote to The Times in support of women’s suffrage, asserting that it had the support of evolution itself. There are in the country thousands of women who not only “want” the vote but who are absolutely determined to get it. And they will get it. Behind them is working an invincible power stronger than any opposition – the force of evolution … It is an unnatural and ridiculous thing that men and women, who were made to love and help each other, should fight as they are forced to do at present, and the cost of the fight is a terrible drain on national resources … It is clear that as the vote for women has to come, the sooner a stop can be put to the degrading struggle to get it the better.2 Seeking to understand Life in its domestic detail, her cosmic vision, expressed in language ecological and divine, would extend in Married Love to the universe of things where the loving egalitarian couple is truly at the centre of it all: “Their bodily union is the solid nucleus of an immense fabric of interwoven strands reaching to the uttermost ends of the earth; some

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lighter than the filmiest cobweb, or than the softest wave of music, iridescent with the colours, not only of the visible rainbow, but of all the invisible glories of the wave-lengths of the soul.”3 Hewitt also poured his intellect into the domestic sphere – but ultimately the celebrated author of HouseFlies and How They Spread Disease would admit that his ideal oikos did not allow for sharing with Stopes male freedoms and privileges. Although Stopes and Hewitt did not marry each other, people and things may be bound in a variety of ways, and their abbreviated relationship explored several forms of connection. As their story really concerns it all – love, life, sex, friendship, science, interwoven strands of “the universe and everything” – the cast of characters appropriately includes not only human souls but also mosquitoes and a host of things, both living and fossilized, with which they are entangled. In their ways, both scientists expressed deep interest in the non-humans of the oikos and spent much of their lives in wild places. Hewitt called conservation the “gospel of unselfishness.”4 Such a message and Stopes’s early twentieth-century feminist vision of gender equality were radical in their time and place. Yet these imaginations still rub uncomfortably against different ways of loving as well as deeper senses of responsibility and relation, in the sense of the Lakȟóta phrase Mitákuye Oyásʼiŋ (“all my relations”),5 in which even mosquitoes have a place in the web to thrive, ways of knowing often ignored, misunderstood, and marginalized. Entwined with the burgeoning ecological awareness that Stopes and Hewitt shared with one another, the heteronormative, settler-colonial, and eugenicist context of imperial science must also be part of the historical and geographical fabric we weave here. The existing letters between these two young “moderns” trace a collegial yet eruptively romantic friendship in a seven-year period (June 1907 to March 1914) prior to some of their most celebrated and, for Stopes, more notorious interventions. Considering these letters and these young British scientists together underscores the relational geographies of shifting identity; it provides a new perspective on the ecologies of their ideas and actions as extensions of the possibilities of collaboration and friendship. It also allows a fresh examination of how they marked each other’s lives, and influenced contemporaneous and subsequent works. Publishing them in full leaves them open to different eyes and alternative interpretations, but I provide in the following pages some introductory notes and contextual sketches that

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I hope will offer useful guideposts. Both Stopes and Hewitt published extensively during this period. Stopes wrote scientific books and journal articles, as well as poems, plays, and novels. In “friends,” a chapter of her unpublished novel “A Man’s Mate” (ca 1910) (see Appendix 3), the male protagonist, Professor Kenneth Laurence, asks: “Do you believe in the existence of friendship between a man & a woman?” The letters can be read with this fictional question in mind, as it was a strong presence in the non-fiction relationship. A century after Married Love, the question has hardly been settled, and many still wonder: how might both women and men achieve a life with the personal and professional freedom to explore all realms of life and also be fulfilled in love? The relationship between Stopes and Hewitt sparked in England, intensified with distance when Stopes travelled for research to Japan, developed again back in England, and became increasingly tangled after Hewitt moved to Canada to take up a position as the country’s Dominion Entomologist. The letters point to lively scientific exchange between Japan, England, and Canada, thereby providing context to the lives and works of individuals and the travel and development of ideas beyond national frameworks. They also attend to the breadth of early-twentieth-century life sciences and the complexity of disciplinary overlap and exchange. Hewitt swore never to co-publish; his work with Stopes on the tent-building ants of Japan was, he told her, his “one little sin.” This crossing of boundaries was facilitated by disciplinary fluidity and the integrating science of ecology; however, Hewitt’s amused confession of illicit behaviour also highlights his own conflicts, some reflected in the contradictory ways in which he has been portrayed. Although Hewitt crops up briefly in various biographies of Stopes’s life, first described in Ruth Hall’s 1977 account as the deceptive “Charlie Hewitt” who “scuttle[s] off to Canada,”6 it is remarkable that Stopes is entirely absent from the scant historical accounts that exist of Hewitt’s life. Duncan Campbell Scott, the poet and now-notorious deputy superintendent general of Indian affairs,7 who served with Hewitt on the Interdepartmental Advisory Wild Life Board, described Hewitt in a Royal Society of Canada obituary as a “peerless friend”: “to those who received fully the intimate charm of his personality in familiar intercourse there cannot be any mitigation of his loss.” “Highly characteristic” was his “fine sense of humour” and “appreciation of the arts and belles lettres … finely balanced by

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a warm love of nature”; he was a man who “touched life at so many points that one cannot think that his interest ever flagged.”8 For Scott and many subsequent elegists and historians including Janet Foster, author of Working for Wildlife, Hewitt was a heroic figure on the cusp of a great career when death came suddenly and tragically. Foster felt his death as a “great blow” to the wildlife cause itself, echoing the American preservationist William Hornaday, who wrote of his friend Hewitt, “May heaven send to wild life more men like him.”9 Peter Kulchyski and Frank Tester, on the other hand, highlight contradictions in Hewitt’s wildlife policy and the racism of white supremacy in which Canada’s bureaucracy was steeped.10 Also flagging Hewitt’s seeming inconsistency, Tina Loo portrays him as the “hard-headed man of science” who, at the same time, embraced the anti-modernist and primal quest of the wild to restore “the balance of human nature.”11 In the preface written by his wife, Elizabeth, to his posthumous book, The Conservation of the Wild Life of Canada, Hewitt appears more as a feminine Snow White figure, speaking “to every flower and bird, no matter how small or how shy.” I first encountered Hewitt’s legacy myself when I was studying the environmental history and geography of Canada in the early 1990s at the University of British Columbia. Hewitt had been one of the more powerful rhetoricians who advocated for the drainage of Sumas Lake, a large lake in the Fraser Valley that grew bigger during annual flooding, its eastern edge near my hometown of Chilliwack. In my mind he was the enigmatic antihero of my first book, Openings: A Meditation on History, Method, and Sumas Lake (1997). Though responsible for Canada’s wildlife, in 1918 he lent his voice to the war cry to drain the lake not just for settlement and farmland but also in the name of mosquito eradication. This drainage, finally completed in 1923, is now understood as one of the major ecological disasters of the Fraser Valley in the twentieth century, devastating to the Stó:lõ people as well as to the flora and fauna of the area. I was not convinced I knew why he pushed for drainage. His expertise included orders of diptera like mosquitoes. He pioneered applied ecological control measures and knew about what we now call “food chains” and how insects and their larvae provided food for birds and fish. Thus his expert advice carried for me a whiff of delusion and betrayal: “If Hewitt, the man supposedly most sensitive to the need for wildlands and bird habitat, had been struck with mosquito myopia,

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who would represent Sumas Lake?”12 At the time of that encounter with Hewitt in the archives, I was also attending public lectures by the fly geneticist David Suzuki, who said that the fact that we still know so little about the fruit fly – which is probably the most-studied creature in the world – should counsel caution before we destroy entire ecosystems, our living archives and storehouses of information. If there was a historical figure I wanted then to summon for reanimation and interrogation, Hewitt was the one. Over twenty years later, as I was looking up correspondence between early ecologists in the British Library Manuscripts Reading Room, I came by chance upon a series of letters from Hewitt to Marie Stopes. Here he was, not a man at the height of his power and creative/destructive impact, but a youth just embarking on his career. These letters began to help me understand the more weathered version of the person as I came to know a selfreflectively ambitious young man working hard to understand nature and increasingly passionate about the possibilities of its control and the economic applications of his knowledge to serve human needs and desires. But my interest turned to fascination when the mosquito muse of Openings – her bite therein a visceral reminder of the nature we have lost this past century – made her appearance again. This time she was a ghost, the haunting figure of a fossilized mosquito. Three million years dead, in the letters she yet acted as a connector for Hewitt to new possibilities of life, opening to fresh aspects of his entomological work as well as to a novel friendship. Embodying shared journeys in deep time and still-smouldering emotion, she managed, in the end, to evade his classification and control, “constantly,” he wrote in his last surviving letter to Stopes, “eluding my grasp like the ‘willo-the-wisp.’” The will-o’-the-wisp (ignus fatuus for “fool’s fire”) is a ghost light that lures unsuspecting travellers into marshes. The journey of this book had its origins in a project that began in watery mosquito habitat. Rather like a pesky buzzing reminder, Hewitt and his complex and troublesome legacy for human/nature relations has never stopped niggling at me, following me across the Atlantic, where I completed graduate studies and worked as a research fellow in England before eventually returning to Canada. In studying geographies of early-twentieth-century science and learning more about worlds that overlapped with Hewitt’s, I have come to appreciate how knowledge exists in relation and in relationships. Since Openings, this sensitivity

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has intensified through my work on collaborative projects, co-authoring and co-editing with many different people, both students and colleagues, within my discipline and beyond. Collaboration itself is not at all unusual. Indeed, it tends to be framed in the current climate as the answer to the most intractable problems facing humankind, particularly when committed to interdisciplinarity. However, it can be harder to find discussions of the histories,13 possibilities, fuzziness, and tensions14 of scholarly relationships and interdisciplinary collaborative work. My hope in bringing together these letters between friends, is that they help to make a resonant contribution to a growing history of collaboration, even (and perhaps especially) as they lead us back into marshy complexity. Although Stopes’s letters to Hewitt exist only in draft and copied form,15 the absent-presence of Stopes retains a decisive influence on the shape and meaning of the collection, it being a very small but captivating part of her bequest to the British Library.16 That Stopes chose to keep and then place these letters in the public realm is remarkable in itself, and her reasons for doing so may well have been scientific, diagnostic, judicial, and forensic.17 As she tried to articulate in a draft letter to Hewitt, the only way to understand “this unimaginable situation” between them was to “go through all our letters carefully.” Her deepest desire, since childhood, was “to understand.” To help flesh out the interrelationships in the Hewitt-Stopes collection of letters, two additional sets of contemporaneous letters are reproduced here, also held in the Stopes Papers of the British Library.18 They include passionate letters to Stopes from the Canadian doctor Helen MacMurchy, an increasingly prominent eugenicist in the period under consideration. There are also letters to Stopes from the English artist Edith Mary Garner and an extraordinary letter transcribed by Stopes but from Hewitt to Garner, giving his perspective on the tangle of their relations with Stopes. With the assistance of these fragments and other letters and writings from this period, Stopes’s identity, along with Hewitt’s, begins to emerge in all its complexity, her thoughts on nature veering from rationalizing to romantic. With growing expertise in birth control, she was becoming in many ways thoroughly interventionist in her general outlook, an ethos in line with the newest conservationist findings of British plant ecology: nature needed management by experts and the quickest way to exterminate valuable species was to leave them in their “natural” state. As Stopes would declare in Married

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Love: “To those who protest that we have no right to interfere with the course of nature, one must point out that the whole of civilization, everything which separates man from animals, is an interference with what such people commonly call ‘nature.’ Nothing in the cosmos can be against nature, for it all forms part of the great processes of the universe.”19 At the same time, Stopes expressed some empathy for Buddhist understandings of nature and an ethic of interconnection as expressed, for instance, by the writer Lafcadio Hearn.20 During Stopes’s research visit to Japan from 1907 to 1909, Hewitt, “being one of the privileged,” would read such thoughts in her “Journal from Japan” sent in installments and displayed for her friends in Manchester’s Natural History Museum: “From the window by the shrine could be seen the grove of the tall bamboo Hearn loved, and in the room floated one or two of the mosquitoes with which he had such sympathy.”21 For Hearn, the Meiji era (1868–1912), in which Japan embraced Western-style modernization, risked destroying much that was valuable in Japanese culture. In a series of “Insect-Studies,” Hearn considered the problem of applying the eradication methods of American entomologist Leland Ossian Howard to “the conditions in my neighborhood.” If Japan was to free the country from mosquitoes, the mizutamé – the water-filled pools within Buddhist cemeteries to quench the thirst of the dead – would have to be demolished, thus diminishing the poetry of a rich and beautiful ancestral cult – “surely too great a price to pay!”22 Hearn was a controversial figure in Japan and it is telling that, while Stopes praised his “suggestive and true description,” she criticized him most for shattering friendships “with English and Japanese alike.”23 Friendship was of paramount importance to her and she put enormous energy into both retaining it and testing its limits: “One of the tests of friendship is time, and only at the end of a lifetime can one say just which men and women had been one’s real friends.”24 Many of her friendships did stand the test of time: even though her Japanese colleague and suitor Kenjiro Fujii spurned her love, for instance, she continued to correspond with him for decades. Bisexual, though not openly so, she had intense relations with women as well as men and in her friendships played with and practised gender identity. Subtle experiments appear in her letters; for instance, she takes on the male role as a “hunter” of fossils for Hewitt in Shiobara, and when their relation looks impossible, imagines starting afresh “disguised as a man!!”

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Friendship underpinned their scientific work, and Hewitt referred publicly to Stopes in his Canadian scientific community as “my friend.”25 Yet her name would be omitted from the posthumously published bibliography of his life’s work. Their joint article is reprinted here (see Appendix 1), and for those who may share a passion for making connections, I provide an epilogue that grapples with erasure and speculates further on the friends’ respective contributions to ecology and on the relations between them.

Figure 1.1 Above Gordon Hewitt to Marie Stopes, handwriting facsimile. Figures 1.2a and 1.2b Opposite Marie Stopes to Gordon Hewitt, handwriting facsimile.

2 v

Pleasant Friday Afternoons Five years older than Charles Gordon Hewitt, Marie Stopes was born on 15 October 1880 in Edinburgh. Her mother, Charlotte Carmichael Stopes, was a Shakespearean scholar, the first woman to obtain a university certificate in Scotland, and her father, Henry Stopes, was an architect from a rich Colchester brewing family. Henry encouraged Marie’s love of science, rocks, and fieldwork in no small part through his own obsession with digging, particularly for ancient artifacts and fossils. Marie won a scholarship to attend University College London from 1899 to 1902, studying under the Quain Professor of Botany, Francis Wall Oliver, who appreciated her so much that he subsequently took her on as his assistant. Before sitting her double honours exams in botany and geology in the fall of 1902, she learned that her beloved father, who had been fighting intestinal cancer, was dying. Characteristically for Marie, her reaction to tragedy was to intensify her work and productivity. She did exceptionally well in her studies and let her father know of her success as soon as she could: the joyful news reached him before his passing in early December at the age of fifty. Always on a somewhat competitive footing with her mother, Marie reported to her separately with comparative ratings: “I have got my degree, I am now B.Sc. Not only have I got it, I have done very well, I have got First Class Honours in Botany with the marks qualifying for a scholarship … [I] am the only candidate with Honours, the others (men only) all failed, so my name stands alone in the list. As it is supposed to be impossible to take one Honours in a year, to get two is nice.”1 Henry left his family two rental properties but little else to add to the family coffers save cases of fossils. From then on, Marie assumed considerable financial responsibility for the care of

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her mother and her delicate younger sister, Winifred. The scholarship money proved a boon for Marie’s academic prospects. On Oliver’s advice, she went to Munich to study under Professor Karl Goebel, complete a “brilliant” doctorate within a year, and defend it in German, a language she had newly acquired during her stay. In focusing on the plant world, Stopes was not a pioneer but had many female forebears. Rusty Shteir has revealed the contributions that Victorian women made to natural history as herbalists, collectors, and popularizers of botanical knowledge.2 Two notable palaeobotanists who preceded Stopes in studies at University College London and went on to distinguished scientific careers at Bedford and Royal Holloway colleges respectively were Catherine Raisin (1855–1945) and Margaret Benson (1859–1936).3 By the early twentieth century, many women had also entered the culture of microscopy. For Stopes some of its appeal was to be found in the world of divine imagination and minute wonder that had astonished the Victorians and first led to the microscopy craze.4 She reflected that, when working as a student in the lab of Professor William Ramsay, she was delighted with his belief that mysticism and exploration of the divine were “compatible with a profound knowledge of science.”5 Marie Stopes’s proximity to Francis Oliver as well as to Arthur Tansley (who, like Stopes, also flourished under Oliver’s wing and now held a lectureship at University College) gave her a front-row view of some of the most exciting developments in the science of botany, including an appreciation for fieldwork and the new science of connections – ecology – the study of things in their natural homes. A key term for early proponents of selfconscious ecology like Oliver and Tansley (and equally true for the new psychology that increasingly absorbed Tansley) was “dynamic.” This concept represented a departure from static morphology and biogeography, the prevailing focus on structure over process, and what ecologists derided as mere “descriptive” botany with its emphasis on species lists. It was an extension of the new understanding of the world offered up in the previous century by the geologist Charles Lyell: the earth was not made as finished product in seven days. All was change; processes of erosion, decay as part of creation. And plants, as part of processes and complex geographies (the first ecological work was carried out in the name of plant geography), were best encountered in the field.

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With his own finances, Tansley created a new journal for this expansive area of interest, and the New Phytologist would publish some of Stopes’s earliest academic work. This included ecological studies such as the paper she read before the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1903, “The colonization of a dried river bed.” Colonization here was used in terms of plants, but the discourse of plant succession, describing how newly exposed or disturbed rock is “colonized” by different species of life in a sequence of orderly changes, shared language and metaphor with the process of colonialism. Ecology developed in part as a tool of empire, and the work was often justified in terms of its usefulness to colonial activities and other aspirations of the nation.6 Tansley was pivotal in yoking the concerns of professional botanists to the activities of naturalist societies in the national survey projects of the British Vegetation Committee, the forerunner to the British Ecological Society, which he co-founded in 1904. He also worked to rationalize and regularize the international practice and language of ecology by founding the International Phytogeographical Excursions, the first of which was hosted by the English members in 1911. Responding to another of Stopes’s New Phytologist submissions, this one on ecological adaptation, Tansley urged her to conform to his own usage: “I should be glad if you could see your way to write ‘ecological’ instead of ‘œcological’ … But I know it is a matter on which botanists have not yet adopted a uniform practice.”7 What kind of scientific career was possible for young British women like Marie Stopes in the early years of the new century? University College London was one of the first academic institutions in Britain to admit female students on equal terms with men (1878), although they were barred from medicine and engineering until 1917. Oliver had a practice of encouraging women students, including Benson, the aforementioned palaeobotanist. His department and the “New Ecology” that he and Tansley were promoting also had attractions for the “New Woman” seeking personal freedom. This identity manifested in activities like travelling alone – by bicycle even – reading what she wanted, or smoking if that gave her pleasure. Above all, a New Woman aimed to work with male colleagues on equal terms; when Stopes undertook doctoral studies in Munich in 1903, she was the only woman in her class. That same year, Oliver and Tansley initiated fieldwork expeditions for the study of ecology, with the “risky” innovation of including unchaperoned single women in the University College party. Stopes would catch

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up with this crew in the spring of 1905, spending a fortnight mapping vegetation with them in the Brittany salt marsh, the Bouche d’Erquy, after hiking on her own all the way from the University of Caen in Normandy.8 Prestigious awards like the Quain Studentship were shared equally between men and women. Tansley once held it, as would Agnes Robertson (later known as Agnes Arber, the celebrated botanist) and Tansley’s future wife, Edith Chick. Edith was one of seven distinguished and intrepid sisters known for their walking parties and sea-bathing in huge, crashing waves. According to family lore, her younger sister Harriette (who, along with sister Elsie, had a warmer relationship with Marie Stopes than Edith) had been Arthur’s first choice for a wife. Harriette retained her single status but also gained for herself a career: after earning her DSc from London University in 1904, and with the encouragement of Charles Sherrington, she became in 1905 the first woman to be appointed to the staff of the Lister Institute of Preventive Medicine. There, she would begin pioneering work on vitamins and nutrition. While the world opened to Harriette (with work at the League of Nations contributing to her being named a Dame of the British Empire in 1949), sister Edith’s marriage to Arthur in 1903 meant the closing to her of many academic doors. This was typical of many professions, and decades later married women still were not allowed to hold a full position in the Department of Botany at University College. Edith would henceforth redirect her energies to supporting her husband’s career and raising their three daughters. Some women, especially those of independent means like the ecologist Marietta Pallis, could pursue research privately;9 although fodder for local gossip, her preference for a female partner had its professional advantages. A few unmarried women were permitted to teach. Ethel Sargant, who mentored Agnes Arber in her private lab, gave a series of lectures on botany in 1907 in Oliver’s department and would become an honorary fellow of Girton College in 1913. Helen Gwynne-Vaughan would be elected head of Botany at Birkbeck, a London college that offered evening education. But such appointments were still relatively uncommon, and women remained barred from the Royal Society, the oldest and most influential professional society for scientists in Britain. In 1905 Oliver would be named a fellow of the Royal Society; Tansley would gain his title ten years later and would always append the frs to his name, knowing this was the distinction that mattered. Helen

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MacMurchy, the Canadian doctor who befriended Marie on her first trip to Canada, insisted: “[They will] make room for you in that august Society. They must – you belong there!” However, the Royal Society was unconcerned about any “serious reflection on them” for failing to recognize her – or any other woman’s – achievements, and would not admit women until 1945. A year later, Agnes Arber became the first woman botanist elected to the Royal Society, a distinction Marie Stopes was never granted. Stopes first encountered Charles Gordon Hewitt at the University of Manchester when she was appointed junior lecturer and demonstrator in botany in 1904.10 The hiring committee’s innovative decision to hire a woman was immediately subject to some dispute. As she was the first woman to teach on the science staff and had to handle classes of around seventy students, the skeptical University Council met with the goal of rescinding her appointment. According to Stopes, it was her father’s old friend and fellow fossil-researcher Sir William Boyd Dawkins, frs, professor of geology at Manchester, who “got on the warpath” with tales of her fortitude in the field and had her position ratified.11 Other key supports for Stopes at the university included Dr William Evans Hoyle, director of the Manchester Museum; Hoyle and his wife were very close to Stopes, and Hoyle helped to plan and finance her work in Japan and North America. Professor of botany Frederick Ernest Weiss and his wife, Evelyn, also took an active interest in her success. Weiss’s sympathetic character is flagged in a limerick published (and likely written) by Stopes: There was a Professor named Weiss Who to girls was so awfully nice That one little maiden Though Botany laden Sat Inter-Biology tweiss.12 Weiss, another key figure in the early history of ecology, was a member of the British Vegetation Committee – forerunner of the British Ecological Society – and hosted the committee in Manchester in both 1907 and 1908.13 Like Tansley, Weiss placed the study of dynamic life processes at the heart of botany. In his 1898 presidential address for the Manchester Microscopical Society entitled “Life,” he asserted: “All biological studies, whether botanical

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or zoological, whether they deal with the histology, morphology, or embryology of plant or animals, lose not only their interest, but their very essence when disassociated from the consideration of the life of the organism of which they are the expression.”14 This rallying call for fieldwork was particularly rousing in the context of his own department’s setting, housed as it was in the Beyer Building; opened in 1887 to accommodate zoology, botany and geology, it was built with direct corridors to the Manchester Museum to provide ease of access to and from the collections of rocks, flora, and fauna – inanimate specimens all.15 Weiss, who in 1908 published “The dispersal of fruits and seeds by ants” in the New Phytologist, credited Tansley for leading him to wonder why Ulex (gorse) grew in such regular rectangular patterns in heather moorland; his intriguing answer involved the effects of both man and insect, as the ants appeared to be carrying the seeds down the ruts of old trackways.16 It also was research ripe for discussion with his Manchester colleagues at the 202nd meeting of a remarkable forum called “Pleasant Friday Afternoons.” Harking back to the “Pleasant Sunday Afternoons” movement initiated by the congregationalist John Blackham in 1875 in the West Midlands, zoology professor Sydney Hickson set up “Pleasant Friday Afternoons” in 1894. Although the choice of name was likely the light-hearted and irreverent gesture of a committed evolutionist, Hickson, like Blackham, sought an alternative kind of meeting: “If men were to be won,” Blackham had stated, “we must give them a service neither too long or too learned, we must avoid dullness, gloom, and constraint.”17 Weiss lent his support, along with staff and students from subjects including (but not limited to) botany and zoology, who gathered in the zoological research laboratory to discuss topics of mutual interest.18 The format was informal – “show-and-tell” style. Weiss’s discussion of his research on ant/gorse/human interactions was recorded as: “Weiss exhibited some live ants which ought to have carried away some gorse seeds.”19 Until the “P.F.A.” gatherings ended with Hickson’s retirement in 1926, topics of discussion ranged wildly, creating an ecological forum in the broadest sense – from intestinal parasites of man to the birds of Macedonia to the application of psychology in daily life. The occasions provided regular opportunities for professional networking across disciplines as well as socializing. Interestingly, Stopes is listed as an attendee along with Hickson, Boyd Dawkins, and Weiss in February 1903 for a discussion of a paper by the

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Figure 2.1 Marie Stopes with microscope, Manchester University, ca 1906.

botanist Keita Shibata on mycorrhiza – long before Stopes’s faculty position was confirmed and her appointment commenced in the fall of 1904.20 Manchester, the centre of the Industrial Revolution, was among the first cities in the world to experience horrifying capitalist extremes and unplanned urban expansion: squalour pressed up against wealth, the sweet symphonies of the Hallé Orchestra reverberated in particulate-filled air made dirty by factory chimneys. The atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen, popularizer of the term “Anthropocene” as a name for our current geological epoch – emphasizing the significant human impact on the Earth’s ecosystems and geology – has proposed the Industrial Revolution as the Anthropocene’s beginning, kick-started by the modern steam engine developed by James Watt. Coal was its fuel and coal smoke became, as Lewis Mumford so vividly put it, “the very incense of the new industrialism.”21 Despite ongoing efforts on the part of the Noxious Vapours Abatement Society, by the early twentieth century the city had not shed its reputation as “dirty old Man-

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chester,”22 prone to what Weiss called the “blackest of fogs” and cheered, he added, only by the “presence of Tansley” and other members of the British Vegetation Committee when Manchester hosted its annual meeting in 1907.23 The fact that Manchester was also close to landscapes of great biological diversity like the Peak District made it an excellent base for ecological study, with its easy access to some of Stopes’s and Hewitt’s favourite hiking places such as Alderley Edge and the Delamere Forest. The mines around Manchester were located in the strata of the Coal Measures and would generously fuel Stopes’s palaeobotanical work on the Carboniferous Era, preserving the petrified plants in beautiful anatomical detail in claybeds under the coal seams. At the same time, they supplied the factories that pumped out poisons. For people living in Manchester’s vicinity, the noxious air exacted an ever-greater price. Charles Gordon Hewitt – one who paid dearly – was born on 23 February 1885 to Rachel Frost and Thomas Henry Hewitt in the village of Bollington, thirty kilometres from Manchester. Shortly after his birth, his family, including his older sister, Ethel, moved a few kilometres south to the larger market town of Macclesfield, where his father would make a name for himself as an educational reformer. Charles Gordon was listed as Charles G. on the 1901 census and was known as “Charlie” to family, friends, and fiancées, but at the university he began using his professional and preferred name “Gordon,” signing himself “C. Gordon Hewitt” or simply “C.G.H.” He was the second of four children; the two youngest were Dora and Sydney. His father, Thomas, was a fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. As a teacher and later headmaster at Mill Street Wesleyan Higher Grade School, Thomas became increasingly interested in ways to relax the rigid school curriculum, particularly through the use of “play” and “handicraft.”24 In 1909 he published an article for the journal Child Study which laid out his general plan: (a) Soul culture, (b) Mind culture, and (c) Brain and Muscle culture, the latter division including handwork, drawing, brushwork, cookery, voice production, swimming, and recreation.25 His interest in “relaxation” may well have been deepened by a fascination – or frustration – with the often excessively studious behaviour of his son. At the age of fourteen, Charles Gordon suffered emphysema in one of his lungs (which he attributed to overwork, although one wonders about air quality and lung irritation), and it failed to heal properly because he stayed indoors, deeply engrossed in his beloved

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studies, rejecting all exercise. Tellingly, he would frame this story of his physical degeneration – as he related to Stopes – as a product of his own dedication to his work rather than any external factor. Intensely competitive and hard-working – these qualities of Stopes were mirrored in Hewitt. In 1905, at the age of twenty and already acting as an assistant lecturer, he earned his BSc in zoology with first class honours. Indeed, it is worth emphasizing that Hewitt’s career trajectory would be equally as meteoric as Stopes’s and, despite his being younger and just an advanced undergraduate when they met (a teasing letter suggests she taught him in Advanced Botany), the two young scientists had many similarities. Hewitt and Stopes were used to mixed lectures of men and women, as both the University of Manchester and University College London had followed this practice since the late nineteenth century. While Marie Stopes is reputed to have been the youngest DSc in Britain when she received the degree at age twenty-five in 1905, Hewitt usurped her place when he received his DSc in 1909 at the age of twenty-four. Like Stopes, he was also increasingly interested in practical applications of his science and in public outreach. His doctoral supervisor, Hickson, promoted applied zoology in the colonial arena and made public health and agricultural entomology the foci of his department. Hewitt’s work on the housefly was beginning to garner much attention, and the alleged role of Musca domestica in spreading disease became increasingly understood as a new public health threat. Hewitt was also part of the new group of economic zoologists interested in gaining knowledge of biological control.26 Appointed as a lecturer in 1907, he taught about the control of insects such as the larch sawfly, an agent in the defoliation of nearby forests, and became active in showing the public how science could be applied to solve economic problems. Hickson shared with Professor Weiss a belief in the value of a general science degree and what we would now call “interdisciplinarity.” Like the ecologists, Hickson wanted his courses to feature practical outdoor work, including field trips, and Hewitt, inspired by this ethos, spent July of 1906 on the remote archipelago of St Kilda in the North Atlantic, the westernmost of the Scottish Outer Hebrides. In a manner characteristic of his broad training, which included skills in drawing, he studied both insects and flora – producing a separate paper on each for the Annals of Scottish Natural History – but his observations were about interactions and the broader ecology:

Pleasant Friday Afternoons The orchis O. maculate which occurs on the banks of the stream interested me during my visit. It is usually pollinated by bees, but as no bees have yet been discovered in St. Kilda, the flowers of that island have to depend on other insects for pollination. Quite accidentally one morning a dipterous fly, an Anthomyia, I believe, settled on my hand; upon its head I noticed two pollinia of O. maculate, but before I was able to capture it, it flew away. O. maculate is no doubt dependent on the visits of flower-haunting flies and other insects in this island, where the hum of the bee has not yet been heard.27

Figure 2.2 Gordon Hewitt “after a day’s puffin searching,” St Kilda, 1906.

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Figure 2.3 Hewitt’s sketch of St Kilda, 1906.

Stopes and Hewitt met regularly among friends and colleagues at the Pleasant Friday Afternoons,28 quickly becoming two of its most stalwart members. Along with papers by British colleagues, the work of German and Japanese researchers was commonly discussed. In 1868 the Meiji Restoration had ended the rule of the Tokugawa shogunate and its policy of isolation, and many Japanese scholars were sent to the West, particularly to leading institutions in Germany, England, and America, for education in advanced sciences. A Japanese visitor to the Friday afternoon gatherings on two occasions was Professor Kenjiro Fujii, a botanist from the Imperial University at Tokyo whose expertise was Ginkgo biloba, the “maidenhair tree.” (Fanjii Miyoshi, the scholar who came up with the Japanese word for “ecology” in 1910, was one of his colleagues.) Stopes had been introduced to Fujii during her doctoral studies in Munich. As would become a theme in Stopes’s relationships with men, in a seemingly stable triangle – Fujii was “safely” married – a close collegial friendship unexpectedly developed into something they both identified as love.29 Fujii sought to divorce his wife in Japan, and the two planned in due course to marry. He was delighted for Stopes on her Manchester appointment and, indeed, would find ways to be supportive of

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women throughout his career.30 During Fujii’s visit to Manchester in February of 1905, Hewitt joined Fujii and Stopes on a hiking trip to Delamere Forest and photographed the Japanese scholar climbing up into Pinus sylvestris, a Scots pine (see figure 3.2). Hewitt and Stopes had many friends in common, including Hewitt’s girlfriend and fellow graduate student, the athletic and vivacious Mary “Molly” McNicol. The surprising news of her engagement to Hewitt in August 1906 after his return from St Kilda warranted an exclamation mark from Dr Hoyle in a newsy letter to Stopes.31 McNicol too was a gifted scholar. After obtaining first class honours in botany, she proceeded to the MSc degree and was elected to the Beyer Fellowship. Together this trio seemed to have enjoyed dancing and laughter whenever possible. Stopes organized “Cinderella” dances, inviting students and faculty from across the university; Mrs Weiss, fearing scandal, would counsel her to stop inviting undergraduates. Hewitt’s rsvp note to one of these dances in 1906, including a self-portrait and his signature housefly, indicates the light-hearted protocol of these events: “Yours gratefully will be pleased to leave all ‘which naturally does surround him,’ & join in the ‘friendly intercourse & dance’ on Dec. 1st 1906.”

Figure 2.4 RSVP to a “Cinderella” dance in Manchester from Gordon Hewitt to Marie Stopes, 8 November 1906.

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The day after Hewitt sent his rsvp, the three friends all attended the Friday afternoon session at which “Miss Stopes exhibited & announced the discovery of the earliest known Angiosperm. Cretaceous of Japan.” Stopes was present when Hewitt on 16 November 1906 “exhibited specimens of the Large Larch sawfly from Bassenthwaite.” In honour of the 200th meeting of the Pleasant Friday Afternoons on 22 February 1907, Stopes, Hewitt, McNicol, and Hoyle together hosted a “Biological Festival” (between the hours of 8 pm and 2 am) which featured a dance with attendees taking on names of plants or animals: Hewitt was “Starfish,” Stopes was “Silk Moth,” and McNicol was “Scarlet-runner.” A spoof Zoology Honours examination was printed up and administered in the course of the evening: “In case of suspicion the examiners will look the other way.”32

3 v

Insects from Japan The extant correspondence between Marie Carmichael Stopes and Charles Gordon Hewitt begins in the middle of their early friendship. It was the summer of 1907, just before Marie embarked on her journey to Japan – a research trip funded by the Royal Society for her to study petrified angiosperms and search for a “missing link” ancestor to flowering plants. Before she left, Hewitt gave her a short “apprenticeship” in the art of photography, and his first letter reported on the state of her negatives, which he was drying in his room.1 Stopes documented her daily life and labwork/fieldwork observations in a journal that she sent back to Manchester in installments, beginning on 6 August 1907. This “Journal from Japan,” later published along with her photographs, was kept in the Manchester Museum, open to a select group in the university. Hewitt was, as he wrote, one of the “privileged,” and Stopes’s friend Katie Wilkinson (assistant to the museum director, Dr Hoyle) reported back to her that Hewitt was a keen reader.2 Perhaps in return for the photography lessons, Stopes collected houseflies for Hewitt; in his thank you letter, “at the risk of emulating Oliver Twist,” he asked for more. He also enquired about the fossil-insect specimens that she had sent to the museum. Hewitt was excited to be asked by Professor Hoyle to describe the fossil-insects, if no one in Japan was doing the work, and asked Stopes to send further specimens if she could. She agreed to hunt for him and, true to her promise, “set off ” on 4 August, “with my bicycle, carrying all my luggage,” for another fossil-insect hunt in Shiobara. The train takes five hours, according to the time-table, to go to the nearest station, and after that I had about 16 miles [25 km] to ride to

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f r i e n d b e l ove d the haunt of the fossil insects. Fossil insects are shy and scarce, and I am the first to stalk them here, so I came with a double lot of patience; and I believe I remarked half a year ago, I have been so battered and worn in this country, where my impetuous spirit tugs at Oriental passivity in vain, that I have now normally the patience of two Jobs.3

Hewitt exhibited Stopes’s Shiobara fossil insects at the General Meeting of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society, popularly known as the Lit & Phil. His preliminary description identified them as belonging to families of Ephemerids (may flies) and Culicidae (mosquitoes).4 They appeared to belong to the Tertiary age, a period (now called the “Neogene” by the International Commission on Stratigraphy) that began with the extinction of non-avian dinosaurs and extended to the beginning of the Quaternary glaciation. Hewitt felt them to be of great interest, as, he wrote, “no fossil insects from Japan have previously been described.” In these months of the friends’ separation, the letters also involved discussions of their respective love lives – the weight being on Hewitt’s relationship with Molly McNicol. The couple remained engaged until Hewitt initiated their break-up ostensibly on account of his respiratory issues and, being difficult to insure, his consequent poor prospects as a husband. Stopes begged him not to break it off as she “loves lovers so.” Addressing him as “Dear lad,” she counselled vigorously: “Don’t, out of a sense of conventional chivalry ‘release her.’” Reminding him of the passionate scenes in Tristan and Isolde, Richard Wagner’s adaptation for opera that they had seen performed at the Hallé, she implored: “Nothing is great enough to interfere with great love.” In Tristan and Isolde, a romantic tragedy based on Celtic legend, and the first of a number of stories about unrequited love to act as reference points in Stopes’s and Hewitt’s exchanges about relationships, the title characters are young lovers. At the end of the drama, Isolde arrives in a ship flying a white sail to indicate that she has come to heal the mortally wounded Tristan. Before she lands, however, Tristan is misinformed by his jealous wife that the ship is flying a black sail (meaning, in the agreed semaphore, that Isolde has refused to heal him). Tristan can hold onto life no longer and Isolde arrives only to die of grief in “his dead arms.” From the lovers’ grave, saplings emerge, their branches entwining to symbolize that

Figure 3.1 Mary (Molly) McNicol and Gordon Hewitt. Signed in Hewitt’s hand “Yours very sincerely, Mary McNicol, C. Gordon Hewitt”: Sent to Stopes in Japan ca 1907.

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they can never be parted again. In Wagner’s version, the final scene is one of blissful union and infinite love, in which two souls are purified and freed from earthly existence, their noble salvation in love “reachable through the gates of death alone.”5 McNicol wrote to confide in Stopes about her broken engagement; she was confused and not sure that Hewitt’s lungs were as damaged as he maintained. Stopes sought perspective from their mutual friend Katie Wilkinson, who wrote: “My dearest little Dr. Marie” – an address both she and Professor Hoyle used when corresponding with Stopes: About the Hewitt-McNicol affair first, as you say you are most anxious to hear about that. It was announced that the reason was that he had been to have his life insured and was told by the Doctor there that he had consumption in an advanced stage. Yet since then several people have said that this was an exaggeration and that it was simply one lung slightly affected. At the time they each only wrote to one or two people and asked that they would not mention it to them, so the consequence was that practically no one ever spoke of it to them, and so very little information has leaked out. I thought Mr. Hewitt seemed to take it very calmly, but I think Molly was fearfully cut up, and seemed to get years older. She has kept away from the College very much since then and has only been when she was obliged. She teaches now at the High School, so she had a good excuse. I fancy Mr. Hewitt would like very much to get a post somewhere away from Manchester: he was talking to me a few days ago about Cambridge and saying he wished he had work there. He comes down to Dr. Hoyle’s room occasionally, but otherwise I hardly ever see him.6 Stopes’s relationship with Kenjiro Fujii was also very troubled at this time. Her letter to Professor Oliver the same month (April 1908) reveals that she rarely saw Fujii and that “my nominal colleague is busy – & now is ill, really very seriously ill, in danger of losing his sight”:7 the intensity with which she advised Hewitt not to break things off may have stemmed from her own anxieties that Fujii, her own betrothed, was using the excuse of illness to avoid her. Although Fujii had obtained his divorce, the full reality of marrying Stopes in his society may have been overwhelming. He did not in fact

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have leprosy, as he claimed, and lived to the age of eighty-six, apparently in excellent health until his death.8 In assuring Hewitt that he would get well, Stopes compared his situation to that of her father, who also had lost a lung at a young age: “He died of something else 25 years later, & all his life his voice & lungs were the most splendidly powerful I ever knew.” Strangely enough, even with only one good lung and a cough due to pleural degeneration, Hewitt kept up his pipe smoking. Tobacco was not viewed then as the great health risk that it is now: to his Macclesfield family doctor, it was the city of Manchester that was the great villain, and it could not have been a “worse place for him.”9 Needing to escape the unhealthiest of urban atmospheres but also perhaps imagining himself closer to Stopes, Hewitt pressed her for opportunities in the East: “Is there any opening in Japan for a young enthusiastic economic or ordinary common or garden zoologist as I know a man who is rather wearied of Manchester fog?” In these letters to Stopes in Japan, the “enthusiastic” but also “ordinary common” Hewitt wrestled frequently with the notion of “ego.” He coupled reports on the success of his housefly research (later to be published as a set of three memoirs) and his public lectures (which were given excellent reviews in the press) with an apology: “Now I am wandering off on the eternal ‘ego’ again!” Friends noted a change in him too and he worried about the rumoured perception that he was being spoiled by success. Even before the break-up with Hewitt, Katie Wilkinson reported to Stopes: “Mr. Hewitt I have seen very little of lately. I think he works very hard, and will certainly make a name for himself. I don’t think I like him quite as well as I used to do: he is cultivating a very casual manner, which, I personally, do not think very pleasing.”10 But later she was more positive about his character: “I think he has got more handsome since you left, and has a good deal more assurance. I always think he prides himself on being quite a ‘man of the world.’ We generally have a little talk about you when we meet, and he always sees the ‘Journal.’”11 Along with “ego” was the recurrent reference to the “long-promised enlargement” of the picture that he took of her beloved Kenjiro Fujii in Delamere Forrest in 1905. He mentioned it first in March 1908, and Stopes’s reply alluded to her troubles with Fujii, confessing that she had been going through a terrible time, the second in her life (her father’s death certainly the first). Hewitt referred to the photograph enlargement again in May and

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then in September specified that he had included it in the letter, noting – somewhat mysteriously – that he thought she would “more than ever care to have it now.” And yet, still he neglected to include it, his following letter apologizing for having forgotten and thus needing to send it by separate post. The consequence of this curious repetition of forgetfulness is that the sending of the photograph of Fujii was delayed until Fujii was definitively out of the picture. In the meantime, Stopes decided to return to England early. Writing to Hoyle in late October 1908, she informed him that she would be returning home from Japan in February, and also that she would not attend the meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in Winnipeg in late August 1909.12 Hoyle’s letters were long and newsy but he also played a mentoring and paternal role, holding an active concern for her finances and employment prospects and keeping an eye on her sister, Winnie. Well I should be right glad to see you and that you know full well, my dear child, but what is the reason? I had quite set my heart on you going to the British Association at Winnipeg & distinguishing yourself there & seeing a goodish lot of botanical institutions in Canada. It is a great education to see how things are done there & you might not [want] to lose the opportunity. In any case even if you do not stay for the B.A. you might try see something of Canada & the States in passing. Now write at once like a dutiful daughter & tell me what is the matter. Is the money coming to an end? If that is it you must not lose the experience for want of a few pounds & you must just tell me what you want. You must see the Rocky Mountains: you need not bother about Winnipeg except for the B.A., but you must see Toronto, Niagara, Washington, New York, Boston & Montreal. I will send you introductions to people in these places, who will see that you get what you want to see.13 In a later letter, Hoyle accepted her reasoning for an immediate return without an extended stay in Canada as “most cogent.”14 Stopes’s reply to Hoyle no longer exists, but interestingly she would have received Hewitt’s letter of 21 October 1908, which stated that he himself would not go to the Advance-

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ment of Science meeting in Winnipeg, but would rather build a little house in a picturesque village in the High Peak district, not far from his parents’ home in Macclesfield: “I find [the travel to Canada] will be more expensive than I had anticipated & I should prefer to spend the money in building myself a wooden bungalow upon the hills near Whaley Bridge: that is what I hope to do, when possible.” In the next few weeks, Stopes mailed Hewitt a number of items, including some intriguing specimens of Japanese ants that advanced the subject of house construction into novel entomological terrain. By way of thanks, Hewitt wrote to say he had been particularly gripped by Stopes’s journal account of the field adventure in which she had obtained them. Marie had gone for a holiday to the seaside village of Hayama, to escape the heat. Accustomed by then to sleeping on the floor on tatami mats, she found the “foreign” style beds of her hotel “miserable.” But shortly after she arrived, she “made a most interesting observation … some ants had built the most extraordinary galleries all up the branches of a tree, and they had taken the leaves and rolled them up and built houses inside them. Then in some cases they had covered the whole twig over with their sandy houses, and just left little bits of leaves sticking out here and there.”15 As this was a holiday, she had brought nothing with which to examine these “ant houses” properly – but suspecting they were phenomena of scientific interest, made do with an old biscuit tin, which she basically stole from a local shopkeeper who had refused to sell it to her: “his geta (sandals) were not in sight, and I knew I could run fast enough to get a start any way.”16 Although unable to find in the small village the spirits necessary for their preservation – “for I wanted to have the ants and all in situ” – she improvised on the spot. I bethought me of saké, the poet-famed drink, the wine of the marriage cups and the friendly festival, and I sent a maid for a jorum of saké; the wine is said to be very highly alcoholic, I know two spoonfuls sent me to sleep after weeks of sleeplessness, and in the saké I plunged my specimens and hoped for the best. Having received the saké-soaked ants in Manchester, Hewitt, demonstrating his pull and his shrewd knowledge of the rarified world of international insect expertise, forwarded them to the renowned ant expert William Morton

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Wheeler, curator of Invertebrate Zoology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Wheeler (who coined the term myrmecology, insisting on the study of the ant, myrmex, as an activity involving whole living organisms17), confirmed the identity of the tent-building ants as the common Laius niger. The English philosopher Alfred North Whitehead remarked of Wheeler that he was the only man he had ever known “who would have been both worthy and able to sustain a conversation with Aristotle.”18 Hewitt and Wheeler would remain lifelong friends, later collecting together in British Columbia and North Carolina.19 Along with the ants, Stopes had sent her draft manuscript on the tent-building ant discovery: in his reply, Hewitt corrected her understanding of why the ants built the tents (the ants were not in fact building homes to live in). Nevertheless he was enthusiastic about the paper’s potential and asserted that he could make it into “quite a decent paper” for her: “[A]s you know, I should be delighted to do it. (Conceit, you say?!) Send me a card as to the course I shall take.”

[Charles Gordon Hewitt to Marie Carmichael Stopes]20 The University, Manchester.21 27.vi.’07 Dear Miss Stopes. With the splendid through draught in my room the negatives dried more quickly than I had anticipated so I think you will be able to get prints of them before going. I am sorry that the photos of your favourite cave22 didn’t come out well, but I will go over this summer (if we have any) & take one or two views there & send them on to you. I am sure you would like visible remembrances in addition to the pleasant recollections. Will you send me the address of your headquarters in Japan, I forgot to ask you for it this morning with thinking about other things. Again, Bon voyage – much happiness & good luck. Yours very truly, C. Gordon Hewitt

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[Hewitt to Stopes] University of Manchester, Department of Economic Zoology,23 31.x.’07 My dear Miss Stopes, You really are too good to me after I had treated you so badly by not writing before this; during the last six or twelve months I have entirely lost my good character as a good correspondent, even Molly24 has had to complain of neglect. I can only say I haven’t wasted the time otherwise. However I will try to slightly redeem, if possible, my lost character. It was not because I had forgotten you, I thought too much of you for that, & really missed you. I know you won’t mind my saying that & will understand. I saw the first two parts of your journal25 but missed the third & fourth. Miss Wilkinson26 also posted me up in your doings while the Father of the Flittermice27 was in America. And now how am I going to thank you for the things you sent. Thank you so much. The links28 are very pretty & I think a great deal about them. You must have been to a lot of trouble to get me the flies; I never thought of receiving such a complete collection. They are really very interesting & form an important part of my collection. Unfortunately, as you anticipated most of them were more interesting to a mycologist than a zoologist, that is the worst of such creatures. Nevertheless, I managed to pick out several specimens from each lot which though ‘fungi’frous were recognizable & quite as good as one could expect after the distance travelled. I envy you being in such surroundings. The insect fauna of Japan must be very fine, & a striking contrast to the somber, almost insignificant fauna of this country. Fancy having such a beautiful Mantis as the one you sent, in one’s room – the other was one of the solitary wasps (Polistes). If, at the risk of emulating Oliver Twist, I might reply yes, to your very kind offer to supply me with more flies. I should be more indebted to your kindness than ever. I should be most interested to have specimens

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of Japanese houseflies, with town & country (if possible) specimens.29 I think they could travel much better, as regards freedom from fungi, if they were put in cotton wool in small card boxes of any kind instead of glass tubes. I have found that in either glass or tin the conditions are moist & favourable for fungi. But this is all deadly uninteresting & I haven’t told you any news yet, as a matter of fact. I really don’t know where to begin unless I begin as early as I can. As you will have heard from Evelyn30 about most people I will be exclusive! Almost egotistical. During the whole Summer vacation, except one fortnight, I stayed here & worked – a necessary but yet foolish procedure. I spent most of July & August between here, my greenhouse out at Fallowfield and the Manchester Fever hospital where I did some experiments on the carrying of Typhoid by flies; but being very risky, gave it up after a few expmts. July & August were very disappointing months from my point of view – Eternal rain & little sunshine (& no flies!!) At the end of September I had an interesting experiment & tackled my first large piece of economic work. The larch plantations round the Manchester Corporation Waterworks at Thirlmere in the Lakes were reported to be devastated by an insect pest. I placed my services at the disposal of the Corporation & was asked to investigate. I spent a very pleasant long week-end at Thirlmere, Bassenthwaite & Keswick & inspected the whole district, almost 250 acres of trees round Thirlmere were being attacked by the Larch Sawfly, which, fortunately I had previously studied – So knowing the thing so well, I was able to advise the Corporation and war began. I was really pleased to be able to get into work with the Corporation so soon & show the utility of an economic department.31 This does sound horrible shop, & in the words of George Robey,32 I will “desist”. By the middle of September I was so absolutely done up, though I wouldn’t own up to the people interested that I decided to go away to the warmest & sunniest place possible – & chose the Channel Islands. Have you ever been there? I had a most glorious two days holiday at a delightful little place called St. Brelade’s Bay in Jersey33 – a little wooded bay, huge granite rocks at the sides & a beautiful stretch of hard sand. I did absolutely nothing but simply “layed” the whole time.

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It did me a lot of good & I have become as brown as a berry. It was brilliant sunshine the whole time, & as the place faces south you can imagine that a little heat was generated. I was very sorry to leave it. I called at Guernsey on my way back & spent a day & night there & then came in to Weymouth & spent a night in London. Dear old London. I am so glad that you still like it in spite of having been so many brilliant places. To me it is unsurpassable. Don’t you really think that it is the centre of the world. I think one can, without being stigmatized as ‘Little Englander.” I got back here having had almost a fortnight’s holiday feeling ready to go on till Xmas. I shall go up to London for a few days at Xmas, as I want to go to the B.M.;34 see my friends there, etc. Tonight is Thursday night, & this year I have taken a seat at the Hallé concerts.35 I enjoy them immensely & they are such a pleasant rest during a week’s round. So that I shall not finish this screed tonight as I want to36 take up your time, or waste it by trying to decipher my awful scribble still further. I must be going now as it is quarter to seven & I am having supper as usual in town with O.V.D.37 Friday morning. I will really try to finish this before beginning work. As regards work I am very fortunate this year as I have most of my time for research. So far this term I have only given two lectures to the advanced people & have only done one day’s demonstrating. Still, as it is the Professor’s38 idea that I should devote most of my time to research I don’t grumble! It is an ideal way of spending this time. At the beginning of the month I gave the popular lecture at the Annual Soirée of the Manchester Microscopial Society39 at the Athenaeum. The ‘Manchester Guardian’ ‘enthused’ to the extent of a leading article which pleased me inwardly; as a result of which I have been asked to deliver the same lecture (on ‘House-flies’) at the Annual Soirée of the Doncaster Scientific Society. Now I am wandering off on the eternal ‘ego’ again! The Lit & Phil40 meeting on Tuesday was amusing. Dr. Wilde (you know the old prehistoric person)41 who put down to read a paper in ‘The Atomic Weight of Radium (“Radyum” as he calls it) & Prof. Rutherford42

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was to speak on the “Origin etc. of Radium”. Dixon43 was in the Chair. Were you at the last meeting of the Lit. & Phil. when old Wilde ‘held forth’ on Atomic Weights? If so, you will know that there is no love lost between Dixon & him. It was most amusing as Wilde is quite off his head about atomic weights & at the end of the discussion Dixon amused himself by asking Wilde questions & got him to admit that he considered an element has two atomic weights, the one as it combined with an oxide & the other with a chloride!! O.V.D. is still here & same as usual. Did you hear that he resigned at the end of last year, and, as I expected & told him he would, withdrew his resignation, after it had been ‘accepted with regret’ by the council! It was just like him. He is still living at High Elms with old R.D.D.44 They are presenting Schuster45 with his portrait this afternoon. I’m very sorry that I shall miss it but I have promised Molly to go out to Whaley Bridge46 to spend the evening with Miss Graves’47 recently married sister. So I must perform my social duties. I spent a glorious week-end down at Church Stretton a fortnight ago with an uncle of mine, going down in the train I had the misfortune to lose my signet ring (in the towel of the lavatory carriage) and they never found it. Does Alderley Edge48 still hold a warm corner in your heart? I intend, when I have the opportunity, to take my camera there & take some photographs for you. I think Spring will be the best time, don’t you? Everything looks bright & green then. I hope your photographs are turning out well in spite of the extreme brevity of the previous apprenticeship. I should like sometime a photograph of you & your Japanese house. Prof. Watase of the Imp. University49 was here last Saturday & I showed him round the building. He was on his way back to Japan from the International Congress of Zoologists.50 Did Molly tell you that she was teaching half the week, at the High School & the High School Higher Brighton, the other half of the week she works here. Gravely51 was appointed to succeed me as Junior demonstrator (much to my grief!) He doesn’t have tea with us in the afternoons. I wish you were back again, if only for tea time! They are rather deadly now, but as I

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work always in my room at the top it is the only opportunity we have of meeting, as F.W.G.52 does not always lunch with Otto & me. Now don’t you think I have taken up enough of your time with my very uninteresting babble, because I have really very little to talk about, the wheel goes much the same day in day out practically. Were I in St. Kilda53 or some other interesting place I would write, or try to write, longer & have interesting letters, but did any good thing ever come out of Manchester? I will promise however to write more frequently, even if I have nothing to say & can only write the address & finish. So ‘auf wieder schreiben’ if I may coin a word! With kindest regards & most sincere wishes for success. From C. Gordon Hewitt By the way, I know you won’t mind me telling you, the chirping cicadas are Hemiptera, or ‘Bugs’ & not beetles. We unfortunately have only one small insignificant species. The Greeks used to keep them in cages.

[Hewitt to Stopes] The University. Manchester. 5. iii. ’08 My dear Miss Stopes. You must think that I am an awful correspondent & a most ungrateful person not writing before this. I shamefully acknowledge all these my misdeeds & crave forgiveness. Did I thank you for the interesting puzzle-box which you sent? It seems such an age since I received it that I almost forget, as it was before Xmas. I expect you will receive all the Manchester news from another quarter. So that if I tell any ‘state’ information you must make allowances; to avoid doing so I will try to be personal. ’Tho of a truth my personal narrative

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must be singularly uninteresting to you out in the East with so much to do. Being one of the privileged, I read the journal of your doings with great interest. Before I forget, there is one little episode to which, as it apparently interested you at the time, I should like to refer as it may help you in unraveling what was apparently a mystery to you at the time. You mentioned the occurrence of a small white thread-like object in the end of one of your fingers one day which you drew out with the aid of a needle & couldn’t understand what it was or how it got there. Being an economic zoologist (!) & interested in parasites it occurred to me that the thing was very probably a parasitic worm. I think it must have been a Filaria as the small worms occur in the human being in Oriental countries in the manner you mentioned. I have taken the liberty of making a note at the bottom of the page of the journal in which you mention the episode as to this probability, & when the journal finally gets into your hand you may find it. I hope it wasn’t very presumptuous on my part?54 I spent the Xmas vacation, partly in London at the B.M. & partly in Warwickshire where I had a very enjoyable holiday. During the vacation I had a room partitioned off in the old ‘mouse room’ & it is now quite the nicest (excuse the word) & most comfortable room in the whole building. With my own work & economics work I am very busy now, although I have practically no demonstrating to do – have so far only done about two half days – and have given about six lectures – all my time to myself to research. That reminds me there is one important matter which I must not forget as it is one of the chief reasons for writing (!) although I believe Dr. Hoyle will also have written concerning it. It is with reference to those most beautiful fossil insects you sent to the museum. Dr. H.55 suggested to me that if I liked I could describe them, that is, if no one in Japan was already doing the same. As comparatively little has been done in the groups of Fossil insects which you sent I should very much like to have the opportunity of working at some of the forms such as you sent, e.g. fossil mosquitoes & other diptera, as you may know the chief groups of fossil insects which have been studied are the Orthoptera – cockroaches etc (carboniferous) very little has been done on the fossil diptera. But of course if someone in Japan is working up the Japanese

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forms, I should not – If, however, you are unable to find that anyone is looking at these forms – could you send me some more from the same formation & I will do them together with the few specimens you have already sent? ... or I will do these alone if you cannot obtain others. Dr. H. has already shown them at the Lit & Phil. (I was away at the time) & I roughly described them for him for the Proceedings56 – & we thought it would be best to write to you about them before describing them in detail. I must confess that they are most interesting & important additions. So will you let me know what to do in the matter & I shall be very grateful & very pleased to increase my knowledge in Fossil Insects. Oh! By the way, the lost is found. For months, in fact years! I had lost the negative of that photo which I took of Prof. Fujii up Pinus sylvestris in Delamere forest57 & of which I promised you a copy. I couldn’t give you a copy because I couldn’t find the negative. On my moving & clearing out operations a week or two ago I discovered it with several others (of you). If you like I will send you out a copy & one for the Herr Professor – or if you prefer will keep it till you return. I went up into the Lake district last week to Thirlmere where I am attacking the attack of a sawfly pest which has ravaged 250 acres of larches in the Manchester Corporation Waterworks Estate. I believe I told you about it. The plantations are all on the sides of the mountains & fells and the weather this visit was the worst I have ever had up there – snow & blizzards. After I came away the mains in the Keswick Line were derailed by the snow. The weather was too much for me. The worst being that the day after I returned, that is, last Saturday, (it is Thursday today) I was laid on to my back with acute muscular rheumatism in the dorso-lumbar region. I am now convalescent! It has been an awful week. Seems like a month. It is the first time that I have been “laid up” for nine years. (This reads amusingly!) but I shall go back to college, so the doctor says, on Monday & I say – “Gott sei dank” I suppose you heard about the huge bequest which had been left to the Botanical Department – Good fortune isn’t the word!58 I have recently read the history of Japan, which I suppose you will

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know quite well. It was most fascinating & remarkable. The Japanese are really a wonderful people. I should think you will be quite sorry to get back to England – for some things. Well, I must not keep you any longer as you have much to do other than read my drivel. Please let me know concerning ‘Die Fossilinsecten’ With kindest regards & good wishes for the best of success. Yours very sincerely, C. Gordon Hewitt

[Stopes to Hewitt, draft letter] Koishikawa. Ku, Tokio 19th April ’08 My dear Mr. Hewett [sic] I saw Prof. Yokoyama59 yesterday (the wily man didn’t write) & he assured me he was not working at the fossil insects, also that none of his students were, & he would be interested to hear of something being done with them – so you are free to fire away as soon as you like. When I hear from Dr. Hoyle about the museum, I will prepare to go to the place in the summer & hunt for you for a day or two.60 It is about a 12 hrs journey to the place, but it is not really far & I am glad to go again, as I liked it very much the last time. _____ I got a letter from Dr. Hoyle the other day, via Siberia … so written not very long ago; & he just mentions two facts, with no details, for he said he knew more, & did not like to go on as you say. He told me your cough is serious, & that your betrothal is broken.61 Don’t think me cruel to write of it – I do so hoping it may, in a way, ease you a little, for I remember so well when I was in agony, how thoughtful everyone was to avoid speaking of my sorrow, so that no one touched the subject & how all the time I was aching with the loneliness of

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it & longed for some one to lay their hand on mine & say, tell me all about it – I have been through two terrible times in my life, one of them I am not quite through I fear & I would do any thing I could to save you from what I suffered. All I can do is – write a letter! It won’t save you anything, but if you feel as I have felt it may do a little towards a substitute for the talk I ached for. Perhaps I am foolish to write without knowing more of the details – […] Your health seems to me less serious than the broken betrothal, tho’ I fancy it will be the cause of it. Of course you will get well, don’t listen to the croaking nonsense of doctors. You with your strong body will conquer any ridiculous little bacteria that may have fancied it a suitable abode. Go in for fresh air, & sunshine (an easy prescription in Manchester, isn’t it?) Cold water & milk & you will be all right. My father was about 25 when he was told one lung was completely gone – he died of something else 25 years later, & all his life his voice & lungs were the most splendidly powerful I ever knew. It is the broken betrothal for which I grieve. Of course, it she thinks it right to break it & chooses to do so, then I can say nothing – but for you the deepest sympathy. But if you, out of any mistaken notions of chivalry are breaking it – I have very much to say to you … Don’t do it, don’t, don’t. To a woman who deeply loves a man, a broken betrothal is as death itself – indeed it is worse, for death we believe means either dreamless sleep, or an all embracing comprehension, but a broken betrothal is an endless agony of pain, of constant little reminding pains that turn very simple daily duty & pleasure into torture. What matter if (supposing an impossibly bad case) you were to die a month, even day after you were married? That month, that day, are so precious they cannot be spared out of your lives. Do you remember Isolde?, flying to the man she loves to die in his dead arms.62 A great love is so much greater than any mere incident of physical sickness or death; & at the same time is so dependent on the physical form of the beloved that it is torture to think of him sick or dying outside ones arms. I speak as a woman – but Tristan, you remember, had only the thought of Isolde on his death bed, longed only for her coming. Nothing is great enough to interfere with great love. I do not know of course how strong your love was, but I fancied I saw in your face the promise of a great & beautiful love – & it has hurt me to think of it lying with broken wings – I love lovers so.

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Of course all your scruples are about the future generation – obviously you are enough of a scientist to know you must have no children63 – but children are more or less of an incident in marriage, the main thing is the love of the two, & that you have no right to sacrifice so long as (or I should say if) you have the deep love of the woman who is your mate. As your mate only is a [future] possible for her, as her mate only can you live – Dear lad, I know in cities & in England these things get hidden under questions of income & social position & suitability & health & all sorts of disfiguring garments – but the body & soul at the bottom of it all is that the real deep love of a man & a woman is so vital, so glorious, so holy, that nothing, should make them break their loving & betrothal even were one or both to die the night of the marriage. Of course if the trial weakens or breaks the love of either – then all I have said does not apply. But if you both love as greatly, such a sorrow should only hasten the marriage, for time becomes doubly precious. Don’t, out of a sense of conventional chivalry “release her”. _____ I hope you will understand all this aright and that your future will be highest above all. The sky looks so very blue after rain. Yours […] M.S.

[Hewitt to Stopes] 16. v. ’08 My dear Miss Stopes Your two letters came so closely together that I can reply to both now. First with regard to work. Which I always place before everything else. I have seen Smith Woodward64 this week and he says the B.M. will be willing to buy what fossil insects you may get: he also informed me that they were buying those wh: you have already sent.65 When more are obtained I can work at them. One thing however I should mention, if you send anything at all to the B.M. or this museum you should send the

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complete impression & not one side of the impression to the B.M & the other here as you have done with the first lot!66 Do you think on those terms that the B.M will buy what you get, that you can go again to the place? I am afraid I am too ‘Honey-broke’ or I would send off £5 at once to you to go again & get me what you could. But I did what I thought was the next best thing. And now with regard to myself. In the first place I find that my reticence has produced misunderstanding. I have no tubercular trouble whatever. Through overwork, one of my lungs, which about nine years ago suffered from emphysema, instead of healing up releasing out as it should have done had I taken the necessary precautions instead of being embued with an intense love of my work which kept me from all outdoor exercise, has not done so, but is practically all fibrous tissue. So that I really have only one lung to get on with, but there is no tubercular disease about. I have a cough, the result of plurous degeneration. As I am, no insurance office would accept my life. Some might with a huge premium impossible for a person in my position to pay. You know and are well aware of the fact that it is considered that a man should not marry if he can’t insure, under such circumstances as mine. Consequently when after my illness in the spring & my feeling of crookedness I found out from my own doctor & a specialist the state of affairs I laid the case before Miss McN.67 & asked to be released. You must know by this time that everyone does not think like you do about things. I wish more people did. You are an idealist & things are viewed from a practical point of view which being the case one has to conform with the prevalent spirit. I hate conventions as much as anyone but they are a necessary adjunct of the present state of affairs. It would be a risk for any girl to marry me and I am unwilling that they should take on the risk, even if they wished to do so. My action may be regarded as selfish. If so, I cannot help it. This McN. is young & attractive & if men are what I take them to be she will not remain a spinster all her life. As for me, I have rescinded the greatest joy one can have, that of a mate. My work is now my mate, and with it I am very happy. So if you love such lovers you can still love me & my work. I have quite got over the first shock of the catastrophe & Miss McN. too for all appearances. You may say I didn’t really love her which opinion I can’t help.

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I must leave this letter as it is time to go, and I want to leave the subject. I dislike “skeletons & ghosts”. I have time to scribble a few lines more before going off to Cambridge in a few minutes where I shall spend a day or two. Last week I was asked to give a short lecture at the Royal Society Soirée on my fly work, which I did to a large audience. It seemed to be appreciated & the ‘Times’ was pleased to call it “highly instructive” so it probably amused someone. I spent last week-end with Miss Pratt68 at Silverdale & the weather provided a most enjoyable time. The county is simply glorious now. I was in the woods near your ancient haunt Alderley Edge yesterday & felt that life was worth living. I really think the sun is the most potent influence for happiness in the Universe. Do you remember Dr. Behn69 who had the Harding Fellowship last year & worked in the Payne Lab. a most peculiar kind of man. He has shot himself. It was rather a sad coincidence that Prof. Schuster communicated a paper by him to the R.S. last week but one. I suppose it was the result of his view of life. I am afraid there is not much news in this letter which is, as usually, very egotistical. Dr. Darbishire has taken a party of botany students [ & ] to Keswick for the week and (Friday to Tuesday) a new departure! I suppose you have heard (how often do you get that phrase in your letters?!) that Ashburne House have taken the Oaks & are going into it shortly under the wing of Miss Parkin.70 Fortunately they haven’t turned me out of my green house, though attempts were made! The new Botanical Dept. seems to be as much in the air as ever, also the new Professorship of Cryptorganic Botany. I don’t know when the appointment will be made. There are three professorships vacant now. Profs of Engineering, Prof. Cryptorganic Botany & Prof of Geology in place of Prof. Boyd Dawkins71 who is retiring this year, as if you would not know. I will send you the two photos of Prof. Fujii as you wish. You have already seen prints of the photos of yourself & gave orders for one at least to be destroyed. It was accordingly done and I hoped thereby that your vanity could be satisfied!

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I must go now. With kindest remembrances & again thanks for your last letter. Yours sincerely C. Gordon Hewitt P.S. Please don’t pull the skeleton out of the cupboard when next you write unless you feel you really must. Then I shan’t mind so much.

[Hewitt to Stopes] The University, Manchester 8th September 1908 My dear Miss Stopes I am sending you the long-promised enlargement of the photo72 which I took of Prof Fujii in Delamere Forest. I thought you would more than ever care to have it now. You will excuse the delay please; it was due to the fact that the negative was lost & I did not find it till recently during some domestic archaeological excavations. I intended to have it framed but thought you might like to subject it to Japanese treatment to be in keeping with the rest of your surroundings. I should like to see your new “little house of your own”. Why do you not illustrate the ‘Journal’ occasionally with photographs. How is your photography going on now? You appear to be taking photographs, from what you say, how do they ‘turn out’? I was very pleased to hear from Dr. Hoyle last week, in Dublin, that you had found some more fossil insects. Watson73 has just returned from a tour in the North of Scotland & the Orkneys & has brought back 26 species of fossil vertebrates – many which we have not got in the Museum & one which he thinks is new – He obtained a number of Palaeospondylus.74 I never knew such a person for finding things. My summer vacation has consisted of three weeks absence from college.

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I spent a fortnight ‘on tramp’ in the Lake District – walked over 280 miles which was really quite good for me considering my Rücksack weighed 21 lbs. I went really to inspect all the larch plantations, to work out the distribution of the Larch Sawfly which I am studying, as I believe, I told you. It has defoliated hundreds of acres & has already caused the death of hundreds of bees. Last week I spent in Dublin at the British Ass.75 But I came away on Saturday, before it was finished as I have much to do. To continue this egoistic screed. You will probably be interested to know that I have been put on an Inquiry which the Local Government Board have instituted to study the carriage of infection by flies. The public is now waking up after much hammering. Is there any opening in Japan for a young enthusiastic economic or ordinary common or garden zoologist as I know a man who is rather wearied of Manchester fogs. Please write when you have a few minutes to waste on Yours very sincerely C. Gordon Hewitt

[Hewitt to Stopes] The University, Manchester 21st Oct. ’08. My dear Miss Stopes I was very pleased to have your letter, even though it was a begging letter! I thought you had crossed my name off your list of correspondents. I am only too pleased to send you some of the pens. As I get them in boxes I am sending you about a dozen, when they are nearly done be sure to write to me for more & I shall be delighted to send you on a fresh supply. They are a gift & with them goes the hope for much success in your work.

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Figure 3.2 Photograph taken by Gordon Hewitt of Professor Kenjiro Fujii up

Pinus sylvestris in Delamere Forest, Cheshire, likely February 1905; sent to Stopes in Japan, after the letter sent 8 September 1908. On back: “Dr. Marie C. Stopes, with very kind remembrances from C.G.H.”

The fossil insects arrived quite safely & are very interesting.76 They are evidently fresh-water as there are a number, in fact the majority, of the aquatic larvae (F.W.) of the Sphemendae, allied to our present day Mayflies; also a great pupa etc. Could you send me some details of the position & if it is possible of the horizon. I think it must be the region from Miocene to Pleistocene, nearer the former, is that so?

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Have you sent any to the B.M. as I obtained Smith Woodward’s promise to purchase any you might send, as I believe I told you. When I have the opportunity I shall work them up but I am simply overhead in work – flies, food of birds, sawflies etc. etc. How am I? Alive, and as physically well, and I think, more so, than I should expect. I only work six days per week now & on the other day – Saturday I hunt with Beagles (on foot). This weekly exercise on the hills is the best thing I could do & the time devoted to it is certainly not wasted. Do you know Prof. Yamagawa?77 He wrote to me for a paper which I have written on House-flies & Public Health. The second part of my House-fly memoir is out & I hope to finish the third & last part by January, when I should say the “Te Deum” & apply for my D.Sc! But I must not bore you with what I am doing etc. I spent the last week-end in Cambridge & had a very enjoyable time, as you may guess. If I had independent means, I should go there. In a few years it will be the Biological centre of the world, take my word for it; they are collecting all the best people together, in Zoology, Agriculture, Tropical Medicine etc. at any rate, & I think in such work on heredity. I don’t know about the Botany.78 When are you thinking of coming home? You said you might possibly return via Canada for the British Association at Winnipeg.79 I shall not go to Winnipeg now as I find it will be more expensive than I had anticipated & I should prefer to spend the money in building myself a wooden bungalow upon the hills near Whaley Bridge: that is what I hope to do, when possible. With kindest regards, Yours very sincerely C. Gordon Hewitt Please don’t spell my name Hewett!

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[Hewitt to Stopes] Department of Economic Zoology, The University, Manchester 15th Nov. 1908 My dear Miss Stopes I expect that by this time you will have rec’d the photo. I am sorry that it was sent off some days after the letter owing to my forgetfulness. Some one has made a most serious charge against me which with all the zeal I can muster I absolutely deny – namely that I am getting spoiled, as a result of some little success. I do not know what tattler whispered it into your ear, all I can say that it was not a friend, as I have asked my two most intimate friends if they have noticed anything of the kind, as I thought I might have, unknowingly, displayed such a state of mind, and they deny it. If it were not that I really do care what certain of my friends think about me, I should not have taken any notice of your closing remark. If one’s work is well received, or even if it is not, one cannot help but be pleased with it, as a mother with a new born child, for if she was denied this pleasure, which I know many people misconstrue as conceit, why write at all, why not turn to selling newspapers or become a trainconductor? I think nothing of anyone who disparages or underestimates his or her80 own work, but when one’s work is commended by others who are competent judges then surely one may be allowed a certain amount of self-congratulation & pleasure. I know you will agree with me in this, or I have an absolutely wrong conception of your character. But that is not conceit in the usually accepted sense of the term, although it is literally conceit. And this should do away with the ‘being spoiled’ theory. If it were not for the fact you seem to have entertained a modicum of belief in the idea & should simply roar with laughter (as I did) & let the incident pass, but being ‘in a far country’ it is only fair to me (!) that you should hear the accused.

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I hear you are coming home early next year? Is that so? Because if you are I wish you would give me sufficient notice to commission you to obtain a certain small article81 before your return. I expect some one will have written to you during the past week & told you of the death of old Mr. R.D. Darbishire. He will be a tremendous loss to those who knew him personally as his friendship was so valuable. He wrote to me the same night that he had the ‘stroke’ which he really brought on himself by his customary doing things that he really ought not to do. I think Miss Dymes82 will miss him more than anyone does. Watson has very kindly given me a copy of your joint paper on ‘Coalballs’83 for which I also thank you. Beaucoup. The ‘militant’ group of the Suffrage movement are still militant, though at this moment they are quiescent owing, I think, to the fact that Mrs. & Miss C. Pankhurst are incarcerated in Holloway “for incitement” to violence.84 And that is all the news! With kindest regards, Yours v. sincerely, C. Gordon Hewitt

[Hewitt to Stopes] The University, Manchester 17th Dec. ’08 My dear Miss Stopes I have received the ants, your ant paper & letter & yesterday your last letter so that I feel that I am now in arrears with you. Concerning the ants. I was most interested in your account first in the Journal85 & then in the paper. Such ‘tent-building’ ants have been previously described from U. States (sub-tropical) & in one of two cases they (the ‘tents’) are rather similar to the Japanese specimens though I do not know of them being recorded from Japan, hence the interest & value of your paper. As to the species, so little has been done on ants that it is hard

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for even a specialist to decide, & I am far from being that. I am sending them across to the U.S. to Prof. Wheeler86 whom I know & who knows more than anyone about the tent-building ants. He may be able to name them. The question of ‘food bodies’ does not concern those tent builders. They build these peculiar structures to shelter the aphides both from enemies & from cold. In fact they are “cow-sheds”! & the Japanese ‘tents’ are interesting as they appear to be intermediate between the original form of tent & that which has been carried up the tree & has lost its connections with the earth. Yours appear to have passages from the Earth to the tent in the foliage. I suppose there is no great hurry to get the thing into print? So if you like, when I hear from Wheeler I will either incorporate the name in the text & alter the latter by the addition of historical reference & statements as to the nature & purpose of these shelters. If you should prefer that I should not carry out this grafting, deleting & patchworking scheme I will leave it as is & add a note at the end. Personally, as the paper & subject is of considerable interest I think the former course would be better & I think I could make it into quite a decent paper for you, and, as you know, I should be delighted to do it. (Conceit, you say?!) Send me a card as to the course I shall take. I think I should only have the one drawing if I were you, the photo is a mere silhouette & would not reproduce. I was surprised when I first learnt that you were coming home so soon. I was beginning to think that you would settle down there!! There is nothing I should prefer more than travelling; but in my case it would be foolish to leave a post in process of making. Travelling is alright if you are on “leave of absence” & have a post to come back to; that is how I intend to go away, when I do so. I don’t want to join the unemployed on my return! The man whom you mention has not yet appeared, I shall be delighted to do what I can, especially as they are friends of yours. The instruction concerning O.V.D. shall also be carried out! I don’t know why you & he have got across each other so much. I could never understand it. I suppose I am the most intimate friend that he has here. I grant that he has a great deal of Darbisherian peculiarity about him but he is very easy to get on with.

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I am looking forward to your return; there will always be a cup of tea for you in the afternoon in the zoo. lab: & a lunch whenever I may have the honour. We are having a performance of Milton’s “Samson Agonistes” by Mr. William Poel’s Company in the Whitworth Hall87 on Sat. Prof. Herford88 & I have arranged it, as Secretary I have been box-office manager, theatre manager, stage manager and general run-a-bout, in fact for the last few days I have done little else – thus we celebrate Milton’s Tercentenary. This letter will be rather late but not too late to wish you much happiness in 1909. What a change England will be to Japan! How restless you will be when you return – still you have lived & that is more than many of us do. By the way, before I forget & before it is too late – I want you to do me a favour. Will you get me a small image – 6 or 9 inches high of the Buddha; they have some very good ones in Japan, I know. I don’t know how much it will be, but if you will tell me I will send it on, so that you won’t be out of pocket as I know only too well how travelling expenses run away with ones slender means – it is only on that condition that I will let you get it for me. I hope you will come to Manchester as soon as you can on your return. With kindest remembrances, Yours very sincerely, C. Gordon Hewitt Don’t forget to send me a line per return about the ‘ant’ paper.

4 v

A Kiss in Canada Gordon Hewitt’s next surviving letter to Marie Stopes arrived in England after her visit to Canada on her way home from Japan in February of 1909. Of the two young scientists, Stopes was the first to visit Canada. There she was very warmly embraced, particularly in Toronto where she spoke publicly about her work in Japan. Her presentation gave her a sweet taste of international celebrity, as it was reported widely in the English-language press. Professor Hoyle kept his word and did in fact send her the promised introductions, though the list is unfortunately no longer included with the letter: “I have written your name on some cards & enclose a list of people to whom you can present them with a chance of success!”1 He also provided detailed travel advice concerning luggage, customs, and stop-offs: “Glacier & Laggan if you can spare them a day each. Banff is distinctly inferior.” Hoyle also promised to send “Baedecker’s guides to Canada & the USA to meet you at Victoria, B.C.” and insisted on financing her trip to any extent necessary so that she would not forgo any experience due to lack of funds: “I have no fear about ultimate repayment. I could send you money to Toronto.” Kenjiro Fujii and Joji Sakurai, the dean of science at the Imperial University in Tokyo,2 saw Stopes off on her crossing of the Pacific, bidding her farewell aboard the Empress of Japan.3 Stopes arrived in Vancouver, not Victoria as Hoyle had anticipated, on 5 February and began her train journey across the country.4 Once in Toronto she stayed for three nights, from 10 to 12 February, with Dr Helen MacMurchy, a former president of the Women’s University Club, which hosted a talk by Stopes on 10 February at Annesley Hall, Canada’s first university residence built for women.

Figure 4.1 Marie Stopes with Baron Sakurai, dean of the Imperial University in Tokyo (standing far right), and Professor Fujii (seated beside Stopes) on board the Empress of Japan leaving to cross the Pacific to Vancouver, January 1909.

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The next day she addressed the Women’s Canadian Club, of which MacMurchy was also a member, at the Toronto Conservatory of Music on the topic of her “Travels in Japan.” As reported in Toronto’s Globe, Stopes was introduced by MacMurchy – who by then was besotted with the young scholar: A much interested body was the Women’s Canadian Club yesterday afternoon, as they listened to what Dr. Marie Stopes told them of her experiences in Japan during the last eighteen months. The lady, who had been commissioned to seek and had found a “missing link plant” for the Royal Society of Great Britain, was young and good to look upon and possessed a graceful manner and a musical voice that without any apparent raising could be heard perfectly in the hall. It may be interesting to know that an artistic soft white gown, with touches of burnt orange embroidery at the neck and on the net bertha and a white girdle knotted in front is not incomptaible [sic] with researches for coy fossils several million years in age. Miss Stopes also wore a black beaver hat, which drooped about a rather slender pale face, and long white gloves. In introducing her, Dr. Helen Macmurchy [sic] spoke of her academic honors and work in the cause of science, and predicted that the name of the speaker of the day would be even more widely known in the future.5 Stopes had asked her mother to provide introductions – “if you have any” – to people she knew in Canada.6 Although MacMurchy acted as Stopes’s primary host, the connection to the Toronto Women’s Canadian Club had been made through another member, the poet Helena Coleman, who first “discovered” Stopes through her mother, the writer and women’s rights advocate Charlotte Carmichael Stopes. MacMurchy is a controversial character in Canadian science. A medical doctor and author who was granted many honours in her lifetime, she is now chiefly regarded as the most infamous promoter in Canada of eugenics, a form of scientific racism with proponents across the political spectrum. In 1906 the Ontario government appointed her “inspector of the feebleminded,” and in a few years she established herself as Canada’s leading eugenicist, her actions resulting in the forced and wrongful sterilization of

Figure 4.2 Dr Helen MacMurchy, on her graduation from the University of Toronto, 1901.

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immigrant, disabled, Indigenous, and poor women, with her gaze especially trained on unwed mothers. MacMurchy’s most quoted statement, from a 1910 government publication, was: “when the mother works, the baby dies.”7 Although ideas about eugenics were in play among Stopes’s colleagues in botany and ecology as well as among members of the suffrage movement,8 it may have been MacMurchy who introduced her to the more “negative” side of the eugenics movement (particularly with regard to the prevention of “degenerate” babies). But in a burst of letters to Stopes following their short and intense period of acquaintance, MacMurchy’s only reference to her work as inspector involves a visit to the Six Nations of the Grand River Reserve. According to MacMurchy, the visit took place at the invitation of “head women,” who wanted her “to come and tell all the women that ‘It’s wiser being good than bad.’” Founded by Thayendanegea (Joseph Brant), Six Nations was (and remains) one of Canada’s largest reserves by population and the only one in which all six Iroquois Nations continue to live together. Within, there were followers of both Longhouse and Christian traditions. The politics and moral tension of that moment may have been deeply complex in the traditionally matriarchal community.9 In 1909 government policy framed Indigenous peoples as a dying race, so the eugenics targets for MacMurchy in this period were typically poor immigrant women, such as Eastern European women, whom she saw as particularly prone to “feeble-mindedness.” If MacMurchy’s account is true – that she did not coercively intervene but was invited – it is uncertain which “head women” would have been concerned about “moral conditions.” The language of good and bad was most likely a result of Christian influence. Having a baby before marriage was emphatically “bad” in MacMurchy’s view. At the same time, she was staunchly against birth control, as she deemed it “unnatural,” a position that, in the coming years, would have put her directly at odds with the woman on whom she had recently lavished affection. In her surviving letters to Stopes, MacMurchy’s main theme involved the ups and downs of consuming love rather than her eugenics aspirations. In sympathizing with Stopes over her broken betrothal, she described Fujii as “false & cruel.” By the time Stopes met MacMurchy, she seems to have already decided that her future husband need not necessarily be a botanist but

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should fit the category of an English “Sir Galahad.”10 Or did she perhaps consider that someone else could provide the affection she needed? MacMurchy wrote to her amorously: “You shall call me Minkie … the fur on my little Canadian coat that gave me my name with you? … And was I the only person who kissed you in Canada!” But Minkie’s letters soon began prodding the younger woman, seeking reassurance, to know if she “meant it all.” Biographers Ruth Hall and June Rose acknowledge Stopes’s bisexuality; it was not, however, an identity Stopes herself embraced. Indeed, although she wrote, “Why do I always fall in love with women?” in her journal on 5 March 1908 (having “fallen” for a beautiful American woman at a ball at the British Embassy the previous month), it seems she was writing more transparently than daringly, without a sense of how “loving women” might be interpreted by others, even the women themselves. “No one has bewitched me in this way since my school-days,” she recorded on 28 February, likely referring to passionate attachments from her youth, including a fondness for a special teacher of natural history, Miss Clotilde von Wyss.11 Hall reflects on these relationships with the insight that adolescent passion of this sort would continue to surface in Stopes’s adult life; her later total rejection of homosexuality in men and women, Hall conjectures, was “all the more violent for her own unacknowledged penchant.”12 MacMurchy compelled Stopes to confront her feelings and seek to understand herself; but the outcome, as Stopes worked through her own psychological states in semi-fictional form, reads more like denial. In “A Man’s Mate,” the novel Stopes finished in 1910, an older female character falls in love with Marjorie, the young woman scientist, flattering and pursuing her with “dog-like devotion.” Although Marjorie does not return this love, she is grateful for the experience of being thought wonderfully beautiful and extraordinary – a swan after all. Stopes wrote: “This is the chief part Frau Braun played in Marjorie’s life, the stimulus she gave stirred the unconscious woman within her, still sleeping, awaiting the future.” MacMurchy’s last deeply affectionate letter is dated 29 March 1909. Significant rifts in their attitudes toward women’s work and birth control might well have caused a break in any potential longer-term serious relationship between the two women. In any case, reading MacMurchy’s letters alongside Hewitt’s allows us a stronger sense of what Stopes may have been longing for at this point of her life, as well as her models for friendship – specifically

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a form of platonic love in which the pursuit of eros and romance were not out of place. On another level, the fact that Stopes apparently chose to keep MacMurchy’s letters addressed to her, but not her own drafted or copied replies, points to another facet of her self-understanding: her expressed feelings for MacMurchy were not part of her story that she wished to perpetuate, especially toward the end of her life. After visiting Toronto, Marie travelled to Montreal and met with MacMurchy’s friend the physician Dr Maude Abbott, as well as Dr George Adami and Professor David Pearce Penhallow, all of McGill University. Penhallow was a fellow palaeontologist, likely to have been on Hoyle’s list of “mustsees.”13 Penhallow had lived in Japan (1876–80), during which time he helped to establish the Imperial College of Agriculture at Sapporo. Both Stopes and Penhallow were interested in the Ainu, the Indigenous people of Japan.14 Penhallow had been appointed by John William Dawson, the principal of McGill, and Dawson (who also trained Abbott) introduced him to the study of fossil plants. This became a specialty of Penhallow, whose research settled a long-standing debate that “resulted in the reclassification in 1889 of Nematophytons (which Dawson had called Prototaxites in 1856) as ancestors of modern algae rather than of forest vegetation, as Dawson had originally thought.”15 There is a slight possibility that Penhallow showed Stopes some of the fossils that Dawson had collected in New Brunswick, which later became the basis of her 1911 commission from the Canadian Geological Survey.16 This assignment would also involve correcting Dawson’s earlier work. Penhallow also may have been unwell and thus cut their meeting short: from MacMurchy’s remarks, it seems that Stopes’s visit with him was, for some reason, unsatisfactory.17 After a visit to Yale on her way to board the Lusitania in New York, Stopes sailed back to England, arriving in Liverpool. Upon her return, her mother hosted a welcome-home reception for her (an event reported even in the Globe). Hewitt sent Marie a note expressing disappointment that, not having been informed of her return date, he was unable to go to meet her, and regrettably couldn’t attend the reception. Indeed, Stopes seems to have cooled in her communications with him, perhaps having discovered through their mutual friends that he was betrothed again, this time to Edith Mary Garner, an artist four years his senior, who had studied painting at the Slade School of Art in London.

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Stopes’s correspondence with MacMurchy had begun to cool, as well, and the gush soon slowed to a trickle. In her catalogue of “Things Sent to People” during her travels, Stopes used the pet name “Minkie” in recording her letter written on the Lusitania. Once home, though, Stopes employed the less familiar “MacMurchy.”18

[Helen MacMurchy to Stopes] February 18th 1909 11.25 pm My darling, That is what I have been wanting to call you ever since the Express took you away from me to Montreal. In that moment I knew I loved you, when I found it in my heart to take you into my arms and kiss you. It hurt my heart all day every day that I had let you go till your dear letter came on Tuesday. Do you think you will ever know how glad I was to get it? “Pleased” – You touched a very appreciative spot in any Toronto heart when you liked us better than Montreal! We amuse ourselves with these rivalries. I was so glad you saw my dear gifted Dr. Abbott19 and Dr. Adami20 – And I did appreciate your remarks on Prof. Penhallow.21 I know people also are like that!” You shall call me Minkie – or anything you will – I think Minkie is quite pretty: Was it the fur on my little Canadian coat that gave me my name with you? – I meant to tell you that the Peterborough musk-rat from which the coats are made is a kind of beaver (Castor Canadensis) so you see it is real Canadian. Well you really have me – Dear? – I am so glad I am old enough to be your adopted mother – I can give you – or rather you have it already – the love I would have given my own children – and it will all be yours – no one to share it with you. “To have got you crowns all.” – You have ‘got me’ – dear – and what a sweet thing that you knew that you had got me – and were a little glad about it.

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Your messages were much appreciated. I have given them to many people who have spoken of you & they were all so charmed to get your message. I was at the meeting of the Committee of the Women’s Canadian Club yesterday and Lady Moss22 and Mrs. Falconer23 and every one of them asked me to tell you specially how delighted everyone had been with your lecture & how charmed with what you said & how you said it. No day has passed sweet without people speaking to me most highly of your lectures and I am sure half a dozen people speak to me of it and of you every day. I am so glad for you, Dear. So sorry about that Railway accident. Were you really in New Haven Dear? – And what did you do in New York? ______ Your other note – the little one from the Lusitania – came today. I can hardly speak to you about it. Darling – it meant so much to me. I am writing tonight to the Martha Washington,24 where I sent my first letter to you. I think you should have it. Dear – I want you to see how, before I could know that the affection I had for you would be returned & even accepted – I wanted to offer it to you. It is only right that you should know that, Dear. There will be true lovers for you, darling – instead of that false & cruel one – You are sure to be both admired & liked – and loved – by many men – and one will be the right one. He will come. Yes dear – I will read again about the Ugly Duckling. You never would have been ugly – but you are going to come to great things. I meant all I said and more Dear – I have just sent you a marconigram25 to say so. How I love that great invention! My message was at Camperdown in Nova Scotia about 11:00 tonight and now it is seeking your good ship away out on the great deep. Wonderful! I hope it will reach you. I wonder if the steward will carry it to your cabin tonight or whether they will give it to you at breakfast. And I claim you for mine, Dear, forever, as you said – I shall always have a share in you – and in what you do – you dear genius. I know what it means to battle against disapproval. I have too – But your manners are charming. No one could make any mistake about that.

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All we say is in confidence – Dear – I think you will find something about that in the Martha Washington letter. Midnight – and mail-time. It must be goodbye – And was I the only person who kissed you in Canada! You darling – what am I to call you? Ever yours affectionately Helen MacMurchy

[MacMurchy to Stopes] February 24th 1909 My Darling, It has been a little hard to make up my mind to write to you, Dear, tonight. I have a great sense of how busy you will be – with little time for letters & I think I wanted to ask you if you “meant it all”! Not that I have not an instinctive trust in you, – and a deep trust at that – a trust below passing events – and above them. Not that I ever doubted you, any more than you doubted me. But you know how it is, Dear. You felt it too – in your cabin – was it in your cabin? – on the “Lusitania”, when you wrote that sweet note – very precious & delectable to me. You see I know so little about you, Dear – and yet so much. I know you mean it all – I know you knew what you were giving me – and yet I want you to tell me once more. I have been following you with such interest these days. Your ship reached Queenstown on Monday afternoon – rather late, I think. And I pictured you going on to Liverpool on Tuesday morning & taking the Express for London and all. I wonder who met you first, of all the people you know, and if they saw much difference in you. For you have come back a very different person from the person who went away. You have won your spurs and golden ones, – three times, D.Sc. & Ph.D & now you

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are in all but the name F.R.S.26 I think they will make room for you in that august Society. They must – you belong there! It is a serious reflection on them, on the Society – if it is not able to include one who has done such valuable work as you have done. Have patience – You will see all the doors open one day. You are at the beginning, I think, of a great career. Your gifts are so unusual that the only wonder I have is, that they have remained comparatively unrecognized. I suppose that is very largely on account of your youth. But what an immense advantage that youth, and your great capacities for physical endurances, are going to be to you! Did you rest at all on shipboard? – I hope so – And did you get my marconigram? I loved sending it to you across the thousand miles of sea. Two weeks ago tonight you were in this room – for I am writing upstairs just before going to bed – and I, then, did not know I was going to love you and “adopt” you, within two days or less. You are a dear. The people in Toronto are still saying the kindest and most appreciative things about you and your address. You should hear how charming the women all think you and your manners are. Did I tell you how much I like the way you spoke to my Father. I appreciated it very much. It was one of the nicest things I saw you do. Tomorrow I have to leave town by early train and go to Brantford – then drive 12 miles to address the women of the Six Nations Indian Reserve, the largest in Canada, at the Council House. Think of that! No – I never did it before! It seems that moral conditions are bad and some of the “head women” thought they wanted me to come and tell all the women that “It’s wiser being good than bad.” The English mail will close before I return on Friday & so I am writing tonight. Goodnight Dear. Tell me what I am to call you. Very affectionately yours – Helen – or should I say Minkie!

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[Hewitt to Stopes] The University, Manchester 26. ii. ’09 My dear Miss Stopes I was very disappointed that I did not know when you arrived in England until I heard from Watson the day following or I should certainly have gone over to Liverpool to welcome you back to sordid Old England. Especially as I shall not be able to come up to town to assist in the official ceremony on Monday.27 But you will let me know when you are next coming to this collection of huts people called Manchester. So that all I can now say is – Welcome! Ever yours, sincerely C. Gordon Hewitt

[MacMurchy to Stopes] March 15th 1909 Well – Best Beloved – for I have not quite made up my mind what to call you and you have not helped me to know yet either – Well Best Beloved I have just written fourteen letters, which brings me up to date – so that I could pretend to myself that I have a perfect right to write to you – though it is 11:00. I was glad to get your note, written in the Manchester Express – Don’t I distinctly remember when I went to Manchester in the Summer of 1907 – And just to think I didn’t know you then at all! I am delighted to hear of your nice visits in New York – All Americans almost are so kind & hospitable. And aren’t you the clever thing – off to Yale and all that. You certainly are a born traveller & a person to whom adventures will flock – couldn’t help it. Yes – New York – especially up by the River – is growing beautiful & more so every year.

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How are the new frocks, Dear – I would love to see them. And shall I write to your mother in answer to her last note & tell her how charmed everyone here was with you? – Or shall I not? I am sending you the news with your lectures (they put it in badly) and a paper from Tennessee which I saw by the merest chance – let us congratulate you on the Athenaeum article28 & on the way it has spread your fame to Tennessee. Do tell me Doctor dear when you have an article anywhere – and do tell me about the verse. Please do, I love to be entrusted with secrets. And is the sky like lead – Dear! I know that so well [it] gets like that. But not nearly so often as when I was younger. You made my sky very blue. My secret – “To have got you crowns all”: I am so glad you knew you had got me: You have. But don’t you know that to me – much dovetails – “To have got you crowns all” – Your sky will clear. Everything will come to you. It will take a while, but it will come. You will win your way to a great place! Ever yours affectionately, Helen MacMurchy

[MacMurchy to Stopes] March 17th 1909 My Dear – I am intensely amused at myself – I who have had “no time to write letters” – for years! And more I not only find reasons but absolutely cannot seem to escape the necessity of writing to you. I wrote to you by the Cunard Mail last Wednesday under protest on account of my feeling that you were too busy to be writing me & that therefore I must not write you. Still I stoutly argued with myself that I must answer your letter, which gave me such pleasure. And now tonight, I want be the first to tell you that you have, by a unanimous vote, been elected an Honorary Member of our University Women’s Club. I had the honour of proposing your name & it was seconded & supported by Miss Addison, Mrs. Coleman &

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Mrs. Hunter.29 We have only one other Honorary Member – Mrs. Coleman – and she was made so when her book – “Songs & Sonnets”30 was published. Do you remember picking it up from my table in the few minutes you were in my room once – it has been been very full of thoughts of you since – that room! By the way I have begged Mrs. Coleman to let me send you “Songs & Sonnets” but she is obdurate so far. Dear I also wanted to tell you that the Women’s Canadian Club of Toronto want to send you £5, as an acknowledgement of all the travelling to Toronto & all, that you did partly for their benefit. All their speakers so far have been paid that sum for travelling expenses – and even though you were intending to come to Toronto, that makes no difference at all – And we want to have the pleasure of making this slight acknowledgment of your kindnesses to us, & the very great benefit that the interest & charm of your address was to the club. Now, – I am just full of other things to say to you – That is one of the strongest proofs of affinities with me – I cannot come to the end of all that I have to say & all that I know I have in common with you. For instance I have a feeling that all your letters are only half answered. That was such a pretty letter you wrote me from the C.P.R. Empress of Japan – I am so glad I kept it. And I wish I could think that any of my letters ever would give you the thrill of joy that the New Haven one of yours gave me. I hoped you were going to like me a little – and after I read that letter I knew. But I did not dare to think you were really going to love me a little till the “Lusitania” letter came and then – another – but I could scarcely believe it – it seemed perhaps you would. You are over the worst difficulties of your career, I think. You have “made good” – as our neighbour T.R.31 says – And you will be sure to go on. There are many who will appreciate you and glory in your great endowments – and in your achievements which will be great also – or I am no judge at all! Men & women too, will like you & admire you & make way for you. But bide your time – dear. It will come – wait for it. Nothing is gained but desire for haste – is it not so? – and great things come slowly. You are such a dear attractive thing! Tell me this moment how many adopted mothers you have! – no wonder they are many!

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Next comes your letter from the ship – which I had been longing for. The sea is so wide. You had a bad time on board, Dear – and I am just afraid that you are a little hard on your dear self. I know you have enormous endurance but a scientist like you should know that there are limits to human endurance. You were a Dear and sent me those letters from the Manchester house. I appreciated it greatly when you were “rushed” I know how hard that must have been. I sent an addressed & American stamped enveloped to the um 32 & they ought to send the letters on to you. It is not anything. Let me know if you have it not yet & I will write them again. Dear – you said I was good to you. No – I am just wishing I could do it over. You see at first I hoped to have you in my own house. Then Mrs. Coleman really wanted you much to go there & she not only had the best request – having “discovered” you through your mother, but she could also do more for you than I – especially when Prof. Coleman33 is so nice. And when Fate gave me my chance – I gave you the wrong bath towels! – as Bessie34 has more than once reminded me. And for supper at the Queen’s that night I gave you the only two things you do not eat (I found that out after!) So just think of it! But you were so charming that night at the Queen’s that I remember that and forgot my own shortcomings. I will do better. How is the sky now, Dear – is it black or is it blue? Blue, I hope. And it will be blue, whatever it may be now. I was going to tell you what I have at – but this letter’s too long & I hear the clocks for midnight – Perhaps I may send you a newspaper. Did you get the Government Depart. that went broke help? Goodnight, Darling – Ever Yours Minkie

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[MacMurchy to Stopes] March 29th 1909 My Dear – I cannot bear to write to you in haste, & yet it must be that or not at all by this mail – for the ‘Lusitania’ – a ship which I shall always connect a little bit with thoughts of you – takes the mail which closes early tomorrow & this is my one & only chance to catch it. It is nearly midnight & doctor’s hours are long, but if I were asleep I should know what I wanted to say to you, Darling. And the letter of March 4th wasn’t half so warm as the previous ones! Then this one shall make up for it, dear – I remember that letter & remember first how I felt. You know it was a bit hard for me after you went away. Before I knew it, I had given you your place in my heart & it hurt to let you go – and it hurt to think about you. Then when your letters came & I found you really did care – perhaps – I thought very much about you. When I came to think it all over a good deal, it occurred to me that I had let myself think your letters were more directed to me personally than they really were. And I wrote that letter of March 4th to make it easier for you to let me see that I had taken too much meaning out of all the dear things you said – if it were so. But it wasn’t so – Dear – How did you manage to care for me as much as I cared for you. So you see. I was not vexed or cross – nor had I forgotten you would not post letters at sea! I shut myself up a little – And I hope you won’t mind that I did. It seemed too good to be true that you really cared for me. That was a dear letter you wrote me & I know you are right about the reason we are a little shy about ourselves & each other. Especially was I glad you told me about the “transatlantic gush.” Infall and see, Dear!35 “How can I step into so important a place so soon” – Don’t you know that people make their places & so step in. You made your place with me, Dear – I could not help recognizing you for what you were. How does the Royal Society paper come on? I know it is much much work. And I am so interested about the Linnean Society.36 Tell me about it.

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The lovely English Spring will be in the land when you read this. I hope you will have the time to reply to it. This is a poor letter – Darling – and rather too personal – I must try to get past that. It is not much of an answer to yours. But next Sunday I shall try to find time to write you one not quite so personal – and I must answer your Mother’s kind note too. Goodnight, Dear – Always affectionately yours Helen MacMurchy

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The One Little Sin After some restlessness, Stopes decided to return to Manchester to take up a lectureship in Fossil Botany created for her by her mentor Professor Weiss. Finally, in April, Hewitt sent her the redrafted paper on ants, based on her materials but with his own corrections and additions. I feel a great reluctance in coupling my name with that of so renowned a person, according to the daily & weekly press, but am quite willing to sink into significance [sic?] even to the extent of deletion should you prefer it. It matters not to me whether it is a joint paper or one by yourself! I once resolved never to write a joint paper with anyone – a resolve which I intend to keep – this is the one small exception – the one little sin – & one which amuses me. Despite his expressed willingness to not be named, he was also making it clear (despite the missing “in” before “significance”) that he wanted his name on it: he was prepared to commit just this “one little sin.” At the same time, Hewitt underlined his recent betrothal by giving Garner’s address as a temporary return address. Again, the terrain had shifted and his availability as a potential lover was dispelled just as his suitability as a professional colleague and friend was enhanced. Yet, the mention of “sin” perhaps betrayed other feelings – and the “eternal ego” again reared its head. The joint paper was completed just before he received his DSc degree. In asking her if she wished to append her degrees (the standard practice to which she evidently assented), he intimated that his decision to remain “degreeless” was almost

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a choice, or at least that her decision to appear comparatively more decorated was her choice. The paper, merging her discovery and understanding of botany with his knowledge of insects, was a model of the kind of ecological conversations encouraged at the Pleasant Friday Afternoons. Appropriately, Hewitt suggested that a good venue for the paper might be Tansley’s New Phytologist, a plan he had discussed with Hoyle months earlier. However, unbeknownst to Hewitt, Stopes had already sent her solo draft to Tansley the previous December, as a letter to her from Tansley indicates: “the article on the ant-inhabited planet … no doubt I shall like it when I get it!”1 There is no record of Tansley’s rejection of the paper, but the authors now considered other options. Over the next month, while preparing to present their paper to the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society, Stopes and Hewitt again became closer. As they continued to meet afterward, their growing intimacy became a shared secret in public view: “You touched me on the shoulder & I felt what you thought.” The delivery of the joint paper marked a change in the dynamic of the relationship. From that day forward, Hewitt stopped addressing his letters to “Miss Stopes.” Unlike MacMurchy, he didn’t implore her “what should I call you?” but thereafter left the addressee line blank, thereby sustaining ambiguity. Stopes appears to have followed suit. Other significant changes were afoot that month. Hewitt had applied for work abroad earlier in the spring, perhaps inspired by learning firsthand of Stopes’s Canadian adventures. There were other sources of encouragement, however. Hewitt had also been in contact with North American entomologists such as L.O. Howard, who supported his candidacy for a new posting within the Canadian government: the role of Dominion Entomologist.2 The Canadian preferential tradition of drawing its scientific elite from the British community rather than the Americas was well established – Hewitt was one among many who benefited from the policy.3 Hewitt accepted the opportunity in May and the following month the Globe announced that he would be appointed for September 1909. In terms of expertise and experience, Hewitt would not have been the first choice. The Americans already had an entrenched tradition of economic entomology and a much larger pool of qualified applicants could be drawn from south of the border. As Charlotte Sleigh writes:

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f r i e n d b e l ove d European colonization and the westward expansion of the immigrant population in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries left unprecedented environmental change in their wake. New species were brought in, ecosystems disrupted and monocultures imposed across the land. Imported insects were introduced to the extant flora, while native species flourished on the new crops brought by the colonists. A rapid succession of fresh agricultural problems was thus thrust upon Americans that Europeans did not have to face in the same way.4

Yet Hewitt had experience in England with the larch sawfly, a recent invader of North America that was currently decimating forests in Eastern Canada. And besides his Britishness, his university credentials may also have placed him ahead of other applicants as the Department of Agriculture under Minister Sydney Fisher began a new practice of hiring people with academic training.5 Addressing Stopes as “beloved friend” in their increasingly intimate correspondence, Hewitt began once more to discuss relationships with Stopes: again, the focus was his love life. Mirroring earlier analyses of his relation to Molly McNicol, they discussed Stopes’s impressions of his new fiancée, Edith Garner. And again, Stopes took the side of love, encouraging him to marry while he could, “to pluck the flower of life.” He remained hesitant: “In this, the greatest thing in life almost, one must look before one takes such a leap.” At the end of August, Stopes came up to Manchester, accepting Hewitt’s invitation to “discuss the weather.” They talked about the work of novelist Maurice Hewlett6 and his new book, Letters to Sanchia upon Things as They Are. Hewlett traces a fictional relationship, through letters, between a Mr John Maxwell Senhouse, an ex-Cambridge errant knight botanist enthusiastically in support of women’s equality, and a young woman, Sanchia Percival, “in the throes of her power to come,” who, a short three weeks after meeting, “were eternal friends, and had sworn it to each other, no doubt with the appropriate ritual.”7 The vow given on bended knee by the sweet knight seems to have been enacted in some similar ritual between Hewitt and Stopes on that August evening, and her unpublished novel, “A Man’s Mate,” offers clues to its nature.

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Indeed, a chapter of “A Man’s Mate” may be the “writing” she refers to as “a fresh & delicious piece of written truth” sent along with the “Sanchia,” the plausible “golden page” describing the scene they had just enacted. The friendship of Marjorie and Kenneth – the two protagonists, both identified as English scientists – survives intact following a crisis in trust, and Marjorie declares her promise, a sacred promise of true friendship: “between us two shall lie always only truth, & … if any change comes in my feeling, I will tell you of it.” Kenneth returns the promise and, exclaiming of his good fortune in having found such true friendship, “swiftly knelt & kissed her hands, & then stood up & squared his shoulders, threw back his head in the sunshine: ‘You have given me once more my manhood, my strength. Life has given me much, but it can take it all away if it will so long as your friendship & trust are left to me. For that, that alone is my jewel, & makes me the proudest, the richest, the greatest man on earth – a soul that is not lonely.’”8 Hewitt confirmed to Stopes in his letter that he was happy to have made her his vow, adding that, if he continued to “live as I am” – single – it would be “the solution of so many difficulties”; and yet, the possibility of loneliness worried him. In responding to her gift of Hewlett’s book (which accompanied him to Canada as “a near companion”), he invoked Ibsen’s Love’s Comedy. In this play exploring emotional self-mutilation as a way forward, the young lovers, Falk and Svanhild, admit that their love cannot survive the dissipation of the first flush of desire. Svanhild makes a sensible and financially secure match with another man, conceding that it is in the nature of things to decay and that love is one of these things. Svanhild dooms herself by deciding that is better to deny herself fulfillment than to experience the death of ideal love. Thus the paradoxical message of the play: only through parting can love survive.9 Upping the promise of the exchange with Stopes with this reference to passionate “love,” not just “friendship,” Hewitt also suggested, with a playful photograph – another of his parting gifts – that he was having something of an identity crisis. In proving himself capable of tenting, high on Stopes’s list of prized skills, he gave her a picture of himself with his dog, Fritz, in a tent, labelling it “The Human Fraud and his dog!”10 What he was being fraudulent about is not entirely clear: was he experiencing imposter syndrome, chiding himself that he was not really camping, that he was not even approximating “the costume of a savage,” that he was not

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really up to his new job in the wilds of Canada? Or that, somehow, he was not the man she wanted him to be? It is worth pausing to reflect that Hewitt was just twenty-four when the picture was taken, preparing to cross the Atlantic for the first time, leaving his academic haven behind. In his parting letter to Stopes, his “last letter in England,” he returned again to Ibsen, quoting the words of Svanhild nearperfectly from memory, despite having no memory for verse. The entire passage reads: svanhild [in rapture]. My task is done! Now I have filled thy soul with song and sun. Forth! Now thou soarest on triumphant wings,– Forth! Now thy Svanhild is the swan that sings! [Takes off the ring and presses a kiss upon it.] To the abysmal ooze of ocean bed Descend, my dream! – I fling thee in its stead! [Goes a few steps back, throws the ring into the fjord, and approaches falk with a transfigured expression.] Now for this earthly life I have foregone thee,– But for the life eternal I have won thee! 11 In his half-teasing melodramatic farewell, Hewitt marked the cardinal voyage of his young life: “Friend beloved … I will say simply ‘goodnight’ – and pass out into the West.” But, even over an ocean of distance, not all ties with her could be severed. In the next few months, he would consider an even closer relationship with his sworn soulmate, who was rapidly gaining renown as one of the most extraordinary figures of the new century.

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[Hewitt to Stopes] Department of Economic Zoology The University, Manchester 5. April. ’09 My dear Miss Stopes At last I have managed to work some sort of a paper on the materials which you provided, though I confess the result is not commensurate with the time I have taken over it. Egoist that I am, I think it is interesting – not for any remarks that I have made, but on account of your observations. You will see that I have left out the latter portion of your original ms. though in your ignorance the remarks were appropriate, in the light of what we know as to the meaning of these “tents” wh. I have suggested might be called “cowsheds”, they were off the track. If you have any further facts or suggestions to include, please do so, & return if not. You might send it on to Tansley for the “New Phytologist12”. I feel great reluctance in coupling my name with that of so renowned a person, according to the daily & weekly press, but am quite willing to sink into significance13 even to the extent of deletion should you prefer it. It matters not to me whether it is a joint paper or one by yourself! I once resolved never to write a joint paper with anyone – a resolve which I intend to keep – this is the one small exception – the one little sin – & one which amuses me. One further remark – if you wish to suffix your degrees, please do so. I have simply written the names as I like them without an individual distinction!! I shall remain degreeless! I am going away on Thursday. My address will be – until April 17th – c/o Miss Garner.14 Wasperton Hill, Nr. Warwick. Are you settling down yet or is the spirit of unrest & “reception” still rampant? With very kind regards, Ever yours sincerely, C. Gordon Hewitt

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[Hewitt to Stopes] [3.v.1909]15 D.E.Z. Monday aft: My dear Miss Stopes I haven’t a conscience but I feel that you should not be without a watch. So am sending you a small one & cheap, which quality please excuse – I daresay it will keep fairly good time. Its purpose is 1 To keep you in time until you either find your old one which I do hope you will, or in other ways glean another 2 To use on all occasions when a good one might be lost or in any way suffer. 3 To act as a souvenir of a pleasant day & a reminder of one word – “Hope”. Consider it childish if you will! I don’t mind. C.G.H.

[Hewitt to Stopes] The University 4.v.’09 After the meeting tonight the Council decided to print our little paper – in fact were pleased to have it I believe! I am so glad that the little gift – valueless ’tho it is – is pleasing. When you came up yesterday I could see you were full of things to say. I didn’t want you to & did my best to prevent it. You touched me on the shoulder & I felt what you thought. Thoughts

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are often more expressively conveyed by silence than by words – & especially when a person speaks by means of the eyes. I did not come down to you today because – of “Miss L.”16 & I knew you would understand. I hope you are having a happy evening – goodnight! C.G.H.

[Hewitt to Stopes] The University, Manchester i.vii. ’09 Will my dear friend please accept these slight means of remembrance? They have been specially nicely done for you by “your old school fellow”! I am sorry that I was unable to take you to hear Shackleton’s lecture17 – which was most enjoyable – Marsh18 went with me. You must be sure to hear him when he comes to Manchester – as he intends – in November. Have you put your house in order yet & obtained an effect of Japanese simplicity? I hope so. Had you been here I should have invited you up to tea as I am alone – there is a spirit of “end-of-term unrest” pervading the place & F.W.G. & O.V.D.19 are not here so that you would be less loved than usual. There will be some disappointment in your department on the result of the Examinations. Holden20 has got a 2nd class & Miss Pearson21 a 3rd – Although I suppose a mere outsider as myself ought not to say it – I am nevertheless glad that Holden, if he intends to stay on for research, has not obtained a 1st, as I think it will do him good: it ought to do – He was suffering from a malignant form of “megalo-cephala”. I have brought the tent from London22 & am sleeping out in the wood at Taxal23 & am lulled to sleep by the ‘whirring’ of the night jar – just as it used to be in Surrey.

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I am not flattering nor doing anything ridiculous when I say that I miss you: still, one can’t have everything & personally I like to be “missed” – Yours ever sincerely, C. Gordon Hewitt

[Hewitt to Stopes] ii.vii. ’09 Lodge Cottage Taxal Whaley Bridge I am glad that my dear & kind friend, for so you are, has put her house in order & am looking forward very much to seeing it all & its presiding genius a week today. ‘She’ is looking to seeing you next Sunday afternoon & as for myself – as ever. It is so kind of you for suggesting giving me Japanese prints. There is nothing that would give me more pleasure – especially as pictures mean so much to me, but if I may suggest it, I would far prefer that you should choose them than that I should do so. I have heard, in the staff common room, that you have ‘a very characteristic article’ in the “Fortunegeise”24 – so far, I have been unable to procure a copy – but am living in hopes & the hopes that it is ‘characteristic’. O.V.D. has missed both Brham25 & Belfast26 (which, as I suppose you know already have been given to West27 & Gwynne Vaughan;28 the former rather surprises me) – it is a pity but I am hoping that he will succeed Gwn. Vaughan at the Birkbeck – ’twill be better than nothing & will probably save him from being ‘cast out’ forever, as he will be otherwise. I am going to Oxford tomorrow until Friday when I come in to London until Monday. Goodbye, dear friend & “Auf Wiedersehen” Yours ever sincerely, C. Gordon Hewitt

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[Hewitt to Stopes] 16.viii.’09 2, SeaBank Filey, Yorks.29 Beloved friend – greeting from one who also cannot remember the date without recourse to a diary! I am very pleased that the camping has proved a success but with such a concentrated bit of summer how could it be otherwise? At times one would long to assume the costume of a savage. I gave my last lecture this morning having performed daily since Aug 3rd. It has been harder work that I expected, but I couldn’t live in such a den of human beings as Scarborough – a perfect Black Hole of Calcutta – and I came out here which is a v. nice quiet place. No pier, no real ‘promenade’ “no nothing” except a band of Pierrots (or should there only be one ‘r’?) & therefore not many people. Now that the work is done I am going to stay on a couple of days & shall return to Manchester on Thursday to finish off and pack. You don’t come up to Manchester again? It’s horrible to think that it will be such a long time before I see you again. What a pity some of the Japanese things were omitted. I enjoyed the visit more than I can tell. Will you send me your impressions – I would like to have them to see if they correspond with my inmost thoughts – I think my going away is a good thing – it will help me to see things in their proper perspective when the ‘personal’ element is eliminated – & I shall never take a step which cannot be retraced until I am absolutely certain – as you say I am still young! Ever yours sincerely, C.G.H.

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[Hewitt to Stopes] 22.viii.’09 Fir Grove Macclesfield I’m glad that the echo came back from the rocks: I somehow felt it would but – why shouldn’t one say what one what one thinks even though words are not always necessary. I don’t want you to say anything. I didn’t mean impressions of that kind – as nothing which people – however much one cares for them & their opinion – say can really affect one’s deep-seated thoughts. You say one should pluck the flower of life in youth – is there not such a thing as plucking a flower & regretting it afterwards. Is not youth synonymous with inexperience? It is because I feel that – because I gain experience, see things from different aspects day by day that I feel the awful risk of snatching a few moments happiness – of a very transient nature – that I hesitate. That I will do nothing until I feel as certain as one can feel about such things. It is because it all means such a deep, serious & hard-to-attain thing to me that I cannot be certain – that youthful ardour but30 inexperience are not to be trusted. In this, the greatest thing in life almost, one must look before one takes such a leap. I feel somehow that you don’t agree with this hesitation – this selfexamination & reflection? But with so much youth in one, youth which blinds, one must. The state of laws with regard to marriage & divorce compel one – & rightly, if people would only recognize it – but I don’t mean that they should not be altered. They should. I am glad that you are coming up to Manchester again. I shall be at college all the week until Friday afternoon, packing.

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Be sure to let me know when you are coming & then we can discuss the weather! C.G.H.

[Stopes to Hewitt, copy of letter] Copy: To Gordon Hewitt Aug. 26th ’09 14 Well Walk, H.H. N.W. Here is the writing I spoke of – at the last I decided to send both together knowing how busy perhaps you would be too busy to find the time. Do not think that I send it as a gospel or inspired work; but as a fresh & delicious piece of writing written truth. I have marked the golden page, but hope you will read it all, otherwise you will not get the whole effect. Return them please, if you will – after Saturday, when the boxes are off, there may be time. Best beloved of friends – all last night, when I slept but little, but there was a feeling in my hands, so strong as to amount to an actual physical feeling, that I held in them something rare, & beautiful, & sacred. Even if we never were to meet again, I could thank you for that vow on bended knee. Difficult – you said – sweet Knight, I know – but not too difficult for your beautiful strength.

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[Hewitt to Stopes] The University, Manchester 27 Aug. ’09 During lunch today I read a few pages of the “Sanchia”31 – it is most delightful: what a fund of real truth there is in it all. If this is but the beginning, what will the end be? Thanks so much well-beloved, my first part is packed up with my other books. I will get the second – & subsequent.32 If we could live as we feel we ought – life would be life. But here we are, or most of us, & we have to make the best of it – We can try to make that best good. I’m happy that I made that vow to you: it shall be kept were I to live as I am – as I may. I wonder. It would be the solution of so many difficulties & yet – ‘tis so lonely at times – Have you ever read Ibsen’s “Love’s Comedy”? Read it. I rather like parts of it. You shall have the papers back shortly – or may I keep the second part & get you another? I should like to – Why? Don’t ask! You won’t forget the promised photograph – the standing up one – “rising to speak!” My tent – & dog, with my best wishes. Summer (?) – say July, 1909. My books are packed, nailed, banded with iron, labeled & ready to go. Gott sie dank! As ever, C.G.H.

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Figure 5.1 Written on the back of the photograph in Hewitt’s hand is: “The Human Fraud & his dog!” and in pencil in Stopes’s hand: “[Charles Gordon Hewitt July 1909].”

[Hewitt to Stopes] 9.ix. ’09 Fir Grove Macclesfield What a beautiful little reminder of an evening we both enjoyed so much. ‘Thank you’ is all I can say, for that & much else. I have sent the book which you lent to me back – it was most interesting but too unreal to be enjoyed to the full by me.

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My window is open & the pack of ‘Beagles’ which have given me so many days of primitive pleasure – of hunting over the hills & moors – are giving me, as it were, a parting cry. The master lives within a stone’s throw: I do not feel any feeling akin to excitement or pleasure (otherwise than that I shall have a few days rest & respite) at the prospect of leaving tomorrow. What heaps of things there are to occupy one’s mind. Thanks so much! Sanchia goes with me: a near companion. I expect the pages will be well thumbed before I set foot on these shores again. I have sent a small present – such a one as you may see constantly. In harmony, I thought, with some of your surroundings. A similar one is on its way to Canada. You don’t return until the beginning of term? What changes there will be! Do tell me what you think of “Love’s Comedy” – I like the sentence “Into the abysmal ooze of ocean’s bed Descend my dream, I fling thee in its stead. Etc.” or something to that effect – this is from memory & I can’t remember either verse or prose. I can never remember the words of my songs. It’s a pity but it’s true. I don’t know your French address so am sending this on to Hampstead. Friend beloved, this is my last letter in England. I will say simply “goodnight” – and pass out into the West. C.G.H.

6 v

Love’s Comedy Soon after arriving in Canada, Gordon Hewitt introduced his work with Stopes to his new community in a contribution to the December issue of the Ottawa Naturalist:1 a “résumé of some observations which my friend Dr. Marie Stopes made during a recent sojourn in Japan and on which she published with my collaboration in the ‘Memoirs of the Manchester Library [sic] and Philosophical Society.’” Here Hewitt became descriptive and speculative, noting affinities between Japanese tent-building ants and man, while upholding imperial and teleological views on human stages of development. He compared the ants to farmers; they cultivated aphids for the sake of producing honey-dew to be used for ant food and, for their protection, building for them tents, or rather, “cow-sheds.” He continued: The ants, as it has been stated, sometimes take the aphid eggs into their nests to protect them from the frost. L. Niger in my mind, is rather like man in the development of its agricultural methods. In some regions they are in these respects less advanced than in other places. Some are mere savages and leave their ‘cows’ the aphides, out in the open to take care of themselves … The Japanese colonies … which Dr. Stopes discovered seemed to have reached the highest stage of agricultural development: even the ants seems to be imbued with the Japanese spirit of progress! As Charlotte Sleigh notes, “The nature of Victorian formic reflection was often to shore up the naturalists’ sense of civilized superiority.”2 Hewitt’s comments, even with his comic undertone, drew upon this inheritance. In

Figure 6.1 Gordon Hewitt, photograph kept in the private collection of Marie Stopes, undated but probably ca 1909–1910.

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so doing, he invoked the Swiss myrmecologist, psychiatrist, neuroanatomist, and eugenicist Auguste Forel, “who has added so much to our knowledge,”3 a man who found in the lives of ants potential models and lessons for the progress of human society. It was during this period of publicly associating himself with Dr Stopes that Hewitt received from her a proposal of marriage. In determining the sequence of events leading up to this portentous moment, we have, as the most detailed source, a strikingly curious document. It is Stopes’s transcription of a letter that Hewitt wrote to Edith Garner, dated 25 April 1910, and which Edith Garner forwarded to Stopes, at her request, on 22 May. In faithfully transcribing this letter, it appears that the heartbroken Dr Stopes was putting relationships on the laboratory workbench, dissecting to understand. Certain features, such as the fact it was signed “Charlie,” indicate the letter’s authenticity. According to this letter, Hewitt, unbeknownst to Stopes and before leaving England for Canada, had broken off his engagement with Garner. When Stopes discovered this, she wrote to Hewitt “condemning” him for his treatment of both his fiancées, Garner and McNicol, and saying “[he] had forfeited her friendship.” Given their vow of eternal friendship, it may have been the evasion and deception that had stung Stopes most severely: Hewitt had not told her about breaking off with Garner. Countering the reproach, he told her all: “[I]t was through her [Stopes] & the love I had for her,” he said, that he “had tried to attain the true love & had seen how unworthy” his love for Garner had been. Hewitt then confessed that he wouldn’t dare ask Stopes to marry him as he “would never have risked spoiling another woman’s happiness.” Stopes interpreted this as him asking to be asked, and so she asked him. And he replied that yes, he was “willing to accept.” But by the time she received that response, Stopes was unsure of his answer. He had followed his acceptance letter with another (which, as fate would have it, arrived the same day as the first) asking for three months to consider the proposal. With those mixed messages at heart, but evidently impatient for clarification, she gave him another six weeks to think about it. As Hewitt explained his understanding of her thinking: “if marriage did not mean everything for me it meant nothing for her.” By the end of that period of pondering – the end of February – he gave his final answer: no. She had made it clear that, once married, she would continue to travel with her work. For Hewitt, “the more I thought the less I felt able

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to agree. I saw more & more that I was in love with the ideal & not the person – that there would be no home life in such an arrangement & I loved ‘home’ too strongly.” Having turned down Stopes, Hewitt was somehow atoning for his cruelty to Garner, as he wrote in an explanatory letter to his ex-fiancée: “Miss Stopes is as unhappy as you were but I feel in a way I cannot help it & I feel that she is more in love with Love than with me. I can see that to her the man is only the personification of her great ideal love – that I cannot be.” While Hewitt admitted his selfishness (though he added that really it was Stopes’s fault – she had told him to be selfish and not think of her happiness), he also acknowledged his own infatuation with the ideal of love, entangled as it was with his sense of “home life.” He could not marry Stopes because he loved “home,” his version somehow incompatible with her person, “too strongly.” It is telling that the language of romantic literature infused Hewitt’s scientific work on the domestic scene as well during this time. In a lecture given to the Ottawa Field-Naturalists’ Club, 1 February 1910, on “House-flies and the public health,” he asserted that the housefly had in the past been seen as too common to interest the public. But public interest does not always slumber. Science disguised as the Prince Charming has at last succeeded in awakening this Princess. The mantle of mystery and veil of ignorance have been torn off, and the house-fly stands alone, known and condemned with clear convincing proof that it must be classed with the mosquito as one of the scourges of man and destroyers of his children.4 Like psychoanalysts exploring the unconscious, a force previously disregarded yet terribly dangerous, Hewitt’s fly work touched a public nerve as he created what philosopher Bruno Latour calls “new sources of power and new sources of legitimacy, which are irreducible to those that hitherto coded the so-called political space.”5 As an expert in biological control, Hewitt was envisioning a new kind of self – nature’s manager in the guise of Prince Charming. The housefly, no longer a “harmless, bright little insect,” was now the destroyer of home life for those who love home: there was no escape from this “fearless, dashing and careless mass of heat-infused vitality.” While

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Figure 6.2 The House-fly, Musca domestica. Female. Drawn by C.G. Hewitt, n.d., reprinted 1912 by Cambridge University Press in a new volume entitled House-Flies and How They Spread Disease.

science was figured as male, the housefly had all the characteristics of everything he deemed oppositional to his ideal domestic scene. His oikos disruptor was embodied in a vital and fearless being that dashes about; conversely, a being conducive to home life would have qualities of tranquility, passivity, and stillness – traits of a feminine nature bound and contained.

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This image of placid domesticity points to the conflict at the heart of the romantic love enacted by Prince Charmings and knights rescuing damsels in distress – female loss of autonomy and enslavement within castle walls. The model of great love that Stopes and Hewitt looked to, played with, and adapted for their own rituals was ideal for reinforcing patriarchal convention, but was hardly material suited to the establishment of male and female equality within the home. And Stopes’s ongoing conflict – not unlike that of Isolde, who figured in Stopes’s first letter to Hewitt6 – was that she loved that very love that caused misery and her own subjugation. In taking the highly unusual step of making the proposal (as Hewitt didn’t dare) and setting some conditions, she was wresting back some power with a role reversal, aware all the while that she was on traditional male terrain: “I will have you – till you tire, when I shall leave you & start fresh disguised as a man!! (here a smile cuts me up)” – risky terra incognita, hard to traverse in person, let alone in letter form. Stopes’s situation was not only painful (after making the proposal, she now faced humiliation) and unimaginable (because of the three-way tangle), but it was absurd and, especially after Fujii’s rejection, a cruel joke on the part of the universe. Garner too suffered enormously, especially after attempts to assure Hewitt of continued friendship by sending him a birthday present, an action she swore she would never have considered if she had known he was in a relationship with Stopes: “My pride, not to say anything of my honour would not have allowed me to, for few men are capable of friendship with women, in the purest sense, when the love of another woman is involved. I have found this out to my cost!”7 Hewitt’s rejection of Stopes was quickly followed by another flurry of high productivity on her part: her response to shock, as usual, was to work harder. A few months before her thirtieth birthday, her plans for love and marriage were yet again in ruins. Two of her books were published that year (Journal from Japan and Ancient Plants), and several papers appeared, including one with Fujii on Cretaceous plants. She showed remarkable grace in warmly congratulating young friends involved with the Cinderella dances on their engagement,8 but by then she was finding respite from her pain in an alternative response to her predicament: laughter. A letter to her sister, Winnie, in March 1908 outlined this protective defence, another of her discoveries from her time in Japan:

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Oh, this is a funny world, & now I am well again I can laugh at it – after a crisis this morning I was chuckling so to myself all the way here, that the people looked at me in the street & I thought I must be very mad to find anything in the road so funny. But it is. Life, if you only realise it, is just the most extraordinarily comical thing one could ever conceive. And all the things that flurry & worry us. What are they? A smoky lamp – an ill-cooked dinner, a cut from a social superior, want of money? & of all of them, the last is the most ridiculously funny, for it can bring so much bother in its train, & is itself so small. Oh my dear child, believe me, if you are well enough to see how comic life is, you are a king among men for nothing can hurt you.9 On April Fool’s Day, she founded The Sportophyte: The Humorous Botanical Annual, having written the copy almost entirely on her own. The title is from sport (meaning genetic mutation) and phytos (a plant), but perhaps for Stopes it also resonated with the term sporophyte (the asexual spore-producing phase of a plant’s life cycle alternating with the gametophyte stage of sexual reproduction). Aware that her readership would consist of mainly male colleagues, she worked up material she envisioned as appropriate for both women and men equally, very much in line with the humour in the spoof zoology exam for the “Biological Festival” of the Pleasant Friday Afternoons group and the comically formal tone of the Cinderella dance invitations. Created in the wake of Hewitt’s rejection, The Sportophyte seems in some way bound to it: whether by design or incredible chance, it acted as an organ of a protracted revenge in the same way that a joke can package aggression – though in her own words, it was not “calculated to wound, but [was] planned to give stimulus to laughter.”10 Her self-parodying review in the Annual of her book Ancient Plants exemplified this method of (mostly gentle) botanical mockery: “The author begins alluringly with references to the ‘romance of fossil botany,’ but as she appears to stick to facts throughout it is self evident that she is at least self contradictory.”11 Tansley signed up, though curious to learn whether she had seen the humorous counterpart to his own New Phytologist, founded two years earlier: “I congratulate you especially on the freedom from anything approaching malice in your hits – you have treated the N.P. [New Phytologist] especially very well. Did you see the Tea Phytologist published or rather

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issued privately from this laboratory?”12 Stopes sent a copy to Hewitt and received a chuckling response from him, in which he compared it favourably to The Tea Phytologist and signed himself “an admirer.” She also heard separately from Hewitt’s colleague the Dominion Botanist H.T. Güssow, who wrote: “I must most cordially congratulate you on the appearance of this interesting little volume, so kindly shown me by my friend and colleague Dr. C.G. Hewitt, the famous ‘fly propagandist’ of Manchester. It is both artistic and wonderful.”13 Before the year’s end, Marie had also completed the first draft of Married Love and by July, her novel “A Man’s Mate” (the latter signed with the pseudonym “Mortlake,” mort, the Latin root word, meaning “death”). Evidently, she was still thinking about themes of love and friendship and their vicissitudes in the wake of her deep disappointment with Fujii and the confounding situation with Hewitt. In “A Man’s Mate,” Professor Kenneth Laurence, an English scientist with a “strong jaw” and “deep-set eyes,” is crafted as her ideal man. While Marjorie is certainly modelled after Marie Stopes and Kenneth’s physical description matches that of Hewitt, Kenneth’s name is resonant with Kenjiro (Fujii). A Japanese scientist plays a key role in Stopes’s novel but not that of lover. Rather, the presence of the Japanese friend Professor Tanaka “often acted as a spur to the conversation, & the others, in their wholehearted efforts to explain things to him were unconsciously explaining & revealing themselves to each other. Nature was using him to bring her two chosen ones together.” Although her first try had failed, the new “sport,” the possibility of an equal relation with a man – friends foremost – becomes, it seems, a thesis to be proven. “A Man’s Mate” provides insight into the next extraordinary set of events in Stopes’s life. A moment of tension enters the novel when Kenneth Laurence suggests that he and Marjorie discontinue their friendship (it is not fair to Marjorie, he says, as he, a married man, can never offer marriage and men will want to marry her). Marjorie is furious that Kenneth does not trust that their beautiful friendship can survive the situation: Oh, why will you misunderstand! Must I say again that it is impossible for a real friendship to die. If it is not in your eyes a holy immortal thing, then I will have no more of it, not for one moment. And it is your doubt that has destroyed it.

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Marjorie’s next proclamation is rather astonishing; friendship surpasses marriage in its holiness. In grieving the loss of this perfect friendship, she will “marry the first man that asks me & kill my soul, the soul that believed friendship to be a deathless reality.” In Marjorie’s mind, Kenneth’s punishment for this lack of faith was to be “tortured” by the thought of her impending marriage, with nightmares of Marjorie, “sometimes as another man’s wife, sometimes on her bridal day, once in the act of kissing a man whose face he half recognized.” Maddened, Kenneth would review the past year “for the hundredth time.” In the “real life” non-fiction story of Marie Stopes, which next featured a trip to North America in late December 1910, Stopes did, in fact, marry the first man to ask her, have Hewitt witness the ceremony,14 and arrive home with her new Canadian husband on 1 April 1911, to the great surprise of her mother, her friends, and her colleagues. This was, of course, April Fool’s Day, The Sportophyte’s first anniversary: its second issue announced, somewhat tongue in cheek, the name of her new husband: Dr. Reginald Gates arrived in England by the ‘Empress of Britain’ on April 1, 1911. Curiously enough, another British botanist, Dr. Marie Stopes, was travelling on the same ship. As the steamer was a day later than the travellers had anticipated, they can hardly claim to have premeditated the date of their arrival, appropriate though it was. The marriage was clearly, in her own publicly issued estimation, a joke. The notion that Stopes’s marriage was an elaborate display of humour and/or payback – with Hewitt somehow in the picture – becomes less inconceivable, though still more absurd, in light of other events that had led up to it. In May of 1910, Stopes had (unsuccessfully) applied to work at the University of Toronto in Canada; on the eighteenth of that month she asked Hewitt to return her letters (also unsuccessfully, despite her repeated request by cable).15 By July she had resigned from her position at the University of Manchester on account of ill-health, the “neuralgia” that she had developed becoming active only when she was in Manchester.16 She tried one final time that month to get Hewitt to return her letters. By then she was planning an extended return trip to North America. Before leaving she completed “A Man’s Mate.” She also sent a draft of Married Love to Maurice Hewlett, whose

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novel Letters to Sanchia she had shared with Hewitt prior to his departure for Canada.17 Upon her arrival in the United States, she first attended the 62nd meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Minneapolis (27 December to 31 December 1910). However, her main professional task at hand was to visit the North American fossil collections that would help her to complete a project for the British Museum on the Carboniferous Flora, work commissioned in 1909 with funding from the Royal Society and private donations. But if the comedic intention of the journey was to marry the “first man” to ask her, that plan too was put into action. In a little red calendar diary of the journey,18 Stopes recorded that she met Reginald Ruggles Gates in Minneapolis on 26 December, along with the leading American ecologist, Frederic Edward Clements. Two years younger than Stopes, Gates was a geneticist with a growing reputation, sensitive and pale, born near Middleton, Nova Scotia, with a twin sister named Charlotte.19 Two days later Stopes dined with the Clements family (Frederic was married to another botanist, Edith Clements). She also recorded that she wrote to Hewitt, identified as “C.G.H.” What she wrote to him about, however, was not noted. Did it involve Gates? Was it a response to Hewitt’s New Year’s greeting card? It seems to have been an important letter, as it was the only one that she recorded writing during these months. On the thirtieth, she noted, “R.R.G. proposed.” The next day, still in Minneapolis, she went skating and shared dinner with Gates’s cousins, and on New Year’s Day she left for Chicago.20 After weeks of travel in the United States, mostly apart from Gates, Stopes came to Canada for the second time. On 3 March, she again addressed the women of Annesley Hall. Her topic this time was “Man,” a category she employed in the exclusive rather than universal sense, dividing men into two groups, gentlemen and servants. The Globe commented that; “While her conclusion that all great men are more sensitive than women may be surprising, it must be remembered that she has been closely associated with many of the greatest minds of England, Germany and Japan, and has herself had ample opportunity for verifying the statement.”21 Stopes then travelled to Ottawa and began to mingle in the same social circles as Hewitt – staying in Government House with the governor general, Earl Grey. There she met Prime Minister Sir Wilfrid Laurier. “Full of rem-

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Figure 6.3 A New Year’s greeting card likely printed by the Central Experimental Farm in Ottawa, where Hewitt worked. The cover inscription reads, “With sincerest wishes for your happiness in the coming year,” and these two photographs of the farm feature on the inside leaf. Hewitt lived at The Sherbrooke (the address is printed on the cover along with his name) from the fall of 1909 to the fall of 1911. Stopes likely received the card before she left on her North American travels in December 1910.

iniscences and confidences about his youth,”22 Laurier was a supporter of wild life protection and a person Hewitt publicly spoke of as a personal friend after the statesman’s death in 1919.23 Stopes confided in her sister, Winnie, about her upcoming marriage to Gates, planned for 18 March at the Windsor in Montreal, a hotel billed as the best in the Dominion. She also remarked on the tentative nature of the plan – she wasn’t sure if she would go through with it – and reported: “I have been staying with the Governor General – who ranks as royalty! Stand up when comes in, curtsy after dinner etc etc – Lord this & Lord that … a lively show!”24 On the same day she wrote to her mother from Government House: “Ottawa is a perfectly delightful place, still under snow, but with such very bright & beautiful sunshine. The river cuts into the town, & there are lovely woods too. It is a very charming place.”25 She also noted the date of her return trip on board the Empress of Britain, but any mention of Gates or their wedding is conspicuously lacking. As the letters reveal, she visited Hewitt in person during this time and invited him to her wedding; in a letter sent to Government House, he confessed his reluctance to attend but was coy about its cause: “There are reasons why I would rather not which you may understand.” Yet she persisted, sending him another invitation along with a gift of a “puppy-cat” in a box, likely the maneki-neko, literally “beckoning cat,” a figurine of a bob-tailed cat, a typical souvenir of Japan and a symbol of good luck. In response to that gesture,

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Hewitt finally conceded and agreed to come. “[I]t is a symbol,” he declared, his reticence suddenly replaced by gratitude. “The purging through which I have gone the past few years did not let me contemplate for long such a state of happiness – a state I long for – but now, [with Stopes’s marriage] perhaps I may. I seemed to step into a new year & a new world. You have helped me.” And he referred to her wedding notice as a model for his own – “I would like to copy it some day” – suggesting that he too could now think of marriage. What this “purging” refers to is somewhat mysterious. Purging himself of what? Guilt? To place an ocean between himself and his erstwhile lovers might have indicated a disturbing force more complex and overwhelming. Part of the attraction between Stopes and him was that they were so similar. As friends, they each held up the mirror to the other: both were open to a reversal of traditional roles, but neither was willing to embrace these reversals openly. In wrestling with his ego in his role as a man, Hewitt frequently took the “feminine” role in relation to Stopes – she didn’t just propose to him but hunted on his behalf, counselled him, was senior in many ways besides age. When he took the role of Svanhild, quoting from the lover’s lines, was it to please Stopes or, perhaps, equally, himself? In his letter to Garner, he referred to other “things which do not concern us here” which had showed him the impossibility of marrying Stopes. Perhaps she had asked to keep her own name upon marrying, a stipulation that she carried out after marrying Gates. Perhaps it was simply an allusion to her intense dislike of housekeeping, an aversion she shared with her mother. Or maybe it was something in Hewitt himself that “froze the personal element” of his love “out of existence.” With Stopes’s marriage to Gates, Hewitt seemed relieved to share her happiness in mending their friendship, a triangle dynamic restored. And for Stopes, her compelling determination to find a platonic lover in a gentleman, a sensitive man, her twin-soul, remained an overriding obsession. She still had a thesis to prove and she was tenacious; not only was a friendship of equality possible between a man and a woman but it was our evolutionary destiny. Such a friendship was the new sport in the field. The conjoining of two lovers of science was the first mutation, the first step.

Figure 6.4 Stopes’s hand-drawn frontispiece for her unpublished novel “A Man’s Mate.” “Lovers of Science [faintly visible as it is sketched only in pencil]: Being the Story of the Love of a Man and a Woman each endowed with a great Brain and a great Heart” seems an alternative title she was considering, this page likely created after her first draft. It is dedicated to “those who understand that in the world are but three things worthy of our Passion. Beauty, which is Goodness, Truth, which is sometimes called Science, And Love, which is Life itself.”

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[Stopes to Hewitt, draft letter] Eastbourne – [To C.G.Hewitt] 29 Dec ’09 Your two letters have just arrived26 – together, because I am away & all were saved up for a time & forwarded in a parcel. Heaven decreed that I should open your second, first. To begin with the ridiculous instead of the sublime (I wish I could say it with a teasing smile & a little tender touch that neutralized it) don’t, liebes Kind, call me Dearie. I can’t bear it, really I can’t. I once heard Mr. McFarlane27 use it to his wife & he covered it all over with tears & treacle & I have hated the word ever since, it’s stinky. A million sweet names you can call me.28… out of making beautiful ones to replace them. I’m tired of this country where “Art” has penetrated Whitely & Poplar.29 Did you know that I am an excellent hand at making furniture? I design it. The people won’t wouldn’t really worry me very much, I have always my books (increasingly) my friends all over this beauty world & I will have you – till you tire, when I shall leave you & start fresh disguised as a man!! (here a smile cuts me up) as an interest or as a joy as you turn out. Your “zygopulmonate condition” is will be a thing to be accepted with as little notice & bewailing as possible. Personally I think it is less serious than you do. If it becomes more serious – I have battled through life so much that 30

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[Edith Mary Garner to Stopes] Wasperton Hill, Warwick 5, iii, ’10 Dear Dr. Stopes – You may be surprised at having a letter from me – I will explain the reason, for it is a matter of vital importance to my life – Do you love Charlie Hewitt, & wish to marry him, & does he return your love? I must know, so trust to your honour to be honest & straightforward with me – I will not mention my own feelings in the matter, or how I suffered through a great love – I have paid a v. heavy price, the price of a spoilt life – I have always known of your friendship towards him, & have always trusted you, for I know you have so many things in common with science, etc – But if it is something more than friendship, that is love, between you, be merciful and tell me all – Charlie is more to me than anyone I shall ever know, this happiness, in spite of all I have suffered, is so precious to me, & if he wants you, I shall pass out of his life, & never trouble either of you again – Edith M Garner

[Stopes to Garner, draft letter] The Victoria College, University of Manchester31 (Private address) 83 Rippingham Rd, Withington Mch 7th 1910 Dear Miss Garner, Your letter has come at a very anxious difficult time for me. Had it come last week I think I would have answered ‘yes’ to all your questions. Now – I do not know!

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This last letter was so very different from the previous ones of this year, I do not know what the future will be. I am very glad you have trusted me so far as to write. Indeed I will be entirely truthful to straightforward with you & do all I can to help to unravel the tangle we are all in. It is impossible to write. I should very much like to see you & get at the truth as far as we two – with his letters – earnestly & sincerely can before you or I write to him again. I am tied to my work, but you could come & stay the night with me couldn’t you? Remember I am only in rooms; so be prepared for simplicity! But you would be very welcome & I could put you up if you didn’t mind partly sharing a big bedroom. Do come. Next Monday, the 14th Tuesday the 15th or Monday if that will not do. Or, almost any day that week if Monday does not suit you. If you can trust me so far please bring with you any letters he has written at all recently, they would probably help greatly toward our understanding all the facts. I go to London on Wed. tomorrow till Sat. so if you write then, please address answer me to 14 Well Walk, Hampstead Heath. Yours very sincerely, M.C. Stopes

[Stopes to Garner, draft letter] 83, Rippingham Rd, Withington, M’chester Mch. 15. 1910 Dear Miss Garner – I am sorry you did not come to see me – it would be far less pain to me to talk with you it over & know things exactly so far as possible than to have only the vague, incomplete knowledge any letter can give. I thought you might feel the same. You ask me to tell you everything – that, in will not be possible in a letter, but I will tell you the important things. He was entirely loyal to you until even after he had broken off his relation with

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you. It was only at the end of last year in the last few letters that anything further than friendship was spoken between us. I need not tell you, he has never kissed me. (Ah! How I envy you.) Yes, he has told me that he loves me but at present I do not know at all whether he really loves me or not but I […] I do know the truth about his relation to you, & that he does not love you as you wish, I think is absolute fact. Forgive me if I pain you by putting it so baldly – he has spoken written of you to me several times, always very gently & tenderly – but surely without marriage love – and he wrote of “It was fatal to him his relation to you “I clutched at straws & they broke”. Yet he wrote to me that if we were to be married he could feel a brute to you – also that he felt he ought not to marry for years as a penance. (Oh, if you really loved him you could not wish that for him!) There is, or was, certainly love between us. I don’t know if it was You have no need to be jealous envious of me at present – disaster seems to be overtaking us. I cannot write to you about it of it now. Still come & stay with me if you will – I wish for more than I now tell you. Friday next would do [or] a Monday – Yours MCS

[Stopes to Hewitt, draft letter] March 21st, 1910 This is not a letter between us at all – but something that must be said. My conscience is giving me no peace so long as I keep you in ignorance of this, hence I must write & tell you the following now, though, as you may imagine I would much rather not write “out of turn” – just don’t be upset. This is it. Edith Garner wrote to me with a number of questions. She wrote so that I got her letter that terrible weekend – on the 7th when I had just written to you. It seemed as though I could endure no more more than I could bear that weekend. On Sat. my book came,32 I was so pleased with it & sent it off to you in joyfulness & security of my

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ignorance, with the usuals in it you must have found there. Then came your letter that very day – on Monday morning, 7th, I wrote to you & on Monday came the letter from Edith Garner. It seemed as though you must have written to her something – I know not what – have betrayed me & I felt that I was not even left to bear my agony & shame remorse in secret. I see now she possibly did it quite herself with no word from you. Well – she wrote with these words questions to me “Do you love Charlie Hewitt & wish to marry him, & does he return your love? I must know, so trust to your honour to be honest & straightforward with me –” she wrote further & concluded “if he wants you, I shall pass out of his life & never trouble you again”. I could not write that day, yet she demanded the truth! I replied “Your letter – know what I feel to be I replied that I could not tell her in a letter secretly – but if all she wanted to know, but that asked her to come & stay a night with me. I said, “Your letter … know.[”] She waited some time, & then replied further & said she couldn’t wouldn’t come – did not wish & said “Will you … again”. I had to tell her more then, it seemed only fair to her, for whether you love me or love me not – does not affect the fact that you do not love her doesn’t it?, a fact she must realize. I hated to end her clinging to a false idea that you might go back to her & I saw that unless she believed you love me would continue to do so. I said several things & then “Yes, he has told me that he loves me but at present I do not know whether he really loves me or not, but “I think I do know … fact” I said a little more, candidly “You have no need to be envious of me at present.” I asked her still to come if she liked to visit me. She hasn’t answered. It seemed to me that probably she would write to you & you to her & that it was is essential you should know of this correspondence: tho’ I think it would be kinder to her not to tell her you know – only answer according to your knowledge. I think for what I have heard & observed that if she was once definitely convinced you would never love her again, she would find happiness later with someone else. Oh why did she write to me? Life is cruel enough at present She demanded I write – I couldn’t lie to her as I would have gladly done to shield myself & yet I haven’t told her all the truth. Oh, how could I? I think it was more than she had the right to ask me yet I tried to hold the balance between what was fair to you to tell & kind to her to withhold. If

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you think I have put too much weight on the fact that these my selfish feelings have been used to assure her then. Pardon me if I have erred in any way – remember I am in the agony is never easy for me. MCS I told her that you had said you love me because it seemed to me as if by thinking you loved someone else would she get rid of her idea of you coming back to her.

[Stopes to Hewitt, copy of letter] The Victoria University of Manchester [Letterhead] 22 March 1910 This came today. I do hope it will catch the same mail as what I wrote yesterday so that you will get the whole thing together. ____ It seems to me to have wrought good, to her at any rate. A cauterized wound heals if it has not gone too deep. If only she does not talk of me to others I shall not grudge what her letters cost me. I thought of asking her for silence – but am not answering her letter. I must risk that.

[Stopes to Garner, draft letter] [Mar 1910]33 Dear Miss G. Thank you for the offer of CGH’s papers. If you really do not care for them I should like to have them. As I think I have been thinking that it would be so good for him if you would write to him & let him know that you do not love him any more (you know what false ideas he has about his value in women’s eyes) &

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would just tell him a few truths about himself! At present I suppose his male vanity is touched flattered to think of you & others languishing for him? As I said, he needs to see himself it is so bad for him! If you would repay evil with good to him, you would write to him & tell him you are flourishing irrespective of his regard! It may seem a queer way to do good, but truth is bitter medicine good for naughty children. I was so glad you came to see me & talked with me. I should have felt very sore & sad about you & now I think that can all be healed. You are worth more stable love than he gave & you will certainly get it, soon I hope. When you write I wouldn’t say I will leave it y Yours most sincerely, MCS In writing to him it would perhaps be as well not to say much about me & what I told you, if then he would think you only wrote out of pique & the salutary truth would not be brought home to him.

[Hewitt to Stopes] 6th May ’10 The Sherbrooke, Ottawa Most sincere thanks for the first & double number of the “Sportophyte”34 – It is far wittier – should one say more witty? – than the “Tea Phytologist”35 (You may use this as a testimonial should you desire & not consider it ‘unfit for publication’) and actually made me laugh! – Please enter my name as a permanent subscriber – expense no object – until the “Sportophyte” shall cease to phyte – for its annual supply of gas (CO2 I presume?) The Palæophytologist fears that most of it may be too technical for my enjoyment! But that witty person forgets that I once had the audacity to

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not only take the Final Course in Botany but also to snatch the practical prize from those who were, all things being equal – expected to get it, or at least display a more profound knowledge of the eccentricities of plants – the names of these two ladies shall not be mentioned but their names are engraved in the Annals (of Botany) & forever connected with the vagaries of Charas & Lycopods36 – But over such past history we will draw a veil – All I can say is “Long life to the Sportophyte – may its shadow never grow less & its wit less sparkling – I sign myself “an admirer” – C.G.H.

[Stopes to Garner, draft letter] May 191037 My dear Miss Garner When you wanted to know something you wrote & asked me – now I want to know something. I hope you will tell me. You know you said you were going to write to Mr. Hewitt after being you came to see me. Would you tell me if he answered you? I should be much obliged if you would let me know the line of argument he took – I suppose it is too much to hope to see the letter? So many things keep coming out from time to time, I am beginning to think he doesn’t really know how to speak the truth. His words to me at various times appear to give the lie, direct to each other, & if I knew what he had sent to answered you (if anything) this time it might help me in estimating him at his. Yours very sinc. MCS

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[Garner to Stopes] 19 Adelaide Road, Leamington 22.v. ’10 Dear Miss Stopes I am doing something that is v. much against my principles, for to me a letter is such a personal thing, at any rate a letter of this nature, that as a point of honour I never show it a third person unless I know the writer would wish me to – In this case I know the writer would not approve of my action, but for your sake, partly because you have been v. considerate to me, & have trusted me, & partly because I feel for you in your trouble, for I went through such bitter suffering myself of the same nature, & for the same cause, that I feel there is a common bond between us – The irony of it all is that it has been through you, & your influence I have lost what to me at one time was everything that was most precious in life, but I feel sure you had no idea what you were doing, & how your friendship for Charlie was ruining my future happiness – Now it is all over, I am again my normal self, I can see that had we married with any feeling of doubt on his side, we should have been miserable – My great love for him blinded me to the real truth of things & I thought so highly of him, I never doubted his sincerity. How could I help it, after all he had said & written to me? He has done the same to you. I see that he wants you too, his love has not lasted – I am putting my whole trust in you, & am sending you his letter to read, which came in answer to mine, although I told him not to write again – You must believe in me sufficiently to know I should never have written or sent my photo & a book for his birthday last February, had I known of his relation with you. My pride, not to say anything of my honour would not have allowed me to, for few men are capable of friendship with women, in the purest sense, when the love of another woman is involved. I have found this out to my cost! He says that my love for him has influenced him in his recent conduct, but believe me this I cannot accept, for he sacrificed me long ago, & wrote to you as your love within a few months of saying good-bye to me –

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I am heartily tired of the whole matter & hope to hear no more of it after this – I am going abroad & shortly I shall put the whole thing out of my life. I hope for your sake if you think marriage unto him will bring you happiness, you will both marry, but it is a risk & now I swear I am better off with my freedom, at least as far as Charlie is concerned. Kindly return the letter to me as soon as possible, & do not mention to him that I have shown it to you. Yrs sincerely, E.M. Garner

[Hewitt to Garner, transcription by Stopes] 25th April. Ottawa [1910]38 Edith, I received your letter today & I suppose I ought not to write again – but I feel I must do so in spite of the fact that you have no belief in me. I do it from a selfish reason: to relieve my mind, to feel that, though we never write again or see each other again, I laid my case before you. It’s a long history & for your sake I must be brief – you have seen Miss Stopes: for that I’m glad but she will have told you only her side & she understands things as little as you did – If I tell you my side & some of the motive which were responsible for my recent conduct you may be able to understand though I never expect forgiveness nor do I ask it as I have behaved only too cruelly to you – Don’t you think I’m sensitive enough in spite of all, to realize that? While I was with you, early last year, I did love you with all my youthful & passionate love. I wrote to you as a lover because I wrote what I felt. Miss Stopes returned from Japan & unintentionally she gradually seemed to change things – I admired & loved an ideal in her & through comparing my love for you with that ideal which she created, I saw gradually, & it

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grew all through the summer that your love & mine were quite different: that yours was a deep lasting, so long as it was reciprocated, love which would go on increasing – mine, instead, had been a thing produced by many factors – a sudden happiness following a deep disappointment, an impressionable & loving nature which I unfortunately have – though now in a less degree & your own powerful love – Those produced it, but it didn’t last & I knew that should we marry under such conditions we should not be happy – I didn’t love you worthily according to both our ideas of what love meant. We were unfortunately, openly engaged & so I put you to all the suffering – but aren’t you glad now that you see how things really are? I was absolutely true to you & honourable in what I did & said – whatever you may think & say. I told you there was no one else – for there was no one else. I had no more intention of saying anything to Miss Stopes than I had of committing suicide. It was on account of my feelings towards her that I recognized the unenduring character of my love for you – but it was the ideal that she set me & not herself that I really loved. I left England & came out here – without a friend – then Miss Stopes realised that I had “broken off ” our engagement & she, naturally, like the good woman that she is – wrote me one of the strongest letters that I have ever had – condemning me for my treatment of you & Miss McNicol & saying that I had forfeited her friendship. Your friendship had gone – for I had received your cable – & to feel that I was losing her friendship was more than I could stand. She who has always been a friend to me, through who’s [sic] ideal of life & love I had come to realize what love really was. She, through whom I had found afterwards I did not love Miss McNicol as I ought; by comparison with whom I had found that my love was unworthy of yours – the one friend, of my own sympathies in all respects whom I now had. To feel that I had lost her – I wrote to her what I thought would be my last letter to her39 – & I should never have written it: I told her all & how it was through her & the love I had for her that I had tried to attain the true love & had seen how unworthy my love for you had been – I told her that although I loved her I should never dare to ask her to marry me – I would never have dared. I would never have

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risked spoiling another woman’s happiness, especially such a woman. I never expected a reply. She replied – a long letter – she told me she loved me & had done so – that I held her happiness in my hand, as I would never ask her – then she must ask me to marry her – You can never put yourself in my place. I was simply overwhelmed. I asked for three months to think it over40 & see whether my feelings were real & lasting, in view of the previous unhappy events – then I felt here is another woman – the one for whom I have most affection & whose ideal has inspired me, & if I refuse I make her unhappy. Edith, what could a man do. Rather than make still another woman unhappy I was willing to do anything – & to make her happy & in the hopes that I should be happy – I wrote & said I was willing to accept.41 That is the absolute truth – & for three weeks I was happier almost than I have ever been in my life at the prospect of the attainment of my ideal. Then she wrote & said she had both my letters & that she could give me six weeks42 – but chiefly, that if marriage did not mean everything for me it meant nothing for her. Marriage to any woman would not mean everything to me & I had six weeks to ponder over that & other conditions as to her work, she wanted to go to England for several months every year – & the more I thought the less I felt able to agree. I saw more & more that I was in love with the ideal & not the person – that there would be no home life in such an arrangement & I loved “home” too strongly. These & other things which do not concern us here showed me the impossibility & simply froze the personal element of my love out of existence late at the end of six weeks43 when I had to make my decision – I said no, & was helped to say no by the fact that she had told me to be selfish & that I musn’t consider her happiness etc. Many other things made me give that decision. I had not made the proposal & if a woman does, she must naturally take the risk. In the meantime you wrote & sent your photo & book44 – Your letters affected me; they were so full of love – I felt by saying no, that I was atoning a little for my cruelty to you, that I was cherishing your love – which I did all the time. That I would not tell you nor have I told her; were it not part of the explanation & also that I can tell you now that love is dead in you I should not tell it to you. It is a beautiful

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memory in me. Miss Stopes is as unhappy as you were but I feel in a way I cannot help it & I feel that she is more in love with Love than with me. I can see that to her the man is only the personification of her great ideal love – that I cannot be. So I am where I am – & still further away – for I have lost you, & I have lost her – for under such circumstances we cannot write. I do not think, in fact am almost sure, I shall not marry – my work satisfies me & there are other reasons why I don’t want to marry – Nor would I be willing to load anyone with such a history as this – I hope you understand it all now – though I make women friends I shall be less & less able to let myself fall in love. I am more master of myself now than I was. Edith dear, these are to be my last words to you. I gave you my best, I felt what I wrote & said in all sincerity, & I was true to you & loyal – & must trust in that as soon as I realised how things were I told you & what I told you, I told you all that I could then understand, was true. I am glad beyond words you can’t & don’t analyse – it has given me more pain than all the things in the world – I’m always analyzing – did I not[,] all this would never have happened. Keep your spirit of “artist drama” – it is a beautiful thing – you will be far, far happier. I want you to do one thing – you say that this is the last letter you will write so I don’t want you to write, but I want to feel that, if you can, you will forgive me – Will you? – I am selfish & I want to be happy – You will live much longer than I shall, as I don’t believe in miracles & you will be happy – You say you are sorry that you ever wrote your last letter & wish you had not done so – & so I can’t keep it & am sending it back to you as your own. Goodbye. I often think of you when the sun is setting & will often – the crescent moon has a meaning for me now – Goodnight. Charlie.

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[Stopes to Garner, draft letter] May 23 [1910 – in pencil] My dear Miss Garner – It is good of you to send the letter, for & I am deeply grateful to you for having let me see it. It is true – and yet – there are just the little differences that make so much. He called me his Beloved before I “asked him”. In truth he is a “plausible villain” & much loves to keep our good opinion of himself. I agree with you that it is not fair of him to pretend that you cannot accept his statement your letters influenced his treatment of me tho’ his hurting me was a penance for having hurt you! I am returning the letter at once – & will of course not tell him you let me see it. I do not wonder you feel heartily tired of the whole matter. I am glad you are going to have a good time abroad. If you care to keep in touch with me, I shall appreciate it. Send me some of your wedding cake. Happiness be with you. Yours sin MCS

[Stopes to Hewitt, draft letter] July 2, 1910 14 Well Walk Hampstead To C.G. Hewitt45 I have not answered asked you to write so there was no call whatever for you to say what you do in your last letter of June 17th. On May 18th I asked you to let me see all my own letters which request, repeatedly by cable, you have had the discourtesy to disregard. Since my childhood I have never prayed for my daily bread, or forgiveness for trespasses, but only – & often – to understand. The one way for me to understand this unimaginable situation is to go through all our letters carefully in the light of my now I can judge both you & myself. Then I may rest. Why do you withhold them from me? The few weeks necessary for their journ I will return them if you wish. Why

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give me the wanton needless pain of both keeping from me the one thing that can satisfy my need, & forcing me to ask you three times for what … [missing page] … it & start afresh – knowing as I do how tragically pitiful life is, how should I let even that make a barrier against so rare & precious a thing as tender & comprehensive friendship – but unacknowledged love is different. MCS

[Hewitt to Stopes] Dominion of Canada46 Department of Agriculture Dominion Experimental Farms Wm. Saunders, C.M.G. Director Division of Entomology, C. Gordon Hewitt. D.Sc. Dominion Entomologist Arthur Gibson Chief Asst. Entomologist Central Experimental Farm, Ottawa 13. iii. 1911 I am sending you the news item for which you asked, and also the extract from “American Men of Science” – in connection with the latter compendium, I think I am the only scientific worker in Canada who refused to have his name included – by not filling up & returning the form – in a collection of “American Men” – My colleagues often fail to appreciate the reason & sentiment – (or the conceit!)47 If I do not come down to Montreal on Saturday you will know that “circumstances over which I have no control” – or something else, pre-

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vent me. There are reasons why I would rather not which you may understand. But I am glad you came – C. Gordon Hewitt

[Hewitt to Stopes] 16.iii.11. The Sherbrooke. Ottawa The “puppy-cat”48 leapt into my arms with delight – which was mutual – thank you: it is a symbol. I will come on Saturday. I thought, I knew, you could understand me & my letter – but if it will be ‘a real joy’ to you – then I want to help to make it your happiest day. I heard from Govmt House49 before your letter came – on Monday I think & in account of my uncertainty suggested that the box should be sent by post. Yesterday – a note came saying that the Gardener had been instructed by Her. Ex: to meet me at the station. Probably a firm but gentle hint that I was to go. “Her Excellency Lady Grey was represented by _______ with a box of flowers”!! The notice is an excellent idea. Is it your own? I would like to copy it some day. They make such a fearful fuss of weddings in Ottawa that one almost trembles at the mere thought of it! The purging through which I have gone during the past few years did not let me contemplate for long such a state of happiness – a state I long for – but now, perhaps I may. I seemed to step into a new year & a new world. You have helped me— Yours as ever – C. Gordon Hewitt

7 v

Rereading the Rocks It quickly became apparent to Marie Stopes, perhaps to no surprise, that her marriage to Reginald Gates was a disaster. He was not a feminist and was threatened by her energy. And in terms of her relationship with Gordon Hewitt, whether she desired a friend, a lover, or both, there was no resolution or finality for Stopes with this union. Still, she was compelled to return to Canada. Even in the weeks before her wedding she was in Ottawa touching the fossil collections that might provide other ways back from England, where she and Gates had agreed to live.1 The return route was via a controversy involving the Fern Ledges, a rocky outcrop near Saint John, New Brunswick, on the shore of the Bay of Fundy, site of the world’s highest tides. The argument, one of Canada’s most acrimonious geological debates, involved the dating of this site and nothing less than the emergence of the first terrestrial life on Earth. In the 1860s, after observing numerous fossils collected by geologists in New Brunswick, John William Dawson, geologist, naturalist, and principal of McGill University, assigned the “Fern Ledges” and other sites near Saint John (the “Little River” group) to the Devonian succession. This determination caused a great stir, even attracting the attention not least of Charles Darwin, as it suggested that terrestrial life had emerged on the planet even earlier than geologists maintained. It meant that Life may have begun in a site now under the British flag – that Eden was a British colonial possession. Dawson was already known for his discovery of the Eozoön Canadensis – the dawn animal of Canada, found in Quebec, which would have been the oldest known organic fossil on Earth (a finding since disproven and the “fossil” reclassified as an inorganic pseudo-fossil). To push land life – and the origins

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Figure 7.1 Site of the Fern Ledges, Saint John, New Brunswick, 2 June 2016.

of humans – back in time was a huge claim. Dawson was finding Calamites, tall, hollow tree-like forms (ancestors of the horsetails found in roadside ditches), in what he called Devonian strata. Before then, geologists had been finding Calamites, linked to the first terrestrial creatures like Hylonomus lyelli, in the later Carboniferous. In Dawson’s 1871 paper “The Fossil Plants of the Devonian and Silurian Formations of Canada,” which he sent on to Darwin, Dawson wrote that from the comparative riches of the Saint John beds, “it might be a fair inference that the North-eastern end of the Appalachian ridge was the original birth-place or centre of creation of what we may call the later Palæozoic Flora, or of a large part of that flora.”2 Darwin wrote to thank him: “I am greatly indebted to your kindness for having sent me your valuable memoir.”3 Local New Brunswick geologist George Matthew was a disciple of Dawson and to his grave would cling to the Devonian (and potentially, an even earlier Silurian) classification. Other geologists maintained, however, that the Fern Ledges were Carboniferous; thus, the geological community found itself divided. The need

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to resolve the debate was high on the priority list of the Geological Survey of Canada. Chief geologist Reginald Brock was preparing for the International Geological Congress that was to be held in Canada in 1913. He wanted to establish a definite classification in advance of the arrival of the international visitors. Howard Falcon-Lang and Randy Miller, two palaeontologists who have provided the most detailed work to date on this episode, remark on Stopes’s apparent lack of qualifications for the job.4 Working on the assumption that the Geological Survey approached her, not the other way around, they note that she was not the obvious choice: yes, she would be an “unbiased outsider,” but she had no experience with compression floras of the Carboniferous era, only the “anatomically preserved floras” that she found in her coal ball research in England. McGill’s David Penhallow may have shown her some of Dawson’s type specimens during her short visit with him in February 1909. It is far more likely, however, that she first viewed specimens related to the Fern Ledges controversy in March 1911, during the month of her wedding, an occasion mentioned in her completed report. These fossils were part of the Geological Survey collection, housed in Ottawa’s newly completed Victoria Museum. A month earlier, during her research tour of the United States, Stopes had met George Matthew’s son Dr William Diller Matthew, an assistant in the Department of Vertebrate Paleontology in the American Museum of Natural History, New York. Her little red diary noted that she had “long interesting talks” with Dr Matthew, which may have been her first opportunity to learn about his father’s role in the Fern Ledges controversy. It is hard to know who connected whom. As chief geologist, Brock may have met Stopes when she viewed the Survey collection in Ottawa or he may at least have known of her reputation through Hewitt. Certainly there had been Hewitt’s introduction to her work for the Ottawa Naturalist, and Brock was a fellow-member who would likely have read the piece. There was also her connection to Earl Grey, with whom Brock had completed a journey from Hudson Bay to Nova Scotia in August 1910. In any case, any real work on the Fern Ledges on her part did not begin until the spring of 1911.5 After her first serious viewing of the Geological Survey collection at the Victoria Museum and return to England following her wedding, Stopes ordered up some of the Saint John specimens to examine more closely at the British Museum of Natural History in London. Only then did she offer to do some

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work on the Little River group (which included the Fern Ledges) in New Brunswick. Judging from Brock’s reply, her letter to him had indicated some familiarity with George Matthew’s work. Perhaps she could be thought to have understood the past acrimony of the controversy and the context of potential hurt “feelings” that Brock was so concerned to avoid. In his reply to Stopes dated 17 June 1911,6 Brock began by referring to the fossils on loan from the Geological Survey. He underlined how the potential assignment would need to consider strata both geological and emotional:7 Dear Dr. Stopes, I have your letter of the 24th ult. I presume the specimens have arrived as they were sent at the same time as the books. Regarding the proposed work on the Little River group, I should be very glad to make some arrangement with you for it. The age of these beds is important for on them hinges a good deal of the geology of Nova Scotia. The International Geological Congress will stop off at St. John, and this area will of course be of much interest to them, so from every standpoint, it is desirable that some first-class work should be done. The Survey has a good collection of fossils from these beds but they were placed in Dr. Matthew’s hands before I took charge and he still has them. We could probably get them from him. Of course he is an old man who has done a great deal of good work as a matter of love, and I should not care to hurt his feelings any more than is necessary, but it is time that we were getting some definite information regarding the flora and if possible the age of these rocks. I should like to know what arrangement with regard to this work would be satisfactory to you. The year of Stopes’s marriage had been marked by many assertions of her autonomy. At the end of June she wrote to her mother from Stockholm, where she was working at its Natural History Museum, her future “plans in the air.”8 Back in England in July and dealing with her mail, she sent out cards to colleagues and friends explaining her request, considered radical at this time, that, although married to Gates, she would continue to be known as Dr Marie Stopes. That year also included the publication of her romantic correspondence with Fujii, Love-Letters of a Japanese, thinly disguised as the

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letters of Mertyl Meredith and Kenrio Watanabe, again under the pseudonym she had used for “A Man’s Mate” – Mortlake. Now, with Brock’s confirmation, in a letter dated 22 August 1911, of a fee of $500 Canadian on its way, she also began to plan her trip back to Canada. She wrote to Hewitt. Would he be available to meet on “a night at the end of August?” Having hoped to restore the triangle dynamic of their earlier friendship with her marriage to Gates, Stopes may have felt the time was ripe for another special night at the end of August. Hewitt replied that she was proving the unbelievability of “settling down” after marriage and declared that he would follow her lead and “do likewise – as soon as I can.” His reply, seemingly designed to deflect, implied that he too would marry but, like her, would not settle. With this lukewarm response from Hewitt (a far cry from a hoped-for renewed promise to keep their friendship a deathless reality) and having viewed the Ottawa collections in London already, Stopes skipped Ottawa and arrived in Montreal on 24 August. There she collected a set of maps left for her by the Geological Survey of Canada at the Windsor Hotel and began her journey to the eastern provinces. On board the uss Philadelphia she wrote to her sister that “the place swarms with Americans, but at table fortunately I have got into a bunch of Canadians. There’s a huge difference.”9 Gates meanwhile was in St Louis, having returned to America to work at the Missouri Botanical Gardens after his attempts to find a post in England proved unsuccessful. The two reunited when Stopes arrived in Saint John and commenced her fieldwork. Dr Matthew’s extensive handwritten directions on key fieldsites proved most helpful. Both Gates and Stopes gave talks at the Natural History Society in Saint John. The Minute Book reads “The 6th and last outing was held at Magwonish [sic]10 Road on Sept. 2 … Dr. Marie Stokes [sic] who was present gave an interesting talk on Paleobotany, and Dr. Reginald Gates on Heredity of Plants.”11 Stopes then returned to Montreal to view again the collections at the McGill University Redpath Museum12 and requested that Dawson’s specimens be sent to the British Museum for her further examination. A month after her return to London, she was still waiting for them: she sought Brock’s assistance in hastening their arrival: “Of course I have discovered there is a good deal of wrath in some quarters over the whole subject of the age of the Fern Ledges – but I did not

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know there was any feeling in Montreal, & I hope there is not. It may be merely slackness, or official delay on their part, & if so a note from you might get things moving. Until I get them it is difficult to work entirely satisfactorily as much depends on what some of Sir William’s plants really are.”13 In the meantime, Hewitt did as he had implied and followed her example, marrying “as soon as I can.” It does not appear that Stopes and Gates were invited to the wedding, though they surely would have found friends in common if they had delayed their return trip and attended. Strangely enough, Hewitt’s betrothed – Elizabeth Borden – was, like Gates, also from Nova Scotia’s Annapolis Valley. In fact, the bride’s home was just sixty kilometres away from Gates’s hometown of Middleton. Similarly, her people were fruit growers and, like him, she was a graduate of Mount Allison College. But Hewitt’s marriage on 11 October 1911 to Elizabeth Borden in the village of Canning involved more than just one person: Gordon Hewitt was marrying into a powerful Canadian political family. Like Svanhild of Love’s Comedy, he had made a most sensible marriage. Elizabeth was the daughter of Sir Frederick William Borden, Liberal mp for King’s County, Nova Scotia, and minister of militia and defence from 1896 to 1911, denizen of Ottawa. The Bordens, heavily involved in the apple industry, were supporters of Hewitt’s Destructive Insect and Pest Act, which had received royal assent in May 1910.14 Although Sir Frederick lost his bid for re-election just before the wedding, his cousin Robert Borden was at the same time installed as the eighth prime minister of Canada. Robert was a Conservative; however, the relationship between the two Bordens was characterized by a deep mutual respect and their families met socially.15 Elizabeth Borden was twelve years older than Hewitt at the time of their marriage: he was twenty-six and she thirty-eight.16 After the wedding, the Hewitts travelled to England from December to February in order to introduce Elizabeth to his relatives, his dog, Fritz, and well-loved places like Whaley Bridge.17 He also caught up with former colleagues in Manchester. May Kershaw, a friend of Stopes who was busy in the Suffrage movement and working in one of the university’s research laboratories, reported back to her in London, assuming (incorrectly) that Stopes had met Hewitt’s wife.18 When she underlined “he” four times, it is not clear if she is referring to Gates or Hewitt:

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I need not ask if you are happy & enjoying yourself – that goes “without saying” under the present circumstances. I’ve never heard a word of you or from you since he arrived back, probably you’ve been so happy that you have hidden yourself temporarily from the outer world. I generally hear every week or two of somebody who has heard from you or seen you – but never a sound lately … Yesterday there was a meeting of the Lit & Phil & Hewitt held forth. His wife was also there – she looked elegant but much older than he – but you probably know her personally so this will be rather stale. The paper was very good – he seems to be doing excellent work in Canada. The following month Kershaw followed up with further information on the Hewitts.19 How splendid to be giving the U.C.L. lectures. I hope they will be a great success. It is very nice that your husband has got lecturing at St. Thomas’ – you must be awfully happy together … I am busy this week helping at the big Suffrage Bazaar. I must tell you more about Mrs. Hewitt since you were interested. Prof. Findlay told me that his wife was not pleased about the marriage. She described Mrs. H as “fair & forty”. That is a woman’s estimate but even an easily-to-be-deceived man described her as 34! Prof. Findlay said the Hewitts had been to see them & Mrs. Hewitt did not seem at home in the surroundings. Poor thing! She has been used to a sort of Diplomatic Circle – it must be a great change to come to university life. Hewitt looked exactly the same – tho’ a little more “swelled-headed.” Stopes meanwhile was hard at work in the British Museum on The Cretaceous Flora as well as the commissioned report on the Fern Ledges. She completed the latter in July of 1912 with ample time for it to be useful to the International Geological Congress. Her finding? Definitely Carboniferous, not Devonian, as Dawson (and Matthew) had maintained. Writing to her at the British Museum, the head of the Redpath Museum, Frank

Figure 7.2 Dawson’s specimen of Calamites from the Fern Ledges, Redpath Museum, McGill University: On the bottom label, Stopes has crossed out “Devonian” and written “Carboniferous” in pencil.

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Figure 7.3 One of Dawson’s Fern Ledges specimens (with labelling corrected by Stopes) held by curator of palaeobotany Peta Hayes, at the Natural History Museum in London. The title of Stopes’s 1914 report for the Geological Survey of Canada has been added in a different hand.

Dawson Adams, asked her to correct the labelling on the fossils that Dawson had misidentified.20 I have just received your letter of July 22nd. And am very glad to hear that the collection of fossils from the Peter Redpath Museum has proved to be of such interest, and that you have been able to study the material so thoroughly. We shall be glad to have you return the collection as soon as convenient, and shall also feel much indebted if you will add to the names assignment to the specimens by Sir William Dawson, the correct designations as determined by your later study … best wishes for Dr. Gates and yourself.

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Brock, having seen the manuscript, voiced again his ongoing worry about the potential emotional impact of remarks pointed towards any problems with earlier work, and levelled some criticisms: I have your letter and also the ms, which has arrived in good condition. As it has just arrived I have not been able to look it over, except to glance at pp. 21 and 193. My impression from this is that all that is necessary or desirable in a report is to state what course you have taken and as castigation of offenders is not germane to an official report on a scientific subject it should be left for a special article in some other style of publication.21 Whether or not she responded by removing any critical comments (nothing untoward was included in the published report), Matthew was not pleased when she wrote to him explaining her ultimate findings, and he let her know that he considered them a personal affront: “You cannot think how much I felt your defection from the cause of truth.”22 Brock delayed the publication of Stopes’s 275-page memoir. In fact, it was not published until 1914 – by which time the 12th International Geological Congress (7–14 August 1913) and the official excursion to the Fern Ledges and environs was long past. Excerpts from her unpublished report were included in the excursion’s guide book,23 but her major work, now celebrated as a key contribution to geological science,24 was on the whole treated with little respect, and clear efforts were made to ensure no male egos/feathers were ruffled in the publication process. In the guide book, her name was misspelled (“Mary” Stopes): if she was invited on the expedition, she chose not to attend. Although Stopes offered extensive acknowledgments in her memoir to Matthew (who “was kindness itself, and placed all he could at my disposal – as well as going with me on two excursions in the neighborhood”), a thank you to Brock was conspicuously missing. By the end of 1912, Stopes and Gates were desperately unhappy together. Aylmer Maude, the man who would become her first (and only “authorized”) biographer, was now both house guest and platonic lover. For Stopes, it was a realization of a cherished desire – a close but chaste friendship with a man. Maude, twenty-two years older than Stopes, was a British author best

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known for his translations of Tolstoy and studies of Tolstoy’s life and work. In his introduction to The Authorized Life of Marie Stopes (1924), Maude wrote: “[Tolstoy was] the ablest man I had met, and now I am writing of the ablest woman I have met.” The Stopes-Gates-Maude triangle of course made for complexity; by the end of 1913, Gates insisted that Maude leave.25 During this period, Stopes launched an investigation in a different section of the British Museum, reading everything she could find on sexual relations between women and men. In early 1913 she also began studies on herself, monitoring her body and mood daily to ascertain if women possessed a “normal, spontaneous sex-tide.”26 Her self-observation of her sexual arousal, and her conviction that a woman’s desire mattered as much as a man’s, would become the basis of her final version of Married Love. By October 1913 she was seeking advice from Canadian solicitors on how she might obtain a divorce from Gates. On 6 March 1914, Hewitt wrote to Stopes for what appears to be the last time. He had been thinking about old transatlantic ties, having recently sent the members of the Pleasant Friday Afternoons a photograph of one of the entomological laboratories that he was continuing to set up across the country.27 The modest building was a significant marker of his success. In April a reorganization of the Department of Agriculture placed Hewitt at the helm of his own separate Entomological Branch, now in charge of insect control from coast to coast. Stéphane Castonguay writes that after its creation “a bureaucratic and scientific organization covering the whole country was permanently mobilized against the eventual introduction of foreign insects or the potential spread of native insects.”28 Hewitt’s letter to Stopes was a response to one received from her with a number of enclosures. In it she told him about her forthcoming book of poetry, Man, Other Poems, and a Preface. Mindful perhaps that Stopes enjoyed publishing the personal, his reply to her reads as if it was written with exquisite care and economy. He thanked her warmly for the latest edition of the Sportophyte (it would be the last and she may have told him so) and congratulated her on her new position, a three-year lectureship at University College London, and also on her inaugural address, a copy of which she had sent him as well. “The ‘Sportophyte’ amused me very much – and so fulfilled its object.” So stated, it is ambiguous if Hewitt meant that the object fulfilled was general amusement or if the emphasis was on me, acknowledging thereby that he was “in” on

Figure 7.4 Entomological laboratory at the Agassiz Experimental Farm, British Columbia, 24 May 1913. The “snapshot,” taken by Gordon Hewitt, was enclosed in a letter sent 9 December 1913 and pasted in the Minutes of the Pleasant Friday Afternoons.

Figure 7.5 Marie Stopes with cat, 1914. Figure 7.6 Opposite One of three copies of a portrait of Gordon Hewitt kept by Marie Stopes and held in the Stopes-Roe Collection, undated. Photographer unknown, although the presence of copies of different size and exposure suggests it may have been Stopes herself.

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the joke – that on some level, the Sportophyte’s overriding mission had been to amuse him. His being “stirred” by a moss-rose symbiotic joke may have been more wry irony: it reads somewhat flatly: as “an example of Symbiosis we may take the Moss-rose, where the rose supports the moss, and holds it out in the sunshine and in exchange the moss becomes sticky and catches the insects that might rob the rose of its pollen.”29 But in this joke that merges botany and entomology, he may have wanted her to know that he was truly moved by the attempt at ecological humour. The moss rose itself (Portulaca grandiflora) perhaps made something of a touching image for him, with its multi-coloured annual blooms of rose, white, yellow, orange, pink, and purple. He reported that he had ordered her poetry book, Man, jesting that he hoped she dealt with him “with the mailed fist!” In this comment, he revealed his familiarity with the title poem, which features “man” as a knight rescuing the “perilled Queen.” He also pointedly encouraged her to take on a masculine guise in confronting him: face it, she really was not the Queen but she herself was the Knight in Shining Armour. The poem’s ending describes the “I” of the poem and her “twin-soul” merging, Each mind entering, permeating, ranged Within the other. All the view is changed. Crystal of fusion from Man’s-Woman’s soul The spirit finds a vision of life whole. The main theme through the rest of the collection is love and its attendant sufferings. While some of the poems were written and published before 1914, and may be associated with a wide range of hurts and disillusionments from her younger life, a number of poems seem to have been influenced by her experiences with Hewitt, in particular. “Storm Clouds,” for instance, may have referred to the spring of 1910 when he declined her marriage proposal: Anger ’gainst the one we loved Like a cloud in April’s sky Is remembered, for it proved How unchanged deep love does lie.

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In similar fashion, “The Rift” explores the confounding situation of being loved, yet left. She also expressed the possibilities of forgiveness in “A King’s Reverie,” in which the speaker asserts: “How wise, O fool, to dare employ Laughter as weapon against hate.” And “After Five Years” recalls the beloved “with head upon my knee / For one whole summer day” and rejoices in the fact that after “five stolen years of life” the dear one has returned. It is significant that when Man came out it was nearly five years since Hewitt’s vow of eternal friendship on that August night in 1909 before he left for Canada. Any notion of his return was fantasy, no doubt, but one that might have effectively accompanied her sexual self-explorations of the previous year. As if in reply to her need to know if he was indeed content at this point in life, he assured her in his letter that he was as happy – implicitly without her – as “human being can ever be,” but also that his work, which he had always put first, was making “splendid progress.” Yet, in referring to the Japanese fossils that were “lying on [his] table,” he invoked in the same gesture the moments and places connected to them – connecting him with her. Now in Canada, they still were lying, “waiting the opportunity which is constantly eluding my grasp like the ‘will-o-the-wisp.’” His reference to the collection (it has reminded him of her; she has reminded him of it) underlines how social and natural worlds were entwined, how collecting was equally “a phenomenon at once psychological and social”;30 its great themes are desire and loss, saving and nostalgia, control and dissolution. Collecting – and hanging on – might be a means of “jousting” not only “with death” but also with life and love. Hewitt’s apt metaphor of the “will-o-the-wisp” conjured up a wetland landscape, ancient haunt of the fossilized mosquito, but also described a hope that compels one on but is impossible to reach. The “will-o-the-wisp” also had more sinister connotations, as it was said to be lighted coal from the devil that lured one deeper into the marsh. Here again he may have been alluding to the feeling expressed years earlier, that time spent working with Stopes was somehow illicit; that the fossils indeed were “lying” and that he had been a fool. In April, by which time she would have received Hewitt’s reply, Stopes had left Gates and her marriage. At the start of August 1914, she was living alone in a tent on the English coast on part of Earl Grey’s Howick Castle estate. She was full of sadness and, though she had not written lately to

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Helen MacMurchy, her Canadian friend sent her a note of condolence and sympathy: I won’t forget you Dear – or all the sad things that have happened. But I know that you will outlive and overcome them. I have written to you twice before, but felt I must write again, just to assure you of my unchanging affection and to tell you I am thinking of you.31 On the morning of 4 August, Stopes was abruptly awoken by a man armed with a bayonet, suspicious of her coastal look-out location. War with Germany had just been declared. In a memoir appended to Maude’s biography, Stopes wrote of these difficult days of personal and national upheaval spent alone camping at Howick: One evening … I suddenly felt that the long poem I had come to write had died within me … Perhaps the next generation may again feel the ease and security that we all felt before this war, but shall never feel again. Since that poem was slain on Howick shore, I have never really been able to do the things that I have personally wanted most to do, always being impelled to expend what power I had only on things that seem urgently necessary, either in connection with scientific research on coal and fuel, or in connection with the sex and birth control work.32 Looking back with nostalgia on the time before the First World War when “no hint of doom and darkness lay on the horizon”33 was inevitably the fate of one who had been young and privileged in the early years of the century. Everything had changed. But, in some ways also, nothing had, and her reminiscence prefacing her war story addressed abiding connections that grounded her throughout her life: I have always had a peculiar sympathy with stones, undoubtedly inherited, for my father’s delight in fossils and flint implements is traceable to his earliest childhood, and I have a sympathy with them

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which, curiously enough, often includes a knowledge of where they are, almost as if I were a stone-diviner, like water-diviners. Their smell delights me. Of course not all stones have a very noticeable smell, but to me, in quarries, almost every freshly chipped stone has a peculiar, and most have a pleasing, smell. The consciousness of fossils, even at a distance from them, has often manifested itself most usefully in my expeditions.34

[Hewitt to Stopes] Ottawa 12 Aug. 1911 I have just returned from Montreal to find another lot of testimonies of your kind thoughtfulnesses & your card. Thanks seem so small to send for your constant sending me of the Linnean Zoological Publications which I find, as I told you, of v. great interest & even if there were no papers to interest me in them they would serve to remind me that once I was a zoologist – or tried to be – & so would fan smouldering embers. I have a fear that I didn’t answer your letter: I know that I started to – But I wanted to say how glad I was that you were truly happy – that I could see – Am I, in a way, insulting your judgement when I confess that I was just a little afraid? I think you will understand me & the reasons for my fears which friendship only engendered – I am happy that you have proved them to be groundless. The fact you mention – of people’s ideas concerning one’s feelings after marriage & “settling down” have always created in me a feeling of horror – to me it seemed an unbelievable thing & you are proving it to be so. I will go & do likewise – as soon as I can. I don’t know where I shall be “a night at the end of August” – probably here, possibly Toronto more remotely possible in the Algonquin Natural Reserve. But how do you

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manage it – I mean the expense of travelling? Will you be on your way to St. Louis or where. If this reaches you in time do tell me more & why not the night in Ottawa or a day? The Government is to build me a house out at the Farm35 & I have chosen a site looking across to Ottawa & over to the Quebec mountains where the sunsets are gorgeous. I expect & hope that it will be finished by the spring. Prof. Findlay36 arrives tomorrow to spend a day or two with me – Mrs. F doesn’t write to me now – I have become a Saint, she says. Did you see any wing rudiments or halo? I have not seen the Greys lately as they are away the whole time – Govmt House is being set in order for “The Duke37” – When I went past “Drawing Room B” in the Windsor38 yesterday I thought of a certain afternoon some months ago. I wonder if you horrified people? With all good wishes, C. Gordon Hewitt

[Hewitt to Stopes] Ottawa 6. iii. ’14 It was very kind of you to send me a reprint of your inaugural address on Palaeobotany – which I had read with great interest in ‘Nature’ & am very glad to have39 – I was so pleased to learn that you had been appointed to the Univ. College position as I know how much it means to you in many ways, & I am sure you will be happy there – The “Sportophyte” amused me very much – & so fulfilled its object – I was particularly stirred by the “moss rose” symbiotic joke (p. 18).40 My hearty congratulations on your appearance in the poetic field & as a writer of ‘prefaces’ – I have ordered “Man” & am looking forward to reading it. I hope you deal with him with the mailed fist!

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My work makes splendid progress & grows apace, & I am as happy as human being can ever be – The Japanese fossil insects are lying on my table waiting the opportunity which is constantly eluding my grasp like the “will–o-the-wisp”. I have worked most of them down to families – tho that is a matter of conjecture with such creatures – With kindest remembrance, from C.G.H.

8 v

Epilogue The contrary of forget, I see now, is to be a part of, to live with and to share. Stella Tillyard, The Great Level, 2018 Only when love takes the lead will the earth, and life on earth, be safe again. And not until then. Lewis Mumford, in Man’s Role in Changing the Face of the Earth, 1956

People are always so much more than we know. One endlessly fascinating reason for this is that we exist in relation to other beings, human and nonhuman, both dead and alive. In attempting here to honour a friendship, I have encountered erasures and the more inevitable decompositions of death, but also extraordinary beauty, impossible kindness, and as many new mysteries as answers to my questions. I have touched letters and photographs that both friends held in their hands, but must admit now that most of the objects that brought Stopes and Hewitt together, including the “Japanese insect fossils … lying” on Hewitt’s table in Ottawa in the Spring of 1914, have evaded this study. Where are the “remarkably well-preserved” mosquitoes? Were they lost? Destroyed? The collection of Marie Stopes’s Japanese fossils held in the Manchester Museum contains an exquisitely preserved specimen of a fungus gnat (of the family Mycetophilidae) encircled in red by Stopes, but no mosquito (Culididae), winged or otherwise. In the last century, curator J. Wilfrid Jackson (who specialized not in entomology but in archeology and conchology) misidentified the gnat as a mosquito, apparently in the

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Figure 8.1 Fungus gnat encircled in red by Marie Stopes, one of the insect fossils she collected in Shiobara, Japan, in 1908. It is approximately 3 million years old (from the Pliocene, the youngest part of the Neogene Period).

course of putting it on public display. It is possible that Hewitt’s classification was the source of the error. However, by 1908 Hewitt had considerable knowledge of Diptera, and it seems unlikely that his senses deceived him in the course of two exhibits for his colleagues. More likely is the possibility that Hewitt had many of the Japanese fossils on permanent loan. Leaving England in 1909, full of good feeling for Stopes and her discoveries, he may have selected specimens from the Manchester Museum collection, taking all of her fossilized mosquitoes, and packed them among his books and other belongings, intending to work on them further in Canada. In one of the Manchester Museum fossil boxes, there is a small

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card with “C. Gordon Hewitt” printed professionally on one side and a note in his handwriting on the other: “Please put this on cotton wool as there is an excellent specimen, not marked in red, underneath, C.G.H.” A fossil with insect specimens on two sides – with only one marked in red by Stopes – is not in the extant collection, so the note adds further evidence that missing specimens accompanied Hewitt to Canada and were never returned. On the chance that Stopes’s Shiobara fossils (borrowed or otherwise) may have been deposited in a Canadian repository after Hewitt’s death, searches have been conducted by curators of the collections of the Geological Survey of Canada, the Canadian Museum of Nature, the Redpath Museum and the Canadian National Collection of Insects, Arachnids, and Nematodes. However, the deep-time mosquitoes that Marie Stopes collected from Shiobara remain elusive.1 Charles Gordon Hewitt died at his home in the Ottawa neighbourhood of Rockcliffe Park on 29 February 1920, less than a week after his thirty-fifth birthday. The attending physician listed the primary cause of death as four days of influenza followed by its secondary cause, five days of pneumonia. His friend William Morton Wheeler would attribute his death to overwork “during and since the World War.”2 He was initially buried at the Beechwood Cemetery in Ottawa, but his wife had him re-interred in Canning, Nova Scotia, where she joined him twenty-eight years later in the Borden family plot. Other memorials to Hewitt, besides the gravestone, include two species of insect named in his honour: Cacœcia hewittana, a Nova Scotian moth, and Aedes hewitti, a mosquito found in the Fraser Canyon of British Columbia. Although Hewitt has made appearances in biographies of Stopes, she has been entirely absent from accounts of his life. Theirs was a friendship that has been largely forgotten, or not understood as such – a misapprehension that bespeaks small erasures of all sorts. Gordon Hewitt may have avoided being tagged and mounted in history in connection with Stopes in part because of the fluidity of his name. Ross McKibbin, for instance, in his introduction to a 2004 re-issue of Married Love, calls Gordon “Charlie,” following the common practice of Stopes’s biographers. Like them, McKibbin does not make the connection between “Charlie Hewitt” and the more illustrious and heroic “Gordon Hewitt,” a trailblazer of Canada’s nature conservation. Along with name confusion is the possibility that the literary scene of British

Figures 8.2a and 8.2b Sir Frederick Borden’s family plot in Canning, Nova Scotia.

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social history was worlds away from Canadian environmental history, reflecting geographical and nature/culture divides that still tend to bifurcate intellectual life so tenaciously. A smaller but more significant erasure can be found in the full bibliography of Hewitt’s life work, compiled by his colleagues and printed in the Canadian Entomologist in 1920. In this listing of 126 publications, the name of his co-author, Marie Stopes, was omitted from the only paper he ever wrote jointly. His “one little sin” was officially erased. By the time of his death, the name of Marie Stopes was no longer acceptable in polite parlour-room conversation; nor, it appears, in certain scientific contexts. The infamous Married Love had been out for two years. In the first months of the Great War, not long after the long poem that she had intended to write was “slain on Howick shore,” Stopes had filed a nullity petition against her husband in the Divorce Division of the High Court of Justice, claiming non-consummation of marriage: “That the said Reginald Ruggles Gates was, at the time of the said marriage and has ever since been incapable of consummating the said marriage and that such incapacity is incurable.”3 Gates countered that Stopes had employed birth control throughout their union: whether or not this was true, the case was rancorous and only settled – in Stopes’s favour – in 1916, two years later. As impotence made its embarrassing appearance in the court and in the public eye, the element of society that Ernest Jones had left in 1913, complaining to Sigmund Freud that Canada stank of “puritanism, religion and suppression,”4 was not particularly receptive to a book that asserted women had sexual needs just as men did. Nor did it appreciate the book’s ecstatic description of orgasm: The half-swooning sense of flux which overtakes the spirit in that eternal moment at the apex of rapture sweeps into its flaming tides the whole essence of the man and woman, and as it were, the heat of the contact vapourises their consciousness so that it fills the whole of cosmic space. For the moment they are identified with the divine thoughts, the waves of eternal force, which to the Mystic often appear in terms of golden light.5 At the very least, one can imagine the powerful political family of the Bordens closing ranks after the tragedy of Hewitt’s death and those close to the

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Bordens doing everything possible to protect Elizabeth Hewitt, the grieving widow, from any hint of scandal. In portraying the friendship of Marie Stopes and Gordon Hewitt, my aim has not been to cast judgment. I have tried, rather, to present these young scientists in relation to their own expressed desires and ideals, as well as the supports and choices that were available to them. By the time their letters were written, the patriarchal grip on society and science had begun to loosen. Yet stresses and inadequacies in their models and institutions presented significant barriers to enacting equal and mutual forms of relation. Scientific endeavour was always – and of necessity – entwined with the personal life, from the (self) managing of egos to the making and remaking of interconnections, both blatant and subtle. In revealing her determined and sustained experimentations with others, Stopes’s archive shows that she was willing to cope with ambiguities of feeling in service of a deeper understanding of the oikos. She was capable of unusual – at times even alarming – creativity and commitment in her attempts to maintain relationships over time and long distances. Her friendship with Hewitt was nurtured in the meetings of the Pleasant Friday Afternoons, a space that venerated unfettered curiosity and the intermingling of different interests. By exploring the continuing ecological context of their collaboration, we are also able to catch something else – a strand of connections and contrasts that have gone unnoticed in their respective major contributions: Married Love (1918) and The Conservation of the Wild Life of Canada (1921, published posthumously). For Stopes, the ant paper with Hewitt was her first and only foray into an entomological topic; her fossilized insect collections from Japan provided Hewitt with his only palaeontological adventure. Their work together was singular but not esoteric, and connections may be found here to agendas and sources that proved important to their later book projects. Ruth Hall writes that Stopes’s disastrous marriage changed life “fundamentally, not just for Marie Stopes but for millions of others.”6 It was during the marriage that she turned her attention to women’s sexual health: as she explained in the Preface of Married Love, “In my own marriage I paid such a terrible price for sex-ignorance that I feel knowledge gained at such a cost should be placed at the service of humanity.” However, Hewitt’s role in the genesis of that book should be acknowledged. He played a part not only in

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her snap decision to marry Gates, but also in developing a key thesis of the book: “When woman naturally develops the powers latent within her, man will find at his side not only a mate, free and strong, but a desirable friend and an intellectual comrade.” In Hewitt’s agreement, then refusal, to marry her, Stopes’s resolve to prove this thesis only strengthened along with her desire to remain friends with him: friendship and equality between men and women were key to progress, the most advanced union being two people who can work together. As she struggled to articulate it in a letter to her biographer Aylmer Maude in 1913, this was the “haunting idea” to die for: “something big – bi-sexual, not, like the women’s movement, unisexual.”7 Hewitt completed his book on the conservation of the wildlife of Canada one month before he died.8 His friend Wheeler wrote that it was “a subject to which he had devoted much attention during the past few years,” but, in fact, his first address on the subject, “Conservation, or the protection of Nature,” had been delivered to the Ottawa Field-Naturalists’ Club in January of 1911, almost a full decade earlier: “Nature is not ours to squander, to amass wealth at her expense and enjoy a transient prosperity,” he had declared; “it is ours to protect, and the protection of nature is nothing more or less than the insuring of a national happiness.”9 Like Stopes’s book, which argued that happy marriages made for a secure nation, his own recipe for happiness in The Conservation of the Wild Life of Canada catered to a wide public. It was the first book to address Canadians directly about their responsibilities to nature and it bore traces of the public statements he had made over the years on behalf of wildlife in the Commission of Conservation and other government forums. It preceded the book of another more populist “father” of conservation, Jack Miner – “Wild Goose Jack” – who banded birds with tags quoting bible verses and published his story as Jack Miner and the Birds in 1923. Hewitt’s book promoted Miner’s work in wildlife protection as an object lesson for all Canadians, what we might now call “citizen-science”: in describing a visit to Miner’s bird sanctuary, Hewitt reflected: “One of the most wonderful and inspiring sights I have ever seen is the return of the flocks of geese during the early hours of sunrise on an April morning … Such pleasures cannot be purchased; they are the natural sequence to a genuine love of wild life and a patient winning of its confidence.”10 Like Married Love, Hewitt’s book not only dealt with pleasure and happiness but had an enormous sweep: in the words of Dr William Temple

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Hornaday, founder of the American conservation movement: “his broad mind reached out, and grasped the whole invertebrate fauna of the vast region embraced in the Canadian Dominion.”11 A British reviewer in The Nation & the Athenaeum declared that, “with the single exception” of Hornaday’s own volume focused on the United States, Hewitt’s book was “the first properly equipped, impartial, and scientific attempt to take stock of what the world has lost and is losing over one of its largest national areas.”12 Hewitt figured Canada as the home and refuge of the most desirable animals on the planet, and his vision included the protection of northern mammals such as the muskox, a concern materialized in the Northwest Game Act of 1917. He also played a key role in negotiations with American representatives of the Migratory Birds Convention Act (1917), aptly described in Hewitt’s words as “the most important and far-reaching measure ever taken in the history of bird protection,” affecting “over one thousand species and subspecies of birds from the Gulf of Mexico to the North Pole.”13 Although Hewitt predicted that the act would lead to an increase in migratory birds – and indeed for some species he was correct and his work likely saved millions of lives – the story of the past half-century, with its dark undertone of climate change, has yet been one of extreme loss of North American birdlife. A 2019 Science article reports a loss of three billion birds, more than a quarter of the continent’s bird population.14 Hewitt’s wide vision for conservation necessarily involved people as well as birds. While the North was a refuge in his mind, he saw the South as the slaughtering grounds, in part because of the increasing numbers of gunners in the United States and also in Central and South America. However, the restrictions of the Migratory Birds Convention Act did not adequately consider the Indigenous people of the North, whose livelihoods and cultures depended on avifauna. Nor, one can fairly argue, did Hewitt’s book. Invoking the imperialist Rudyard Kipling on the call of the wild – “It is there that we are going with our rods and reels and traces, To a silent, smoky Indian that we know … For the Red Gods call us out and we must go!”15 – his book rendered Indigenous voices silent indeed. Hewitt’s cited expertise on animal populations and conditions, and on Indigenous people themselves, came only from white (and male) observers. Indeed, nature conservation was enmeshed with Indigenous silencing, erasure, and dispossession just as Canada was transformed “from a place long inhabited to an unoccupied frontier

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awaiting colonization and the imposition of a new economic and moral order.”16 Hewitt’s assistance in creating Point Pelee National Park in 1918, for instance, simultaneously disregarded Caldwell First Nation’s historical occupation of the land, a claim settled only in 2011.17 As environmental historian Bill Cronon has said of the “trouble” with wilderness, its making very often involved the removal of people from their homes and a flight from history. Entangling both humans and non-humans, it is this interconnected sweep of conservation practice that opens up its promise for revolutionary change but also its darker possibilities and a more disturbing past. In December 1911, Stopes was invited (in a letter addressed “Dear Sir”) to join the First International Eugenics Congress to be held at the University of London.18 The list of vice-presidents gives some clues as to how racist science travelled, the ideas embodied in attractive people who called them “commonsense.” Led by Charles Darwin’s son, Leonard Darwin, the list is a cast of all-male luminaries including the Right Hon. Lord Mayor of London, the Canadian inventor Dr Alexander Graham Bell, the Canadian physician Sir William Osler, the Right Hon. Winston Churchill, and the American nature preservationist Gifford Pinchot.19 Another vice-president was Auguste Forel, myrmecologist and sexologist and one of four scholars whom Hewitt and Stopes cited in their joint 1909 paper on the tent-building ants of Japan. Forel’s 1874 book, commended by Charles Darwin, was Les Fourmis de la Suisse [Ants of Switzerland]; his five-volume Le Monde Social des Fourmis [The Social World of Ants] was not completed until 1923. Forel also wrote about humans – and in terms of inspirations for Married Love, McKibbin asserts that Stopes probably “owed more to Forel … than anyone else.”20 Forel’s 1905 eugenic study of The Sexual Question21 was topmost on the stack of books on sex that Stopes read at the British Museum to assuage, first, her own ignorance, and then that of millions. But it also offered grist for her feminist critical perspective. In Married Love Stopes used the example of Forel – “an exceptionally advanced and broad-minded thinker” – to demonstrate how little the discernment of women’s desires figured in the writings of sexologists (even Forel) and, therefore, the urgent need for her own study.22 The ideas of eugenics, disseminated by politicians and activists and defended by scientists, spread through the next two decades, only restrained once the genocidal outcomes of racialized hatred were revealed in the ashes

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of the Holocaust. Historian Angus McLaren writes that “in Canada, as in Britain and America, the rise of eugenics symptomized a shift from an individualist to a collectivist biologism by those who sought to turn to their own purposes the fears raised by the threat of ‘degeneration.’”23 Emphasizing the role of “experts” in promoting it, he adds that in 1914 “Dr. Helen MacMurchy, Ontario’s leading public health expert, felt it necessary to provide an explanation of just what eugenics stood for; in 1915 she spoke of its tenets being ‘universally’ accepted.” Julian Huxley and H.G. Wells (both of whom were correspondents of Stopes) published a popular book in 1931 entitled The Science of Life, which summed up the many utopian hopes for society held by leading eugenicists. Labelling as evil the “unrestrained breeding” of any species, “whether they are mice, lemmings, locust, Italians, Hindoos or Chinamen,” The Science of Life exuberantly painted a completely tamed and managed future for life on the planet: And it is not only human life that human knowledge may mould. The clumsy expedients of the old-time animal and plant breeder will be replaced by more assured and swifter and more effective methods. Of every species of plant and animal man may judge, whether it is to be fostered, improved or eliminated. No species is likely to remain unmodified. Man’s protective interference goes far to-day, and it may extend at last to nearly every life-community. Perhaps no man has yet imagined what a forest may some day be, a forest of great trees without disease, free of stinging insect or vindictive reptile, open, varied and delightful. The wilderness will become a world-garden and the desert a lonely resort for contemplation and mental refreshment. An enormous range of possibility in the selective breeding of plants and animals still remains to be explored. One may doubt the need to exterminate even the wolf and tiger. The tiger may cease to be the enemy of man and his cattle; the wolf, bred and subdued, may crouch at his feet.24 Hewitt was always close to mortality through his own embodied experiences and fears (“you will live much longer than I shall. I don’t believe in miracles,” he wrote to Edith Garner), and his rebellious remarks against extinction (and lament for the catastrophic extermination of the buffalo,

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the passenger pigeon, and the great auk) never contained such an allencompassing vision. A palaeontological sensitivity saw human recklessness at work in the disappearance of “[c]reatures that have existed long before the advent of man.”25 He had experienced his first taste of horror regarding the extent of human barbarism toward other creatures back in his undergraduate days: There has always remained in my mind the impression which I received when, as a student of zoology, the tragedy of the American bison was brought home to me by a little colored chart in the Manchester University Museum showing the past and present distribution of this animal and its gradual decrease in numbers. Frank Evers Beddard’s excellent volume on “Mammalia” in The Cambridge Natural History had recently been published, and the sad history was summarized in these words: “The Bison of America, formerly present in such numbers that the prairies were black with countless herds, has now diminished to about a thousand head.”26 Hewitt’s 1921 book quoted Hornaday (“Our conquering and pulverizing natural spirit is a curse to all our wild life”)27 and his thoughts on “genuine love of wild life” gesture to the provision of safe spaces for wild geese, not to a desire for domesticating control. Yet in his hopes for conserving the wild we also find aspects of a more managerial and controlling bureaucratic spirit, elements of (and models for) a “modern” conservation practice that resonated throughout the twentieth century. In terms of “protective interference,” Hewitt asserted that “the greatest value of the buffalo … lies in the possibility of its domestication”28 and he enthusiastically supported cross-breeding experiments between buffalo bulls and domestic cows at Buffalo National Park to create a hardy “cattalo.” None were fertile and the experiment was termed a “violent cross” because of the danger to the mother in birthing an unnaturally large calf. Though determined to assist in bison resurgence, he did not conceive of, let alone push for, a space that would allow them to roam freely. In this, he was hardly alone; indeed, as Shane Mahoney, Valerius Geist, and Paul Krausman write (though presumably not with Indigenous peoples in mind), “North

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Americans have never mustered the political will to set aside a large portion of unfenced prairie land for an ecologically viable herd of wild bison.”29 Hewitt was eager to wage a war of extermination against the mosquito at Sumas Lake, not anticipating then how “cure-alls” such as drainage (or the postwar use of chemical pesticides) could lead to “silent springs.” In this gesture of mosquito myopia one might see the rise of the “eternal ego” that Hewitt himself lamented, along with a growing confidence in economic biology, with its overriding interest in the value of nature in terms of human use and pleasure only.30 As articulated in The Conservation of the Wild Life of Canada, a proper use of wildlife entailed that it should be conserved for the following purposes: 1) to make non-agricultural land useful; 2) to provide a meat and fur supply for Canadians; 3) to provide a food supply and potential revenues for Indigenous people, thus meeting government obligations to them; and 4), to act as a source of refreshment and recreation for men. The first point was linked to Hewitt’s work for the Commission of Conservation, chaired by Sir Clifford Sifton, which sought to manage Canada’s lands and natural resources, spaces created largely through Indigenous dispossession.31 Hewitt’s third point implicitly recognized that appropriation and, explicitly, the moral requirement to find practical ways to address it in the fulfillment of federal fiduciary obligations. In the “primitive state,” Hewitt stated, the “Indian” was “merely a unit in that balance of nature that is so marvellously adjusted.”32 Here he was using ecological concepts of balance and equilibrium to frame an argument that existed in many colonized places where Indigenous people were present, refusing them ecological and political agency. But Indigenous people, he asserted, that were no longer in the “primitive state” and, living in a nature of balance upset by modern man, were less apt to take “common-sense precautions” to ensure that wildlife was conserved. However, for changes “brought about in the Indian’s attitude he [was] not to blame.” Hewitt was setting forth the “foregoing facts,” he said, with a view to removing prejudice in the minds of those who have not seriously considered the rights of the Indians in this matter. Our obligations to them in those areas where tribes still exist who have always lived on the wild life that still constitutes a means of subsistence, cannot be overlooked or neglected in developing those regions.

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Although his “facts” about Indigenous people were paternalistic and stereotypical, Hewitt’s reference to their “rights” went against the grain of public opinion and policy at the time. His friend Duncan Campbell Scott, head of the Department of Indian Affairs, would vow to eliminate the “Indian problem” in 1920, and thus obviate any need to address Indigenous rights: “Our objective is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic and there is no Indian question, and no Indian Department.”33 Whether or not Hewitt agreed with Scott, his book’s central concern was the disappearance not of Indigenous people but of wild life through wasteful slaughter by white hunters, as well as by “Eskimos” and “Indians.” Hewitt advised on the strict regulations that were implemented by Indian Affairs to prevent what he considered “wasteful practice.” In the calculating logic of Scott’s department, Indigenous people were doomed to disappear, one way or another. As McLaren observes, the place of Canada was actively being (re)filled by Sifton’s racist immigration policies, which supported first and foremost the creation of prairies of wheat farmed by British and American agriculturalists: Between 1896 and 1914 three million immigrants came to Canada. In the single decade between 1901 and 1911 the population jumped 43 percent in what had become the world’s fastest growing country … English Canadians assumed that white Anglo-Saxons were racially superior and immigrants were welcomed according to the degree to which they approached this ideal.34 Hewitt accepted that Canada’s identity and economy would inevitably be based on agriculture; any land not pulled into cultivation needed an argument justifying its usefulness. But early in his appointment – and before the devastations of the World War – this stipulation also seemed to rankle on moral grounds. In 1911 Hewitt qualified Earl Grey’s remarks to the Commission of Conservation on the need for accepting principles aimed at profitable development: there was “no mistake more profoundly erroneous” than to equate material prosperity with national happiness.35 The fourth and final “use” of wildlife in The Conservation of the Wild Life of Canada was men’s recreation. Indeed, despite (or associated with) Hewitt’s

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self-conscious capacity to offer a joking image of himself as a “Human Fraud” to a woman who loved camping,36 the wild he conjures is a man’s world only: “What man is there who, after months of unremitting toil, takes down his gun, rod, or camera, and, seeking the silence of the open air for a week or two, does not come back physically and mentally refreshed and remade?” Quoting from one of Scott’s poems, he emphasized the reinvigorating effect for men “when you steal upon a land that man has not sullied with his intrusion.” The wild as a source of national vigour was a well-spring not only for the sportsman with his rod and gun, but also for fighting men, for whom the wild was tied to the wherewithal to “conquer new lands” and to rise up bravely in battles such as Ypres and Gallipoli. When men were compelled to return to “primal competitive habits,” nothing made them more resourceful than the pursuit of wildlife. The wild made men – real men, not frauds. Although Hewitt did not fight in the war, likely declared unfit because of his compromised lungs, his writing indicates that he valued those who did sign up: these brave men included many friends, including some from Manchester days.37 The oikos that Hewitt sought to defend and conserve, besides being home to buffalo cows and bear sows, ultimately became a battlefield.38 This was a male preserve, an imaginary normalized perhaps by Hewitt’s everyday experience of working alongside the men he mentored carefully in his own department and the boys he supported so generously in the Scouts and the Ottawa Boys’ Home. The erotic ecology of Married Love offers a stark contrast to Hewitt’s wartorn and homosocial vision of nature, one that shadowed a significant period of his short life. Marie Stopes asserted that a highly effective way for a woman to restore her sexual desire and vitality was to hike in the mountains and take in “the Alpine air.” Just as ecological language suffused the work of both Hewitt and Stopes, so does the ecological search for cycles, laws, and patterns in the history of life. Flagging entomology, Stopes wrote: [It] seems strange that those who search for natural laws in every province of our universe should have neglected the most vital subject, the one which concerns us all infinitely more than the naming of planets or the collecting of insects. Woman is not essentially capricious; some of the laws of her being might have been discovered long ago had the existence of a law been suspected.

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One need only observe. If a swimmer comes to a sandy beach when the tide is out and the waves have receded, leaving sand where he had expected deep blue water – does he, baulked of his bathe, angrily call the sea “capricious”? But the tenderest bridegroom finds only caprice in his bride’s coldness when she yields her sacrificial body while her sextide is at the ebb … That woman has a rhythmic sex-tide which, if its indications were obeyed, would ensure not only her enjoyment and an accession of health and vitality, and would explode the myth of her capriciousness, seems not to be suspected. We have studied the wave-lengths of water, of sound, of light; but when will the sons and daughters of men study the sex-tide in woman and learn the laws of her Periodicity of Recurrence of desire? Beginning her self-study in 1913, Stopes drew on her own experience as well as that of other women to confirm her theory, now understood as natural law, of the “normal sexual cycle in women.” Laura Doan argues that Stopes’s “adept use of statistical methods, and her championing of citizen participation” – methods in the tool-kit of natural science and ecology – helped to give her an “edge over sexologists” in popularizing a new understanding of ordinary sex lives.39 Although conceding that “clockwork can never rule us,” she asserted that intimate observation and loving respect were the answer to the great question of “where” the attentions of a husband should go. In the loving pair’s seeking of “innumerable possible positions of equilibrium,” her guiding law found support in both nature and history: “The old Jewish plan of having twelve clear days after the beginning of menstruation before the next union is in almost exact harmony with the law of Periodicity of Recurrence of women’s desire shown in my charts.” Opposite top to bottom Figure 8.3 Chart I. From Married Love, 43. Figure 8.4 Chart II. From Married Love, 44. Figure 8.5 Periodic Fluctuations of Rabbit, Lynx, and Wolverene in Canada. From The Conservation

of the Wild Life of Canada, 1921, 217.

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Hewitt also produced time series graphs for his book, in his case employing research from the Hudson’s Bay Company archives.40 His graphs showed the periodic and relational rise and fall of associated animal populations such as rabbits, lynx, and wolverine, an original study that the British animal ecologist Charles Elton later applied in his 1927 classic, Animal Ecology. Following Hewitt, Elton wrote that “fluctuations in the number of any one species inevitably cause changes in those of others associated with it, especially of its immediate enemies.”41 Quoting him directly, Elton also warned of the vulnerability of any species and the need for managerial vigilance: “As Hewitt has pointed out ‘great abundance is no criterion that a species is in no danger of extinction. Just as an animal can increase very quickly in a few years under good conditions, so on the other hand it may be entirely wiped out in a few years, even though it is enormously abundant.’”42 Among Elton’s many accomplishments as a “founding father” of animal ecology, he has been credited with providing in his 1927 book the first working definition of the ecological term “niche.” He gives a memorable instruction: “When an ecologist says ‘there goes a badger’ he should include in his thoughts some definite idea of the animal’s place in the community to which it belongs, just as if he had said, ‘there goes the vicar.’” But palaeontologist and ecologist David Wilkinson alerts us to the fact that Marie Stopes, without using the specific term, had described the concept in a very similar way twenty-five years earlier in her 1912 textbook Botany: The Modern Study of Plants.43 In her chapter entitled “Ecology” she wrote: [Plant communities] correspond to a city among men where there is room for a certain numbers of tanners and bakers and printers and postmen, but where, if the community is to succeed, the types must not all be adapted to the same trade nor exactly the same environment. The interaction of the individuals on each other is as important a part of the environment as are the merely physical conditions … so in any community, because the plants are growing together, it does not at all follow that they require the same conditions for life: but that they fit into each other’s needs, and together help to adapt to their requirements the natural physical environment. [emphasis mine]

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Wilkinson rightly points out that a careful examination of the history of ecology and palaeontology, disciplines now seen as quite separate, demonstrates their deep kinship. The sciences have been founded on a grave forgetting of their origins. As science historian Simon Schaffer writes: [I]f, as the philosophers of the fin-de-siecle notoriously argued, truths are dead metaphors and scientific instruments are boxed experiments about which one has forgotten that this is what they are, then disciplines are interdisciplines about which the same kind of amnesia has occurred.44 Yet, despite definitional affinity, what is particularly interesting in this revisionist “origin” story of the niche concept is how Stopes’s definition subtly but significantly differed from Elton’s. For Elton the “niche” of an animal means “its place in the biotic environment, its relations to food and enemies” (emphasis mine). He viewed the organism as a competitive individual, while Stopes stressed cooperative behaviour – plants’ ability to “fit into each other’s needs.” In 1928 Stopes published her novel Love’s Creation under the pseudonym Marie Carmichael. As literary critic Deryn Rees-Jones argues, this was undoubtedly the “Mary Carmichael” referenced in Virginia Woolf ’s 1929 acclaimed feminist essay “A Room of One’s Own,” and it is Carmichael’s novel that Woolf had in mind when she discussed the necessary conditions for women’s creative powers to materialize.45 The English male scientist protagonist of Love’s Creation, Kenneth Harvey, is much like the Kenneth in “A Man’s Mate” and thus, again, much like Hewitt. Interestingly, however, Kenneth’s worldwide adventures include encounters Stopes herself experienced on her North American journey in 1910–11.46 Her ideal man – “part-artist, part-creator” – here appears more akin to her own “twin-soul.” In the chapter entitled “The Niche Doesn’t Fit,” the central female character, a scientist named Rose Amber, blossoms when she moves to the country with her new husband, Harry. But in relation to Harry, Rose Amber has not found her niche – he does not fit her needs – and she, this “woodland flower,” cannot bear fruit and remains childless. It is Kenneth she needs to

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be with, not Harry. Having described the concept of niche in 1912, she employed Elton’s term in her novel but remained true to her original definition, which implied care, attention, joint endeavour, and even, as her story demanded it, love. The chapter that follows is entitled “The Greater Unit.” Launched by an epigraph declaring that it “does not carry on the story and should only be read by those who think,” it fleshes out Stopes’s ecological vision of a future “full of hope.” She had alluded to this “greater” vision in Married Love, there explicitly based on “units” of happily conjoined couples: The whole trend of the evolution of human society has been toward an increased coherence of all its parts, until at the present time it is already almost possible to say that the community has an actual life on a plane above that of all the individuals composing it: that the community, in fact, is a super-entity.47 In “The Greater Unit,” Kenneth outlines his new fundamental idea of life, a “system of systems” of which we are but a part – a system preceding, yet broadly resonant with Arthur Tansley’s “ecosystem,” a concept first introduced in 1935.48 As Rose Amber is speaking of how, since the war’s desolation of so many homes, people were considering these big questions, Kenneth eagerly breaks in: Yes, and that is an aspect of it so important, so illuminating. Don’t you see that the war, instead of being as so many think, the crash and break-up of our civilization and good old order, is really the rearrangement of the units of life at the beginning of a higher phase – a new and better order. That fits in with what I said just now of the cell units in a caterpillar that is at the last stage before it becomes a butterfly – all its cells re-arranging, its old order breaking down – apparent destruction re-arranging the myriad cells in its body. Looked at from their point of view, war – calamity – but from the insect’s point of view, the greater unity they compose, the beginning of a glorious phase when the cells re-arranged form part not of a crawling ground worm, but a winged, beautiful creature.

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After concluding with his entomological analogy, Kenneth adds: “You see now … why I cannot possibly settle down to an ordinary routine professorship. I have something bigger to teach.” Rees-Jones emphasizes the evolutionary currents in Love’s Creation along with its social Darwinist undertow.49 With similar concerns, historian Carla Hustak begins to examine Stopes’s sex manuals as ecological texts.50 Considered as works of ecology, both Married Love and The Conservation of the Wild Life of Canada can be regarded as political and, in places, radical, attempts to sort out vital relationships in the home, the oikos. Together, they help us to explore how different versions of the oikos are implicated in the imaginative and mutual constitution of nature and society. While Hewitt’s oikos – under threat and requiring management by experts – was devoid of women, its material was the particularity of biological diversity. Stopes’s erotic ecology, although focused on human relationships needing expert advice, was suffused with the vital pulse of Life writ large. Metaphors from both science and poetry entered each of these visions. In the introduction to Man, Other Poems, and a Preface, Stopes wrote of the expressive restrictions of science that lead to a “large untruthfulness,” and the resultant need for other forms of human expression, such as poetry: What is commonly called Nature, and what is really the life of this world unspoiled by men’s barbarities, sings to him silently; and the poet who is attuned draws from her actual currents of thought – or perhaps one should say, of cosmic feeling which can scarcely be described as thought.51 But poetry, like science, could also kindle human “barbarities.” Cosmic feeling was described in Henri Bergson’s Creative Evolution as élan vital, a vital impulse that could be intuited but not measured. This book, a copy of which was gifted to Hewitt by his wife, Elizabeth, in 1911, was an enormous influence on many biologists and ecologists of the period. As in the eugenics movement, vitalism had adherents across the political spectrum including Hewitt’s friend Wheeler as well as Stopes.52 Her poem “Transmutation,”53 written in the spring of 1914 some weeks after she received Hewitt’s final letter, dauntlessly appeals to a purifying and erotic current rousing all of nature:

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Flame of life! that steals between Atoms of all vital dust In their motions only seen; Flame that lights the woodland lust Sets the sexes nerves afire So that merge with each they must When they tingle with desire: Burn, oh flame that weak men flee, Fusing molten dust with lust Burn till true Love’s trinity, Leaps toward Heaven, from earth outthrust. A hundred years after the publication of Hewitt’s book, we face increasing biological diminishment as well as the threat of mass extinction of species, including our own. Awakening to new forms of kinship, both Hewitt and Stopes edged closer to new understandings of life. “Burn, oh flame that weak men flee”: the invocation is unrelenting, and extreme. For Stopes, being alive required an equal and intense relationship with the chosen other. For Hewitt, death was always looming in the midst of life. In neither of the friends’ major works do we find ecopolitical positions free of hierarchy and prejudice. Yet, when placed together critically in wider conversations focused on healing and redress, it may well be that their ideas and their lives in relation provide openings for new configurations to emerge, creative opportunities for more unselfish, compassionate, and unsettling ecologies. Such an interconnection extends the possibilities of collaboration across time and space. It offers an entangled gift of past friendship.

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Appendix 1 “Ordinary Meeting, 20 October 1908.” Memoirs and Proceedings of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society 53 (1908): iv–v. By permission of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society.

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Appendix 2 Marie C. Stopes, PhD, DSc, and C. Gordon Hewitt. “On the Tent-building of the Ant Lasius niger Linn. in Japan.” Memoirs and Proceedings of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society 53, 20 (1909): 1–7. By permission of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society.

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Appendix 3 Chapter VIII, “friends,” excerpted from “A Man’s Mate,” ca 1910, an unpublished novel by Mortlake (pseudonym of Marie Stopes). By permission of the Stopes-Roe Collection. “A Man’s Mate” A Novel by Mortlake The property of Dr. Marie Stopes, Manchester University1 Chap. VIII friends. “Do you believe in the existence of friendship between a man & a woman?” Prof. Laurence put the question to Marjorie as they were walking slowly along the steep path leading up a mountain side. Prof. Schmidt had brought his class out into the mountains where they could see & touch the rocks while he expounded their histories. All the seniors were there, but the way was steep & the day warm with brilliant sunshine, & the party had broken up into a straggling line. Marjorie & Prof. Laurence, being the only English on the expedition were naturally leading it, & as naturally led it together, for Marjorie’s lightness of bearing & her swinging step made her a perfect match for Prof. Laurence with his long strides. The party behind them were lost in the landscape & when they got too far ahead of the others they sat down in the sunny air & waited for

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them in perfect content, however slowly they came. The beauty of the mountains wreathed with films of clouds above them & skirted by the rich green pines, filled the two scientists with such satisfaction in their mere existence, that they were willing to do whatever the moments suggested. Marjorie thought for a little space of seconds before replying to his query. “Once I did, & then I didn’t.” “And now?” “I can’t answer in a word. There are certain conditions under which I think it might be possible.” “Such as?” “Well – if they had some absorbing common interest that was not personal in any way, & if they were neither in love, nor married, nor wanting to be in love. It sounds rather impossibly difficult I am afraid!” Marjorie laughed. “What common interest do you suggest? That seems to me the difficulty.” “Well, I fancy that it must not be Literature, for of course the best literature has very much personal sentiment, look at our great novels & poetry –. No! Literature would be fatal. So would Music I think, & Art quite certainly. Why the very essential of Art is the beauty of form & the physical body. An artist couldn’t get very intimate with another of opposite sex without having strong feeling about their physical personalities. I think philanthropy might be the kind of impersonal interest I postulate, that is all a feeling for the people outside the immediate two – or Science might do. Science is the best of all I think as it is far the most impersonal. If they studied astronomy & contemplated the immensity of space, or bacteriology & looked into the infinitely minute forms of life, there would be nothing to cultivate a personal feeling, everything to help them to lose themselves in the universe. So I suppose it could be possible if everything was suitable, for two scientists to be real friends.” “Do you think people take these things into consideration? I don’t. Yet I suppose they must influence them nonetheless. I think people drift into friendship, unconsciously drawn by the tide of sympathy.” “Yes, in individual cases. I quoted the conditions which allows the flowing of the tide.” “Do you consider that we are friends, or not?” The question was not premeditated, & surprised him almost as much as it did her.

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“Yes of course, in a way, very good friends, but not what I separate out under the term real friends, & I thought just now you were thinking of that – deep, life long friends, with whom one feels alone & yet with whom one can share everything. We are not that you know.” “Why not? I believe you don’t realize how well we know each other. I have only just thought of it. Think how much we have spoken & worked together, there is nothing I can think of that I care about that I have not discussed with you. Have we not drifted with the tide together into a delightful harbour of friendship & never noticed where we were going?” “Perhaps. I hadn’t thought of it. And we have all the qualifications I named as being necessary! We are neither in love, nor wanting to be in love, & we can both be taken as being unmarried, & our common interest is in aeons of past time, quite an impersonal subject. Yes, it may perhaps be true that we are really friends, with a stable possibility of permanence for the friendship.” She spoke with a mixture of gravity & innocent amusement, there was no trace of coquetry in her feeling or expression & she conveyed to him completely the pure openness of her childlike attitude. “You know, I think we might find ourselves to be in possession of that gift from heaven, a friendship in which there is no background of love on either side. Let us see. Have you many good friends? Compare me with them.” Marjorie was prepared to do so frankly, & literally. She soon came to a conclusion. “Oh, of course you could never equal a real girl friend in the number of points we have in common.” “Why not? Just let us see! Have you any girl friend who is scientific, & is in particular a geologist?” “Oh yes. There are several girls in London.” “Take the best of them. Her religion? Do you agree?” “I have never discussed, I think she just goes with the tide of her family’s wishes.” “While we –” “Yes, I know. It was delicious to find that you loved my favourite philosophers too.” “Go back to this girl friend. When you go to a country walk together do you want to sit down on the same stile, & stop at the same bird’s nest?” “No. She hates muddy lanes – & I love them.” “There! I thought so. Now if she is discarded, where can you produce

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another friend who has real claims? If she is not in your own particular branch of science you can’t have the truly comprehensive understanding of each other’s moods.” “You forget, we are only discussing whether I have a girl friend whom I know so “really” as I know you. Now there are lots of things I have in common with my girl friends that we never broach. So that makes up for the science, & puts them on a level with you.” “Prove it. Gave an instance.” “Oh. Well – dress then. I just love dress, & talking about it with some one who is interested in it too.” “It’s a small thing.” “‘Many a mickle makes a muckle,’ & it is one of many.” “But let us consider it then. Why don’t you discuss it with me. It does interest me too, particularly the colours of the beautiful cloths & silk.” “Does it?” doubtfully she spoke, eyeing him to see if her were jesting with her. “Well let us begin then. Did you notice a lady at the Frau Professor’s party the other evening who wore big, thick dusty boots, a short tweed skirt & a pale lavender silk blouse cut with a very low bodice?” Marjorie put the question with the utmost apparent gravity, & in the same manner he answered. “I did.” “Well. Tell me what you thought.” “I thought that her partner should have turned up in swallow tails, a white waistcoast & riding pants.” “Good. Just what you should have thought. Do you know, I believe some satisfaction might be got out of you along these lines too, particularly in a country like this where there is so much of the kind to be discussed.” “But I am not going to let you off about the girl friend. In what other way does she surpass me?” “Oh, lots of ways.” “But does the sum total of coincident sympathies with her nature equal that between us? Marjorie considered for the space of two quiet minutes. “No.” she said frankly, “it doesn’t. And it is extremely curious that I never noticed it before.” She looked at him frankly & at the same time questioningly as though she saw him in a new light.

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He made the apparently irrelevant reply. “That is one of the things I like so much about you. You consider a new point before you answer it, & then you don’t mind facing a strange conception.” “Well” he said after a short pause “have you become accustomed to the idea of a man friend who is of the same order as your girl friends but an improvement on them? It did not take me so long to accept you in your new position. I did it gladly five minutes ago.” His voice became entirely earnest. “I have only had one friend in my life who was what you would call a “real” friend. He died years ago.” They walked silently along the path for several minutes, then Marjorie stopped & said very earnestly – “You know I thought at one time that it was right & natural that a girl & a man should be friends – I still think that – I mean natural that they could be friends. Then I found they couldn’t, didn’t at least, for men seem so apt to fall in love. But I think with us it is different, & we can neither do it, nor do we wish to. I don’t think it is any good deliberately entering on a friendship that does not hold out good hopes of permanence. Now in our case it does seem as though all the necessary conditions were fulfilled.” “Does it not occur to you that we are regularly locking the stable door after the steed has been stolen? What can we do now? We are friends, true friends, by our own showing the best we have either of us got.” “A possession is only ours when we realize our ownership. Today is the birthday of our friendship.” “Let us celebrate it right royally.” But they were interrupted. Herr Prof. Schmidt called a halt. They had reached a point on the mountain side where a slab of rock had been broken from an overhanging crag, & showed the fresh unweathered surface. The students gathered round him as he talked, & brought out their geological hammers to collect the specimens he wished for the museum. After his impromptu lecture there was a babel of talk, & many of those who had been toiling upwards were glad of the excuse of sitting down to break up a piece of rock into the required shape, or to chisel out a specimen for the Professor. These halts were also used by all the Germans to bring out the rolls & sausages with which they filled their pockets, & Marjorie was assailed with offers of sausages of many descriptions. Had she not been English, her refusals

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would have given offence, but as it was, all were prepared with excuses for a girl who had not been brought up to appreciate the minor joys of life in the right way. “Ack,” said one. “What pity it is you were not a German, you would then enjoy the mountains & walk slowly up them & have an appetite instead of racing & making yourself so ill that you cannot eat!” To assert that she was enjoying the mountains more than anyone there, & that she was also fit for twice the distance at twice the speed they were going, would have been as useless as it was discourteous, so she contented herself with telling them that their mountains were the loveliest part of the earth that she knew. When they reached the little “Gasthaus” near the top, & set down to a midday dinner, she at least disproved the statement that she could not eat, by attacking & making away with a thoroughly substantial meal. For the first time they realised that she might really be enjoying herself after all, & their pleasure in her appreciation of their good things was most sincere & outspoken. After the dinner & a rest, they set off for the summit, from which the Professor wished to show to the students the panorama of the mountains & the outcrops of the different rocks on their sides. Very soon, Marjorie & Kenneth found themselves walking in the van once more, though they had each set out with the intention of spending a little time with some of the other climbers. They had to cross a stream, two or three feet wide, & they were out of sight of the others. Kenneth put out his hand as she was about to jump, but she ignored it & sprang over with the greatest ease. “If we are friends,” she said, “We must be so properly. The others couldn’t see us, that is why I did it, I was not rude to you. If we are to be friends with the true equality of friendship, you must not always be remembering I am a woman & making allowances, & I will not be remembering that you are a man & expecting privileges. If we do, we will simply introduce the personal element & that will lead to destruction in the end. Of course when others are looking on, others who see in us only a man & a woman, then we must behave as such, & as a well bred man & woman. But when we are friends together, I do not want you to be all the time remembering that we are man & woman. Your hand should only be stretched out to help me when

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I am in real need, at times when I would stretch out mine to help you were the positions reversed. Sincerity must be the groundwork you know. Do you understand?” She looked at him clearly, frankly, sweetly. Though she had practically asked the same thing that loud voiced mannish women demand, she did not realise it, nor see the difficulty of her request. Kenneth Laurence would then have done much at her bidding, & so he took the pledge in the spirit in which she demanded it. “As a symbol of the perfection of equality in our friendship, I will treat it as you wish.” After that day they went together on many similar expeditions, & in the glorious mountains they discussed many subjects that seemed to glow with interest when handled by these enthusiasts. Each time they came together, they discovered further beauties in each other, & further points of contact & warm sympathy. Yet they remained perfectly free from the remotest thought of love on either side. In neither case was the nature ripe for it, & both Marjorie & Kenneth felt intensely, that the sacredness of the marriage vow was so great that even words of love were an unforgiveable violation of it, & therefore, in their eyes, as he was married there was not the most remote possibility of their ever developing a feeling of personal tenderness beyond that which they recognised was a part of friendship. Now that they had awakened to the fact of their friendship, & to the reality of its influence, they began to discuss the subject in the abstract, to search for definitions of its form, for descriptions of its beauty, for the laws that govern its growth. They were surprised to find how small a part friendship has played in poetry in comparison with that of love. Yet they found gems of thought in the Literature of many nations, which they strung onto the threads they wove for themselves. The recognition that tenderness played a part in friendship as important as the one it must ever do in love, though in a different key, was one which opened new vistas of delight. Marjorie trusted both herself and Prof. Laurence so completely that she felt that whatever they desired to do or say to each other was right for them to do or say in their capacity of friends. In this she was personally justified, though it is not a decree which could be generally put forth, because both she & he were of a peculiarly sensitive & harmonious disposition, & anything which was not in tune

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with their conception of the highest phase of friendship would have jarred on them inexpressibly. Sometimes he laid his hand on her knee, sometimes she touched the collar of his coat, sometimes he called her “dear”. That was as far as they went, as they had desire to go. But their voices were always tender when they spoke to each other, & their constant thought & delight was to please the other by the gift of beautiful thoughts or things. There is a fine subtlety in such friendship, a delicate fragrance, & purity of delight, that comes in no other relation in life. Love is infinitely stronger, more gloriously rich, more enrapturing, but it has not the faint delicacy of beauty, the odour of the morning dew when the sun is rising, the feeling of the joy of two disembodied spirits on their flight heavenward, that is contained in a friendship which is completely noble & completely reciprocal. To the two friends, everything had now an interest, for everything offered a theme on which they could hear each other’s views & round which they could weave their own fancies & gossamer threads of romance. Just because they touched at so many points, this charm of friendship could endure. There was no danger of its becoming sentimental or insincere, for they had so much in common which took them out of themselves. All their scientific work in the laboratory was sound intellectual meat that kept the sweets from cloying, while their sense of the deliciously ridiculous in life & in themselves flooded them with streams of sparkling water which quenched their thirst & cooled their brows. The footing on which their friendship now placed them was partly recognised in the laboratory, which could understand that such a relation might exist between two English people. It spoke much for the strength of their characters & the respect which they commanded that no one suggested, no one even thought that there was a breath of love on either side. By those that watch for its advent, the absence of love is as easily recognised as its presence. Those in the laboratory who could have detected him, were well assured that the love-god had not yet penetrated its walls. The quiet friendship which she shared with Prof. Laurence did not interfere with the pursuit of Marjorie by those who were free to marry her, but whose most ardent attentions were as seed sown on a barren soil, unkissed by the sun.

8 v

Notes abbrev iations jlmc

Julia Leslie Mackay Collection

lac

Library and Archives Canada

nhma

Natural History Museum Archives, England

spbla

Stopes Papers, British Library Archives

src

Stopes-Roe Collection

uma

University of Manchester Archives

ch a p ter o n e 1 By 1955, when it was in its twenty-eighth edition, Married Love had been translated into fifteen languages as well as Braille. See Szreter and Fisher, Sex Before the Sexual Revolution, 35; and Eaton and Warnick, Marie Stopes: A Checklist of Her Writings, 26. 2 Stopes to The Times, 16 December 1909; cited in Rose, Marie Stopes and the Sexual Revolution, 64. 3 Stopes, Married Love, 17–18. 4 Hewitt, “Conservation, or the Protection of Nature,” 221. 5 See Layli Long Soldier et al., https://www.racingmagpie.com/mitakuye-oyasinexhibit/. Discussed in her talk for the Against Hungry Listening series at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Queen’s University, 1 February 2019. Thomas King has written that the phrase also is familiar to “most Native peoples of North America” and “while each tribe has its own way of expressing this sentiment in its own language, the meaning is the same”; All My Relations, ix.

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6 Hall, Marie Stopes, 142. Other tributes and biographies include: Maude, The Authorized Life; Briant, Marie Stopes; Rose, Marie Stopes and the Sexual Revolution; and, Debenham, Marie Stopes’ Sexual Revolution. Although Hewitt appears in their indexes as Charles Gordon Hewitt, Hall, Rose, and Debenham refer to him almost exclusively as “Charlie” in their main texts. While focusing on Stopes and the many events of her long life, both Hall and Rose discuss some of the letters reprinted in this book; my transcriptions and interpretations differ in places. 7 In 2015, in the wake of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a new plaque acknowledging his “notorious” career with the Department of Indian Affairs overseeing the deeply harmful “assimilationist Indian Residential School system” was installed near Scott’s grave at the Beechwood Cemetery in Ottawa. 8 Scott, “Charles Gordon Hewitt,” vi–viii. Despite their age difference (Scott was twenty-three years older than Hewitt), the two became friends: he sent Hewitt copies of his poems, and in one of Hewitt’s albums there is a photograph of “D.C. Scott & self ” at Meech Lake, 30 July 1914.” Scott would maintain a friendship with Hewitt’s widow, continuing to send her copies of his own poems along with letters after Hewitt’s death. 9 Foster, Working for Wildlife, 210. 10 Kulchyski and Tester, Kiumajut (Talking Back), 24. 11 Loo, States of Nature, 35. 12 Cameron, Openings, 69. 13 A recent exemplary study is Greer, Hemsworth, Farish, and Smith, “Historical Geographies of Interdisciplinarity.” 14 On the challenges of interdisciplinarity, including its emotional life, see Callard and Fitzgerald, Rethinking Interdisciplinarity. 15 Some of these letters appear to be handwritten copies and making copies seems to have become a regular feature of Stopes’s writing practice. Aylmer Maude recounts the story of her experience of a storm when she was crossing the Pacific from Japan to Canada in 1909. The sea burst into her cabin and a manuscript was soaked: from this “the authoress learnt a lesson she has never forgotten, and never now allows a manuscript of hers to remain uncopied.” Maude, The Authorized Life, 114. 16 The Stopes Papers in the British Library comprise 324 volumes of a lifetime of correspondence in English, French, German, Italian, Swedish, Japanese, and Spanish. The Stopes-Hewitt correspondence is in spbla, Add. ms 58473.

notes to pages 10–1 6

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17 According to Ruth Hall, Stopes selectively destroyed some of her letters and papers before she died. In the letters between Hewitt and Stopes, reference is made to letters that are no longer with the set and were perhaps destroyed. 18 spbla, Add. ms 58574 and Add. ms 58682. 19 Stopes, Married Love, 88. 20 Lafcadio Hearn (1850–1904) was known also by the Japanese name Koizumi Yakumo. While in Japan, Stopes would visit his widow and sponsor a debate on the proposal: “That the picture of Japan presented in Lafcadio Hearn’s books in totally fallacious,” a position she herself rejected. This debating group, founded under Stopes’s direction in 1908, was the Tokyo Ladies’ Debating Society, and is still in existence, though in 2020 it is called the Tokyo Women’s Club. 21 The journal was later published: see Stopes, A Journal from Japan, 249. 22 Hearn, Kwaidan, 211. 23 Stopes, A Journal from Japan, 273. 24 Ibid., 273. 25 Hewitt, “Tent-building Habits of Ants,” 168.

ch a p ter t wo 1 Rose, Marie Stopes and the Sexual Revolution, 27. 2 Shteir, Cultivating Women, Cultivating Science. Feminist scholars have shown that natural history was accepted as a “feminine science,” providing a means of selfdiscipline and self-improvement while upholding women’s place and gendered responsibilities in the domestic sphere. See also McEwan, “Gender, Science and Physical Geography in Nineteenth-Century Britain,” 217. 3 Cornish and Driver, “Between Kew and Royal Holloway.” 4 See Seibold-Bultmann, “Monster Soup,” 211–19 and Forsberg, “Nature’s Invisibilia,” 638–66. 5 Maude, The Authorized Life, 199. 6 An illustrative example is Tansley’s 1926 Aims and Methods in the Study of Vegetation, a book edited with T.F. Chipp, assistant director of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, to facilitate British management of botanical resources under the auspices of the British Empire Vegetation Committee (bevc), established by the Imperial Botanical Congress. Here they stressed the key role of ecological study in enabling the living resources of the Empire to be properly managed

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notes to pages 16– 2 0 by colonial agencies: Aims and methods in the study of vegetation, London, uk: Whitefriars Press, edited for and published by the bevc and Crown Agents for the Colonies.

7 spbla, Add. ms 58468, Letter from Tansley to Stopes, 10 February 1907. 8 Ayres, Shaping Ecology, 68; Maude, The Authorized Life, 84. 9 See Matless and Cameron, “Experiment in Landscape,” 96–126. 10 Established by Royal Charter in 1903, the new Victoria University of Manchester was merged with Owens College by Act of Parliament in 1904. It was commonly referred to simply as the University of Manchester, its current official title as of 2004. 11 nmha, Palaeontology Collection, Untitled ms, second of four pages. 12 The Sportophyte 4 (1913), 19. 13 Tansley, “The Early History of Modern Plant Ecology in Britain,” 134. The first two women members were elected to the committee in 1910: Marietta Pallis and Jean Shaw were admitted only after the new category of Associate Membership was created. See Cameron and Matless, “Translocal Ecologies,” 22. 14 uma, F.E. Weiss, “Life,” presidential address to the Manchester Microscopical Society, 1 December 1898, https://archiveshub.jisc.ac.uk/search/archives/a77a8 d27-8c30-36e6-9c2c-13dcdc677439. 15 Samuel Alberti notes: “Boundaries were permeable, and curators, lecturers, students and objects pass to and fro … A major function of these collections was to provide material culture for the departments’ teaching.” Alberti, Nature and Culture, 36. 16 Sheail, Seventy-Five Years in British Ecology, 69. 17 Killingray, “The Pleasant Sunday Afternoon Movement,” 262–74. 18 uma, Minute books of the meetings of the Pleasant Friday Afternoons. Initially meeting weekly, they would be held at least twice per term until their end in 1926. 19 uma, “Pleasant Friday Afternoons” [P.F.A.], Minutes Volume II dzo/5/2, 1906– 1915, 11 October 1907. 20 uma, “Pleasant Friday Afternoons” [P.F.A.], Minutes Volume II dzo/5/2, 1906– 1915, 20 February 1903. 21 Mumford, Technics and Civilization, 169. “Just as the noisy clank of Watt’s original engine was maintained, against his own desire to do away with it, as a pleasing mark of power and efficiency, so the smoking factory chimney, which polluted the air and wasted energy, whose pall of smoke increased the number

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and thickness of natural fogs and shut off still more sunlight – this emblem of a crude, imperfect technics became the boasted symbol of prosperity,” 168. 22 spbla, Add. ms 58531, f.23, Wilkinson to Stopes, 28 June 1908. 23 spbla, Add. ms 58470, f.122, Weiss to Stopes, 4 December 1907. 24 Pole, “The Development of State Education in Macclesfield.” 25 T.H. Hewitt, “The Value of Handicraft as a Factor in Mental Evolution.” 26 See Palladino’s Entomology, Ecology and Agriculture but also Kraft, “Patronage, Pragmatism and Politics in English Biology.” 27 Hewitt, “A contribution to a Flora of St. Kilda,” 241. 28 The first meeting that they would attend together was on 4 November 1904. 29 The dynamic of Stopes’s triangles typically had one person’s romantic or wedded involvement with a second member safeguarding the platonic relationship between the first and the third. Other variations can be found in history; for examples of famous Victorian triangles, see, for instance, Phyllis Rose, Parallel Lives, 71–94. American poet Dorothy Parker famously remarked that the Bloomsbury Group “lived in squares, painted in circles and loved in triangles.” 30 For example, he was the supervisor of Kono Yasui, a biologist and cytologist and, in 1927, the first Japanese woman to earn a doctoral degree in science. 31 spbla, Add. ms 58471, f.120, Letter from Hoyle to Stopes, 29 August 1906: of three engagements he announced, only this one was given an “!”. McNicol retained close ties to the university and never married: after returning to teach at the Manchester High School for Girls, where she herself had been a pupil, she remained a lifelong friend and correspondent of Stopes. See Tylecote, The Education of Women at Manchester University, 83. 32 uma, “Pleasant Friday Afternoons” [pfa], Minutes Volume II dzo/5/2.

ch a p ter t h re e 1 From examples of their photographs in this period, it appears each of them was using a Kodak Brownie 2, a light box camera with a waist-level viewfinder, one of the first cameras to place the taking of snapshots in the hands of the masses. It was manufactured from 1901 to 1935 by the Eastman Kodak Company and shot 120 film, a format that became popular for still photography. 2 spbla, Add. ms 58531, f.17, Letter from Wilkinson to Stopes, 28 June 1908. 3 Stopes, A Journal from Japan, 201. 4 See Appendix 1.

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notes to pages 30–5

5 Cleather and Crump, Tristan and Isolde, 8. 6 spbla, Add. ms 58531, f.16–17, Letter from Wilkinson to Stopes, 28 June 1908. 7 spbla, Add. ms 58468, f.70, Letter from Stopes to Oliver, 29 April 1908. 8 Rose, Marie Stopes and the Sexual Revolution, 57. 9 spbla, Add. ms 58681, f.78, Letter from McNicol to Stopes, 20 May 1908. 10 spbla, Add. ms 58531, f.17, Letter from Wilkinson to Stopes, 15 March 1908. 11 spbla, Add. ms 58531, f.16–17, Letter from Wilkinson to Stopes, 28 June 1908. 12 spbla, Add. ms 58471, f.42, Letter from Hoyle to Stopes, 25 November 1908. The meeting of the baas was held 25 August to 1 September 1909 with a number of Manchester scholars in attendance, including the physicist Ernest Rutherford. 13 Ibid. 14 spbla, Add. ms 58471, f.44–5, Letter from Hoyle to Stopes, 10 December 1908. Hoyle would have big news of his own that fall; he and his wife were leaving their birthplace and long-time home of Manchester, for Hoyle to take up a job as the director of the new National Museum of Wales. 15 Stopes, A Journal from Japan, 2 September 1908, 213. 16 Ibid., 214. 17 Sleigh, Six Legs Better, 63. 18 Ibid., 64. 19 Hewitt’s photo albums contain images of insect-collecting with Wheeler in Tryon, North Carolina, in December 1913. Wheeler would write an obituary for Hewitt in the Journal of Economic Entomology 13, 2 (1920): 262–3. 20 The original letters from which my transcriptions have been made are held in the Stopes Papers of the British Library: Add. ms 58473, Add. ms 58574, Add. ms 58682. Transcription is something of an art, and errors and misunderstandings easily creep into the text through misreadings. Although I learned to read the cursive scripts of Hewitt, Stopes, MacMurchy, and Garner, the few words that I still feel slightly uncertain about are enclosed in square brackets. Note that in Hewitt’s use of his fountain pen, periods sometimes look like dashes and vice versa. 21 University letterhead. 22 Hewitt is likely referring to one of the Frodsham sandstone caves, a survival of medieval quarrying located southwest of Manchester and on the way to the Delamere Forest, which he visited in 1905 together with Stopes and Kenjiiro Fujii (see figure 3.2 for Hewitt’s photograph of Fujii). 23 University stamp.

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24 Mary “Molly” McNicol was Hewitt’s fiancée (August 1906–March 1908) and lifelong friend of Stopes. 25 This journal was later edited and published in 1910 as A Journal from Japan: A Daily Record of Life as Seen by a Scientist (London: Blackie & Son, 1910). 26 Miss Katie Wilkinson was assistant to Dr William Evans Hoyle, director of the Manchester Museum, until 1912, when she began working with the board of trade in connection with the employment of children. Stopes exchanged letters with her while she was away in Japan, and they would remain correspondents for the next three decades: after Stopes’s son, Harry, was born, Wilkinson’s nephew would live for a period with Stopes’s family as Harry’s companion. 27 Dr W.E. Hoyle, director of the Manchester Museum (and later as of 1909, director of the National Museum of Wales): his expertise was the bat, Fledermaus in German. 28 A gift of cufflinks from Stopes. 29 Stopes collected houseflies for Hewitt and she made observations of them in A Journal from Japan, 79: on 12 December 1907 she noted the hot, sunny weather in relation to “a number of house flies in my room.” 30 Evelyn was the wife of Professor Frederick Ernest Weiss, George Harrison Chair of Botany (1892–1930), who promoted and supported Stopes during her hiring process at Manchester in 1904 and subsequent rehire in 1909. 31 Hewitt’s unpublished report on this project of economic zoology is held by the University of Manchester Archives: 1907/8, dzo/4/5/1. 32 Sir George Edward Wade, cbe (1869–1954), better known by his stage name George Robey, was an English comedian, singer, and star of musical theatre. 33 This beach on the largest of the Channel Islands remains a popular holiday destination. 34 The British Museum, established in 1753, enlarged its collections enormously over the next centuries as the British Empire expanded to become, at its height, the foremost global power. Several branch institutions were created, including the British Museum of Natural History in 1881 (currently the Natural History Museum). It is likely this branch in South Kensington to which Hewitt is referring. 35 The Hallé is an English symphony orchestra housed in Manchester’s Free Trade Hall since its founding in 1858 until 1996, when it moved to the Bridgewater Hall: Hans Richter was musical director from 1899 to 1911. 36 If Hewitt intended to write “don’t want to,” the “don’t” is missing.

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notes to pages 37– 8

37 Dr Otto Vernon Darbishire (1870–1934) was a senior demonstrator and then lecturer at Manchester University from 1899–1909: he was also a member of the British Vegetation Committee, forerunner to the British Ecological Society. Moving to the University of Bristol (1911–33), he worked as a lichen expert, treating those from the British Antarctic (Terra Nova) Expedition. His geneticist cousin Arthur Dukinfield Darbishire (1879–1915) was a demonstrator in zoology at Manchester (1902–05) and also a friend of Hewitt, Stopes, and Fujii. 38 The professor of zoology was Sydney J. Hickson (1859–1940), a marine zoologist and specialist in corals who held the Chair from 1894 until his retirement in 1926. He was Hewitt’s doctoral supervisor and the founder of the Pleasant Friday Afternoons, the joint meetings of the Zoology and Botany departments. 39 The Manchester Microscopical and Natural History Society was established 1880 after beginning as the Microscopical Section of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society in 1858. S.J. Hickson was president 1893–1904 and F.E. Weiss was president 1904–22: women were admitted as associates in 1884. 40 The Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society (the Lit & Phil), founded 1781, is Britain’s second-oldest learned society (the oldest is the Royal Society of London, founded 1660). Its “House” was in George Street until it was destroyed in the Christmas Blitz 1940. Women were not admitted to the Lit & Phil until the early twentieth century: Molly McNicol became a member in October 1905, along with Hewitt (who was elected its secretary in 1909 while Ernest Rutherford was made a vice-president). 41 Dr Henry Wilde, DSc, dcl, frs, was a wealthy electrical engineer, president of the Lit & Phil from 1894 to 1896 and the inventor of the self-energizing dynamo, which employed electro-magnets to achieve a significant increase in power. The Royal Navy used his dynamo to provide their ships with stronger searchlights; its ability to melt iron bars also provided spectacular entertainment value for Wilde’s public demonstrations. 42 After serving as Macdonald Chair of Physics at McGill University, Montreal, from 1898–1907, Professor Sir Ernest Rutherford returned to England to become Langworthy Professor of Physics in the University of Manchester. In 1919 he became Cavendish Professor of Physics at Cambridge. 43 Harold Baily Dixon was professor of chemistry at Manchester (1886–1922) and twice president of the Lit & Phil (1907–08) and (1923–25). He was an expert for the government in the cause of mine explosions and a long-time supporter of the education of women scientists.

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44 Robert Dunkinfield Darbishire (1826–1908), the uncle of O.V. Darbishire, was a Manchester lawyer and philanthropist and a fervent advocate of women’s right to education; he founded the Manchester High School for Girls. Another pastpresident of the Lit & Phil (1886), he was a major donor to the Manchester Museum, providing over seven hundred items. Delighted to be invited to one of the dances that Stopes hosted (in December 1906), he exchanged many letters with her while she was in Japan. 45 Sir Arthur Friedrich Schuster (1851–1934) was Langworthy Professor of Physics until 1907, when Rutherford replaced him. 46 Whaley Bridge is a small town on the River Goyt in the High Peak district of Derbyshire, fifteen kilometres from Macclesfield, Hewitt’s hometown. 47 Unidentified. 48 A classic geological site for the study of Triassic sandstones as well as a popular walking and picnic destination, Alderley Edge is a sandstone escarpment on the edge of the Peak District above the Cheshire Plain, around twenty kilometres from Manchester and ten from Macclesfield. It has been associated with King Arthur and the wizard Merlin and is the site of ancient wells and historic quarrying activity. 49 Professor Dr Shozaburo Watase of the Sapporo Agricultural College and the Imperial University of Tokyo was trained in both Japan and America: he was an expert in animal phosphorescence and electricity, and in 1905, the first to make zoological observations on the phosphorescence of the luminous organs of Hotaru-ika (Firefly Squid). Lafcadio Hearn describes him and his work on fireflies in Kotto: Being Japanese Curios, With Sundry Cobwebs (1902). 50 The 7th International Congress of Zoology in 1907 was held in Boston. 51 F.H. Gravely (1885–1965) was a British arachnologist. He studied zoology at Manchester, where he became a demonstrator in 1907 and worked on the Discovery Antarctic Expedition collections. 52 Frederick William Gamble (1869–1926) was a lecturer in zoology at Manchester from 1893 until 1909, when he was appointed to the chair of Zoology at the University of Birmingham. In the latter stage of his career at Manchester he became assistant director of the University Zoological Laboratories. 53 Hewitt spent a stormy month in July 1906 on the isolated volcanic archipelago of St Kilda in the North Atlantic, the westernmost islands of Scotland’s Outer Hebrides. His photo albums of St Kilda mainly document village life (which ended abruptly after the entire population of St Kilda was evacuated in 1930).

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notes to pages 40– 4

54 This episode is not included in the published version. 55 Dr Hoyle. 56 25 February 1908, Proceedings of the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society, xvii: “Dr. W.E. Hoyle exhibited several well-preserved examples of fossil insects which were sent to the Manchester Museum from Shiobara, Japan, by Dr. Marie C. Stopes. These were Diptera, one being probably a Calypterate, whilst another was a remarkably well-preserved mosquito probably of the family Culicidae, another appeared to be Culicid larva, whilst the remaining specimen strongly resembled a Machilis. They were all derived from Tertiary deposits and were probably of Pleistocene age. No systematic work, however, seems to have been done as yet on these strata.” 57 Delamere Forest, forty-eight kilometres from Manchester, is a large woodland in Cheshire, remnant of the twin medieval forests of Mara and Mondrem. 58 In 1907 an endowment was made for a Chair in botany and a new botany building was opened in 1911. 59 Professor of geology, palaeontology and mineralogy, Matajiro Yokoyama (1860– 1942) became in 1889 the first professor of palaeontology at the Imperial University of Tokyo. 60 Stopes would hunt additional fossil insects from Shiobara for Hewitt from 4–8 August 1908 (see A Journal from Japan, 201–4). See Appendix 1 for Hewitt’s description of some of them. 61 Hoyle to Stopes, spbla Add. ms 58471, f. 180, 23 March 1908: “Next I have a piece of very sad news for you: the engagement between Mr. Hewitt & Molly is broken off. He, fine fellow, has been troubled with a cough for some time & now it has been discovered that one of his lungs is seriously affected & the other somewhat. I do not know whether Molly’s people have insisted on the match being broken off or whether they have done it themselves, for I have not ventured to speak about it, but I know they are both very sad: we are all full of sympathy for them.” 62 Stopes assumes Hewitt’s knowledge of the story, so it is likely they saw it performed at one or more of its several performances at the Hallé. Extracts from the opera were performed as follows: 24 March 1904 – Prelude & Closing Scene; 2 March 1905 – Der Engel, Steh Still, Schmerzen, Traume (billed as Songs, Study for Tristan & Isolde); 10 January 1907 – Prelude & Liebestod; 31 January 1907 – Act II; 21 March 1907 – Prelude & Liebestod. 63 It was intimated that he may have had tuberculosis – which was thought to be inherited. 64 Sir Arthur Smith Woodward, palaeontologist and the world expert on fossil fish.

notes to pages 4 4– 7

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Like Hewitt, Woodward grew up in Macclesfield, Cheshire, and was educated at Owens College, Manchester. He became keeper of the Natural History Museum, London, in 1901. His reputation suffered in the Piltdown Man hoax; the fossil remains of this previously unknown early human were discovered to be fraudulent after his death. 65 The Shiobara collection in the British Museum was purchased on 23 March 1908 from Stopes, so Smith Woodward took this “first batch”; presumably no others were sent and/or purchased. 66 After splitting the shale, Stopes evidently sent one half of the fossil impression to one Museum and the other half to another. While not best practice, her method would have made her findings known more widely and somewhat more lucrative. 67 Mary “Molly” McNicol. 68 Miss Pratt was Dr Edith Mary Pratt (DSc 1904), a zoologist specializing in aquatic organisms and member of the Pleasant Friday Afternoons group; like Hewitt, her DSc was supervised by Hickson. 69 Dr Ulrich Behn was a chemist from Berlin: he came to England on the Royal Society’s Joule Studentship in 1902. 70 Miss Maude Parkin was sub-warden of Ashburne House at Manchester University: she was Canadian and held the position until 1911, when she resigned upon marrying Mr W.L. Grant, later the principal of Toronto’s Upper Canada College. When Grant died, she became warden of Royal Victoria College, McGill University. 71 Professor of geology at Manchester University until his retirement in 1908, Sir William Boyd Dawkins was curator of the Manchester Museum 1869–89 and served many other organizations including the Lit & Phil, acting as president from 1903–05. 72 See figure 3.2. This photograph, sent “some days after” this letter, was located by the author in the Stopes-Roe Collection. 73 David Meredith Seares Watson (1886–1973) was a student in the Department of Geology at Manchester: in 1907, the final year of his undergraduate studies, he worked on an influential paper with Stopes on “coal balls,” concretions resembling coal in shape but made of stone and often containing remarkable records of Carboniferous plants. He was awarded a Beyer fellowship and completed his MSc in 1909: later he became the Jodrell Professor of Zoology and Comparative Anatomy at ucl (1921–51). 74 Palaeospondylus is a fish-like fossil from the Middle Devonian epoch.

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notes to pages 48– 5 4

75 The British Association for the Advancement of Science. 76 Hewitt doesn’t mention his Lit & Phil talk on the Shiobara fossils on 20 October, the day before writing the letter. 77 Yamakawa Kenjiro (1854–1931, he wrote his name as “Yamagawa” in English) was a samurai who, after studying at Yale at the behest of the new Meiji government, became Japan’s first professor of physics. He was president of Toyko Imperial University (1901–05 and 1913–20). 78 Arthur George Tansley (1871–1955), rapidly becoming a key figure in the development of British ecology, would be hired the following year by the Botany School. He was a botanist, a leader in the science of ecology, and a key popularizer of psychoanalysis in Britain. 79 The British Association for the Advancement of Science met in Winnipeg, 25 August–1 September 1909; the meeting was followed by a train excursion to Victoria, returning 13 September. Keynotes were given by physicists J.J. Thomson and Ernest Rutherford. 80 “Or her” is inserted as an edit. 81 This is likely the Buddha figure mentioned in the following letter. 82 Darbishire’s secretary and companion. 83 Stopes, M.C., and D.M.S. Watson. “On the present distribution and origin of the calcareous concretions in coal seams, known as ‘coal balls,’” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, 200B (1908) 167–218. Coal balls are calcareous concretions in coal seams containing fossils. 84 Mrs Emmeline Pankhurst was an organizer of the British suffragette movement and lived in Manchester, close to the university, until 1907. In their efforts to gain women the vote, both Emmeline and her daughter Christabel (who obtained a law degree from Manchester in 1906 but, being a woman, was not allowed to practice) were imprisoned several times in Holloway, a women’s prison in London. 85 This episode is recorded on 2 September 1908 in A Journal from Japan, 213–15. 86 Professor William Morton Wheeler (1865–1937) was curator of invertebrate zoology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. 87 William Poel (1852–1934), actor and director, was the influential founder of the Elizabethan Stage Society, which characteristically presented the plays of Milton and Shakespeare with swift pacing and musical speech on a bare platform stage. Whitworth is a gothic revival hall adjoined to the Manchester Museum. 88 Charles Harold Herford, professor of English at the University of Manchester.

notes to pages 55–9

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ch a p ter f o u r 1 spbla, Add. ms 58471, f.46, Letter from Hoyle to Stopes, 21 December 1908. 2 A former student at University College London, Sakurai would co-publish with Stopes a study of classical Japanese dance-drama: Plays of Old Japan: The “Nõ,” London: Heinemann, 1913. 3 The Empress of Japan was “one of the trio of the Canadian Pacific Railway Company’s first generation of ‘White Empresses’ … a ship so lovely in appearance that school children used to be taken down to see her pass in and out of the harbor on her regular schedule, a schedule that was maintained from 1891 to 1922.” “History of Vancouver – Empress of Japan,” http://www.vancouverhistory.ca/ archives_empress.htm. In the Canadian passenger lists for the cpr Empress of Japan, Stopes is recorded as being four years younger than her actual age, her birth year as 1884 and age as twenty-five. Oddly enough, Hewitt would do the same when he sailed later that year on 16 September, though he was born in 1885. 4 Although Aylmer Maude records in The Authorized Life, 115, that Stopes spoke to the Women’s Canadian Club in Vancouver, both bc clubs would be founded later that year, Victoria’s in June, and Vancouver’s in July. 5 The Globe, 12 February 1909, 8. 6 spbla, Add. ms 58450, f. 131, Letter from Marie Stopes to Charlotte Stopes, 20 November 1908. 7 MacMurchy’s 1914 book A Little Talk about the Baby became widely known to Canadian mothers. In the 1920s she wrote a series of “Little Blue Books” offering advice to mothers about topics such as good hygiene and breastfeeding, published by the Canadian Department of Health in several languages, including Cree, and selling millions of copies. The phrase “when the mother works, the baby dies” is cited in “Infant Mortality: Special Report,” 17. Printed by order of the Legislative Assembly of Toronto. 1910. See Nathoo and Ostry, The One Best Way?; Dodd, “Advice to Parents.” 8 In Canada, for instance, eugenics had the support of Canada’s “Famous Five,” Henrietta Muir Edwards, Louise McKinney, Nellie McClung, Emily Murphy, and Irene Parlby, who actively fought for the rights of women and in 1929 successfully (and famously) challenged a narrow interpretation of the British North America Act that did not consider women to be “persons.” 9 Historian Sally Roesch Wagner has shown that Haudenosaunee women, who traditionally had a strong political voice in their nations, provided inspirational

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notes to pages 60–2 models for the women’s movement. See Wagner, Sisters in Spirit: Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Influence on Early American Feminists, 2001.

10 spbla, Add. ms 58450, Letter from Stopes to C. Stopes, August 1908. 11 Miss von Wyss cultivated amorous feelings in her pupils, extracting vows of devotion and accepting gifts: she wrote to Stopes in 1899: “Whenever I think of you a strange gladness creeps over me and I feel rich in the thought of your love and less lonely.” Stopes responded in kind, “Psyche, my beloved …” Hall, Marie Stopes, 39. 12 Hall, Marie Stopes, 39. Stopes was not a Freudian, unlike her colleague Tansley, who offered a similar psychoanalytic interpretation of those who condemn homosexuality in his 1920 bestseller, The New Psychology and Its Relation to Life. Tansley explained here that the modern condemnation of homosexuality was “due to the existence and repression of a homosexual component in the sex complex of the ordinary mind.” Cameron, “Histories of Disturbance,” 10. 13 spbla, Add. ms 58471, f.49, Letter from W.E. Hoyle to Stopes, 20 January 1909. Another was his old friend Professor J. Playfair McMurrich, Anatomy Department, University of Toronto, to whom Hoyle addressed letters to Stopes c/o McMurrich. 14 David Penhallow was the first Westerner to spend time with the Ainu. Stopes had recently written an article about her experiences with them for the Athanaeum: see page 67, chapter 4, note 28. 15 Zeller, “David Pearce Penhallow.” 16 Although Aylmer Maude misdates the visit (to the following year when Penhallow was no longer alive), he records that Stopes “visited Professor Penhallow, the palæobotanist, who had charge of many interesting fossil specimens, some of them dating from the famous Dawson’s time.” See Maude, The Authorized Life, 119. The 1911 commission is discussed in chapter 7. 17 Shortly before or after Stopes’s visit, he suffered a nervous breakdown (attributed to overwork). He died a year later. 18 spbla, Add. ms 58744, Stopes, “Things Sent to People.” 19 Dr Maude Abbott (1869–1940) was a physician acting as an assistant curator in the McGill Medical Museum: one of the first women in Canada to graduate in medicine, she would become an internationally known heart specialist. 20 Dr George Adami (1862–1926) was professor of pathology at McGill from 1892: he was born in Manchester and educated at Manchester and Cambridge.

notes to pages 62–70

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21 Dr David Penhallow (1854–1910) was a plant physiologist and palaeobotanist: he held the Macdonald Chair of Botany at McGill from 1883. 22 Lady Moss, daughter of Toronto’s second mayor, Mr Justice Robert Baldwin Sullivan, was the first president of the Women’s Canadian Club, founded 21 April 1908. 23 Lady Falconer, active in the Women’s Canadian Club and the Canadian Red Cross, was the wife of the president of the University of Toronto. 24 Launched in 1908, uss Martha Washington was a transport for the United States Navy during the First World War, named for Martha Washington, the first First Lady of the United States. 25 This new word referred to messages sent by Marconi’s wireless telegraphy system. 26 Women would not be admitted as fellows of the Royal Society until 1945: Stopes was never elected frs. 27 A formal welcome party was hosted by Stopes’s mother, Charlotte Stopes. 28 Stopes, “The Hairy Ainus of Japan,” 202. Despite the derogatory appellation in her title, Stopes also counters some racist characterizations in this article: “Dwarfed creatures, covered with hair, half monkeys, half men, cowering for shelter beneath the burdock leaves in unapproachable forests – such were the Ainus of which I learnt at school … I can testify that the portrait imagination had painted of them was a travesty.” 29 From its founding in 1903 until 1931, Margaret Addison (1868–1940) was dean of Annesley Hall Residence at Victoria University (later Victoria College at the University of Toronto), the first university residence purpose-built for women in Canada. Helena Coleman (1860–1953) was a Canadian writer, poet, and music teacher. Mrs Hunter is unidentified. 30 Songs and Sonnets was published in 1906 by the Tennyson Club, Toronto. 31 T.R. is likely Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt (president of the United States from 1901 to 1909) who was often referred to by his initials. 32 University of Manchester. 33 Arthur Philemon Coleman was a professor of geology at the University of Toronto (1901–22). He shared a home with Helena Coleman, his half-sister. 34 Helen MacMurchy’s sister. 35 The meaning here is somewhat mysterious. Infall means to “fall in.” The “transatlantic gush” may have referred to Stopes’s own mention of her “gushy” letter to

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notes to pages 70– 7 MacMurchy written on the Lusitania, or the gush of water that burst into her cabin during a storm (see chapter 1, note 15.) By “infall,” perhaps MacMurchy is encouraging her to succumb to her feelings.

36 Founded in 1788, the Linnean Society is the oldest still-active biological society in the world. Stopes was made a member in 1904, one of the first women to be admitted to the society. She spoke to the society on 1 April 1909 on “Plant Petrifactions from Japan” and was congratulated by the president on the important results of her journey.

ch a p ter f ive 1 spbla, Add. ms 58468, f.172, Letter from Tansley to Stopes, 17 December 1908. 2 Castonguay, “Naturalizing Federalism,” 17–18. Two positions (Dominion Entomologist and Dominion Botanist) had been created to replace the work of the late James Fletcher of the Central Experimental Farm in Ottawa, an autodidact on the subjects of insects and plants. 3 Palladino, Entomology, Ecology and Agriculture, 1996, 57. Alongside Hewitt, Dr H.T. Güssow was appointed Dominion Botanist. Güssow was German-trained but, from 1903, had been employed by the Royal Agricultural Society of England. See Anderson, “Field Experiments,” 203. 4 Sleigh, Six Legs Better, 2. 5 See Castonguay’s “Naturalizing Federalism,” 15–16: the “amendment to the Civil Service Act in 1908, which instituted a competitive system to appoint professionals valued for their scientific qualifications rather than their partisanship, confirmed the government’s interest in a new breed of scientist.” 6 Maurice Hewlett (1861–1923) in 1888 married Hilda Herbert, who had two children with him: Hilda was the first woman in the uk to earn a pilot’s licence. The couple separated in 1914 in part due to Hilda’s new interest in flying. 7 Hewlett, Letters, 10. 8 Mortlake [Marie C. Stopes], “A Man’s Mate,” Unpublished, ca 1910. 9 Bhatia, “The Impossibility of the Ideal.” 10 June Rose mistranscribes the word “fraud” as “friend.” Rose, Marie Stopes and the Sexual Revolution, 61. 11 Ibsen, Love’s Comedy, 117. 12 A.G. Tansley founded this still-active journal in 1902. 13 A slip perhaps; “insignificance” is likely intended.

notes to pages 7 7– 84

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14 The British painter Edith Mary Garner (1881–1956), to whom he had become engaged, was born at Wasperton Hill, near Warwick. 15 Added in pencil, likely by archivist. D.E.Z. is Department of Economic Zoology. 16 Unidentified. 17 Lieutenant Ernest Henry Shackleton (1874–1922) had returned to London from his second British Antarctic Expedition (Nimrod 1907–09) on 14 June 1909, his team having made it closer to the South Pole than any previous expedition and after having climbed the most active Antarctic volcano, Mount Erebus: for these achievements he was knighted. 18 Robert Laurence Marsh (Manchester BSc Zoology II and MSc 1908) was born in 1884 and in 1908 was a clerk to an accountant, living in Epping, Essex. 19 F.W. Gamble and O.V. Darbishire. 20 Henry Smith Holden would become professor of botany at the University of Nottingham in 1932, and later, specializing in forensics, was appointed director of laboratories in New Scotland Yard in 1946. 21 Hilda Hewitson Pearson (Manchester BSc Botany III 1909). 22 This is likely a reference to Stopes’s tent. 23 Taxal is a township and a parish in Macclesfield district, Cheshire, near Whaley Bridge. 24 Stopes, “Expedition to the Southern Coal Mines,” 93–107. 25 Birmingham. 26 He likely intended to write Birkbeck. 27 George Stephen West (1876–1919) was in 1909 promoted to professor and chair of the Department of Botany at the University of Birmingham. Like Hewitt, he died in the influenza epidemic following the First World War. 28 A botanist and mycologist, Dr Helen Gwynne-Vaughan (1879–1967) was appointed head of the Botany Department at Birkbeck in 1909 and was named full professor in 1921. 29 Yorkshire. 30 He writes “but,” though may intend “and.” 31 Hewlett, Letters to Sanchia upon Things as They Are. 32 Hewitt is likely referring to his dissertation on houseflies, which was published in three parts in the Quarterly Journal of Microscopical Science (1907–09); it was later published as a book by the University of Manchester in 1910 and in revised form as House-Flies and How They Spread Disease by Cambridge University Press in 1912.

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notes to pages 87– 9 4 ch a p ter s i x

1 Hewitt, “Tent-Building Habits of Ants,” 168–9. 2 Sleigh, Six Legs Better, 9. Other familiar yet contrasting sources of formic reflection available to Hewitt notably included the work of Lafcadio Hearn. Hearn’s reflections on the ants of Japan led him instead to a cosmic affirmation of “the worth of every human system of ethics fundamentally opposed to human egoism.” See Kwaidan, 240. 3 Forel’s work on ants was also referenced in Stopes and Hewitt’s joint paper. 4 Hewitt, “Houseflies and the Public Health,” 31. 5 Latour, The Pasteurization of France, 41. See also Davie, “An unbidden guest at your table.” 6 Rabine, “Love and the New Patriarchy,” 69. 7 As Hewitt predicted, Garner did outlive him – dying in 1956. After her break with Hewitt, she studied further in Paris and achieved some artistic success, exhibiting at the Royal Academy, the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours, the Royal Institute of Oil Painters, the New English Art Club, and the Paris Salon. She lived some years with the artist William Lee-Hankey before marrying him in 1917 at the age of thirty-seven; they enjoyed travel and had no children. 8 spbla, Add. ms 58682, f. 18, Letter from Portway to Stopes, 30 March 1910. Miss Portway wrote that of all the good wishes received for her betrothal “none has given me more pleasure than yours.” 9 spbla, Add. ms 58456, f. 41, Letter from Stopes to Winifred Stopes, 28 March 1908. 10 The Sportophyte, April 1911, Vol. II, 1 11 The Sportophyte, April 1910, Vol. I, 19. A somewhat mediocre but also teasing review is by the Cambridge botanist Albert Charles Seward, who subscribed to The Sportophyte, and wrote the review shortly after, seemingly inspired by her own satire, “Notes on Recent Literature”: review of Ancient Plants in the New Phytologist 9, 5 (May 1910), 187. 12 spbla, Add. ms 58468, f. 154, Letter from Tansley to Stopes, 10 May 1910. The periodical continued “periodically” until 1984. 13 spbla, Add. ms 58468, f. 153, Letter from Güssow to Stopes, 7 May 1910. Güssow would keep in touch with Stopes for the next quarter century; in 1937 he wrote to Stopes for birth control advice as he and his wife had reached the age of no longer wanting further children but could find little information about how to

notes to pages 95–1 00

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prevent them. Although Married Love was available in Canada in 1937, Stopes’s books on planned parenthood were not. 14 Helen MacMurchy acted as an official witness while Hewitt was among the guests. See Rose, Marie Stopes and the Sexual Revolution, 69. 15 Despite Stopes’s repeated plea for Hewitt to return her letters, it appears that he never did, and if he kept them, they no longer exist among the family papers. If, in fact, he did return them, there is also the possibility that Stopes may ultimately have had reason to destroy them. 16 Hall, Marie Stopes, 87. 17 Stopes destroyed this first draft of Married Love when she received Hewlett’s comments after she returned home from her North American trip: his directive was for her to start again. See Rose, Marie Stopes and the Sexual Revolution, 70. 18 spbla, Add. ms 58745: 1911. It is inscribed with Helen MacMurchy’s Toronto address, 133 East Bloor St., and may have been a parting gift from Stopes’s previous trip. 19 Coincidentally, both his mother and Stopes’s mother also shared the name “Charlotte,” and it was one of Stopes’s middle names, along with Carmichael. 20 In Chicago she met up with another key figure in American ecology, Henry Chandler Cowles. Her ensuing travels, from museums to coal mines, included meetings with dignitaries and potential supporters of her science such as John D. Rockefeller (thanks to botanist John Coulter, who provided an introduction). Andrew Carnegie shared an afternoon at his own home. 21 “Dr. Marie Stopes on Research Work,” The Globe, 4 March 1911, p. 8. 22 Maude, The Authorized Life, 118. 23 National Conference on Conservation of Game, 6–7. 24 spbla, Add. ms 58456, f. 71. Letter from Stopes to W. Stopes, 8 March 1911. 25 spbla, Add. ms 58450, f. 154, Letter to C. Stopes from Stopes, 8 March 1911. 26 These letters are missing from the collection. 27 Possibly John McFarlane (1873–1953) lecturer in geography at Manchester; a subject with strong links to geology in this period: his classic Economic Geography text begins with thanks to wife and an overview of geological eras. 28 The paper is torn so that a quarter of the page is missing. 29 Whiteleys was London’s first department store, opening in 1889: Poplar is a district in East London. 30 Again, as with the reverse side of the letter, the paper is torn so that a quarter of the page is missing.

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notes to pages 101– 13

31 University letterhead. 32 Of the two books by Stopes published in this period, A Journal from Japan may have been the one she would have been most eager to share with Hewitt, containing as it does stories with which he was well familiar: it is more beautiful – the title embossed in gold and a golden ginkgo leaf framed with red on the cover. The other book, Ancient Plants. Being a Simple Account of the Past Vegetation of the Earth and of the Recent Important Discoveries Made in This Realm of Nature Study, was also published by Blackie & Son and available by March 1910. 33 In pencil in Stopes’s hand. 34 A lightly humorous annual botanical journal founded by Stopes on 1 April 1910 and lasting until 1914. 35 The Tea Phytologist, published irregularly in the Cambridge Botany School (1908–1984), had a similar spoofing remit but it is unclear if Stopes was aware of its existence until A.G. Tansley told her of it after he received his first issue of The Sportophyte. 36 The “ladies,” likely classmates in a botany course instructed by Stopes, were Molly McNicol, his ex-fiancée, and Grace Wigglesworth, who would publish in the Annals on charas and lycopods respectively: Mary McNicol, “The Bulbils and Pro-embryo of Lamprothamnus alopecuroides,” Annals of Botany 21, 82 (1907), 61–70. Grace Wigglesworth, MSc, “The young Sporophytes of Lycopodium complanatum and Lycopodium clavatum,” Annals of Botany 21, 82 (1907), 211–34. Wigglesworth was assistant keeper in the botanical section of the Manchester Museum (1910–44). 37 In pencil, reads “Mar” but is more likely May. 38 Date in pencil. The letter, sent to Stopes by Garner on 22 May 1910, is transcribed by Stopes. 39 This letter is missing. 40 This letter is missing. 41 This letter also is missing. 42 This is likely her fragmentary draft letter of 29 December 1909. 43 This would be approximately mid-February 1910 – Hewitt’s letter of final refusal arrived on 7 March. 44 As mentioned in the letter from Garner, these were gifts for his birthday on 23 February. 45 Added in pencil in Stopes’s hand.

notes to pages 11 4–1 9

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46 Official government letterhead. 47 Hewitt is listed only briefly in the 1921 edition of American Men of Science (p. 774) under the heading “American Men of Science Who Died Between January 1, 1902 and December 31, 1920.” 48 Most likely this was the Japanese symbol of good luck, the maneki-neko, a bob-tailed cat figurine – a typical souvenir of Japan. 49 Stopes was staying at Government House in Ottawa as a guest of the governor general of Canada, Lord Grey.

ch a p ter s even 1 In his nuptial congratulations, Tansley wrote that Gates would be “a great accession to the strength of the Mendelians this side.” spbla, Add ms 58468, Tansley to Stopes, 3 May 1911. 2 Dawson, “The Fossil Plants of the Devonian and Silurian Formations,” 83. 3 Letter from Darwin to Dawson, 19 January 1872, McGill University Archives, Dawson-Harrington families fonds (mg1022), 0000-2211.01.04.1.1 and 00002211.01.04.1.2. 4 Falcon-Lang and Miller, “Marie Stopes and the Fern Ledges of Saint John,” 231. See also the analysis of the episode by historian Carla Hustak, “The stories rocks can tell,” 888–904. 5 In recounting her fieldwork, Stopes scholars have maintained that Stopes worked on the Fern Ledges controversy from 1910 to 1914. This chronology appears to be incorrect. The chief scientific reason for Stopes’s second trip to North America in 1910, during which she met and married Gates, was her commission from the British Museum on fossils of the Cretaceous period – not a commission from the Geological Survey on the Fern Ledges. Reporting on her address to the University Women’s Club at Annesley Hall in Toronto in March, The Globe stated that she was in Canada “doing research work in palaeontology from the British Museum … In speaking of her work here she regretted that Canadian museums have few specimens for her special work fossils of the creeaceous (sic) period.” “Dr. Marie Stopes on Research Work,” The Globe, 4 March 1911. 6 c/o of the British Museum of Natural History 7 nhm sto Box 3, f.1002. Letter from R.W. Brock to Stopes, 17 June 1911. 8 spbla, Add ms 58450, f.10, Letter from Stopes to C. Stopes, 29 June 1911.

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notes to pages 120–2

9 spbla, Add. ms 58456, f. 72, Letter from Stopes to W. Stopes, 25 August 1911. 10 Manawagonish is the usual spelling, a name derived from the Wolastoqiyik language (sometimes still referred to as Maliseet). 11 Natural History Society of New Brunswick Minutebook, General 1890–1911 (p. 457) F41 S127. The meeting was held on the 3 October 1911. 12 This would have been in September 1911. See nhm sto Box 3, F. 1005 Stopes to Brock, 4 November 1911. “When I was in Montreal in September, I went through the collections there.” In her final report “The “Fern Ledges,’” 1914, Stopes wrote that she examined the McGill University collections twice in Montreal and then was able to examine them along with all the other collections (from the Natural History Museum, St. John as well) when she worked out the results in the Geological Department of the British Museum (October 1911 to at least the summer of 1912). One of those times was in September, 1911; the other may have been in February 1909 when she met up with Penhallow. She also could have visited around the time of her wedding in March 1911. 13 nhm sto Box 3, F. 1005-6, M.C. Stopes to R.W. Brock, 4 November 1911. 14 In carrying out the provisions of the act, Hewitt was eager to maintain the backing of the fruit-growers associations and cultivate good federal and provincial relations. In 1911 Hewitt established entomological field laboratories in four key areas for fruit production across Canada, one of which was in the Annapolis Valley. See Castonguay, “Naturalizing Federalism,” 24, 30. On 25 October 1911, the government of Nova Scotia, acting in part on Hewitt’s advice, passed stringent biosecurity regulations under the “Injurious Insect Pest and Plant Disease Act, 1911.” 15 Miller, A Knight in Politics, 149. 16 Elizabeth Borden (1873–1948) died at the age of seventy-five, occupation “applegrower.” Borden and Hewitt may have met through Elizabeth’s brother-in-law Leslie Macoun, who had worked as an accountant at Hewitt’s main place of work, the Dominion Experimental Farm in Ottawa. See Miller, A Knight in Politics, 293. 17 The Globe, 9 February 1912, recorded the Hewitts’ “return from 2 month visit to Hewitt’s relatives in England.” Hewitt’s photograph albums held by the Julia Leslie Mackay Collection contain images from this period. 18 spbla, Add. ms 58628, f. 92, Letter from Kershaw to Stopes, 10 January 1912. 19 spbla, Add. ms 58478, f. 6, Letter from Kershaw to Stopes, 10 Feb 1912 [misdated by Kershaw as 1911 but clearly follows the above.]

notes to pages 12 4–3 4

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20 spbla, Add. ms 58479, ff. 70, Letter from Adams to Stopes, 3 August 1912. The label “Not Devonian” currently accompanying these specimens is not in her hand but was written by an assistant or added later, sometime after her paper came out. Corrections in red or in pencil are in her hand and were likely made at the British Museum. 21 spbla, Add. ms 58479, ff. 71, Letter from Brock to Stopes, 16 August 1912. 22 spbla, Add. ms 58479 f. 80, Letter from G. Matthew to Stopes, 25 October 1912. 23 Mary [sic] Stopes, “Fern ledges,” in Guide Book No. 1, Excursion in Eastern Quebec and the Maritime Provinces, Part II, issued by the Geological Survey, Ottawa: Government Printing Press, 1913, 390–5. 24 Stopes and Geological Survey of Canada, The “Fern Ledges.” For commendations of this work, see, for instance, Falcon-Lang and Miller, “Marie Stopes and the Fern Ledges,” 242–3. 25 The unconventional arrangement was dramatized in Stopes’s play Vectia, which she unsuccessfully attempted to have staged. 26 Doan, “Marie Stopes’s Wonderful Rhythm Charts,” 595. 27 uma, “Pleasant Friday Afternoons” [P.F.A.], Minutes Volume II dzo/5/2, 6 March, 1914. 28 Castonguay, “Naturalizing Federalism,” 32. “The situation resulted from the enforcement of the Destructive Insect and Pest Act, a law that transformed the representation of what was formerly a localized phenomenon into that of a constant, generalized threat … With the new representation of nature, Hewitt had achieved, concurrently, a political order in which the federal government centralized executive power and scientific expertise related to insect control in Canada.” 29 “Extracts from Examination Papers,” The Sportophyte, Vol. IV (1913), 18. 30 Elsner and Cardinal, The Cultures of Collecting, 1–6. 31 spbla, Add. ms 58574, f.27–9, Letter from MacMurchy to Stopes, ca August 1914. 32 Maude, The Authorized Life, 207–9. 33 Forrester and Cameron, Freud in Cambridge, 100. 34 Maude, The Authorized Life, 201–2. 35 The government did not build him this house: see Anderson, “Field Experiments,” 203. 36 Professor J.J. Findlay was the Sarah Fielden Chair of Education at the University of Manchester (1903–25). Mrs F was Mrs Findlay. 37 The Duke of Connaught succeeded Lord Grey as governor general of Canada (1911–16).

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notes to pages 13 4– 43

38 The Windsor Hotel in Montreal, where Stopes married Reginald Ruggles Gates. 39 Stopes, “Palæobotany,” 15–30. 40 See page 130.

epilo gue 1 Besides the insect fossils, the letters mention many other scientific specimens and materials that passed between Stopes and Hewitt. Stopes captured, killed, and preserved flies that she sent to Hewitt for his private collection, as well as a praying mantis and a wasp. Her Japanese fossils were sent to the Natural History Museum in Manchester, but some were also sold to the British Museum (where it appears fossil mosquitoes were not part of the original acquisition). Stopes also sent specimens of Japanese ants that Hewitt subsequently passed on to Wheeler in America; after searches of collections in the Manchester Museum and the American Natural History Museum, as well as at Harvard, where Wheeler subsequently would hold a position, these also were not located. Stopes and Hewitt also exchanged many other objects that no longer appear to be held in any collection, public or private, including cufflinks, pens, a puzzle-box, a watch, a maneki-neko, and a Buddha statue. 2 Wheeler, “Charles Gordon Hewitt,” 262. 3 Hall, Marie Stopes, 107. 4 Paskauskas (ed.), The Complete Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Ernest Jones, 56. 5 Stopes, Married Love, 78. 6 Hall, Marie Stopes, 88. 7 Ibid., 110. 8 Hornaday, The Statement of the Permanent Wild Life Protection Fund.” 9 Hewitt, “Conservation,” 209. 10 Hewitt, The Conservation of the Wild Life of Canada, 147. 11 Ibid., vi. 12 Anonymous, “The preservation of wild life,” 25 March 1922. 13 The Migratory Birds Convention Act provided a close season throughout the year on insectivorous birds (such as bobolinks, chickadees, humming birds, and warblers widely understood at this time to be beneficial for agriculture) and a close season on migratory game-birds (including wild ducks and swans) from March to September.

notes to pages 1 43– 7

201

14 Rosenberg et al, “Decline of the North American Avifauna.” 15 Kipling gave Hewitt permission to quote from the poem “The Feet of Young Men.” 16 Bocking, “The Background of Biodiversity,” 12. 17 Hewitt, The Conservation of the Wild Life of Canada, 241–2. See Sandlos, “Point Pelee’s Summer of Discontent,” 51–69. 18 The Congress was held 24–28 July 1912. Special Collections & Archives, University of Waterloo, Marie Stopes Collection ga 84, f.2. Although the letter is in the Marie Stopes Collection, it is possible that it was intended for Stopes’s husband, Reginald Ruggles Gates, a geneticist increasingly interested in eugenics research. He wrote Heredity and Eugenics (1923) and, well into the postwar period, he continued to defend racial theory and oppose interracial marriage. 19 On Pinchot’s involvement with eugenics, see Charles Wohlforth, “Conservation and Eugenics,” Orion Magazine, 2010 https://orionmagazine.org/article/conser vation-and-eugenics/. 20 Stopes, Married Love, xxxiii. 21 Forel’s book, subtitled A Scientific, Psychological, Religious and Sociological Study for the Cultured Classes, was published in 137 editions and 5 languages – the English edition in 1908. Key too, for Stopes, was the work of Havelock Ellis. 22 Stopes, Married Love, 29. 23 McLaren, Our Own Master Race, 27. In November 2020, Marie Stopes International changed its name to msi Reproductive Choices to disassociate its work from Stopes’s eugenics involvement. 24 H.G. Wells, Julian Huxley, and G.P. Wells, The Science of Life, 608. 25 Hewitt, The Conservation of the Wild Life of Canada, 17. 26 Hewitt, “The Coming Back of the Bison.” 27 Hewitt, The Conservation of the Wild Life of Canada, 19. 28 Ibid., 136. 29 Mahoney et al, The North American Model of Wildlife Conservation, 37. 30 In terms of other contemporaneous approaches to insect pests that were available and likely familiar to Hewitt in this period, the Buddhist ethic of Lafcadio Hearn argued against eradication (see p. 11) as did the “commonsense” of natural theology “that every created thing has its purpose and appointed use.” See Anonymous, “Review.” 31 Hewitt joined the Commission of Conservation (created in 1909) early on in his appointment: in 1916, he became its consulting zoologist. 32 Hewitt, The Conservation of the Wild Life of Canada, 13. The sentence continues:

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notes to pages 1 48– 52 “that while the abundance of species of animals rises and falls extermination does not follow the preying of one species of animal upon another.”

33 lac, rg 10, vol. 6810, file 470-2-3, vol. 7, 55 (L-3) and 63 (N-3). Mark Abley notes that in the 1920s, Scott suggested that “white trappers should be kept out of the Northwest Territories so as to preserve the fur-bearing animals for the use of Indians.” See Abley, Conversations with a Dead Man, 88. The idea (perhaps inspired by Hewitt’s book, pp. 258–60) was rejected. Scott’s suggestion may have reflected genuine concern for those under his care, or was perhaps more evidence of his department’s cold calculus with regard to people doomed (in Scott’s assessment) to disappear as a “race”: providing food supplies for starving Indians across the North would be more expensive than allowing them to hunt food for themselves. 34 McLaren, Our Own Master Race, 47. 35 Hewitt, “Conservation,” 210. 36 See figure 5.1. 37 One of these friends was the geneticist Arthur Dunkinfield Darbishire, who visited Hewitt in Ottawa in 1914 and died of cerebral meningitis during military training near London on Christmas Day a year later. Darbishire had also been declared unfit for service but he persisted and was accepted as a private. One of the few remaining books belonging to Hewitt and now in the family’s possession is A.D. Darbishire’s An Introduction to Biology, published posthumously in 1917. The book contains newspaper clippings reporting the author’s death; a sketch of a horse skeleton is glued to the inside front cover and it is signed: in memory of A.D.D. from H.D. [H.D. was A.D.D.’s sister, Helen Darbishire, principal of Somerville College, Oxford]. 38 The metaphor of nature as a battlefield was a characteristic trope in the writing of ecologists in the wake of the First World War. See chapter 2, “Minds and Natures,” in Cameron, “Anthropogenic Natures,” 2001. In terms of Hewitt’s strategies for controlling insects, he, like his American colleague Leland Howard, seems to have shifted in the war years from an early focus on applied ecological methods to an alarmist and martial rhetoric regarding insect pests. Such an aggressive eradication policy was evident in Hewitt’s 1918 recommendations that contributed to the death of Sumas Lake in British Columbia: see chapter 1, “Reopenings.” On Howard’s change in thinking, understood to presage the U.S. commitment to controlling insect pests with chemicals, see Kohlstedt and Kaiser, eds., Science and the American Century, 93.

notes to pages 150–65

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39 Doan, “Marie Stopes’s Wonderful Rhythm Charts,” 596–7. 40 Hewitt wrote (p. 215): “Through the kindness of Mr. W.H. Bacon, late fur commissioner of the Hudson’s Bay Company, I have been able to obtain the fur returns of that company covering a long period of years, from 1821 to 1914.” 41 Elton, Animal Ecology, 139. 42 Ibid., 113. 43 Wilkinson, “Paleontology and Ecology,” 17. 44 Schaffer, “How disciplines look,” 58. 45 Rees-Jones, Introduction to Love’s Creation, xx. 46 Kenneth meets, for instance, the famous palaeontologist H.F. Osborn in New York. That said, Hewitt also knew Osborn and acknowledged his assistance in writing The Conservation of the Wildlife of Canada. 47 Marie Stopes, Married Love, 100. 48 The ecosystem concept was also foreshadowed by Tansley in 1932 in a discussion of human consciousness. In his 1932 paper for the Magdalen Philosophy Club, Tansley outlined his approach to closing the gap between psychology and biology. Here Tansley’s concept of mind is an “interwoven plexus of moving material … a more or less ordered system, or rather a system of systems … acting and reacting.” See Cameron and Earley, “The ecosystem,” 475. 49 Citing Gillian Beer’s remarks on The Origin of Species, Rees-Jones (p. xix) notes too that “Stopes’s preoccupation with a perfect sexual and emotional union, however, in one important way saw her far removed from the social Darwinism that underpinned eugenicist thought.” Her emphasis on sexual congress and desire ran contrary to Darwin’s focus on productivity and generation. 50 Hustak, “The stories rocks can tell,” 897–904. 51 Stopes, Man, Other Poems, and a Preface, ix 52 Sanford Schwartz writes: “There was in effect a vitalism of the Right and a vitalism of the Left, the first a modified form of spiritualism (or at least a repudiation of positivism), the second a more dynamic form of naturalism.” See “Bergson and the politics of vitalism,” 278–9. Bergson argued for multiplicity and freedom, yet, for an example of a vitalist and deeply conservative ecopolitical vision, see Cameron and Matless, “Benign Ecology,” 253–77. 53 The poem is dated 9 May 1914 and is cited in Hall, Marie Stopes, 105.

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note to page 169 a p pen d i x t h re e

1 June Rose refers to this manuscript as “A Man and His Mate.” Rose’s dating (ca 1910) seems correct. If Stopes was at Manchester University when she completed this draft – as she indicates – she must have finished it before July 1910, the date of her resignation.

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Index The letter f following a page number indicates a reference to a figure. Abbott, Maude, 61–2, 190n19 Adami, George, 61–2, 190n20 Adams, Frank Dawson, 123–4, 199n20 Addison, Margaret, 67–8, 191n29 Ainu people, 61, 190n14, 207n28 Ancient Plants (Stopes), 92–3, 194n11, 196n32 Arber, Agnes, 17–18 Behn, Ulrich, 46, 187n69 Bell, Alexander Graham, 144 Benson, Margaret, 15–16 Bergson, Henri: Creative Evolution, 155, 203n52 Blackham, John, 19; Pleasant Sunday Afternoons movement, 19 Borden family, 121, 138–41, 139f; Robert, 121; Frederick William, 121. See also Hewitt (née Borden), Elizabeth Botany: The Modern Study of Plants (Stopes), 4, 152 Boyd Dawkins, William, 18–20, 46, 187n71 British Ecological Society, 16, 18, 184n37 British Vegetation Committee, 16, 18, 21, 184n37 Brock, Reginald, 118–21, 125, 198n12; letter from Stopes, 119–20, 198n12 Cameron, Laura Jean: Openings: A Meditation on History, Method, and Sumas Lake, 8–10

Carmichael, Marie (Stopes’s pseudonym), 153 Castonguay, Stéphane, 126 Chick, Edith, 17 Chick, Harriette, 17 Churchill, Winston, 144 Clements, Frederic Edward, 96; Edith (botanist and spouse), 96 Coleman, Arthur Philemon, 69, 191n33 Coleman, Helena, 57, 67–9, 191n29, 191n33; “Songs and Sonnets,” 68, 191n30 Cretaceous Flora, The (Stopes), 122 Cronon, Bill, 144 Crutzen, Paul, 20 Darbishire, Arthur Dukinfield, 46, 184n37, 202n37; Helen (sister), 202n37 Darbishire, Otto Vernon, 37–9, 53, 79–80, 184n37, 185n44 Darbishire, Robert Dukinfield, 38, 52, 185n44 Darwin, Charles, 116–17, 144, 203n49; Leonard (son), 144 Dawson, John William, 61, 116–18, 120–4, 123f, 124f, 190n16 Dixon, Harold Bailey, 38, 184n43 Doan, Laura, 150 Dymes, Miss, 52, 188n82 ecology, 3–10, 15, 18–19, 21–4, 149–56; and colonialism, 16, 143–4, 147, 173n6; and Hewitt, 8, 73, 141, 147, 149, 155–6, 202n38; and Stopes, 16, 141, 149, 152–5; and Tansley, 15– 17, 179n6, 188n78; and women, 16–17

216 Elton, Charles, 4, 152–4; Animal Ecology, 152 eugenics, 6, 10, 57–9, 89, 144–6, 155, 189n8, 201n18, 203n49 Falconer, Lady, 63, 191n23 Falcon-Lang, Howard, 118 Fern Ledges controversy, 116–23, 117f, 125, 197n5, 198n12 Findlay, J. J., 122, 134, 199n36 Fisher, Sydney, 74 Forel, Auguste, 89, 144, 194n3, 201n21; and eugenics, 89, 144; Les Fourmis de la Suisse, 144; Le Monde Social des Fourmis, 144; The Sexual Question, 144 Foster, Janet, 8; Working for Wildlife, 8 Freud, Sigmund, 140, 190n12 Fujii, Kenjiro, 11, 24–5, 30–2, 41, 46–7, 49f, 55, 56f, 59, 92, 94, 119–20, 182n22, 184n37 Gamble, Frederick William, 39, 79, 185n52 Garner, Edith Mary, 10, 77, 92, 103–4, 145, 194n7; engagement to Hewitt, 61, 72, 74, 89–90, 98, 193n14; letters from Hewitt, 10, 89–90, 98, 101–2, 109–12, 145; letters from Stopes, 101–2, 105–7, 113 Gates, Reginald Ruggles, 95–8, 116, 119–21, 124–6, 131–2, 140, 142, 197n1, 197n5, 200n38, 201n18; Charlotte (sister), 96 Geist, Valerius, 146–7 Goebel, Karl, 15 Gravely, F.H., 38, 185n51 Grey, Earl, 96, 118, 131, 134, 148, 197n49, 199n37 Güssow, H.T., 94, 192n3, 194n13 Gwynne-Vaughan, Helen, 17, 80, 193n28 Haeckel, Ernst, 4 Hall, Ruth, 7, 60, 141, 179n17 Hearn, Lafcadio, 11, 179n20, 185n49, 194n2, 201n30; “Insect-Studies,” 11; Kwaidan, 3, 11 Herford, Charles Harold, 54, 188n88 Hewitt, Charles Gordon: collaboration with Stopes, 7, 34, 72, 77, 87, 140, 144; The Conservation of the Wild Life of Canada, 8, 141–2, 147–9, 155, 201n32; death, 8, 138–40; Dora (sister), 21; engagement to Garner, 61, 72, 74, 89–90, 98, 193n14; engagement to McNicol, 28–30, 89, 183n24; Ethel (sister), 21; Rachel Frost (mother), 21; Thomas Henry (father), 21; House-Flies

index and How They Spread Disease, 6, 91f, 193n32; letters from Garner, 101–2; marriage to Elizabeth Borden, 121; Sydney (brother), 21 Hewitt (née Borden), Elizabeth, 8, 121, 138, 141, 155, 198n16. See also Borden family Hewlett, Maurice, 74–5, 95–6, 192n6, 195n17; Letters to Sanchia upon Things as They Are, 74–5, 84, 86, 95–6 Hickson, Sydney, 19, 22, 184nn38–9, 187n68 Holden, Henry Smith, 79, 193n20 Hornaday, William, 8, 142–3, 146 Howard, Leland Ossian, 11, 73, 202n38 Hoyle, William Evan, 18, 25–7, 30, 40–2, 47, 61, 73, 182n14, 183nn26–7, 186n56; letters from Stopes, 32–3 Hunter, Mrs, 67–8, 191n29 Hustak, Carla, 155 Huxley, Julian: The Science of Life, 145 Ibsen, Henrik, 75–6, 84; Love’s Comedy, 75–6, 84, 86, 121 Jackson, J. Wilfrid, 136 Jones, Ernest, 140 Journal from Japan, A (Stopes), 11, 27, 92, 183n25, 183n29, 196n32 Kershaw, May, 121–2 Kipling, Rudyard, 143, 201n15 Krausman, Paul, 146–7 Kulchyski, Peter, 8 Latour, Bruno, 90 Laurier, Wilfrid, 96–7 Long Soldier, Layli, 177n5 Loo, Tina, 8 Love Letters of a Japanese (Stopes), 119–20 Love’s Creation (Stopes), 153–5; Rose Amber, 153–4; Kenneth Harvey, 153–5 Lyell, Charles, 15 MacMurchy, Helen, 10, 17–18, 55, 57–62, 58f, 73, 131–2, 145, 189n7, 191n35, 195n14, 195n18; Bessie (sister), 69; and eugenics, 10, 57–9 Mahoney, Shane, 146–7 Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society (Lit & Phil), 28, 37–8, 41, 73, 87, 122, 184n43, 184nn39–41, 185n44, 187n71, 188n76

217

index Man, Other Poems, and a Preface (Stopes), 126, 130–1, 134, 155 “Man’s Mate, A” (Stopes), 7, 60, 74–5, 94–5, 99f, 120, 153; Prof. Kenneth Laurence, 7, 75, 94–5; Marjorie, 60, 75, 94–5; Prof. Tanaka, 94 Married Love: A New Contribution to the Solution of Sex Difficulties (Stopes), 4–5, 7, 10–11, 94–6, 126, 138, 140–4, 149, 154–5, 177n1, 194n13, 195n17 Marsh, Robert Laurence, 79, 193n18 Matthew, George, 117–20, 122, 125; William Diller (son), 118 Maude, Aylmer, 125–6, 132, 142, 178n6, 178n15, 189n4, 190n16; The Authorized Life of Marie Stopes, 126 McFarlane, John, 100, 195n27 McKibbin, Ross, 138, 144 McLaren, Angus, 145, 148 McNicol, Mary (“Molly”), 25–6, 29f, 35, 38, 45, 74, 110, 181n31, 184n40, 186n61, 196n36; engagement to Hewitt, 28–30, 89, 183n24 Migratory Birds Convention Act (1917), 143, 200n13 Migratory Bird Treaty (1916), 4 Miller, Randy, 118 Miner, Jack (Wild Goose Jack), 142; Jack Miner and the Birds, 142 Mortlake (Stopes’s pseudonym), 94, 120 Moss, Lady, 63, 191n22 Mumford, Lewis, 20, 136, 180n21 Noxious Vapours Abatement Society, 20–1 Oliver, Francis Wall, 14–17, 30 orgasm, 140 Osler, William, 144 Pallis, Marietta, 17, 180n13, 203n52 Pankhurst, Emmeline, 52, 188n84; Christabel (daughter), 52, 188n84 Parkin, Maude, 46, 187n70 Pearson, Hilda Hewitson, 79 Penhallow, David Pearce, 61–2, 118, 190n14, 191n16, 191n21, 198n12 Pinchot, Gifford, 144 Pleasant Friday Afternoons, 19, 24, 26, 73, 93, 126, 141, 180n18, 184n38, 187n68 Poel, William, 54, 188n87

Pratt, Edith Mary, 46, 187n68 Raisin, Catherine, 15 Ramsay, William, 15 Rees-Jones, Deryn, 153, 155, 203n49 Robertson, Agnes. See Arber, Agnes Robey, George (Sir George Edward Wade), 36, 183n32 Rose, June, 60, 192n10, 203n1 Rutherford, Ernest, 37–8, 182n12, 184n40, 184n42, 185n45, 188n79 Sakurai, Joji, 55, 56f, 189n2 Sargant, Ethel, 17 Schaffer, Simon, 153 Schuster, Arthur Friedrich, 38, 46, 185n45 Scott, Duncan Campbell, 7–8, 148–9, 178n8, 202n33 Shackleton, Ernest Henry, 79, 193n17 Sherrington, Charles, 17 Shibata, Keita, 19–20 Shteir, Rusty, 15, 179n2 Sifton, Clifford, 147–8 Six Nations of the Grand River Reserve, 59, 65 Sleigh, Charlotte, 73–4, 87 Smith Woodward, Arthur, 44, 50, 186nn64–5 Sportophyte: The Humorous Botanical Annual, The (Stopes), 93, 95, 106–7, 126, 130, 134, 194n11, 196nn34–5 Stó:lõ people, 8 Stopes, Charlotte Carmichael (mother), 14– 15, 57, 61, 95, 97–8, 119, 191n27, 195n19 Stopes, Henry (father), 14, 18, 31, 43 Stopes, Marie Charlotte Carmichael: and birth control, 4, 10–11, 132, 140, 194n13; bisexuality, 11, 60–1; and Buddhism, 11; collaboration with Hewitt, 7, 34, 72, 77, 87, 140, 144; divorce from Gates, 126, 140; draft letters to Hewitt, 42–4, 83, 100, 103–5, 113– 14; letters from Brock, 119–20, 125; letters from Garner, 101, 108–9; letters from Hewitt, 9, 31, 34–42, 44–54, 66, 75–86, 106, 114–15, 126, 133–5; letters from Hoyle, 25, 32, 55, 181n31, 182n14, 186n61, 190n13; letters from MacMurchy, 60–71, 131–2; letters from McNicol, 30; marriage proposal to Hewitt, 89–92, 130; marriage to Gates, 95– 8, 116, 120, 125–6, 131, 140–2, 197n5, 200n38; self-study of sexual arousal, 126, 150

218 Stopes, Winifred (sister), 15, 32, 92–3, 97, 120 suffrage, women’s, 5, 52, 59, 121, 188n84 Suzuki, David, 9 Tansley, Arthur, 15–19, 21, 73, 77, 93, 154, 179n6, 188n78, 190n12, 196n35, 197n1, 203n48; International Phytogeographical Excursions, 16; New Phytologist, 16, 19, 73, 77, 93 Tea Phytologist, The, 93–4, 106, 196n35 tent-building ants of Japan, 7, 34, 52–3, 87, 144 Tester, Frank, 8 Thayendanegea (Joseph Brant), 59 vitalism, 155, 203n52 Wagner, Richard: Tristan and Isolde, 28–30, 43, 92 Watase, Shozaburo, 38, 185n49

index Watson, David Meredith Seares, 47, 52, 66, 187n73 Watt, James, 20 Weiss, Frederick Ernest, 18–22, 72, 183n30, 184n39; Evelyn (spouse), 18, 36, 184n30 Wells, H.G.: The Science of Life, 145 West, George Stephen, 80, 193n27 Wheeler, William Morton, 33–4, 53, 138, 142, 155, 182n19, 188n86, 200n1 Whitehead, Alfred North, 34 Wilde, Henry, 37–8, 184n41 Wilkinson, David, 152–3 Wilkinson, Katie, 27, 30–1, 35, 183n26; letter from Stopes, 30 will-o’-the-wisp analogy, 9, 131, 135 Woolf, Virginia, 153 Wyss, Clothilde von, 60, 190n11 Yamagawa (Yamakawa), Kenjiro, 50, 188n77 Yokoyama, Matajiro, 42, 186n59