Sarah Heckford

Sarah Heckford

Description

A Lady Trader in the Transvaal presents the South African adventures of Sarah Heckford, a once famous but now forgotten Anglo-Irish gentlewoman. After treking to the Transvaal in 1878, this intrepid woman served as governess, doctor, builder, nurse, and farmer. When her farm failed, she broke through the barriers of gender and class to make her fortune as a smous or peddler —trading with the Africans and Afrikaners of the remote bush-veldt. Caught up in the Anglo-Boer War of 1879–1880, she survived the hundred-day siege of Pretoria only to find the British dishonored and herself financially ruined.

Sujets

• Travel
• Africa

Informations

• Publié par: Parlor Press, LLC
• Date de parution: 03 octobre 2008
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781602355668
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 4 Mo

Extrait

Writing Travel
Series Editor, Jeanne Moskal
The series publishes manuscripts related to the new field of travel studies, including works of original travel writing; editions of out-of-print travel books or previously unpublished travel memoirs; English translations of important travel books in other languages; theoretical and historical treatments of ways in which travel and travel writing engage such questions as religion, nationalism/cosmopolitanism, and empire; gender and sexuality; race, ethnicity, and immigration; and the history of the book, print culture, and translation; biographies of significant travelers or groups of travelers (including but not limited to pilgrims, missionaries, anthropologists, tourists, explorers, immigrants); critical studies of the works of significant travelers or groups of travelers; and pedagogy of travel and travel literature and its place in curricula.
Other Books in the Series

Vienna Voices: A Traveler Listens to the City of Dreams, Jill Knight Weinberger
Eating Europe: A Meta-Nonfiction Love Story , Jon Volkmer


Sarah Heckford
A Lady Trader in the Transvaal
Edited by
Carole G. Silver
Parlor Press
West Lafayette, Indiana
www.parlorpress.com


Parlor Press LLC, West Lafayette, Indiana 47906
© 2008 by Parlor Press
All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America
S A N: 2 5 4 - 8 8 7 9
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Heckford, Sarah, 1839-1903. Sarah Heckford : a lady trader in the Transvaal / edited by Carole G. Silver. p. cm. -- (Writing travel) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-1-60235-082-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-60235-083-0 (hardcover : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-60235-084-7 (adobe ebook) 1. Transvaal (South Africa)--Description and travel. 2. Heckford, Sarah, 1839-1903--Travel. I. Silver, Carole G. II. Title. DT2310.H43 2008 916.8204’45092--dc22 [B] 2008038417
Cover design by David Blakesley.
Printed on acid-free paper.
Parlor Press, LLC is an independent publisher of scholarly and trade titles in print and multimedia formats. This book is available in paper, cloth and Adobe eBook formats from Parlor Press on the World Wide Web at http://www.parlorpress.com or through online and brick-and-mortar bookstores. For submission information or to find out about Parlor Press publications, write to Parlor Press, 8 1 6 Robinson St., West Lafayette, Indiana, 47906, or e-mail [e-mail].


Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chronology of Sarah Heckford (1839–1903)
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Notes
About the Editor


Acknowledgments
Creating a new edition of Sarah Heckford’s provocative and unusual travel book would have been impossible without the help of a number of institutions and individuals. First, I am truly grateful to the excellent staff of the Cape Town Campus of the South African National Library and for the use of its facilities. Here, with the invaluable assistance of reference librarians Najwa Hendrickse, Zaidah Sirkhotte, and Petrie Le Roux and Special Collections librarian Melanie Geustyn, I was able to do most of my research on Heckford and her world. I am also indebted to the South African National Gallery in Cape Town, both for the help given to me by curator Hayden Proud and for permission to use material in its collection. The British Library was, as usual, an extraordinary resource and I am particularly indebted to the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh—holders of what appears to be the sole surviving copy of Heckford’s book on Christ and Communism —for welcoming me and permitting me to use it. The New York Public Library and the libraries of my own institution, Yeshiva University, have been extremely helpful and resourceful. In addition, I must thank Stern College for Women of Yeshiva University and its remarkable Dean, Karen Bacon, for the technical, financial and intellectual support they have provided throughout this project.
My appreciation and thanks must also go to a number of people. My summer research assistant and former student, Rebecca Rosenberg, was largely responsible for the chronology of Heckford’s life and for many of the notes to Lady Trader. Working with her was a delightful experience. Vivien Allen, Heckford’s biographer, whose volume, Lady Trader: A Biography of Mrs. Sarah Heckford , is soon to be republished, has been a major resource, graciously providing permissions and sharing information throughout this project. Friends and colleagues on two continents have been helpful readers, adding comments and making suggestions. I am especially grateful to Ellen Schrecker, Frinde Maher, Jill Landimore, and Norman Levy.
Lastly, I wish to thank the editors and staff of Parlor Press for their patient and helpful assistance in the production of this book. I am grateful to Jeanne Moskal for including it in the Writing Travel series and especially to David Blakesley, Publisher, for making this edition possible.



Introduction
Carole G. Silver
Three days after Sarah Heckford’s death on 18 April 1903, a correspondent for the Times of London announced: “The news [. . .] comes as a terrible shock to all who knew her; and even those who know a tenth of her adventures and achievements will feel that her country is much the poorer for her loss. It is not an extravagance, indeed, to describe her as one of the most extraordinary women to whom the British nation has given birth” (“Obituary” 8). The lengthy and eulogistic obituary concludes by saying, “her life will remain an inspiration to noble, disinterested, and patriotic endeavour; and her country cannot afford to let it pass into oblivion” (9). Yet Heckford and her life have been almost entirely forgotten, and, in republishing her remarkable book, my intention is to re-inscribe her name in the annals of South African and British History.
Born in Dublin on 30 June 1839, Sarah Maud Goff, as she was then known, was the youngest of the three daughters of William Goff, formerly governor of the bank of Ireland and descendent of one of Oliver Cromwell’s generals. 1 Her mother was Mary Clibborn, William’s cousin as well as his wife. In 1842 Goff and his family left Ireland for the Continent, settling in Dresden. Mary Goff died in 1845, followed soon after by her oldest daughter, Jane. Mary’s sister, Abigail Clibborn became surrogate mother to the surviving girls, Annie and Sarah. Rich enough to enjoy living on and touring the Continent, the Goffs spent two years in Switzerland and then in 1848 moved to Paris—where they were inadvertently caught in the 1848 French revolution. Returning to London, the family rented rooms in Eaton Square, perhaps to be close to William’s bachelor brother Robert, whom William appointed as his daughters’ guardian. Shortly after Sarah’s ninth birthday, William killed himself. At roughly the same time, Sarah contracted tuberculosis of the spine (Pott’s Disease), which left her hunchbacked (her left shoulder was deformed) and slightly lame. Raised by pious Aunt Abigail and worldly Uncle Robert, Sarah and Annie were deprived of part of the serious education their father had intended for them. Instead, they were “finished,” trained in the “accomplishments” necessary to make them “ornaments of society” and thus marriageable. So, Sarah learned her foreign languages, studied piano, painted (even visiting the National Gallery to copy its pictures), and became an excellent horsewoman.
After Aunt Abigail died in 1859, the sisters, now without a chaperone, took a house together in Warwick Square, Pimlico, London. They were rich, each inheriting some fifteen thousand pounds sterling from their parents; they were serious and they were unusually independent. In the late 1850s, Sarah came in contact with some of the leaders of the burgeoning women’s movement and was sufficiently influenced by their ideas to become a feminist, if a slightly unconventional one. Concerned, as were others in the movement, with women’s rights to work outside the home and to enter the professions, her ambition was to become a medical doctor, emulating Elizabeth Blackwell, who had qualified as a doctor in America and was placed on the British Medical Register in 1859. It was at this point that Sarah, as she later put it, began to leap over “the barriers of young-lady-dom” despite the disapproval of her remaining family. Like George Eliot before her, she ceased to attend church; like Octavia Hill, 2 whom she much admired, she began to apply herself to social work, visiting and attempting to aid poor women and children. Slightly later, she began to visit the East End—something “a young lady” did not do—and to be distressed by the poverty and illness she found there.
As she later noted, “at two and twenty, I found myself possessed of a good fortune and absolutely my own mistress” (qtd. in Allen 6). An unhappy love affair with an older man, a friend of her uncle Robert, did