Arthur Munby

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]

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]

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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]