CHORD blog – Mary Taylor: ‘Friend of Charlotte Brontë’ or successful storekeeper of colonial New Zealand and ‘her own best friend’?

Jane Tolerton, independent researcher

Mary Taylor: ‘Friend of Charlotte Brontë’ or successful storekeeper of colonial New Zealand and ‘her own best friend’?

In Mary Taylor’s only novel, Miss Miles, teacher Maria Bell realises that her school is making a profit: ‘She reckoned and re-reckoned, and found she was making a living – that is, earning as much or more than she needed to spend….’ As a result, the narrator tells us, ‘[a] silent change which she never noticed took place in her character and disposition. She got courage and self-confidence and was braced up to the certainty that she herself was her own best friend’.[1]

This was the message Taylor wanted to give other women. She knew what it was like, as she had run a successful general store in Wellington, New Zealand, from 1850 to 1858, and gained wealth, confidence, respect and friends. She gave that message to her friends, Charlotte Brontë and Ellen Nussey, by letter at the time, and wrote her 1870 book The First Duty of Women to tell other women they should earn (or do their own housework rather than employing someone) whether single or married. [2]

She was fulfilled by her business life. She told Brontë: ‘I take great interest in my trade – as much as I could do in anything that was not all pleasure’ in 1852. [3] ‘I should think it is that partthat I shall think most agreeable when I look back on my death bed,’ she wrote to Nussey in 1857.[4]

Taylor is usually tagged ‘friend of Charlotte Brontë’, the sub-title of the only two books about her.[5] That is how she is remembered in Wellington, where a phrase on a mural says that she climbed up Mt Victoria in mid-1848 to look for a ship to take a letter to Brontë, but a city council history board outside her old shop site does not mention her.

Taylor was the daughter of a mill owner and wool merchant in Gomersal, Yorkshire. She arrived in Wellington aged 28 and moved in with her youngest brother, William Waring Taylor (Waring), who had been there for three years. She planned to make, save and invest money so that she could live off the interest – as a writer, in Yorkshire. She built a rental house, which she rented for 12 shillings a week; invested in cattle; and taught the piano.[6]

In late 1848, she went to live in the Couper household. William Couper had transformed himself from a carpenter working on whaling ships to one of the richest men in Wellington. He asked Taylor to teach his daughter the piano and wanted to marry her, she told Brontë.  He married Taylor’s young sister-in-law, Margaret Knox, instead, but invited her to join the household. Watching Couper operating several businesses at once may have inspired Taylor to start one of her own.

When her cousin Ellen Taylor arrived in mid-1849, they went into business together, leased land, built a house with shop space downstairs and living quarters upstairs – and opened a general store that sold everything from groceries to clothing. ‘We like it, that’s the truth,’ Taylor declared to Brontë. [7] She admitted to Nussey that they had been ‘frightened shy and anxious’ at first but told Brontë that her ‘improved circumstances’ meant more social invitations. [8] The Taylor women were respected for going into business in Wellington where it was not unusual for women to run businesses while also doing their own cooking and housework – as they also did. Ellen Taylor died of tuberculosis in December 1851. Taylor bought her share from her cousin’s legatee, her brother, Henry – then doubled the size of the shop by building on.

Writers have underplayed Taylor’s success – for two major reasons. One is a 1856 letter to Nussey in which she wrote: ‘I suppose you know that in the last 18 months I have not prospered in wealth being just where I was in that respect a year and a half ago.’[9] This has been interpreted as if the business was on the slide. Yet Taylor bought the land beneath the shop and the rental house and employed an assistant for the first time in that period. She had saved less, perhaps, but she had increased the value of her assets and had an easier life.

The second reason is that writers have not realised that Taylor was a creditor in her brother’s 1884 bankruptcy for about £3000.[10] She had given Waring power of attorney over her four properties and money for investment before sailing from Wellington in 1860.[11] Waring sold off her properties in the 1860s – and stole her money. He might have sent her ‘fake’ interest payments, as he did this with others.

Waring was convicted on fraud charges and sentenced to five years in jail with hard labour. Yet he has been described by historians as ‘a kindly, well-meaning muddler.’[12] One charged Taylor with having been a ‘clamouring overseas creditor’ who helped push her brother into bankruptcy – and even that her ‘blood [was] no thicker than water’, although there is no evidence that she asked for her money and some that she did not.[13]

In 1903, after Waring’s death was reported in Yorkshire, someone wrote to a local newspaper pointing out that Taylor had been ‘an admirable businesswoman’.[14] Wellington has a Waring Taylor Street. Why not rename it Mary Taylor Street? She is a much better role model than her brother.

References

[1] Mary Taylor, Miss Miles: or A tale of Yorkshire life 60 years ago. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 20. Originally published by Remington & Co., London, 1890.

[2] Mary Taylor, The First Duty of Women: A Series of Articles Reprinted from The Victoria Magazine, 1865 to 1870. (London: Emily Faithfull, Victoria Press, 1870).

[3] Mary Taylor to Charlotte Brontë, n.d. 1852, quoted Joan Stevens, Mary Taylor: Friend of Charlotte Brontë: Letters from New Zealand and Elsewhere. (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1972), 107.

[4] Taylor to Ellen Nussey, 4 to 8 January 1857, Stevens, Mary Taylor, 131.

[5] Joan Bellamy, ‘More Precious than Rubies’: Mary Taylor: Friend of Charlotte Brontë, Strong-Minded Woman (Beverley: Highgate Publications, 2002) and Joan Stevens, Mary Taylor.

[6] Taylor to Brontë, June to 24 July 1848, Stevens, Mary Taylor, 76.  

[7] Ellen Taylor to Brontë, April 1850, Stevens, Mary Taylor, 95.

[8] Taylor to Nussey, 13 August 1850, Stevens, Mary Taylor, 100; Taylor to Brontë, April 1850. Quoted, Stevens, Mary Taylor, 95.

[9] For example, in Taylor’s entry in the Dictionary of New Zealand Biography by Beryl Hughes, 1993; Taylor to Nussey, 19 April to 10 May 1856, Stevens, Mary Taylor, 128.

[10] Evening Post, 3 July 1884. The exact sum of £3103.5.1 differed slightly in other renditions of the listing.

[11] Power of Attorney agreement, Mary Taylor to W. Waring Taylor, WGTNGRR R24008122, Archives New Zealand.

[12] A.G. Bagnall, Wairarapa: An Historical Excursion. (Masterton: Hedley’s Bookshop Ltd & Masterton Lands Trust, 1976), 352.

[13] B.R. Patterson, ‘Whatever Happened to Poor Waring Taylor: Insights from the Business Manuscripts’, Turnbull Library Record, 1991, Vol XXIV, Issue 2, 113.

[14] Bellamy, ‘More Precious than Rubies’, 143.

Jane Tolerton is the author if the New Zealand Book Award-winning Ettie: A Life of Ettie Rout (Penguin Books, 1992) and the best-selling oral history, Convent Girls (Penguin Books, 1994). She has just completed an MA thesis on Mary Taylor at Te Herenga Waka, Victoria University of Wellington.