Clara Lucas Balfour ( Lucas; 21 December 1808 – 3 July 1878) was an English temperance campaigner, lecturer and author. For many years, she was associated with the philanthropic movements of her time.
Early life
Clara Lucas Liddell was born in the New Forest, Hampshire, on 21 December 1808, the only child of John Lydell Lucas (c.1767–1818), a butcher and cattle dealer from Gosport, and his wife Sarah. The family name was Liddell.
Her parents appear to have separated when she was very young (it was later said that John had deceived Sarah into entering into a bigamous marriage), and Clara went to live with her father on the Isle of Wight. Following John's death in 1818, Balfour was baptized, and taken by her mother to live in London. The two were not well off, and supported themselves by needlework. The mother was highly intellectual, while the daughter was very early in life characterised by a love of reading and of elocutionary exercises.
In September 1824, at the age of 15, she married James Balfour (1796–1884), of the Ways and Means Office in the House of Commons, her new home being in Chelsea.
Career
Activist
In October 1837, James, an alcoholic, took a temperance pledge. A week or so later, Balfour also took the pledge; this was at the Bible Christians' chapel, a meeting-place close by her house. Having adopted teetotalism, Clara then contacted Jabez Burns in 1840, and became a Baptist convert.
At first she was content with merely setting an example of total abstinence; but in face of the awful ravages committed by drunkenness, she advanced a step further, and stood forward as an active member of the temperance reformation crusade. The first to receive attention, and corresponding benefit, were the women of Chelsea. A larger constituency was then addressed through the press, so that Balfour was one of the first of the teetotal litterateurs. Having taken the pen in hand, she appears to have understood that she had discovered her avocation, and she gave her attention to other matters more or less associated with the welfare of the industrial classes. At the time, Chelsea was "troubled with Socialism", and Balfour was happy to contend with it through well-written pieces, exposing the pernicious fallacies of the system, which had the effect of breaking up the Chelsea society.
In the period 1837 to 1840, Balfour wrote Common Sense versus Socialism, a tract directed at a local Owenite group. Jane Carlyle called to thank her, and began a friendship. Importantly in practical terms, around this time Balfour also met the campaigner John Dunlop of Gairbraid. He gave her paid editorial work on the Temperance Journal in 1841.
Balfour's last public appearance was at the Memorial Hall, Farringdon Street, in May 1877, when she was elected president of the British Women's Temperance Association.
Lecturer
Balfour and her family moved from Chelsea to Maida Hill in 1841; and it was at this time that she began the work of public lecturing with which her name became associated. The first lecture was given at the Greenwich Literary Institution ; and abundant success attended the somewhat startling innovation. Whatever prejudice existed always broke down after a single hearing. On one occasion a gentleman at the close of the evening rose to apologize most chivalrously as the only member of the Committee who had voted against Balfour's being invited to lecture. As she repeated her attempts, her fame increased, applications for service became correspondingly numerous, and she visited all the great towns in the UK. Her lectures were not confined to the temperance topic. She lectured on the influence of woman on society, and kindred subjects; and she held the post for some years of lecturer on belles lettres at a leading ladies' school.
Amongst her wide range of lectures was one on "The most distinguished Female Sovereigns of Europe" given in the Scientific Institution, Wisbech in 1851, another was "Henry the Eighth and his Six Wives" delivered at the Southport Town Hall Literary Lectures on 8 February 1866.
The lectures were not sermons, but their tone was always decidedly Christian, and, they were occasionally the means of clearing the debts of struggling literary institutes. This work continued with uninterrupted success for 29 years, until she was physically unable to continue.