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Breadth from Dissent: Ada Ellen Bayly (‘Edna Lyall’) and Her Fiction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 January 2016
Extract
Attitudes change. They broaden as well as contract. They reflect the permeation of dissenting ideas in apparently settled communities and the assimilation of conventionally accepted ideas by dissenters. The process is transformative. Literature is a prime medium for the transmission of ideas. It shapes attitudes. What, then, of the role of popular literature, especially fiction, in shaping the attitudes, especially the religious attitudes, of a rapidly growing, clearly intelligent and significandy female reading public? This paper considers an Anglican writer, formed in part by Dissent, whose work particularly appealed to Nonconformists exercising their citizenship in a complex but now promisingly open society. This Broad Churchwoman enlarged the minds of her readers in liberal directions without diminishing their Dissenting formation. She is now quite forgotten, but her apparently modest achievement was in fact considerable.
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References
1 To simplify matters this paper will refer to her as Edna Lyall, a name using nine letters from Ada Ellen Bayly. General information about her is drawn chiefly from four sources: Payne, George A., Edna Lyall: An Appreciation (Manchester, [1903])Google Scholar, J[esse]. M[aria]. Escreet, The Life of Edna Lyall (Ada Ellen Bayly) (London, 1904); DNB, Supplement 1901–1911, s.n. ‘Bayly, Ada Ellen (1857–1903)’; ODNB, s.n. ‘Bayly, Ada Ellen (1857–1903)’. I am grateful to David Wykes and the late Jonathan Morgan of Dr Williams’s Library, London, for help in the preparation of this paper.
2 In the 1850s and 1860s the Baylys lived in Brighton; Henry Fawcett was Liberal MP for Brighton 1865–74: ODNB, s.n. ‘Fawcett, Henry (1833–1884)’.
3 The extent of her reading and the depth of her research are indicated by her biographers, Payne and Escreet, and are apparent from her books. Thus, for the purposes of the present essay, In the Golden Days (1885) demonstrates her knowledge of Algernon Sydney, Hampden and Baxter; and The Burges Letters (1902) engagingly notes on page 43 her childhood memory of Pilgrim’s Progress as an example of allegorical Sunday reading that was neither dull nor sad.
4 Escreet, Lyall, 257–63.
5 Payne, Edna Lyall; Escreet, Lyall; DNB, Supplement 1901–1911, s.n. ‘Bayly, Ada Ellen’.
6 ODNB, s.n. ‘Bayly, Ada Ellen (1857–1903)’.
7 This information is drawn from the title pages of We Two, new edn (London, 1888); In the Golden Days, new edn (London, 1899, repr. 1903); Knight Errant, 15th edn (London, 1894); Derrick Vaughan, Novelist (London, 1889). For Donovan: A Modern Englishman and We Two, see Payne, Edna Lyall, 23, 25.
8 For James Clarke, founder of James Clarke and Co., see Jeffs, Harry, Press, Preachers and Politicians. Reminiscences: 1874–1932 (London, 1933), 44–6 Google Scholar; for James Greville Clarke (1854–1901), see Who Was Who: 1897–1916 (London, 1920), 140.
9 Jeffs, Reminiscences, 47, 50–1.
10 Ibid. 57.
11 For Picton, see ODNB, s.n. ‘Picton, James Allanson (1832–1910)’.
12 Jeffs, Reminiscences, 55.
13 Payne, Edna Lyall, 18.
14 An extensive family tree is to be found in W. B. Gurney, Some Particulars of the Gurney Family (London, 1902).
15 Macdonald, Greville, Reminiscences of a Specialist (London, 1932), 270 Google Scholar.
16 Ibid. 270, 310. For George Macdonald (1824–1905), see ODNB.
17 Escreet, Lyall, 3.
18 Ibid. 3–4; Pye-Smith, Arthur, Memorials of Fetter Lane Congregational Church, London (London, 1900), 14–18 Google Scholar; ODNB, s.n. ‘Bradbury, Thomas (1676/7–1759)’. Bradbury ministered at the Congregational Fetter Lane from 1707 to 1728, and at the Presbyterian New Court (it became statedly Congregational on his settlement) from 1728 to 1759.
19 Pye-Smith, Memorials, 16–17.
20 Watford’s County Families of the United Kingdom, 38th edn (London, 1898), 126.
21 Sandon, E., Suffolk Homes: A Study of Domestic Architecture (Woodbridge, 1977), 216, 219 Google Scholar.
22 The Henry Crabb Robinson correspondence (London, DWL), contains letters from Joseph (HCR 1856, 7a, 8a, 11b, 36a; 1857, 14a) and Nathaniel Warner Bromley (HCR 1862, 63a; 1864, 1a, 7b).
23 Hosken, T.J., History of Congregationalism and Memorials of the Churches of our Order in Suffolk (Ipswich, 1920), 289–90 Google Scholar.
24 For Henry Bromley, see Congregational Year Book, 1879, 703–5; for Olaudah Equiano (c. 1745–97), see ODNB.
25 Lyall, Edna, In the Golden Days, new edn (London, 1899, repr. 1903), 17 Google Scholar.
26 Ibid.
27 Escreet, Lyall, 244–6, 248.
28 Lyall, In the Golden Days, 306–12. For the original Francis Bampfield (1614–84), see ODNB.
29 Lyall, In the Golden Days, 287–90.
30 Lyall, Edna, The Burges Letters: A Record of Child Life in the Sixties (London, 1902)Google Scholar.
31 Payne, Edna Lyall, 26.
32 Lyall, Edna, Derrick Vaughan, Novelist (London, 1889), 4–5 Google Scholar.
33 No source for the quotation is given. For Toynbee (1852–83), see ODNB.
34 Lyall, Derrick Vaughan, 136. Toynbee Hall, the pioneer university setdement, was conceived in November 1883 and opened in Whitechapel, in memory of Arnold Toynbee, in December 1884.
35 Lyall, Derrick Vaughan, 99–100.
36 Lyall, In the Golden Days, 37.
37 Ibid.
38 Ibid. 38, 39.
39 Lyall, Burges Letters, 133.
40 Ibid. 134.
41 Ibid. 134–5. Croquet became the rage in the 1860s.
42 Ibid. 137.
43 I am indebted for much of what follows to information provided by the late Jessie Ridge, a niece of the last Mrs Warner-Bromley of Badmondisfield.
44 Handbook and Directory with War Record of The Leys School, Cambridge, 9th edn (Cambridge, 1920), Part II, 28. I am indebted also to Amanda Goode, Emmanuel College Archivist.
45 For Clarence Hatry (1888–1965), company promoter and financier, sentenced to fourteen years’ penal servitude for fraud in January 1930, see ODNB.
46 There is a mural tablet to her memory in Wickhambrook Congregational (now United Reformed) Church.
47 Lyall, Burges Letters, 117–18, 128–9.
48 According to Jessie Ridge.
49 Handbook and Directory of The Leys School, 14th edn (Cambridge, 1948), 37.
50 For George A. Payne (1865–1950), minister at Knutsford 1890–1930 and Gaskell enthusiast, see The Inquirer, 4 March 1950, 78.
51 Payne, Edna Lyall, 8.
52 Geoffrey F. Nuttall to Clyde Binfield, 20 October 1988.
53 Richards, Colin, ed., Geoffrey Fillingham Nuttall 1911–2007 (Prestatyn, 2008)Google Scholar.