The Chanlers’ rustic ways were incomprehensible to their grand relations. And grand is the only word to describe a lineage that melded the best of colonial and old Knickerbocker society—descended as they were from Winthrops, Livingstons, Beekmans, even Peter Stuyvesant himself—with the immense Astor fortune. It was an unbeatable combination of blue blood and greenbacks. The Chanlers were perched atop the highest rung of society; they knew or were related to every important family in New York, but they seemed to studiously avoid the pageantry expected of their class. Their great “Aunt Lina”—a.k.a. Caroline Schermerhorn Astor, wife of William B. Astor Jr., but known simply as “the Mrs. Astor” to anyone who mattered—became, without question, the most powerful personage in all of society. She and her minion Ward McAllister (also a Chanler relation) sifted and selected the elite members of society, the so-called “Four Hundred.” According to legend, that was the number of grandees who could cozily fit into Mrs. Astor’s ballroom. The Chanlers were among the elect. (In 1968, Life magazine featured a photo essay of “America’s ‘Grandes Dames.’ ” Among them was ninety-five-year-old Alida Chanler Emmet, the youngest Chanler sister, and the only sibling then still alive. Posing in a ball gown, Alida was identified as the last surviving member of the “Four Hundred.”)
Aunt Lina ruled from her Fifth Avenue mansion, which was just around the corner from the Chanlers’ handsome brick house on Madison Avenue between 34th and 35th Streets. After Elizabeth’s birth in 1866, Aunt Lina was chosen to be her godmother. She presented the infant with a beautifully engraved set of christening silver. (You can see it today, prominently displayed at the Smithsonian American Art Museum next to Elizabeth’s portrait.) Life at Rokeby surely did not conform to Aunt Lina’s idea of a proper upbringing.
At Rokeby, Elizabeth and her sisters had a makeshift education. Governesses taught them French, music, and drawing; dancing and cards were also part of the curriculum. (When playing whist they learned early on to “Lead from a king and remember the small cards.”) Mainly, they read. The library of books that once belonged to their great-grandfather was their lifeblood. “Books, books, books,” Elizabeth’s sister Margaret later wrote in a memoir. “Did they not line the tower, twenty shelves high, many of their old bindings out of reach?” The children managed to grab them anyway. Books were not just an ornament, or an idle amusement, in the Chanler household; they were an integral part of it. Jane Austen, The Arabian Nights, history by Macaulay, Victor Hugo’s memoirs in the original French. They read all of it. Elizabeth was particularly enamored with Robert Browning, and devoured his poetry as a young girl. After evening prayers the children were routinely read to, the assumption being that “reading aloud was human nature’s daily food.” Mary Marshall read to them, as did visiting cousins. Even their “disconsolate” father was “persuaded to stop looking at his wife’s portrait and read straight through” the long narrative poem by Sir Walter Scott titled Rokeby, after which their house had been named.
Life took an abrupt twist for Elizabeth in 1877. Her father pulled her two brothers out of St. John’s boarding school in the middle of the spring term so they could be educated in England. They were lackluster students, and the Gilded Age set loved anything that reeked of the Old World. An immersion in an English public school—Archie to Rugby and Wintie to Eton—was meant to give them the manners, accents, and education of British aristocrats. J. Winthrop Chanler booked passage on a transatlantic steamer for himself, his two sons, and eleven-year-old Elizabeth. He’d brought his daughter to England with the idea of placing her in a tiny, elite school for girls—a school that several cousins had previously attended. It was located across the English Channel on the Isle of Wight and run by Miss Elizabeth Sewell, a renowned author and educator. Every year she would take a handful of young female students, all of them rich and well connected, into the home that she shared with her two unmarried sisters, Ellen and Emma. The Sewells hated the term school—it sounded much too institutional. They preferred to call their enterprise a “family home.” The students fondly referred to the Sewell sisters as their “aunts.” Aunt Elizabeth and Aunt Ellen taught the girls; Aunt Emma was an invalid who never left her couch—her “prison sofa” as one student called it—but she was a warm presence, and the one the girls could confide their secrets to.
After they’d arrived in London, Chanler seemed to have second thoughts about leaving Elizabeth behind. She was so young. For all of her adult posturing, Elizabeth was still playing with dolls. He eventually made up his mind. Elizabeth’s mother had expressed an interest in having her daughter attend the school. How could he refuse to carry out his dead wife’s wishes? There may also have been an element of mercy on Chanler’s part—an attempt to relieve some of the parental burden that young Elizabeth had prematurely taken upon herself. She worried so about her siblings. This would be her chance to free herself from those responsibilities. One relative described the school as “a perfect haven of rest.” With luck, it would be that for his daughter. And it would also provide her with a serious education.
Chanler made the necessary arrangements for his daughter—the boarding fees involved, how vacations would be spent, the possibility of Elizabeth’s brothers joining her during holidays. He then returned to America, to the Chanlers’ summerhouse in Newport with the rest of the children. “What horses have you taken to Newport, and what dogs?” Elizabeth wrote her father. She inquired after the health of the animals and asked him to “Please give lots of love to the little ones, and keep some for yourself.” She described her first impression of the isle and her new school: there were many beautiful plants and flowers, she liked the Sewell sisters “very much,” and she found their house, called Ashcliff, “very pretty.” But she ended her description with the plaintive, “Please come soon.”
Not long after, a telegram arrived at Ashcliff. Miss Sewell delivered the tragic news: Elizabeth’s father was dead. Eleven-year-old Elizabeth tried to comprehend the unfathomable. A sudden case of pneumonia. A chill caught while her father was playing croquet on a soggy field. Elizabeth was now an orphan, left among strangers to grieve. She’d only been at the school for a month. Elizabeth was told she must be brave, it was God’s will. She’d heard that before.
What is it about orphans and English boarding schools, and even poor-little-rich girls, which resonate with a Grimms-fairy-tale quality? Terror combined with an I-can’t-avert-my-eyes-from-this-particular-horror-story—that is the feeling evoked when reading through the scores of handwritten letters addressed to Elizabeth on the Isle of Wight, a young American girl far from her homeland.
Elizabeth was not permitted to return for the funeral, not allowed to clutch her orphaned brothers and sisters. “My dear sweet little Bessie,” a cousin wrote. She assured Elizabeth that her father had looked beatific and happy in death, “a most glorious smile on his face.” The cousin enclosed a lock of his hair that she had cut off herself. Another relative wrote to say that she looked forward to the day when the youngster could return to Rokeby and be “Mother Bess” to her siblings. In the meantime, she instructed the orphan to “learn all you can from the dear Aunts” and not to be lonesome. Elizabeth had to tough it out alone, in an unfamiliar place, in a foreign country. She was marooned in the tiny village of Bonchurch, on the far southern reaches of the Isle of Wight. That distant island outpost remained the locale of one of the most formative periods of her life. For the rest of her days it served as both an inspiration (she remained devoted to her Aunt Sewells) and as a reminder of the cruel turn her life had taken.
The Sewells’ stone house, sited high above the sea in Bonchurch, still stands. No longer a school, it is now in private hands. Bonchurch earns its reputation as the most picturesque village on the entire island. Its houses of local stone are set on ascending terraces on a steep hillside overlooking the English Channel. Vertiginous, curving stone stairs, slick with mud, lead from one level of the town to the next. The village nestles against chalk cliffs, known as St Boniface Down,
that rise nearly eight hundred feet above the sea. The Down serves as a kind of wall that traps the sun’s heat to create a unique microclimate—a paradise of subtropical vegetation—in the so-called Undercliff that stretches for roughly seven miles along the coast. It’s a bit of the Mediterranean in the United Kingdom, nicknamed the “Madeira of England” and touted as the sunniest place in all of Great Britain. Even Miss Elizabeth Sewell, an exemplar of Victorian restraint, could not resist exclaiming that “heaven itself can scarcely be more beautiful.”
Once the province of poor fishermen and smugglers, the Undercliff became fashionable in the mid-nineteenth century after Queen Victoria and Prince Albert built Osborne House, their grand rural retreat on the other side of the island. The queen loved her Italianate-style hideaway and could scarcely be budged from the place after the death of her husband. (She died at Osborne House in 1901.) When the royal family moved to the island, the entire court converged on the Isle of Wight and one of Victoria’s ladies-in-waiting settled in Bonchurch. The queen herself came to the village. All who did were amazed. The miraculous Undercliff boasted palm trees and all manner of exotic plant life; lizards basked in the December sunshine; wild cyclamen, geranium, primroses, and violets thrived at Christmastime; and masses of rare butterflies got positively drunk on the abundant nectar.
With its sea air, warm winters, and cool summers, the area soon became renowned for its healthful properties. Invalids, especially those suffering from lung diseases, arrived. In neighboring Ventnor, the Royal National Hospital for Consumption and Diseases of the Chest (its motto, “While I breathe I hope”) was built on a bluff overlooking the sea. Donkey-drawn carriages carried invalids through the streets. Wheeled bathing machines (some dedicated strictly for use by women, others for men only) lined the beach, as soaking in seawater was considered curative. The place became a destination for both foreign royalty and wealthy Brits—though Karl Marx also spent two winters there convalescing. (It was no miracle cure for him: he died within weeks of leaving Ventnor.)
Bonchurch, next door, attracted literary celebrities. Charles Dickens came for the summer season in 1849 and rented a villa named Winterbourne. He was especially pleased by a waterfall on the property; he hired a carpenter to build an enclosure around it so that he could use it as “a perpetual shower-bath.” He exulted in the sea air, daily strenuous walks to the top of St Boniface Down, games of rounders on the beach, and visits from such luminaries as Thomas Carlyle, William Thackeray, and Alfred Lord Tennyson. There were amiable picnics, garden parties, and amateur theatricals.
Dickens wrote a chunk of David Copperfield in Bonchurch but his boisterous and rather blunt manner did not sit well with some of the local gentry, especially straitlaced sorts like Miss Sewell. She claimed to have seen him only once because she and her sisters “did not go into society” much. (That’s putting it mildly: though formal entertainments were an integral part of her social set, Miss Sewell could recall attending only half a dozen balls in her entire life.) There were doubtless other reasons to avoid a person like Dickens, who lived a stone’s throw from her house. Miss Sewell had a positive horror of what she termed “irreligious society”—she said that she found it hard to breathe in such company. Most Londoners, alas, fell into that category for Miss Sewell: she found them generally “distasteful” since “religion seemed entirely out of their thoughts.” Hardly surprising then that she would avoid at all costs a clever man like Dickens, who threw satirical poison darts at organized religion.
The offending author didn’t last too long in Bonchurch. His initial enthusiasm for the climate transformed into a positive hatred of it. By August he was complaining of being depressed, bilious, sleepy by day, and sleepless by night. He blamed it all on the weather. “I am quite convinced that I should die here in a year,” Dickens wrote. The equinox’s high winds took its toll. A close friend was seriously injured in late September after the wind had whipped up—he suffered “congestion of the brain” after being flattened by an enormous wave. Dickens hypnotized his friend to help cure him; not long after, the author bid good-bye to the island.
The Sewells had been just across the way from Dickens. Their manor house is located atop “The Pitts,” the site of an old quarry as rock solid as the discipline and rigor inside the house. “In that little world there was never any doubt about belief or duty,” one of Elizabeth’s cousins, who preceded her at the school, wrote in a memoir. “The religion was Anglican and thorough; . . . the language pointed and pure, and the morals so high and honourable that during all my stay under that kindly roof I cannot remember one case of deception or fibbing on the part of the girls, or one expression of suspicion or disbelief, or a single act of injustice, on the part of the authorities.”
Well, maybe one. The author recalled the sad fate of a fellow student named Rosie, who had the audacity to peek at a proscribed bit of text. One evening Aunt Elizabeth was reading aloud in the drawing room to the seven assembled students—the usual nighttime ritual—when she came to an abrupt stop. She was midway through Cranford, the quaint novel by Elizabeth Gaskill about English country life, when something in the text struck her as objectionable. Something about a baby. “I will leave this out,” Miss Sewell said ominously, and moved on to the next page. The girls were naturally riveted. What juicy bit had been excised? The book, left behind in the parlor for anyone to look at, was like an occasion of sin, a trap laid by the aunts. Rosie was found “devouring the forbidden page” the following morning. Despite the tears and entreaties of the other students, Rosie was expelled.
Moral judgment hung heavily in the air. The aunts kept a running tally of the students’ daily performance in large bound books. Every evening each girl had to carry up her register and wait for the verdict on how she had done on her lessons that day: “Very good,” “Good,” or the dreaded “Tolerable,” which was considered a “foul disgrace!” If, heaven forbid, a girl had broken a rule of any kind, she was expected to own up to the infraction—that too, would factor into the grading. There were no overt punishments. There was no need. On Saturday evenings every girl had a private audience with Aunt Ellen— a kind of weekly confession—during which the student’s register was examined. A frown from Aunt Ellen was more than enough punishment; a smile from her was a cherished reward.
The school was a bastion of Victorian rectitude. Queen, country, religion—of the right Anglican sort—that was the credo. Photographs from the era show the Sewells dressed in acres of dark fabric, with gloves and heavy bonnets, only their faces visible. And yet, for all of their resolutely old-fashioned beliefs, Elizabeth and Ellen Sewell were also quite revolutionary. After their father died leaving huge debts in his wake, the pair earned money to help stave off creditors, a bold move by women of their refined, and usually idle, class. They did not look to marriage as a fallback; they looked to themselves. The sisters took in pupils, beginning with their widowed brother’s children, who’d been left motherless. Soon word spread among the wellborn, and places in the Sewells’ school became sought after years in advance.
Much of this was due to Elizabeth Sewell’s growing literary fame. Her first novel, Amy Herbert, mirrored her own life. The plot concerned the travails of a well-bred young woman, deeply Christian, who was thrust into the role of governess and educator of young children. Published in 1844, the book was hugely popular in both England and the United States. Scores of novels and educational texts followed, and the titles of them reveal the class-conscious, religious, and classical focus of her brand of pedagogy: The Earl’s Daughter, The Child’s First History of Rome, Private Devotions for Young Persons, and Principles of Education, Drawn from Nature and Revelation, and Applied to Female Education in the Upper Classes.
The school boasted a rigorous curriculum: logic and history, math and science, literature and grammar—all of it imbued with a heavy dose of Scripture. On occasion, a male expert was brought into the girls’ school, among them a university lecturer who introduced the students to politic
al economy. Ellen Sewell had the artistic gift in the family, and she tutored the girls in music, singing, and drawing. The minutiae of social etiquette were also drilled into the students. The art of letter writing had to be mastered: how to accept and decline invitations, how to properly inquire after an invalid, how to check references for servants, how to address a tradesman (“rigid third person” was the rule on that one). A dancing instructor taught them to move gracefully: “Be willowy, young ladies, for heaven’s sake be willowy!” Aunt Ellen would sometimes play the role of hostess as the girls were taught to navigate a room properly—entering it with confidence and style, engaging the eye of the hostess before glancing at anyone else, moving a teacup or opening a window soundlessly, and always with a smile on one’s face.
Unlike the free-for-all at Rokeby, days at Miss Sewell’s were carefully structured, from morning till night. To the schoolroom by 7:30 for bread and butter. An hour of prayer and study before a hearty breakfast. Lessons all morning, with a playtime break in the gardens surrounding the house. A large midday meal followed by a two-hour walk, with or without a friend. Afternoon tea. More hours of study. Yet more tea—“the highest of high teas, where everybody chattered all the time and the girls cut the vast cakes to suit themselves.” Evening in the drawing room, a fire blazing, Aunt Elizabeth reading aloud, Aunt Ellen on the piano. Bed at 9:30. The next day, as Elizabeth woke to the maids carrying hot water for her bath, the cycle would begin anew.
The surroundings were homey: chintz furnishings, large windows looking out to the sea, watercolor paintings by Aunt Ellen on the wall. But the discipline was ironclad. Even Aunt Elizabeth’s spelling exercises bore moral instruction. Sentences were read aloud and students had to copy them, with special emphasis on learning the italicized words. A typical dictation: “The child is a homeless wanderer, brought up in careless and shameful habits, and it is truly sad to see how rudely she behaves. In my judgment her case is wholly hopeless; but it is awful to be brought to such an acknowledgment.” Pretty sobering sentiments for an eleven-year-old orphan.
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