Harriet Grote
She was married to George Grote and was acquainted with many of the English philosophical radicals of the earlier 19th century, a significant political hostess and facilitator of the period.
[2][9] Peter Elmsley, living at St Mary Cray, allegedly in 1815 falsely claimed to George that he was engaged to Harriet.
[11] Despite the obstacles, this courtship period was for Harriet one of reading guided by George: political economy and utilitarianism, atheism, and the views of Jeremy Bentham and Thomas Malthus.
[12] Harriet, "herself possessed of a domineering character", did not enjoy Selina's nearly uncontested regime of a strict, somewhat gloomy and exclusive evangelicalism, which she characterised as "positively disheartening" and affecting the home with "dullness and vapidity".
[27] East Burnham Cottage was replaced by a small house, which they had built in the neighbourhood and occupied under the name of "History Hut", from the beginning of 1853 until the end of 1857.
[2] It was in fact Harriet's project, "a small Elizabethan house to be built in Popple's Park", undertaken from 1852, once profits from the multi-volume History of Greece began to accrue.
[26] Harriet had given support to this, George Grote's major scholarly work, from the outset, suggesting the title and dealing with the publisher.
[36] Augustus Hare described a visit she made to Oxford in 1857: "Mrs Grote sat with one leg over the other, both high in the air, and talked for two hours, turning with equal facility to Saffi on Italian Literature, Max Müller on Epic Poetry, and Arthur on Ecclesiastical History, and then plunged into a discourse on the best manure for turnips, and the best way of forcing Cotswold mutton, with an interlude first upon the 'harmony of shadow' in water-colour drawing, and then upon rat-hunts at Jemmy Shawe's – a low public-house in Westminster.
Upon all these subject she was equally vigorous, and gave all her decisions with the manner and tone of one laying down the laws of Athens...[37]From 1859, the Grotes took Barrow Green Court in Surrey, which had once been occupied by Jeremy Bentham.
An overlapping discussion group on political economy, in which Harriet also joined and which she called the "Brangles", included too David Ricardo and John Ramsay McCulloch.
Her naval brother Richard John Lewin married in 1825 Plumer's widow Jane, daughter of George Hamilton, but died after two years.
[3][21][45][44][46][47] Harriet arranged a small dinner for the purpose of discussion between James Mill and Lord William, shortly before the latter sailed to become Governor-General of India in 1828.
[50] Later, Harriet Grote's social circle was broad: it has been described as "an extensive group of (mainly but not exclusively) liberal and radical intellectuals, politicians, writers and artists.
"[51] One opinion was that Harriet Grote had a most curious salon, where practically all worlds met, artists as well as savants and politicians, and which was quite assiduously frequented by, among others, John Stuart Mill, Carlyle and his wife, Cornwall Lewis, Sidney Smith [sic], not to mention Thalberg, Lablache, and, during his visits to London, Mendelssohn [...][52]The wit Sydney Smith coined "queen of the radicals" for Harriet, but also the unkind quip that she was the origin of the term grotesque.
She cannot make up her mind to marry a very good, good-looking, infinitely stupid man she has engaged herself to, and at the same time has not the cruelty to throw him over; so she goes to Paris, to Mrs Grote, for a month or two, when she is to give her final decision.
This visit to Lafayette, on a shortened form of an intended journey to Switzerland, took place with an introduction from Charles Comte, son-in-law of Say.
[59] In 1852, Harriet took a political article in Paris from Alexis de Tocqueville, on the 1851 French coup d'état, and saw through Henry Reeve that it was published in London in The Times.
[60] Charles Sumner wrote to Horatio Greenough in 1841 about a letter of introduction to the Grotes, stating that Harriet was "a masculine person, without children, interested very much in politics, and one of the most remarkable women in England."
He added that from William Ellery Channing he had had Catharine Sedgwick's opinion that Harriet was "the most remarkable woman she had met in Europe.
"[37] G. M. Young in an essay wrote of her: In Mrs. Grote, who would have been a far more effective Member of Parliament than her husband, who sat with her red stockings higher than her head, discomfited a dinner-party by saying "disembowelled" quite bold and plain, and knew when a hoop was off a pail in the back kitchen, the great lady is formidably ascendant [...][62] Minnie Simpson (1825–1907), née Mary Charlotte Mair Senior, was a daughter of Nassau Senior.
She knew Harriet as a long-term family friend, and wrote in Many Memories of Many People (1898) an extended account of her as a person, initially comparing her to Queen Elizabeth I.
She always wore short skirts, no crinoline, white stockings and high shoes ...[63]The comment about the pail is found in Lady Eastlake's memoir, coming from a discussion of neighbours in Surrey.
[64] Minnie Simpson gives a basis for Harriet's approach to estate management, quoting a letter from the Grotes' property at Long Bennington.
[40] George's brother Andrew Grote, of the Bengal Civil Service, died in 1835, shortly after his wife; leaving two sons and two daughters as orphans.
