When I moved
to Oxford I rather disapproved of the hostel next door, with its Victorian
attitude to young, single mothers. I was not surprised when our local vicar told
me that it was run by the ‘Skene Moral Welfare Association’. I then learned that the Skene in question was
Felicia Mary Frances Skene, one of the most radical women in nineteenth century Oxford. I was even
more amazed to discover that she was my grandfather’s great aunt, known in the
family as ‘Fifi’. I decided to find out more.
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Felicia Mary Frances Skene as a young
woman
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Her father James,
was a wealthy Scottish lawyer and amateur artist whose engravings illustrated
Walter Scott’s novels. Born in 1821, Fifi comforted Scott with fairy stories the
night in 1825 when he lost everything. Roused by her cheerful spirit, he
decided to fight bankruptcy and work through his debts. Scott
wrote that Fifi’s parents ‘bring so much old-fashioned kindness and good humour
with them that they must be always welcome guests.’ They were also enterprising
and resourceful.
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Fifi’s father James Skene of Rubsilaw, 1775–1864,
with two of his grandchildren.
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James Skene believed that travel was the best
form of education and led his family on
a grand tour around Europe. Fifi was taught the piano in France by Liszt, whom
she described as ‘a wild-looking, long-haired excitable man’. Between 1838 and
1845 the family lived in Athens where Fifi sang with the Greek royal family. During
an expedition on horseback across the
Marathon plain, she spent the night in a shack with Albanian peasants and their
pigs. At the age of twenty-four she brought her young nieces aged ten and eleven
(one of them my great grandmother Janie) home from Athens by ship and train via
Constantinople. Arriving in England she wrote her first book Wayfaring Sketches among the Turks and
Christians, first in French and then in English. Her observations of conditions in slave
markets, galley- ships and an Ottoman Pasha’s harem made it a bestseller.
The Skene
method of education obviously worked. Her older brother James Henry married a
Greek aristocrat and became a British Consul to Aleppo. Fifi’s brother George was Professor of Law at
the University of Edinburgh and Sheriff
of Glasgow, and another brother William became the Historiographer Royal of
Scotland, writing the first academic history from Scotland’s point of view. One
of her sisters married the Swedish ambassador to Washington, Berlin and Paris,
and the other married a Greek aristocrat – the brother of her sister-in-law.
Fifi, left, with her niece Zoe Thomson, wife of the Archbishop of York, and her brother William Forbes Skene, Historiographer Royal of Scotland 1892.
Her 1866 novel
Hidden Depths was an exposure of prostitution in Oxford inspired
by the injustices she had witnessed in the
prison and women’s reformatories. The Athenaeum criticised her writing as ‘unrepresentative
of society’, The London Review disapproved of the message and Mudie’s
Library considered the subject-matter
altogether too provocative. The
Lesters: A Family Record warned
readers of the dangers of alcohol but was denounced by Saturday Review as being ‘cheap melodramatic horror’
and ‘almost beneath criticism’ while Academy dismissed the novel as dull and destined for
failure. Fifi’s social views were just too
progressive for 19th century male critics. Attracted by intellectual life, Fifi persuaded her parents to move to Oxford where
she settled down as a writer and philanthropist. Despite countless offers, the auburn-haired
and boisterous Fifi was far too busy to bother with marriage. She didn’t want
to belong to a man and much preferred to carve out her own life. Fluent in both
French and Greek, and possessing a photographic memory, she published more than
twenty books under the pseudonyms of Oxonesis, Francis Scougal and Erskine Moir. Her interest in the high-church ‘Oxford
Movement’, inspired a theological work The Divine Master, which ran to eleven
editions. She wrote for Blackwood’s, Cornhill
and Macmillan's Magazines, Quiver, Temple Bar and Good Words, which had
a circulation of 100,000 and featured contributions by Thomas Hardy and
Anthony Trollope.
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Fifi’s 1865 anonymous pamphlet, ‘Penitentiaries and Reformatories’ on the humiliation of ‘fallen women’ whom
society ‘sought to hide its blackest curse under a veil of mock prudery. . .
because their sin was unfit to be named in the polite society that received
with open arms the very men on whom they sinned’. ( University of Indiana's Victorian Women
Writers Project)
Published under the the pseudonym Erskine
Moir, her novel Through the Shadows had more success and The Spectator stated it to be ‘the outcome of a most
refined, religious, and poetical mind’.
They were right. Fifi was a deeply
religious and principled woman and used
the income from her books and articles to finance her
philanthropic work. Her biographer Ellen Rickards wrote
that ‘it was her rule throughout her long life never to spend on herself what
she gained from her writings, partly from her natural love of giving, partly
from an old-fashioned idea that it was an undignified thing for a lady to earn
money for her own personal advantage.’
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The Skene Arms, left, in St Michael’s
Street, Oxford.
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For most of her life Fifi lived in St
Michael’s Street in the centre of Oxford. It’s nickname was ‘The Street of
Seven Deadly Sins’. Her home was known
as ‘The Skene Arms’, because it was always open to beggars, clergymen,
prostitutes, politicians and students. In her Cornhill
Magazine article ‘Ethics of the Tramp’ she wrote that like her parrots, men
of the road should roam free and never be incarcerated. She braved the wrath of
local pimps and drunken husbands by finding refuge for women fleeing prostitution
and domestic violence.
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Fifi,
Tatters and Rev. Algernon Barrington Simeon,
the first Warden of St Edward’s School,
whom she nursed though diphtheria, 1875. |
After years of impromptu visits to
Oxford Prison accompanied by Tatters, her Skye terrier, Fifi became England’s
first official female Prison Visitor. She insisted on complete confidentiality
and demanded that male and female prisoners be housed separately, for the protection
of the women. On their release, she gave prisoners a hearty breakfast and a
reference for employment. She even organised marriages to legitimatize the children
of ‘fallen women’. Independently of any political movement, she fought for prisons
to be used for rehabilitation; for the abolition of capital punishment; and for
the decriminalization of suicide. She also campaigned against female
inequality, animal vivisection and religious intolerance. When the Prime Minister,
W.E. Gladstone, asked her advice on the new theory of evolution, she told him
that Darwin’s discovery was true, and compatible with Christianity.
Fifi helped found St Edward’s School
for the sons of poor clergymen and dug the first sod of earth for its new buildings
in North Oxford. With Dr Henry Acland, Fifi trained nurses to deal with the regular
cholera and smallpox outbreaks in Oxford. But when she offered her nurses to
Florence Nightingale for the war in the Crimea, all but three were turned down for
being ‘too working class.’
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Fifi, 1821-1899,
in old age.
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Fifi died of bronchitis in 1899 and was
buried in St Thomas church, near Oxford railway station. A century later the assets of the Skene Moral
Welfare Association were redistributed among Oxford’s social housing
associations. In old age, Fifi had said of herself, ‘I am like the Martyr’s Memorial
– everybody knows me and no-one is interested me.’ Beyond Oxford, she has largely been forgotten,
but in 2002 a blue plaque was erected outside her home, now a hostel for single
men. The plaque describes Fifi as ‘Prison reformer and
friend of the poor’ but there is no mention of her literary achievements.
At times I have felt that my own career,
which is split between writing popular history books and international development, confuses people.
Great Aunt Fifi demonstrated that a woman can have as many different careers as
she likes.
Some of her titles: Wayfaring sketches among the
Greeks and Turks, and on the shores of the Danube by a seven years
resident in Greece, 1849. The Isles of Greece, and other poems, 1843. Use and Abuse, a tale, 1849. The Inheritance of Evil or, The
Consequence of marrying a deceased wife’s sister, 1849. The Tutor's Ward, 1851. The Divine Master, 1852. S. Alban’s, or, the
Prisoners of Hope, 1853. Hidden Depths ,1866.
Still and Deep, 1875. Memoir of Alexander, Bishop of Brechin, 1876. Raymond, 1876. Life of Alexander Lycurgus:
archbishop of the Cyclades, 1877. More than Conqueror , 1878. The Shadow of the Holy Week, 1883. A Strange Inheritance,
1886. The Lesters: a Family
Record, 1887. Through the
Shadows: a Test of the Truth, 1888. Awakened. A tale in nine chapters,
1888. Dewdrops: selections from writings of the saints,1888. Scenes from a
Silent World, or, Prisons and their Inmates, 1889.
