Unbridling the Tongues of Women - The University of Adelaide

Unbridling the tongues of women
tomed to innovation; a family of capable and independent-minded women. Spence’s
grandfather’s holdings were drastically reduced when he invested in an unsuccessful
attempt to launch an East Lothian bank. When a stroke rendered him incapable of
running the one farm that he still held, he turned it over – not to his eldest son –
but to his daughter Margaret, who managed the 800 acres profitably for the next 30
years. 4 Spence remembered her aunt as a ‘vigorous business-like woman … riding or
driving her little gig all over the farm’. 5 Another aunt, Mary, took an independent
stance on religion following the disruption of the Church of Scotland in 1843, and
instead of remaining with the rest of the family, turned to the Free Church. 6 Helen,
herself, had unusually forthright political views: during the debates on the first Reform
Bill at the beginning of the 1820s, she wrote two letters to the local press,
under the name ‘Grizel Plowter’, setting forth the advantages of reform. 7 But she did
not think of even attempting to retain control of her own financial resources. When
she married David Spence in 1815, she brought him a dowry of £1500, believing
that ‘the wife’s fortune should come and go with the husband’s’. 8
Spence’s father, William, was the son of a former naval surgeon who retired to
practise in Melrose. William Spence appears to have been a gentle, considerate man.
The family preserved the story of his getting up early in the mornings to light the fire
so that he could take his wife a cup of tea in bed; he would not rouse the maid, ‘he
said young things wanted plenty of sleep’. It was, said Spence, ‘a wonderful thing for
a man to do in those days’. His medicine ‘trusted much to Nature and not too much
to drugs’, which meant that his grandson, young John Brodie Spence, passed a painful
11 th birthday after having a double tooth extracted. 9 David Spence grew up wanting
to be a farmer, but there was no capital in the family to finance such a venture, so he
was apprenticed at the age of 15 to the only lawyer in Melrose. He served a three-year
apprenticeship – ‘five years was required for Writers to the Signet but inferior court
practice only required three’ – which qualified him to work in a field developing as
a specialism of solicitors and attorneys. 10 At the age of 18 he moved to Edinburgh
with a friend, earning his living by writing law papers at threepence a page. There,
he probably spent much of his time with other members of the legal fraternity who
became the most vociferous champions of the Whigs and reform. When he set up
as a writer on his own account back in Melrose, he was a declared a ‘reformer’. 11 He,
too, had come from a household of self-sufficient women: one of his sisters, Mary,
established a boarding-school, at which Spence’s two elder sisters were educated. 12
However, Spence’s parents were reformers, not radicals. They may have been eager to
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