Anna Wickham, born Edith Alice Mary Harper in 1883, published as Anna Wickham and knew the domestic battlefield from the inside. She married a London lawyer, raised children, and wrote poetry that bristled against the expectation that women should be the serene moral center of the home. Her first collections appeared in the 1910s, just as the suffrage movement was forcing public debate about women’s private unhappiness. “The Conscience” sits in that context as a compressed account of what happens when female virtue turns into performance, repression, or a weapon.
The speaker does not moralize from a pulpit; she confesses. The opening line names the damage: “Deadly destructive to my man and me.” The word “deadly” pushes beyond ordinary marital quarrel, implying that something vital in the relationship is being killed. The phrase “my man” is both intimate and slightly possessive, placing the injury squarely inside a love relationship. The fault, she says, lies in “rare fits of sore morality”—not steady goodness, but sudden, inflamed episodes of moral anger. The adjective “sore” makes morality sound chafed and tender, as if principle has become an irritation rather than a guide. The title, too, sounds heavy with judgment, yet the poem treats conscience less as an inner light than as a punishing voice.
Then the poem turns from confession to diagnosis. A “mad, domestic hell begins,” the line snapping into a shorter four-beat rhythm after the longer opening lines. The word “domestic” keeps the drama inside the house, where a woman’s role was both sacred and confined. The final line delivers the central paradox: “When woman hides her virtues, and displays her sins.” It sounds backwards because people are expected to hide their sins and display their virtues. In the heat of a “sore” moral fit, the speaker may do exactly the opposite: bury affection and exhibit rage. But Wickham also widens the claim. Under pressure to appear good in a narrow, male-defined way, a woman may bury her real strengths—honesty, anger, appetite, independence—because they are not acceptable as female virtues. What she is allowed to display may then be her failures, her frustration, her acting-out. The home becomes hell not because a woman is too moral, but because her authentic virtues have nowhere to go.
The form reinforces that cramped feeling. The two longer opening lines create a heavy, almost unwieldy confession, while the rhyme of “me” with “morality” sounds deliberately off-balance, as though the neat couplet cannot quite contain the speaker’s self-knowledge. The shorter third line interrupts with a blunt image of madness, and the final line stretches out, holding “virtues” and “sins” in the same breath. The final rhyme “begins” and “sins” clicks tightly shut, but the thought it seals is more unsettling than tidy.
What makes the poem significant is its inversion of the Victorian image of the angel in the house. Instead of celebrating female moral purity, Wickham treats self-righteousness and self-concealment as poison. Her speaker implicates herself, not only men, in the damage; that honesty gives the poem its sting. The brevity matters, too: this is not a long narrative of domestic misery, but an epigram that readers can carry like a hard truth. In just four lines, Wickham suggests that the cure for a “domestic hell” is not more moralizing, but a more truthful acknowledgment of what women actually are.