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3. The Commitment to Law:
1872 to 1888
I still wonder what circumstances made Eliza Orme decide to become a
lawyer, when she might have been a medic or a mathematician. Many
people make that career commitment on the basis of family tradition,
but neither her father nor any of her brothers and brothers-in-law were
lawyers. So perhaps it was her professorial mentors who motivated the
decision, men like Leonard Courtney, John Elliott Cairnes, and W. A.
Hunter. And maybe those men did inspire her, although I doubt if any
of them endorsed her most ambitious hopes and dreams. I think that
probably their inuence was more at the level of installing liberal—and
Liberal—political ideals, and perhaps also the notion of law as a means
to an end in public life. Instead I like to think that, before she met any of
those eminent gentlemen, the seed of the idea might have been planted
by her mother’s friend, the feminist leader Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon.
Wealthy and independent, Bodichon was involved in founding the
English Woman’s Journal in 1858 and Girton College, Cambridge in 1869.
Her book, A Brief Summary of the Laws of England concerning Women, had
rst come out in 1854 and prompted changes in the Married Women’s
Property Acts. Eliza was only ve years old in 1854, but in 1869 a revised
and expanded third edition of the book appeared, one that included
information on franchise reform and was widely reviewed and discussed.
Eliza was twenty-one that year and considering her options for university-
level education. I can imagine some exciting and productive conversations
taking place between the three of them: the unconventional, experienced
feminist politician, her wealthy and well-connected friend Mrs Charles
Orme, and the determined young Eliza. Perhaps that was the moment, as
I speculated in Chapter 2, when she moved from an interest in science and
mathematics to embrace the study of law.
©2024 Leslie Howsam, CC BY-NC 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0392.03
38 Eliza Orme’s Ambitions
Fig. 3 Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon (1861, Samuel Laurence),
©National Portrait Gallery, London.
Books and movies about the Victorian women’s movement mostly
focus on the campaign for the vote, and to a lesser extent on the one
for respectable opportunities for middle-class women (‘ladies’) to earn
their own livings by work. But what kind of work did they envisage?
Leaders in the movement recognized that if a lady were to avoid moving
from the nancial support of her father to that of a husband (that is,
to remain single) she would have to nd a job of some sort. If she got
married she would have children, which was deemed to preclude work
outside the home altogether. Meanwhile, if a woman was of the working
class, a whole other set of social and economic conventions applied. The
rst diculty was that a ‘lady’ could not respectably take the kinds of
jobs that working-class women did, and the second was that clerical
work—otherwise eminently suitable—was restricted to men. At mid-
century, a ‘lady’ could really only work as a governess, because that
labour could be carried on under a domestic roof. It was also poorly
paid, subject to exploitation, and precarious. The Society for Promoting
the Employment of Women existed to remedy this situation. However, in
addition to opening up the work of teachers, ‘typewriters’ (the person,
not the technology) and other non-professional occupations, there was
39
3. The Commitment to Law: 1872 to 1888
a campaign to make it possible for women to be doctors. Medicine was
one of three traditional professions; the other two were the law and the
clergy, but feminists were not campaigning to enter these. In the case of
medicine, reformers like Elizabeth Garrett Anderson and Sophia Jex-
Blake were able to argue that women doctors provided an important
service to women patients. Whereas the merits of having either legal
or theological technicalities explained by women, to women as well as
men, remained unthinkable to almost everyone, even feminist leaders.
Such was the situation as Eliza Orme came of age at the end of the
1860s. But that young woman had courage and ambition. Whether
or not she shared my opinion that Harriet Taylor and John Stuart
Mill took advantage of her goodwill (when they manoeuvred her to
ll the secretary’s post in the London National Society for Women’s
Surage) she ruthlessly took advantage of her acquaintance with
them—and perhaps even their obligation to her—to seek support for
an extraordinary project. (And incidentally to announce her resignation
from the job they had landed her with a year and a half earlier.) Mill and
Taylor were out of London at the time, so she wrote to them. Although
Orme had almost certainly met Mill in her family’s home from a young
age and more recently through the women’s surage movement, she
addressed the letter to Taylor. As Mill’s stepdaughter, Helen Taylor
managed most of his correspondence, even writing some letters on his
behalf herself.
Part of the correspondence between the two women is preserved at
London School of Economics (LSE), which is located close to the Inns
of Court and Chancery Lane and so not far from where some of the
letters were written. The Women’s Library at LSE has a comfortable
and well-appointed reading room where an archivist brought me the
le when I revisited in 2021. On my rst visit, in 1990, it was a dierent
room, simpler and plainer–though I really do not remember much from
back then, except the excitement of reading the letters, scrambling to
transcribe as many as possible, and all too quickly running out of time.
The rst letter in the folder is dated 7 December 1872. Orme’s 24th
birthday was a few weeks away, her sojourn teaching in Wiltshire was a
couple of years behind her, and her studies at University College were
well established and already yielding prizes. Her letter begins formally,
‘Dear Madam’ and gets straight to the point.
40 Eliza Orme’s Ambitions
For some months I have been considering the best method of entering the
legal profession. Professor and Mrs Cairnes, who have taken the kindest
interest in the matter, approve my now writing to you for advice. Before
stating my plans and diculties it may be as well to explain, as shortly
as possible, why I have undertaken what seems such a hopeless task.
Since I have been actively working on the Women’s Surage committee I
have become convinced that we probably have many years work before
us and that nothing assists the question so much as practical work done
by women.
What an opening! Here was a clear statement of purpose, backed up by
an impeccable academic reference. A gracious acknowledgment that the
challenge was a hopeless one, and then a commitment—not to ideals,
but to a political strategy and to hard practical work. Eliza went on to
mention the name of Henry Fawcett, to repeat that of Professor Cairnes,
and to add that of her brother-in-law, David Masson. She continued:
I therefore resigned my oce of secretary of the Exec. Comtee of the
Lond. Nat. Soc. with the denite purpose of doing some practical work if
possible and at the same time remaining a public supporter of the cause
which seems to me to be of paramount importance. I have made up my
mind to study law (1) because I see work to be done in explaining to
women their real position from the legal point of view; (2) because it is a
lucrative profession which ought to be open to women.
She was astute enough to realize that the quixotic decision to
attempt a career in law might damage the reputation of the women’s
movement. (‘The manner of making such an attempt as this has such
an important eect that I should be quite willing to give up all public
action if experienced friends thought the time ill-chosen or that I was
an unsuitable person to commence it. Otherwise I am prepared to work
steadily at the subject, quite independently of whether I am admitted
as a student, and to gather support and sympathy as I go along’.) It
was going to be a slow process and Eliza Orme, Helen Taylor, and John
Stuart Mill all knew that for every instance of ‘support and sympathy’
there would be many more occasions for derision and undermining of
the project.
She then apprised Taylor of her situation: ‘In 1869 I passed the
General Exam. at the Univ. of London and in 1870 took a Special
Certicate in Physics and Chemistry. I intend taking similar certicates
in Mathematics and Mechanics and in Political Economy next May,
41
3. The Commitment to Law: 1872 to 1888
if possible. I am 24 years of age and am strong enough to work hard
without its doing me any harm. I tell you these particulars because it
seems unfair to ask your advice without giving you full information’.
She was fudging her age, but only by a few weeks.
Having reminded Taylor of what she already knew, that Orme was a
student at University College, the letter moved on to the nitty-gritty of
legal training and credentials. These had nothing to do with academic
education or the degree of Bachelor of Laws. To become a barrister, a
young man had to spend three years as a pupil at one of the four Inns of
Court. These were very old and tradition-bound institutions in central
London, situated near the law courts. Their purpose was to reinforce
and reproduce for succeeding generations the legal profession’s
culture of entitlement and privilege, which has been described by Ren
Pepitone as ‘a culture deeply resistant to women’. Calmly ignoring
this incontrovertible fact, Orme noted for Taylor the pros and cons of
applying to each of the Inns. Her own idea was to go to Gray’s Inn,
partly because ‘there are so few benchers that it would be possible to
bring pressure on each’. The letter closes with courtesies. In this initial
communication, Orme is aiming for the more prestigious and powerful
part of the legal profession, the bar. She might have tried to become a
solicitor, where she would at least not have been putting on a wig and
arguing in court in front of a learned judge. However that branch of the
law was also restricted to men, this time by statute. Later on, she did
consider that option, but at the beginning she coolly sifted the tness of
the several Inns of Court for her purposes.
Mill and Taylor replied a month later. The document that survives
is a copy of their letter, with a note ‘To Miss Orme, dictated by me’—
that is dictated by Helen Taylor to John Stuart Mill. The Mill scholar
Ann Robson says in an article that it is his handwriting. So Helen Taylor
composed the letter, but she and Mill must have discussed the matter
too. Taylor was positive, but she also mentioned two caveats in the rst
paragraph:
There is no profession better suited for women to exercise, & none the
study of which is better calculated for women’s minds than that of
the bar, & the only objection, therefore, that I see to it is the very great
length of time that is likely to elapse before in the rst place they can get
admitted to it, & in the second place, before they will be able to practise.
42 Eliza Orme’s Ambitions
If you look upon it as a pursuit, likely to enable a woman to attain to real
superiority of mental power, & likely to enable her to be of use in advising
women, as well as in shewing what women can do, I know of none which
I should value more highly or perhaps even so highly. But I do not feel
sure whether the eect on the public of the endeavor would be especially
useful. I do not however think it would be injurious, & therefore the
decision shd rest, I think, very much upon personal inclination.
Clearly Taylor thought that legal education was not a high priority for
the women’s movement. Not only would success take too long, but she
foresaw—correctly—that ‘the public’ would not be supportive of ‘the
endeavor’. She continued:
As regards the question of which Inn of Court to apply to, it depends
upon details of which neither Mr Mill nor myself feel ourselves competent
to give any opinion without further consultation and advice. We expect
to be in England early in next year, & if you do not make your decision
before that time it would give us much pleasure to talk over the matter
with you, & in the mean time we will consult those of our friends whose
judgment we shd most rely on in such a matter.
I have long thought that it would be very useful if a rm of women
solicitors could be established. But I am not suciently conversant with
the details of the profession to know the relative diculty of the obstacles
to the success of a woman as a solicitor or as a barrister, happening the
necessary capital for the beginning of a solicitor’s business to be found.
There is no doubt room for considerable development in England of the
solicitor’s portion of the law; and it would be very satisfactory if a woman
were to lead the way in raising the solicitor’s profession to a level with
the barrister, as it shd be, instead of being regarded merely as a trade, as
it is. How far these considerations might weigh in a choice between the
two branches of the legal profession, I have not however considered from
a practical point of view.
This was a diplomatic and somewhat hesitant response. (Not to mention
remarkably unstrategic. Why ever should the admission of women to
the legal profession serve to improve the status of solicitors vis à vis
barristers?) Orme ignored their lack of enthusiasm in her follow-up
letter of 28 April 1873. This oered details of an arrangement that had
presumably been discussed, although not in the correspondence that
survives. Those missing letters or conversations may also have contained
Mill’s commitment to pay Orme’s fees at one of the Inns.
43
3. The Commitment to Law: 1872 to 1888
From Lincoln’s Inn Fees to ‘a Miniature Girton’
The initial arrangement, which in the end did not work out, was for Miss
Orme to become a fee-paying pupil in the Lincoln’s Inn chambers of John
Savill Vaizey. That barrister knew John Westlake as a fellow-bencher
and fellow-Liberal. Westlake’s wife, the artist Alice Westlake, had met
Orme through the women’s movement and was willing to facilitate the
introduction. Aspiring barristers were required to spend three years as
pupils at one of the Inns, attached to a senior lawyer’s chambers (oce),
eating a certain number of formal dinners and participating in other
social rituals, as well as picking up some courtroom or litigation skills
from the lawyers and clerks who lived and worked in these ancient and
very masculine establishments. (They were not required to study for
the academic LL.B. qualication.) For this extraordinary situation, the
arrangement was uid, perhaps six months or maybe a year, with only
some of the rights and privileges of a pupil. Notably, it was imperative
that Miss Orme become acquainted with her instructor’s wife. Vaizey
would have preferred to have two women pupils together, presumably
for reasons of propriety, and there was some thought that Edith Simcox
would participate. (Later, Mary Ellen Richardson joined the class.)
While he did provide her with some professional guidance during
their years together, Vaizey also required her assistance with his book
on marriage settlements. It is not clear how extensive her participation
in that project may have been, but Vaizey later acknowledged Orme’s
labour in preparing an ‘elaborate index’ of sixty-nine pages.
It is possible that Helen Taylor was less enthusiastic about supporting
Eliza Orme than her stepfather would have been. John Stuart Mill died
in the spring of 1873 and Taylor, while not withdrawing the oer of
support, hinted that it would be dicult to nd the money for Vaizey’s
fee. This put Orme in the awkward position of assuring her patron
that she could cope easily with any delay. While she might really have
needed the money, despite her family’s wealth, I think it is more likely
that Orme valued Taylor’s sponsorship from more of a social and
political perspective, given the latter’s inuence in both surage and
Liberal circles. In any case, Taylor sent her ₤50 in October for the rst six
months, and Orme’s training began. In a letter of December 1873, Orme
reported that she would be ‘unable to do anything protable’ until either
44 Eliza Orme’s Ambitions
the legislation or the professional norms changed: only simple wills and
powers of attorney, not the more lucrative property conveyances. The
legislation, she explained, explicitly forbade ‘what is called “devilling”
for other barristers’. Her judgment was that she ‘must therefore work
on with the hope of one day getting sucient support to be admitted to
an Inn’. Beneath Orme’s humble approaches to Taylor and presumably
to supporters like the Cairneses and Fawcetts (and perhaps to others
where the correspondence is lost) she reveals the political motivation
and strategy inherent in her ambition, aiming to ‘get sucient support’
and even to ‘bring pressure’ on the benchers of one of the Inns.
Two years passed, and Orme was obliged to take on some pupils
herself to make ends meet, and to avoid accepting any more money
from Helen Taylor than was absolutely necessary (or perhaps politic).
She helped Taylor with preparing a new edition of one of Mill’s books,
Dissertations and Discussions. By this time Mary Ellen Richardson, another
London law student, had joined her in Vaizey’s chambers, but the two
women seem to have realized they were not getting very far. Someone
introduced them to yet another barrister, William Phipson Beale, who
told them they were wasting their time (and presumably their money).
He advised Orme and Richardson to set themselves up independently,
lease premises in Chancery Lane and oer their services to any barrister
willing to pay for them, rather than tie themselves to one. This they did.
Orme described Beale’s plan in an August 1875 letter to Helen Taylor:
He thinks we can become pupils of well-known men if we like at any
time when the opportunity occurs and meantime we shall be gaining
knowledge and friends by ‘devilling’ in our own chambers. It will be
less expensive for us to take chambers than to read with a barrister and
on the whole I am inclined to follow his advice. By taking rooms in
Chancery Lane we shall excite less attention than if we were to try to
engage any within one of the Inns of Court. Mr Beale is strongly of the
opinion that we had better do some work before we make our claims to
enter the profession and Miss Richardson and I both agree with him in
this entirely.
To ‘read’ with a barrister as his ‘pupil’, the arrangement with Vaizey,
would be a bit like undertaking an independent study project with
a professor. But since male pupils were not so much reading (or
studying) as apprenticing for a lifestyle that was limited to people of
45
3. The Commitment to Law: 1872 to 1888
their gender, the arrangement was obviously not working very well for
the two women. A barrister’s ‘devil’, on the other hand, might be a pupil
or a clerk; in the latter case their job was to prepare written legal work
on behalf of the principal barrister. They might also go out and secure
briefs from solicitors, and in those cases, they received a percentage
of the principal barrister’s fee. The clerk might work outside the rigid
culture of the Inns of Court, not ‘indoors’ but ‘outdoors’, with chambers
(an oce) in Chancery Lane. Another loose category was that of ‘legal
assistant’. But there were no generally accepted terms, legal or informal,
with which to describe a woman who was doing the work of a lawyer.
Three months later, Orme wrote again to Taylor, describing the set-up
at 38 Chancery Lane as ‘a miniature Girton’, a phrase that evoked all
the austere joys of the women’s college at Cambridge. There were three
of them, Eliza Orme, Mary Ellen Richardson, and a younger woman,
Minnie Robertson. Minnie was a niece of Eliza Cairnes, preparing for
examinations of her own. They had a little boy to run errands and ‘a
very respectable laundress’ who looked after the establishment. (In
the legal culture of the Inns of court, house servants were known as
laundresses.) They all lived together too, in a house in Camden Road
belonging to Richardson. As at Girton and other women’s colleges, they
could engage in tough disciplined intellectual work, argue politics and
revel in literature—all the while drinking cocoa and toasting muns
at the replace—without having to perform the exacting and tedious
social roles expected for leisured young women of their class.
Both Vaizey and Beale were oering work, as much as Orme and
Richardson could handle, she told Helen Taylor. In Beale’s case, he gave
Orme half the fee he took for any draft that she could ‘do completely
enough to save him the trouble’. In his view, she told Taylor, if the
women never signed the draft documents they prepared, ‘but did them
in the character of outdoor clerks’ they could ‘go on safely’ even without
being called to the bar. (Much later, in an 1893 article, Orme came to
describe this kind of work in a more formal and above-board manner,
in terms of working on the established legal principle of ‘qui facit per
alium, facit per se’—’He who acts through another does the act himself’.
At this early stage, she was understandably more hesitant, and perhaps
Beale was too.)
46 Eliza Orme’s Ambitions
In December 1879 the Women’s Surage Journal reported that ‘a young
lady has just sent in an application to the Incorporated Law Society’.
This was the organization that controlled the accreditation of solicitors,
quite separate from the Inns of Court that accredited barristers. However
historians of the legal profession report that it was refused ‘on grounds
of sex’. I have never been able to determine whether this applicant was
Eliza Orme, but it might have been. As it turned out, both the bar and
the Law Society remained closed to women practitioners until after they
were forced to open their doors in 1919.
More light on the work of conveyancing comes from Mary
Jane Mossman, in her book on the rst women lawyers in various
jurisdictions. In England there was an elite category of lawyer known
as the ‘ conveyancing barrister’. Their organization, the Institute of
Conveyancing Barristers, was known as ‘the forty thieves’ and also
operated as a dining club. These were high-powered men who handled
complex and dicult property cases as well as estate law. Mossman
speculates that:
It seems likely that [Orme] was engaged by members of the Institute
to provide legal opinions on land titles and to draft conveyancing
documents, as a ‘ legal assistant’; such an arrangement would explain her
receipt of ‘half-fees’. Furthermore, Orme’s acceptance as an assistant at
the bar probably resulted from her ability to do highly competent and
reliable legal work within this close-knit and highly specialised group
of conveyancing barristers; indeed, her work for this group suggests that
she was both accomplished and professional.
Even if William Phipson Beale did not himself dine among the ‘forty
thieves’, he probably knew enough of them to put his protégée in touch
with a lucrative source of work and income.
It seems pretty reasonable to speculate that this arrangement was
humiliating, even though the ‘practical’ side of Eliza Orme’s nature
might have believed it was the best she and Mary Ellen Richardson
could do and they should make the most of it. Much has changed
in the century between their generation and mine, but there are
resonances nevertheless: powerful male mentors who seemed aable
but nevertheless could be capricious; barriers to promotion and other
kinds of achievement; the pinpricks of discomfort and annoyance that
accompany questions about one’s competence When women lawyers in
Britain began, in the lead-up to 2019, to look into their predecessors’
47
3. The Commitment to Law: 1872 to 1888
1919 achievement of equal status, many of the former focused on how
judges smugly explained the latter’s absence from courts by the lack of
female toilet facilities in those establishments.
What did Orme and Richardson do all day? There is considerable
evidence of a wide variety of professional activities going on in
their chambers, beyond preparing conveyancing and estate-related
documents for half-fees and doing less complex (and less legally
restricted) work at full fee. In the latter category, Orme and Richardson
were patent agents, and both were directors of a nancial service
business. The 1883 Patent Act had not only made the registration of
intellectual property a more complex process than earlier; it had left the
way open for qualied women by not limiting that process by formal
qualications. The Nineteenth Century Building Society was one of a
class of important institutions concerned with mortgage lending. In
addition to oering mortgages to individual house-purchasers, they
also funded builders who were undertaking large-scale construction
projects. The Englishwoman’s Review reported in June 1880:
The NCBS aords, we believe, the rst instance of a Building Society,
which numbers women among its directors … The Society provides
also special facilities to people of small means, by giving borrowers the
right to make their repayments weekly instead of monthly, and it pays
particular attention to the sanitary condition of property mortgaged to
the Society. This last consideration is one which we think specially shows
the advantage of having women among the responsible directors, as the
sanitary condition of dwelling-houses particularly demands qualied
female supervision.
All this sounds a long way from winning prizes for top marks in subjects
as academic as political economy and Roman law. Many lawyers, then
and now, make the transition from intellectually challenging course
work at university to the mundane tasks of preparing documentation
and so forth when they set up in practice. A smaller number make a
more complex transition, from law school through practice and on
to an apprenticeship in politics, either national or local. Perhaps the
progressive policies of the Nineteenth Century Building Society might
serve as evidence that Eliza Orme and Mary Richardson cherished
aspirations in that direction? Or perhaps the Englishwoman’s Review was
being idealistic, and the women lawyers were in the mortgage business
for the money.
48 Eliza Orme’s Ambitions
A sidelight on Orme’s nancial arrangements, and the extent to
which she would go to overcome obstacles, comes from her cousin
Mabel Barltrop, who wrote with considerable indignation if not full
understanding: ‘She has become a barrister . . . and she has become so to
prove that women are fully as capable as men to act in that capacity. But
she is compelled by law only to take half fees, and is not even allowed
the use of the Libraries for the use of those in the legal profession. She
has to buy for herself all the expensive books, one set cost £40, the other
day’. Half fees were an informal agreement, not a legal provision; and the
books were presumably for the chambers as a whole, not just for herself.
Still, it is worth noting that library access was apparently yet another of
the masculine privileges reserved for members of the Inns of Court.
Discrimination and Challenges
In contrast to this modest attempt to wedge open the door of Chancery
Lane by even a crack, other parts of Eliza Orme’s life looked like one
academic or journalistic success after another, but interspersed with
one public challenge or mortication after another. In July 1872 she
won rst prize in Political Economy at University College. In December
of that year, she ought to have received the Ricardo Scholarship in the
same subject but it went to a London barrister, George Serrell. What is
interesting here, and why we know about it, is the press reports. These
indicated that the judges were Cairnes and Courtney, the winner was Mr
Serrell, and that according to the judges Miss Eliza Orme had ‘obtained a
sucient number of marks to qualify for the scholarship had she not had
so powerful a competitor’. Perhaps the judges were quietly advocating
for their protégée and expressing veiled disapproval of the injustice of
the scholarship process. Having read those reports, the Englishwoman’s
Review dismissed Serrell as ‘that old and accomplished prize-taker’ and
celebrated Miss Orme’s prociency. Three years later Orme reported to
Helen Taylor that Hunter assured her he would have backed her for a
200-guinea scholarship in Roman Law, but it was oered by the Inns
of Court and ‘not open to women of course’. According to Hunter, the
previous year’s winning paper had been inferior to her own. Apparently
undaunted (though these injustices must have stung), Eliza wrote two
articles about ‘University Degrees for Women’ for The Examiner.
49
3. The Commitment to Law: 1872 to 1888
She knew how to defend herself when directly attacked. Late in 1876,
University College London announced that Miss Orme had won the
Hume Scholarship, a three-year award for the study of Jurisprudence.
Soon after that, the college authorities received a letter from one Pascoe
Daphne. This gentleman had missed the prize exam and felt entitled
to request that he be allowed to write it anyway. Mr. Daphne further
observed that Miss Orme ought not to have won the prize because he
had not often seen her attending the lectures. When challenged, she
pointed out to the authorities that she had sometimes arrived late,
but had indeed been present despite having already sat the course
of lectures (and applied for the same prize) the previous year. The
scholarship designation remained unchanged. I will restrain my twenty-
rst century feminist indignation and just observe that there is evidence
here of patience, not to say determination, in the face of severe and often
humiliating obstacles.
Meanwhile the enterprise in Chancery Lane was a business success
which began to draw notice, not all of it very desirable. An article by
the Sporting Gazette’s ‘Man About Town’ column of 24 June 1876 called
attention to the two partners’ distinction in the Roman Law examinations
( Richardson came third and Orme rst) but academic commendation
soon gave way to matrimonial speculation: ‘How long, I wonder, will
the partnership last? Will they be proof against entering into that other
foolish partnership in which the partners are of opposite sexes—known
to mankind for some time past as matrimony? With such pretty faces
and graceful gures, and with youth and health to boot, I am dident
of their long holding the fort of celibacy’. The same columnist wrote in
November about the prospects for women doctors, lawyers, and clergy:
‘Miss Orme and Miss Richardson, those eminent legal practitioners in
Chancery-lane, are pretty enough to make any susceptible male rush
into law merely for the pleasure of consulting them—and now here is Dr
Mary Hogan … When the physician and the lawyer come to us armed
with all the wiles of woman, with beauty and youth to supplement
their attacks, what hope is there for us? Will you turn parsons next?’ No
doubt there were equally unpleasant remarks being made among the
barristers, solicitors, and clerks who populated Chancery Lane and the
Inns of Court, including those who availed themselves of Orme’s and
Richardson’s professional services.
50 Eliza Orme’s Ambitions
‘A Fine Chaos’: Co-workers and Business Partners
Not much is known about Mary Ellen Richardson, except that she
was elected a member of the London School Board from 1879 to
1885, and she lived with a woman, Jane Chessar. Richardson and
Chessar were involved in the Somerville Club (as was Orme), and
with a debating society and swimming clubs. Richardson does not
seem to have completed the LL.B. degree, although she did well in
some exam competitions as we have seen. In addition to sharing the
chambers in Chancery Lane from the mid-1870s to the mid-1880s, she
and Orme were both directors of the Nineteenth Century Building
Society. Outside of the work environment, they were both part of the
leadership of an Association to Promote Women’s Knowledge of the
Law, founded in 1878. This is something I would like to know more
about (even though ‘having knowledge of the law’ was not the same
thing as ‘becoming a lawyer’) but apart from a few press notices of
meetings, little evidence seems to have survived. The ODNB essay
on the education pioneer Jane Chessar says that Richardson was
Honorary Treasurer of the organization. Chessar was also a member,
as was Annie Besant. In any case, Richardson and Orme seem to have
worked together for about a decade and lived together for at least part
of that time. They both moved, with their families of origin, to the
Bedford Park suburb of Chiswick in the eighties. A letter from Eliza
Orme to the American surage pioneer Susan B. Anthony reveals that
Richardson (and another woman, Miss Novelli) left the rm before
February of 1884, to ‘devote themselves … to commercial speculations
at Bedford Park’. The ‘commercial speculation’ was later advertised
(including in Orme’s own Women’s Gazette) as The Stores, Bedford
Park, a purveyor of toys, games, fancy boxes of chocolates, patés de foies
gras, and turkeys from Ireland. I have not been able to track down any
watertight documentation about Miss Novelli, but it is clear that not
every woman who studied law continued to practice as a lawyer.
Thanks to that newsy letter to Susan B. Anthony, we also know
that Reina Emily Lawrence had joined the rm by 1884. She too was a
law student at University College. When Jessie Wright, an American
lawyer, visited in 1888, the chambers (now located at 27 Southampton
Buildings in Chancery Lane) still bore a brass plate marked ‘Orme and
51
3. The Commitment to Law: 1872 to 1888
Richardson’ but it was Reina Lawrence that she encountered (‘a very
pretty girl, with short, dark, curly hair, and she was scrawling away in
the most business-like manner’). Wright describes the room as ‘a ne
chaos’—furnished with revolving chairs and a ‘good sized oce table’
in the centre of the room, the table ‘loaded with papers, pamphlets,
books’; there was also a bookcase stocked with reports, and ‘the oors
were carpeted, a blazing soft coal re burned in the open grate, two
large windows were lowered from the top, a book case stocked with
reports was behind me’. Prints of two paintings, one modern and one
Renaissance, hung on the wall. Miss Orme was in the oce next door,
working with a client. An oce boy (‘black-eyed, in a gray suit, sti
as a ramrod’) stood next to Lawrence at the table, waiting for orders.
Wright sketched this word-portrait of the rm for her fellow American
members of the Equity Club, adding that ‘Miss Orme is ne; a rst-rate
kind of woman, and nobody could have been more kind and cordial
than she has been to me’.
Fig. 4 Reina Emily Lawrence (n.d., photographer unknown), ©John Partington,
London. Reproduced with permission. http://www.pjohnp.me.uk/famhist/
lawrence-re.pdf
52 Eliza Orme’s Ambitions
A ctional description of a London professional women’s oce,
intriguingly similar to Wright’s of 27 Southampton Buildings, can only
be a tentative attribution. It comes from Bernard Shaw in the text of his
1893 play Mrs Warren’s Profession. The profession in question was that
of prostitute and brothel-manager, but in the play it is set in contrast
to the professional life and values of Mrs Warren’s adult daughter.
Vivie Warren is Cambridge-educated (in mathematics) and works with
a partner in Chancery Lane chambers. The partner, Honoria Fraser is
somewhat older than Vivie, in the business of actuarial calculations and
conveyancing, resolutely single and nancially independent. Setting the
scene for the chambers of ‘Fraser and Warren’, Shaw noted: ‘There is a
double writing table in the middle of the room, with a cigar box, ash
pans, and a portable electric reading lamp almost snowed up in heaps of
papers and books. This table has knee holes and chairs right and left and
is very untidy’. The Shaw scholar Michael Holroyd thinks Vivie might
have been modelled on Eliza Orme, presumably on the strength of Shaw’s
remark on one occasion that the ‘original’ of Vivie ‘heads a party which
denounces my plays as disgusting’. (Close enough, although Orme was
not technically head of the Women’s Liberal Federation, which was not
technically a party.) On another occasion, Shaw mentioned a dierent
woman, Beatrice Potter, as his model. The play was not performed in
England for many years, because of its ‘immoral’ (or as Shaw puts it,
‘unpleasant’) aspects, so it is unlikely that Orme was aware she might
have been used as a model for Honoria Fraser. But now that so much
more is known about Eliza Orme, I would suggest that it might be of
interest to Shaw scholars to explore the connection once again. In any
case, 27 Southampton Buildings sounds like an attractive place to work.
There is a rather strange footnote to the story of Eliza’s relationship
with Helen Taylor. A whole year after Orme’s last surviving letter
(which described her ‘miniature Girton’, sought Taylor’s support for
a protégée’s education and bragged a little about some of her own
academic accomplishments), Taylor received a letter from Mary Ellen
Richardson. It contained a cheque for £100, repaying funds that had
been sent to Orme in three increments. Richardson insisted that Orme
had spoken of Taylor and Mill with deep gratitude, ‘but after the events
of the past 2 months’ (this was December 1876) ‘I do not choose that
she should longer remain indebted to you, for what, I can with no
53
3. The Commitment to Law: 1872 to 1888
inconvenience send to you for her’. Taylor replied, outraged and (at
least in the draft version which is all that survives) rather incoherent.
She declined to receive the money and denied that she knew who
Richardson was. Ann Robson speculates that this had something to
do with Helen Taylor’s anti-clerical views, which had been publicized
during her recent election to the London School Board. Given what I
know of Eliza Orme, that seems unlikely, and research by Jane Martin
(on Chessar) reveals that Taylor and Richardson, both school board
members, clashed on several occasions. It is also possible that Orme
and Richardson had, by this time, come to realize that Helen Taylor’s
support for their larger ambitions was lukewarm at best, and perhaps
even a liability. The little incident is curious, a reminder of how much
about these women remains unknown.
Although I cannot measure the relative proportions of each
aspect, it seems that Eliza’s working life in her thirties—roughly the
1880s—fell into three parts. She worked in the Chancery Lane oce
alongside Mary Richardson and later Reina Lawrence, preparing
conveyancing documents for barristers as well as organizing nancing
for homeowners through the Nineteenth Century Building Society
and helping inventors to secure patents. At the same time, she lectured
extensively, wrote articles for the periodical press, and engaged in
several organizations aimed at improving public life in various ways:
not just women’s surage and women’s employment, but world peace,
proportional representation, Home Rule for Ireland, and other causes.
Some of these activities would have been paid, while others were, no
doubt, done gratis. And thirdly, there were her studies. Most years,
Orme’s name appears on the register of University College, and in 1880
she passed the initial LL.B. exam. This was the rst of two; the second
came in 1888. Once her academic studies were nished, however,
and the degree obtained, Orme seems to have committed more of
her energies to party politics. Her friend Sophia Fry had founded the
Women’s Liberal Federation ( WLF) in 1886, and Orme immediately
took on a leadership position. From 1888 to 1892, she was the editor of
the WLF’s newspaper, the Women’s Gazette and Weekly News (WGWN).
I will return to several of these activities in Chapters 5 and 6, and just
note for now that she always did more than serve as a barristers’ devil.
54 Eliza Orme’s Ambitions
This chapter is entitled ‘the commitment to law’ but it ends with a
question. Just how committed to law was Eliza Orme? Or perhaps a
better way to phrase it would be to ask what the practice of law meant to
her. To the extent that law is an academic discipline and an intellectual
exercise, I believe she enjoyed it and was good at it. (Her massive and
painstaking index to Vaizey’s book on the law of marriage settlements
might be evidence of that arcane pleasure.) But law is also a career and
an identity, and it can be a vocation. She told Helen Taylor she wanted to
enter the profession partly to help women clients with gender-specic
legal challenges, and partly because it was lucrative and should be open
to women practitioners. Given the gender limitations on being a barrister
or solicitor in her time, both ambitions were really impossible. (Slightly
mystied press reports at the time of her 1888 degree, especially those
reporting on her quasi-professional labours along with the academic
kudos, are evidence of this ambiguity.) But law can also be a stepping-
stone to political power, with the call to the bar serving as one step in a
life plan that includes journalism, networking, the paying of social dues,
the testing of a reputation for party loyalty, then eventually nomination,
campaigning, election, and a seat in the House of Commons, perhaps
even one in the Prime Minister’s cabinet. I have not found evidence that
this was Eliza Orme’s ambition. It is only my speculation. But in the 1870s
and 1880s, neither she nor anyone else knew how painfully long it was
going to take before women in Britain could reasonably articulate this
kind of objective. She told Jessie Wright in 1888 that ‘when four or ve
women were ready to apply for admission to the bar, they would do so’.
Wright added: ‘She says she thinks things look more hopeful now than
ever, and that several of the benchers are already in favor of [women]
being admitted – not as solicitors … but as barristers’. For an optimist
with a high opinion of her own capabilities, perhaps Eliza Orme’s larger
aspirations seemed, that year as she turned forty, eminently reasonable
and still on track. But it remains impossible to know whether the law was
her ambition in life, or merely a stepping-stone to another goal, because
we know so little of her private hopes and dreams, of her personal likes
and dislikes, her prejudices and partialities.