The Victorians

by A. N. Wilson

  Meeting her a little later than this – at London Zoo – Georgiana Burne-Jones recalled how ‘Lizzie’s slender elegant figure – tall for those days, but I never knew her actual height – comes back to me, in a graceful and simple dress, the incarnate opposite of the “tailor-made” young lady.’ Georgiana recollected that when she went home with Lizzie:

  I see her in the little upstairs bedroom, with its lattice window, to which she carried me when we arrived, and the mass of her beautiful deep-red hair, as she took off her bonnet; she wore her hair very loosely fastened up, so that it fell in soft, heavy rings. Her complexion looked as if a rose tint lay beneath the dark skin, producing a more soft and delicate pink for the darkest flesh tones, her eyes were of a kind of golden brown – agate colour is the only word I can find to describe them – and wonderfully luminous.21

  It is not entirely inappropriate that behind the bearded gentle figure of Hunt’s Light of the World, standing with his lantern, and knocking to be let into our hearts, there should lurk those golden-brown eyes. If suffering could redeem, then poor Elizabeth Siddal would have redeemed us all.

  It was widely assumed for years, on no evidence, that Gabriel Rossetti and Elizabeth Siddal were lovers in the modern way between 1851 – the year of their so-called ‘engagement’ – and their marriage in 1860. Rossetti’s most learned biographer, Jan Marsh, has cast doubt on this and plausibly argues that Elizabeth’s misery and frustration during these years, and her subsequent decline into drug addiction, were related to Rossetti’s coyness, later neglect. Two years before he married, Rossetti probably lost his virginity, aged thirty, with a young woman who was cracking nuts in a bar in the Royal Surrey pleasure gardens, and who flicked a shell in his direction. This was Fanny Cornforth, another of the great icons of nineteenth-century painters, a large girl with abundant golden hair, pouting lips, a strong Cockney accent and a sensual laugh.

  As when the last of the paid joys of love

  wrote Rossetti, lest one should be in any doubt about how Fanny earned her living

  Has come and gone … and with one laugh of satiate bliss

  The wearied man one minute rests above

  The wearied woman, no more urged to move

  In those long throes of longing, till they glide

  Now lightlier clasped, each to the other’s side

  In joys past acting, nor past dreaming of …22

  Lizzie was an image to be adored with the heart and the eye. Sick worship can kill its object, as the lives and deaths of modern icons, pop or royalty, demonstrate. Siddal sickened and died of being worshipped as a dead Ophelia, an ethereal Beatrice. Her husband’s most loving image of her was of Beata Beatrix, the soul of Dante’s beloved, painted from memory after her drug-overdose death.

  Vulgar, pouting, sensual and strong, Fanny was destined to be housekeeper and muse to Rossetti and his friends for years.23 She was not, as it happens, the model for what I have called the companion-piece to Hunt’s Light of the World – The Awakening Conscience. This was another ‘stunner’; a teenage barmaid at the Cross Keys public house in Chelsea called Annie Miller.24 Hunt first saw her when she was swabbing beer and spit off the pub floor – she was bare-foot and her red-gold hair fell over her shoulders in flaming ropes. She was soon part of the Pre-Raphaelite circle, affecting to be shocked by Rossetti’s claim that ‘women are so much nicer when they have lost their virtue’, while loving the attention. She was one of the most successful artist’s models of her day – much disapproved of by the would-be genteel Lizzie Siddal; she was the mistress of Rossetti and was for a time Hunt’s fiancée.25 In Hunt’s view of Annie, communicated in his granddaughter’s memoir My Grandfather, His Wives and Loves, Annie is represented as a spirited girl who could be ‘trouble’: her attempts to get Hunt to educate her, marry her, find her a position are seen as potential blackmail – but how else was a girl who had grown up in a warren of rooms used as a brothel supposed to make a life for herself?

  Carlyle, initially an admirer of Hunt’s, had loathed The Light of the World – ‘You call that thing a picture of Christ!… Don’t you see that you’re helping to make people believe what you know to be false, what you don’t believe yourself?’26 The icon of the Victorian Christ – who was in fact a ‘wronged woman’ with a beard – represented that side of the Christian religion which was most under threat as the Sea of Faith ebbed away in the nineteenth century: namely a belief in the Divine Saviour, the Man-God. This was the ‘falsehood’ in which Carlyle and so many Victorian intellectuals refused to believe.

  To discard Christian morality, however, was altogether more difficult, and this is one of the reasons for the fascinating double standards which we find in so many individual Victorian lives, particularly where sex and money were in question. Christ had taught that you cannot serve God and Mammon. A state which modelled itself on the socio-economic ideas of Malthus, Ricardo and Bentham had enthroned Money, so it was not surprising they lost their sense of God. Chastity was no easier for Victorians than for anyone else, but their guilt-feelings about sex, combined with their attitudes to economics, could lead to those presumptions of possession, ownership, purchase of women by men against which feminism formed its inevitable Hegelian antithesis. (Hunt was in love with Annie Miller, wanted to marry her; but his very act of ‘educating’ her, treating her as a Pygmalion creation of his own, was in itself a form of purchase.)

  Hunt’s nickname among his friends was ‘Mad’ and his granddaughter tells us that he was a manic depressive – ‘when in despair about his future or his work he would shut himself up in a poky bedroom above the studio and shiver with fear. He felt as if icy water were trickling down his spine. Alone in the dark, he raved, holding long noisy conversations with the Devil … He frequently lost faith in humanity and in his confused idea of God, but for him the Devil was always real.’27

  The word ‘Pre-Raphaelite’ in popular modern parlance does not refer to particular painting techniques or attitudes to the Middle Ages. It means young women with pale faces, pouting lips and abundant hair. The hair was important; so important that hairdressing, for the first time in English history, came out of the private domain of the home. Women who could afford to now went to hair-stylists – the styles varying much from year to year. No respectable woman wore her hair loose – which is what gives these loose-haired Pre-Raphaelite maidens so much of their erotic charm for the men who painted them and the men who bought the pictures. And in an age where everything was up for sale, the exporters and importers did not stop at hair itself. Great quantities of hair were imported into Britain from the European continent. The ‘hair harvest’ in Italy was an annual feature in poorer villages and 200,000 lb of hair were sold annually in the Paris markets, at a price of 10s. or 12s. per ounce – 20s. for really long hair. ‘We saw several girls,’ noted one observer at the Collenée market, ‘sheared, one after the other like sheep, and as many more standing ready for the shears, with their caps in their hands, and their long hair combed out, and hanging down to their waists.’28

  So valuable a commodity had hair become that The Hairdressers Journal reflected on ‘one most unpleasant feature connected with the business’ – the prevalence of hair thieves who would set upon young women whose head showed a valuable crop, shear them, ‘and always kept on the safe side of the law, apart from the robbery of the hair’.29

  In The Awakening Conscience Annie Miller’s hair tumbles down her shoulders and back, as she rises from the lap of her roué lover. Just as Carlyle saw at once that The Light of the World was not so much an expression of faith as – something radically different – a seeking after false consolation, so The Awakening Conscience disturbs us with its jingle-jangle of confused imagery and – more – confused sexual feeling on the part of the artist. The picture is meant to depict the ‘awakening conscience’ of a kept woman who rises from her lover’s knee listening to the promptings of morality. It is in fact soaked, like so many Pre-Raphaelite canvases, in male feelings about sex
– purely mechanical lust clashing noisily with schoolboy masturbation – guilt masquerading as serious moral feeling. This, apart from their sheer technical skill, must explain the enduring popularity of the Pre-Raphaelite painters.

  Yet however sheepish a man, and satirical a woman, must feel when standing in front of one of these paintings today, and whatever the final analysis of their aesthetic worth, how pleasing it is that these faces, these images, survive. Lizzie Siddal, Fanny Cornforth and Annie Miller’s are among the best-known faces of the nineteenth century – far better known to us than the faces of most of the prime ministers or novelists or civil servants. Next to the Queen herself, theirs are the faces which survive.

  The Awakening Conscience, depicting the world of the ‘kept woman’, awoke some raw nerves among the critics. Carlyle liked it as much as he’d despised The Light of the World. The Morning Chronicle denounced it as ‘an absolutely disgraceful picture’. Although the middle classes liked tut-tutting over the moral dangers of fallen women and lapped up depictions of their decline in novels such as Mrs Gaskell’s Ruth, they probably felt that Hunt’s picture had lifted too many veils. Hunt, while painting it, had lectured Annie on the dangers of going down such a path herself. While she posed for him in an expensive gown, fine linen trimmed with hand-embroidered lace, Annie was supposed to be staring into the pits of hell as her whiskery admirer tries to hold on to her bottom. Many observers of her face must have seen, rather, a young woman with an eye to fun and prosperity ahead if she continues in her ‘degrading temptation’ – Hunt’s words.

  The young Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood found themselves to their good fortune with an eminent defender, none other than the greatest art critic of the age (or any age). Ruskin saw at once that the sexual aspect (confused as we may find it) of The Awakening Conscience is only part of the story. In his letter to The Times of 25 May 1854 expounding the picture’s meaning, he sees that the hideous mid-Victorian furnishings speak of the moral destructiveness of new wealth brought in by the ‘success’ of industrial capitalism:

  There is not a single object in all that room – common, modern, vulgar (in the vulgar sense, as it may be), but it becomes tragical, if rightly read, that furniture so carefully painted, even to the last vein of the rosewood – is there nothing to learn from that terrible lustre of it, from its fatal newness; nothing there that has the old thoughts of home upon it, or that is ever to become a part of home …

  In the coming decades, William Morris was to wage war on the factory-made ugliness of Victorian domestic interiors, and to expand, even more trenchantly than Ruskin himself, on the intimate connections between morality, as socially and privately understood, and design.

  Ruskin in Modern Painters had been the great defender of Turner against production-line Academy painting rules. At first sight it might seem surprising that the man who could see Turner’s smudgy seascapes as the highest painterly form would be able, at the same time, and so instantaneously, to form a generous judgement of the crystalline Pre-Raphaelite innovation. In both cases, what Ruskin recognized was that the fledgling Brotherhood, like the great old sun-worshipper, were devotees of truth, believers that painting must be true in two senses, both faithfully reproducing nature, and punctilious in its emotional integrity. When Ruskin first impulsively leapt to the defence of the PRB – against those who suspected them of being crypto-Catholics, or worse – he did not do so because they were his friends: ‘Let me state, in the first place, that I have no acquaintance with any of these artists, and very imperfect sympathy with them. No one who has met any of my writings will suspect me of desiring to encourage them in their Romanist and Tractarian tendencies.’

  As the 1850s unfolded, however, Ruskin’s social contact with these much younger men was to have momentous effects in his personal history. In Rossetti’s raffish ménage, Ruskin was to find the very opposite of the prim, well-ordered, rich suburban household of his sherry-merchant father – both so stifling and so inescapable. In Holman Hunt, Ruskin was destined to discover a deep and important artistic friendship. But it was Ruskin’s acquaintanceship with John Everett Millais which had the first and explosive effect.

  Millais, ten years Ruskin’s junior and a year younger than Ruskin’s wife Effie, had been a child prodigy, admitted to the Royal Academy Schools at the age of eleven. He was twenty-two years old when Ruskin first called on him, and tried to convert him to Turner. ‘He believes,’ Millais wrote, ‘that I shall be converted on further acquaintance with his works, and that he will gradually slacken in his admiration.’30 Neither thing happened, but the two men had soon become friends, constantly visiting one another, and travelling together. Millais, the painter of Romantic Scottish history, had never been north of the border; Ruskin, ethnically a Scot and devotee of Sir Walter, put right the difference by arranging a Highland tour. In July 1853 they arrived at Glenfinlas, Brig o’ Turk, near Stirling. Here, by the falls, Millais set to work to paint a portrait of his hero.

  Millais has fixed on his place – a lovely piece of worn rock, with foaming water, and weeds, and moss, and a noble overhanging bank of dark crag – and I am to be standing looking quietly down the stream – just the sort of thing I used to do for hours together – he is very happy at the idea of doing it and I think you [Ruskin’s father] – will be proud of the picture – and we shall have the two most wonderful torrents in the world, Turner’s St Gothard – and Millais’s Glenfinlas.

  The picture did get painted, in spite of a very wet summer and a persistent cold suffered by Millais and by Ruskin’s wife. Ruskin himself, and his friend Dr Acland, who was for a while of the party, and Millais’s brother were all blind to what took place during that wet summer: Millais and Effie Ruskin fell in love. As they did so, Millais discovered that Ruskin, great art historian, was a man who ‘appears to delight in selfish solitude. Why he ever had the audacity of marrying with no better intentions is a mystery to me. I must confess that it appears to me that he cares for nothing beyond his Mother and Father, which makes the insolence of his finding fault with his wife (to whom he has acted from the beginning most disgustingly) more apparent …’31

  These words were written to Effie’s mother. The Gray family discovered that summer not only that for five years their daughter had suffered neglect and reproach, but that her marriage was unconsummated. On her wedding night, Ruskin (who was completely ignorant of sexual matters) had been unable to consummate – ‘he had imagined women were quite different to what he saw I was,’32 Effie afterwards recalled. Later he was to suggest other reasons – religion, a lack of desire for children – why the marriage should not be consummated, at least until she was twenty-five.

  Gladstone said that if one had known all three parties as well as he had done – Ruskin, Millais, Effie – one would be unable to blame any of them. Let this be our line. Ruskin was one of the great men of the nineteenth century, Millais a prodigiously accomplished (if ultimately uninspired) painter, Effie an affectionate, intelligent woman who married Millais – when the Ruskin marriage had been set aside – and bore him eight children. Peace to them all! Vulgarians claim to know precisely what it was about the female anatomy that Ruskin had found so shocking. The truth is actually unclear. Geoffrey Hill is wiser to observe that:

  Ruskin’s wedded

  incapacity, for which he has been scourged

  many times with derision, does not

  render his vision blind or his suffering

  impotent.33

  Far more important than the details of Ruskin’s private life were the areas to which his ‘vision’ and his ‘suffering’ took him. Having begun as a pioneer student of art history, he had come to see that aesthetic theory cannot be detached from social theory. Increasingly a follower of Carlyle, Ruskin came to see the nineteenth century as a nightmare era, and the core of this horror – the corollary of its materialism – was its loss of faith.

  The weathercock mind of Harriet Martineau is a good guide here to the movement of middle-class
opinion in the 1850s. Carlyle himself was impressed by her – ‘far beyond expectation. She is very intelligent-looking, really of pleasant countenance … full of talk though unhappily deaf as a post, so that you have to speak to her through an ear trumpet.’34

  By the early 1850s the Punch wag Douglas Jerrold was quipping, ‘There is no God, and Harriet Martineau is his prophet.’ Marian Evans could not dispel the impression of Harriet’s vulgarity when she first met her, but after a few encounters they had become intimate friends.35

  Miss Evans, known later to the world as George Eliot, was, from 1851 to 1855 (i.e. from the age of thirty-two to thirty-five), living in the household of the radical bookseller John Chapman, 142 The Strand. She had translated in 1844 the revolutionary Hegelian version of Christ’s life, Das Leben Jesu of David Friedrich Strauss, and in 1854 she was to translate Feuerbach’s Das Wesen des Christenthums (Essence of Christianity). Both books saw religion as a purely human construct and the Christian religion as an exercise in mythology.