by Gillian Gill
Pattledom was a good place for clever men—too good for a shy neophyte journalist like Virginia Woolf’s father, Leslie Stephen, as we shall see—and there was great talk centered around the husbands, Henry Thoby Prinsep and Charles Hay Cameron. The ailing Prinsep and the reclusive Cameron were large, quiet men who had traveled far and done much, and they had higher mathematics and Indian tribal law, Persian poetry and Italian art at their fingertips. In the eyes of their wives and their guests, they were the undisputed lords of Pattledom, but they preferred to keep on the far edges of the busy social action. The magnet that drew so many distinguished men down to rural Kensington to see the Prinseps on a Sunday or across the choppy Solent for a weekend near the Camerons was the Pattle women. As everyone who knew them agreed, the Pattle sisters and their daughters were almost overwhelmingly beautiful and possessed of a captivating mixture of Parisian chic and the colorful exuberance of their native India.
Maria Pattle Jackson, one of the beautiful Pattle sisters and Virginia Woolf’s maternal grandmother
At Little Holland House, Josiah Wedgwood, the scion of a great intellectual family as well as heir to a great pottery fortune, was happy to run into his elusive kinsman Charles Darwin. The dueling prime ministers William Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli could occasionally be seen chez Prinsep, exchanging a cheerful handshake and talking of Whitehall and the weather. Alfred Tennyson, the poet laureate, was notoriously antisocial, but he became the particular pet of Julia Pattle Cameron, his neighbor on the Isle of Wight. As for the writer and illustrator William Makepeace Thackeray, whose family fortunes were thickly intertwined with British India, he was quite a fixture on the Pattle landscape, coming with his daughters Anne and Harriet (known as Minny) Thackeray as soon as they were out of short skirts.
Casual, outdoorsy, and freeform, Pattledom was mainly upper-middle-class professional, with a scattering of aristocrats once Sophia and Virginia Pattle found husbands, and it had a thick patina of the respectability and sexual restraint so often assumed to be typically Victorian. If Pattledom had distinct echoes of the French salons of old, where upper-class women had been queens of society, it was sharply different from the late-nineteenth-century Parisian high society of Balzac or Zola. Noblemen, bankers, and artists did not gather chez Cameron at Freshwater to clink and cavort and copulate (to use a favorite word of Virginia Woolf) alongside Jewish opera singers and little street whores, as they do in novels like Splendeurs et misères de courtisanes and Nana, and as they did in real Parisian society circa 1870. Pattledom was the confident, complex, and chaste world of the novels (though not always the lives) of Dickens, Meredith, and Thackeray, one to which men brought their wives and daughters and sisters but not their mistresses.
It must be admitted that the Victorian women we know so much about today were not much in evidence in Pattledom. Elizabeth Gaskell probably put in an appearance at Little Holland House, but as she was then only a “lady novelist” with a small readership, the diarists don’t say much about her. The Pre-Raphaelite painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti brought his brother, William, but not his poet sister Christina, about whom Virginia Woolf would write one of her great essays. As for the then new literary phenomenon Charlotte Brontë, only Thackeray managed to pry her out of Yorkshire for a dinner party. The poet Robert Browning came to Pattledom on his own, eager to invite people to come and entertain his wife, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, in Florence. The journalist and literary critic George Henry Lewes also came alone since Mary Ann Evans (alias George Eliot), his wife in all but name, was deemed an adulteress who could never be received in respectable English society. Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon, artist and social reformer, was similarly not acceptable to Pattledom because she was born illegitimate. On the other hand, if Barbara’s first cousin Florence Nightingale, the most famous woman of her day after the queen, did not actually go to Little Holland House, she certainly knew the people who did.
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If, on the Isle of Wight, Julia Cameron had an edge over her sister in literary men and scientific luminaries, Sarah Prinsep had a corner on painters. Her son Valentine brought home to Kensington his artist friends Rossetti, Millais, Burne-Jones, and Holman Hunt, who were making a name for themselves as the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. John Everett Millais, best known perhaps today for his 1851 painting Ophelia, was a good friend of Val Prinsep’s, as was the actor-writer George du Maurier, Daphne du Maurier’s grandfather.
The personal lives of the Pre-Raphaelite brothers were not exactly a pattern of Victorian respectability, as the Pattle descendant Henrietta Garnett shows in Wives and Stunners, a book based in part on previously unexplored papers in her mother’s family. But Rossetti and his artist and writer friends did not bring their stunning mistresses with them to Pattledom, and, for the sake of the younger sisters and the nieces still in need of husbands, Julia Cameron and Sarah Prinsep were careful to maintain what the author Graham Robb calls “the tactical hypocrisy of the Victorians.” Of course, Val Prinsep’s lusty young friends were not blind to the beauty of the Pattle women, but they found no willing conquests. Burne-Jones was, according to Sophia Pattle’s descendant William Dalrymple, eager to marry her, and Holman Hunt proposed marriage to sixteen-year-old Julia Jackson, but neither man was successful in his suit.
Sexual desire seems to have hit women in the Pattle family line rather late, a pattern to be replicated in the early twentieth century by their descendants Vanessa and Virginia Stephen. Ever since the days of Thérèse de l’Etang, the strategy for social success pursued by the women in the family was to hold out for the right match (though not necessarily the right man) and, as we shall see in the next chapter, Virginia and Sophia Pattle took that strategy to a whole new level. As a result, the problem of sex came to the surface at Little Holland House not when a Pattle niece ran off with a struggling artist, but when the Prinseps’ resident artist, George Frederick Watts, married the teenage actress Ellen Terry and brought her to live in Kensington.
Sarah and Thoby Prinsep met the painter Watts in Rome during the Grand Tour they embarked upon after leaving Calcutta. Watts was living in Rome under the patronage of Lord and Lady Holland, and it was Watts who suggested that the Prinseps take Little Holland House. Watts was an excellent painter and a hapless man, and he gladly moved from the noble patronage of Lady Holland to the hands-on management of Sarah Pattle Prinsep. She installed Watts upstairs at Little Holland House, apparently rent and board free, declared him a genius to the whole world, and referred to him grandly as “the Signior.”
All this was deeply gratifying to the son of a Marylebone piano-tuner, and in return Watts, though a rather reluctant portrait painter, did portraits of the Pattle sisters and their daughters and even the daughters’ husbands, many of which have, happily, come down to us. The portrait of Leslie Stephen by Watts had pride of place in the reception rooms of Virginia Woolf’s childhood home, and Woolf remembered her father standing in front of his portrait when guests came and making mildly disparaging remarks about it—in the full expectation of being contradicted.
In her memoir, The Story of My Life, published in 1908, Ellen Terry gave a heavily edited account of her early life, which she knew the public dimly recalled as scandalous. Terry claimed in her book that, when she married Watts, she had no understanding of sex and believed that, when Watts kissed her, he had in effect made her his. Somehow I doubt if that statement should be taken as a true confession. Dame Ellen was in financial difficulties when she took to writing her memoirs late in life, and it was in her interest to claim she had been an innocent lamb when she strayed off the primrose path. Certainly, Terry was born into a family and an English theatrical world that were striving for respectability, and the days of Nell Gwyn and Aphra Behn were long gone. All the same, if a girl living in the world of traveling entertainers like Ellen Terry had cared to open her eyes, there was plenty of illicit sex to be seen. Nubile girls were still at risk of rape, extramarital relationships were common among actors (Terry herself would
later have one with the actor-impresario Henry Irving), and ambitious young women often had to choose between the casting couch and the sugar daddy. Charles Dickens, my readers will recall, found Ellen Ternan, the woman who became his secret mistress, when she appeared with him on stage.
But whether or not, in the moment that George Watts kissed her and proposed marriage, Ellen Terry knew the facts of life is irrelevant. She was barely sixteen years old, she loved and obeyed her parents, and, in crude twenty-first-century terms, they sold her to a rich and famous man three times her age.
At first the Terrys resisted marrying Ellen to Watts, who was, to put it mildly, no Romeo. Michael Holroyd quotes an unnamed biographer who opines that Watts was “emotionally unstable, sexually frustrated, and probably sexually ignorant.” After he looked over the Watts-Terry marriage many years later, Lytton Strachey opined that, like those other eminent Victorians John Ruskin, Matthew Arnold, and Benjamin Jowett, Watts was impotent. However, when George Watts came back some time later, with new and better terms, Ellen’s parents were ready to listen. Watts offered to pay Ellen’s father a monthly sum calculated to cover the loss of income he would suffer if Ellen retired from the stage. All the numerous Terry children had to earn their keep almost as soon as they could toddle. As each child came along, he—or more especially she, as cute little girls were more popular with theatrical audiences—became an actor. Ellen Terry went on stage when she was about six, as one of the little princes in the tower in Shakespeare’s Richard III.
The regular payment offered by Watts would mean a lot to the Terrys, perhaps the difference between traveling penury and a little house in the London suburbs. It would be a kind of Arthur’s Education Fund for their sons, whom they wanted to send to school. Moreover, by the time G. F. Watts appeared on the scene, the Terry family had decided that Ellen’s older sister, Kate, was the girl to back. In her late teens, Kate was already getting juicy parts, decent fees, and good reviews in the national press. Ellen was prettier than Kate, but she was a dreamy, idle girl who showed none of the fierce determination needed for a woman to make a career in the theater. Ellen herself was eager to move into the magic world of Pattledom, where, as she recalled in her memoir, “only beautiful things were allowed to come. All the women were graceful and all the men were gifted.”
The Terrys were not bad people or bad parents. An age gap of thirty years between a husband and a wife was not unusual, and Watts, on a second look, seemed a decent working-class bloke, earning a living as a painter as the Terrys did as actors, but with more success and possessed of powerful backers in the Hollands and Prinseps. So, in February 1847, dressed in a brown silk gown designed by the painter William Holman Hunt and a white Indian shawl presented by the Pattle sisters, Alice Ellen Terry was married to George Frederick Watts. The contrast between the blooming bride and the withered groom made a powerful impression on all present. Ellen cried a great deal during the ceremony and was told to stop by her new husband. “It makes your nose swell,” said George to Ellen.
Watts cared more about his bride’s nose than her feelings because he was far more eager to paint her than to sleep with her. His first marriage would prove a professional triumph for George Frederick Watts. It was Ellen’s image—as Persephone, Francesca da Rimini, Ophelia, Joan of Arc—that Watts captured in some of his greatest paintings. Outside the studio, on the other hand, Watts had little use for Ellen or need for her society, and he entrusted the education of Ellen to his friend, patron, and landlady, Sarah Prinsep. This proved a recipe for disaster—for the girl.
Sarah was happy to tolerate the bohemian young men her son Val had befriended, but turning Ellen Watts into a conventional little wifey was too much for even the efficient Mrs. Prinsep. Ellen’s family had not quite figured out yet how to be middle-class, and she was coltish and unruly, casual in her manners, careless with her tongue, unaccustomed to being exercised on a leash. She could not have been more different than Sarah’s favorite niece, the lovely, obedient, graceful Julia Jackson, the girl who would one day give birth to Virginia Woolf. No one denied that Ellen was affectionate, kindhearted, eager to please, and far from ignorant—could Julia Jackson recite yards of poetry and Shakespeare?—but she discharged an electricity that today we would call sex appeal, and it threatened to upset the sexual equilibrium at Little Holland House.
Sarah Prinsep became increasingly harsh in her attempts to discipline Ellen and make her conform to the rules of respectable Victorian womanhood. Within months, to the distress of her family and friends, Ellen grew pale, listless, and depressed. Kensington was not the sunny paradise she had dreamed of, and at night her “signior” husband might try some feeble caress, but nothing more. Things between Sarah and Ellen came to a head when Ellen appeared at a dinner party costumed as Cupid and wearing pink tights. Since her young girlhood, Ellen had played “trouser roles” on stage—these had in fact become her sister Kate’s theatrical stock-in-trade. Ellen knew just how practical it was not to be encumbered by skirts and petticoats, and she was rightly proud of her legs, but Mrs. Prinsep was aghast to see them appear in her dining room.
Thus, according to Michael Holroyd, citing the various biographers of G. F. Watts, it was Sarah Prinsep who convinced Watts after barely a year that he should send Ellen back to her father’s house. Basically, Sarah told the signior that he must either leave Little Holland House or send Ellen away, and Watts chose his studio over his wife. A separation settlement was negotiated, by which Watts would pay the Terry family—not Ellen herself—three hundred pounds a year. Though Watts would quickly turn against his wife and spread vicious rumors about why he had sent her away, he continued to pay the Terrys this money until Ellen secured a divorce some twelve years later.
For Ellen, at seventeen, the separation from her husband was a disaster. That she probably left Little Holland House a virgo intacta did not matter. She was seen as spoiled goods, rejected by her famous husband and his wealthy friends, a burden and an embarrassment to her parents and her siblings, a social pariah. Respectable admirers of the Terry sisters kept away, now that Ellen was back, though Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll), a highly respectable Cambridge mathematician, did continue his visits. Ellen’s given first name was Alice, and in The Story of My Life Dame Ellen Terry wrote in gratitude: “[Dodgson/Carroll] was as fond of me as he could be of anyone over the age of ten.” This was one of Terry’s apparently naive confessions that Virginia Woolf could not comment on in her published review of Terry’s memoir, but that she, as the victim of child sexual abuse, surely picked up on.
The Terry family had been wrong about Ellen. Somehow she found the strength to recover not only from the debacle of her marriage to Watts but from a six-year extramarital relationship with the whimsical architect Edward William Godwin. When he left her, Terry had two children as well as herself to support, so she returned to the stage and was soon recognized as the greatest woman actor of her time. The theatrical Terry family would stretch well into the twentieth century, with Ellen’s son, the influential designer Gordon Craig; her costumier-director daughter, Edy Craig; and her great-nephew (Kate’s grandson) Sir John Gielgud.
Ellen Terry, born in 1847, fought against heavy odds all her life, and the success she enjoyed came not from legacy, or even from luck, but from talent. With her many amours, her difficult children, her unending struggles to make ends meet, and her fabulous career as an actor, she has every claim to be a Great Victorian. As Virginia Woolf learned from her lesbian network, Terry was known for her warmth of heart and generosity of spirit, and, unlike her famous lover and theatrical collaborator Sir Henry Irving, she was cared for devotedly in her last years, dying poor in pounds, shillings, and pence but rich in love and laughter and reverence. For the writer Virginia Woolf, Terry was an inspiration and a new window onto Victorian culture.
Would Pattledom have been more interesting had it included more women like Ellen Terry, if the working-class artist’s model Lizzie Siddal had come with her lover, Dante Gabr
iel Rossetti, for example, or if brilliant George Eliot had been welcomed with her partner, George Henry Lewes? No doubt, but, as Virginia Woolf began to understand in her Bloomsbury years, Pattledom mattered because it was a place outside the individual home where educated middle-class English men and English women could laugh and chat, innocently flirt a little perhaps, and exchange ideas, memories, and dreams as one human being to another. As Woolf knew well from her extensive research into English social history, such places became increasingly rare during the reign of Queen Victoria, and her own parents’ home in Kensington had not been one of them.
As the nineteenth century progressed, upper-class Englishmen from an early age were herded into single-sex institutions—the prep school, the public school, the university, the regiment, the law firm, the civil service, the London club, Parliament. Well into the twentieth century it was possible for an unmarried Englishman to know nothing of women beyond the mother who wept to see him leave home, the sister who inked his initials onto his underwear, the school matron who dosed him with castor oil, and the Piccadilly streetwalker who beckoned him to prove his manhood. In mid-Victorian England, any social institution that allowed men and women to meet and talk and prove a common humanity was important. Pattledom, thus, in its small way, was important. It was not just a fun family story—it was a countervailing force in social history, and in the 1920s Virginia Woolf seized upon it as such, even as her friend and rival Lytton Strachey was leading the repudiation of all things Victorian with the book he derisively titled Eminent Victorians.
In 1923 the Woolfs planned for their Hogarth Press to bring out a book of photographs by Virginia’s great-aunt Julia Margaret Cameron. The book would open with a biographical introduction by the Hogarth Press’s star writer, Virginia Woolf herself, and it would be based on her original research. Virginia Woolf loved reading old letters and memoirs and diaries, and so, while collecting odd bits of oral testimony from friends like Anne Thackeray Ritchie, Lady Strachey, and Ethel Smyth, she plunged with delight into her own family’s papers. These were ready to hand since her father, Leslie Stephen, following the death of his wife, Julia, in 1895, had dug them out of old boxes and trunks, organized, reread, and set them aside in good order, as a trained biographer should. Woolf found herself transported back to the world her mother, Julia Stephen, had known—Pattledom. There, she discovered, windows opened wide onto meadow or seashore; walls were green and blue and crowded with paintings and photographs; music filled the air; and the talk played and sparkled like a fountain. It was, in fact, a world singularly like the one she herself now lived in, but one that had largely sat silent during her childhood. Pattledom and Bloomsbury, Woolf discovered to her surprise, had much in common!