The Victorians

by A. N. Wilson

  Elizabeth Rossetti, destined thus to be immortalized in this painterly likeness of a resurrection body, was also destined to have her sleep disturbed in Highgate Cemetery. By the end of the decade Rossetti wanted his poems back, and in one of the most macabre scenes in the history of literature, on 5 October 1869 the coffin was opened. Lizzie was holding her Bible and Rossetti’s poems. Some believe – the lawyers entrusted with the gruesome task found all ‘quite perfect’ in the casket – that the opium had preserved her as if in formaldehyde, and that her hair was still red-gold, but this is mere speculation, a good example of the iconic status which Elizabeth achieved in death.23 For later generations, Elizabeth Siddal could become the ultimate female victim of male neglect or emotional violence: or else, viewed differently, she could be seen as a Sixties raver, the sort of young woman who in the Sixties of the twentieth century would have married pop stars, not painters. Later writers could take more interest in her own achievements and aspirations as a painter, which Ruskin always championed.

  Modelling and drawing were, for a woman of her socio-economic background, a means of escape. If, for the less economically advantaged feminists of the Beale, Buss, Bodichon school of thought, the Cause – college, education, professional life – was an escape from the fate of being a governess, then for the Elizabeth Siddals art was the means of not being a domestic servant or a seamstress. The higher feminists wanted to save their sisters from becoming Jane Eyre: practically speaking, far more had to choose between becoming Dickens’s Marchioness or the Doll’s Dressmaker.

  A concentration on the exotic life and death of Elizabeth Siddal should not make us forget those who did not end up either as painters or paintings. The largest occupational group among nineteenth-century women in England was, overwhelmingly, the servant class. In 1851 there were 751,540 domestic servants in the census; forty years later the number had swollen to 1,386,167.24 In London one person in every fifteen was in service. It was a simple matter of supply and demand. As the rentier class grew more prosperous, more and more servants were required, and figures lower and lower in the social scale not merely employed servants but considered any menial activity – such as putting coal on their own fires – as demeaning. If this seems to a modern mind like exploitation, one has to remember from the other point of view the comparative restfulness of the servant life. The master was expected to provide food, housing and a modest cash wage; and for those working in larger households, there was the camaraderie of the servants’ hall. Many found such a life in every way preferable to the long hours and daily grind of factory work. Only in the 1930s in England did the number of domestic servants sink below one million.25

  For a record of the lives of working-class women in the middle of the nineteenth century, we go to the diaries of one of Rossetti’s confrères at the Working Men’s College, a minor poet and civil servant, who came along one or two evenings per week to conduct a Latin class. Arthur J. Munby’s (1828–1910) not very good poems occasionally appeared in Macmillan’s Magazine alongside those of Christina Rossetti and Matthew Arnold. A graduate of Trinity, Cambridge, the son of a York solicitor, Munby had a dullish job as an ecclesiastical civil servant, having failed to make a career at the Bar. It is, however, not for his verses, but for his remarkable diaries that Munby will be remembered. He was obsessed by working-class women. ‘Blessed is the land whose peasant women measure four feet round the waist, and have arms as thick as a bed post! Those who prate of women’s rights, if they knew their own meaning, would honour such mighty daughters of the plough as much at least or more than the “strong-minded females” who have neither the shrinking graces of their own sex nor the bold beauty of ours.’26

  These are typical Munbyisms, but while this might have been true in his physical predilections for the female crane-driver type, it does not really reflect his socio-political stance. He was in love with a servant girl called Hannah Culluick, a native of Shropshire, who first met Munby when the family with whom she was in service brought her to London for the season. She was twenty-one, he was twenty-six. He accosted her in the street as he did dozens, hundreds, of young women and learnt her story. He saw ‘a robust hardworking peasant lass, with the marks of labour and servitude upon her everywhere’. She saw ‘such a nice manly face with a moustache’.27 Eighteen years later, they were secretly married. Their courtship had been chaste, as were his encounters with the colliers, milkmaids, waitresses, prostitutes, fisherwomen etc. etc. whose lives he recorded and whom he so obsessively photographed or had photographed. Clearly, there was a strong sexual attraction which led Munby on, but one suspects that had he only been interested in a string of Simenonesque conquests his diaries would make less compelling reading.

  The immediate and continuing impression they leave upon the reader of the twenty-first century is the prodigious gulf created by the class structure. At times it is literally a gulf, as when Munby:

  met my Juno [i.e. Hannah] at the Haymarket Theatre, to see Tom Taylor’s ingenious & spirited piece, the ‘overland Route’. We went to the gallery of course; Hannah has never been to any other part of a theatre, except once, when ‘William the groom’ took her with an order to the boxes – actually the boxes! at Astley’s. Poor child! She did not presume to recognize me in the street, but waited alone in the crowd.

  When Munby looked over the rail of the gallery

  down upon my equals in the stalls and boxes, I am sensible of a feeling of placid half-contemptuous indifference: but how if they were to look up and see me thus? Should I feel ashamed, worthy of their contempt? I think not: yet, if not, would it not be only because I know that she is worthy to be one of them? And so we get back to class distinctions: I love her, then, because she is not like her own class after all, but like mine!

  It is a fascinating entry because it shows that for all his empathy for the large, red-handed women whose lives he chronicled in his diary, he does not really question the Victorian class system. He meets the Prince of Wales at dinner in Trinity: the archbishop of Canterbury comes into his office – ‘a mild patriarchal old man’ – it was Sumner. He dines with the Rossettis, Ruskin, Swinburne. He frequents gentlemen’s clubs and Inns of Court. All the while he is recording conversations with female acrobats, parlour-maids or – during a holiday in Scarborough – the ‘bait girls’ who lowered themselves down the cliff face on a strong rope to gather winkles and mussels in baskets. ‘Noo then, coom on, we’re gahin!’ He liked sketching, as well as making verbal descriptions – Mary Harrison, 20, a waggon-filler at Pewfall pits near Wigan; or Jane Matthews, also 20, ‘mending her stocking, seated on a heap of ironstone’ at the Dowlais Works, Merthyr Tydfil. A typical Munby diary entry was for 26 October 1865, the funeral of Lord Palmerston – ‘a most poor & mean business’:

  I saw no one of either sex who was at all noteworthy, except one, & that was a servant maid belonging to the Guards’ club. A kitchen wench she was; the word “kitchen” or “kitchenmaid” was stamped on a corner of her coarse apron. With two common-place fellow-servants, she had come up from the cellars, & stood within the railings, holding on thereby, in her humble dress of lilac cotton frock and coarse clean apron, while some of her moustachio’d masters lounged on the steps above. A robust country looking lass of good height, pleasant to behold in such a spot … Thus she stood, gravely gazing, while sumptuous ladies, silked & furred, looked down from balconies all around.

  Some modern readers will find Munby’s attitude to the ‘specimens’ collected vaguely disconcerting or downright offensive. There is something more than condescending, and bordering on the sexually deviant, about his preoccupations. His wife called him ‘Massa’ in imitation of a black slave. Yet without his obsession, posterity would be the poorer. Thanks to Munby, dozens of human lives that would otherwise have passed unrecorded into oblivion have been preserved to us. We can see their beauty and their struggle. They remind us, even more than the early feminist heroines such as Miss Davies, Miss Bodichon or Dr Garrett Anderson, of th
e huge spiritual and imaginative divergence between our own times and the Victorians.

  fn1 The first was passed in 1864, amendments in 1866, 1868 and 1869. The Acts were repealed in 1886.

  fn2 Though statistically less likely than the working classes. Vide infra.

  fn3 Elizabeth Garrett was typical of those who nearly abandoned religion but recovered a version of it under the influence of F.D. Maurice – see Manton, p.97.

  21

  Wonderland

  THE CHANGES WHICH had come upon the world – and upon industrialized Britain in particular – during the first quarter-century of Queen Victoria’s reign were without historical parallel. The population explosion; the revolutions, industrial, social and political; the changes of world-view; the collapses and revivals of belief-systems were all prodigious. Historians can still play the game of cause and effect and ask which of these disruptive events was the origin, which the consequence of the other. ‘The more we consider these mid-Victorians,’ wrote Munby’s biographer Derek Hudson, ‘the more we realise how many, including some of the most sensitively intelligent, were forced by the pressures of a materialist age to live out a world of fantasy in their daily lives.’1

  The age which had begun to fear that materialism was the only truth built railway stations in the manner of Gothic cathedrals. The Pre-Raphaelites were not alone in choosing for theme, not the changing industrial townscapes and ever-varying modern fashions in clothes and houses, but historical tableaux. David Wilkie Winfield, who changed his name to Wynfield, was a characteristic creature of his age.2 Having trained at ‘Dagger’ Leigh’s (the model for Barker in Thackeray’s The Newcomes) studio in Newman Street, he painted such subjects as Oliver Cromwell in the night before his death and – his most acclaimed work – The Death of Buckingham, which depicted the murdered body of Charles I’s favourite. Wynfield and his friends constituted the ‘St John’s Wood Clique’, self-consciously Bohemian young men whom he photographed in a variety of fancy dress – Elizabethan ruffs, skullcaps redolent of Colet and Erasmus, breastplates and turbans. Wynfield’s photographic portrait of Frederic Leighton, whose own early canvases included Dante in Exile, shows a figure who is every inch a young man of the 1860s with his slightly wispy moustache and bushy beard, but whose costume – medieval? ancient Roman? – suggests the child’s dressing-up box. The ‘Clique’ were of course going out of their way to stand apart from their bourgeois origins; but as is so often the case, rebels seem as much characteristic of their age as conformists – in some ways more so, the retreat into fantasy being an urgent, even a central compulsion of the mid-Victorians, their literature, architecture, religion or lack of it. (F.D. Maurice had objected to the Tractarians: ‘Their error … consists in opposing … the spirit of a former age, instead of the ever-living and acting Spirit of God.’3 It makes a reasonable commentary on many of his contemporaries, not just those High Church or Roman clergymen who wished themselves back in the age of Saint Augustine of Hippo.)

  It was typical of them to use the modern invention of photography for the furtherance of fantasy. Just as Newman did not want to be a clergyman of the nineteenth, as much as of the fourth century, so Wynfield could use the means of collodion (a gummy solution of gun-cotton) spread over glass plates to immortalize his friends as if they were figures in Ainsworth’s Tower of London or Bulwer-Lytton’s The Caxtons. Meanwhile, Julia Margaret Cameron had persuaded her much older husband to go and live at Freshwater on the Isle of Wight to be near the poet laureate. Her villa, Dimbola, became a centre of photographic activity, social voraciousness, affection, noise. William Allingham – poet of ‘Up the airy mountain, Down the rushy glen …’, diarist and friend of the Tennyson circle – recorded:

  Down train comes in with Mrs Cameron, queenly in carriage by herself, surrounded by photographs. We go to Lymington together, she talking all the time. ‘I want to do a large photograph of Tennyson and he objects! Says I make bags under his eyes – and Carlyle refuses to give me a sitting, he says it is a kind of inferno. The greatest men of the age (with strong emphasis) Sir John Herschel, Henry Taylor, Watts say I have immortalized them, and these other men object!! What is one to do, h’m.’4

  Mrs Cameron’s lens, eye, imagination, transformed the great men of the age, and anyone else she could persuade to sit for her – parlourmaids, children, friends and relations – into creatures of fantasy. Her Benthamite old husband with his long white beard became King Lear. The American artist/model Marie Spartali, who sat for Burne-Jones and Rossetti, becomes Mnemosyne the Goddess of Memory and mother of the Nine Muses.5 Lady Elcho posed beside a tree as a spectre in Dante … Tennyson was perhaps never better depicted than in the Cameron portrait known as The Dirty Monk. And who is this – looking half away from the camera in 1872, a full-bosomed twenty-year-old woman, her hair loose against the shrubbery? Cameron entitled the picture Alethea, truth, and the model was Alice Liddell.

  Very different she seems in one of the most celebrated of all nineteenth-century child-images, ‘Beggar Child’, as photographed by the Rev. Charles Dodgson, leaning against a rough stone wall in the Deanery Wall at Christ Church, Oxford, and lifting her ragged slip to reveal a slender knee and a hint of thigh. Dodgson must have taken dozens of pictures of Alice and her sisters Lorina and Edith. The dons’ wives seemed content to allow this stammering clergyman to photograph their daughters completely nude, though only when they were very young. More than one friendship came to a sudden end when he asked to photograph a girl of eleven or older.6

  No one knows why Dodgson so abruptly ceased to be friends with Alice’s parents. When Liddell arrived at Christ Church as dean, in 1856, Dodgson (1832–98) was already installed as the young mathematics lecturer and sub-librarian. (He was ordained deacon, aged twenty-nine, in 1861, but never became a priest.) Alice was his most devoted little ‘child friend’ during her ninth and tenth years, and it was during a picnic in July 1862, when she was ten, that the first version of Alice’s Adventures Underground were told to her as an oral narrative. The written version was finished the following year, with Dodgson’s own illustrations. The next year – 1863 – Tenniel agreed to illustrate the much-expanded Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. By the time Through the Looking-Glass was published (1872) Alice had grown into the wistful young figure photographed by Mrs Cameron.

  It was no less a figure than Lord Salisbury, no fanciful observer, who wrote to a friend six years later, ‘They say that Dodgson has half gone out of his mind in consequence of having been refused by the real Alice. It looks like it.’7 If true, then the rift with the Liddells, occurring in 1863, would have been caused by the thirty-one-year-old Dodgson proposing to Alice when she was eleven. This probably seems more shocking to a twenty-first-century sensibility than it might have done to the Victorians. Edward White Benson, future archbishop, proposed to Mary Sidgwick when she was twelve and he twenty-four – though they waited six years before marrying. The 1861 census shows that in Bolton 175 women married at fifteen or under, 179 in Burnley.8

  Alice Liddell, however, was evidently capable of exciting affection from older admirers. Dodgson’s photographs, which might produce queasiness in the eyes of some, conform to that most horrible cliché of paedophile fantasy – the little child who ‘wants it’ is leading on the voyeur. (Voyeurism, we may be sure, is all that was at work with Dodgson, and he was probably so much in denial about the erotic nature of his photographic pursuits that he believed the asexual nature of the naked poses he set up for his child models made them ‘innocent’.)

  After 1870, she befriended the Slade professor of art, John Ruskin, who in Praeterita recalls sneaking an evening with her and her sisters when Dean and Mrs Liddell were supposed to be dining at Blenheim Palace with the Duke of Marlborough.9

  Well, I think Edith had got the tea made, and Alice was just bringing the muffins to perfection … when there was a sudden sense of some stars having been blown out by the wind, round the corner; and then a crushing of the snow outside the hous
e, and a drifting of it inside; and the children all scampered out to see what was wrong, and I followed slowly; and there were the Dean and Mrs Liddell standing just in the middle of the hall, and the footmen in consternation, and a silence, – and –

  ‘How sorry you must be to see us, Mr Ruskin!’ began at last Mrs Liddell.

  ‘I was never more so,’ I replied.

  Snow had made the expedition to Blenheim impossible – ‘and I went back to Corpus, disconsolate’.

  Alice would have been seventeen or eighteen when described here as a scampering child; but Ruskin could most cheerfully relate to females when he regarded them as presexual infants. His own hopeless and painful love affair – one has to use this word, though it was of course entirely Platonic, and indeed largely something taking place inside his head – was with Rose la Touche. They met when she was ‘nine years old … rising towards ten; neither tall nor short for her age; a little stiff in her way of standing. The eyes rather deep blue at that time, and fuller and softer than afterwards. Lips perfectly lovely in profile; a little too wide, and hard in edge, seen in front; the rest of the features what a fair, well-bred Irish girl’s usually are; the hair perhaps, more graceful in short curl round the forehead, and softer than one sees often, in the close-bound tresses above the neck …’10 Ruskin was nearly forty when he fell under Rose’s spell, forty-seven when he proposed. The mother and father were appalled – not least when Ruskin’s former wife wrote to Mrs la Touche revealing the secrets of her own marriage to the sage. Poor Rose, anorexic religious maniac, half wanted to marry Ruskin. ‘Do you think,’ she wrote in 1872, when in her early twenties and about to die, ‘that the Professor would really, really care to have me and be happy with me – just as I am?’11 We can all guess the truthful answer to what would have happened had Rose recovered, and had Ruskin and she attempted a ‘normal’ married relationship. In later life when he had gone mad, Ruskin was something of a ‘liability’ with the little girls at the local school, near his Coniston home. Long before this, however, in letters to his cousin Joan Agnew (whose destiny, with her husband Arthur Severn, it was to nurse Ruskin in his insane old age) he had employed extraordinary baby-talk – e.g. of Scotland, he wrote to her (he aged forty-eight, she newly married to Arthur), ‘There was once a bonnie wee country marnie dear – ey called it Totland – I pose because it was so nice for wee tots to play at pushing in wee bookies … When I was the weest of tots – it oosed to be so pitty, mamie.’12 And so on.