It was a childhood marred by more of the emotional and physical upheavals that had already scarred their young lives. The first trauma was the increasing incoherence of their uncle William, with whom they seem initially to have spent much of their holidays.6 William Kirkpatrick had retired to a relatively small but elegant townhouse in Exeter, an easy carriage drive from Sir John Kennaway, his ‘oldest and most esteemed friend’.7 Southernhay House lay in the lee of the crumbling Norman towers of Exeter Cathedral, the centrepiece of the smart new development of Southernhay, which prided itself on being to Exeter what the Royal Crescent was to Bath. The house lay in the middle of the two wings of the crescent, the only detached residence in the whole development. With its pair of side-wings, fluted classical pillars and a pedimented portico, it stood assertively in the middle of the other flat-fronted Georgian townhouses with their fan windows and wooden shutters, somewhat like a miniature redbrick version of the Hyderabad Residency re-erected in Devon. It was also remarkable in the English townscape for one single Oriental flourish that distinguished it from everything around it: a pair of twisted old Indian palm trees standing sentinel in front of the house, presumably planted by William to make the children—or indeed himself—feel at home amid the oaks, chestnuts and holly trees of Southernhay Green.ir
William was now an invalid. He had never recovered from either his bowel complaint or his ‘rheumatic gout’, and by 1809 he was confined to a chair. Judging by the pain he suffered and his increasingly erratic handwriting, he may have been taking large quantities of laudanum to help soothe his condition.8 But despite his illness, and the laudanum, he worked prolifically at his Oriental studies. He helped select a library for the Company, and wrote an account of his travels in Nepal.9 Increasingly, however, he became obsessed with the figure of Tipu Sultan. Before William had left India, James had in September 1801 sent him a huge wagonload of documents which had been taken from Tipu’s chancellery in Seringapatam.is These documents William now worked up for publication in his 1811 volume Select Letters of Tippoo Sultaun, carefully sifting and selecting his material with a view to showing Tipu in the most fearsome light possible.10
As the decade progressed, William’s interests seem to have centred more and more on Tipu’s astronomical and astrological learning. William’s letter books in the India Office contain a series of fascinating letters that he wrote to Mark Wilks, Lord Clive’s Private Secretary during the Clive Enquiry into James’s love life, who had gone on to become Resident in Mysore, and the author of a series of important studies of both Mughal metaphysics and the political history of Tipu’s reign.11 William’s correspondence with Wilks deals with increasing singlemindedness on Tipu’s astrological system, and seems to hint at his growing conviction that Tipu had correctly forecast the time of his own death by a series of esoteric astrological calculations.
In November 1809 Wilks sent William the answer to his query as to the exact moment—according to Tipu’s new Mysore calendar—of Tipu’s birth ‘in the year Angeera on the 17th of the month Margeser. Angeera is the 6th of the cycle and corresponds to 1752-3.’12 From William’s last letters emerges an extraordinary picture of a man, clearly aware that he is dying, taking larger and larger doses of laudanum, obsessively studying the Mysore system of astrology, and all the while (one grows increasingly to suspect) making calculations, casting horoscopes, and believing that he is onto something, that he really does hold, almost within his grasp, some sort of universal Philosopher’s Stone. Whether William, in the haze of an opium addiction, really was trying to calculate the date of his own death in the same way that he clearly believed Tipu had succeeded in doing, must remain a matter of speculation; but it is certainly a possibility.13
A few weeks before he died in the summer of 1812, William sold all his possessions from his Exeter townhouse;it and on 22 August he overdosed on laudanum ‘near London’, aged fifty-eight.14
It remains uncertain whether the death was a suicide or not.
Another tragedy followed close on William’s overdose.
A month later, while the family was still in mourning, the eleven-year-old Sahib Allum, or William George, as he was now known, fell into ‘a copper of boiling water’ and was disabled for life, with at least one of his limbs requiring amputation.15 A letter in shaky old man’s handwriting from the Handsome Colonel to Kitty (as Katherine was now known), written immediately after the accident, survives in the archive of their descendants. It shows the closeness of the relationship that had developed between the grieving grandfather and his ten-year-old Anglo-Indian granddaughter:
My dear Kitty,
Many affected mourners are joined with you for the calamity which has recently taken place in our Family, but you & I will bewail it together when we meet, for I cannot weep upon paper. I send you a small present which I hope will be to your Taste, and apprise you that I shall send a carriage for you on ye 28th to meet your poor brother. I remain, my dear Kitty
Your affectionate grandfather
Jas Kirkpatrick
Hollydale, 8 Sept 181216
It is the last letter to survive from the Handsome Colonel. Having outlived all but one of his sons he died six years later, in 1818, at the grand old age of eighty-nine.17 After the funeral, Kitty and William George were shunted off yet again, this time to live in rotation with their various married cousins, William Kirkpatrick’s daughters: first Clementina, Lady Louis; then Julia, who had married Edward Strachey (Mountstuart Elphinstone’s friend and former travelling companion who had stayed with James at the Hyderabad Residency in 1801); and finally Isabella Buller, who had moved back to England from Calcutta with her husband Charles, become a fervent Evangelical, and set up house on Kew Green. William George begins to fade from the picture at this point: a dreamy, disabled poet, obsessed with Wordsworth and the metaphysics of Coleridge, but sufficiently active (and attractive) to marry at the age of twenty, and to father three girls.
As William George disappears into the background in the 1820s, Kitty begins to takes centre stage. She was already attracting attention as a woman of quite remarkable beauty—as well as one, thanks to her father’s generous legacy, of unusual means. In 1822, when Kitty was aged twenty, she met the new tutor Isabella Buller had hired to teach her two sons. He was a young, unknown and struggling Scottish writer and philosopher, three years her senior. His name was Thomas Carlyle. And it was through his pen that Kitty comes suddenly into dazzling focus.
Carlyle had arrived in London off the boat from Edinburgh in the spring of 1822. It was his first visit to the city, and, as he wrote years later in his Reminiscences:That first afternoon, with its curious phenomena, is still very lively with me … Then … dash of a brave carriage driving up, and entry of a strangely complexioned young lady, with soft brown eyes and floods of bronze-red hair, really a pretty-looking, smiling, and amiable though most foreign bit of magnificence and kindly splendour, who [was] welcomed by the name ‘dear Kitty’.
Kitty Kirkpatrick [was] Charles Buller’s cousin … her birth, as I afterwards found, an Indian romance, mother a sublime Begum, father a ditto English official, mutually adoring, wedding, living withdrawn in their own private paradise, a romance famous in the East... 18
Carlyle heard a great deal about Kitty that first week in London. He was staying with his childhood friend, the fiery Evangelical preacher Edward Irving, at 7 Myddelton Terrace. As Irving was too poor to furnish his own house, two of his most ardent admirers had done so for him at a cost of £500, a princely sum in those days. The two ‘rich and open-handed ladies’ were Mrs Buller’s sister, Julia Strachey, and her cousin, Kitty Kirkpatrick.19 Both were religious—Julia Strachey especially so—and attracted to the Evangelical Clapham Sect, ‘whose pious members, it was said, would ask each other at intervals “Shall we Engage?” and drop to their knees’.20 Irving, with his gaunt features and black broad-brimmed hat, was one of the Sect’s star performers, and crowds numbering in the thousands would eagerly squeeze into the Caledonian Ch
apel to await one of his breathless three-hour sermons.
Over the months that followed Carlyle saw more and more of Kitty, and became increasingly fascinated with her lovely voice, her sense of humour, ‘a slight merry curl of the upper lip, the carriage of her head, the quaint little things she said, and her low-toned laugh’.21 Soon after their first meeting, Carlyle was invited over to Shooter’s Hill, the Stracheys’ country house. ‘I remember entering the little winding avenue,’ he later wrote, ‘and seeing, in a kind of open conservatory or verandah on our approaching the house, the effulgent vision of “dear kitty” buried among the roses and almost buried under them … the before and after and all the other incidents of that first visit are quite lost to me ... ’22
Although Carlyle was already involved in an intense (though at this stage largely epistolary) relationship with the formidably clever and acerbic Jane Welsh of Haddington, East Lothian, whom he would later marry, the young philosopher clearly fell a little in love with Kitty. Soon after he got to know her he wrote to Jane:This Kitty is a singular and very pleasing creature, a little blackeyed, auburn haired brunette, full of kindliness and humour, and who never, I believe, was angry at any creature for a moment in her life. Tho’ twenty one and not unbeautiful, the sole mistress of herself and fifty thousand pounds, she is as meek and modest as a Quakeress … Good Kitty, would you or I were half as happy as this girl. But her Mother was a Hindoo Princess (whom her father fought for and scaled walls for); it lies in the blood, and philosophy can do little to help us.23
Jane, predictably enough, grew to become deeply jealous of this constant talk of Kitty in Carlyle’s letters. ‘I congratulate you on your present situation,’ she wrote, acid dripping from every stroke of her pen,with such a picture of domestic felicity before your eyes, and this ‘singular and very pleasing creature’ to charm away the blue-devils, you can hardly fail to be as happy as the day is long. Miss Kitty Kirkpatrick—Lord what an ugly name! Oh pretty, dear, delightful, Kitty! I am not a bit jealous of her, not I indeed—Hindoo princess though she be! Only you may as well never let me hear you mention her name again … Oh thou Goose! Are you mad? Has Miss Kitty Kirkpatrick turned your head?24
Jane’s jealousy became all the more acute when Kitty, Carlyle and the Stracheys set off on a trip to Paris in the autumn of 1824, during which, according to Carlyle’s later account, Julia Strachey seems to have tacitly pushed the two together.25 Jane’s response when she heard about this trip was characteristically forthright: ‘Paris? Art thou frantic? Art thou dreaming? Or has the Hindoo Princess actually bewitched thee that thou hast brought thy acid visage into this land of fops and pastry cooks, where Vanity and Sensuality have set up their chosen shrine?’26
Two years later, with Kitty still very much at the centre of Carlyle’s life and letters, Jane continued to shoot off jealous darts in her direction: ‘Your ‘’Rosy-fingered Morn”, the Hindoo Princess, where is she?’27 Or: ‘There is Catharina Aurora Kirkpatrick for instance, who has £50,000 and a princely lineage, and “never was out of humour in her life”; with such a “singularly pleasing creature” and so much fine gold you could hardly fail to find yourself admirably well off.’28
As Jane Welsh was all too aware, Kitty was indeed a woman of considerable means, and Carlyle was only a tutor. But ironically, despite the former’s Indian blood and the latter’s subsequent fame, marriage to Carlyle would have been regarded as inappropriate for Kitty, due to the perceived disparity in class and status between the two, though they were clearly and openly attracted to one another.iu As Kitty later explained to one of her friends (taking a swipe at Jane in the process), ‘He was then the tutor to my cousin, Charles Buller, and had made no name for himself; so of course I was told that any such idea could not be thought of for a moment. What could I do with everyone against it?iv Now anyone might be proud to be his wife, and he has married a woman quite beneath him.’29
In 1828, Isabella Buller’s eldest son Charles wrote to tell Carlyle the news of the latest tragedy in Kitty’s life: the death of her beloved brother William George at the age of only twenty-seven: ‘We have some expectation of seeing Miss Kirkpatrick soon, but she is in great trouble,’ wrote Buller. ‘Her brother William, perhaps you already knew, died in May after a painful and lingering illness. His poor young wife has gone mad and Kitty, after all this, has been in a very wearisome dispute with her sister respecting the care of her brother’s children.’30
A year later, possibly on the rebound, Kitty finally found the love, support and stability that had always eluded her, in the person of a nephew of Sir John Kennaway, the dashing Captain James Winslowe Phillipps of the 7th Hussars.iw They married on 21 November 1829.31 Carlyle, himself now clearly jealous, dismissed Phillipps (quite inaccurately) as ‘an idle ex-Captain of Sepoys’;32 but the marriage was a passionate one, and in Phillipps’ love letters to Kitty, still in the possession of their descendants, he assures her that ‘How sincerely & devotedly I love you, words cannot express’.33
Shortly after this, Carlyle began work on his celebrated though almost unreadable (and indeed now little-read) novel Sartor Resartus (’The Tailor Retailored’). This deeply enigmatic book—even by the standards of the other work produced by the Sage of Ecclefechan—aimed to take on the great issues of Faith and Justice through the curious guise of a History and Philosophy of Clothing by the German Professor of Things in General, the ‘Visionary Pedant’ Diogenes Teufelsdröckh. At the centre of the narrative of the book lies the story of Professor Teufelsdröckh’s relationship with the aristocratic Zähdarm family and his fascination for Blumine, who having made the Professor ‘immortal with a kiss’ then ‘resigned herself to wed some other’. Teufelsdröckh meets Blumine at an ‘Aesthetic Tea’ in the garden house of Frau Zähdarm, where she sits embowered in a cluster of roses. She is a brunette (‘dusky red’), young, hazel-eyed, beautiful and somebody’s cousin, ‘a many-tinted radiant aurora … this fairest of Orient Light bringers … his whole heart and soul were hers’.34
At the time of publication, and for about forty years after, while the book was still being eagerly read, there was a fierce debate as to the identity of Blumine, with Jane Welsh Carlyle, Margaret Gordon (Carlyle’s first love) and Kitty Kirkpatrick all canvassed as potential candidates.35 No one in the Strachey family, however, had any doubt. As Lady Strachey remarked to her son George on reading it, ‘The book is as plain as a pikestaff. Teufelsdröckh is Thomas [Carlyle] himself. The Zähdarmes are your uncle and aunt Buller. Toughgut is young Charles Buller. Philistine is Irving. The duenna cousin is myself. The rose garden is our garden with roses at Shooter’s Hill, and the Rose Goddess [Blumine] is Kitty.’36 According to George Strachey, ‘That “Blumine” personified Miss Kirkpatrick has always passed in the family for a certainty, requiring no more discussion than the belief that Nelson stood on the column in Trafalgar Square.’37
Kitty herself clearly had no doubt that she was Blumine. Indeed she was once heard to take on an embarrassed Carlyle with the forthright words: ‘ ‘’You know you were never made immortal in that manner!” … where upon they both laughed.’38
Six years after finding herself the romantic heroine of one of the most bizarre novels to be written in Victorian England, in May 1841 Kitty was visiting Mrs Duller, a childhood friend, when she was taken to tea with one of Mrs Duller’s country neighbours who lived in a grand Berkshire mansion named Swallowfield, to the south of Reading. She had never been to the house before, nor did she know the owners. She could therefore have had little inkling of what she would find inside.
To Mrs Duller’s amazement, Kitty walked through the front door of the house and promptly burst ‘into floods of tears … and was much affected’. On the stairs, instantly recognisable, was the portrait of her and her brother painted by Chinnery just before they left India, thirty-six years earlier.
Swallowfield, it turned out, was the house of Henry Russell, now Sir Henry Russell, a name Kitty may have dimly remembered from her childhood. R
ussell himself was away in London on business that day, and his second wife, a French woman named Clothilde, gave the ladies tea and promised to find out from her husband how it was that he had somehow acquired the Chinnery portrait.39ix Russell eventually wrote to Kitty explaining that it had been given to him after Khair un-Nissa’s death in 1813, and promised that he would leave her the picture in his will; but he did not offer to hand it over immediately, and seems to have made no attempt to meet the woman whom he must have remembered as a little girl in the Residency mahal. His reticence was hardly surprising; after all, there was clearly a limit to how much of the truth he could tell Kitty.
Russell had been back in England for nearly twenty years, having left India in deep disgrace with the Company, but with the redeeming compensation of having hoarded away a phenomenal fortune for his premature retirement. Fearing he might be humiliatingly removed from office, he had resigned as Resident at Hyderabad in 1820, after nine years in the job. Though he did not know it, even as he packed up and headed off towards Masulipatam for the last time, a set of furious letters were in transit from the Court of Directors in London ordering ‘that Mr Russell be immediately removed from the Residency of Hyderabad and that he not be employed again at any other court’.40
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