Sisters in the Wilderness Read Free Page B

sixth wife, with whom there was a vague ancestral link) in 1802 and Susanna in 1803. Two sons subsequently took their places in the nursery—Samuel in 1805 and Thomas in 1807—but they were never players in their sisters’ nursery games.
    Thomas Strickland didn’t really enjoy the bustle of Rotherhithe: his heart lay in his library, not his wharves. He took particular pride in the books and memorabilia once owned by Newton that his first wife had brought into his household. And he suffered from gout—an excruciatingly painful complaint. For health reasons, and with hopes of bettering his social position, Thomas decided in 1803 to leave the city and move to Suffolk.
    Thomas Strickland’s decision to move to a bucolic county north of London and reinvent himself as a country squire was typical of his age—although it probably didn’t seem so to him. In 1803, the country was simmering uncomfortably under George III , the third inadequate Hanoverian monarch in a row. It was also fighting one of the greatest enemies it had ever faced: France’s Napoleon Bonaparte, whose forces challenged the Duke of Wellington on land and Admiral Horatio Nelson at sea. But the preceding century had seen changes in Britain that had shaken the traditions of centuries. Brilliant prime ministers such as Robert Walpole and William Pitt had successfully transferred power from hereditary aristocrats to elected representatives; demand for an extension of the franchise beyond wealthy landowners was starting to build. Robert Clive’s victories in India had established British rule there,and the American War of Independence had eliminated British control of thirteen colonies. There had been a rush of inventions, such as Richard Arkwright’s water-powered spinning machine and James Watt’s steam engine. In 1785 The Times was established; in 1802, the English physicist John Dalton introduced atomic theory into chemistry. As Britain embarked on the new century, it was alive with new thinking, new intellectual movements and a new sense of possibility. It was on the brink of the Industrial Revolution, which would make Britain the wealthiest nation in the world. The social strata were shifting, and there was new room for upward mobility.
    In Suffolk, there was a surprising turnover of estates at the top of the social hierarchy as members of a new class—nouveaux riches—bought up old manor houses. The industrialist John Crowley, who owned England’s largest ironworks, in County Durham, two hundred miles north of London, had set himself up in a mansion in the sleepy old Suffolk village of Barking. One of London’s richest malt distillers, Samuel Kent, had settled into a stately hall on the River Lark at Fornham St. Genevieve. The district in which Thomas Strickland decided to set himself up was the Waveney Valley in eastern Suffolk. By late 1803, he was renting Stowe House, a Georgian manor on a hill overlooking the town of Bungay.
    Suffolk was attractive to people like Thomas Strickland because the comfortably rounded bulge of land jutting into the North Sea has always been one of the most beautiful corners of England. Suffolk shares with Norfolk, its northern neighbour, vistas of flat fields, scattered villages and meandering streams. The gentle features and wide skies of Suffolk at the time of the Stricklands are best captured on the canvases of two of England’s greatest landscape painters, John Constable and Thomas Gainsborough. Curlews endlessly wheel round in the sky; silvery light slants onto still water; yellow fields are spangled with the brilliant vermilion of poppies. In 1803, the county’s most dramatic features were man-made and on a human scale. Inland, there were medieval flint-and-stone churches, and brick windmills with creaking sails. Alongthe coastline, there were lighthouses to warn North Sea fishing fleets and collier brigs of the shifting sandbanks on the East Anglian