Virginia Woolf

by Gillian Gill

  From her mother’s papers Woolf learned that, at a time when English women were slowed to a walk by widening crinolines and tightening stays, the Pattle women when at home darted about in cool, form-fitting garments that gestured toward the sari and suggested a dance. And if, chatting among themselves, the sisters lapsed into the Hindustani of their childhood and raised their arms in laughter—the bracelets on their wrists chinking, the precious paisley scarfs slipping off their shoulders—old East India Company hands were transported back to lazy, fragrant evenings in Mughal gardens, smoking hookahs on marble verandas to the steady rhythm of the punkahs.

  The bracelets, the shawls, and the infectious laugh came down in the family from the Pattle sisters to their daughters and granddaughters. When Vanessa and Virginia Stephen as tiny girls watched in delight as their mother, then still young and vivacious, transformed herself for an evening party, they were, without knowing it, falling under the old Pattle magic. And when Vanessa Bell redecorated her home after her marriage, she draped the furniture in the Pattle paisley shawls.

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  For Woolf, a writer who had always been interested in resurrecting famous women of the past and who by the 1920s had come to identify herself as a feminist, the story of Julia Pattle Cameron (1815–1879) was especially exciting. Julia was the second Pattle sister and, by all accounts, the ugly duckling of the original swanlike septet. In the portrait we have of her by Watts, we see a young woman with a long, oval face, dark hair and eyes, and the firm dark brows of the family women down the ages. For a woman known for her boundless energy and sudden enthusiasms, her expression in this painting is surprisingly melancholy and reflective. Hair color apart, she looks very much like Virginia Woolf at the same age.

  Surrounded by sisters who were acclaimed beauties, Julia Pattle was self-conscious about her own looks, but she had an eye for beauty, and like Woolf’s painter character Lily Briscoe in To the Lighthouse, an urge to create it. As she wrote in an 1874 autobiographical fragment, “I longed to arrest all beauty that came before me.” Given a chance, Julia Cameron thought, she might become an artist, but that chance was slow to come. In mid-nineteenth-century England, upper-middle-class women dabbled a good deal in the plastic arts as they did in music, but there was no path for them to take into art as career or profession.

  In her early twenties, Julia Pattle was sent, we are told to our surprise, to South Africa to find a husband, but when that did not work out she returned to the Calcutta of her birth and there fell in love with and married Charles Hay Cameron. He was a brilliant lawyer some twenty years her senior, with a long and distinguished career already behind him. In 1835, Charles Cameron was appointed fourth member to the Supreme Council of India, a prestigious new administrative position, and for some twenty years, in the oppressive heat of Calcutta, Julia had her hands full as wife to a prominent jurist and educational reformer, mother to five sons and a daughter, and a leader in her community.

  Julia Margaret Cameron

  Since the governor-general of the East India Company at that time was not married, Mrs. Cameron was the first lady of British India, but there was nothing of the social butterfly and little obviously of the snob about her. Fluent in Hindustani since childhood, she communicated easily with the local citizens and actively seconded in private life her husband’s public labors to bring European education to India. Her sympathies were as wide as they were passionate, and her interest in liberal causes went far beyond India. In 1848, for example, she was busy raising money for victims of the Irish famine, not a popular cause in England at the time.

  When the Camerons installed themselves on the Isle of Wight in the early 1850s, the flood of remarkable people that washed over Dimbola Lodge every summer was overwhelming for some visitors. Caroline Amelia Stephen, Leslie Stephen’s sister, her niece Virginia Woolf reports, was once heard to ask plaintively “is there nobody commonplace?” after she watched four of Benjamin Jowett’s Balliol men drinking brandy and water while Tennyson recited “Maud” and Mr. Cameron, “wearing a coned hat, a veil, and several coats paced the lawn which his wife in a fit of enthusiasm had created during the night.”

  After a few years in England, despite her growing collection of famous and fascinating friends, her eager involvement in every aspect of Pattledom, her massive correspondence, and her social activism, for the first time in twenty-five years, Mrs. Cameron, the former vicereine of India, had time on her hands. As Virginia Woolf puts it, having hitherto dissipated her overflowing energies “in poetry and fiction and doing up houses and concocting curries and entertaining her friends,” Julia Cameron was given a camera—or a lens, as she put it—and became a photographer.

  It was her daughter, also called Julia, not her husband or one of her sons who were back in Ceylon watching the coffee plants die, who thought to give forty-nine-year-old Julia Cameron a camera. Like the story of Madge Watts, Agatha Christie’s older sister, daring young Agatha to write a murder mystery, this story of the gift of a camera to Julia Cameron is one of those legendary, apparently random moments when a woman’s life veers and takes a bold new heading. Soon after the death of her daughter, in the 1874 autobiographical fragment called “Annals of My Glasshouse,” Julia Cameron wrote, “The gift from those I loved so tenderly added more and more impulse to my deeply seated love of the beautiful and from the first moment I handled my lens with a tender ardour, and it has become to me as a living thing with voice and memory and creative vigour . . . I longed to arrest all beauty that came before me, and at length, the longing has been satisfied.”

  Of course, receiving a camera and using it are two very different things, as many of us even in this digital age have discovered. Collodion wet-plate photography circa 1865 was not a pursuit for the lazy or the dim. Fortunately, Julia Cameron was neither, so her friends were not entirely surprised when she began, after some trial and error, to produce successful images.

  That, unlike so many early photographers, Mrs. Cameron kept excellent records of her photographs and preserved the plates with meticulous care in a converted glasshouse might also have been expected of an educated woman in the age of domestic gurus like Catharine Beecher and Isabella Beeton. What did surprise the friends of the Camerons was that their dear Julia, so busy, so restless, so scatty, proved to have both a vision of what she wanted to achieve with her lens and the talent to execute it. In the words of her niece Julia Stephen, photography in Julia Cameron’s hands “became truly artistic, instead of possessing merely mechanical excellence.” Cameron began to submit her pictures for international competitions and to win medals, and she achieved a certain fame. Magda Kearney, an Australian scholar, tells us in an important article that Cameron put together albums that she gave to her supporters and friends, had her images exhibited in the British Museum and the South Kensington Museum, and through the Colnaghi Gallery had her most popular images reproduced as carbon prints.

  Given the wearisome seven to twelve minutes needed for the exposures at that time, landscapes and still lifes might have been an obvious direction to take for a neophyte photographer. Mountains do not fidget, after all, and an apple does not scratch its nose. But the beauty Julia Cameron was interested in was of the human body. She aimed to capture on collodion gel not just the outer appearance but the inner truth of the men and women who peopled her domestic landscape, and once she had chosen her subjects, she was inexorable. Illustrious friends like Charles Darwin and Alfred Tennyson sat rigid for interminable minutes in front of her artfully ill-focused lens, and the images she produced of Victorian Grand Old Men now grace our biographies and history books.

  But the photographs for which Julia Cameron was most cherished in her lifetime and that are today most prized by the art world are of the beautiful young women she knew. Ellen Terry was one of these, captured just before she was abandoned by her disagreeable husband, G. F. Watts. Another was May Hillier, the daughter of an Irish beggar woman. Famously impulsive, generous, and indifferent to social boundaries, Julia
Cameron took May into her home, educated her with her own children, and launched her into middle-class society and affluence. But Julia Cameron’s favorite subjects were members of her family, including her niece and namesake Julia Jackson.

  Anyone who has the chance to see an actual Cameron print up close will agree that no reproduction quite does justice to her art. When in a recent exhibition I found myself face-to-face with a portrait of the widowed Julia Jackson Duckworth, I could for the first time really appreciate Cameron’s expert handling of light and shadow, the subtle gradation of tone, the exacting yet revealing choice of pose as the subject turns her long slender neck as if to evade our inquisitive gaze.

  Around 1870 the hitherto thriving coffee plantations in (then) Ceylon were wiped out by Hemileia vastatrix, a fungus also known as coffee rust. Charles Cameron lost a great deal of money and decided that he could no longer afford to live in England, though he seems not to have sold the Freshwater property or the small house he also owned near London. In 1876, the Camerons moved back to Ceylon, where at least one of their sons had turned to planting tea.

  Charles Cameron had never been quite happy in England. He felt the cold intensely, preferred books to people, and displayed an attitude of amused resignation toward the manic schedule of social activities and house improvements maintained by his wife. Charles was once heard to remark in reference to his beloved coffee plantation in Sri Lanka, “Julia is slicing up Ceylon.” Thus, he was more elated than depressed to be forced by financial difficulties to go back to the original Dimbola. “There was peace, there was warmth, there were the monkeys and the elephants which he had once lived among as a friend and a brother,” as Virginia Woolf puts it.

  Julia’s feelings were probably rather different from her husband’s, as she had built such a vibrant personal and professional life for herself in England. But she was unfailingly loyal to Charles and, unlike her sister Maria Jackson, who lived apart from her husband for many years, seems never to have thought of leaving Charles. Julia and Charles kept their financial problems a secret from friends, announcing out of the blue that they were going to visit their son in Ceylon but not saying that they expected to settle there again.

  Standing on board ship at Southampton, with an ivory staff in one hand and a pink rose in the other, every inch the venerable patriarch and, for once, inviting the camera, Charles watched as his wife, “grave and valiant,” bustled around to ensure that all the huge piles of luggage were safely put on board. These included two coffins packed with glass and china, and, as Virginia Woolf intuited, those coffins tell us a lot about how Julia Cameron felt as she sailed away from England.

  Julia Margaret Cameron apparently took many photographs in Ceylon, but it is unclear if any of them survive. In 1878, Charles and Julia returned to England for a visit, but they failed to get in touch with their old friends. Anne Thackeray Ritchie, who had her first child, Hester, in that year, was hurt and amazed that her beloved old friend Julia Cameron was back but never came to see her. Then, on the evening of the child’s christening, the nurse told the Ritchies an odd story. “A rather strange-looking lady” had come to the house unannounced, asked to see the baby, and put a beautiful white shawl around her. Anne Thackeray Ritchie wrote in her diary, “When I saw the white shawl I knew it came from my dear Mrs. Cameron.”

  Soon after her return to Ceylon, Julia Cameron died, at the age of sixty-four. Charles Cameron, twenty years her senior, soldiered on for several more years, managing even to pay one more visit to England. Virginia Woolf imagines the dying Julia looking out a big open window, “birds fluttering in and out . . . photographs . . . tumbling over the tables,” and dying peacefully, with the word “Beautiful” on her lips. For myself, I wonder if the death could really have been so easy and so aesthetic. Did some tropical disease lay low that bundle of energy and determination and talent, Julia Margaret Cameron, or did she finally give in to the melancholy we see in the portraits of her?

  Back in England, Julia Stephen did what she could to keep her aunt’s memory alive. In the eighth edition of the Dictionary of National Biography, we find the single-column entry “Julia Margaret Cameron, photographer,” a tiny female atoll poking up in an ocean of frothy male fame and windy self-congratulation. Julia Cameron’s entry is signed “J.P.S.” and is based, we are informed by the dictionary’s editor, on “personal knowledge.” “J.P.S.” was Julia Prinsep Stephen.

  Virginia Woolf, in her introduction to Victorian Photographs, surprisingly does not cite or refer to the DNB entry her mother had written, but we know that the proof of Julia Cameron’s creative spirit was from birth before her eyes, as a set of Cameron’s portraits hung in a dim hall at 22 Hyde Park Gate in Kensington. To Julia Stephen herself the images were reminders of childhood happiness and early married loss. For the Duckworth and Stephen children, the Cameron pictures were silent testimony to the years before their mother’s second marriage to Leslie Stephen, years of which Julia rarely spoke. They were also powerful evidence of the legendary Pattle beauty that had passed to their mother from her mother, Maria Pattle Jackson, and which Julia had passed on to all three of her daughters.

  And just as the Pattle beauty was passed on, so was the Pattle-Cameron creative impulse. Vanessa, from early childhood, determined she would be a painter. Virginia, when even younger, decided she would be a writer.

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  In the early 1920s, Woolf not only brought Julia Cameron’s photographs out of the Victorian penumbra and memorialized her great-aunt in a sparkling essay; she also dashed off a little skit called “Freshwater” to amuse her fellow Bloomsberries. One of the things that Pattledom and Bloomsbury shared, after all, was a love of theater and a passion for dressing up and putting on amateur theatricals.

  Collapsing several time periods, Woolf’s skit conjures up the antic excitement of life chez Cameron at Dimbola Lodge. Act I opens with Charles Cameron having his long white hair and beard washed while his wife is busy trying to persuade anyone who comes her way to sit—and sit!—in front of her camera. The Camerons await only the arrival of two sturdy coffins before setting sail for Sri Lanka, but in the meantime, their neighbor Alfred Tennyson drops by for a visit. The poet laureate is fleeing Farringford, his nearby property, for it has been invaded by American poetry enthusiasts. Tennyson begins to recite his famous poem “Maud” but is interrupted by the painter Watts, who is agonizing over how to draw the big toe of Mammon in his latest allegorical painting.

  All this gets on the nerves of Nelly (Ellen Terry), Watts’s wife, model, and muse, and she skips off to the beach for a swim. There she encounters Lieutenant Craig, a handsome naval officer, and they fall into each other’s arms. Craig, let it be noted, was the name that in real life Ellen Terry chose as a surname for her children. Returning to Dimbola, Nelly informs her “signior” husband, Watts, that she is leaving him. The skit ends with the unexpected arrival, dea ex machina, of another of the Camerons’ neighbors on the Isle of Wight—Queen Victoria. Her Majesty declines to sit, literally or figuratively, but she confers a peerage on Tennyson and the Order of Merit upon Watts, all of course in memoriam of dearly departed Albert.

  “Freshwater” is a romp that Virginia Woolf, with her hands full of more important literary projects, put to one side. But it was clever and said something she wanted said about the Victorian era, so in 1935 she revised the text and organized a new performance. The revised “Freshwater” was put on before a small audience of friends in the London studio of Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, and the cast list, in Woolf’s own handwriting, has come down to us.

  That list is fascinating, for it shows the comic yet insightful way Virginia Woolf was mapping Pattledom onto Bloomsbury. Virginia Woolf was in love with her artist sister, so it is no surprise that she cast Vanessa Bell as their great-aunt Julia Cameron. Virginia’s husband, Leonard Woolf, a radical thinker with a love of Ceylon, was a natural to play Charles Cameron, a man aching to get back to his plantations on that distant island. As for having th
e unconventional and highly sexed modernist painter Duncan Grant play the part of the staid and impotent old Victorian fuddy-duddy George Frederick Watts, that was a marvelous joke of Virginia’s that all Bloomsbury could appreciate. And what more could Virginia’s beautiful seventeen-year-old niece, Angelica Bell, an aspiring actress, want than to play the part of that legend of the English stage, Ellen Terry, when Ellen too was a frisky teenager?

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  High Society

  Sarah Prinsep and Julia Cameron had once been queens of Calcutta society, and after their move to England, they quickly found ways to attract England’s best and brightest to their homes. All the same, the legend of their grandfather the Chevalier de l’Etang, in Queen Marie Antoinette’s circle at Versailles, seems to have been etched into their souls, and they longed to be more than rich and bourgeois. England had its own caste system, and for a Pattle to be invited to a ball by a duchess around 1850 was about as difficult as it would be thirty years later for a Mrs. Smith from Duluth to be invited to one of Mrs. Astor’s Manhattan soirees.