‘I spend too much time on trifles’: a glimpse of Victorian Liverpool through the diary of a ‘serious’ woman

It was a cold February day in 1949 when Edward Hall went into an unknown second-hand book shop. Browsing shelves of leather-bound tomes and battered volumes, he finally stopped at a thin notebook with a marbled cover. A quick thumb through the handwritten pages told him all he needed to know; it was another diary he could add to his collection. He paid two pounds and five shillings for the book, equivalent to two full days’ work for the average labourer – not a trivial sum of money. Hall then took the notebook back home to Surbiton, where it joined his collection of some 200 other diaries. Some years later he donated it to Wigan Library. He provided only a glimmer of context about the writer: ‘Miss Henrietta Bell, Liverpool 1839-40.’

For the past 50 years Henrietta’s diary has sat in the temperature-controlled strong rooms of Archives: Wigan & Leigh, just 24 miles away from where it was originally created. It now lives nestled in a box between the diaries of an 18th century apothecary, a Victorian vicar and an Edwardian musician.

Over the years her words have been digitised and transcribed, but the mystery remained: who was Henrietta Bell? I thought it would be a straightforward task. A name is key to unlocking histories. In the past few decades official records have been digitised and uploaded online through genealogy websites and archives, now conveniently available at my fingertips. Packed into neat little rows on the screen are names, ages and addresses which means Victorians, like us, now have a digital footprint. Except Henrietta’s was that bit harder to follow.

I turned detective. Leafing through Henrietta's words, I realised that whilst she was vivid in her detail of emotion, she was sparse on facts. Family are mentioned but never named, with the exception of her brother-in-law, Reverend J. E. White. Edward Hall noted that Henrietta was a ‘Miss’, so I assumed the maiden name of her sister was also Bell. 

I looked for marriages between Bells and Whites in Liverpool. Nothing. I expanded my search to Lancashire. Success! Some hits, but completely the wrong period. Anyone who has ever attempted to do their family tree will probably empathise here with the emotional rollercoaster I was on.

Deflated but not defeated, I returned to the 1841 census, and eventually made a breakthrough. A 33-year-old Henrietta Bell living not in Liverpool itself, but at Rock Park in Bebington, an exclusive suburban retreat from the hustle and bustle of the early Victorian town. Verifying her details by tracing other family members, I was finally able to piece together Henrietta’s story. 

Her maiden name was Birch, and  she was born in Stirling in August 1808. Her father, John Birch, was a captain in the 73rd Regiment, who had eloped with her mother, a 15-year-old heiress named Mary Arabella Forbes. John’s regiment took his young family across the world. By the time Henrietta celebrated her 10th birthday back in Stirling, she had already lived in Sydney, Sri Lanka and South Africa. In 1829 she married Charles Cowan Bell. 

Now we've established who she was, I know you’ll be wondering what she wrote about. Let’s start with Edward Hall's summary of the diary:

This diary concentrates on Christian values in their most narrow sense. She must have been very annoying to live with, for she always seems to be criticising everyone and everything. She often receives 'notes from friends who have taken amiss what I did in kindness.' Miss Bell's type of Christianity is hard and harsh, and this is reflected throughout the diary.

Doesn’t exactly sound like a page-turner does it? It may be heavy on the evangelical Christianity, but it is also a fascinating insight into the mind of a young woman of the period. Her words speak to us across the centuries. We might not understand her religious viewpoint, but those of us who keep, or have attempted to keep diaries and journals, will understand why she felt compelled to write.

The diary begins on 14 April 1839. Henrietta was 30 years old. Her husband, Charles, had died in Calcutta six years earlier, and her father died two years after that. She had ten siblings of which she shared the responsibility of raising the youngest. Religion was her comfort, helping her navigate the sadness which pierced her twenties. It was also a burden of an unachievable example, no doubt amplified by her preacher brother-in-law. Her first entry was a self-analysis:

[I] give way so much to Self-indulgence, to worldly conformity in dress and conversation […] giving way to irritability of temper, and not making allowances for the temper and capacities of my pupils - being pleased when flattered - a reluctance to show myself a Servant of Christ in distributing treats in public, and afraid of the displeasure and sneers of my worldly relations, […] Spend too much time on trifles - do not cultivate my talents, nor give a portion of it to study - do not live in the Spirit of prayer - am not watchful over my thoughts and words

The diary records a scant period of just two months in 1839 and four months in 1840. It is highly personal and charts these struggles of self-identity as Henrietta attempts to reflect and better know herself. She was caught in a battle between being a regular person and living up to her own ideal of a higher self. 

On the first day of 1840 she prayed, successfully, to change her pew at St Andrew’s Church. Yet three days later she lamented: “my thoughts were very distracted during divine Service, and discomposed by the novelty of our new pew.” 

For Henrietta every daydream, every flare of emotion, every incident was an obstacle and test of faith, pushing her back on the right path. When she lost her bible she saw it as a sign from God because “I fear it was the utility and beauty of the edition, and not the Word of God contained in it, that I most praised”.

She held Sunday, the sabbath, with the utmost reverence, to the point of self-denial. The rest of the household did not follow suit: “The inconvenience of Company visiting us and dishonouring this holy day by worldly conversation and waste of its Sacred and valuable hours.”  This was not an isolated incident; she preferred sermons to socialising. It’s becoming obvious why Edward Hall said she must have been annoying to live with.

The child of one friend described her as “a very serious Lady, and that I appeared to love God very much”. This love of God she took too far. Harsh on herself, she could be equally as harsh on others, receiving disappointed letters when she espoused her views too freely. She saw the rebuttals as lessons in controlling her judgement. The regularity of these events would suggest it was a lesson she had to re-visit often. 

Those beneath her in class or age, such as the Sunday School children or her servants, could not escape her half-maternal, half-authoritarian attitude. She admonished the cook for being engaged in “unnecessary work” on a Sunday, and another time seems to have terrified one maid: “The Servant was affected by what I said to her regarding her soul - but was sorry at having so distressed her.”

Living in Liverpool in the 1830-40s, Henrietta was witness to the vast social schisms between rich and poor, Catholic and Protestant, immigrant and non-immigrant. Her diary only tantalisingly, and somewhat inadvertently, reveals her thoughts and feelings on these subjects. She often attended lectures and sermons which focused on the “errors”, “danger” and “guilt” of Catholicism. She was also more concerned with the poor’s lack of faith, than their lack of basic amenities or sanitation:

In one Court alone there are 142 persons living, two only of whom regularly attend Public worship and keep the Sabbath, and 2 only have a bible, so that the others are actually living "without God in the world", and in a worse state than the heathen.

As a middle-class woman, Henrietta did not mix with the lower classes unless in strictly controlled circumstances, though she may have encountered black workers on the dock when she took the steam ferry from Bebington. But her ancestral links to slavery are not difficult to uncover in today’s digital age. Her grandfather, Dugald Forbes, was a Scottish merchant who had emigrated to Philadelphia in 1777, before moving to South Carolina in 1783. Losing his land during the War of Independence, he was compensated with a land grant in the Bahamas. 

A document now held in the National Library of Ireland details the sale of 45 enslaved people from James Stevens to Forbes for £4,000 in 1798. On the back of the document are the names of 17 men, 15 women and 13 children. Some of the men were re-named after locations, such as ‘Dublin’ and ‘Glasgow’. Others had family names belonging to their owner: ‘Dugald’, ‘James junior’, ‘Tom Forbes’. Some of the children, perhaps too young to work, were only known by their enslaved mother: ‘Nanny’s child’ or ‘Rachael’s child’. 

Forbes and his family left the Bahamas, settling briefly in Liverpool. He died in 1820 in Stirling, when Henrietta was 11. We will never know if her mother or grandfather told her stories about the plantation but we do know from her diary that Henrietta’s view of other peoples and cultures was undoubtedly influenced by her class and era. On May 13, 1839 she recorded her attendance at the annual meeting of ‘The Church Missionary Society’:

Mr Boyd's was more a political speech, showing the Supremacy of our Nation above all the Nations of the World, and the Providence of God in allotting her so large a proportion of dominion, the blessing she possessed, and the obligation she lay under to dispense the light of the Gospel to every part of her dominions […] Mr White related some amusing anecdotes of the Natives in New Zealand and in the South Sea Islands.

Born in the era of sailing ships and dying at the age of 97 in 1905, just after the first aeroplane, Henrietta lived a long life, of which her diary is just a snapshot. The document was too easily dismissed by Edward Hall and without proper context, the writing had stood isolated from the writer. Henrietta was not recording day-to-day trivia of life, or big events like the invention of the railway, nor was she revealing saucy secrets and gossip. 

Instead, this thin notebook was a private journal to pour out her thoughts, feelings and frustrations; much as we might do today through ‘brain dumping’ into our diaries or notes app. Clearly a prickly character, paper and pen were a friend to which she could turn to unpack her spirituality and morality, and her struggles with those closest to her. This, together with archival records, has revealed enough fragments to piece together the parts of a life, and gives her diary new meaning and importance, especially as a little window into Victorian Liverpool.