Arthur Munby
Arthur Joseph Munby | |
|---|---|
Arthur J. Munby. Frontispiece to Munby's Vestigia Retrorsum: Poems (1892) | |
| Born | Arthur Joseph Munby 19 August 1828 York, United Kingdom |
| Died | 29 January 1910 (aged 81) Pyrford, United Kingdom |
| Education | Trinity College, Cambridge |
| Occupations | Barrister, solicitor |
Arthur Joseph Munby (19 August 1828 – 29 January 1910) was a British diarist, poet, portrait photographer, barrister and solicitor. He is also known as Arthur J. Munby and A. J. Munby.
Biography
Arthur Munby was born in York on 19 August 1828. He was educated at St Peter's School, York and Trinity College, Cambridge, graduating with a BA in 1851, and was called to the Bar from Lincoln's Inn in 1855.[1] Munby became a barrister in accordance with his father's wish, a traditional role for an eldest son in his class. He worked as a civil servant in the Ecclesiastical Commissioners' office from 1858 until his retirement in 1888.
His published poetry included the collections Benoni (1852) and Verses New and Old (1865).
He taught Latin at the Working Men's College for more than a decade and helped promote the Working Men's College Volunteer Corps, a response to the national call in 1859 for Volunteer Rifle Corps in response to a perceived war threat from Napoleon III. Munby penned verses of support, the Invicta: a Song of 1860, for the 19th Middlesex Regiment, a regiment to which the W.M.C.V.C. was attached.[2] In 1864, a sister Working Women's College was established; Munby was a leading spirit of the new college and taught there.[2]
Munby had an interest in working-class women, particularly those who performed hard physical labour. He strolled through the streets of London and other industrial cities and approached working women to ask about their lives and the details of their work, while noting their clothes and dialects.[3]
He kept journals from 1859 to 1898 that recorded the details of his interactions and in them he expressed his desire for the strength and care of a working woman.[4] He was an amateur artist, and his diaries contain sketches of working women. He collected hundreds of photographs of such subjects as women who worked at collieries, kitchen maids, milkmaids, charwomen, and acrobats. His diaries and images provide historical information on the lives of working-class Victorian women.
In 1854 Munby met Hannah Cullwick (b. 1833), a Shropshire-born maid-of-all-work who had been working in London since her late teens. They formed a relationship in which Munby was the master, whom Cullwick addressed as 'massa', and Cullwick the slave, with him training her in the virtues of hard work and loyalty. However, Cullwick used this master/slave dynamic to prove her own worth outside of Munby and put herself in a place of power. For example, she used the slave band Munby gave her to display the fact that she was a working-class woman, and that she was not ashamed of it; this can be seen in Cullwick’s journal when she says, "my hands and arms are tho' chief to me, to get my living with."[5]
Munby and Cullwick experienced their roles differently. He once visited Cullwick at her workplace, where she is actually a servant. He wrote: "But to see her stand in a drawing room in her servant's dress and know that she is a servant and that the piano, the books, the pictures belong to her mistress... this I could not endure."[5] She, on the other hand, enjoyed waiting on him when he stayed at an inn where she was working.[5]
They married secretly in 1873, but Cullwick resisted his efforts to place her in the role of a Victorian wife of his class. She continued to play the role of his domestic servant and only took on the role of a wife and lady when they traveled to Europe. They separated in 1877, but continued to see each other and at times lived together until Cullwick's death in 1909. From 1887 onwards, the couple rented a cottage in the Shropshire village of Hadley, and they regularly spent time together. In 1903, they moved to Wyke Place in Shifnal, just a few metres from the house where she was born. Their landlord was her brother Jim Cullwick. Their marriage was kept secret from all but a few close friends and Munby revealed it to his brother only a few months before his own death from pneumonia[6] in Pyrford, Surrey, on 29 January 1910.
His papers are housed at Trinity College, Cambridge.[7] He required they remain sealed until the 77th anniversary of his wedding day in 1950.[6]
One of Munby's best friends was Richard Monckton-Milnes, an aristocrat who collected sexual literature and wrote of sexual fetishes.[6]
Portrayals
Munby was portrayed by John Rowe in An Uncommon Love, an audio drama about his relationship with Cullwick by Michelene Wandor that was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 1984 and repeated on BBC Radio 4 Extra in 2025.[8]
Selected works
| Benoni 1852 | ||
|---|---|---|
| Prologue | Selene | |
| Beginnings | The Eve of Change | |
| Life is like a tear | A Scrap of Lyrics 1851 | |
| The Shadow of Death | Farewell | |
| Passing Away | Glaucus | |
| Despair | Be with us | |
| The Poet's Bride | Patience | |
| Scent and Jewels | A Surprise | |
| St Mary's | Faith and Fancy | |
| Irene | The Sea | |
| Similies | The Preacher | |
| Like to Like | Autumn | |
| The Prisoners of Hope | Our Father | |
| Be Still | Elegiacs | |
| Isola Bella | The Mourning Mother | |
| The Bride to come | Bethesda | |
| O Sweet Sad Face | Work and Rest | |
| Cloudland | Magdalene | |
| Verses New And Old 1865 | ||
|---|---|---|
| I. Of Men and Women Generally | III. Woman's Rights | VII. Of Decay and Death |
| Violet | IV. Auld Lang Syne | Vestigia Retrorsum |
| Under the Porch | V. Of Love in Various Aspects | In the Desert |
| The Whaler Fleet | Anamnesis | Nudum Remigio Latus |
| Ducie of the Dale | After Long Years | The Flyfisher |
| Shady Valley | Sonnet | In the Forest |
| Mary Anerley | Green and Dry | October |
| Romney Marsh | Queen Sophia | An Exception |
| Seamer Mere | A Parting | At Perivale |
| Casque and Plume | A Consolation | Autumn |
| Five-and-Thirty | A Talk on Filey Brig | N'importe |
| Doris | Seaside Questions | The Wolf |
| A Husband's Episodes | Lucy's Garland | In the Marshes at Landwick |
| II. Of Common Folk | A Jilt | Question and Answer |
| T' Moossel Gatherers | In Florence | One in Bedlam |
| T' Runawa Lass | VI. Of Irony | De Profundis |
| T' Statties | Longo Intervallo | |
| "Followers Not Allowed" | One Way of Looking at it | Six Farewells |
| The Serving Maid | Evander | |
| Maid Margery | Discipline | |
| Mary Ann | Lucinda's Story | |
| At Sempach | Post Mortem | |
| The Poet Jobson | ||
- [10]
- Transcriptions
- Faithful Servants: being epitaphs and obituaries recording their names and services, 1891
- Sometimes catalogued with J.W. Streeten as co-author. Munby did not collect all of the 692 epitaphs he published himself. His volume includes 311 epitaphs collected by Streeten which were published anonymously in 1826 in a volume titled Epitaphia.[11]
References
- ^ a b "Munby, Arthur James (MNBY847AJ)". A Cambridge Alumni Database. University of Cambridge.
- ^ a b Harrison, J. F. C. (1954). A History of the Working Men's College (1854-1954). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
- ^ Wills, Matthew (10 September 2018). "The Bizarre Victorian Diaries of Cullwick and Munby". JSTOR Daily. Retrieved 27 April 2021.
- ^ Davidoff, Leonore (1979). "Class and Gender in Victorian England: The Diaries of Arthur J. Munby and Hannah Cullwick". Feminist Studies. 5 (1): 87–141. doi:10.2307/3177552. hdl:2027/spo.0499697.0005.106. ISSN 0046-3663. JSTOR 3177552.
- ^ a b c McClintock, Anne (1995). Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. New York: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-90889-2. OCLC 29911127.
- ^ a b c Hughes, Kathryn (18 January 2003). "A good roll in the muck". The Guardian. Retrieved 13 January 2021.
- ^ "Trinity College Library Cambridge: MUNB".
- ^ "BBC Radio 4 Extra - Hidden Treasures, An Uncommon Love by Michelene Wandor". BBC. Retrieved 13 November 2025.
- ^ Munby, Arthur Joseph (1852). Benoni: poems.
- ^ Munby, Arthur Joseph (1865). Verses New and Old. Bell and Daldy.
- ^ Munby, Arthur (1891). Faithful Servants. Reeves and Turner. pp. xiii–xiv – via Internet Archive.
- Further reading
- Flanders, Judith; Inside the Victorian Home: A Portrait of Domestic Life in Victorian England. New York: W. W. Norton, 2004
- Atkinson, Diane; Love and Dirt: The Marriage of Arthur Munby and Hannah Cullwick. New York: Macmillan, 2003
- Reay, Barry; Watching Hannah: Sexuality, Horror and Bodily De-formation in Victorian England. Reaktion, 2002. (ISBN 1-86189-119-9)
- Hudson, Derek; Munby: Man of Two Worlds. Gambit, 1972. (ISBN 0-87645-066-4)
- Hiley, Michael; Victorian Working Women: Portraits from Life. Gordon Fraser, 1979 (ISBN 978-0-86092-033-5)
- Cullwick, John; Our Hannah: A biography of the Victorian published diarist Hannah Cullwick (1833-1909). Lewis Sinclair Associates, 2022 (ISBN 978-1-3999-3139-7)
- Stanley, Liz, editor; The Diaries of Hannah Cullwick, Victorian Maidservant. Rutgers University Press, 1984.
- Rust, Martha Dana (1994). "In the Humble Service of Her Emancipation: Hannah Cullwick's Maid-of-All-Work Diaries". Pacific Coast Philology. 29 (1): 95–108. doi:10.2307/1316351. JSTOR 1316351.