by Gillian Gill
“is there nobody commonplace?”: Cameron, Victorian Photographs, p. 18.
“in poetry and fiction and”: Ibid. I gather from this volume that Julia Cameron had shown an interest in photography before she began to take pictures, having corresponded on the subject with her close friend Sir J.F.W. Herschel, the English astronomer who originated the terms “positive” and “negative.”
“The gift from those I loved”: Ibid., p. 10.
Catharine Beecher and Isabella Beeton: The hugely successful Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management was published in London in 1861. In the United States, Catharine Beecher (the older half-sister of Harriet Beecher Stowe) published many books, including A Treatise on Domestic Economy for the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School (1841), Miss Beecher’s Domestic Receipts Book (1846), and Principles of Domestic Science (1870).
“became truly artistic, instead”: Entry for Julia Margaret Cameron, Dictionary of National Biography, 8th ed. (London: Smith & Elder, 1886).
Magda Kearney, an Australian: The monograph “Julia Margaret Cameron Biography: The Victoria and Albert Museum,” by Magda Kearney, curator of the National Portrait Gallery of Australia, can be found on the internet.
her artfully ill-focused lens: Julia Cameron explained, in “Annals of My Glasshouse,” how her early untutored efforts at photography developed into artistry: “I began with no knowledge of the art. I did not know where to place my dark box, how to focus my sitter, and my first successes in my out-of-focus pictures were flukes. That is to say that when focusing and coming to something which was, to my eyes, very beautiful, I stopped there instead of screwing in the lens to the more definite focus which all other photographers insist on.” Cameron, Victorian Photographs, p. 10.
Another was May Hillier: May Hillier became Julia Cameron’s parlor maid, and then, according to Virginia Woolf’s account, “was sought in marriage by a rich man’s son, filled the position with dignity and competence, and in 1878 enjoyed an income of two thousand four hundred pounds a year.” Woolf, introduction to Cameron, Victorian Photographs, p. 17.
When in a recent exhibition: In the summer of 2014, I managed to catch the small, overcrowded exhibit on Virginia Woolf at the National Portrait Gallery in London, superbly curated by Frances Spalding. The reproduction in Cameron, Victorian Photographs, does not do justice to the image of the widowed Julia Duckworth.
Hemileia vastatrix: This is the same fungus that in the twenty-first century wiped out so many coffee plantations in South America and Central America. I am grateful to my daughter, Catherine Gill, for this information.
“Julia is slicing up Ceylon”: Woolf, in Cameron, Victorian Photographs, p. 18.
“There was peace”: Ibid.
“A rather strange-looking lady”: Henrietta Garnett, Anny: A Life of Anne Thackeray Ritchie (London: Chatto and Windus, 2005), p. 229.
“birds fluttering in”: Woolf, in Cameron, Victorian Photographs, p. 19.
skit called “Freshwater”: Freshwater: A Comedy by Virginia Woolf (New York: Harvest, 1976) includes drawings by Edward Gorey and an excellent introduction by the editor, Lucio B. Ruotolo. The inspiration for publishing the little book seems to have come from Quentin Bell and was part of the family’s efforts to save Charleston and rehabilitate the Bloomsbury image.
3. High Society
“Aunt Virginia, it is plain”: Woolf, “Sketch of the Past,” in Moments of Being, p. 88.
the duchess had come: Woolf, “22 Hyde Park Gate,” in Moments of Being, p. 164.
Adeline’s sister, Isabella: The cover of Ros Black’s biography shows the portrait by G. F. Watts of Isabella Caroline Somers-Cocks, whose long oval face, dark hair, large dark eyes, and thick black eyebrows suggest her Bengali ancestry.
Plantagenet John of Gaunt: John of Gaunt had several children by his mistress Katherine Swynford. John and Katherine were finally able to marry, and their Beaufort children were legitimized and permitted to marry into royal families. Perhaps some of my readers will recall the 1954 bestselling novel Katherine, by Anya Seton, and several recent novels based on Katherine’s life by Alison Weir.
officially anathema: The 1886 Labouchere Amendment, making homosexual acts, even between consenting adults and in private, illegal in the United Kingdom, is notorious in gay historiography. However, as Graham Robb points out in his important book Strangers: Homosexual Love in the Nineteenth Century, p. 20, it was a parliamentary reaction to a sensational press campaign that aroused public ire and merely made explicit what had long been on the books. As Robb shows, there were very few prosecutions under the sodomy laws in England—Paris was far more dangerous for gay men. Following the Labouchere Amendment, the prosecutions ticked up only a small notch, according to Robb and also Matt Houlbrook, in Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis, 1918–1957 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).
“horrible and foul crime”: Black, A Talent for Humanity, pp. 30–31.
“the land of Michelangelesque”: Bell, Virginia Woolf, vol. 1, p. 15. Following the police raid on the male brothel on Cleveland Street in 1890, Lord Henry was joined in exile in Italy by his younger brother Lord Arthur Somerset, who, unlike the unfortunate Rev. Veck and a poor clerk called (!) Newlove, who both got prison sentences after the raid, was allowed by the police to escape to the Continent. There, according to Robb, Lord Arthur lived for some thirty-seven years with his male lover.
Encouraged by middle-class: The Wikipedia entry on Lady Isabella Caroline Somerset includes a 1904 photograph of her with the religious writer Hannah Whitall Smith, Mary Berenson (wife of the art historian Bernard Berenson), Karin Costelloe Stephen (wife of the psychoanalyst Adrian Stephen, Virginia Woolf’s brother), and Ray Strachey (wife of Oliver Strachey, Lytton Strachey’s brother).
The Bedford-Beaufort connection: Sir Leslie Stephen’sMausoleum Book, edited with an introduction by Alan Bell (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), p. 75.
“The children of Sir Leslie”: Leonard Woolf, Beginning Again: An Autobiography of the Years 1911 to 1918 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1963; published also in London, 1964), p. 74.
“my first appearance as”: The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. 1, p. 316. In an August 1901 letter to her cousin Emma Vaughan, Virginia Woolf describes meeting their aunt—her namesake Virginia Somers. “One night we [that is, she and her siblings and their father while on holiday] gave a small dinner party to which Bea Cameron [Julia Cameron’s grandson] came, and when we came up for dinner we saw a large white form artistically grouped on the sofa—it was Aunt Virginia! . . . I can never quite see Aunt V’s surpassing charm or beauty. The charm at any rate need not have vanished though the beauty has almost entirely. Save her great eyes, which are beautiful—and her enthusiasms and loud whispers and French manners, I think she was rather disappointing.” The Letters of Virginia Woolf, vol. 1, p. 44.
“Am I a Snob?”: “Am I a Snob?” is included in Woolf, Moments of Being, pp. 203–20. The Bloomsbury Memoir Club had inherited from the meetings of the Cambridge Apostles the custom of asking a speaker to give a talk on a specific, often frothy, and apparently inconsequential topic. Woolf acknowledges this tradition and the influence of G. E. Moore when she remarks, “Dominated, I suspect, by the iron rod of old Cambridge, dominated too by that moral sense which grows stronger in Maynard the older he gets, that stern desire to preserve our generation in its integrity, and to protect the younger generation from its folly, Maynard never boasts” (p. 206).
Beatrice Thynne: The rather pathetic Beatrice Thynne crops up quite often in Virginia Woolf’s letters and diary. Woolf remarks of her in May 1919: “Beatrice Thynne has inherited a quarter of a million; two large properties & one of the finest libraries in England. She has no idea what to make of them; visits them in a distracted way to see which she’d like to live in; can’t make up her mind to settle in either & finally spends most of her time in Gray’s Inn, looked after by a charwoman. Her only acknowledgement of her balance is that
now & then she pulls out strings of pearls & parades the squares of the Inn, with such effect that Lady H. Somerset has to beg her to remove them.” The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. 1, p. 274. I quote this passage in full, both because this is Woolf practicing her character sketches but also showing that, despite the sharp disagreement over the Stephens’ removal to Bloomsbury from Kensington, Woolf was still bumping into people from her parents’ world, like her mother’s first cousin Lady Henry Somerset.
4. Finders Keepers
No one, it seemed, was keen: In her diary entry for December 28, 1919, Woolf notes that the family is negotiating the sale of 22 Hyde Park Gate, fifteen years after the death of Sir Leslie Stephen. The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. 1, p. 317.
“Thoby made £1000”: The Letters of Virginia Woolf, vol. 1, p. 232. In 1930, Vanessa Bell was seeking to sell another drawing by Thackeray, which was in her studio, to the Pierpont Morgan Library for five hundred pounds. The Letters of Virginia Woolf, vol. 4, pp. 155 and 156.
as a “fine fellow”: Here I am closely following what Virginia Woolf writes about Jacob. Flanders, the central character in her novel Jacob’s Room, is based on her brother Thoby. The phrase “stumble through a play” is Woolf’s.
pretty, vivacious Irene Noel: Irene Noel was “the heir to her father Frank Noel of Achmetaga. Thoby Stephen was competing with his Cambridge friend Desmond MacCarthy for Irene’s hand but she married Philip Baker, who thenceforth was known as Philip Noel Baker.” The Diary of Virginia Woolf, vol. 1, note, p. 115.
Smith allowed Anne and Harriet: Gordon N. Ray, Thackeray: The Age of Wisdom, 1847–1863 (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1958), p. 423.
“a dowry for Laura”: Annan, Leslie Stephen, p. 72.
That was a salary to make: “Cornhill paid its contributors handsomely, and the salary of five hundred pounds a year, which George Smith offered Stephen, not only exceeded what Longman (publisher of Fraser’s Magazine and also in search of an editor) could pay, but it enabled him to give up some of his journalism so that he could settle to the task of writing . . . The History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century.” Annan, Leslie Stephen, p. 66.
“Stephen’s most important”: Ibid., pp. 86 and 87.
“I feel as if we owed more”: John Aplin, A Thackeray Family Biography: Volume 2, Memory and Legacy, 1876–1919 (Cambridge, UK: Lutterworth Press, 2011), p. 189.
“When I read Dickens”: Spalding, Vanessa Bell, p. 13.
“What is it to be a gentleman?”: Woolf, “A Sketch of the Past,” in Moments of Being, p. 116.
5. William and Isabella
Prince Albert was at: For a careful look at the origins and development of Prince Albert’s sexual obsessions and their effects on his wife, his children, and English society in general, see my book We Two: Victoria and Albert—Rulers, Partners, Rivals (New York: Ballantine Books, 2009).
they were largely taboo: Writing for a preponderantly male readership, novelists in the Great Tradition of French fiction—Stendhal, Balzac, Maupassant, Flaubert, Zola—had far greater freedom to explore the sexual mores of all classes of society. A cultural abyss separates the two nineteenth-century masterpieces David Copperfield (1850) and Madame Bovary (1856).
William Makepeace Thackeray: This discussion of the Thackeray family is based on the following works: Gordon N. Ray, Thackeray: The Uses of Adversity, 1811–1846 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1955) and Thackeray: The Age of Wisdom, 1847–1863; John Aplin, A Thackeray Family Biography, Volume 1: The Inheritance of Genius, 1798–1875 (Cambridge, UK: Lutterworth Press, 2010) and Volume 2: Memory and Legacy, 1876–1919; Winifred Gérin, Anne Thackeray Ritchie: A Biography (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1981); and Henrietta Garnett, Anny: A Life of Anne Thackeray Ritchie.
Sophia and Virginia Pattle: Garnett says that the Pattle sisters were in France, staying with their grandmother in Versailles. Anny, p. 22.
former French mistress: Ibid., p. 17. Garnett states matter-of-factly (p. 44) that Thackeray always had mistresses, a fact that standard biographies of the writer, using the same archival material, were careful to omit.
Madness, Thackeray was discovering: In middle age, Jane Shawe, Isabella’s sister, also became insane. Anny Thackeray Ritchie did what she could to help her aunt, who was poor as well as mad.
Cowan Bridge School: Cowan Bridge appears as Lowood School in Jane Eyre, and in the person of Helen Burns, Charlotte Brontë gives us her memory of the life and death of her brilliant eldest sister, Maria.
his mistress Ellen Ternan: See, notably, Claire Tomalin, The Invisible Woman (1990) and Charles Dickens: A Life (1999).
also had a secret life: Even his extremely guarded biographer Gordon Ray, writing in the 1950s, establishes that, as a young man, Thackeray explored the highly erotic world of French cabarets and masked balls. Henrietta Garnett discovered in the Thackeray private papers that, after leaving Cambridge, Thackeray had a longstanding affair with a French governess. Ray notes circumspectly that, when on vacation in Europe with his extended family, Thackeray would occasionally disappear for weeks, giving no explanation. Furthermore, not all of Thackeray’s secret life may have involved women. At Cambridge, he moved comfortably in the territory between homosociality and homosexuality, forming lifelong friendships with two men, Edward Fitzgerald and Richard Monckton Milnes, who today are confidently listed by queer historians in the column of notable gay writers. When Thackeray came into the public eye after Vanity Fair, Fitzgerald wrote to reassure him that he need not worry for his reputation. Fitzgerald had destroyed all the letters Thackeray had sent him when they were young students. Thackeray himself, according to the biographer John Aplin, burned all his youthful correspondence.
renegade royal historians: On the issue of the prince consort’s possible homosexual relationships, see my book We Two, pp. 409–10, note 135.
“She had been her father’s”: Woolf, Night and Day, p. 58.
Historians, novelists, and playwrights: To name but a few, see Steven Marcus, The Other Victorians (1966); Phyllis Rose, Parallel Lives (1983); Colm Tóibín, The Master (2004); the five volumes of Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience: From Victoria to Freud (1984–98); and Tom Stoppard, The Invention of Love (1997).
6. Anny and Minny
Adelaide Kemble Sartoris: Again, it is useful to see how important it was for Virginia and Vanessa Stephen to have in Anne Thackeray Ritchie a living link to the high Victorian period in all its complexity. Adelaide and Fanny Kemble not only had outstanding careers in the performing arts as young women but also managed the tricky transformation into respectable society matrons.
Margaret Thackeray: Victorian family life is odd in all sorts of ways. Margie Thackeray at age twenty married one of Sir Richmond Ritchie’s brothers—in fact, his older brother Gerald. Thus, Margie was the distant cousin, adoptive daughter, and sister-in-law of Anne Thackeray Ritchie.
modern versions: Thackeray Ritchie’s updating of fairy stories makes her a forerunner of Angela Carter, Stephen Sondheim, and the Disney Company. I recommend her Five Old Friends (1875), available on Kindle.
Leslie Stephen never went: Annan, Leslie Stephen, p. 99.
the Yorkshire Sodom: On the sadomasochistic tastes of Richard Monckton Milnes, see my book Nightingales, pp. 223–32.
“rode round to offer”: H. Garnett, Anny, p. 31.
companionship and respect: See Annan, Leslie Stephen, p. 29.
“absolutely faultless”: Sir Leslie Stephen’sMausoleum Book, pp. 31–34. The praise is effusive: “I must dwell a little more upon her beauty: for beauty . . . was of the very essence of her nature. I have never seen—I have no expectation that I shall ever see—anyone whose outward appearance might be described as so absolutely faultless . . . Her beauty was of the kind that seems to imply . . . equal beauty of soul, refinement, nobility and tenderness of character; and which yet did not imply as some beauty called ‘spiritual’ may seem to do, any lack of ‘material’ beauty” . . . and so on.
“a shad
e out of control”: L. Woolf, Beginning Again, pp. 70–71.
“[Mrs. Hilbery’s] large blue eyes”: Woolf, Night and Day, p. 9. Woolf’s novel was published very soon after Thackeray Ritchie’s death, and the Ritchie “cousins” Hester and William were, according to the biographer Henrietta Garnett, deeply offended by Woolf’s portrayal of their mother. See Garnett, Anny, p. 266. They had a point: their mother had been meeting literary deadlines since the age of sixteen, had a long list of published books to her name, and had successfully edited and written the biographical introduction to The Complete Works of William Makepeace Thackeray.
character based on Leonard: I read the relationship of Ralph Denham and Katharine Hilbery that Virginia Woolf develops in Night and Day as based closely on her own courtship with Leonard. Denham’s confession of his love to Katharine—“I’ve made you my standard since I saw you. I’ve dreamt about you, I’ve thought of nothing but you, you represent to me the only reality in the world” (p. 169)—is based on things Leonard actually said to Virginia during their courtship. No wonder she married him. And whereas men have often said such things to women in the height of passion, few live up to them in marriage, as Leonard did.
she is basing Katharine: See especially the page-long letter Woolf composes for Mrs. Hilbery, relaying to Mrs. Mulvain, her sister-in-law, the news that Katharine is engaged to William Rodney, a man both eminently suitable and somehow not quite up to snuff. Night and Day, p. 81. When Mrs. Hilbery writes of her daughter “Of course Katharine has what he [William, her fiancé] does not. She does command, she isn’t nervous: it comes naturally to her to rule and control,” Virginia is definitely thinking of her sister Vanessa.
7. Virginia Woolf’s Mad, Bad Sister